Apparently i have a deluge of comics coming next week, so i'd better catch up on my current books...

Deadpool: Merc With A Mouth #4 - Looking forward to Deadpool Team-Up for my "funny comic" fix, cause this ain't it. Not even a zombie T. Rex does the trick.

Dark Reign: The List - Hulk #1 - Well, i was getting the List books in part to sample some of the comics that i'm not currently reading, and this confirms that i don't need to be reading Pak's Hulk. I don't like this premise, with Banner walking around with his super-tech forcefields and whatever and hanging out with his son who wants to kill him but not until he turns back into the Hulk. Kinda dumb. And this issue was relatively pointless. Banner even says so at the end.

Spider-Woman #2 - It's a bit slow, isn't it? I thought we were backing away from super-decompression. Not terrible though, if you can tolerate Maleev, who i guess is a little better here than in books he's done in the past. I did like the extended explanation about Spider-Woman's pheromone powers; that was pretty cool.

Marvels Project #3 - It's good. Waiting to see where we're going with this. Slower and less eventful than i expected, but for issue #3 out of 8, i can kind of reserve judgment.

Dark Avengers #10 - This is very nice. So Bendis obviously can at least set up an entire story in one issue if he wants to. And, you know, you throw in the Molecule Man and you've got my goodwill. I enjoy the bits with Venom and his meds, too.

Hercules #136 - Super awesome. Probably too much nipple pinching and wedgies for this to wind up in a Greatest Hercules/Thor Battles of All Times trade compilation, but... Even the recap page is hilarious. Great stuff.

And some trades...

Ghost Rider: The Last Stand - I'd heard good things about Jason Aaron's Ghost Rider run so i thought i'd try a trade. But often a writer needs time to find his footing, so i figured i'd start with the second trade instead of the first. And if i liked it, i could go back and get the first one. Clever, right? But i think i outsmarted myself, because i don't think this was a great arc to begin with. It starts out pretty good, with Blackout and the other silly villains (i like the eyeball guy). But once it gets into the revised Ghost Rider mythology, it got really boring. And you don't want to be boring at the same time you're screwing around with continuity. Iron Fist pulled off its revisions to the Iron Fist mythos by being very well written. This was a drag, and it seems stupid. The Ghost Rider really works for God? And there's like a Ghost Rider in every region of the world? Nah, no thanks. Plus, i didn't think the dialogue was that great, and the art was terrible. Well, the art was fine for the actual Ghost Rider stuff, but it doesn't work when your regular people are as warped and weird looking as your flaming demon angel skulls.

Betra Ray Bill: Godhunter - I guess i'll say that i liked this very much except for the way it ended. It seemed to me that Beta Ray Bill gave up too easily. OK, so apparently Galactus explodes when he dies (although we've seen enough alternate universe Galactus Dies! stories to know that's not really true... the Surfer is a good liar), so he can't let him die right now. But why not keep pursuing him until you get him in a more sparse region of space? It seems to me that Bill was bought off when Galactus re-formed the lady Korbinite. And i'm sure that wasn't the writer's intent. This is probably a little too fanboyish for these harsh modern times, but if you wanted to give a reason why Bill couldn't kill Galactus, i would have liked to see it tie in with Byrne's Trial of Reed Richards. I did like seeing it tie in with Annihilation, though. Another problem with this series is that it was only 3 issues and it seemed like a lot of the action was happening off panel. Presumably Beta Ray Bill destroyed a lot of planets to get Galactus so weak. But Galactus much prefers planets that contain life. So there must have been a lot of conflict between Bill and the occupants of those planets. And we didn't get to see any of that. So overall this wasn't quite as good as a "Beta Ray Bill hunts Galactus" story ought to be. But it wasn't bad at all. I would try something else by this creative team.

I thought, and just double-checked with wikipedia, that Aaron was given the Ghost Rider actually works for heaven bit. That was by Daniel Way.

Ah. Well, can't fault him for that, then, but i'd have preferred if he just sort of left it alone and didn't build a whole arc out of it.