Friday, November 28, 2008

Weekly Comic Review for November 26th, 2008

Woohoo! I have comics to review. Actually, this was a pretty busy week in comparison to most weeks. I had a whopping 5 books come out.

She-Hulk #35 -- First off, let me just say that I'm going to miss this series. I usually find that even a not-so-good issue of She-Hulk more enjoyable than most other books I see coming out of the big two companies right now. Having said that, I didn't find this issue to be one of the stronger issues of Peter David's run. Don't get me wrong, it was pretty good. The story was a pretty solid Peter David story (and I say "Peter David story" because the blending of superheroes with real world problems in this issue seemed similar to the stories he did in the Hulk or Captain Marvel) and despite She-Hulk and friends taking the moral high ground you have to give credit that the Red Guardian wasn't portrayed too poorly given the stance he was forced to take. But I found the problems I had with the issue were mostly in the art/story telling side of things. There were a few panels that I thought were rather weak in terms of anatomy and such but I could get by those, but there were moments where the art just didn't feel right. It didn't seem to be telling the story very well. The part with Crimson Dynamo seemingly putting Thundra to sleep with no dialogue seemed weird, almost as though the dialogue was missing or the art just wasn't portraying what was actually happening. And there were quite a few times where the expressions and body language just didn't match with what was going on. It was too bad, I think this issue could have been a lot better.

Skaar Son of Hulk #5 -- This may have been the strongest issue of this series in my opinion. The art was less distracting to me (though I still had some problems with the overall sketchiness of it and it being hard to figure out who's who at times) but more importantly, I felt this issue flowed a bit better and when combined with the second story presented, I finally feel like I understand what's going on. I hope this is a sign that the series is on track (at least for me). I'm looking forward to the next issue more so than I have in the past for this series.

Runaways #4 -- This issue was a bit weird for me. I did like parts of it but after I was done reading it I felt a bit let down that really the story didn't seem to progress very far. There was some reinforcement that the team's disfunction is due to her spell as they battle a big green ball of snot (okay, it wasn't snot but still) but that was about it. And I felt let down by the art at times as I couldn't quite tell what was going on, especially during the afore mentioned battle with the snot. Maybe I'm just getting too used to reading TPBs where this would just be one part of the story and I could keep reading to the next part and now, reading it monthly, it feels like I'm only getting a small portion of the story and it just wasn't enough for me. Having said that, I'm still interested to see where things go.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #19 -- This issue had some pretty huge moments (at least for me, and no, I won't spoil it by saying what those moments are) but some moments I had to go back and forth to figure out and it was a little distracting. Early on there was a scene I had to flip back and forth from page to page to see if maybe I missed something (like a full page or two). And for the reveal of Twilight's latest ally, I had to go back to the start of this storyline to see what he was referring to and to see if there were any clues as to who he was (some people recognized him from the art, I didn't, I guessed based on what we knew and from what I've read online afterwards it looks like I was right). And Xander's story felt like it was just getting in the way here as it ended rather abruptly. The ending felt a little weird at first as more questions are raised and only a few are answered but once it settled in it felt like a good chapter of an ongoing story. So overall, it felt like a good important chapter of a bigger story but the execution maybe could have been better.

Mouse Guard Winter 1152 #4 (of 6) -- It actually didn't take me too long to get back into the story. With the delay, I was expecting it to be worse. Though I did forget that one of the mice was a female. :) The art is really amazing here and there is a surprising amount of story to be absorbed in this one issue. I just hope the wait for the next issue isn't as long as the wait for this one. This really is a great series and well worth checking out. Though I think I'll go back to reading the collected versions with the next series. Oh yeah, I forgot about the Millennium Falcon being hidden in the cover. So keep an eye out for it.

My reading pile just grew a huge amount. A friend lent me the first two volumes of Akira while another friend keeps wanting to lend me non-comic stuff to read thinking it's stuff I may be interested in. I don't mind having a decent reading pile but I hate it when it's filled with loaned books because I tend to be a slow reader.

And I don't know when I'll be posting next week's reviews. I'm flying out on Tuesday for a conference and won't be back until Friday. So I may not get a chance to pick up my books until the following week.

Take care!

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