Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Comics Out April 18, 2007

Brad Meltzer and Shane Davis's Justice League of America #8. Meltzer has a character do a trick with a chessboard I did not know about even though I played competitive chess for years. That was kinda cool. We also have a weird allusion to the Legion of Superheroes being "seven soldiers," "scattered" across time; I do not know what to do with that, especially since Seven Soldier scribe Grant Morrison handled the last major Justice League launch. I doubt anything will come of it, but ... strange. This is the first part of the JLA/JSA team up and I think it is going to get on my nerves. I am going to need to find a website that can give me some footnotes on who everyone is; Johns and Meltzer are going ga-ga with the nostalgia, and I hate nostalgia. But I will stick with it, if only because I enjoyed JLA 1-6 (though not 7) and know Meltzer's run wraps up with 13.

Mike Carey and Chris Bachalo's X-Men #198. I get it for the art. I am never disappointed.

In comics news Ed Norton is the new Bruce Banner.

Also, Julie Tamor (The Lion King) is slated to direct SPIDERMAN: THE MUSICAL with Bono and the Edge doing the songs. Anytime now, someone is welcome to yell April Fool's. Anytime. Please -- God -- someone yell April's Fools.

9 comments:

Geoff Klock said...

review, recommend, discuss

Anonymous said...

What's the chess trick? I'm not really into JLA, but I do love chess.

I generally use DCUGuide (http://www.dcuguide.com/Who_Home.php) to find out who new characters are. It can be woefully incomplete (understandable, it's a huge project!), but it is a pretty good resource.

Unknown said...

I didn't read X-Men, but I flipped through it in the store, and wow, there was some really cool art, even for Bachalo. He did an effect on some sort of ghost or monster that I've never seen him do before. Now I'm tempted to pick up some of these issues.

Thacher said...

Even though I'm so not a DC nostalgia nerd, two of my employees are, so I usually just turn to them to get a 10 minute dissertation on who Karate Kid is and stuff like that. Not having that slavish devotion to the DCU of yore, I still enjoy the hell out of Meltzer's run, even though I still find myself going "Geo-Force? Really? You wanna go with Geo-Force? You can change your mind, it's okay. I'll wait."

Given that it's a JLA/JSA/Legion crossover with time travel, and there's a few surprise guests arriving at some point, I have to wonder if the title "Lightning Saga" refers to the return of a Flash from sometime in the future, especially given Flash #13's sudden returnability. My DC rep reminded me of this in our call on Tuesday, and confirmed that "it's going down" in that issue. Idle speculation on my part, but still. I mean, I was jawing today that the new Ronin is either Wong or Jessica Jones, and I thought the killer in Identity Crisis was going to be Snapper Carr.

Despite my love of JLA, Brave & the Bold is my favorite DCU title. It's basically a team book that's just everyone in the DCU can participate in. Waid manages to touch on the core of every character that appears in it, without falling into traps like making Batman an asshole to the rookie, or Supergirl a giant whore. Even Lobo comes off as likeable. DC should consider cutting a large portion of their line and start making books like this, Countdown, Action, Detective and maybe even JLA & JSA double sized and with backups featuring these newer twists on characters that they're trying out, like Firestorm, Blue Beetle and Atom.

But now I'm just rambling...

Kyle Hadley said...

I didn't pick anything up today because I am still not sure what to pick up. I never thought it would eb difficult to get back into comics.

I wisxh they would just dead the Hulk movies. I love Norton, but the problem with the lastone wasn't Eric Bana, it was the CGI and I am just not sure Hulk can really be done well.

James said...

I haven't even picked up last week's comics yet, so I have some catching up to do.

Just read another Countdown-related interview with Dan Didio over at Newsarama, and the Permanent Event Climate just gets stupider and stupider. Apparently, the leads from 52 (who haven't been seen in DC's One Year Later stories so as to not give away who lives and who dies) will now get stories to fill their "missing year". Presumably this refers to the real-time year since everything jumped "One Year Later", rather than a comic-time year, but who knows at this point. Structuring it this way you could just daisy-chain "missing years" to infinity. Hilarious.

Anonymous said...

When Meltzer made the Seven Soldiers reference, I thought he was evoking the JLA/JSA team-up wherein the two groups get together to rescue the Seven Soldiers of Victory lost in time. It seemed to me Meltzer has The Legion of Super-Heroes stand in for the Seven Soldiers. Nostalgia as repetition. The fact that the Seven Soldiers have recently been re-vamped by Morrison seems like a repetition or continuity bagatelle that leaves "New Earth-Hyper-Time" indifferent. The current Superman was now a member of the Pre-Crisis Legion of Super-Heroes even while he exists in the same multi-verse if not the same time-line of Waid's Legion of Super-Heroes that boasts the current Supergirl as a member. It seems to me that everything, pre-, post, Crisis and Zero Hour, has happened and will happen again repeatedly in ever more mercilessly short intervals. Easy reading and clear continuity is 1985. Now, if you want to know what is going on, you have to have read everything and remember the differences and, oh yeah, read Interlac. I like the Flash idea. But then where does "Lightning Lad" (Starman's code word) and the lightning effect that flashes across Karate Kid's eyes when he wakes up all fit in?

Mitch said...

Geoff-

I figured this crossover would be a good jumping off point... Meltzer is only on the book until issue 12, so this will eat up at least 3 or 4 of his last 5 issues. When I saw it wasn't Benes doing the art, I was sure, DEAD SURE that I would throw this issue in the trash, but to my surprise... I liked it a lot! I think I was more pleased with Justice League than you, because I expected this to be a downward slope from last issue... which I didn't really like that much.

Thatcher- I'm loving Brave and Bold too. Good stuff.

Geoff Klock said...

David: The chess trick is that Mr Terrific plays two people at once, but Batman notices that on one board he is black and on another he is white. What he is doing is copying his opponent's moves on the other board, making them play each other, which guarentees that he will not lose both games. Kind of ironic that he wears a jacket that says play fair.

Matt: the story is not unreadable, either though I do not care about it much.

Thacher: it is just so many characters to keep track of. I do not even know who geo-force is.

MH: if you don't have all star superman trade, get that.

James: that is hilarious.

Tony: another thing is that when Morrison had the JLA/JSA team up it was also about Lightning -- the kid gets the 5D pink lightning Genie or whatever. I liked that story.

Mitch: I am very curious to see what happens with this, even though I am not crazy about it.