AvX Consequences #3 - I'm enjoying the "Cyclops in prison" scenes although when you have to have your characters say "That's just the way things are" when they ask themselves why he's stupidly been put in a regular prison it means you probably don't have a great premise (but that's not Gillen's fault). I'm still not sure what's going on with the "Iron Man learns to love magic" theme; that surely can't be going anywhere. As for Hope, i haven't read a lot of X-books so that whole "I think like Sally, i run like Billy-Bob" sequence didn't mean a lot to me. Gillen's a great writer and i'd be happy if they cancelled all of Marvel's other books and just turned this title into Marvel Universe, but i'm worried that as this sort of aftermath side series it's not going to wind up being all that relevant.

Astonishing X-Men #55 - The storytelling is so bad in the art in this series. The whole morse code bit was lost on me; i couldn't tell who was tapping on what. And the fights were awful, and i still don't know what Gambit was holding up to Tyger Tyger's face as the X-Men were being loaded into the police van. From a story perspective, i'm pretty sure that loading up Karma's backstory with an angry long lost sister and a never-really-died father isn't improving anything. I also thought, thanks to the Marvel Sliding Timescale, that the vaguely placed flashback to Vietnam was hilarious. A narration caption that just said "Saigon. Before." and dialogue that does everything except mention the Vietnam War. Anyway, i guess we might as well stick around for the last issue of the arc.

Captain America #19 - The final issue of Captain America until next month. It seemed a bit weird for the end of Brubaker's run to be focused on Crazy 1950s Cap but i guess it worked well as a retrospective. One thing that i think may have been a mistake: Cap called Crazy Cap "William" at one point. As far as i know, Crazy Cap's real name was never revealed. But as shown in this story, the first Cap replacement was William Naslund (formerly Spirit of '76). At first i thought Marvel was tossing out the intermediate replacement Caps which had me quite alarmed(!) but then i saw that wasn't the case. The sequence (or even existence of) of Cap replacements probably seems a bit crazy to readers not already mired in this stuff, so calling Crazy Cap "William" was potentially extra confusing. But that aside i enjoyed this issue. It was nice to have Epting back for the end. And i'll certainly miss Brubaker.

Avengers #32 - Well, i wanted a Microverse romp and i got a copyright-free Baron Karza replacement, so i'm happy. The art in this issue was terrible - go back and look at the strange poses the Red Hulk is doing all over the place - but the story is fun so far. I have some friends who will not be pleased to see the return of Janet, but i'm about as affected by it as i was by her death ("Meh").

Journey Into Mystery #645 - It took the lettercol to make me realize the "swallow the lie"/bird-eating connection so i suspect generally there's a lot more to this series than my mainstream comic-addled mind is trained to see, but even at the level i'm able to grok it i've enjoyed it tremendously and i'm sad to see it end. Gillen elsewhere is good but this series has been great, so even though Gillen will be writing a Young Avengers book that has (an incarnation of?) Young Loki, it won't be the same.

Punisher War Zone #1 - It's funny because on the one hand any series where the Punisher holds his own against the Avengers is going to get my Nerd Goat up, but at the same time this is what it took to get me to buy a Punisher book. So now you know why the Avengers appear everywhere nowadays. Rucka handles this about as well as you can ask for, with Punisher going up against a reluctant Spider-Man first and then sending just the Black Widow after him, while Wolverine is actually helping Punisher behind the scenes. But at some point Punisher is going to be staring down Thor and Iron Man; i'm assuming Rucka has a twist waiting for us on that. Whoodwin stuff aside, so far this was good.

I actually forgot Hanet died, so I was clearly unaffected as well.

Bob

Is this me then? I don't care that they're bringing back Janet. In fact, I support it. I'm against pointless deaths to make a story seem important.

Oh the founding member of th avengers is coming back.

Founding member of the avengers, I said.

Don't know if everyone knows this but she's a founding member of the avengers.

Wei took a dislike to the Wasp when he read Secret Wars. I'd blame Jim Shooter's "Every issue is someone's first" policy of repetition for some of it (as you can see from his comments) but i think it runs deeper than that.

First, wasp is a founding member of the avengers. Second, it wasn't every issue. It was every other page.

First, wasp is a founding member of the avengers. Second, it wasn't every issue. It was every other page.

AvX Consequences: i think being in prison isn't Cyclops' punishment. it's having to wear that goofy helmet.

Astonishing XM: i agree that the storytelling is messy bad, but i for once saw all the things fnord12 didn't. i believe you're referring to the handcuffs Gambit is holding up to Tyger Tyger.

that said, i feel like they had no clue what direction they wanted to take with this series. when you have to bring back someone's dead father who nobody was really wondering about and include a never-before-mentioned evil half sister to do it, it's a sign you need some new ideas.

Avengers: is anyone else having trouble seeing anything except T&A everytime the Wasp is in a scene?

hasn't Pym been in the Microverse before? why does it seem like it's a new experience for him? he only suspected but didn't know his equipment wouldn't work?

I'm pretty sure this is Pym's first trip to the Microverse (although he's helped the FF and Hulk get there before). It's actually cool seeing the Avengers in a long-established Marvel location for the first time.