6/15/11

AVENGERS #14—Bendis’s mighty talking heads return to tell us how it all went down in their tonally pitch-perfect voices. My favorite panel was Logan’s take as to what makes you an Avenger. If Wolverine makes a declarative statement while pointing at you and holding a beer can with the same hand, it’s doubleplus gospel. And okay, I suddenly almost care about the Red Hulk, as silly as the concept sounded to me when I heard about Loeb’s run. JRjr draws the hell out of the Red Hulk/Worthy Thing smashup. Of course. And man, the tower just goes down, kind of makes you wonder what they’ve got planned to up the stakes for the back end, here.

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #505—Yeah, it is getting pretty biblical around these parts. Beautiful pages from Larroca and D’Armata, as usual. That last shot of him flying off is something else.

UNCANNY X-MEN #538—Fantastic conclusion to Gillen’s first solo arc. I love love love the work that he and the Dodsons have been doing. I’m sure that nostalgia for the halcyon days of the characters/franchise is playing a large part here, but if you can make me feel 23 years younger by the judicious application of corporate characters, then I say, Good on you. It’s interesting how it all comes around, Whedon seemed to start Buffy out as a Kitty Pryde analogue, then got the chance to script dialogue for the original a few years later. Now, this last scene by Gillen channels the Whedon tone to perfection. This is as much as I’ve enjoyed this flagship title in monthly form since I first stumbled into the last three years of Claremont’s run. I hope they never cancel it.

GENERATION HOPE #8—More Gillen goodness. Espin’s art is a little bit looser and cartoony than I prefer, but I can maybe rationalize it by glancing at some old Blevins NEW MUTANTS pages. Gillen seems to be building something here, having a good idea about where he’s taking these characters, and I’m interested to see what’s next.

X-FACTOR #221—As good as this series always is, David always trumps everything that follows with the bit of silly on the recap page, this one pumping me up more than usual, as I am also making my way through Watterson’s three-volume collection of CALVIN & HOBBES. I heard Leonard Kirk got assigned to this, fantastic news.

LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #14—Only one DC book? That’s got to be some kind of record for me. This was cool enough, didn’t crush me, but solid. But what’s the deal with the two Mon-Els on the last page? I missed something.

****
BEST OF WEEK: KIRBY: GENESIS #1—This more than delivers on the promise of the zero issue as we fast forward a few years to our protagonist’s college years, at which point all the Kirby madness immediately starts erupting down from the sky, because where else? The pace is still batshit insane, with characters and origins dropping in left and right, but I don’t want my distilled Kirby any other way. I could use a little more Ross art in these pages, but I like what this Jack Herbert guy’s doing. Particularly since, you know, they could have tried to get Tom Scioli to do just a straight Kirby style, but he’s already doing GODLAND and the most Kirby thing to do is to not hire an artist to replicate Kirby’s style, but rather get someone who does their own thing. This one’s a lot of fun with the promise of much much more to come.