Quick comic hitters

Just returned a whole bunch of trade paperbacks and thought I'd throw my thouts out to the world. As a general comment, it wasn't a good week for choosing comic books for me. Most left me rather blah...

JLA Classified: New Maps of Hell - decent enough but standard JLA stuff. The team has to work together to beat some bad guy who will destroy the world/species if the JLA doesn't win. Nothing special here.

Superman:Doomsday Omnibus is the first of the really large but in color trades that I've seen from DC. They've begin putting out huge collections of black and white reprints for a cheap price, trying to follow Marvel's model to get casual readers a cheap way to get background of the big characters. I've got issues with Doomsday which cause me to have problems with this trade. Doomsday is a great creation. He was just about the only villian I can imagine being effective as an actual threat to Superman much less to kill him.

But he shouldn't be showing up a half dozen times in the next five or so years. He's a big gun, a rare case who should make an appearance once a decade at most because he's too big, too terrifying (to the comic characters) to show up every year or so. Here we see him being faught and defeated over and over, making him too common - in spite of the fact that we keep being told that "he's the ultimate evil, unstoppable...evolving to never be beaten the same way twice". My advice, read the Death of Superman and Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey trades and leave this giant trade behind.

The House of M cross-over event gave Marvel some pretty good chances to write sort of Elseworlds versions of their characters - how things might have been if everybody was happy instead of prosecuted. They took characters that most folks knew and twisted their lives while still keeping many of the aspects true and together. House of M: Uncanny X-Men left me cold, however, but I think that might be more of a reflection on my feelings about the X-Men rather than the quality of the trade. The X-Men have done so many possibly future stories that I can't keep any of them together in my mind, so this one just left me wondering what the "real history" of the characters was. If you're an X-Men fan, give this a try. if not, continue to steey clear. Plus, it's got Alan Davis's art, and I just don't care for that - never had, even when he was doing the JLE stuff in the early 90's.

Supreme: Story of the Year worked. Majestic: Strange New Visitor doesn't. Apparently this happened at a time when Superman had been taken from Metropolis (I have no clue as to why - there was a weird period of Superman that I just kind of lost track of). In the midst of the time storm (?) ravaging the city, a Superman-esque hero appears to save the city. Majestic is basically a Superman with stilted, psuedo-scientific "I'm from the future so I'm smarter" dialogue. I don't know if Majestic has his own comics, and - if so - whether he's a decent character over there, but here he just seems like a Superman clone - especially when Supes shows back up and tries to cram Majestic into his mold even further. Get a secret identity, Majestic. Be like me, Majestic. Be like me, Majestic. Meh...

In the Green Lantern world, I took a tour through Rebirth and Recharge. For most folks - at least for most folks who came along before the current JLU on cartoon network stuff - Green Lantern is Hal Jordan. He's not the original GL, and - until the past year or so - he wasn't the current GL. He was the GL of the sixties, seventies, eighties, and the very early nineties.

Then things went awry. Hal Jordan went bad, destroyed a city, scrapped the whole of the GL Corps, killed Sinestro, died, went to Hell, and became the Spectre - spirit of vengance. It was all pretty complicated. In the first of these volumes, Rebirth, we get to see the...um...well...rebirth of Hal from the dead. He's become unhappy with being vengeful, so he forces himself free from the Spectre - leading nicely into Infinite Crisis's Spectre without a host.

rebirth sees Hal break free and help the GL Corps fight some sort of spirit of evil, yellow demon thing that's apparently been causing the yellow impurity in the GL rings. It really doesn't make sense to me - nor does the reappearance of the supposedly dead Sinestro. It's pretty much all just a way for the DC writers to bring Hal Jordan back into the fold, proving yet again that no comic death is forever (see Todd, Jason; Barnes, Bucky; Queen, Oliver; Kent, Clark; et al.). It's a decently engaging story line that tells enough of the backstory that folks who haven't been around DC for decades will be able to follow things through.

Recharge is the next step in the line, showing the first steps in the Guardians trying to restock the Corps and training the newest recruits. Some sort of aliens mount an attack on Oa.

In combo with the two - art and story are both decent enough. Nothing marvelous or required reading for even the DC folks out there, but decent enough for a lark.

On to the Marvel trades...

I'll let the review over at TheAxis.com speak for X-Men: Kitty Pryde Shadow & Flame:

Kitty Pryde goes to Japan and fights a bunch of ninja types who have a bafflingly irrational plan to blackmail her into leading them. Kidnapped dragons are involved, for those with a burning desire to find out what happened to the Japanese dragon who appeared in one issue of Uncanny X-Men in the mid-1980s.

It's entertaining enough, though. Kitty Pryde is one of the fan favorites of the X-Men, and it's a deserving title. Sort of the way that The Thing is the heart of the Fantastic Four, Kitty's the heart of the X-Men. She's the innocent one who came in late, and she's been carrying things ever since - solid powers, suprisingly effective, brutal when need be, and she's some sort of ninja - which is where the plot begins. It's a fun one.

Hey look! Wolverine: The End tempts readers - yet again - into thinking it was about to reveal something about Wolverine's history. And then it doesn't. Shock! Surprise! Less surprising, however, is that it's another crappy X-Men story.

Oh, just when I thought there couldn't be any more craptacular X-Men, along comes X-Men: The New Age of Apocalypse. I really don't know why I'm even still trying to read the X-Men stuff. This is horrible. The artwork's bad. The storyline doesn't make much sense and comes from a futuristic something or other that I really don't understand. Crap - stay away.

And then there's Alan Moore.

Promethea Book 1 isn't his greatest work. Promethea is a character, a demigod who shifts from human host to human host as decades pass, taking on the atributes of whichever image of Promethea each host has. We enter the story as she has taken on a new host and while Promethea's old enemies are trying to take advantage of the weakness.

Alan Moore's finest work transcends the limits of comic books. This doesn't quite do that, but even his less than best makes this is best trade I read this week. Give it a try. The artwork is rich, calling to mind some of the best of the Sandman by Gaiman - and the twists of mythology, switching back and forth between the "real world" and the imaginary one make for a rich read. I picked this one up just so I could work my way to the fourth book in the series, one that supposedly contains one of the single greatest issues in the comic book medium. I'll keep reading just to get to issue 32 at this point.