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Post by dbutler69 on Dec 31, 2018 10:00:50 GMT -5
I've been reading the Adventure Legion comics. I've just read #367 (No Escape From The Circle Of Death!) and 368 (The Mutiny of the Super-Heroines!). Both good, but not great, Shooter Legion issues.
I've finished volume 2 of the Secret Society of Super-Villains hardcover. Fun stuff. It's a shame that it got cancelled in the middle of a story.
I've also read The Flash #120, 121, 129, and 137. The house ads for them looked interesting when I was reading the Adventure Legion comics, so I dipped in. I also plan to read The Atom #36 because the house ad looked good, as he battles the Golden Age Atom.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Dec 31, 2018 12:37:37 GMT -5
More Legion (up to issue #26)!
And more excellent blend of SF and superheroics. Olivier Coipel left the book (I believe to become a major star at Marvel) but was replaced by another brilliant artist: Chris Batista, whose name was unfamiliar to me. Wow!!! Talk about picking up the baton without missing a beat! More great designs, more ambitious scenes, and an astonishing refusal to take the easy way out when drawing crowd scenes!!!
Plot wise, we get more of Ra’s Al Ghul, who has kne of those mature moments I love in fiction: when a villain realizes that his behaving like a stereotype will just result in his getting more of the same (mostly fistfights with people in capes) and that it would make more sense to redefine the rules of the game. (The Purple Man did that, decades ago, when he decided to stop being a vengeance obsessed supervillain to become a “gentleman of leisure”). Here Ra’s proves that the Legion can never hold him captive, and having proven that, agrees to resume his detention (with better conditions). Unexpected and cool!
Then Universo returns, in a multi-parter that shows him almost taking control of everyone’s psyche. Really neat use of alternate realities (illusions, but still) and a believable plot twist to resolve the crisis.
I am a bit annoyed by the transformation of Sensor fr9m a giant snake to a half-snake half-human creature; first it pushes the ridiculous idea that evolution has a direction and that humans are somehow “more volved” than other creatures, then it does not provide anything except another reason for a character to mope and cry “oh woe isme”, and finally it shows the Legionnaires to be complete jerks when it comes to mutilation. Come on, people, your friend has been horribly disfigured according to her standards of beauty... stop saying she’s beautiful, that’s not what she wants to hear!
More interesting ideas for future developments: there is a new instantaneous way to travel between stars, thanks to a species the Legionnaires encountered in Legion Lost; there is a cosmic communication system that depends on the Titanian telepaths; there is a new Legion candidate from Robotica, who gives the opportunity to reflect upon racism; there is an interesting subplot about the people from Colu (Brainiac 5’s people) withdrawing from the U.P. because they see Robots as an abomination, and the revelation that the whole story about Colu having once been ruled by robot overlords is a lie... yes, lots to work with!
There are also, alas, a few hints that things could go bad. Introducing a new Superboy strikes me as too much inbred continuity. Jo and Tiny baby growing up at an accelerated pace is unoriginal and unlikely to provide as much story material as a normal kid would be. Having the soul of Garth reanimate the dead body of Jan is both gross and too continuity-involved.
Still, so far so good! And the Batista art... wow!
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Post by spoon on Jan 1, 2019 1:36:58 GMT -5
I read Blue Beetle #1-13. Some of those I've read before, and some I hadn't. The art by Paris Cullins wasn't as good as I remember, but it gets better later, maybe due to a change of inkers. There are a mix of villains. I know at least one group (the Madmen) are from BB's Charlton days, some are new, and some are borrowed from the rogues galleries of existing DC heroes.
I was really young when these issues came out, and I had forgotten the postures that various characters started the post-Crisis era in. BB was an established character when he was from Earth-4 in Crisis. Rather than getting a reboot for the unified post-Crisis Earth, he is treated as an experienced hero. He is actually coming out of semi-retirement at the start. The series is set in Chicago. Unlike his appearances in Justice League, Beetle is treated as a generally serious character, although he does wisecrack occasionally.
Now, I've moved on to reading some Booster Gold. I'm up to #6 and I don't think I've ever read any of his series before. Like Blue Beetle, it's played mostly serious, but there are some laughs. Issue 6, which I'm just starting, promises to reveal Booster's origin. The first 5 issues have avoid exploring his origin in detail. It's mostly just people wondering where Booster comes from. Booster mentions hearing about certain current events as historical events, he has a Legion flight ring, and he often messes up slang; however, there is no direct reference yet to Booster traveling back from the future.
I didn't realize how much the start of the transition from pre-Crisis to post-Crisis varied from title to title. Apparently, Booster Gold #1 came out the same month as the last issue of Crisis, and an early letters page confirms that Booster's series occur solely in the post-Crisis world. I think Booster Gold may be the first series to take place in the post-Crisis world, or at least the first new series. Yet other series continued with no real change in the status quo, and other would not be rebooted until several months later. Booster Gold is set in Metropolis, and Superman is mentioned a number of times. However, at this time, Superman's Earth-1 series were still ongoing. According to the Mike's Amazing World website that shows contemporaneous issues for each month, Man of Steel #1 was published the same month as Booster Gold #9. The ongoing Superman series would not relaunch under Byrne until the month that Booster Gold #12 was published.
I really like the Dan Jurgens art. Some of costume designs, like the Director of The 1000, seem like stylistic forerunners to the type of costumes that would be designed by the artists would went from the X-books to Image in the early 1990s.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 1, 2019 10:46:25 GMT -5
I'm updating the 2019 Classic Comics New Year's Resolutions thread for that alone and this is going to be my last post on this thread.
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Post by dbutler69 on Jan 1, 2019 14:43:08 GMT -5
I read this: It reprints the first appearance of Mordru the Merciless, a two-part story by Jim Shooter & Curt Swan. The middle has a two-page spread showing the weding scene of Bouncing Boy and Duo Damsel, with a key in the back to everyone at the wedding. There's also a guide to the Legion Hedquarters.
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Post by dbutler69 on Jan 2, 2019 12:02:33 GMT -5
I read this. It reprints Amazing Spider-Man #24 (actually Marvel Tales #, Luke Cage Hero for Hire #7, the backup story from The Incredible Hulk #147, Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD #10, and Doctor Strange #180. These were all good stories, but the annoying thing is, the Doctor Strange story is really part one of a two part story. They add a panel just saying something like "and of course Doctor Strange defeated Nightmare". What a ripoff! They should have either found a one part story, or if they're only going to include one part of this story, make it the conclusion.
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Post by dbutler69 on Jan 4, 2019 17:32:25 GMT -5
I read Adventure #371 & 372, a two part story where Colossal Boy is blackmailed into betraying the Legion because some crooks have turned his parents into glass. It's a good, solid Legion story. I also read The Super Friends #6. This was a fun story. Finally, I read Super-Team Family #3. The lead story, with Hawkman & the Flash vs. Gorilla Grodd is a fun story. The second story, which is really two stories (an Aquaman story and a Green Lantern story) reprinted from Adventure #267, was perhaps the worst story (or two stories) I've ever read. Pretty bad. Silver Age silliness at its height. The third story is a Cary Bates/Neal Adams story from World's Finest, and that was a pretty good one.
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Post by dbutler69 on Jan 6, 2019 10:25:03 GMT -5
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Post by dbutler69 on Jan 6, 2019 10:27:04 GMT -5
I have been reading the Jim Shooter Legion stories in Adventure. I've been thoroughly enjoying them, though to be honest, these last two were only so-so.
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Post by dbutler69 on Jan 6, 2019 10:30:35 GMT -5
I also read Super-Team Family #8. The first story was a new Challengers of the Unknown story. I like the Challs, but this story was a little disappointing. The second story was a reprint of Doom Patrol #87. It was very good. It's the first Doom Patrol story I've ever read, and I'll have to check more out. It must be one of the better DC title of the 60's.
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Post by dbutler69 on Jan 6, 2019 14:54:57 GMT -5
I just read Thor #217-218. In 217, they finally return to Asgard after their interstellar odyssey with Tana Nile, Silas Marner, the Rigellians, slavers, etc., only to find imposters have taken over Asgard! It's the work of one of Loki's disgruntled minions. There are also side plots building up to future issues. In 218, one of those side plots heats up, as the black stars destroy the colonizers of Rigels' homeworld, though they are able to evauate 9 billion people. Thor leads a handful of folks (Tana, Silas, and a couple of Asgardians or so) to try and stop the black stars. They sure have their work cut out for them! These things destroy planets and suck up the remains and convert them to energy. Galactus, eat your heart out!
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Post by The Captain on Jan 6, 2019 16:22:03 GMT -5
I tend to read in a fairly linear manner, so I have been working on the post-Crisis Flash run for the past month or so.
The Mike Baron issues that start the series are just OK, as he writes Wally like an over-sexed creep who will fall into bed with any woman that shows the slightest interest (this fuels an ongoing argument in the letters page between folks who hate the turn from good-guy Barry Allen to horndog Wally West and folks, especially the writers, who think adding more sexuality to the book shows that the comics medium is "growing up". It's really quite fascinating.). Art is primarily provided by Jackson "Butch" Guice on his first steady DC work after jumping ship from Marvel, and it's serviceable, although nothing like what he would later do on Ruse. These stories use Vandal Savage as a villain a few times, while also introducing the Kilg%re and The Chunk to the Flash mythos, but that's not really a good thing; the Kilg%re is exactly the type of techno-inspired crap that one would expect from a late-80's book, and The Chunk, who would eventually become Wally's friend, is like a much larger version of Stevie from "Malcolm in the Middle", wheezing through his words and being generally useless.
The William Messner-Loebs era is a definite step up, as he uses more classic villains (Captain Cold, Golden Glider, the Turtle, the Icicle) instead of creating a bunch of new ones, although he does bring back both Vandal Savage and Kilg%re as foes. He also uses both The Chunk (meh) and a reformed Pied Piper (this is a good thing) as friends and confidants for Barry. Greg LaRocque did most of the artwork during this run; this was his second DC run, as he had done an almost-three-year stretch on Legion of Super-Heroes after leaving Marvel, where his most notable work was as the artist for the first five issues of Web of Spider-Man.
Finally, at issue #62, we get to Mark Waid, who is considered one of the definitive Flash writers. Waid almost entirely eschews creating new bad guys, instead utilizing the likes of Grodd, Abra Kadabra, Professor Zoom, Kobra, and Mirror Master to great effect; in fact, the new villains he introduces like techno-terrorist organization The Combine and human wrecking-ball Razer (a horribly-cliched 90's enemy, who thankfully disappeared almost entirely after his three-issue story, only showing up twice more in DC history) are just not interesting. He greatly develops the relationship between Linda Park and Wally, getting rid of the man-slut trait entirely that Baron initiated, and he also brings back Golden Age heroes like Jay Garrick and Johnny Quick while creating new heroes, those being Max Mercury and Impulse, a time-jumped Bart Allen from the 30th century, that expand and enhance the story. Art is provided initially by LaRocque, who is then followed by Mike Wieringo and then Oscar Garrido. This is some really good stuff (although there are some clunkers in here, especially when Waid strays from using classic villains), and I'm excited to keep reading the rest of the series.
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Post by beccabear67 on Jan 6, 2019 18:25:54 GMT -5
I'm midway into the '70s Mister Miracle #19-25 run and it's pretty weird even before the Gerber issues. Sort of reminding me of Starlin's Warlock. It might help if I knew more about the New Gods, but then I read and enjoyed the Warlock run having read only one of the earlier Gil Kane Warlocks. I find the names off-putting (Kirby is responsible I'd imagine)... Granny Goodness and Scott Free, that sort of thing. Very nice Golden art with Russ Heath inking on the last two issues, and before that there were some nice Marschall Rogers moments depending a but on the inker or how much time he had (there is an awful looking Darkseid in some panels).
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Post by Hoosier X on Jan 6, 2019 23:01:50 GMT -5
I just read Thor #217-218. In 217, they finally return to Asgard after their interstellar odyssey with Tana Nile, Silas Marner, the Rigellians, slavers, etc., only to find imposters have taken over Asgard! It's the work of one of Loki's disgruntled minions. There are also side plots building up to future issues. In 218, one of those side plots heats up, as the black stars destroy the colonizers of Rigels' homeworld, though they are able to evauate 9 billion people. Thor leads a handful of folks (Tana, Silas, and a couple of Asgardians or so) to try and stop the black stars. They sure have their work cut out for them! These things destroy planets and suck up the remains and convert them to energy. Galactus, eat your heart out! I'm still reading The Essential Thor, Volume 4 (maybe 5) and it reprints #196 to #220, so I'm getting pretty close to these issues. I read #206 to #208 over the last few days. Sometimes I whiz right through these Essential volumes (or Showcase volumes for DC) but other times it takes a little longer than expected. And this era of Thor - well, I don't feel compelled to read the next issue, so I finish a storyline and put it down and forget about it for a few days. It's not bad! I like the stories as I'm reading them. But it's certainly not as good as Thor #125 to #140 or so. Maybe I'd like it better in color!
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Post by Hoosier X on Jan 6, 2019 23:42:01 GMT -5
This is cover-dated April 2009, so it's not technically ten years old yet. But it will be very soon, so I decided to put it here instead of in the corresponding Modern Comics thread. I went to the comic book shop in Fullerton last week. It's a little out of the way, but it's worth the trouble to go in that direction two or three times a year because that shop has a much larger back-issue stock than any of the other comic shops around here. I picked up Batgirl #30 and browsed around and didn't find anything I was specifically looking for. But I did pick up an issue of Batman '66 with King Tut and the first issue of the 2009 Agents of Atlas series. I've long been intrigued by the idea of The Agents of Atlas series, but I've never actually read it. I've read about it, but I never found any of the back issues and I could never commit to ordering any of the trades without knowing more about the series. The art might be bad. The stories might rely on modern comic-book tropes that annoy me, like disposable villains, absurd re-characterizations, montages of scenes that look much more interesting than any of the extended scenes in the comics, etc. Or they might use one of the characters that bug me. Like, say, Norman Osborn. (Turns out, yeah, they used Norman Osborn. More on that later.) I really love these characters! I had What If -? #9 back when it was brand new and I was much intrigued by Venus, Marvel Boy, Gorilla Man, the Human Robot, etc. It may well be my favorite issue of What If -? I consider them the Freedom Fighters of the Marvel Universe. When I heard they had been brought back as The Agents of Atlas, well, I knew I would get to it eventually. And as I was poking around at the comic-book store in Fullerton, I found the first issue of something called Agents of Atlas: Dark Reign #1 … with Namora on the cover! Namora's awesome! I liked it well enough. I would prefer stories set in the 1950s, but it's cool enough to see these characters that I'm not put off at seeing a story set in then-present day 2009. It's nice to see Namora, Jimmy Woo, Venus, Gorilla Man, the Human Robot, as well as Man Mountain Marko's brief appearance. (He gets killed (probably) but it's not quite a "disposable villain" scenario because he gets several pages of character development.) The art is nice. I could do without the "Logan: Agent of Atlas" backup. And I could definitely do without Norman Osborn as the villain. Yuck. I honestly have never understood what was so great about Norman Osborn that he had to be resurrected and made into Marvel's version of businessman Lex Luthor. (Which, by the way, is the most boring version of Lex Luthor I've ever seen.) Norman Osborn before he died was never some cool and collected master manipulator. To me, he seemed like a guy who started out with some money he inherited and had some skills that enabled him, with a little bit of luck, to turn his enterprises into a decent technology business. But he couldn't take the pressure and he developed a Green Goblin alter ego and an obsession with Spider-Man that eventually led to his death in Spider-Man #122 after he killed Gwen Stacy. Anything after that is a bunch of things that never happened in my own personal Spider-Man head canon. (Nowadays, according to Ultimate Spider-Man, Osborn owned the facility where a radio-active spider bit Peter Parker and gave him spider powers, and Osborn kept tabs on him. I only read the first issue. My niece liked it and persuaded me to read it. I didn't tell her how awful I thought it was. Tying together every single possible strand into a super-hero origin is just about the most unoriginal and annoying characteristic of modern comics.) It's why I'm very cautious about reading Marvel comics anymore. I might see Norman Osborn! I doubt that I will ever read modern Spider-Man comics again. And Osborn seems to have become ubiquitous. A few years ago, I was thinking about reading Avengers again and I flipped through an issue … and there was Norman Osborn! No thank you! So here's Norman Osborn again, in Agents of Atlas: Dark Reign #1. He's not the wailing, sweaty, paranoid Norman Osborne of the Silver Age (and early Bronze Age). No, he's Marvel's version of businessman Lex Luthor. Ugh. I haven't decided if I'm going to keep buying this series. The shop in Fullerton had most of the first eight issues. I'll probably get the second issue next time I go there (which will probably be two or three months at least) and see if Osborn is in it much. I really really like the Agents of Atlas, but I just don't know if that offsets my dislike for modern Norman Osborn.
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