Weekly Pull List 7-24-13

Justice League Dark 22 - Part 3 of Trinity War. The Phantom Stranger shows up while the Justice Leagues are analyzing Dr. Light's body and tells them of Wonder Woman's plan to find the Justice League Dark. They go to New York to find Wonder Woman and have a quick standoff. The Question shows Superman an article that reveals that Dr. Psycho is the one behind Dr. Light's death leading him to escape in a rage. A scuffle nearly ensues before Zatana whisks away Diana and the JLD as Constantine lures Shazam away for his own schemes. The book ends with a nice little voice over moment of the mysterious man who has kidnapped Madame Xanadu and is explaining that the "knights" are moving into place nicely and reveals he has a mole in the Justice League! Gasp!! Interesting next step in the story. Another mole? pretty contrived and not very exciting. This series so far has been great books with very underwhelming endings and contrived twists. The story is decent, but seems to be lacking something. Something like a good reason for existing. Not great, but interested to see where it's headed. Especially after the next book. 3 out of 5.

Constantine 5 - This book as well as the character is one I really had little interest in. A few months ago I watched the movie and realized I kinda like the occult story. I picked this one up as it's a tie-in to the Trinity War and takes place after Constantine and Shazam take off. They arrive at a bar apparently frequents and John tricks Shazam into changing back to Billy and manages to take the magical power from him to fight off the demon who is apparently chasing them. The story is rather obnoxious and out there, but it's written in a way that I don't care about that. It's an excellent, quick read and I'm looking forward to picking up another issue or two. The art is rather brilliant. It has a fantastic balance of realism and stylistic imagery that works perfectly to evoke the demonic, surreal story. This book is an excellent surprise in that I wasn't expecting it to be great and it still blew me away. 4 out of 5.

Lastly, I picked up The Sixth Gun: Sons of the Gun 5. This is apparently the last issue of this mini series. I thought it was six, not five. This issue brings together all of General Hume's horsemen and their journeys to a place where a disease has been infecting the town. They destroy all the demons when the widow Hume shows up and recruits/guilts them into joining her. The survivors start heading toward the group when they shoot them all down as they are villains. This series is great. It answers the question I didn't know I was asking about how the men got wrapped up with Missy Hume after banishing the general. I can't wait to go back and read the main series to see how this one helps enhance it. Brian Churilla's artwork homages Brian Hurtt's work on The Sixth Gun while making it a little darker and more oriented to the villainous story. Great book and great series! 4.5 out of 5.

Weekly Pull List 6-19-2013

Very solid week for comics this week. I only picked up three books, but they are all great books.

We'll start with Sonic Universe 53 - We return to the world where the blue heroes take on the dastardly doctor duo. This issue wraps up part two of Worlds Collide by having the heroes rescue the rest of the roboticized masters (the friends of sonic turned into evil robotic versions.) They then start heading toward the base where Drs. Wily and Eggman are holding Dr. Light captive. Once again, good book. I think I'll hold off on reviews until the crossover is finished and just leave basic plot synopses for the issues. 4 out of 5

Next up we head to the beautiful, horrific, wild west in Sixth Gun: Sons of the Gun 4. This title follows the story of the wicked General Hume's comrades and vicious teammates. I re-read all four issues today which is definitely the way to read it. It is great to see the villains' story outside of the main book. This issue's main story follows Silas as he arrives in a town and begins to investigate the mysterious disease taking hold of people and a bunch of livestock with strange injuries. A few of the infected beg for Silas to put them out of his misery. As his gun, the fourth, calls up the spirits of those it has killed he brings about a sort of cult. The book ends with him stumbling into a barn and finding a crazed looking lady taking a bite out of a cow's neck. Interesting story and fantastic to see a cult sort of story in a very atypical setting. Bunn and Hurtt do great work as always and this is a fantastic prequel mini series. This is probably my favorite issue so far. It's an interesting concept of having the bearers of each gun get their own story in this pseudo prequel. 5 out of 5.

Finally I got Sixth Gun 32. As part 3 of this story, I was a bit lost until I got a digital copy of issue 31 which still hasn't come in yet. This story is following Becky through her "Ghost Dance" as she is passed out in the desert. Drake and the others set off to find the supposed skinwalkers who are Hacking into her ghost dance to hunt Becky down at the behest of Missy Hume. This story is close to being the best of the series to date. Her fever dream of sorts takes her into the past where she finds out that The Six have been reincarnated throughout the years. We see them as tomahawks and later as swords as she appears in medieval times at a castle under attack by dragons. We see the dark past of the Six as they are used in sword form in a seal much like one we saw in the first arc. After they activate the seal Becky appears on a street in the middle of some town and is confronted by a pale, older version of Silas Hedgepath, wielder of the Fourth gun and his crew which resembles the other gun holders we've seen in the Sons of the Gun. I really like this issue! It's setting up for some really neat story to connect both books through Becky's dream while still keeping a great story going in the book's present time. The art always pops off the page to portray the wicked feeling of the book. The story takes turns that hint at a fantastic history of the Six and promises to fulfill the desire to see more. I've said it plenty, but if you aren't reading Sixth Gun, go pick up the trade paperbacks at your LCS. 5 out of 5.

Weekly Pull List 4-17-13

And I'm back to talk about what comics I picked up this week. Again, been super busy with work and working on my novel for Camp NaNoWriMo. Yeah, there's a thing called National Novel Writing Month. It's a yearly event in November that gets people to write a novel in a month. They're doing a summer camp kind of thing for the month of April. I decided to take a shot at it. It started off great, but again super busy with work so I'm kind of running behind.

So today I picked up several books. Let's get started! Spoilers ahead!

Justice League #18 - Now this is my first issue of this one that I picked up. I've been kinda following the series but haven't been reading it religiously. This issue starts with Jason Todd and Alfred in the Batcave mourning the death of Damian when a mysterious figure breaks in and knocks them out before taking Batman's stash of Kryptonite. Meanwhile Superman and Wonder Woman are confronted by Batman over what the world views of them being together and how they can do anything. On the Justice League satellite, Firestorm and the new Atom get confronted by the return of Despero. As far as story, this book isn't really innovative. The story of Batman's contingency plans being stolen or going awry has been told many times (See JLA Tower of Babel, Batman No Man's Land, etc...). That being said, Geoff Johns is brilliant so I'm not too worried. As usual Ivan Reis' art is pretty beautiful. Overall a great book and I can't wait to see where it's going.

DC Universe Presents #19 - This is an interesting book. I've been following this title since issue 13 or so and it's an anthology kind of book. There's a few issues per story arc or there are one shots as the last few have been. I haven't been overly impressed by the last couple, but this is the final issue of this series so I figured I should finish it out. This issue was probably the biggest surprise this week. It follows a female scientist who comes across an artifact that seems it comes from 300 years in the future  when it's carbon dated. Anyways, a portal opens and Beowulf (yes the character from the poem) chases a shapeshifter to our time. At the end he ends up going back only to be followed by the scientist. I don't know what it was about this issue that was super exciting, but it was well written and intriguing. The art was pretty neat, but not overwhelmingly awesome. This seemed as a sort of set up for the issue Sword of Sorcery that started recently and I enjoyed it enough that I really want to go check out that series.

Sonic Universe #51 - Part 2 of the Worlds Collide Crossover. This book was a good continuation of the story that started last week. I had no real issues with it except that the continuity is kinda weird. Last issue the timeline jumps back a few days or something and this one continues from the jump back. I didn't pick up on that until halfway through which made for an odd read...

Sixth Gun: Sons of the Gun #3 - Again not an incredible book, but it was decent. The story still isn't as intriguing as the main series. Definitely worth a read if you enjoy the world of the Sixth Gun, but it might be worth waiting for the trade.

Finally, Sixth Gun #30 - This is the first issue in the next arc and it has the main character Becky getting trapped inside the spirit world or something like that. Hard to sum up the plot in a single sentence so that's how I'm doing it. Great beginning to a new story and I'm still in.

Sorry about the brevity of the reviews, I'm really tired. May come back and edit these tomorrow. We'll see. Thanks for reading!!

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