Hello I'm logging on for the first time in forever and right now I'm reading last week's BRZRKR special from Jason Aaron and Salvador Larocca!

I also just read the trade collection of the X-Men Days of Future Past Doomsday mini. It revisits the world of the classic Days of Future Past by covering a few decades of events (labeling each year as the story moves forward) leading up to the original storyline.

If you miss a more classic X-Men world (Hickman's modern run on X-Men has really left me cold, much as I liked him on FF), this will definitely take you back to a more recognizable set of characters. While it's horribly sad event after sad event, the characters actually seem heroic to me. Kitty Pryde really shines in this, best Kitty in a long time, and Colossus, Storm, Wolverine, Rachel, and Magneto get a lot of storyline in particular here as well among others, I feel like these are the versions I've missed so much.

This will also appeal to those who appreciate events after the Bronze Age, characters like Bishop get nice roles as well, so if you are/were a longer term X-Men reader I think it's particularly enjoyable seeing such a wide cast. Again though, even though one would expect a generally darker story given the dystopian setting, it's serious tragedy left and right.

And that's probably a bit of the weakness to me, it doesn't really have a compelling storyline beyond year-by-year vignettes of stuff that goes wrong. I say vignettes because it doesn't really flow like a coherent story, I think it just assumes the reader knows Days of Future Past already and lots of classic X-Men characters. Which works fine for me, but doesn't really make it critical reading either, again more like just revisiting an old friend. I found the interior art to be just ok as well (nice cover on the trade though).

But I'll take my classic X-Men where I can get them, and again, really nice seeing them "in character" again.

Apart from X-Factor, (see the weekly review thread), I bought and read Houses of the Unholy (the new Brubaker/Phillips), which was not my favourite of their works. I'll read it again, but maybe because the Satanic Panic never was a thing over here, that I just don't have any connection to this story.

I also bought volume 1 of Home Sick Pilots (by Watters and Wijngaard), mostly because I was liking Wijngaard's so much on The Power Fantasy (see previous weeks review thread) and I really liked the first trade. The Home Sick Pilots and their rivals The Nuclear Bastards are two teenage punk bands. Ami, one of the Pilots, disappears when checking out a alleged haunted house as a venue for their next performance. Described on the back as The Shining meets Power Rangers, which odd as that sounds, is not a bad description for it.

Monsters
Barry Windsor Smith, 2021

So, it seems like monsters are a recurring theme in my recent comics reading. Just read this, and all I can say is wow, very impressive, Mr. Smith.
A brief rundown of the story: a confused young man named Bobby Bailey, who apparently has some kind of serious learning disability and/or psychological disorder, wanders into an army recruiting office in LA. The recruiter, named Elias McDonald, realizes that he has no close family ties and would be a perfect fit for some kind of hush-hush military project called Prometheus, so he contacts the relevant officer, albeit with some trepidation (and he immediately regrets it, which has takes a serious toll on his mental health). Bobby is subjected to some, well, monstrous experimentation that turns him into a hulking, misshapen giant. He eventually escapes from the laboratory with some belated help from Elias, and the story then goes mainly into flashbacks as we learn about the pasts of Bobby, his father Tom, mother Janet and other key characters in the story which all led to this outcome. It should be noted that despite his eventual appearance, Bobby Bailey is *not* one of the monsters from the book’s title.
I can see why pretty much everyone, both previous posters in this thread and throughout the internet, have been so effusive in their praise of this book. It is truly an amazing piece of graphic storytelling. However, my own impressions aren’t quite as uncritical as most of the reviews I’ve seen. One of the main things that bothered me throughout is how many coincidences there were – upon which the story hinged. First, there is the fact that Bobby just happened to wander into the recruitment office where Elias was posted, as we later learn that Elias had also grown up in Ohio close to where Bobby did and had in fact bumped into his mother once on the street.

Also, it turns out that his father was one of the soldiers who found a secret Nazi laboratory at the end of the war along with Bobby’s father, an army interpreter, where the latter essentially went insane. And that Nazi experimentation was in fact the basis for the later army project that took in Bobby. There is also the fact that Elias – a character I really liked, by the way – ends up being something of a ‘Magical Negro.’ So I can’t give this one an unqualified 5 out of 5 stars or whatever, but I’ll still say that it’s very much worth reading. It’s a gut-wrenching, tragic story, and the art, needless to say, is gorgeous. All together, this is probably Smith’s magnum opus.

(By the way, I should note that except for the cover, which is a scan of my own book, the other two images here were borrowed from a review of the book by Greg Burgas at the Atomic Junk Shop.)

After putting it off for so long I finally read and finished House Of X/Powers Of X by Jonathan Hickman the other day. It was a pretty good read, and I have considered continuing with the stories that have taken place after but I don't know yet. I have so much stuff on my to read list as it is. However I do have some down time coming up so I may give it a shot then. I have already printed out a list of the branching titles, issues, and storylines that have come after... so maybe I have already committed to it without even realizing it.

Resident Alien Omnibus, volume 2
Peter Hogan (writer) and Steve Parkhouse (artist), 2023
collecting Resident Alien: The Man With No Name #1-4 (2016), Resident Alien: An Alien in New York #1-4 (2018), Resident Alien: Your Ride’s Here #1-6 (2020), and a short story, “The Ghost” from a 2022 FCBD issue, published by Dark Horse

I posted my review of the first omnibus in the classic comics section because most of its contents have already passed the 10-year mark; everything in this one, however, fits comfortably into our ‘modern’ comics category.
Also, looking over what I wrote about the first omnibus, I see I didn't really talk about the content oft he actual stories. Like I noted, the tone is completely different from the TV show, and pretty much all of them often revolve around some kind of mystery (usually there’s a dead body involved, but not always) in which our resident alien Harry is either asked by the local authorities to assist or he sometimes stumbles onto the solution unintentionally. For example, the aforementioned FCBD story involves a cranky old woman who lives alone (Harry pays her regular house calls) in a big house that everyone in town thinks is haunted, and then one night some strange bumping sounds are heard on one of the upper floors.

“The Man With No Name” involves arson, possible drug dealers and the death of a mysterious, elderly drifter. “An Alien in New York” sees Harry travel to the Big Apple to unravel the mystery of why a graffiti artist who was active almost 30 years before left symbols on his works that are actually numbers in an alien language Harry understands (again, if you’ve watched the show, there is a similar story arc, but the outcomes differ radically). This one again underscores how much Harry prefers small town life.

“Your Ride’s Here” sees the town of Patience troubled by both a BB gun sniper and a possible child snatcher. It also ties up a running plot thread involving a government agent tracking a potential alien living on Earth.
I highly recommend this series. It’s so nicely written; I like how subdued the stories are. So many of them have the structure of cozy mystery stories - except that the main character is an alien from outer space. And Parkhouse’s art is lovely.

Houses of the Unholy by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

The latest graphic novel by the team is, I think, a step up from the last couple.  I lived through the "Satanic Panic" of the 80s so I was concerned with how the duo would deal with it.  I was a bit older than the victims in this story, and they were victims, though not of "Satanic cults."  They were victims of therapists, psychologists, parents with overactive imaginations and a society that is obsessed with seeing boogiemen behind every bush.  I hated the whole thing then and I hate it even more now.  

Brubaker and Phillips do a good job of showing the very real toll that the entire thing took on innocent children and on innocent people accused of crimes that never happened.  I've seen some people who feel that the ending is a let-down.  I thought the ending was completely appropriate.  The entire thing was, and continues to be, a sad chapter (not entirely closed unfortunately) of a book that destroyed thousands of lives for absolutely no reason.