Marvel - Review - FA Online

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.

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.

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?

Herc 1

This is a good first issue, and it does pretty much everything you want a fresh start to do. We get an opening fight scene, making clear that Hercules is now mortal and vulnerable, but still strong and with an array of ancient magical weapons. We get what looks like a new supporting cast, which also gives him a job and a place to live. We get mysterious voices of worship, suggesting that his demigodhood is not entirely dispensed with (and being a superhero comic, we can have no doubt that it will be returned sooner or later). Finally, we get some more action, leading to confrontation with the (or a?) Hobgoblin, who is working for the Kingpin.

Fear Itself 1 & The Home Front 1

Three comics in, and I am very irritated by this Fear Itself event. The prologue set up the Red Skull’s daughter, Sin, tracking some mighty weapon. In FI1 she gets it, and it’s like Don Blake getting Mjolnir: she becomes some ancient scary Asgardian god (of fear, I suppose). Odin immediately runs away, taking all of his Asgardians with him. Oh, and Sin meets some old guy, an alternate or evil Odin type by the look of it, and summons something or other. This is a double-length issue, so 66 or whatever pages in, and we still don’t actually know what is going on, but just keep getting “OMG Odin is scared and look the Watcher is hanging around so just imagine how big and exciting this is!!!!” stuff thrown at us.

Essential Captain America 6

My god the slump in standards some way into this is painful. I’m not sure I can think of another Essential volume where it’s so precipitous.

Cyclops 1

This suffers the same fault as most other recent one-shots, in that it is utterly inessential, not being a notable or pivotal moment in Cyclops’ life, but what it achieves that the others don’t is being thoroughly entertaining, a virtue you don’t find in so many Marvel comics these days.

Captain America 615.1

This is certainly the best of the .1 issues I’ve seen so far, which actually isn’t saying much. It tells a story, complete in one issue, which along the way tells us where Steve Rogers is right now, and sets up a key emotional theme for the immediate future.

FF 1

I buy a lot of things just to review, including lots of first issues. It’s a while since I’ve enjoyed any of them as much as this.

Thor 620.1

I’ve seen various approaches to the .1 jumping-on-point issues so far: just exposition to bring readers up to date; leaving the main character out of it completely; and a comedy single-issue story. This is closest to that final approach, except there is minimal attempt at comedy here, as far as I can tell.