After last week's deluge, we've only got two books for this week...

Captain America #618 - I'm enjoying the espionage/intrigue aspect of this plot. Not a typical Captain America story, and it's good. Since it was a slow week i finally started getting to my trade paperback backlog, and i'm also reading Brubaker's Sleeper, which has a similar vibe. Good stuff. The art could be better. The art credits say "Butch Guice & Stefano Gaudiano; and Chris Samnee" (all punctuation reproduced verbatim). I'm not sure how that breaks out in the issue, but there's a very cartoony prologue with Agent 13 and Black Widow, then a sketchy but gritty mid-section with Bucky in the prison, and then a sketchy but cartoony end section with Steve Rogers. It's all a bit of a mess, but it doesn't distract too much from the story.

Amazing Spider-Man #662 - I gave the first part of this story very high marks. Conclusions can sometimes be a bit of a let down, especially in cases like this where it's a guest writer so there's no real chance for any continuing developments, and this wound up feeling a bit too pat. A bit too much of the 'triumph of the individual spirit' type of thing, which i guess is inevitable when fighting Psycho-Man. Really, this was fine and i enjoyed it, but there were parts that felt a bit too sentimental. The additional material at the end of the book was odd. The "Infested" storyline was a pointless two pages that didn't do anything to make me want to read the Spider-Island story i assume it's building up to. The Magnetic Man story by Frank Tieri was 8 pages, and i actually thought it was pretty good. But it was Infested that was advertised on the cover so i thought it was strange that it barely existed in the comic and there was this additional story instead. Still, i thought the Magnetic Man story was a nice Astro City style POV piece.

Spider-man - it was ok. more spidey being himself, but way too much "i believe in you and you should believe in yourself" touchy feely crap. the tiger mom wouldn't approve.