Manga and Comic Reviews
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Return of Effie Kolb #1 (of 2) I like “Hellboy” stories as much as the next person, but do you know what they usually aren’t? Scary. For whatever reason most comics pegged as horror don’t usually scare me. That includes the vast majority of “Hellboy” and Mignolaverse stories. […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: King Thor (or Thor by Jason Aaron vol. 18) Seven years. That’s how long Jason Aaron has been writing “Thor.” It’s a virtual eternity in this comics marketplace where a creative team is kicked to the curb if their series doesn’t hit the ground running. Aaron’s work on “Thor” has been consistently good […]
This current storyline has the feeling of a final arc, what with how everything hits the fan here, but it still feels like we’ve still got a ways to go yet. That’s because Sato has finally revealed his plan for destabilizing Japan. It employs the same kind of stupid/clever planning that this series has specialized […]
Here’s the second half of Matthew Rosenberg’s story and it doesn’t quite nail the same entertainingly downbeat vibe that the first one had. That’s mainly because the story goes off in a lot of different directions in vol. 2. From funerals for friends, to finding out what Emma Frost has been scheming, to fighting forgotten […]
…write about the comic that it got me to buy. I wasn’t planning on buying any of the other “Age of X-Man” series since “Marvelous X-Men” made for a pretty self-contained spine of the story. It’s just that seeing Apocalypse in the role of someone who wants to let love live is so utterly bizarre […]
Out of the ashes of “Uncanny X-Men: Disassembled” comes… something really strange. By either regular “X-Men” standards or even their alternate universe stories. “The Marvelous X-Men” collection makes up the spine of the “Age of X-Man” event as it collects the title miniseries, as well as the “Alpha” and “Omega” issues that kick it off […]
With “Invincible” and “The Walking Dead” no longer with us, the chances of me winding up with two Robert Kirkman-written books on my shelf to review is going to be an increasingly rare occurrence. It’ll become even more so when one of the series I’m writing about here wraps up with its next volume. So […]
“The Man of Steel” was a decent enough start to Bendis’ run on “Superman” and “Action Comics.” It showed he had a good handle on the character, even if the stories being set up didn’t really grab me. “Phantom Earth,” however, is a big step in the right direction. It’s got a great setup for […]
I wasn’t expecting to see Smith back with Talas after the two parted, or rather “were parted,” way back in vol. 3, but it’s nice that it happened nonetheless. There’s a part of me that wishes it led to some more engaging storytelling here, however. Things start off with a chapter of glorified and glorious […]
It’s a lovely, dense volume of the series we have here. While the cliffhanger from the previous volume is dispatched quickly enough, it immediately segues into telling us all about Father Simon’s genuinely tragic backstory. (As well as the various factions which exist in the church, which I’m sure will become relevant later…) Then we […]