Weekly Pull List 4-10-13

Once again I have let my personal blog go a little bit. I've had a few ideas that I have yet to execute. It boils down to it that I need to get into a schedule for my posts. I'm hoping to get to 2 posts a week. To help this I'm going to start a weekly review of the comics that I read! I bet for most of you this will be less than interesting since you may not read comics, but this one's mostly for me to get in the habit of doing critical writing on a regular basis. So... yeah.

This week I picked up 4 books.

The first I read was Mega Man #24. This is the first ever Mega Man cmic I've ever read. I didn't even recognize that they actually existed. I was watching videos on youtube by Grace Randolph (She does excellent movie reviews for most everything, Beyond The Trailer, and also has a channel where she talks comics, Think About the Ink.) and came across this one:

As a child I played a lot of Mega Man X as it was one of the best games I owned for the Super Nintendo. and I loved going to my friend Tim's house because he had the Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog games. As these were two of my favorite games growing up, I was pretty ecstatic when I heard about a crossover between these characters. Now to part 1 of 12! This book is pretty much exactly what you would expect coming from a crossover published by Archie comings with two of my big childhood characters. The writing isn't bad, but it is aimed toward a pretty young target audience. The plot is a bit fuzzy having not read the previous issues to get where it's coming from, but I'm excited to see where this is going nonetheless. I'm not expecting the biggest literary masterpiece I've ever read from this crossover, Just a nice fun story. So far it's exactly what I want.

Next up is Avengers #9. I started getting this book since they just restarted at issue 1 for the Marvel Now! campaign. I'm not going to lie, this is probably the worst book that I'm picking up. It seems like it is trying to be a high concept work that follows the big plan to have an "Avengers World." I think the biggest issue is there are too many characters. The main team doesn't really exist. They introduced some random people who appear and become the series villains of sorts. It's a little hard to follow, and as someone who generally doesn't like the otherworldly cosmic stuff, this book doesn't do it for me. It has a few more issues to intrigue me before I drop it.

Thor: God of Thunder is one of my favorite books. Those of you who know me know that I have Scandinavian ancestry and enjoy their culture and Mythology. So the thought of taking a Norse God and making him a superhero is perfect for me! I tried picking up some Thor stuff when I first got into comics, but the series I tried were either really childish and painful to read (Thor: The Mighty Avenger) or really awesome but a short miniseries with incredible artwork (Thor For Asgard). I have since collected quite a bit of Thor graphic novels and am only a few away from being caught up to present day with the continuity. But let's get into this weeks book! Issue 7 starts a new storyline that is a continuation out of the previous one. Jason Aaron spins a masterful web of a self proclaimed God Slayer who encounters Thor in three different times: When Thor is a much younger god, around nowadays when we know him best, and 900 million years in the future where Thor is the last Asgardian. The writing is fantastic and intriguing, the art is beautiful and the story is just all around awesome. It's not the easiest thing writing a story involving three different Thors and making them each unique and someone you care about. Not to mention the letters at the back of the book are pretty hilarious. This book is pretty cosmic, but unlike the Avengers book, it's not too difficult to follow and you find yourself caring about Thor. All three.

Last and completely not least is Sixth Gun: Sons of the Gun #2. This is a spin off of the Sixth Gun series which I'm sure you've seen me write about earlier in the blog. I've already talked about why I like the Sixth Gun and this spin off has almost the same flare to it. This book follows the guns in the past as their being wielded by the main villain, General Hume's, Henchmen. It's not quite as awesome but the main reason I wasn't as intrigued by this book was that it's been too long since I've read issue 1. I'm excited to go back and reread these past two issues before I pick up number 3.

Anyways, that'll do it for tonight. Soon I hope to do a quick post on the G.I. Joe movies and have a bit of a flashback to my childhood of playing with the action figures. As always, thanks for reading and check out links to our podcasts at the top of the page!

-DWJ