So many comics...so much fluff...

It's summer, so I'm reading comic books...and 'round noon I'll be watching the new X-Men movie...review to follow tomorrow...

I made a run on the X-Men TPB at the local library branch, grabbing a dozen or so trades. The first one on the top of the stack is Uncanny X-Men - The New Age: On Ice. The art style from Alan Davis is one that bugs me. He did some work for Justice League Europe back in the 90's, and it drove me nuts back then. Don't know exactly what it is about his style that drives me so nuts, but I just can't stand it.

The story's not too bad, though except for the absolutely attrocious pseudoscience (I know I shouldn't complain when a movie or comic book has bad science, but this one presented itself as being kinda scientific). X-Men end up kidnapped to the Savage Land (again) by a race of mutant dinos who have super powers. It's nothing great, but it's a decent little lark. The more interesting story here is the rebirth of Psylocke. There are hints that something bigger is coming with her story, and I don't follow the dozen X-titles regularly enough to know what's coming there. Overall judgement - interesting, quick read...far from essential.

Next up is the Black Panther/X-Men crossover Wild Kingdom. This collects four issues and contains an entire storyline which is always a bonus in any of these trades. There's a definite starts, middle, and end. And it's a pretty good tale with a credible villian (who I hadn't seen before), talking (arguing, joking) monkeys, and a decent selection of X-Men to follow along. This one's better than the Uncanny title.

I think I've finally figured out which series of the X-Men I actually enjoy. It's Astonishing X-Men by Wheedon and Cassaday - the second trade of their run Dangerous is another gorgeous run that mines some territory that's been mined before. Hopefully they'll keep Wheedon and Cassaday around for a while longer so I can get a couple more trades before they disappear.

Breaking form the X-Men saw me taking a quick run through Space Ghost by Kelly & Olivetti. It certainly wasn't what I expected from what's turned out to be a jokey character. This series wasn't played for laughs, though, which is a welcome improvement. We get a pretty dark backstory on the titular Ghost, and he's got some very dark motivation. The artwork's nicely pulpy, and the journey of the character from hero to martyr to vengeful angel to hero again makes for a decent little journey. I doubt there's much of a future here, but it's a good six-issue run that touches on all the key points of the character (introducing the necessary supporting characters) but giving the whole of the story a totally different feel from the comedic Space Ghost: Coast to Coast that most of us know him from. Good stuff and probably the best that I read through this review cycle.

Another non-Marvel story was the dual Wonder Woman trades of Gods and Mortals along with Beauty and the Beasts. These are the first and third volumes in George Perez's semi-legendary run restarting Wonder Woman after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Perez started the whole idea afresh, introducing Wonder Woman to the world for the first time. She doesn't know English, doesn't understand the chaos of the modern world, and she's a near-perfect woman that everyone either idolizes or envies. Perez's greatest step was the tight tie to Diana's Greek god(ess) heritage. The gods are the major movers and shakers in these stories as their machinations are the driving forces here.

This was a revolutionary change and one that's been improved upon only by Greg Rucka's run on the series. Perez's run is outstanding, and I'll be hunting down the other two collected volumes, but I'll admit that his art style (he both wrote and drew these issues) isn't quite for me. It's a little too clean at times, too classical, and I don't care for the sometimes cluttered with crosshatching and pencil shading on what could be shown more simply. He's a classic, but he's not quite my tastes as an artist. As a writer, he has almost no peer from the mainstream superhero runs. For anyone who wants to know the history of the Wonder Woman character, this run is an absolute must.

Spider-Man: Wild Blue Yonder sees Webhead as part of the Avengers initially having to deal with a bit of a rivalry with Wolverine who doesn't understand how a geek got the girl. It's a bit of a red herring as a cover subject, but the rest of the story does turn out to be pretty entertaining. There's not one storyline that maintains the entire time, so it's not a perfectly unified trade, but the two main stories are pretty entertaining - a Superman-esque farmboy from Kansas shows up in the newsroom and is assigned to Peter to show the ropes and Absorbing Man gets mixed up with a crime kingpin and gets a little hacked off at the Avengers. We also get three or four flashbacks in different art styles making this a trade worth flipping through. Fun stuff, good story, decent art.

The last of the X-stuff that I grabbed was the first three volumes of New X-Men: Academy X - Choosing Sides, Haunted, X-Posed, and House of M. I'm a little surprised that I enjoyed this series. It's written to a younger audience than most of the X-books with the main characters being teens just finding their way in the X-world. It's a fun run and one I can recommend for any Marvelites out there.

Finally was the second reboot of the Legion of Super-Heroes first two collected volumes Teenage Revoluion and Death of a Dream. The old idea of the LSH being a grouping of teens who have tapped into the heroic ideals of the heroes of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries has always been a great one, and they managed to hold together in spite of so many characters with so many different powers and back stories. This rebooting of the series is outstanding. There's a major villian and thread to hold the storyline together, and the motivations of the main characters are nicely revealed a bit at a time.

I'm amazed and surprised at how good this series is. It's one that should be followed tightly, particlarly since they've recently introduced Supergirl into the timeline post Infinite Crisis.

Wow...lots of fluff crap into my brain today. Good to know summer isn't hitting me too hard...