Brain, brain, go away, come again another day

Conan: Death Covered In Gold #1 (of 3)

... Um. Well, uh... it's... it's Conan. Any questions? I didn't think so. Good ol' heroic fantasy tripe, involving gold, women in far too little clothing, and underground worms taking over people's bodies.

Forever Amber #1

MORE tripe. Why do I keep buying these new Image #1's? They're always tripe. They're obviously tripe. Why? Why can I not resist their evil power? This one is clearly Stock Cyberpunk Plot #3, with the Company Girl(tm) bounty-hunting for the surly, surly Mega-Corporation, and getting sent on a mission that's Not As It Seems. Didn't I read this in a William Gibson novel ten years ago?

X-51: The Machine Man #2

Retcotheric tripe about a character nobody cared much about in the first place. Marvel's death throes are certainly entertaining to watch, but only in a sick, horrifying train-wreck sort of way. Okay, so, they want to start a new "sub-imprint" called Marvel Tech about their technology-oriented characters. That I can buy. But... the best they could come up with is Warlock, Deathlok and X-51? Deathlok? DEATHLOK, for crying out loud? Anyway, X-51 is a goofy ol' character, a robot raised as a human, who flies by "cancelling the gravity equasion" and whose main power seemed to revolve around stretching out his arms, legs and head like a really demented Inspector Gadget. But, of course, that wasn't very Kewl, now was it? So now we have an All-New, All-Different(tm) X-51, with part of a Sentinel program running around in his head (causing him to occasionally start babbling about suppressing those evil mutants), a body full of "Nanotechs" (what?! that's not even correct grammar, you dip-switches!) and Sentinel adaptability. And boot jets instead of that horribly golden-age gravity equasion thing. Okay, so we've got a character who's grown surly, is chok-ful of nanites and who sprouts powers as needed to crush his foes. And the sad thing is, this seems to be the best of the Marvel Tech line, as demonstrated by the fact that it's the only one that still seems to be coming out. Make... the hurting... stop...

Avengers #20

It's Ultron-riffic! Now *this* is super-villainy. Old Avengers foe Ultron takes on one of the Marvel Made-Up Nations, Slorenia, and completely obliterates it, its army, its zombie troops (left over from some ancient plot-line... Kurt Busiek does so love cleaning house) and some bit part mercenary badass (ditto). And, for good measure, some mystical punk who nobody's every heard of. And then he wipes out every living thing in the entire country. And this is just for *starters*. The Avengers join up with an elite assault force to go in and kick some robot butt, a plan hampered by the fact that their telekinetic is still recovering from a boot to the head he received recently, and half their team just got taken out by some of Ultron's goons. It's good to see I bought at least *one* non-tripe book this week.

X-Force #94

And now, things in jars. Memories in jars! A brain in a jar! X-Force goes traipsing around in civil-war-strewn Genosha looking for things in jars, with the help of British loser Pete Wisdom, fresh from getting booted from the mainstream X-Books after a failed relationship with Kitty Pryde, who has since been retconned into being sixteen again, or something. Hey! Wait a second. Someone needs to call the Kiddie Porn Patrol on these guys, since there was definitely some nookie going on there. Anyway, Wisdom, apparently not yet too embarassed to show his face after taking part in a miniseries entitled "Pryde and Wisdom" (the pain... the pain...!), manages to recruit Our Heroes to help him track down a brain in a jar. Then, robots attack. Meanwhile, off in Argentina, one of the team surls about how the others were too busy saving the world to see him off at the airport when he was rudely kicked out of the States by the INS (the INS, for crying out loud!), and is promptly recruited for some no-doubt nefarious task by a surly, millenia-old sorceress, who is, startlingly, not carrying anything in a jar, which suggests that this subplot may have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the book.

Rising Stars #1

JMS (aka "That Babylon 5 Guy") takes a stab at superhero comics, and provides a meaty-keen little story. Or, at least, the underpinnings of one. It's a first issue, what d'ya want? It establishes the setting (a bunch of kids who were in utero at the time of a Bizarre Cosmic Phenomenon (aka a whopping big meteor) get super-powers), establishes the conflict (the government is none too keen on the whole concept) and establishes plenty of characters. And there do seem to be a lot of 'em. On TV, JMS could get away with a lot of little quibbles because Babylon 5 was so much better than all the other (Star Trek) options for TV Science (Star Trek) Fiction that the competition (Star Trek) was a laughable, sucking pile of (Star Trek) in comparison. In comics, he's up against stiffer competition, and, the free market being what it is, he may run a tighter ship this time 'round. Keen.

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