What comic are you reading at the moment.

McLoughlin · 10-04-2020 10:14PM

When Panini reprint that crossover in the 90s they heavily edited it removing half of it didn't realise it till years later when I picked up the graphic novel. Still one of my favourites X Men X-Overs.

Brief_Lives · 22-04-2020 04:40PM

The Sensational She-Hulk The Return...,...just arrived at my door... 458 pages... hopefully it's a good read....

Ridley · 25-04-2020 01:34PM

She-Hulk 6: Jaded*
She-Hulk 7: Here Today...*
She-Hulk 8: Secret Invasion*
She-Hulk 9: Lady Liberators*

I like Peter David's bounty hunter version of Shulk but I still prefer Dan Slott's lawyer dealing with superhuman crimes.

Doctor Strange 1: Across the Universe* - Fine, I guess. Was hoping Waid would get me on board with the character. Think I'll get along with it better once Strange is back on Earth so I don't push against the combination of Strange and Marvel. In. Spaaaace. Soft reboot with Strange trying to rediscover his magic after blasting off-world in Tony Stark's space car. Deliberate parallels with his origin story.

Fantastic Four 2: Mr. and Mrs. Grimm
Fantastic Four 3: The Herald of Doom

Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson Omnibus - I do remember reading that Miller said the reason he didn't many Batman stories was cause he used most of his ideas in Daredevil assuming he wouldn't get to ever work on Batman. Didn't see much that looks like it would translate though Batman doing the cinema fight that Daredevil and Bullseye have would work great, I think. Maybe the Hand stuff would have gone to R'as al Ghul or some such but I don't much get on with the comic version of that character.

Batman: Legacy 2 - O hai R'as.

Titans 1: The Return of Wally West* - Very much a Wally West story rather than a team book. Lovely bit of Watchmen button foreshadowing with the blood spatter. Dunno how much was out of the bag at that point though.

Green Lanterns 1: Rage Planet* - That whole set up with Justice League training and Baz/Cruz having to share a power battery to learn to work together is nice and all but Justice League stuff happens in Justice League and the power battery makes little difference to whether or not the Lanterns stick together nor does that particularly impede them.

Django/Zorro* - I like that Don Diego de la Vega reminds Django of Schmidt but he spends far too much of the story playing second fiddle to Zorro in the same Schmidt dynamic from the film (though one of the seven issues is the villain's origin story). What's laughable is the WRITTEN BY QUENTIN TARANTINO and Matt Wagner throughout then right at the end story by quentin tarantino and written by Matt Wagner. If the film version gets going, I don't see it having much in common beyond the team-up.

Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor - A New Beginning* - Houser does her damnedest with little to work with thanks to the current iteration of the TV show being a chore to watch.

William Gibson's Alien 3 - Do the wooden space cathedral screenplay, guys.

Samurai Executioner Omnibus 1

Judas* - The takeaway that the Old Testament

is God's practice run for the New Testament to figuring out whether He could sacrifice His own child

would turn my stomach if I believed in it and it's not as noble as the book wants it to be but it's an enjoyable read and looks great. Judas and Satan in the underworld bitter at their preordained fall and

Judas ultimately becoming the Jesus of not Heaven and Earth

. Credit to whoever it was in the past two-thousand years who figured out the redemption story needs Christ to do time in Hell for all the sins of man. And to the first to give Judas a black halo. And the necklace of silver coins. When I told a buddy about the book, he just texted back Iscariots of Fire and since I'll never give him the props for that directly, I'm posting it here.

*Digital version

Xofpod · 19-06-2020 01:51PM

Just finished the first collection of Charley's War. Loved it as a kid and still every bit as impactful.
It's probably the comic that has had the most influence on me in my history of reading comics.
Have collections 2 & 3 ready to roll. The recent Rebellion collections are absolutely gorgeous too, with a selection of the covers and notes by Pat Mills.
Can't recommend highly enough if you've never read it.

CastorTroy · 03-07-2020 08:23PM

Just finished volume 2 of iZombie and about to start 3.
Big difference from the TV series but still liking it

Xofpod · 07-07-2020 09:32AM

Xofpod wrote: »

Just finished the first collection of Charley's War. Loved it as a kid and still every bit as impactful.
It's probably the comic that has had the most influence on me in my history of reading comics.
Have collections 2 & 3 ready to roll. The recent Rebellion collections are absolutely gorgeous too, with a selection of the covers and notes by Pat Mills.
Can't recommend highly enough if you've never read it.

Finished volumes 2 & 3 of Charley's War, absolutely superb stuff. Continued on my Pat Mills trip with Sláine:Timekiller and Nemesis, the Gothic Empire. More mixed quality but always interesting. Two questions that spring to mind for this particular forum:
-Is/was Pat Mills British comics' Stan Lee?
-Has anyone heard of a physical reprint of the New Statesmen? I've heard there's some legal shennanigans but I never read it first time round and would love to pick it up.

CastorTroy · 10-07-2020 12:42PM

Anyone else reading Green Lantern these days? It's a chore to get through.

Ridley · 07-09-2020 12:40AM

Probably widely known around these parts but on the off-chance someone lurking hasn't heard by now:

Comixology has a stealth 'sale' with unknown end date giving away hundreds of Black Panther single issues (along with Shuri/Killmonger/Wakanda Forever) for free.

KayJay86 · 07-09-2020 09:16AM

Thanks for the heads up - wasn't aware. How do we access?

Ridley · 07-09-2020 09:31PM

KayJay86 wrote: »

Thanks for the heads up - wasn't aware. How do we access?

https://www.comixology.com/search/series?search=Black+Panther
https://www.comixology.co.uk/search/series?search=Black+Panther

They're still charging on collections so you have to add single issues manually but if you click each series there's an add all to cart option under the Singles heading.

That Visions of Wakanda first result is an art book so doesn't count.

Xofpod · 08-10-2020 09:13AM

Doomsday Clock. Meh. Should have known better.

Fysh · 08-10-2020 04:36PM

Xofpod wrote: »

Doomsday Clock. Meh. Should have known better.

Continuity gubbins puts me off at the best of times, but I figured I'd skim the wiki page for the plot of Doomsday Clock. There's some bang of bad fanfiction to the description that the best art in the world won't shift.

CastorTroy · 15-10-2020 08:12PM

I'm still unsure if it was canon. Seems it was.
The current one annoying me with whether it's canon or not is the Death Metal. Again, I believe it is canon but it just feels off. Having everything else continuing as normal doesn't help, like even having the Joker War.
What also doesn't help is I wasn't a fan of that Metal story overall that brought in the dark multiverse and all the dark versions of Batman.

I started reading Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan version from the beginning for the first time. 15 issues in so far. Enjoying it.

Fysh · 18-10-2020 08:58PM

I realised a little while ago I've accumulated a bunch of digital comics via Humble Bundles and haven't read most of them, so have started making a dent on those. I got through Nailbiter (I liked the premise but it went pretty stupid towards the end, and was overly reliant on bad thriller tropes for my tastes) and 4 trades of Revival (felt like two stories struggling to co-exist - the rural noir part was fine, the supernatural gubbins that underpins the larger plot not so much) a while back.

More recently, I finished up all the trades of Stray Bullets. I enjoyed the original series quite a lot - it felt like something halfway between Criminal and Love & Rockets, which is right up my alley. This got me excited for Sunshine & Roses, but unfortunately that one outstayed its welcome by, realistically, the end of the first trade. It's got that classic prequel problem of trying to tell interesting stories during a time-jump period in the original series, which means the characters can't really change too much. Realistically I was probably done by the end of the second volume at most, but the third and fourth volumes of Sunshine & Roses really confirmed that. Orson's stories remained good, but nothing interesting did (or could, due to the series chronology) happen around Beth or Nina other than them continuing to be massively selfish arseholes. Which gets tedious after a while.

I'm now torn between getting started on some of the Humanoids stuff I picked up recently, or some of the Bloom County comic strips...

Ridley · 24-11-2020 11:02PM

Dragon Ball Super 7
Dragon Ball Super 8
Dragon Ball Super 9

Story moves past the point where the anime ends with an ancient evil goat escaping space prison and ripping off earlier Dragon Ball villainy.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The IDW Collection (V1) - A re-read as I decided to throw a lot of disposable wealth amassed during COVID at getting the rest of the available volumes based on how good the first book was. It still is. I'd rather Splinter was established as being a Japanese rat

rather than 'just' the reincarnation of Hamato Yoshi

at some point so he's actually from there even if the turtles aren't but it's still better than the original character having a photographic memory of martial arts or Michael Bay's Splinter being the product of hideous computer wizardry.

I've bought the first Transformers collection on the strength of this and hope to get to the GI Joe and Sonic the Hedgehog ones eventually although digital may be the only option at a reasonable price.

James Bond: Kill Chain
James Bond: Felix Leiter

Donald Duck: The Pixilated Parrot - I do enjoy these books. Perfect two-panel gag for which this description will be just as good where a woman accosts Donald against a white picket fence to ask if he can see any wrinkles on her face (cause those mid-20th century fictional lady folks amirite, fellas?) just as the titular bird - compelled to count - walks past behind the fence and throws out a figure in the tens of thousands. Speech balloon comes up from behind the fence over the duck's head. Amazing.

The Boys Omnibus 1* - Prefer the TV series which could just be down to the order in which I experienced them but I'll take the post-MCU reaction of that show over dat whole out-Preachering Preacher DC thang.

Green Lantern: Earth One 1* - Meh, feels like change for the sake of change with the origin. The creative team do better with Planet of the Apes and Star Wars.

Batman: Cataclysm - Liked it the most of the stories on the road to a No Man's Land re-read so far. Ground level heroics in the face of a natural disaster which actually suffer when They threaten to make it the result of a villain's scheme. I think they missed a trick by having Bruce Wayne's buildings be quake-proofed because he respects the science or some such and not having been seen as an extravagant expense in an incredibly unlikely set of circumstances that he just happened to luck out on. That's my one giant penny's worth, I'd afraid. Alfraid. It works.

Star Wars: Poe Dameron 2: The Gathering Storm

Black Panther: Who Is The Black Panther?* - Informs the movie a fair bit and has the benefit of John Romita Jr. art.

The answer is Chadwick Boseman

.

X-Men Gold 1: Back to the Basics* - So Syaf just shot his anti-semitism salvo all over that two-page spread of Kitty Pryde standing up against bigotry in the first damn issue, huh?

The Amazing Spider-Man: Worldwide 2 HC- Looking back through the thread, it's been about two years since I read the last one and I'm hoping it won't take as long to get to the conclusion. After that, I hope to go back over and get through The Gauntlet so I'll have read every ASM since JMS. This book is something of a middle-act between the first volume and the next. Accidentally spoiled myself on some Clone Conspiracy stuff but I do prefer the Anubis Jackal look to the green furry gremlin of old.

Thor: Latverian Prometheus*
Siege: Thor*
Thor: Siege Aftermath*

Clor's so good I forgot that was a thing twice.

I don't normally get on Kieron Gillen's work but credit to him for just running with the ball from JMS' departure. Don't think I would have been able to tell there'd be a writer switch if I hadn't known better. The Thor-in-Hell arc is his strongest work for my tastes

with one issue almost free of Thor dialogue until the end

. Interesting take on Loki's mischief being a compulsion for that is his role so he will fulfil it, and magic being held together through belief.

You can't break the rules if you know you're breaking them but you can if you know they don't apply to you

.

*Digital version

Jayd0g · 25-11-2020 01:15PM

Those IDW collections are gorgeous. I've the first few Transformers volumes and they were a great introduction to the franchise. A tad too expensive for me to continue collecting though.

CastorTroy · 06-01-2021 07:22PM

So DC's Death Metal ends and

Reboots/restarts/brings back the DCU. The multiverse is back to being infinite and everyone remembers all their past lives.
The coming weeks are going to be Future State so will see what happens after that.

Fysh · 07-01-2021 12:11PM

CastorTroy wrote: »

So DC's Death Metal ends and
Reboots/restarts/brings back the DCU. The multiverse is back to being infinite and everyone remembers all their past lives.
The coming weeks are going to be Future State so will see what happens after that.

Future State is only a couple of months long and then devolves to a less tightly-woven approach to continuity, as I understand it.

CastorTroy · 07-01-2021 05:55PM

Fysh wrote: »

Future State is only a couple of months long and then devolves to a less tightly-woven approach to continuity, as I understand it.

Yeah the last issue is first week in March, I think. The fact they're all 2 or 3 issues long seems to imply some will become ongoing in some way, especially with the new Wonder Girl/Woman tv series planned with the new character

Fysh · 07-01-2021 09:05PM

I don't really have much involvement in any of the mainstay DC or Marvel series these days.

I had been hopeful about Si Spurrier's Hellblazer revamp getting a long run, but that got axed before the first trade dropped, because it's not like expanding the following via trade collections was ever part of the strategy with Vertigo titles :rolleyes: The first trade is really good and feels like old-school Hellblazer at its best, it's just really frustrating knowing that there's only one more trade to go before it goes back in its box and another well-intentioned but daft variation on the character gets trotted out instead.

Ridley · 12-01-2021 09:37PM

Dragon Ball Super 10

The StoryTeller: Witches* - Pink on purple watercolours in one tale is nice and artistic an' all but a devil to read on a monitor.

Largely lip service to the TV show except for the adaptation of another unused teleplay (which is also where it's apparent where the puppets would be) so, y'know, try to lean into that more, plz. Still, it's giving creators an issue to retell folklore around a supernatural creature from lesser known stories around the world that doesn't have Disney's name on it.

Aliens: Dust to Dust - Aliens the third thing after Star Wars and Conan I've sought to complete the Dark Horse collections of before Marvel just saunters over to be handed the rights after DH did all the work. Miniseries with a Xenomorph attack from a kid's perspective. Not that it's use here is bad but I just groan now when an android pops up cause of how overused they are in this franchise. Androids always have to be in an Alien story, making the lead character female every time is a leap too far apparently. The suggestion that

a Xenomorph can carry over the mother's protective instinct when it takes on its host's traits

is cheesy as hell in text but it's ambiguous enough in the book to get away with it.

Star Wars: Age of Resistance - Heroes
Star Wars: Age of Resistance - Villains
Star Wars: The Storms of Crait#1*
Star Wars: DJ - Most Wanted #1*

Not normally one for one-shots but I am finding Marvel's Star Wars works better that way. TV and films out the wazoo will constrain them to an extent and yet most of the ambition on the transmedia side is coming from the novels compared to the comics where the opposite was the case pre-Disney buyout (eye em oh).

Fantastic Four 4: Thing vs Immortal Hulk
Fantastic Four 5: Point of Origin

Putting Reed Richards' defining mistake in the hands of someone else is silly.

She-Hulk 2: Disorderly Conduct - Anthology series where every issue is a different Jamie Madrox dupe, plz.

X-Men Blue 1: Strangest* - Both Blue and Gold do Sentinel stories at the same time for some reason forcing me to look up what happened just to even type this sentence.

Uncanny Inhumans 4: IVX - Enjoyed it actually. Character gets revived based solely of the written account of other people with X-istential results then switches over Maximus' attempts to recreate the Terrigen Crystals

before deciding that building a giant mecha is a much more worthwhile use of his time

.

Avengers Disassembled - I mean, it's not a story. Three issues of everything going wrong until Dr. Strange pops up to explain it all.

The Vision 1: Little Worse Than a Man*
The Vision 2: Little Better Than a Beast* - Unashamed background reading in time for WandaVision. Nothing weird about

Scarlet Witch hooking up with Wonder Man and giving Vision a copy of her own brain pattern so he can make a wife

at all. Doubt it'll have much in common with the TV series.

*Digital version

Ridley · 11-04-2021 10:00PM

Please, someone else read something, I don't want to do a blog.

Champions 1: Change the World
Champions 2: The Freelancer Lifestyle
Avengers/Champions: Worlds Collide
Secret Empire: United We Stand
Uncanny Avengers 5: Stars and Garters
Ms Marvel Omnibus 1

I think the way this order worked was my wanting to continue with reading the main Avengers line but didn't what to start the Champions issues mid-run which is where they cross over (after the Champions quit the Avengers). Around that time as Disney+ MCU TV background reading, I ordered Young Avengers: The Children's Crusade and Ms Marvel, and read Vision digitally, while figuring that as Viv Vision and Kamala Khan were Champions members it sense to start at the beginning for them. Then Young Avengers and Marvel kept getting delayed due to stock issues because of some pandemic or something so I just threw up my arms and got on with Champions.

Those done I could finally hit the No Surrender story. Except I saw the Unity squad was in it with the Human Torch listed on the team and I thought he had been written out in volume 4. So that meant going back over with Stars and Garters and that meant finding out some of those issues were in the Secret Empire tie-in collection. Ms Marvel showed up eventually but I still haven't hit No Surrender yet.

Anyhoo, early run Champions has time-displaced, likeable Cyclops drawn by Ramos so that wins.

Fun with him being about the same age as the others but his points of reference are at least a generation outdated. Viv specifically being stated as not into guys seems to go against what was going on in the Vision book. Could be wrong though. Morales is Spider-Man. Cho-Hulk I have no other point of reference for. Having later read the Ms Marvel omnibus, Waid's Kamala seems to have some of the edge taken off her that she was given by (creator) Wilson. Can't put my finger on what seems off.

I do wonder what a reader new to the comics would make of the Ms. Marvel run just ending to accommodate Secret Wars without acknowledging that's what's happening in any way.

And Secret Empire just flips mutants and Inhumans with the former getting a monarchy and the latter getting internment camps. It's almost like someone just tried to make the Inhumans into mutants solely to spite Fox or something!

Doctor Strange 2: Remittance*

Batman: Rebirth Deluxe Edition Book 2 - Well, I liked the War of Jokes and Riddles. The secret is lousy and doesn't land as the big reveal the book wants it to be. Best story from the collection, however, be read legally online.

The Flash: Rebirth Deluxe Edition Book 2

WWE 1: Redesign. Rebuild. Reclaim.* - Grabbed in a sale. Way better than it has any right to be, really, since it's a big ol' advert for a match which isn't paid off in the comic (and hadn't happened yet while being written if I've got the dates correct) but shows what you can do by putting creators on a book who don't treat the subject matter as fluff. Same can't be said for the wrestler 'quotes' on the front of these collections which are catchphrases.

Alien: The Original Screenplay - Wasn't worth the effort, eye em oh as it's the film story with the stuff that was correctly dropped as it was saying too much where the Alien 3 book was something different.

Unrelated to this specific book: if you were Greg "

" Land, famous for tracing porn and lifting art, and were being paid to fart out a cover for an omnibus of Dark Horse's Aliens comics for Marvel, would you copy Giger's designs which are notably phallic or would you copy porn cause if you're gonna lean into it you might as well for a big ol' penis creature?

Or would you continue to be the hackiest hack to ever hack and just rip off your colleagues in the industry again?

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 1: Phantom Blood 01 - This is the first third, when are they gonna get to the bizarre adventure factory? Next book, I'm told.

*Digital version

beakerjoe · 16-04-2021 01:53PM

Just thought Id pop in to the thread to let folks know about the new Marvel Werewolf game happening the the Forum Games region of Boards.

If you like Marvels MCU and their characters, both good or bad, our role playing game will be based on the heroes and villains we all know and love.

Sign up page is in my Signature and we always welcome new players. Any Q's, PM me

Mal-Adjusted · 17-04-2021 01:55AM

Been reading the old 90's JSA trades, great, fun comic with a large, bright cast. A far cry from today where DC just seems to be farting out 15 Bat books every month.

Fysh · 17-04-2021 09:50PM

I've been reading a few bits and pieces recently.

El Murciélago Sale A Por Birras is a very silly, very funny parody comic of the sort you'd perhaps more normally expect as a small press thing. It started as a series of tweets, but manages to remain a funny riff on Batman-as-pop-culture-concept pretty much all the way through. Very possibly even more fun than the dialogue-less "Antics of Batman & Commissioner Gordon" bits of Teen Titans Go! (which I personally adore).

Strange Planet is a collection of Nathan Pyle's webcomics (see here (Twitter) for examples). They are wry and quirky, and I really like them. As with many webcomic collections, this is as much a case of wanting to support the artist as specifically wanting the book.

Regreso al Edén is another great slice-of-life/character drama from Paco Roca, whose La Casa I previously loved. (Though I may have forgotten to post about it). This book has a similar focus on character and examining how families grow and develop over time, but the mood and tone is quite different - because where La Casa was about a family coming together upon the death of their father (an occasion of grief and sadness, but also of sharing happy memories), Regreso Al Edén is a portrait of the unending difficulty of life for a family of modest means under Franco's dictatorship in Spain, compounded by the family having members who fought on the losing side of the Civil War.

Annihilator is a comic I wanted to read for the Frazer Irving art. Which was absolutely delightful. The writing was about what you'd expect with Grant Morrison, really, which for me often as not means "fine if it doesn't get in the way too much". It doesn't get in the way too much here, and the narrative gimmick even allows for us to just have the best bits of the more fantastical aspect of the story without having to wade through the endless tedious gubbins explaining how clever Morrison is the exact details of the plot mechanics involved.

I have also been reading some single issues recently since I picked up a couple more bundles.

We Only Find Them When They're Dead #1 - #3 - I had anticipated enjoying this more, but I think it's not for me. There's nothing wrong with any of it, but for whatever reason I don't feel any need to know how the various strands of character arc or plot will resolve.

Ludocrats #1-5 - Oddly I expected to enjoy this more. Nothing wrong with it, exactly, but where I hoped it would land like Nextwave did back on release, it felt more like an echo of that. Oh well. I may revisit this at some point, to see if I was just not in the right mood for it at the time.

Ha-ha #1 - a disconcerting, somewhat Lynchian suburban horror from the same writer of the excellent Ice-Cream Man series. If you like ICM you'll almost certainly enjoy this, in that there's a certain shared.... off-kilter tilt to the perspective in it.

I actually have more digital comics backlogged than I know when to get through, so I'm trying to be better about just bailing on things if they aren't fun. My next reading will be one of Once & Future vol 1, Ice Cream Man vol 4, Haha #2 & 3, or Rain Like Hammers #1 & 2.

storker · 17-04-2021 10:05PM

I'm taking the odd trip down memory lane courtesy of Kindle with some the only Marvel-type comic I ever liked:

Fysh · 17-04-2021 10:14PM

Also, just wanted to say thanks to Ridley for linking to that Batman comic from Rebirth Deluxe Edition Volume 2 - that was great!

Xofpod · 18-04-2021 08:21PM

All about the Zenith. Bought the four phases in the hardback collected editions recently and flucking love them. 30+ years later, still one of my favourite comics of all time, with Phase III being the standout.

mrcheez · 18-04-2021 10:45PM

Gideon Falls vol 5 at the mo. The final volume should be arriving in the post in a few weeks... loved everything about this one.

Also have gotten addicted to digital copies thanks to copious Humble Bundles... Reading Bog Bodies by Declan Shalvey and Legendary Comics take on Dracula featuring Bela Lugosi...great stuff

https://youtu.be/zPAfrNH9c68

Fysh · 19-04-2021 03:06PM

Bog Bodies was great, between that and Savage Town I'm very much on board to read as many Irish-set crime stories as Shalvey wants to write.

What comic are you reading at the moment.

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