Avengers #19 - Wait... the Vision's been up and around for a while now, in the pages of Young Avengers. I mean, for years. Is this a different Vision? They'd better destroy the Vision at the end of Children's Crusade or something. Other than that, a fun recruiting issue. Hopefully next issue we'll start seeing some forward progress, but this was good.

Avengers Academy #22 - This, on the other hand, was great. Nice characterization all around. Cyclops sure is playing up the melodrama these days, huh? No, i won't let my kids play baseball with your kids. Because of genocide, that's why!

Avengers solo #2 - I think maybe i'd better just drop this now. I'm already tired of trying to figure out Chance vs. Trace. I guess maybe now that one of them is a girl, it'll be easier. But it's really not turning out to be a good story. Not thinking much of the Academy back-up, either.

Captain America #4 - Brubaker sure writes a nice story. And Steve McNiven's art is nice, too. I liked the Falcon's "I took one out quietly -- but two more popped up to take his place" line about Hydra. And i'm enjoying the weird Jimmy Jupiter plot.

Captain America & Bucky #624 - So at least i know that this series takes place in the present with Bucky telling these stories to his sister. That said, this issue read like a Winter Soldier Saga issue that they could have given out for free. I'm not sure if we got any new information out of it, and it was barely a story. Don't know what's coming next issue but with a creative team switch it sounds like a jumping off point for me.

Thunderbolts #165 - This was great.

New Mutants #34 - It's time for the Hypno-Hustler to stop hogging the stage and let the next generation of musical super-villains take over. I guess since they're modeled after Korn or Slipknot, Diskhord is only a decade or so behind the times. I was kind of hoping for a little more of an actual plot this issue after all the Fear Itself stuff and then last issue's downtime, but this was fine.

Annihilators: Earthfall #3 - Even though this was a lot of standing around talking, i thought it was better than the previous two issues. If only the art wasn't terrible. And i'm not discussing the back-up; i don't know how you put out a Rocket Raccoon/Groot story and make everyone hate it.

Alpha Flight #6 - Hey, this is a good series! They should turn it into an ongoing! You think the Wolverine appearance was added when they still had hope for sales to pick-up? Not that i imagine Wolverine really does much for sales anymore, and it's somewhat natural for him to appear in this book, even though there's plenty going on without him at this point. It really is a good series, and they really should turn it into an ongoing, by the way.

Fantastic Four #600 - Oh boy. Well, i really wanted to like Hickman's FF, but i couldn't get into it and i dropped it a while ago. I was intrigued with the switch to Fantastic Force Future Foundation, but i held out. Then i saw the ads for issue #600. Nice super-sized jumping on point, right? They're advertising the book so they know that new readers will be checking it out, so it's a good opportunity for me to give the series another shot, and maybe go back and pick up what i skipped. So i went into this with high hopes. But this was impenetrable. I at least had read some of the previous FF issues and i had a vague idea who Black Bolt's stupid brides were and a few other things like that. I have real pity for any truly new readers. No exposition, not even a recap page, and the story flopped around like a dying fish out of water. There's absolutely no structure to it! It starts off with the Avengers and the FF facing off against a Kree space threat (i guess i'll give them a pass over the fact that Ronan's got Kree Sentries hovering over the Earth this same month over in Annihilators, but really? Can't we coordinate just a little bit?). Then it jumps into a tedious Human Torch flashback (and i do mean tedious) and then the weird Franklin Richards thing (and i see Hickman is still writing Franklin as some kind of autistic kid, whereas Valeria is still a super-genius). No resolution to anything. Just bouncing around like we ripped out the middle pages of three separate comics and stapled them together. Even if this wasn't going to be a complete story in itself (and with 100 pages, why not?), you'd think it would have at least reached a conclusion. And to top it off, they're now splitting this into two separate books? I really wanted to like this. Every review i read of this series is just glowing. I just don't get it.

Avengers: i don't know how, but i'm sure this Vision problem can be blamed on the fact that it's taking so goddamned long for Children's Crusade to wrap up.

Avengers Academy: it always gets all angsty and touchy-feely when you bring in the X-Men, doesn't it? meh. i would have preferred an issue where something happened and that something not be "Dad, you suck!" "I know, son, but I love you anyway.".

Thunderbolts: still waiting for the point of this back in time plot to be revealed to me. i feel like it's filler, and i'm waiting around for them to get back to the story.

New Mutants: we all know the old lady's a Doombot, right?

Annihilators: so, the explanation for why they spent the entire last issue fighting each other for no reason is "we didn't have time to tell you before we showed up and starting smashing things." that is the stupidest excuse for a few reasons.

1) no matter how quickly they had to travel to earth, they still had to travel to earth. you can't send a message in that amount of time? it's not going by messenger pigeon.

2) as seen in this issue alone, they can communicate with each other instantly thru earpiece communicator thing that they've all got. in the heat of battle with the Black Knights, they're able to chat back and forth about what's going on. but when they fought each other last time, they didn't have 2 seconds to spare with a "Wait! it's not how it appears!"?

3) or, hey, how about just shouting that aloud at any time?

lame. and the art was horrendous. i can only imagine Huat is drawing everyone to be ugly on purpose because clearly, you couldn't do that by accident and not notice how awful it is.

Alpha Flight: i'm sorry!

FF: you know what this should have been? Free. it was a bunch of teasers that should have been stuck in the back of other titles (i hear the technical term for that type of story is "a backup") in the months preceding the release of the actual 600th issue. that way, the fact that they made no sense, came to no conclusions, and jumped all over the place wouldn't have mattered. as much.

oh, and the whole discussion with Black Bolt and Medusa with him "explaining" how she just needs to accept his other wives? yeah, no chick is going to get told "this is just how it is now" and go "oh, ok!". well, not unless they're from Utah.

characterizing the two of them this way just makes me dislike both of them. Black Bolt is an insensitive jerk and Medusa's weak. clearly (well, as clear as this mish mosh was) something's going on with Black Bolt not being exactly Black Bolt, but i didn't see any green jelly heads hanging over Medusa's head, so how about a little more reaction from her on the subject? mebbe some insistance that an alternate solution be found?

having recently read the old comics from the 60s, i can say with certainty that narration goes a loooooong way towards clarifying things that a reader doesn't know because they haven't been reading every issue of EVERYTHING for the last year. Marvel needs to relearn that. where's Stan Lee when you need him?