Kavinay
A strong finish. If nothing else, JMS is a master of plotting meaningful final stakes in the last act. Is it corny and a bit reliant on deus ex machina? Probably, but if you can get past that, you have what could be considered a great counter argument to Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End.
Better than I expected, but still not really doing much besides the 90s action movie tropes. :)
Charles Soule's Lando book was a fantastic take on the character. He distinguished Lando as a master hustler because he's a bad guy who thinks he's good (as opposed to Han Solo who's a good guy who thinks he's bad).
This book is not that. Lando is a punchline, even to himself. A major disappointment given the great roadmap Soule provided for quite possibly the most interesting of the original trilogy characters.
L3's inclusion is nice, but you really wonder how much better this could have been with a more thoughtful approach to Lando's moral ambiguity.
It doesnt have to be Shakespeare, but a good premise is spoiled a bit by the rambling pointlessness of most of the marines. The art is good but makes weird choices in terms of the bulkiness of the hunters or Machiko's sudden 7ft physique in armour.
This is really good! I don't think I've ever enjoyed a team superhero book since the heydays of the X-men. This is so much better than that. Valiant is trying to accomplish a lot more than another Marvel/DC retread and succeeding.
Hockey is great, the NHL though is amazingly dumb. If you've followed the league for any amount of time, you can't help but concur with McIndoe's gentle sarcasm about the decision makers in pro hockey.
What's interesting about the Down Goes Brown style is how McIndoe can be so precisely critical of jaw-dropping stupidity (Gil Stein's helmet rollback!) without wallowing in cynicism.
It's really easy to get turned off hockey due to the atavistic and incompetent nature of the pro culture. Before you give up on the game, read this book again to give you context for how the latest stupidity really isn't that big a deal relative to everything else the NHL has condoned.
What makes Harbinger so unique is that Harada is such an interesting figure for everything to revolve around. He's both Prof X. and Magneto in one and a lot more on top of that. What drives this book is as much Harada's combination of empathy and ruthlessness as anything the Renegades do.
Predictable, but not in a bad way. Feels like what you'd get with The Prisoner wrapped up in a Punisher shell.
There's a lot going on here. At times an homage to X-men, Animal Man and Farscape, Dysart mixes it up in a delightful way to keep the characters fresh and the plot moving along. Animalia and Samurai Sue are just pure genius.
A lot of creative teams would take on something as ambitious as head-fake within a head-fake of Perfect Day's central conceit and struggle to bring it to fruition. This was pure genius though and I really hope we see way more of Animalia and more PoC characters in the book going forward.
Next time someone wonders what comics offer besides superheroes, give them this book.
What's outstanding about Ennis is the way he's able to take some of the best aspects of police procedurals (i.e. Law & Order) and turn everything up a notch without copping out. Little touches like a rich kid crapping herself are delightful extra touches.
The Poe Dameron series is okay... but there's nothing really of note that goes on here. Both in terms of canon or drama. Do we really learn anything or care anymore about the cast by the end of its run? Probably not.
This book is beginning to find it's groove. The bits of lore and backstory on armour are the sort of world-building that was much needed until now.
James Bond is a lot like a superhero. He's become such a caricature of himself that it's almost impossible to do anything fun with Bond himself. That's why a “The Boys” style parody works so well.
Ennis and Braun are fairly audacious and it works. But note, this isn't The Watchmen of Bond. It's more like the Team America World Police treatment.
The original series and “The Web” are still quite stellar. The rest of the books are a bit uneven or goofy (“Eternal”). Still, it's nice to see some 90s era panels hold up quite well.
Not nearly as good as the first half of the story. It runs of out of steam shortly after the big revelation of the title.
Not the sort of book that I expected. I was hoping for something more into the details of the x & o's but this book feels more like a collection of in-season articles. It's too bad, a steady unfolding of the season would be a profoundly interesting narrative compared to a collection of hagiography.
I think the series peaked at “Cobra Commander.”
I appreciate the humour and to a degree the sheer wackiness of the setting. At some point though, it starts to wear at you that there's really not enough substance to carry you through the dick jokes.
Ugh. The problem isn't Patience, it's Millar. There's this weird tell on creators who try to be woke but fundamentally don't get it. Patience's “service” of comedic kiling of brown people, her MAGA like beliefs in her country passing her by and her thinknig about her skill set don't come across so much as the origin of a black single-mother as a superhero. Rather, this whole book instead comes across as white guy trying to convey the idea of a black single-mother as a superhero, and failing.
What's cool isn't just that Soule is able to give an expansive EU feel to the conclusion of his series, but that's he's also able to definitively end it. When we leave Vader by the end of this book, his descent into both despair and rebirth in the dark side is so dramatic that you understand how completely Anakin Skywalker has been broken and lost.
The stories range from mediocre, Holden, to quite good, Amos, yet the art is just really poor. The weird thing is that Danlan seems like a capable artist but it's as if the the whole book just went from pencils to colour seperations without any inking. It makes for these bizarrely thin and lifeless sketches that jar you out of the narrative.
Shockingly good. It's amazing how much better 40k gets with a touch of Discworld-ish wryness mixed into the grimdark.
Ever since Rogue Trader, 40k books and fluff have subtly been buying into their own emo-seriousness to the point you now wonder if the creators actually get how ridiculously the Imperium's fascism contributes to the dystopian aspect of the setting. Abnett is one of the few Black Library authors that can spin a good turn of fluff and inject some vibrancy of 40ks origins back into the universe.
So Prince Lotor decides to conquer a world with a token force of marines to showoff to the Emperor...
It's not a horrible story, but it takes a long time to resolve some relatively petty political maneuvering. In the end, it really doesn't tell us much about Fulgrim besides he's exactly what you thought he was before cracking open this book.