Fantastic Four #576

So, a watery city following on from the earthy city in #575. What's the betting we get a fiery and an airy city to complete the foursome before the war of the cities? I like the idea of the Fan 4 going to hell. Thought that Reed (water) would end up being the one chosen by the watery dudes to speak for earth though, not Sue (air). Ach well, good stuff.

Childcare

My son Jack learning how to care for comics and identify the costumed vigilantes found inside.

Educational content courtesy of The Essential Amazing Spider-Man Volume One

Off the stack

Oi, Oi! How goes it? I've knocked a few issues off the old stack and felt like blathering on a tad, so let's have at it!

Firstly, I just reread Fantastic Four #571, the second installment of Hickman and Eaglesham's run on the title. I've now gone through this one three times. Why? Because it's flipping ace is why! Pretty much my idea of a perfect Marvel comic really. It hooks you right from the off with a fresh spin on the obligatory Galactus appearance, which sees Hickman resist the obvious device of using Galactus as the big reveal villain at the end of the book, and instead gets him out of the way at the START of the issue. It's a great moment rendered beautifully in a splendidiferous Eaglesham spread of all the alternate reality Reeds fighting Galactus and a whole squadron of Siver Surfers. Sort of the comics equivalent of the preludes in James Bond films and a typical piece of Hickman thinking.

The rest of the issue is also top drawer as Hickman reels off a series of big concepts all drawn very nicely by Mr Eaglesham, who seems to be channeling the bastard lovechild of Jack Kirby and Chris Sprouse. Even with a squadron of Silver Surfers, an army of lobotomised Dooms, a terraformed planet and some intergalactic DIY, Hickman still finds time for the obligatory Fan 4 family moment, a flashback to Reed's childhood and another genuinely exciting cliffhanger. All this while developing the characters of a bunch of alternate Reeds. I'm still not sure how he manages to cram all that into 22 pages without everything becoming a confused mess, but he does. Top stuff, a PROPER comic which has gone straight to the top of my list of superhero faves.

Giant-Size Old Man Logan was a satisfying enough end to a very good Mark Millar story. I have issues with the $4.99 price point, largely because the extra pages were padded out with uninteresting concept art and a gallery of covers, but the story itself was a fittingly over the top gorefest. The big moments were all entirely predictable, but they still made me chuckle. McNiven does another fine job with the art and there's an ending which leaves things open for a possible sequel - not that we really need one.

Blackest Night Superman #2 Oh now, this was just terrible, but I found myself enjoying it anyway. Basically, Psycho Pirate (of Crisis fame) comes back as a zombie and starts using his funky emotional manipulation powers to mess with the population of Smallville - making teenagers get off with old ladies, that sort of thing. Meanwhile Superman and Superboy duke it out with Zombie Superman while Supergirl has a ruck with her old man on New Krypton. There's an absolutely laughable bit at the end of the book where Ma Kent goes all pissed off action hero, brandishing a torch in a corn field and shouting at zombie Earth 2 Lois Lane that "It's On!" It's a WTF? moment that actually made me laugh out loud. The rubbernecker in me is looking forward to reading the car crash that will come as an old lady fights her zombie daughter-in-law in the next issue. Yay comics!

Reviews

After saying I wasn't going to buy or enjoy Fantastic Four #570, I went and did both. It was in my box at the new shop, so I paid for it, read it and flipping well loved it! Yes, Reed's looking all ripped, but it doesn't end up mattering that much because there is enough traditionally good Fan 4 action in Hickman and Eaglesham's first issue to make me want more.

I got a strong Chris Sprouse/Tom Strong vibe off of Eaglesham's pencils and thought Hickman hit all the necessary notes with the main characters - Ben and Johnny banter, Sue going to bed while Reed works, Reed labouring to invent cool humanity saving stuff.

Heck of a last page too.

Flash Rebirth #4 on the other hand, was an utter pile of brightly coloured impenetrable poo. I'll stick with it, but I now have absolutely no idea what's going on and can't really be bothered to fire up Wikipedia to find out. As far as I can tell, (and bear in mind I was fairly drunk when I read the latest issue), Professor Zoom is having some sort of ruck with Barry Allen and another geezer, (who I don't recognise), in the Speedforce, while Wally West charges about saying meaningful things which I don't understand. It's a right load of old bollocks. Maybe it'll all make sense if I reread it sober.

Blackest Night Titans #1 More tie-in tosh, with a horrible, horrible zombie snogging cover. But, (for shame), I grooved on it. It's got pencils by Ed Benes, who draws people in that '90s, Elfin, Michael Turneresque style which normally turns me off, but actually works very well here. His fight scenes are particularly good, and the ladies will appeal to any saddos out there who like to whack off over their comics (ahem). The story is a solid enough romp. Overall, a very pleasant piece of throwaway entertainment.

Green Lantern #45 Doug Mahnke draws the bejesus out of a bunch of different aliens in this issue. Him and Ivan Reis? Phoosh. I'm an easy sell on Green Lantern, but these two are making my fix of intergalactic punch-ups even more enjoyable. Some great pissed off Sinestro action in this issue, I'm going to soil my plastic pants when he finally faces off against Mongul for control of the Sinestro Corps.

Since when did Mr Fantastic look like a Chippendale?

I'm dropping Fantastic Four this week, not because I think the new creative team of Hickman and Eaglesham will be shit or anything, I'm just making an attempt to cut back on my single issue habit at the moment, and this seems like a good jumping off point.

Anyway, I'll probably end up checking the new stuff in trade if it's well received, although I must admit that Marvel's preview pages fro the new series have me a little worried from an artistic standpoint. I mean, call me old fashioned, but Reed should not look as ripped as this...

Alright, so Jack Kirby never drew him as a seven-stone weakling, but Reed shouldn't look like bodybuilder. Of course this being a preview page, this could just be some alternate universe Reed, but if it's not, then I don't like it. So there.

Bizzare transport choices of the super-villains #34

"With my great power I can travel any way I choose"

"And you chose a slide?"

Scan from Fantastic Four #20, November 1963

With respectful nods to the Fantastic Four panel a day thread over at the 11 O'Clock Comics forum.

Some comic related stuff I've been doing

Bought Dazzler for 50p on ebay

Regular readers will know that I like a bit of the old Dazzler, I also happen to think that Heroclix figures are things of great beauty, so you know:  KERCHINNG!

I've got quite a collection of these little plastic people now, but still haven't got the faintest idea how to play Heroclix. No matter, they are my favourite variety of man toy and I will continue to buy them.

Defended Millar and Hitch's Fantastic Four run on a comics message board (AGAIN)

The haters have been whacking themselves off in delight ever since it was announced that Jonathan Hickman and Dale Eaglesham will be taking over from Millar and Hitch on Fan Four. While I have no doubt that the new team will do a very fine job on the book, I also think the criticism of Millar and Hitch has been well over the top. In the main their run has been excellent - lots of crazy ideas, strong characterisation and good art from Hitch all of which has been delivered without any of the hideous delays that people were claiming there would be. But I really should stop defending the book on message boards, because it seems impossible to convince anyone else that this is a good comic.

Bagged and boarded until I ran out of bags and boards

I'd like to be one of these cool types who just tosses their comics in a corner when they've read them or gives them away to children's hospitals - but I'm not, I'm a deeply unstable collector who has an unhealthy need to bag, board and file every comic I buy. Sadly I've neglected my bagging and boarding responsibilities for close to a year now and as a result have a large backlog of comics to seal up and consign to the dark long boxes which clutter up my life.

These teetering piles of unbagged floppies have been making me very unhappy of late, and so I have begun the long process of preparing them for eternal rest. I spent three hours on the little fuckers t'other night, three robotic-like hours. Gahh! Thankfully I ran out of bags and boards or I'd have carried on until my eyes started bleeding. 

Only another hundred or so to do before the hell of alphabetical filing can commence.

Bought £50 worth of trades on Amazon

What I didn't mention is that this bagging and boarding all took place on Valentine's night. What can I say? After 12 years together me and the missus very rarely end up making sweet, sweet love. She was spark out by 10, so you know, bagging and boarding it was! She is, however, still a wonderful woman and proved as much by providing me with a £50 Amazon token on my birthday. Obviously I spent all of this on comics (because clearly I don't have enough to read already). Here's what I got for  a nifty...

Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits (Ennis/various artists) Kingdom Come (Waid/Ross) Justice Society of America: The Next Age v. 1 (Johns/Eaglesham) Hulk Visionaries: John Byrne (BYRNE!) Hellboy: Conquerer Worm v. 5 (Mignola) Godland Volume 4: Experimento Afterlife (Casey/Scioli)

A fine haul, I'm sure you'll agree. I've already read Byrne's Hulk, but lost my originals in the great Brighton wallpaper disaster of 96 so took this opportunity to replace the run in one hit. I've also read Kingdom Come, but thought it was about time I owned a copy. The rest is all new stuff which will join my ever growing "To Read" pile.

Notes on some comics I read yesterday

I read eight comics yesterday and they were all good. Here's the what and why of them all...

Green Lantern Corps #31

Delayed, delayed, but worth the wait. Krib - a particularly creepy lady alien from the Sinestro Corps who steals babies and stores them in a cage that grows out of her back - goes toe to toe with a giant green foetus. Meanwhile the guardians say no to jiggy jiggy while Mongul says yes and chills with some scantily clad extra terrestrials. Bonkers brilliance.

Fantastic Four #562

At this point I realise that I'm the only person in the world enjoying Millar and Hitch's Fantastic Four. Well yah boo sucks to the rest of you, you don't know a good Fan 4 comic when you see it! Big super-hero funeral shenanigans that give Hitch the chance to draw EVERYONE. Some nice characterisation of Franklin Richards, and a decent dash of talking heads between Doom and Reed.

Captain America #45

Not much to say really, just another solid issue in a consistently good run. Luke Ross and the mighty Butch Guice provide pencils, but it might as well be Steve Epting, because it looks as good as ever.

Incognito #1

Brubaker and Phillips new book from Marvel's Icon imprint. The Super-Villain in witness protection thing is a decent idea and this issue does a good job of setting the scene for what promises to be an interesting tale. It is slightly reminiscent of Millar's Wanted, but given how good that was, this is no bad thing. Lovely colouring job from Val Staples, and a very interesting text piece in the back on the early days of The Shadow.

Marvel Zombies #3

This Fred Van Lente fellow is a proper geezer. First he produces Comic Book Comics, one of my favourite books of last year,  then he does this - a sequel to a sequel that not only succeeds in outdoing the first two chapters in the zombies trilogy, but is also quite easily the best Marvel comic on the stands at the time of writing. 

Honestly, this comic is ACE. First off, van Lente has taken the Aaron Stack Machine Man from Warren Ellis's Nextwave and made him even more awesome than he was in that book. Then he's somehow made the whole Marvel Zombies thing seem fresh and exciting DESPITE the fact that (pardon the pun) it's an idea that should be dead in the water by now. AND, on top of all that he's produced an action packed page turner of a story loaded with witty dialogue. 

The art by Kev Walker looks just like Sean Phillips' stuff on the first two books which lends the story the feel of a proper continuation and also means that it looks flat out fantastic. Issue #3 features a quite sensational sequence where Machine Man nicks the bike of zombie Ghost Rider and outruns a trio of Marvel's most famous speedsters. I read it, put it down and muttered "fuck, that was excellent!" 

THIS is why I buy super-hero comics folks. Sadly there's only one issue left. Make sure you buy the trade.

Gigantic #2

Robots, satire and sick humour - this is sooooooooo 2000AD. Which is excellent given how shite the real 2000AD is these days. Rick Remender is kicking arse at Dark Horse, and this tale of intergalactic reality TV gone wrong is threatening to top the other grade A goodness he's been producing for the company. I still think that the colour palette is a touch muted for the robot smashing, planet busting style story, but it's a minor quibble. Top notch sci-fi.

Superman #683

What happened to the Creature Commandos? I'm getting confused. Oh well, I still enjoyed this. Part nine of the New Krypton saga and those pesky Kandorians are getting madder by the minute. An enjoyable super-hero romp.

Final Crisis Secret Files

Written by Len Wein, this is a look at Libra's origin. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but do have a couple of reservations about it. Firstly, the interior art isn't much cop. Sorry, but it isn't. I think my main gripe with it is that the artist chooses to ignore drawing backgrounds in a lot of his panels, thus we get a shot of Big Ben with no Houses of Parliament, and a warehouse which is quite literally empty and, as a result pretty uninteresting to look at. Several of the figures are also out of proportion. There you go. 

NEVERTHELESS, the story was OK. It's a heavy-handed retelling of a tale originally written in the 70s (I think) complete with exposition heavy dialogue and corny set pieces. Sounds dreadful, right? well it is in a way, but I also found it strangely refreshing, a nice change from the well written comics we've got used to. 

I say DC let that Len Wein fellow write more throwback super-hero romps, but next time give him an artist who can bring his work to life - Berni Wrightson would be alright I reckon!

Brief comments on the stuff I've been reading

The End League #3

Deliberately derivative, yet devoid of the faith in the power of good to overcome evil which many would consider essential to any superhero book; The End League isn't going to make all spandex fans happy. Writer Rick Remender likes superheroes, (you'll recognise the archetypes on show here), but he doesn't think humans are necessarily very heroic, and the world of The End League is one where the existence of super-powered folk spells disaster for the planet.

Given that it's essentially a "What If the bad guys won" story, there are parallels to be drawn with Mark Millar's Wanted, but The End League is so pessimistic that it makes Wanted look like the Beano. Quite how this will play out in the long run I don't know. It's a novel take on a tired old genre, but then so was Robert Kirkman's excellent Irredeemable Ant-Man, and look what happened to that.

While I fear cancellation then, I hope enough people out there get behind The End League to make it last. Remender's voice is a unique one and I'm keen to see where he's going with this. His work on Fear Agent and Crawl Space shows a certain reverence for the Sci-fi and Horror comic genres, but his take on superheroes is different. This is no nostalgic tribute to the genre, it's a bitterly pessimistic treatise.

Captain America #38
In many ways this is just as bleak as The End League, which (given that it's a mainstream Marvel title) makes it all the more impressive. We all know that the world's in a mess at the moment and Cap reflects that fact.

A word too for Steve Epting who hits the high notes with his pencilling on this issue. The fight scene between Bucky the Falcon and a bunch of AIM agents is as dynamic a looking superhero beat 'em up as you'll see anywhere.

Black Summer #6
Bleak, bleak, bleak. Are you sensing a theme here?

Check out the Juan Jose Ryp's splash on pages 2+3 for a bunch of unexpected special guest appearances. I've spotted Sponge Bob, Mario, Pebbles, Shrek and this fellow who I can't quite place...


any ideas?

Nice to see Ryp sending his famously overly detailed work up. The man's a marvel.

Fantastic Four #557
This has been taking a real bashing, but I like it. Millar is doing a particularly fine job with Reed Richards. It's easy to portray Richards as a pipe smoking bore with no sense of fun, but Millar wants us to know that he's not called Mr Fantastic for nothing. This is a man who in the space of 22 pages climbs into giant Galactus-Transformer to save the world, travels back in time and gives his missus a ring containing a micro-galaxy as an anniversary present.

Fantastic indeed.

Hypnotic Kirby baby

Hypnotic Kirby baby says: "You WILL love me!"

Detail from Stan Lee & Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure

Two comics I read on the bus

A slightly uncomfortable shop today. Gosh! was rammo and I got pinned in a corner next to a grubby old pentacle wearing bearded chap who stank of stale sweat and shit. He looked a bit like Alan Moore actually...nah couldn't have been.

Escaping his stink I managed to get on a relatively empty bus, allowing me the freedom to read a couple of comics on the way home.

GL Corps first. Top issue featuring some fine Sinestro Corps shenanigans in an alien prison for the criminally insane. Lots and lots of words too! Yes! A comic that took me a good 20 minutes to read. I like that.

That's 15 minutes more than it took to get through the latest issue of The Fan 4. Not the greatest from the World's greatest. Short on words and full of confused art, we'll have to chalk this one down as a rare failure from the normally excellent Millar and Hitch team. The fact that much of the issue is set in a snowstorm doesn't help, but there are also several small panels that try and cram in enough action to fill a splash page and end up looking cramped as a result.

It's not a total washout (the Johnny Storm shags a super-villain storyline has potential for example) but it's by far the weakest of the three so far. We can but hope for a return to form next ish.

Oh and as far as fights in snowstorms go you can't beat that old Byrne issue of Alpha Flight where Snowbird dukes it out with some old Injun god or other. The whole comic features nothing but white panels and speech bubbles*. I remember reading it when it came out and thinking it was hugely clever. All that white makes it very hard to find in mint condition apparently.

* OK so I had another look at this issue after writing this and it seems that only a third of it takes place in a snowstorm with no pics.

Short bits about comics I've been reading

Time's at a premium for me at the moment. I'm reading comics inbetween other more important real life stuff and updating the blog as and when I can grab five minutes. Fact is I'm too knackered to put any real thought into anything but changing nappies and dealing with family stuff. BUT I am still ploughing through the comic backlog, so here are some SHORT strem of conciousness styleeee reviews of what I've been reading...

Green Lantern/Green Lantern Corps

Nearly hit the Sinestro War now. Seems the whole Empire of Tears, Alan Moore thing was cropping up even earlier in the run than I'd thought. Ranx and The Children of The White Lobe both appear in the Corps. Wish I'd been reading them at the time.

And the other day when I said it would be really cool to see Batman as a Sinestro Corps. Well fuck the ducks, for one glorious splashpage it actually happens. NERDGASM!

Green Lantern is a great run. I did raise an eyebrow when Hal Jordan started quoting John McCain and creating pissed off US soldiers instead of big green mallets to take down Chechen terrorists, but hey I guess that's the kind of shit Hal would do. On the other hand maybe Geoff Johns is a raging republican hawk. Oh well, I still like his comics.

Fantastic Four #554

Superheroes as celebrities. Savvy cynicism. Pop culture references. Bryan Hitch on pencils. Basically Mark Millar is still writing The Ultimates. That's alright by me.

I liked the Back to the Future III beginning, The cheeky Miracle Man T-shirt (Copyright! Copyright!), the obscure Chris Claremont character dredged up to be Reed's ex, Sue Storm's Spice Girl style charity gig and the Doombots serving cocktails.

We've read it all before of course, but Millar and Hitch do it so well that it's still worth picking up.

Northlanders #3

I like the pencils and colours on this a lot. It's got a stark look to it. Brutal. Cold. Grim. The kind of art that fits the grimy paper Vertigo use to a tee.

The Orkney Islands in the 10th Century look like a shitter of a place.

The story is good too. Sven is like a skinny whiny Conan.

The coolest/only viking comic I've ever read (Thor doesn't count)

Amazing Spider-Man #549/#550

I'm not mad aout Salvador Larocca's art. It's not horrible, it just doesn't seem like the best fit for Spidey. His Jonah Jameson is all wrong.

Guggenheim's words are good, not Dan Slott good, but good all the same.

I'll keep reading, but I'd still rather be reading Slott/McNiven Spidey once a month.

Teen Titans Year One #1/#2

I like the idea behind this one, and it's entertaining enough comic tomfoolery but really, I could use a few more words. Seriously, it pisses me off to spend £2 on a comic that takes 1 minute to read.

I get that the writers are aiming at a younger audience, but when I were a lad I was drooling over Daredevil and Watchmen. Lot of words in those buggers I tell you. Lot of words.

The covers are ace though.

Millar & Hitch preview pages

So after pissing off plenty of people by fucking about with Spidey's continuity, Joe Quesada is risking yet more nerd ire by entrusting the world's greatest comic book to a duo who are notoriously bad at meeting deadlines.

I say good on him! The new Spidey is ace and Millar and Hitch doing the Fantastic Four is gonna be grrrrrrrreat!

If you haven't already, check out the first few pages of next week's big event HERE

and for a hint of what's to come in future issues have a gander at these great Hitch pencils and inks...




How good is that Doom?! If anyone wants to buy it for me, it's going for $4,000 HERE

Gee Reed what's that on your head?

Yeah? Well it makes you look like a dick, take it off.

The Weekly Shop #10

On the list this week, or last week as I suppose it is now...

Thunderbolts #114, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four #2, Tales of the Unexpected #8, Guy Ritchie's Gamekeeper #2, Marvel Zombies Dead Days one shot, Comics gone Ape and 2000AD #1536

I swerved Countdown #51 and remain determined not to get hooked into World War Hulk either.

So, where to start. Well I guess Marvel Zombies Dead Days is as good a place as any. I loved the original mini series and the Millar scripted Ultimate Fan 4 crossover arc but this prequel isn't great chiefly because it seems that Robert Kirkman's heart isn't really in it.

The great thing about the original was the vein of dark humour that ran through every page. That sick sense of fun is missing from this one shot which is a wholly pessimistic affair and less enjoyable as a result.

Sean Phillips' art is still nice to look at and we get another pretty Arthur Suydam cover to savour (this one's based on Jim Lee's X-Men #1) , but overall this is a bit of a let down. It'll still sell bucketloads and no doubt we haven't heard the last of Marvel Zombies, but super-hero zombies need to be fun to work and sadly there isn't a great deal of fun to be had in Dead Days.

Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four is much better. I wish Jeff Parker was doing The Ultimate Fantastic Four, because this book is everything that the Ultimate title should be but isn't. It zips along at a nice pace, doesn't get bogged down in unnecessary dialogue and most of all it's fun.

I've said it before, but I think Parker really gets Spidey. Reading this it's clear that he also understands the FF too. An excellent writer whose stuff I must make it a mission to read more of.

Gamekeeper #2 continues to read like the comics version of an X-Box shooter. Didn't feel that the second issue quite matched up to the promise of the first and there were several moments of clunky dialogue this time out, but it's still an enjoyable read and is different enough to some of the other stuff out there to keep me on board for the duration.

Tales of the Unexpected #8 winds up a mini-series which I was only buying out of a misguided sense of nostalgia for I Vampire who features in the Doctor 13 back-up story. I stopped reading the main Spectre story after issue 1, but Dr 13 was a smart piece of DC weirdness which read more like a Grant Morrison story than Brian Azarello's normal stuff.

I guess the main problem with Thunderbolts is that as fun as it is watching a team of bad guys being sponsored by the US government to take down good guys, we're never going to be allowed to see them tackling any A listers. I don't mind that too much, and #114 is another enjoyable beat-em-up featuring a selection of heroes direct from the Appendix of the Handbook of the Marvel Universe. But for this book to really deliver the goods we need to see the Thunderbolts messing up one of the big boys. Bring on Spidey v Norman Osborn I say.

Time to start saving...

...the second Fantastic Four omnibus is on the way


At £60 it's an expensive tome, but it won't put as big a dent in your wallet as this little lot