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SuperMegaSpeed Reviews

Iron Man #6 - HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh Greg Land.

Fearless Defenders #1 - This seemed... ok. As Bunn notes in the text piece at the end, the "Defenders" name is arbitrary but that's fine. As a set-up issue, this did its job. I'm iffy on the art and i'm blaming the weird and sudden lesbian kiss on that as well (it would have been just as weird a kiss if it was a guy and a girl, but i imagine reaction to the follow-up of "let me come with you or i'll use my Asgardian artifacts to control you" would have been stronger if the archaeologist was a guy). We'll see how it goes. P.S., the cover promised Hand ninjas in addition to Asgardian zombies, but i'm not complaining that they failed to deliver.

Red She-Hulk #62 - Enjoying Machine-Man, enjoying (god help me) Tesla, but still kind of neutral on Red She-Hulk. It's a good story and i'm enjoying it and i'm ok with Pagulayan's art, but nothing yet has convinced me that RShulk is an interesting character or that she has any connection to the Betty Ross that used to exist. And just as a jokey aside, it would have been great if Captain America walked into Walter Reed and all the soldiers were like "Hey, who's the guy in the fake Captain America costume? Dude, that costume looks terrible!".

Avengers Assemble annual #1 - I liked this (storywise; i think the art was atrocious), but i think aspects of it were really forced. Sunturion as a continually abused corporate lackey is not really a great parallel for the Vision, not in any reading of the character that i'm familiar with. If we ignore that forced comparison, i think on a more granular level the exploration of the Vision's feelings after his resurrection were pretty good.

All-New X-Men #7 - I am surprised to find myself still enjoying this. No blatant continuity problems that i noticed this issue (disclaimer: i'm not up to date on what Mystique is up to at this point), but even beyond that, i expected that by now the meandering pace would have me pretty annoyed. By all rights this should be a mini-series (note that this is different than my argument yesterday that everything should be a mini-series; what i mean here is that the "Young X-Men come to the future" ought to be a limited affair with a set end point, not the basis for an ongoing series. See also: Avengers Arena), but so far i can see how it will work as a Bendis-paced book and even with the art problems (more bad panel layouts), i'm going along with it for now.

X-Factor #251 - Min asked why i always say that this book is a good read but i don't like it anyway. So a little more detail this time: So we've had this kid who is the daughter of Wolfsbane and the Asgardian Wolf-Prince Hrimhari. And it seems he's marked for death. Why? Not because of his mutant-Asgardian heritage, or anything else specific to the kid. He just happens to be the seven billionth person born on Earth. That's not a plot, that a lottery. When X-Factor was debating whether to go to the X-Men or the Avengers for help, my thought was that they should dump the whole story on Dr. Strange; it's got nothing to do with X-Factor. I really don't have any interest in this disparate group of mutants fighting every Hell God in the Marvel Universe (i also have categorization problems with including the likes of Pluto and Hela with Mephisto and Satannish, and what is Satana doing here? But that's not the main point.). All the plots in this book since we started getting it (the dimension hopping storyline, the fake superhero vigilantes, the banshee thing) have seemed equally random and just uninteresting. All that said, Peter David does a good job with the script and provides distinct (if uniformly goofy) voices for all his characters, which i appreciate. So i don't mind that we're getting it if others like it. But it's really not for me. So with that, i'll just go back to "It's fine for what it is".

Thunderbolts #4 - Now this i am just loving. Not only is it zany crazy fun, but it's really cool having a team with really unique perspectives, from Flash-Venom's highly moral good soldier personality to the Punisher's pragmatic but short sighted approach to, well, Deadpool. And, of course, all are reacting to the Red Hulk's seemingly outrageous scheme. I think people worried that this group didn't make much sense should be comforted with the fact that, so far at least, they don't and that's borne out in the plot. On top of that, some geopolitical blowback plus an underutilized Hulk villain. In another book i might complain that Elektra's been in captivity the whole time, but i trust Way & Dillon to make that pay off.

By fnord12 | February 12, 2013, 12:39 PM | Comics


Comments

As several people pointed out, (including on the MCP board yesterday), there was one continuity problem with this issue- past Bobby said he fought Unus but the past X-Men were supposedly taken from a point shortly before their first battle with Unus.
There's precedent for including Pluto and Hela with Mephisto and Satannish- the first Hellcat limited series did the same thing.

I think i recall that Gillen also merged the local deities with the cosmic deities in his short Thor run. I'm not holding that one against PAD; i'm just airing my gripes.

It's a shame about ANX, though.

IM: mebbe it's not that Greg Land only has 1 photo of 1 female actress/porn star that he traces. mebbe it's that Tony Stark is just so obsessed with Pepper that every female in the entire galaxy looks like Pepper to him. or mebbe the universe really is just populated with Pepper Potts clones. or young Tawny Kitaen clones...

FD: i laughed when i got through the first 2 pages cause Misty Knight is drawn in the most exaggerated poses. Daredevil is also a ninja-esque hand-to-hand fighter. i'm pretty sure i never saw him posing like this during a stakeout or just before engaging his opponents. so, why is Misty doing it? i also thought the giant lunges between one sentence and the next were pretty amusing. now everytime she talks, i imagine she's lunging from one side to the other with each sentence.

Valkyrie's costume needs work cause right now the second set of mini cones she's got on her ribs look like secondary nipple covers. *shudder*

fnord12 and i tried coming up with a way for the kiss at the end to fit in with what was going on in that scene, but it's just not possible. that kiss was weird and out of place.

Avengers Assemble: i fulfilled all of fnord12's expectations when i declared this issue to be too sentimental. apparently, Gage and i will never get along.

XFactor: i agree that the plots have been pretty random and i'm not a fan of that. the Tier as the seven billionth person born thing is silly, too. but what i enjoy about X-Factor is that in pretty much every issue, someone's beating someone else up and people are generally rude to each other in an amusing way. better than all that mushy touch feely stuff that some people prefer.

TB: if only we could manage our d&d characters so well within their various alignments. sadly, we're too dumb.