A great week if you like comics that start with vowels.
Angel 5. The story continues without being so bad I will drop it, but not being so good I would actually recommend it to anyone. Page one does steal a bit from the Matrix, which is really lame considering how popular that movie was like TEN YEARS AGO. Overall it is a hard book to get really worked up over. Urru is a muddy artist, but there are some panels I am actually liking, such as the two girls on the bottom of page 16. The book should look more like that and less like mud. Maybe someone needs to give this guy more time to draw? Or not make him mimic actors' faces? Writing about this book makes me tired.
Iron Fist 13. So Aja only provides three pages this issue, which is a shame, but the fill in guys are pretty good, especially Zonjic. As for the writing -- the last two pages of this book made me cheer. It is really a lot of fun. Eat em up, Danny.
The Order 9. The more I read this book the more I like it. I wish people had supported it more. A detail that stands out -- I do not know if it was Fraction or Kitson who thought of putting a red smiley face on the torturer-surgeon's mask, but that is seriously going to keep me up at night.
In Comics News Matt Fraction will be writing us some Uncanny X-Men, which I am excited about for three reasons: I like me some Matt Fraction; as much as I follow creators, X-Men was the book I grew up on and I relish any excuse to read it if it is handled by someone I like; and Fraction picks up at issue 500, which I find satisfying because Uncanny X-Men 301 was my first comic book and this is the first chance in my life to compare my personal real-time investment in comics 200 issues apart .
Also -- remember that book about Superman that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely used to do? I cannot remember the name, but it is totally out next week.
RANDOM PERSONAL RAMBLE:
I hope no one is shocked that my first comic book was Uncanny X-Men 301. I know it is a lame place to start, but we all started somewhere. My mom got it for me from the drug-store because she noticed it had the same name as the cartoon I occasionally watched and the Sega game I had rented that week. Does anyone remember that game? The premise was that you were trapped in the Danger Room playing out scenarios and at the end of the fifth one, a timed one, you had to "reset" the danger room computer; except there was nothing to do at the end of the fifth level when you beat Mojo and the clock would just run out and you would die every time. I could not figure it out and just played the game with every character for fun until one day, wanting to play twice in a row, I hit the reset button on the game console rather than watch the clock run out on the fifth level. Hitting that button at that moment was the only way to get to the sixth and final level. Even looking back now that still seems kind of cool. You should have seen the look on my face. Like I discovered the Maltese Falcon.
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That game bit reminds me of Metal Gear Solid, where you had to read the Codec number/Frequency (Spy communication radio thing) on the back of a CD you had been given by a character in the game. Except there was no way to examine the CD up close. What you had to do was to look on the back of the actual game to get the number.
Dude, you are made of STONE if you couldn't be a little bit moved by the last page of After the Fall.
Do agree about the art though. Ick.
My first comic was Uncanny 295. Opens with a marvelously overwritten splash of a half-dead Apocalypse rising out of the sea like Godzilla.
He finds a half-dozen X-Men in his safe house and proceeds to beat them mercilessly. Meanwhile, Prof X is dying from robot mold, and Wolverine and Bishop are in Canada beating up soldiers for information.
Between that and the cartoon? Yeah. Sold.
My first comic was Superman and the Wizz Kidz, a Radio Shack freebie.
yeah I remember that X-Men game too.
I'm shocked that your first comic was so damned recent. Uncanny X-Men #301 was, like, yesterday.
That Radio Shack Superman comic was definitely one of my first comics, if not my first too. (Atari Force was a pretty early one for me too--I don't know exactly what my first comic was, really.)
Iron Man #206; The cover had Iron Man standing surrounded by a bunch of people in swimwear as some sort of debris fell from the sky. Don't remember a thing about the interiors, but I can see the cover like it's in front of me.
The first comic I ever made my mom buy for me was Infinity Gauntlet #2, and that was just because there were so many characters (who I would soon find out were DEAD!) on that screen on the cover.
Before that though, my uncle used to read the early Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers issues of Silver Surfer out loud to me. (Checking now, I think it was actually Issue #2, also.) I've always told people that the combination of him reading them out loud and seeing at the pictures and looking at the words probably played a significant role in my learning to read. Also, my Uncle Dan does a mean Galactus.
So... YAY COMICS!
Oy. "Seeing at the pictures" ?? I guess I need a few more reading lessons!
I don't know what my first comic was; I read stuff here and there as a kid, and I bought a lot of Disney comics like Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck when I was around 10. The first superhero comic I read (but didn't buy) was an issue of Spider-Man (it was during the storyline when his parents came back, but they turned out to be robot duplicates or something) that I looked at on the rack at a supermarket while my mom was shopping. I remember he fought the Scorpion, and I loved the way his spider-sense reacted and he jumped out of the way of energy blasts and stuff. That's what got me hooked right there. The first superhero comic I actually bought was Untold Tales of Spider-Man #1, because I thought that was a really cool idea, to go back and tell stories in between the first issues, when Spidey was just starting out. I think I was junior high age, or maybe early high school at that time.
Dude, true story: My LAST issue of Uncanny was #300.
My first comic was G.I.Joe #19 - the all ninja issue! Snake Eyes had to rescue Scarlett from the clutches of Cobra - bringing him head to head with his ninja nemesis Storm Shadow. The entire issue played out without a single word balloon or caption.
My first superhero comic was X-Men #197 (I think) which featured Doctor Doom fighting the X-Men on the cover. I knew of Doctor Doom from reading the paperback collections of the early Kirby/Lee Fantastic Four at the library. Unfortunately SPOILER this as an Arcade issue and Doctor Doom was merely a robot.
I gave up on X-Men long before issue #300. I did not return to the book until Morrison's run and then Whedon's Astonishing. Damn Matt Fraction for writing this - because of course - I will have to buy it.
I'm glad to see Matt end up on such a high profile book as X-Men after The Order as canceled.
Yay, Matt.
VoE -- but the bad art keeps me from getting emotionally invested is the problem.
JP-- i totally believe you and that is a crazy.
Streebo -- did you see the GI Joe movie pic that just came out? I have NO interest in GI joe but I thought it looked kind of cool
I got into superhero comics very gradually, so I don't think I'd ever be able to pinpoint a "first", but definitely my first X-Men comic was the silver holo-foil bonanza of Uncanny X-Men #300, so obviously it was a pivotal time. More weird is that yesterday I came back into possession of that very comic while going through the stuff my brother is throwing out before he moves. MOST SHOCKING OF ALL is that the original UK cover price was a whopping £2.10, which is around 10p more than your standard Marvel costs now, 15 years later. (It was $3.95, Americans. It had extra pages and was silver, I guess.)
I started with 298, and the first comic that i got in my new subscription was 300. I am so amazed by xmen 300, and was already irritated by 301 not being as good.
Geoff: I haven't seen that poster yet. I have very low expectations for the G.I.Joe movie. Perhaps it will be at least viscerally entertaining like Transformers - in a popcorn fun kinda way.
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