Spider-Man: Blue sees Peter feeling melancholy on Valentine's Day, relating into a tape recorder a letter to Gwen Stacy, retelling how they fell in love or how - in his words - "they almost didn't fall in love." The story he tells over the six collected issues here is a story long told, of Peter's first meetings with Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy, of the flirtations between Peter and the two girls, and of his choosing Gwen. The tale doesn't follow up to her death at the Washington Bridge, but it does acknowledge the event as Peter tells Gwen how much he felt bad for being unable to save her.
The story is a moving one, seeing Peter recount his first love, particularly now that Peter isn't with Mary Jane - but rather Carlie Cooper now - and as the events of this run have been maybe retconned out of existence. The artwork is also gorgeous, providing emotional resonance to the story...
Well worth a read...
Avoid this one like the plague - mostly like the entire run of the late-pre-52 Teen Titans run...awful ending for what was previously a very good series...
Invincible: Ultimate Collection 7 - PLCH, you're killing me. See, you have the first six Ultimate collections of Invincible, but you haven't gotten the seventh in yet (though the catalog does say that they have eleven copies of some Ultimate Collection edition on order now). So, I broke down and bought a copy of Volume 7 to see what there is to see.
I continue to be impressed with Invincible in that it is one of the few ongoing series that really allows its characters to change, to mature, to age, to die. The heroes in this series are people, real, human, fallible, prone to overreaction, complete with all the foibles and faults that people have. The heroes get beaten up, nearly killed, and sometimes killed, and the world gets thoroughly trashed when the heroes fight.
This volume sees the Viltrumite empire nearly wiped out when the Coalition of Planets' forces - Space Racer, Omni-Man, Invincible, Kid Omniman, Tech Jacket, and the assembled forces from Omni-Man's books - attack their home planet, but the forces take huge losses, as well. Mark - after spending months in a coma recovering from his wounds then rejoining the battle - eventually makes has way back to Earth and finds a changed Atom Eve as she spent their months apart in semi-deep depression after making an unpleasant choice with Mark possibly dead in space. Mark begins to see Earth and its problems in very different ways, realizing that his constant punching of the bad guys doesn't seem to be making the world any better in the long run. Instead, by the end of this volume, he has begun to take a more proactive approach to solving the world's problems.
Hopefully we're finished with the Viltrumites for a while as this storyline has dragged on with Earth - and specifically Mark - being attacked too many times for my tastes. There's only so much worst-fight-ever that we can read over and over again - whether it's Mark against one or two or a dozen Viltrumites. The Atom Eve and Mark relationship, though, is beginning to be even more interesting with the two trying to make a living from Mark's powers and Eve trying to work off the weight she gained during her depression - in spite of Mark's appreciation for her new-found curvaceousness.
As I said, I appreciate that this comic actually allows things to change, and because of that, I'm curious as to where they're going. I'm along for the ride for as long as Robert Kirkman wants to string me out.
Tomorrow, Skyfall...
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