Friday 1/2/09

Damn holidays and their shipping delays...

Gigantic #2: I got this a week late because I forgot to buy it. I liked this issue, although the plot is going in a fairly predicatble direction at themoment. Nguyen's art is better when he's drawing giant robots smashing crap and weird looking aliens, but that's no to say there's anything wrong with it here. Iconoclast seems like a fun character - kind of seems like the Indy Remender is having some fun with the fact that he's writing some mainstream stuff at the moment. Seems like that could get funny.

Final Crisis Secret Files: The words "Grant Morrison" on the cover are a bit of a stretch. He has one page on the anti-life equation which is pretty cool, and a few design sketches, but othrwise that's all from Morrison this issue. The rest is the origin of Libra by Len Wein, as well as how he went from his last appearance in an old silver age JLA issue to harbinger of doom in FC. It's not bad, but not really anything you didn't kinda put together on our own, you know. Very skipable.

Captain America #45: It's a good wrap-up to the the three-parter, leading straibght into the next story. Ive got to admit, it's kind of funny to have a three-part story end with "To be continued" - why not just make it 6 parts if that's what you're doing? It's still a solid issue with a nice performance for Cap (who I refuse to refer to as Bucky, or New Cap - he's Cap, people). I like that he's fighting some actual supervillains - not that this series was exactly calling out for it, but it helps make him seem more "superhero", and gets him settled into the rest of the MU. It's kind of interesting that Cap's villain here - a previously unseen Chinese supersoldier he once fought as the Winter Soldier - seems like a very pulp-inspired character, a the same time Bru is releasing Incognito , which is also more Pulp than Superhero. Guess he was feeling pretty pulpy.

Incognito #1: Not quite the perfection I was expecting, but it's still pretty awesome. Very much a darker version of Sleeper, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. Brubaker is better at world-building than he's given credit for, fleshing out characters, histories, supprting characters, backstories, all through generalized implications. I love the casual meanness of the main character, and how it plays next to Wanted - both characters commit rape without concern, but Bru does it with so much more subtlety and complexity that Millar's "beat you over the head" technique. Yeah, I managed to bash Millar in a totally unrelated review. This was good, go buy it.