Weekly Comic Reviews

Yep, read through them already. And I'm even going to include a review of the Wizard How To Draw: Character Creation that I finally picked up last week. This week we have Hulk, She-Hulk, and Civil War: Frontline.

Hulk: Another solid issue. Things are starting to come to a head. How do I know this? Well, the Hulk said he wanted to be left alone and tried to walk away. That's always a sign that things are about to get nasty. And this book has everyone's powers shown. We have the Hulk showing feats of strength, some smarts, and not even flinching when Miek put a spear in his chest (although it didn't go in too far). The Emperor toasts a few people and his Lieutenant starts to show her stuff (powers that is). And getting back to Miek, he seems to be having a tough time getting past the whole slaughter of his people. And seeing the end of this book and the preview for the next issue (which talks about the Hulk and the Lieutenant finally battling it out) I think we might be in for a slobberknocker of an issue. This issue even seemed to be better written (better flow) than some of Pak's other issues. And the art remains quite cool.

She-Hulk: Shulkie seems rather passive about the whole registration thing. But I guess that's not too far off character for her. We have the Pugsly, Jameson, She-Hulk love triangle bubbling over and the identity of her new boss figured out (with the reveal ending in a comedic although slightly predictable fashion which still leaves She-Hulk out of the loop). Although the reveal makes sense given the previews to upcoming issues (I gotta stop reading the previews). The writing was well done, the art was well done. The book continues to impress me. And we're finally getting more to the story concerning Starfox.

Civil War: Frontline -- Osborne is out and threatening Jameson while Stark's people claim he's still in prison (moving Stark more and more into the badguy role). Jameson believes Stark's people and fires Eurich. Eurich's friend (the female reporter, I can't remember her name) is arrested for associating with unregistered combatants (they're starting to use anti-terror laws to do this). Wonder Man is blackmailed into service (it seems he's starting to realize that registering might not be a good thing) to look into a possible sleeper agent (who we know works for Namor). But the big one is Speedball who is taken to the secret prison Reed Richards has been working on (She-Hulk even knew about this but was supposedly reluctant to tell Speedball about). I won't say too much about it except 1) I'm surprised that this reveal was done in Frontline and not the regular series, 2) Reed Richards and anyone else involved in the making of this prison aren't looking too good right now (it's not a nice place to send "heroes", it makes sense I guess, but it's not nice). I was thinking about not spoiling it for Carl but I guess that doesn't make sense, it won't be a shocker put in Civil War as readers will already know about it thanks to this series. So here it is, Reed Richards built the prison in the Negative Zone. So another issue, if he believed Annihilus was still in the Negative Zone then it might be somewhat dangerous to leave the heroes imprisonned there. There are also the issues of what effects the Negative Zone has on people (which is brought up slightly in this issue) and how time is different. Unless the prison is near the center of the zone the time will be off. For every hour on earth, 2 weeks pass in the Negative Zone. So if the heroes are left there for one day (our time) it will seem like 48 weeks for the prisoners. Hopefully that has been accounted for or else these heroes are in deep poopoo (and Reed Richards would be a total @$$). All in all this book was good. And I'm totally used to the various stories now. The one downer was the mirror story (the one where they have something written about a war from history and show mirror images of the old war with this Civil War). I haven't been a big fan of these and this one talks about two brothers fighting each other in the US Civil War but they show pictures of Spidey and Iron Man fighting some two bit heroes. It doesn't seem to really mirror the two. A better mirror would be Cap and Iron Man fighting one another, they would be closer to brothers. Anywho, the story continues to keep me intrigued.

I could now rant about how some people on various forums are dismissive of this storyline in Marvel and just scoff at the idea that a person's civil rights would be a concern to heroes such as Captain America but I'll keep that for another time.

Lastly we have the Wizard How to Draw that I picked up last week (it was actually a few months old but Silver Snail sold out of them and then I just forgot). I've reviewed a couple of the Wizard How to's on here and this one is the same. A few new tidbits and a lot of rehashes of stuff from the first book. And this one is really noticeable as it's a stretch to see why "Movement and Motion" and "Making Characters Move" are in a book about "Character Creation". But there do seem to be a few somewhat decent ones (like Chapter 3 which has a bunch of sections on creating your stereotypical super male, super female, sidekick, etc. But all in all, it just doesn't seem worth the money. You'd probably be better off looking through the books at your local library or checking out chapters for more comprehensive books on the subject.