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Marvel Universe vs Wolverine 1

A title like that, I thought this would just be some fairly lightweight all-action adventure. Then again, I suppose Mark Millar’s tremendous Wolverine: Enemy of the State more or less fulfilled this title as well, and was entirely serious. One note is that this has to be a What If alternate world story (not that it states that), since a few heroes have already been finished off in this first of four issues, and I bet there will be lots more.

Vengeance 1

I’m a highly intelligent person who has read fucking thousands of Marvel comics over the years, so I don’t often find I read a comic mostly centring on existing characters and end up with not the slightest idea what is going on.

Mysterious Ways 1

This is an odd comic, in that it seems to set up one kind of storyline and genre, then on the last page tell us that it isn’t that kind of thing at all.

Bloom County: The Complete Library Vol. I (1980-1982)

The Library of American Comics has finally given Bloom County fans what they have been requesting for years – a complete Bloom County collection assembling every daily and Sunday strip.

All-Winners Squad: Band of Heroes 1

This strikes me as a total disaster area of a comic. First, purge your mind of any previous knowledge of the All-Winners Squad, more or less the same as the Invaders: this lot has no Torch (though is that supposed to be him on the cover?) or Sub-Mariner or Whizzer, though it does have Cap and Bucky. We see them from 1944 in mostly army uniform with a bunch of other soldiers who wear masks.

Gary Panter

It’s difficult to believe that Gary Panter’s now in his sixties. He still carries the image of a brattish punk rocker, producing art that tapped into the Californian New Wave in much the same way as Jamie Reid’s came to summarise a whole generation of earlier, British music.

Witchdoctor 1

Our hero here is a mystical doctor, taking a pseudomedical approach to the supernatural, here dealing with the traditional possessed kid. He wears a white coat and talks about parasitical infection by demons, and comes accompanied by a paramedic and some sort of weird anaesthesiologist, a mystical girl.

She-Hulks: Hunt For The Intelligencia

This paperback collects a mini-series that ties into the current continuity of the Hulk comic. Actually Hulk comics, since there are currently two monthlies, Incredible Hulks and Hulk, dealing with the wacky antics of a whole bunch of gamma-irradiated folks as they search for love n’ life n’ learning in the big wide world.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep 19

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep isn’t Philip K Dick’s best novel, but, thanks to Blade Runner, it’s by far his most famous. This adaption retains all the novel’s text, and is clearly a labour of love. Sadly, it’s also not very good for precisely those reasons.

Flashpoint – Deadman and the Flying Graysons 1

DC’s Flashpoint series seems to be latest attempt to simplify the DC universe and make it accessible to a wider readership. It happens every few years: some big, earth-shattering crisis that levels years of cross-continuity and increasingly self-referential storylines. Maybe it even works, for a little while, but it’s a doomed mission. Plotlines and characters accumulate again, history becomes baggage, and the comics become incomprehensible to a casual readership.