Well, I am rather behind on my comic reading. To give you an idea how far, here is a picture of my “too read” pile:

Considering that new comics are released today in most places (Thursday here due to the Canada Day public holiday) I still have a huge amount of reading to get through from previous weeks. I have also been busy house hunting this week, but I still wanted to be able to review a couple of items from this week’s releases. What I decided to do, is do a couple of mini-reviews, then two big reviews. The first big review will be for one of my most anticipated comics of the week, and the other for my least anticipated, which I have been considering dropping from my pull-list.

Mini Reviews:

Stranded #5 - This was a great wrap-up to Mike Carey’s Virgin/Sci-Fi mini series. Things are left open for a second volume, which seems to be the way Virgin like to do stuff. There is even talk of a Sci-Fi Channel TV series, which would be cool.

Crossing Midnight #19 - Another Mike Carey series wrapping up. This was a really nice conclusion to this epic Japanese Fantasy story. If you haven’t been reading it, I implore you to pick up the trades, you won’t regret it.

No Hero #0 - Warren Ellis is starting another mini-series on Avatar Press, or as they chose to call it “A Serialized Graphic Novel”, hmmmm! This was a little $1 cold opening to the series, showing snippets of story from the 1970s to 2012. It gave you a little taster of the story of wannabe superheros who take drugs to get their powers, but really suffer for the privilege. Thematically it is quite similar to some of Warren’s other recent superhero series, but it is too early to judge just from the #0 issue. It was definitely enough to get me to come back for issue #1.

Big Reviews:

Least anticipated:

Teen Titans #60

I started buying Teen Titans about half way through Geoff Johns’ run on the title. Geoff is (arguably) very good at writing light-hearted superhero titles, so he was a perfect fit for the Teen Titans. He also had a knack of taking obscure or unheard-of characters and making them cool. Geoff eventually went on to pastures new, and left the team in the hands of Sean McKeever. Sean was left a rather odd ball team, which included the likes of Kid Devil, Ravager, and Miss Martian. I think this title would have worked much better if he had just thrown them all out and started his own version of the Titans. Instead he seems to have kept every one, and added Blue Beetle to the team, though he isn’t part of the team, he just hangs out with them, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to be honest. The run has consisted of various members getting upset and threatening to leave the team, but eventually coming back, which got old very quickly. He has had two major story lines The first was Titans of Tomorrow… Today! which was basically a rip-off of Johns’ Titans of Tomorrow storyline, but here the Titans of Tomorrow come to the past, including the now dead Conner Kent and Bart Allen. The storyline fumbled around with a pathetic time paradox theme, and there was an inevitable battle, but eventually they went back to the future leaving the evil future version of Miss Martian inside the head of the current Miss Martian?! The next, and current story line The Terror Titans, had a guy called the Clock King (with nice clock face Glasses) who forms his own Titans team to terrorize the Teen Titans. Again, it was just a rip-off of Johns’ Teen Titans East where Deathstroke did the same damn thing. On top of everything, the current story is a Darkclub tie in!

Grade: E - REMOVED FROM PULL-LIST

That makes 5 DC titles I have dropped this month.

Most anticipated:

Final Crisis #2

My enjoyment of Final Crisis #1 was somewhat hampered by the fact that the events occurring jarred very badly with those that were set up in the Lead-in series to this event. Apparently this was due the fault of DC editorial, and not Grant Morrison, but all the same, it is pretty confusing if events are set up in a series called Countdown to Final Crisis, but they seem to completely deny things occurring in Final Crisis. I later re-read the first issue, and cast out from my mind all the preceding details. I found the story was much more enjoyable. Now, with #2 things have been allowed to rest for a month, and we can go in and just enjoy the story for the story, rather than the crap around it.

This issue was still very much set up for things to come. According to Grant Morrison it will go pretty slowly, putting pieces in place until #3. At the end of #3 the Flash will race the Black Racer one month into the future, where he will find the world in ruins, and that evil has taken over, then shit will kick off. This is pretty high concept stuff to be putting in an event comis, but damn if that doesn’t sound cool. There was some good stuff to keep you going here though, the Gods of Apokalips are revealed a little more, and some New Genesis Gods surface, including Mr. Miracle. We also get an appearance from some Alpha Lanterns, and the very crazy concept of a bullet fired back though time that becomes embedded in concrete 50 years prior to the murder! Yes, this is Grant Morrison at his prime, and I fucking love it!

Thematically, this is very much the natural successor to Seven Soldiers. The emphasis is very much on plot development and characterization. It is pretty much the polar opposite of Secret Invasion. Secret Invasion had 1 issues of “who’s a Skrull?”, then the Skrulls and some maybe-original superheroes arrive from space, and then everyone had a big fight for the next two issues. I expect much more fighting to come. So, get Final Crisis now! Especially if you fancy a much more cerebral event comic, that feels much more like a self-contained mini-series, rather than one of those events where you have to buy every issue of every comic that is out that week!

Grade: A+ - highly recommended

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