Weekly Pull List - 5-8-2013

And we're back! I've had a busy week. Recorded 3 podcasts and edited and posted 2 of them (still need to get Mainframe Chronicle up). Been busy with the two jobs as usual. Beat Mega Man X for the first time (a battle 20 years or so in the making). So now I'm onto Mega Man X2 as I have the Mega Man X Collection for PS2. Great game(s)!! Also saw Iron Man 3, which I liked a lot. Look for a review on that soon.

On a sadder note: news broke that the Sixth Gun Pilot was passed over by NBC. Read writer Cullen Bunn's response here. I didn't really expect it to get picked up, but was super hopeful as this could easily turn into a new Walking Dead size phenomenon. But alas...

Anyways, onto the main feature! Had a heavier week this week.

Avengers 11

I've not been impressed with this book since issue one. I was waiting for a change in style or story or something to make it better and this issue is it. Instead of feeling like exposition to an upcoming, uninteresting story, this issue was essentially a heist story. It follows a bunch of characters who I have no idea who they were as they infiltrate some place that I don't remember to find out why something happened in a previous issue (maybe?). Unfortunately the end seemed to be just set up for a new story. I'll try out issue 12 and if I'm not impressed, I'm out. Overall, decent issue. Much better than previous ones, but still not outstanding.

JLA 3

We will now jump to the big group team from DC. I think DC is handling their team books much better. We have a set roster with guest appearances instead of a pool of hundreds of people that it is ridiculous to keep track of them all. Also the story seems to be going somewhere and actually feels like it continues from month to month. I think the issue is that Marvel is trying to do a bimonthly book in Avengers so it feels rushed.
But onto the Justice League of America. This story may work better than Avengers, but it is rather cliche. It starts off where we left off: With the JLA fighting the Justice League, but surprise! it's actually robots. Since their assault didn't work, they try to infiltrate the Society of Villains or whatever they're calling themselves nowadays. They do so using a decent plot device, but of course the hot-headed Green Arrow almost ruins the plan since he's not in the know!! This confused me as I thought he was actually already part of the team, but he's apparently not... So I need to go reread the first two issues to see what I missed. Again, an enjoyable book if not at all surprising.

Sonic the Hedgehog 248

So I caught up with the Worlds Collide story where Drs. Wily and Eggman have tricked Sonic and Mega Man into fighting each other. I think the best way to describe this book is a young gamer's fantasy played out and aimed at a very young audience. In that respect it succeeds greatly. The story is predictable but it is still really cool to see. The evil doctors are sufficiently egotistical and fairly obnoxious, but it totally works for the story. Since Mega Man X and Sonic 2 were two of my absolutely favorite games growing up, I love the story. Were this not the case, I would probably not care at all.

Mega Man 25

Woo! 25th issue! In this episode Sonic and Mega Man go from fighting in Sonic's world to fighting in Mega Man's world. Eventually they start talking and realize they're on the same side. The part that's great is when the bad guys actually acknowledge this and verbalize why that's bad for them. It's amusing and again exactly what I want from these issues.

Chin Music 1

I picked this up because The owner of my LCS mentioned it was new. I saw Steve Niles was involved and he wrote the Mystery Society, one of the books that made me love comics. He also created 30 Days of Night. Everything I've read by him has been enjoyable. Not my number 1 writer by any means, but all decent at least. This book does not disappoint. It reminds me a lot of Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt's The Damned series. It looks to be a 30's gangster book with supernatural elements. I enjoy the book. Took a couple reads to follow it. Really to get into the style of story telling. Bottom line? I'm in for a few issues at least. I could me getting this book for quite a while.

Thor God of Thunder 8

I've raved quite a bit on this book here already and this one doesn't disappoint. It's not the best issue in this series, but it's great in it's set up of the (hopefully) epic fight between the three Thors (say that 5 times fast) and Gorr the god slayer. I'm interested to see how this story will go forward and really this book is worth buying for the epic final page of the Thors riding through space on a viking ship. Art is beautiful. The dialogue is subtle and has great humor in it. The time travel in the story is odd, but easy to look past as the rest of the book is awesome. Great book! All around.

Weekly Pull List 4-24-13

Once again I'm back with this weeks comics. It was a light week for me, which is good since I had an hour between jobs to stop at the Cab Comics and grab food ad drive across town. Anyways, down to business.

Avengers 10: This book is still quite underwhelming for me. It's got two more issues to capture me before I drop it. I really don't recall what happened this book. Something weird involving the aftermath of a previous story. The problem is there are pretty much no characters I have any connection with or care for. So when they introduce new characters it's impossible to care for them. As I said. They get two more issues.

Fury of Firestorm 19: This is a book I'm glad I started to pick up when the new 52 hit. I was just getting into podcasts and Rob Kelly of the Aquaman Shrine and Shagg Matthews of Firestorm Fan started one called the Fire and Water Podcast where they talked about Aquaman and Firestorm. It's a great listen and the character of Firestorm really intrigued me. Since then I have read the entire series of Firestorm from the 80s and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm really glad I did that before we got to this issue as it was pretty much the "Hey remember the characters from the series in the 80s?" issue. It brings back pretty much the entire rogues gallery from that series. This issue was good all around. The stakes are high, there are a lot of characters but that doesn't muddy up the issue at all. The story is a good continuation from before and an even better set up for the next and final issue of this series.

Helheim 2: You've heard my praise for Cullen Bunn's Sixth Gun series. So when I heard he was doing something set in Viking ridden Norway I was super excited. I picked up the first one and it wasn't quite what I was expecting, but I still enjoyed it. The series follows a Frankenstein Monster character who is brought back after dying defending his village from dark men and dark beasts. The story will follow Rikard's adventures as an undead killing machine. I have no idea where the story is going, but I'm intrigued so far and I think I like it so far. Definitely worth checking out if you're into gothic horror kind of stuff.

Anyways that's all for now. Next week will be another small pull list week, but it's also the week Iron Man 3 comes out. You can probably expect a post about that. As always, thanks for reading and I'll see you next time.

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