Martin Skidmore - Review

Incredible Change-Bots 2

This is Jeffrey Brown’s idiosyncratic version of, or perhaps love letter to, the Transformers.

2 Sinister Dexter books

Gunshark Vacation & Murder 101: I found these two books at £3 each in a remaindered bookshop, and after really enjoying the end of Abnett’s Heroes For Hire #1, I was pleased to snap them up.

Hitchcock once described suspense something like this: if a bomb under a table goes off, that’s a shock. If the viewer sees it there, the timer counting down, the people around the table not knowing it’s there, it’s suspense. The Hoebers haven’t quite grasped this.

Heroes for Hire 1

Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning revisit another old team, successfully.

Showcase Presents Justice League of America 5

This collection, reprinting JLA 84-106, 1970-73, is not one of the better periods for the JLA. I love the team and several of its members, but it has to be faced that it has had plenty of crappy periods. After the charming and fun, if very trivial, early stories by Fox & Sekowsky, by now it is trying to be more Marvel and more ‘relevant’ as the term was then.

BPRD: Plague of Frogs

I am by now a total Hellboy fan, and that extended quickly to Mignola’s world, especially when I fell for Guy Davis’s artwork. Having said that, this 400+ page hardback book is not a very coherent volume.

Hawkeye: Blindspot 1

How many lousy ideas can you fit in the first issue of a mini-series starring one of Marvel’s finest characters? Not a challenge anyone should be taking up, but McCann seems to be having a good go.

Amazing Spider-Man 654.1

I was bewildered by the Iron Man .1 issue, and this adds to my confusion. These are supposed to be ‘jumping-on points’ for new readers, but like Iron Man 500.1, this makes no attempt to give you any idea that there are interesting things to come for the title. At least in Iron Man you got plenty of sense of where the character is right now, which is something: here, what you get is no Spider-Man at all.

Marvel Girl 1

I can’t quite work this out: it seems to be set pretty early in X-Men continuity, presumably to link in to the new movie set back then, but it sets up Jean as, in Professor X’s words, “one of the strongest beings on the planet,” which was certainly not the case in the original run of X-Men comics.

Brubaker’s Catwoman: an appreciation

A belated apology for not following Brubaker from many years ago, thanks to finally reading his superb Catwoman run.

FA - The Comiczine