Shopping List

No visit to London's magical West End last week as I only had one title on the old shopping list. My brain barely survived the disruption to its weekly routine of course, but I felt better about myself for not dropping a wad of cash. Still, one week without new comics is enough for any emotionally retarded man to bear, and I'm straining at the leash to lash the cash on some overpriced funny books. Here's what I'll be picking up this week...

The End League #5
Relentlessly depressing, deliberately derivative superhero team book by Rick Remender. The End League gets darker and more difficult to follow with every passing issue, but it's well written, cool stuff and I'm a big fan.

Action Comics #870
Geoff Johns' mission to clean up any discrepancies in DC continuity continues apace with part four of his Braniac story, and very well done it is too. He's successfully managed to build a new Braniac out of all the old versions of the character while still telling a rollicking good Superman yarn.

Final Crisis: Revelations #3
Oh dear which one is this again? I'm getting a bit confused by all the tie-ins that I swore I wasn't going to buy but in fact am. Ah yes, the Spectre threatening to kill the Question at some indeterminate point in the Final Crisis timeline, lots of quotes from the bible and some horrible art from Philip Tan. Still, I enjoyed the bit where Dr Light got turned into a candle and I'm now irreversibly locked into buying everything related to Final Crisis so...

Green Lantern #35
More house cleaning from Johns as he retells the origin of Green Lantern. This arc was obviously designed to be a bit of a filler while Hal Jordan gets on with all the Final Crisis stuff elsewhere, but it's turned out to be one of Johns' finest moments on the book. Lots of Sinestro, plenty of Hector Hammond and a plausible fusion of current events in the GL universe and the original Silver Age origin of the character.

Green Lantern Corps #39
How do you follow up the last story where a bunch of evil alien insectoid types dumped a truckload of eyeballs on the Green Lanterns for a laugh? Answer: You can't. What you can do is whet the appetites of your slavering audience for the upcoming Blackest Night story with an origin story for one of the multitude of new Lantern Corps. Yay!

Wonder Woman #25
Hmmm. I'm getting closer and closer to dropping this. The first few issues of Gail Simone's run were really strong, but the glory days of talking apes v techno Nazis on the beach are long gone and let's be honest, it's been downhill since then. Last chance to get good or it's off the list.

Avengers Invaders #5
Yeah, this is shit awful but I've bought four issues already so what are you gonna do? Ahh the mindset of the comic fan.

Invincible Iron Man #6
Eziekel Stane is the best NEW villain to hit the Marvel U for a long time and Invincible Iron Man is as good a reboot of a Marvel property as there's been in recent years. Can't say much more about this book than that. A gem.

Marvel Zombies III #1
Really? It's by Fred van Lente though, so it's might be OK.

The Twelve #8
Given that we're eight issues in and the Twelve still haven't done anything but moan about how shit modern life is, I should be hating this, but for some reason it works. Not only that, it's spawned a fine Big Dave F impression. Really, you should see his Mastermind Excello, it's uncanny.

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.

A few quick recommendations while my baby is asleep!

Well I've been ploughing through my comics backlog (amazing how quickly it builds up when you have a job and a baby to think about) and have a few recommendations for you.

Number #1 on the LLC list: The End League #1

If this hadn't been written by Rick Remender I'd never have picked it up. After all who needs ANOTHER superhero team book?

Set in a super-villain run post-apocalyptic world where 1 out of every 1000 people has superpowers, the End League is essentially a rehash of ideas which have already been explored in Wanted, Top 10, The Authority, The Ultimates and Kingdom Come.

Seen it, read it got the T-Shirt etc. I wanted to hate this, but it's done so well that it doesn't seem to matter that we've seen it all before.

It's doing Remender down to say that he does a great homage, but errrm....he does. Just as Fear Agent is a love letter to EC's Weird Science so The End League references and pays tribute to the big superteam books.

Yet for all the familiarity, there are enough new ideas in this to make it an exciting read. If you're in any way jaded by the super-hero genre though, you aren't going to like it.

Number #2 recommendation Army at Love

Regular readers will know that I've been blathering on for some time about Special Forces and how it's the ONLY book out there that's tackling the American occupation of Iraq.

WRONG!

Army at Love is a corker that cocks a snook at the war and the people running it while also finding time to send up corporate America and the apathy which it fosters.

Oh and it's by Rick Veitch.

There's a cheap trade of the first few issues available, the cover is plastered in good reviews. Rightly so. Top quality stuff.

Recommendation #3 Gravel #0

Starts in Iraq, but that's where the similarity to Army at Love ends in this typically gore spattered Warren Ellis/Avatar offering.

I loved the Bond style prelude to the main story. And hey, a secret agent combat wizard...what's not to like.