Nova #12 - Perfect. It's all coming together exactly as i planned it. My only concern is that to people who have been following Annihilation: Conquest and not reading Nova, the sudden appearance of the Technarchs is going to seem a little like Deus Ex Machina (emphasis on Machina), but that don't befront me.

Fantastic Four #556 - When i saw the negative reaction to this online, i dismissed it as Millar haters, but... this really isn't any good, is it? Just from a "high concept" point of view, two plus issues of fighting a Captain America robot isn't exactly up there on the scale. Beyond that, relying exclusively on Reed's brains to win every fight is exactly the sort of rut that i thought Millar was trying to break the FF out of. Plus, Alissa Moy, nearly as smart as Reed, is just flailing around helplessly this issue (and she built in a failsafe to keep the robot from attacking her but left no way to turn it off???. That doesn't make a lot of sense. In fact, the whole idea of this group of geniuses building this whole new world, but being completely unable to stop a single robot that they created doesn't really work for me). I think the art is pretty nice, but the snowstorms scenes obscure what could otherwise have been good looking fights. And i was a little confused by the sequence of events. Was the scene where all the non-FF heroes attacked the robot a flashback, or did they all suddenly wake up and then get trounced a second time? Hopefully this will improve.