Comic Books

[benji]

Many people are saying.

[benji]

BOOM. ROASTED.

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

[benji]

[benji]

Mike Grell's run on Green Arrow is pretty good, I didn't go past his last issue though I understand the series immediately drops a lot of the realism. Then I took a look at Azrael which surprisingly had the same writer for all 100 issues. I thought it did the whole aspect of him learning to be in the real world outside an assassin cult better than the semi-same-time Batgirl series did. There were some odd errors that started to pop up in Azrael involving characters moving locations in such a way that they "came to Gotham" multiple times despite nothing saying they ever left. Also there's a series of about five issues where Azrael travels to Africa and back to Gotham three times and it implies the entire story took just a week.

For some reason Babs has dolls of various characters on her computer, this was when Batman was supposed to be considered an urban legend too.



Listen to Leslie, Bruce.


Azrael has such a way with women.

[benji]

Very natural looking body.

[chronovore]

Still better than Liefield.

[Eric Cartman]

Is that Kelley Jones doing the art?

I think I said in Ye Olden Country Place I waver between love / hate because its so stylised - sometimes he draws a cool vampiric looking batman with ridiculous length cape and talons on his gloves, or a Deadman who befits the name with his ghoulish starvation looking ribcage and cheekbones, and sometimes it looks like his reference for a body builder was a starvation victim on an IV in a hospital

[chronovore]

Is that Kelley Jones doing the art?

I think I said in Ye Olden Country Place I waver between love / hate because its so stylised - sometimes he draws a cool vampiric looking batman with ridiculous length cape and talons on his gloves, or a Deadman who befits the name with his ghoulish starvation looking ribcage and cheekbones, and sometimes it looks like his reference for a body builder was a starvation victim on an IV in a hospital

Kelley Jones rarerly gets enough love. The early SANDMAN work was so strange and ethereal.

[benji]

I don't remember the exact issue I found that in, but Trevor McCarthy looks like he was the artist for every issue for that part of the story.

[benji]

Damn, Helena, and you wonder why so many in the Bat Family don't want to hang out with you.

[D3RANG3D]

[benji]

Whose hand is this catching Donna???

[benji]

I liked this:


A lot of the reviewers complain that it doesn't really go anywhere and well, it was cancelled after seven issues in the middle of the first post-introduction plotline.  

I'm also not one who complains about the suggestion of a larger universe outside of the main story and characters as I quite enjoy that sort of thing. While I agree with the complaint about little insight into Lady Styx, the point of her character in the New 52 was to create an alternative to having Darkseid always be behind everything in the universe. With that in mind I don't particularly find a problem that she doesn't have any "goal" here, it's just one of probably a million ongoing schemes these characters fall into. I don't think she was being intended as any Final Boss type character. I also don't think the "Green Lantern lore" is really needed here, it's very minimal beyond a general knowledge of Green Lantern stuff. The Green Lantern annual is included because it's a backdoor pilot not because the story has anything to do with Green Lantern stuff other than Green Lantern is the main space franchise book of DC so most space stuff traces back to some Green Lantern story somewhere. The Third Army references and so on in this are because that was the big altering event that had just made it so everyone hates the Guardians and Green Lanterns now, you don't need to know what happened in that story at all.

I would say that I prefer The Omega Men series that was similarly a Green Lantern backdoor pilot type thing but to be fair that one did get a full run.

[benji]

[benji]

Read I Vampire from the New 52, that was pretty good. One of them complete circle stories. It's like poetry, it rhymes.

At the start they pretend it's part of the DC Universe and mention superheroes then it crosses over with Batman and Justice League Dark and then it's like "oh yeah that's all dumb and this makes no sense if it's happening in the same universe" and mostly drops everything but Constantine. He's really there just to be Big Magic Explain Guy so the plot can advance but he's all John Constantine about it so I guess that technically ties it into the DC Universe still.

Spoiler: I think my favorite part was (click to show)(click to hide)

Nobody realizes the obvious regarding Cain even after he tells them.

[benji]

He's right there? With the remote?

[benji]

[Eric Cartman]

Someone in another thread mentioned 72 virgins and reminded me of this garth ennis bit

[benji]

Gotham by Midnight was alright enough. About the Gotham PD precinct that handles supernatural cases featuring Jim Corrigan.

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

[Eric Cartman]

For the people who need to know, because nobody told me until now:

The new Outsiders book is fucking Planetary. Its Planetary.
Issue 1 they find The Authorities Carrier, which is very confused about all the reboots.

That is sufficient information for you to want to pick up Outsiders.

[benji]

I love the Outsiders in all their series back to the original so I was waiting for this just to pile up, at worst it looked like it could be similar to The Terrifics. (Which crosses over with Tom Strong!) The Drummer showed up somewhere earlier to lead to this, but yeah, it's pretty much literally the same exact characters doing the same stuff in the now restored DC Multiverse.

[Eric Cartman]

I've only read the OG Outsiders where Batman went, "Screw the Justice League, I'll make my own superteam. With Blackjack, and hookers Black Lightning, and Looker" which is pretty good, and the one that ran concurrently as a pseudo Titans spin off which was also pretty good before EVENT CROSSOVERS fucked it and I dropped it. I've never read the 90s Outsiders because its a comic from the 90s.

I skimmed the Terririfics when it came out, but it seemed to be channelling OG Fantastic Four pretty hard (The two young guys constantly bickering, the stretchy guy, the ghost like girl, the freak of nature big hitter, the team leader being a brainiac inventor responsible for them coming together and researching the fix for it) which isn't really my kind of thing, but I might give it a second chance.

When I say Outsiders is Planetary though, it is mining those meta-beats pretty fucking hard; theres a batman issue which is reeeeeeeeal similar to the concept of the Supreme Supremacy, theres a voyage to Limbo which conceptually is similar to the Limbo from the G-Moz Animal Man run but in execution is very similar to Gail Simones Welcome To Tranquility, and there's a fucking perfect execution on how to race & gender swap an existing legacy character while respecting what came before and not coming across as tokenism for the sake of it.

Its pretty good. I'll be surprised if its not cancelled before issue 12.

[benji]

Read the third part of Batman: White Knight, Batman Beyond The White Knight and I thought this is the best one and the only one that comes anywhere close to the hype these get. The big moments were far less groan-inducing than previously. I'm still fascinated at how this series completely threw out the original hook of it after just a few issues and like nobody even cares. Really nothing in this series has had much of any thought behind it and I think I'm somewhat vainly trying to figure out why it's beloved.

[Eric Cartman]

Couple of Humble comics bundles, but I think they might be re-heats:

Dynamite bundle which is actually frigging huge; of the stuff I've read,

• Project Superpowers is some old golden age out of copyright characters brought into the modern ages (and I'm pretty sure I've said this before, the 'twist' is mental even by comic book standards) and is alright
  
• Jennifer Blood is pretty good as a Punisher type thing
  
• the Evil Dead books are fun but I suspect the crossover with Marvel Zombies isn't included
  
• Pete Cannon: Thunderbolt is... pretty interesting. If you don't know the charlton backstory, he is who Ozymandias in Watchmen would have been if DC werent scared of using the actual charlton heroes. Its kind of helpful to know that going in.
  
• Kevin Smiths Green Hornet is kind of fucking terrible. I think I'd say the Seth Rogen film is better.
  

I've never read any red sonja or vampirella which seems like the bulk of this bundle

Theres also a Hellboy bundle if you wanted to get into hellboy

[doby8]

Thanks, I was looking for them.

[benji]

 

[benji]

[Eric Cartman]

#sorrynotsorry

[benji]

Meanwhile: