Comic Monday

Thursday night, Pat and I hit Meltdown, and I purchased about $40 worth of comic books. I'm trying to catch up. I was buying big for a while. I picked up any series that looked that interesting. Then I funneled down to just the absolute necessities: the Batman titles going trough War Games (a let down), Flash (my current favorite), and the Identity Crisis (that last issue was horrible).

Now I'm trying again to find the titles that I want to be following for the time being. I'm picking up a bunch of titles to see how they read. Plus I'm catching up on what I missed in the Batman family. I've generally avoided the Marvel Universe, but I picked up some titles when I was back in Iowa on the urging of Joe, my comic book mentor. I followed up two this week, and they're the first to books I read from my $40 spree.

New Avengers #2: Breakout Part II - I have never liked the Avengers. They just seemed like a crappy version of the Justice League. None of them had very distinct personalities. But I'm enjoying this book. It might be the massive scale of this first story. Matt Murdock and his best friend/law partner Froggy are visiting a prison for metahuman criminals guarded by Luke Cage and a former Spiderwoman to meet with a guy called the Sentry. There's an attack on the facility, and Captain America and Spiderman come to help. Issue two had Spiderman thrown into a mob of his worst enemies and severely beaten, Carnage trying to devour Luke Cage and Murdock, and this Sentry guy starts doing something. I guess what I like is the sense of peril. You know none of these characters are going to die, but there is a sense of peril and pain. You do feel that they could lose, which is why I stopped liking the Avengers in the first place. They seemed invincible. And who wants to read that?

Invincible Ironman #2: Extremis Part II - I've been iffy on Warren Ellis as a writer for a while. Transmetropolitian seemed like just a bad mix of Hunter S. Thompson and Frank Miller's Elektra stuff. Planetary was good, but I didn't get very far into it. But there's something about this book that I love. Maybe it's the mixture of his writing and Adi Granou's art. They work together to make this great naturalism. I don't think I've ever purchased an Ironman book before issue one of this series. The character is so mature and real that he doesn't seem to fit in the world of comic books. A millionaire industrialist recovering alcoholic who defends with a mechanical suit to make up for developing weapons for the first part of his career. I read a little on the message boards about this issue. Some people complain that Tony Stark never suits up as Ironman in the entire issue. The complain about too much character development and not enough action. Well, go read Claremont's X-Men crapfest or buy a collection of Stan Lee garbage. Leave this for people with more than an 8th grade education.

Wow, got a little mean at the end. Message Boards will do that to you.

I also picked up the Legends of the Dark Night issues of the Riddler's reinvention (which I'm not looking forward to), a Robin/Batgirl cross over I haven't heard about, and the next JLA from Busiek. I'll bore you to death with my opinions of them once I've read them.