Reviews - Review - FA Online

Fantastic Four 588

So here it is, the final ever issue of the Fantastic Four. Johnny Storm’s dead, Spider-Man’s waiting in the wings to become the new fourth member, there are new costumes, a new direction, it’s the end of an era, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah.

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.

Tiny Titans 31

This is rather charming: a comic featuring the Teen Titans and other superheroes as primary school characters, drawn in a style that you traditionally associate with (US) childrens comics. How is this supposed to fit in with existing DC continuity? Well, Tiny Titans is a TV show that the “real-life” Titans watch. How very metatextual.

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.

Grandville

This 2009 graphic novel seems to have done sufficiently well to produce a recent sequel, Grandville Mon Amour. It is a rather odd beast, presenting us with a story set in a world where France won the Napoleonic Wars and still rules the continent in the early 21st century, with Britain having been granted independence only a few decades earlier. The story is mostly set in Paris, now renamed Grandville (hence the title), now a kind of steampunk theme park with excitingly retro-futuristic technology.

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.

Silver Surfer 1

Oh, look, it’s the return of the Silver Surfer again. Oh my Shalla Bal! Oh, my Zenn-La! Woe is me and shalt I talk in a florid sub-Shakespearean language that invariably ends in exclamation marks?! Shalt I ever develop a sense of humour or shalt I muse over the world’s follies in an obviously messianic fashion?! In my dotage shalt I join my namesakes and take to browsing the web and contacting distant friends via Facebook?!

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.

Venom/Deadpool What If? 1

I’ve never read a Deadpool comic before, and it would be unwise to rely on this one for any guidance as to the character. It’s set in a not terribly serious alternate universe, one in which the Beyonder has grafted MODOK to Galactus’s ass and Galactus hires mercenary assassin Deadpool to kill the Beyonder.