Reviews - Review - FA Online

Undying Love 1

This is an impressive debut issue. The mode is sort of Buffyish, a horror vampire adventure story, though without any of the humour, and for once the attempt to step into that peerless territory doesn’t make your heart sink.

Jimmy Olsen 1

This Jimmy Olsen one-shot is a knitted-together set of scrapings, unwanted leftovers from DC’s back-up program last year. This run of ten-page back-ups in Action Comics was dumped mid-run when DC decided that people would rather pay $2.99 for less pages. Snappy, fun and hanging on the full, ridiculous history of Jimmy Olsen, these little stories are knitted into a really fun 70 page giant, which successfully manages to tell a new, contemporary, fun Jimmy Olsen story.

Wolverine: The Best There Is: Contagion

Sometimes a single panel seems to sum up everything that makes a comic terrible. Here it’s the bottom panel of page 15, which may be a contender for the single panel with most glaring faults in any Big Two comic ever.

Elephantmen: Man and Elephantman 1

This is kind of a fake #1, and it fooled me. It’s sort of #30, really (and next issue is #31), but at least they give you a decent text intro so you know where you are: with some human/animal (mostly not elephants) hybrids created for a war that has now ended, and these ex-soldiers are struggling for a place in human society. Well, apparently they are – we see only one crude sign of any prejudice, and plenty of success.

Adventure Comics 523-525

Twenty-two years ago, in the previous ‘hardcopy’ incarnation of this illustrious publication, I concluded a dismissal of the first issue of the 1989 Legion of Super-Heroes series with a phrase along the lines of, “Legion fans have long memories, and endless patience. We can wait.”

Blazing Combat / It Was the War of the Trenches

What makes a comic an Important comic? Here are two collections that are thematically linked, and which can both be considered to be landmark comics of their type.

Journey Into Mystery 622

I bought this because the recent X-Men 534.1 interested me in writer Kieron Gillen, and this increases my new very high opinion of him. In that X-Men comic he focussed on Magneto, doing a beautiful job of defining who he now is, where he is and what we might expect from him. In this, he does something similar for Loki, now resurrected (after dying in Siege) as a child. He makes him into a more interesting character here than I can ever recall before: brilliant, talented, very complex, powerful, with a precisely judged blend of chaotic risk-taking and genuinely cunning intelligence and planning.

Archie & Friends 153

This themed issue looks at four successive April Fools’ Days in the life of Riverdale High’s premier prankster, Reggie Mantle. Each story is by a different artist/writer combo, each a little different from the Archie ‘house style’ – retaining enough of the characteristic flourishes so that the characters remain on-model, but still giving a slightly different flavour to each tale.

Madman: All-New Giant-Size Super Ginchy Special

Immediate warning: the Allred content here is one 18-page story. The rest is stories by other creators, plus loads of pin-ups.

Uncanny X-Men 534.1

Another week, another .1 issue to review. Thankfully this is one of the best of them that I’ve read. The current team is reasonably compact and all really famous (the line-up is all on the cover), so it’s not much effort, but Gillen gives them all a moment anyway. More importantly, he zooms straight in on the point of greatest interest: why is Magneto now an X-Man, and how will this be accepted by the world?