Big Stack o' Comics

Hello out there, everyone. It seems the day job took over for the past few weeks (and turned into something more like a 24-hour-a-day job), leaving me no time to blog. Indeed, not only did I have no time to blog about comics, I had no time to read comics, so as a result, I have a big stack o' comics (somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3 weeks worth) to plow through, with more coming this week. As I go through them, I'll try to share a few thoughts about each, leaning much more toward instant impressions than in-depth analysis. I was able to make it through a couple on my commute in this morning, so let's take a look at them now:

Ultimate X-Men: Requiem # 1. Wow, that was horrible. I've always been a sucker for all things mutant, but this was too much even for me. I actually tend to enjoy "requiem" retrospective issues for dead characters (the Martian Manhunter Requiem book was one of my favorite Final Crisis tie-ins), but in order for them to work, their has to be some reminder as to why we should care whether they lived or died in the first place. This book has none of that - just a bunch of dead bodies laid out on the ground, and various "Ultimate" X-Men survivors sulking around basically saying, "It sucks they all died in that crappy cross-over". For a line with a lot of promise when it debuted, Marvel's "Ultimate" books are probably up there for the worst wrap-up/re-launch in history.

Marvel Comics # 1. I find these Golden Age reprint books fascinating. They are definitely more illuminating than they are entertaining, though. One thing I noticed was how long it took me to read this thing. There are a ton of captions explaining exactly what happened in the pictures, but nothing really has that great of a flow. It's also interesting to note the level of violence and death found in this book from a supposedly "simpler" time. The strip featuring "the Angel" is basically a Punisher-type character who chokes the bad guys to death rather than shooting them. This book also features re-prints of the first appearances of the original Human Torch, and Namor the Sub-Mariner, a masked-man Western, and a couple of jungle adventure stories (one of them is Ka-Zar, though it seems doubtful this is the precise same Ka-Zar still running around the Marvel Universe). If you are looking for a compelling story, you might want to skip this. If you are interested in tracing the roots of Marvel and comics story-telling in general its worth your time. Also, if you are picking up Brubaker and Epting's "Marvel Project" mini, the Human Torch and Sub-mariner stories do dovetail nicely with that and provide some good context for what Brubaker is doing with that story.

And that's all I got through so far. Two down, dozens to go. I'll be back with more thoughts later this evening.