Finished the Comic Book History of Comics and it was quite good. It included chapters on European bandes desinees and Japanese manga, a couple chapters on undergrounds (with a particular focus on Crumb and the Texas Mafia), animation, the birth of the direct market, etc. Lots of focus on Kirby, Crumb, Eisner, spiegleman, Tezuka, and Disney, but the love is spread around to cover lots of folks and areas. Well worth checking out, though someone having an in depth knowledge of comic history might not get a lot of new info from it, but it does offer some different perspectives.

-M

Kill or be Killed 1-13

There is one more to go. So far, it's quite good. Philips/Brubaker improve in one apsect or another with every new title.

I think this may be my least favorite work by Brubaker and Phillips.  That said it's still better than 90% of comics that I read, but I don't like it nearly as well as Criminal or The Fade-Out. 

Read the first volume of The Wild Storm (collecting issues #1-6), Warren Ellis and Jon Davis-Hunt's revival of the Wildstorm line. Phenomenal stuff. All the weird science I love form Warren Ellis and visual storytelling I really dig from Davis-Hunt, who I was unfamiliar with before this. I really like his page layouts and use of panels to control time (yes I have been reading Eisner & McCloud recently). I picked up the first issue of this but ended up in the hospital shortly afterwards and never got around to reading it or picking up the rest, so gave the trade a try on Hoopla and really dug it. Need to pick this up for my shelf soon.

-M

I need to check out that series I never got around to it. I remember reading some of the Gotham academy books and liked them.

So as said in the other thread, I bought the Top Cow Humble Bundle, mostly to get my hands on the Stjepan Sejic artwork in the titles I didn't have/read yet.

So mini-reviews of the few titles I've read so far (alphabetically and I skipped titles I read before):

Angelus: Sejic on art, it's his old style so less attention to facial expressions (which is one of its strongest points right now IMHO), but more highly detailed monsters and armour etc. I've read some of Marz/Sejic Witchblade and this spins out of that series. I only knew the Angelus from Ennis' The Darkness, but the story has gone on. The Angelus, one of the primal forces of the universe that controls light, has decided that its regular tactic of possessing a human and overruling their mind with its own hasn't really been successful in its fight with the Darkness and therefore its current host, Danielle, former owner of the Witchblade, has been given full control. Danielle decides that she has no interest in killing the Darkness (as its current host, Jackie Estacado, is kinda/sorta friend). The various angels created by the Angelus are bad at dealing with this and many start to rebel, so it's up to Danielle to take control.
Kinda unclear how this whole thing fits with previous Witchblade/Darkness stories, it always seemed like the Angelus' warriors didn't have much of a free will themselves, but here they are openly rebelling and questioning the host. Might be just because this is the first time that the Angelus itself is not in the driving seat. Still weird how one of the angels can bond with another artefact (as I expect the angels themselves to be part of the Angelus).
Overall not a bad story, not a great story. Main draw is Sejic's art and his art here is not as good in his more recent work or as in Sunstone, Death Vigil or Ravine.

Aphrodite IX: There are multiple trades in this bundle. I already read the Hawkins/Sejic series, so I didn't reread those for this. This is the Wohl/Finch series. I think? that the Wohl/Finch and the Hawkins/Sejic series are set in different continuities. Anyway it's quite a mess: Aphrodite, the titular android assassin, has no memory (a plot point that usually annoys me, like this time) and the opening narration is vague, especially as we don't have a frame of reference as to who's talking. Scenes are peppered with flashbacks and Aphrodite's memory resets after every mission (which I admit, is quite an asset if you want to hire an assassin), so the amnesia plot point doesn't even go away or is resolved. Also not a fan of Finch's art (is changing shape/clothes a part of her power set? Cause she changes outfits between panels that should take place less than a second apart), and the collections tendencies to put the various pin-ups all through the story instead of collected at the end also annoys me.

Berserker: Another series that didn't appeal to me. A horror series by Rick Loverd and Jeremy Haun, Berserker is about two young men, Farris, a former soldier and Aaron, a student/amateur wrestler. Both are descendants of the ancient Berserkers, a group of warriors that went into murderous trances where they were unstoppable killing machines that murdered everybody around them. Both have no idea what they are and have no control over their power. The remains of the Berserkers have split up in 2 secret groups and each of them has their own reasons to want to recruit the young men. The story ends on an obvious cliffhanger and I'm not sure if the series itself went on after that, but I'm not interested enough to find out. The fights are long and very bloody and the series that came to mind is Luther Strode, but Strode has better writing and art IMHO. With characters that are completely blind to who they attack and why, it's very hard to get emotionally invested in them, so I had no connection to the plot at all.

Cyberforce: I wanted to say I never read a Cyberforce issue (WildC.A.T.s was my Image X-Men copy, cause they had Moore, Charest and later on Casey, Phillips and Nguyen.), but it's not completely true I realised. I have an issue from Top Cow's pilot Season, where they did single issues with a creative team and the most successful would become an ongoing title. There was a Velocity one-shot by Joe Casey and Kevin Maguire (but the ongoing, if it ever came to be, didn't have those two on it, so as a pilot it was pretty useless). Anyway these are a complete reboot as far as I can tell and it's more a sci-fi comic than a superhero comic. The previous team of X-Men copies is mostly killed off within the first issue. Cyberdata, the evil company (aren't they nearly all in comics?) that created the cyborg protagonists, has created a supercomputer and all their calculations point to civilization being destroyed in the near future. Their two leaders (husband and wife) have each their own ideas how to go forward from that. One by exterminating the majority of humanity, the other by creating a new species that will replace humanity. All these cyborgs and supertechnology are hidden from the rest of humanity and most of the series is taking place in the present time, though it speeds up a lot in the final few issues. It's not a must-have series, but it's a competently written sci-fi/conspiracy book with a plot that works even though some things confuse me (one of the cast member is Aphrodite, but she is not the same Aphrodite as in the series above as far as I can tell, nor the same as the Aphrodite in the Hawkins/Sejic series.) I quite liked one scene where the nominal heroes have one of the directors at gunpoint and the director tries to prove his point by letting the super computer calculate the chances of his plan to save the world succeeding depending on various scenarios. The heroes immediately start to suggest scenarios where the director himself is killed and other scenarios that won't go well for him and it turns out that those scenarios are even better to saving the world compared to his plans.
One weird art-thing that kept bugging me: Stryker, the Cable-clone, has three cybernetic right arms. (Weird, but that is the character's design and it's a pretty unique look, so I'll allow it.) When keeping a lower profile, he only has one right arm (I expect he's able to connect or disconnect those arms when necessary, so still making sense so far.) But there are various action scenes where he has 1-3 right arms depending on the panel he's in. Is this a superpower he has? Can he just grow and retract them as he finds necessary? It's like Aphrodite's clothing before. I can see those things changing between scenes, but not in mid-action.

Cyberforce/Hunter Killer: Mark Waid and Kenneth Rocafort create a ... by-the-numbers crossover story: two teams (Hunter Killer, which I didn't even know existed as a series till this Humble Bundle and Cyberforce, this time the old school X-Men copies) meet, have a fight due to misunderstanding before teaming up against a common threat. It's as boring as it sounds and I really expect more from Waid (never been his biggest fan, but this could have been written by any superhero writer on their first attempt). Kenneth Rocafort is a pretty good artist IMHO, though his insistence to draw every female character with perfectly spherical breasts is something that he should grow out off.

Darkness Rebirth v1-3: David Hine and Jeremy Haun reboot the series that was started by Garth Ennis, but there is an in-comic reason for the reboot. I liked this series; I read the original Darkness because Ennis was writing it and he just came from Hitman and Preacher. It was a mixture of dark comedy and anti-hero action. Hine went for more of a horror take for this and it works very well. At the end of the previous run/crossover with Witchblade and other titles, Hope, the daughter of Jackie Estacado (wielder of the Darkness) and Sara Pezzini (wielder of the Witchblade) turned out to be a threat to the universe just be existing. Faced with the choice between ending the universe or their daughter's life, Jackie turned against everybody else to save his daughter (Jackie having the moral high ground for once in his life, must have felt weird for him), using her power to recreate the universe. In this new world, Jackie is happily married to his childhood love, Jenny (who apparently was killed somewhere in the original Darkness series) and they have a daughter named Hope. By changing the universe, bringing Jenny back to life and replacing Hope's mother with Jenny, Jackie might have saved her life, but the damage he has done turns out to be far more than he ever imagine. The series ends on a cliffhanger, to be resolved in a mini-series by Hine and Sejic that never was. A bit of googling shows that it was resolved in an arc in Witchblade, so I might find those issues just to get a resolution to this. Haun's artwork here is so much better than in Berserker, even though Berserker was the newer series I think? The reason this series works, is because despite all his power, Jackie is desperately trying to keep things under control, but he has no idea what's happening all around him.

Hunter Killer: Waid and Silvestri do a mediocre-at-best superhero book. A supergenius has created superhumans named Ultrasapiens near the end of WWII, then most of them rebelled and fled to all corners of the world. A special group of superhumans and trained soldiers are sent to capture, control or kill the Ultrasapiens. This group is called Hunter Killer. I mean.. what are they expecting with that name? Even the most peaceful superhuman will not be in the most cooperative of mood if they find out that the group that is coming after them is called "Hunter Killer". The main character (new to the group) shares the reader's scepticism, so it's not as if Waid is unaware of the implications behind the name... but then the founder/leader of Hunter Killer is a guy dressed in completely white with blond hair who uses the name Morningstar (maybe I've read too much Lucifer and played too much Shin Megami Tensei video games, but that should set off all the alarms in your head). There turns out to be a "the world will be destroyed in X years" subplot, that was also in Cyberforce, though Cyberforce had some clever bits with it as said before. Here Waid tries to do something where various historical events of the past 70 years were all covers to prevent the end of the world. The interesting part is that the date of the end of the world shifts (the original one was in the early 60s), but is never completely averted only a few years or months are won every time.
The characters are pretty boring though: obviously-evil Morningstar, newbie Ellis who hopes to do some good, Wolf, the mysterious superhuman that works against Hunter Killer, Sam Argent, whose only role seems to be to stand around, bark orders and look pretty. The only character I liked is Cloaker, a minor character with illusion powers whose job it is to keep all of Hunter Killers actions a secret from the general public with a sense of humour.

Upcoming (when I get around to actually reading them): Rest, Symmetry, Think Tank and Wildfire (plus some oneshots included in the bundle I didn't read before).