Reviews - Review - FA Online

Avengers Academy 14.1

This is one of the better .1 issues, on nearly every level. It introduces the characters, all of whom are pretty new to me, gives us some action, presents an interesting and ambiguous new character connected to the team, and presents some actual moral ideas for them to think about.

S.H.I.E.L.D. 1

I take it much of this stuff was set up in a previous S.H.I.E.L.D. series – we’re thrown right in the middle here – but the first thing to do is to dismiss all thoughts that it has any discernible connection to S.H.I.E.L.D.. No Nick Fury or helicarriers or secret agents or anything like that. We have instead the Brotherhood of the Shield, a secret mystic/scientific organisation that has existed for thousands of years. We get 20 pages of story, one intro page, and at the back ten pages of mostly Marvel Handbook style background material (useful when I looked back at the otherwise information-free final splash, since the backup material tells me who these people are). I still don’t have much idea of what is going on.

Pebble Island & Birchfield Close

These two short books by Jon McNaught are an unexpected pleasure. From a distance they resemble stocking filler books, the sort you flip through and then consign to your local charity shop. In actuality, they contain unusual, rather striking comics which have a quality I haven’t really seen in the medium before.

Criminal: The Last of the Innocent 1

I was very slow in getting onto Brubaker, but I’ve become a big admirer in recent months. Criminal tells different stories with different characters with almost every run (apparently a sequel to ‘Coward’ is coming, so this isn’t always true), so it’s easy to jump on here with no prior knowledge. And it’s well worth doing so.

Daken: Dark Wolverine 9.1

Obviously “this works – let’s have some more of it” is commonplace thinking at just about any business, naturally enough, but Marvel have been surely stretching the point in recent years. Multiple Hulks, Spider-clones of various types, a second Thor, two or three Avengers teams at a time. I suppose it derives from the success of the X-franchising of some years ago. Here we have Wolverine’s son, who is a lot like him but a bad guy.

The Walking Dead TV Series season 1

The Walking Dead comic book, when I read the first issue, did not grab me. “It’s 28 Days Later, in black & white, without even the benefit of Cillian Murphy’s winkie – what’s the point in that?” Similarly, the unique selling point of actor Andrew Lincoln, in vehicles like This Life and Teachers, was his cheerful inability to retain much in the way of clothing – his thespian abilities didn’t make much of an impression. But I was pleasantly surprised, in both cases, to have underestimated the parties in question.

Strange Adventures 1

On the one hand, I’m all for a revival of DC’s ancient SF anthology; on the other hand, this is Vertigo, and I often get exasperated with them. Unfortunately the balance comes down on that side, for me.

DC Comics Presents Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City

This is a comic-format collection of four twenty year old Detective issues by Milligan, a three-parter and a one-off. Both stories are very good ones, and at eight dollars it’s good value too.

Paying For It

Paying For It is both autobiography and polemic. It’s autobiographical because it’s a blow by blow (no pun intended) recounting of a period in Chester Brown’s life when, after breaking up with his girlfriend, he starts to visit prostitutes. It’s also a polemic, defending his right to behave in this way, and an argument that prostitution should be decriminalised.

Alpha Flight 0.1

Wait, 0.1? We need a jumping-on point BEFORE the first issue proper? How is a first issue not a good enough jumping on point, exactly? Oh well, let’s read this as if it is a first issue, okay?