Instead of traipsing down to the Royal National, I relaxed with my latest ebay purchase, Annihilation. I've been meaning to read it for a couple of years now, and finally scored the trades for a very low price. Just finished up the first installment, and it's different gravy. Abnett & Lanning get massive props for their work on Marvel's cosmic line, and I enjoyed their Nova issues a lot. But for me, the shining star of that first volume is Keith Giffen. The Drax The Destroyer story is off the hook! Alien desperadoes pitching up in a smalltown America and terrorising the good folk therein. A lone, flawed hero coming to the rescue. This was classic Western stuff set to a cosmic beat. The ending was a bit of a let-down, but you can't blame Giffen for that, he had to tie the mini into the wider Annihilation story so we were never going to get a completely satisfactory resolution. Still, overall this was top stuff and I expect I'll gobble up the remaining two trades in super quick time.
Other than that, I enjoyed Darrick Robertson's Conan one-shot The Weight of the Crown quite a bit. It was an interesting look at the flaws in Conan's character, (basically he's into birds, booze and fighting to the detriment of everything else), with some lovely looking battle scenes to geek out over. I'll always pick up Conan comics, cos I love a bit of the old barbarian action, so I do. But I still really, really want to see Conan drawn as Arnie. I think it would work, sort of along the same lines as Gary Frank who draws Superman as Christopher Reeve. For me Arnie is as much Conan as Reeve is Superman. Someone make it happen.
