Reading random comics

[Chris N]

Thor #337, by Walter Simonson.

One of many runs I know I need to sit down with. I've actually never read it all the way through. I have volume 1 of the Visionaries collection (which is what I read this first issue from) and I assume I've read every issue of the run. But never through. An oversight to correct one day.

I think for the moment I'll content myself with just this issue as I have enough reading projects at the moment.

But it is an excellent issue and the beginning of an excellent run of comics.

[thwhtGuardian]

today's choice was Predator #3 by Mark Verheiden and Chris Warner.

this was a pretty fun mini series by Darkhorse, it's similar to the plot of Predator 2 but unique enough to keep you interested.

[Chris N]

Avengers Spotlight #38, by Roy & Dann Thomas and June Brigman

Part 2 of Avengers Reborn, this one focusing on Tigra. The new direction for her at the end of the issue is that she can now change between human and Tigra at will, and will be in complete control as Tigra. Recently her feral side had taken over.

The issue begins well enough with a feral Tigra shrunk to catsize wandering around, to be fed by a kind lady and attacked by a pit bull. But on the whole it is not a good issue. The art has a hard time with perspective and relative sizes, and the script is largely uninteresting exposition, undramatically retelling Tigra's origin and explaining how her transformation works. The Dr. Druid story suffered from the same concerns, though nowhere near as badly.

[thwhtGuardian]

Today's pick is not so random, but it was an impulse buy on comixology. I dig Cyborg so when I saw the Tales of the New Teen Titans mini on sale for 99 cents I had to have it.

You really can't go wrong with Wolfman and Perez.

[Chris N]

Batman/Toyman is an odd 4 issue series by Larry Hama and Anthony Williams. One I do not believe I have read before, though I will not swear by that. Each issue has a different POV character, respectively: Sgt. Bullock, Toyman, a young deaf child named Tyler, and Batman himself.

Bullock's issue is narrated like a police report. Toyman's issue is from a crazy man's perspective, in which Batman is a raging evil demon. Tyler's issue is entirely silent.

The final scene of the miniseries is unexpected. A wounded Batman, struggles to hold a falling Toyman. Meanwhile, Tyler agrees to let the murderous Stiletto adopt him. They walk off together, and Batman is unable to stop them. A sudden turn of events combined with a surprisingly unresolved story make for a fairly unique ending by Hama.

[Chris N]

Well, I let this go by a few days. I often read my random comic before bed, and don't have a chance to post about it.

A few nights back, I read Thundercats #5, the conclusion of a 2002 Wildstorm miniseries.

I liked the Thundercats cartoon in my childhood, but my nostalgic affection for it is less than that of many I know. Probably because I never collected Thundercats toys. I was into: Masters of the Universe, Transformers, and GIJoe.

Nonetheless I was excited for this new Thundercats series when it came out many years back. Ed McGuiness was the perfect artist for it.

Despite concluding a miniseries, not much conclusion is offered here. It is a lead-in to the next Thundercats series. But it's a fine issue, hitting all the right standard dramatic high points. A returned villain. A mentor departing. The battle for the future of Thundera.

[Gothos]

From the depths of the early 90s I pulled an odd issue of LEGIONNAIRES #4.

This allegedly "light" take on the Legion concept featured writers Tom & Mary Bierbaum putting a new face on the Fatal Five. In their rewriting, among other things, the Emerald Empress was originally a chubby girl who auditioned for Legion membership. Some of the guy heroes, particularly Lightning Lad, mock her for her appearance. She goes off, finds the Emerald Eye and tries to destroy the heroes.

I don't know what the writers were going for here. Lightning Lad might not have been a deep character, but what do you get out of making him a stereotypical idiot who insults women to their faces? How does that help tell a good superhero story? Yet another Afterschool Special effort where the message is more important than the story.

Chris Sprouse art was the only positive here.

[Chris N]

Marvel Two-In-One #85 by Tom Defalco, Ron Wilson, and Chic Stone

I've been pretty neglectful of this project. In part, I blame this issue. The first half was just endless exposition by Defalco. It constantly put me to sleep. Admittedly, I usually opened it pretty late at night. Anyways, I've been working on this comic for over a week and finally finished it.

It's actually a decent story. And it read quick enough once they got through reminding me of Giant-Man's story so far. Good character work and some internal conflicts. Giant-Man is dying and needs to decide if he wants to keep being experimented on or go live out his final days. Spider-Woman may be able to save Giant-Man, but at the loss of one of her own powers, and perhaps at the cost of greater benefit to humanity.

I would just swear the retelling of Giant-Man's story took 100 pages.

[thwhtGuardian]

Been a while since I tried this but I decided to try and get back into the habit today and I picked a fun one: The Joker #6.

I don't have the whole run of this series but from the issues I've read it's pretty fun. I'm pretty sure that when I bought this I did so just for the cover; who could pass up a story with the Joker and Sherlock Holmes? Sure it turned out to be just a guy who thought he was Holmes in the story but it was still good.

[Chris N]

I have let this poor thread suffer from neglect. Last week, I tried to start again with picking out random comics, though have been failing to record them here. So here are 4 truly random comics I read.

Magneto #1

Magneto had apparently been deaged and robbed of his memories in conjunction with the Onslaught saga. The truth of the man now known as Joseph was yet to be revealed. His story started off pretty strong, as I recall, and became an increasingly convoluted mess. This miniseries is somewhere in the middle of that journey. Given that this is a standalone miniseries, they don't work very hard to get you up to speed on Joseph's story. Fortunately, I have some recollection of the era, but attempting to just read this comic expecting it to make sense would leave one disappointed.

While a decent enough issue where Joseph thinks that becoming Magneto again may be the only way to stop the mad plans of Exodus, it is a tremendous waste of talent for the likes of Peter Milligan and Kelley Jones. I'd like to rank it amongst the most tremendous wastes of talents in comics history, rivaling Alan Moore scripting Youngblood for Liefeld to draw.

X-Men Evolution #7

I think this was a great show, one often forgotten in favor of the earlier Fox series. The premise of both Xavier's students and the Brotherhood trying to blend in as normal people at a high school, where Mystique is secretly the principle only really works as a children's cartoon. But once you grant it its setup, it better captures the spirit of X-Men than 99% of X-Men comics.

The comic series to coincide penned by Devin Grayson tells its own story along the same lines and with the same setup. In this issue, Beast joins the teaching staff of Xavier's school, and a softball game between the senior students (the X-Men) and the junior students (the New Mutants) proves Hank's skill as a teacher and leads to Cyclops being nominated as field leader of the X-Men.

Uncle Scrooge #251

This 1991 issue reprints a classic Carl Barks Christmas story, where the plot is driven by people needing to keep their promises, leading to adventure aplenty. Clever schemes abound, and all the plot elements come together nicely.

It also contains a new backup, with beautiful splash page Christmas images of Uncle Scrooge uniting to tell a Christmas story that questions whether Scrooge is really a scrooge.

I don't know enough about Duck comics to tell you precisely which series this is or what classic comic was reprinted.

Journey Into Mystery #89

Thor has to fight some gangsters who are no match for him. Nonetheless, conflict is created through Thor's need to protect his secret identity and through bad guys taking hostages.

A fairly unremarkable issue, though Kirby's art is Kirby's art.

What stands out to me unfortunately is the depiction of women. We get insight in Jane Foster's fantasies, and they involve polishing Thor's hammer, ironing his cape, and cutting his hair. Admittedly, that first one may be a subtle innuendo. The other woman is Ruby, the mistreated wife of the gangster. Who spends the whole issue talking about how bad he is but how helplessly in love she is. The only solution to this dilemma, of course, if for Odin to use his magic to remove these feelings from her.

Lieber's script just doesn't quite work for me in terms of its female characters.

[Scott Harris]

What stands out to me unfortunately is the depiction of women. We get insight in Jane Foster's fantasies, and they involve polishing Thor's hammer, ironing his cape, and cutting his hair. Admittedly, that first one may be a subtle innuendo. The other woman is Ruby, the mistreated wife of the gangster. Who spends the whole issue talking about how bad he is but how helplessly in love she is. The only solution to this dilemma, of course, if for Odin to use his magic to remove these feelings from her.

Ruby would return over 20 years later during the Simonson run and her children would become fairly important supporting characters for quite a while.

The Simonson run as a whole is both incredibly awesome but also interesting in terms of how it uses a lot of forgotten elements from the title's first couple of years. You don't need to know anything about the Journey Into Mystery era to enjoy the stories - I knew nothing about them when I first read the Simonson stuff as it was coming out - but if you have read JiM, there is a lot of cool callback stuff.

[Chris N]

Maximum Security: Dangerous Planet

Busiek and Ordway's prequel to the Maximum Security crossover. Allows us to see a host of the alien races of the Marvel Universe gathered for an intergalactic council. On the table is a mysterious new alien race, the threat of Ego, and a particularly dangerous planet.

I remember Maximum Security fondly as a well-orchestrated crossover. Where the elements all flowed naturally out of a strong core premise, which allowed other comics to tie into it, without creating a giant mess. Crossovers seem to go through waves. Some have a core miniseries which reads perfectly on its own, but organically creates ripple effects which show up in other titles. Some just insist upon themselves, sprawling across tons of titles and not making a whole lot of sense. There are more of the latter. Maximum Security is a rare example of the former. I'm not sure how much of that is owed to Mr. Busiek and how much is the result of good editors. But it came out well.


Note. I cheated on my randomness. My algorithm led me to Master of Kung Fu comics. But I've been meaning to sit down and read through that series, so I jumped to the next comic in the box.

[Chris N]

Gotham Central #11

I love this series. This was a well-done standalone issue by Ed Brubaker and Brian Hurtt.

The premise is that after some legal troubles, GCPD are not allowed to touch the bat signal or in any way officially recognize a relationship with Batman. So a subcontractor is employed who is not a city employee, and so can turn on the bat signal.

They point out how little sense that makes, which is why it makes perfect sense.

It's her story. Really, it's about the office and the people in it we've been getting to know, but through her eyes. But also, in the best tradition of Marvels, it's her story as she stands and observes another, perhaps more interesting, story.

[icctrombone]

It occurred to me that a comic fan starts out reading comics in a random manner. Before the era of collected issues via TPB, one would go to the LCS and pick up different single issues of that weeks releases. It's only now that I pull runs of titles to read. It points out the importance of having a recap in the new books. I often forget everything that happened in the previous months book. The last 2 days I've read Cyberforce 1-5, Captain Victory 1-3 and Titans 1-14. Maybe I'll try an experiment and pull a bunch of comics from a given month from a given year- Example:pull March 1983's books that I own from my collection , and read them all.

[Chris N]

Batman: Gotham Knights #5. During the period of my life where I was working in a comic store and could read as many Wednesday comics as I wanted. And I wanted to read a lot. And I quite enjoyed everything. All the Batman comics at the time were great. This series in particular had some great stories.

The main story with the Key is better in my memory than it was tonight (this happens), but it's still a good story. (And I'm not sure my memories don't mix in the Morrison Key story). The Key can unlock anything, and he unlocks the inhibitions that hold Batman back from killing and torturing.

These issues also featured almost universally excellent black & white backup short stories. This one features a simple story with a touching twist by Paul Levitz.