Every comic you've read in 2014


Missy

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Yeah, absolutely made the right choice here.

SWORD 1-5: Brand and Beast running around dispensing SPACE JUSTICE, with a heavy appearance from Lockheed and cameos from almost every Marvel cosmic character (Beta Ray Bill, Karolina, etc)? Sign me the fuck up. Tied into the Uncanny X Run by virtue of one of the villains, though heavily Dark Reign influenced, and just fucking fun, to boot.

Thor: The Mighty Avenger 1-8: Pure Silver Age goofiness, with awesome Samnee art and gratuitous appearances from various Avengers, along with Thor dealing with modern technology. Good intro book, sad it didn't get further than the 8 issues it got.

Captain Marvel 1-17: Kelly Sue fucking DeConick, man. I knew precisely jack shot about Carol going into this, and Im definitely part of the Corps now. You get to see part of her early work with Emma Rios partway through the run, and what they do right around that time with her lesion preventing her from flying is wonderful. The final issue of this volume nails Carol down perfectly, and features two of the sappiest pages ever.

Great note to end the trial on.

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Captain Marvel 1-17: Kelly Sue fucking DeConick, man. I knew precisely jack shot about Carol going into this, and Im definitely part of the Corps now. You get to see part of her early work with Emma Rios partway through the run, and what they do right around that time with her lesion preventing her from flying is wonderful. The final issue of this volume nails Carol down perfectly, and features two of the sappiest pages ever.

It has been so awesome to see DeConnick, who's always been really good, go from "Matt Fraction's wife" to a star in her own right in such a short period. This book has caught on like it has for a reason.

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Avengers Assemble, Vol. 1: Collects #1-11 plus the first annual of The Avengers, Vol. 3 (the Heroes Return year).

Heroes Reborn was a fucking shitshow. God, those were some awful comics. (For those of you who don't remember/weren't alive, Marvel gave Fantastic Four and Iron Man to Jim Lee and Captain America and The Avengers to Rob Liefeld for a year to goose sales by heralding the triumphant return to Marvel of the two biggest non-McFarlane Image creators. The Lee books were adequate. The Liefeld books were horrible and he got canned before the year was up.) So when that turdstorm passed, the books went to actual good creators, and this was arguably the best of all of them. Kurt Busiek (in his post-Marvels glow) and George Perez (creating arguably the best art of his career) came together to make this really fun, vintage-feeling team book that harkened back to the Englehart days. Here we have the Morgan La Fey arc, a lot of Scarlet Witch melodrama, the development of Carol Danvers' alcoholism, and a metric fuckton of not terribly awesome characters like Triathlon and Silverclaw (along with Justice on loan from the New Warriors, which... no). However, the Big Three are pitch perfect, Busiek writes the best Hawkeye you're ever likely to encounter, the artwork is really amazing, and Perez actually manages to give everyone a recognizable, distinctive face to the point that Clint and Steve can be standing silently in a room in civilian clothes, unmasked, and there's no question which one is which, which is actually a hell of a lot more difficult that it ought to be. It's a little old fashioned and Bronze-Agey, but you know me, and that's not a bad thing.

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I've gotten back into the X-Men with the Bendis ALL-NEW era, catching up with the trades. I'm on vol.4 having just finished Battle of the Atom, which everyone warned me was not good. It certainly wasn't awesome, but not as bad as I was anticipating. I'm still hoping this story will bring about the redemption of Cyclops, of whom I'm one of the few hundred fans on the planet.

Battle of the Atom was needlessly convoluted though. What was the point of bringing in more time displaced X-Men? At one point there's FOUR Icemen running around. Ultimately the crossover served little point other than to contrive Kitty Pryde into leaving the team, which felt as hollow as can be. Still digging the era, but Battle of the Atom was pretty cheap as a story.

Also filling holes in my Robin collection. I've got practically all of the Jon Lewis run, which I remembering hating when it first was coming out. There's this terrible storyline of Tim having an Alfred from the future warn him of a traitor in the Bat-Family. After issues of Tim suspecting everybody, turns out it was all a crazy test by Batman. Tim rightly cusses him out, only to turn back to him by the end and promise to be the bestest Robin he can be. Story was shite. I hated it 10 years ago and I hate it now. It does lead into the Bill Willingham run which wasn't brilliant but definitely better and more memorable considering he has Jack Drake learn of Tim's identity and Stephanie becoming the 4th Robin (both things that Chuck Dixon wanted to do but wasn't allowed).

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Daredevil by Mark Waid, volume 3: collects Daredevil #22-36 and Indestructible Hulk #9 and 10.

Seriously, why is Waid so fucking good at this? Also, Samnee needs to draw everything forever. I love that they're not afraid to show Matt's blindness as actually being a hindrance on occasion (accusing a black man of being a white supremacist being probably the best example). A few posts back I praised this run for Waid uncanny ability to balance the funny, quippy DD with the "everything ever always happens to me" DD, and the balance leans much more toward the latter here, but that's only because everything ever really does seem to be happening to him, and finally we put the "I'm not Daredevil" thing to bed once and for all. The Hulk issues don't need to be here, though.

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In the Adventure Comics stretch of the Showcase Presents: The Spectre and hoo boy this was what I'm looking for. Not that I wasn't enjoying what came before, I particularly liked his solo book, which had some early Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson art. These stories are just 12 pages of pure Spectre terror. Would've loved to have seen a TV show or mature animated series with this. Guess that animated short will have to do. For now. And man, I love Aparo's Batman work, but I think this might be the best of his career.

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Avengers Assemble, Vol. 1: Collects #1-11 plus the first annual of The Avengers, Vol. 3 (the Heroes Return year).

Heroes Reborn was a fucking shitshow. God, those were some awful comics. (For those of you who don't remember/weren't alive, Marvel gave Fantastic Four and Iron Man to Jim Lee and Captain America and The Avengers to Rob Liefeld for a year to goose sales by heralding the triumphant return to Marvel of the two biggest non-McFarlane Image creators. The Lee books were adequate. The Liefeld books were horrible and he got canned before the year was up.) So when that turdstorm passed, the books went to actual good creators, and this was arguably the best of all of them. Kurt Busiek (in his post-Marvels glow) and George Perez (creating arguably the best art of his career) came together to make this really fun, vintage-feeling team book that harkened back to the Englehart days. Here we have the Morgan La Fey arc, a lot of Scarlet Witch melodrama, the development of Carol Danvers' alcoholism, and a metric fuckton of not terribly awesome characters like Triathlon and Silverclaw (along with Justice on loan from the New Warriors, which... no). However, the Big Three are pitch perfect, Busiek writes the best Hawkeye you're ever likely to encounter, the artwork is really amazing, and Perez actually manages to give everyone a recognizable, distinctive face to the point that Clint and Steve can be standing silently in a room in civilian clothes, unmasked, and there's no question which one is which, which is actually a hell of a lot more difficult that it ought to be. It's a little old fashioned and Bronze-Agey, but you know me, and that's not a bad thing.

BTW Dan, the podcast Views From the Longbox episode #190 talks about this exact subject of the Busiek/Perez Avengers. The episode just came out this week if you're interested.

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In the Adventure Comics stretch of the Showcase Presents: The Spectre and hoo boy this was what I'm looking for. Not that I wasn't enjoying what came before, I particularly liked his solo book, which had some early Neal Adams and Bernie Wrightson art. These stories are just 12 pages of pure Spectre terror. Would've loved to have seen a TV show or mature animated series with this. Guess that animated short will have to do. For now. And man, I love Aparo's Batman work, but I think this might be the best of his career.

This was an incredible batch of stories. Michael Fleisher's scripts were pretty out there, especially for the time, and I can't disagree about this being arguably Aparo's best work.

BTW Dan, the podcast Views From the Longbox episode #190 talks about this exact subject of the Busiek/Perez Avengers. The episode just came out this week if you're interested.

Funnily enough, I downloaded it just this morning.

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Grimm Fairy Tales vol 2: This is better than the first. I'm interested to see where it goes.

Extinction Parade #1-5: Max Brooks has shown me nothing to prove that he is anything but a one hit wonder. World War Z is great. Everything else? Nope.

Robocop Vs. Terminator: The story will not change your life, in any way. It is an interesting move to incorporate RC in the origins of what becomes Skynet. The elements of the story that play with time and make it a story about the soul of a man fighting not to be the end of mankind is there, it's just not fully explored. The art is some of the most beautiful shit you'll ever see, so there's that. Simonson is God.

Trades: 56
Comics: 648
Omnibus: 8
Graphic Novels: 15

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Blood Syndicate #1-12: first step in my reread through all of the Milestone Comics line. This is some heavy shit. Super dark, but still airy enough to be considered exciting superhero comics. Not only race is looked at here, but homosexuality, body issues and transgendered people. Pretty amazing for the early nineties at DC comics.

Trades: 56
Comics: 666 (!!!!)
Omnibus: 8
Graphic Novels: 15

Also, 666 comics read this year!!!!

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Batman: A Celebration of 75 Years: Just like it says, a collection of stories covering the entirety of Batman's history, split into five sections (Golden Age, 1950s, New Look, Bronze/Copper/Modern, New 52). This is a pretty mixed bag. The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told came out for the 50th anniversary, and that was a much stronger mix, but it's remarkable how little crossover there is between the two. The obvious suspects are here like "Chemical Syndicate" from Detective 27, and "Who He Is And How He Came To Be"; some of the other stories are... fine, I suppose. However, some highlights include "The Deadshot Ricochet" by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, "The Player on the Other Side" by Mike W. Barr and Michael Golden, and "The Beautiful People" by Paul Dini and J. H. Williams III. Overall, there's some great artwork from Dick Sprang, Neal Adams, Carmine Infantino, Alan Davis, even actual honest-to-God-did-it-himself-not-a-ghost Bob Kane. Very little here that's indispensable, but as an overall look at Batman it's certainly not bad, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Knightfall issue was actually better than I remembered.

The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus vol. 1: collects Giant Size X-Men #1, The Uncanny X-Men #94-131, and Annual #3.

This is just phenomenal. For all my problems with the X-Men over the past thirty years, this is one of the strongest runs in comics history. As much as I love the original X-Men as a team, their actual book was pretty weak, and this goes scorched Earth on the title and rebuilds almost from scratch. Re-imagining the X-Men as adults ranging from their late teens (Colossus, clearly still a kid at this point) to late 30s/early 40s (Banshee), it takes forever for this group to actually act as a team - they're still kind of shaky as the book ends, and they never really gel - and that drives a lot of stories. The actual stories are fairly run of the mill - fights with Magneto, Arcade, Mesmero, that sort of thing - but there are some classics here, like Alpha Flight's debut, Proteus/Mutant X, and the first three issues of the Dark Phoenix Saga.

Where these issues differ is the characterization; everyone feels like their own person with very real personality quirks, and it's not just "this one's the joker" or "this one likes to argue". Characters that start off one dimensional either don't last (Thunderbird), develop motives and relationships that weren't there early on (Colossus),or finally get out from under Xavier and Jean and explore why this uptight control freak acts like that (Cyclops). The only exception is Wolverine, who really is just a one-note psycho for much of the book.

The first half or so is drawn by Dave Cockrum, and this stuff is above average superheroics. Nightcrawler is clearly his favorite character, and Kurt gets some great playing up. When John Byrne takes over, Kurt recedes into the background and we finally start to see some slow development of Wolverine. In fact, it's kind of amazing how little we know about Wolverine starting out; from all appearances, the sum total of his powers are "has claws and can smell stuff pretty well". It's obvious even the creators are making this up as they go, as there is no mention at all in this entire volume of his healing factor other than a blink and you miss it "I heal quick", and during their first confrontation with Magneto, he's flung across the room by the magnetism affecting his claws; there's no mention at all of his adamantium bones until two or three issues before the end, several years after his introduction. In fact, there's more than one reference to his having super strength, before that gets quietly forgotten. (Other powers that get quickly set aside include Nightcrawler's invisibility in shadow - not camoflauge, but actual invisibility.)

They seem pretty determined to keep the roster to a manageable number; after Thunderbird dies, it stays at six (Cyclops, Storm, Colossus, Banshee, Nightcrawler, Wolverine) for several years. (Phoenix is so overpowered that she quickly becomes a nonentity in this book.) When Banshee is injured and leaves, the wheels are set in motion for Phoenix to join full time, and within a few issues she's Dark Phoenix, by which time we've met Kitty Pryde. It's easy to forget after decades of "We have so many X-Men that we need four teams or whatever" that the roster was at one point pretty much as fixed as the Fantastic Four's.

While Claremont's overwriting is on display, as is his overuse on stock phrases ("Hear me, X-Men!" "No quarter is asked... and none given!" "Power? You do not know the meaning of the word!") and references to some of his (now well-known) proclivities ("It hurts so much... but secretly... do I crave it???"), the scripting here is really, really good.

And what's really interesting is that the letter pages are reprinted as well, and for a book published in the 1970s, it's very unusual for a letter page here to not have at least one letter from a woman, and frequently more than one. If nothing else, Claremont wrote the hell out of strong female characters, and readers responded.

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Doc Unknown: The Secret of Gate City-True pulp fun in a visual style similar to Cooke meets Mignola.

Doc unknown: Winter of the Damned & Other Tales-Second volume that I kickstarted. Brilliant stuff. The art styles change up, but there's still a lot of Ryan Cody, which is good.

Boss Snake-a oneshot comic for the origin of a Doc Unknown villain. Typical stuff, but still very visually appealing.

Doc Frankenstein: Another pulpy doc I decided to read. This trade collects the first four issues (there were only six, but a further trade next year promises to collect the next 8. I'm a little dubious. Beautiful stuff. Steve Skroce's art takes the front seat here and that's okay. Burlyman had a pretty good batting average as a publisher. Even if the Matrix comics sucked (never read them) Doc Frankenstein and Shaolin Cowboy more than made up for it.

Trades: 59
Comics: 667
Omnibus: 8
Graphic Novels: 15

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Spider-Man: The COSMIC Adventures!:

Got this trade at SDCC from Marvel's Epic Collection which I really never knew existed. This was during the era where Gerry Conway was writing both Spec and Web, and Micheline was fairly established on Amazing. I really freaking dug it. It's a solid pre-Clone Saga era in Spider-Man's history that often gets overlooked. It's kind of fresh into the marriage, Post-Venom Pre-Carnage. Peter's response to his new cosmic powers is so in character it would be surprising if if wasn't being handled 2/3rds of the time by one of his best writers ever. It also takes place during the Acts of Vengeance Marvel crossover where Doom, Mags, Wizard and various others all team up. Spidey fights a lot of wild cards like Graviton, Titania and others whom he usually doesn't go up against, which keeps the repetitive nature of the issues fresh. He even goes up against the gray Hulk and punches him into space, which was awesome. Pretty much everything about the Cosmic Spidey arc was engaging and honestly it ends way too fast just as he realizes that the powers were from Captain Universe.

Oddly enough this is about halfway through the trade paperback. The collection includes the return of the Black Cat, where she dates Flash Thompson to get back at Peter for daring to marry Mary Jane, the third encounter with the classic Eddie Brock Venom, and meaningless Punisher team-up, and an interminable story told across the Annuals about Spidey shrinking down to the Microverse and fighting the Psycho-Man. It's all still a fun read. Micheline's run on ASM isn't the all-time greatest, but it's still plenty enjoyable. This is right before Mark Bagely came on the title, but I still enjoy Erik Larsen's work as it grows from being a poor-man's Todd Macfarlene to his own take on the character.

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Hardware #1-12: Not as compelling as Blood Syndicate by a long shot. The character design of Hardware is very cool, but the fact that he spends almost all of the twelve issues trying to bring one man non-superpowered man to justice is a little more than tedious.

Trades: 59
Comics: 679
Omnibus: 8
Graphic Novels: 15

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The Golden Age Green Lantern Archives, vol. 1: collects the Green Lantern stories from All-American Comics #16-30 and Green Lantern #1.

This is, to be frank, not very good. Co-created by Bill Finger and Martin Nodell (and every story here appears to have been written by Finger), the idea is that Alan Scott got his hands on a magic lantern, from which he fashions a ring, which gives him unimaginable power. Mostly he uses it to fly, walk through walls, and deflect bullets; otherwise he mostly just punches people in the face a lot. The stories are all virtually identical (here's a bad guy, the Lantern goes after him, the bad guy's thugs try to shoot him, it doesn't work, he punches a lot of people and then he goes home and is a dick to his girlfriend) and the highlights of the artwork tend to be stories not drawn by Modell (Sheldon Moldoff's covers, however, are generally pretty great). Dull.

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They're pretty bad, aren't they? I actually read a bunch of those in issue form if you can believe that. My friend had his uncle's old collection and they were ratty and shabby, but intact.

They are. Every story was virtually identical and the art was generally substandard. Golden Age comics were mediocre more often than not, but you can usually find something interesting in the classic ones (the All-Star Comics Archives are a hell of a lot of fun) but these bored the shit out of me.

However, that's awesome that you got to read the originals. Holding old comics in your hands is just amazing. Plus you got a lot of story back then; I wish they could figure out a way to make anthology books work today.

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Icon #1-12: The Black Superman is a Conservative Republican with a pregnant hood rat sidekick. Absolutely fantastic. The art changes in the later part, but this is a really fantastic series. Too bad Icon gets a case of Spawn cape early on.

Trades: 59
Comics: 691
Omnibus: 8
Graphic Novels: 15

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