Time for some comics catch-ups I think…

Doom Patrol peaked with the Grant Morrison written (and mostly re-created) ‘mature readers’ version in the 90s and various incarnations have come and gone since then. The current run is back in the regular DC Comics world and has shown promise as it has combined some of the best elements from all previous versions dating back to the mid 60s, with another old favourite making a return:

The geeks will love this and I’m hoping this book becomes as great as it should be.

So that’s another run of Manhunter over with again:

The final part of the Manhunter back-up story in whatever Batman comic that was has ended but it will be out in a collected edition soon. Snap up the four existing books in the range if you like your spunky leading ladies and quirky casts.

The Angel comic is still mostly the unpopular ugly brother of the Buffy comic (which has been wildly inconsistent in  the last year itself) but the current storylines by Bill ‘Fables’ Willingham have been far less messy than usual:

Dirty telepathic fishie and new floaty thing character that I cannot remember much about!

Marvel have been producing some good comics in the last month, including the long-awaited return of The Young Avengers (in Avengers: The Childrens’ Crusade) by their creators:

There are also superhero fights and that sort of thing, it’s not just scenes of teenage homosexual super-powered romance although that is rather sweet and lovely. Other teenage Avengers are available in the newest Avengers title to launch (that’s alongside Avengers, New Avengers, Secret Avengers and The Childrens’ Crusade): Avengers Academy!

It’s like the 80s again with all these Avenger teams! Rumours abound of another more cosmic team on the way… hopefully not with ruddy foil covers or holographic bullshit. Never again please, comic big cheeses.

Mutant time: Dazzler had a one-shot recently involving her dead-but-now-not-so-dead sister, among other things:

Someone reminded Warren Ellis that he has an unfinished arc of Astonishing X-Men to be getting on with and it was surprisingly good:

X-Factor continued to be probably the most consistently good mutant title:

Severl shits hit numerous fans in a big old crossover and big characters died, limbs were lost, things were changed forever, all that jazz… and then the titles slowed the pace right down to explore their characters, which was a nice bloody change:

No mutant baseball matches were played. Phew.

I’m sure we all have days like that sometimes.

It’s comic catch-up time! (again) and I seem  to have been mostly reading Marvel:

The current run of Fantastic Four by Jonathan Hickman and Dale Eaglesham has that retro futuristic feel if you know what I mean. 60s-influenced artwork, loads of new ideas and a big dollop of cosmic comic mayhem. Great stuff.

In X-Men they appear to be reciting Bros lyrics in a telepathic stylee… and there was a big old death. We’re in the middle of one of those crossovers that is spread out over all  the usual mutant titles, just like in the 80s.

I assume this Avengers panel is nothing to do with the musical Ms Houston but with her reputation  you never know.

Brendan McCarthy is doing a Spider-Man and Doctor Strange comic so it’s a bit peculiar, as you might expect. Those pop culture references will look horribly dated when it’s reprinted in a book in 2050.

Mostly Doctor Who nonsense again, as you might expect…

This video excites the inner child in me:

Those Doctor 11 action figures are rather hard to find. Damnit. Nothing in Forbidden Planet last Friday which I went to with the lovely That Cheryl before her birthday drinks and eats in Fancy Soho. Nice pub but Friday night in Dean Street made me flashback to when I could tolerate the crowds and noise i.e. 15 years ago. Such an old man these days, went home a bit early with the husband for a nice cup of tea and a sit down. My own miniature plastic Matt Smith should be in the post and I look forward to playing with it soon.

Bleeding Cool has some interesting Doctor Who timey wimey plot arc theories and this image is heavily involved:

The fact that it is of a man’s bottom is pure coincidence, I swear.

BBC Archive site has some great archive (obviously) material that is well worth a look. Lots of information about audience reaction to new Doctors… can you guess which one got the worst reaction?

Hmm… McCoy’s face says it all really.

The clip below intrigued me last night on the telly. BBC soap doing a sensitive storyline about gay kids with cockerney hardmen local gangster dads?

Or just more soap nonsense?

In other geeky news: Joss Whedon to direct Avengers film? The Marvel comic, not the British TV series that has already had one terrible film.

Talking of comics…

No the X-Men are not reading one of the mutant spin-off comics, it’s more of a brown stuff hitting spinny whizzy thing situation.

Doom Patrol is still the place to go for oddball DC characters. Danny The Brick is in the current issue but he’s not really talking much Polari unlike when he was a whole street. Shame.

I still have half of the big pile of new hardbacks from last weekend’s Forbidden Planet extravaganza left to read but have been spending some time with the floppies today. Which means comics in my confusing language of geek…

The robot dog cat is out of the bag:

Manhunter’s run as a back-up story in Batman: Streets of Gotham is almost over. Damnit. It works better as a full issue experience but that’s unlikely to happen after the last few series cancelation. In this issue: Kate gets a bit blown up and Harvey Two Face goes a bit loony. Again.

Buffy spent most of a whole issue taking the piss out of superhero cliches and then moved onto other obvious but amusing targets. Please do not cry if you are a fangbanger.

The current incarnation of Doom Patrol is the best since the Grant Morrison one but it still needs a bit of focusing.

More people person trouble for those Uncanny X-Men.  No change there then, and they even hired a decent artist this month which is nice. Not everyone looked like a whore with only one expression. Bravo! 

Tomorrow: Doctor Who week begins!

I almost got sick of the sight of comics and graphic novels during the Epic House Rearranging which is now thankfully done. A load of stuff got exiled to the ugly wardrobe but moving all those books made me go all reminiscey for olden times when comics cost 25p and the whole month worth of Marvels arrived at the newsagent up the road from my school on the last Thursday of the month. I still have three big bookcases packed solid with comics and bloody hundreds of graphic novels / trade paperbacks. Oh that smell of old paper, you cann’t beat it! How much do comics cost now, anyway? £2.50 or something mental?

Top comics bloke Kieron Gillen wrote both Phonogram volumes (you may have seen me blog about those before) and he has been writing the new but already cancelled Marvel series S.W.O.R.D. Damnit, it turned out to be the new Captain Britain and MI13 (great but doomed). There’s a good interview with him on the Newsarama site, well worth a look as it covers his past, present and future work:

Hell, you could look at ‘(Phonogram) the Singles Club’ as a cross-over between seven different indie-comics, if you see what I mean. That was good training for (Marvel’s) Siege.

New Mutants ties in with Siege and sees Dani Moonstar starting to pay off her debt to Hela, which she picked up in the ‘Utopia’ cross-over. Niko Henrichon is a phenomenon, frankly.

Gillen on New Mutants? I’m up for that.

The final issue of S.W.O.R.D is out in March. Damnit.

So what else is good at the moment? Well…

The Authority have been decidedly ropey for ages now but the current Lost Year series is good stuff, including their visit to the real world. Keith Giffen writing from Grant Morrison’s plots for that series that never got finished is definitely some kind of thing. Talking of Morrison, he has taken Batman and Robin to In-Ger-Land and may have slightly exaggerated some local ways:

Is this a new piece of cockney rhyming slang?

Batwoman is definitely one to watch, her current run in Detective Comics just screams Oversized Hardcover. Which sounds smuttty.

Still with the Morrison connection we have Doom Patrol 7 which features one of his old characters:

Hardcore geeks wet their pants over that. Maybe.

Forthcoming:

May 2010. For the gays.

I’ve been busy doing interiors stuff at home, as well as discovering old things in boxes to delight and baffle (blogs on that to follow at some pojnt) but for now here’s a nice new homagey comic cover coming in May:

Oh yeah, it’s X-Men 138 all over again. That was the first issue I ever bought, albeit in a black and white Marvel UK reprint form. This one is from the following release:

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #35
Brad Meltzer (W), Georges Jeanty (P, Cover), Andy Owens (I), Michelle Madsen (C), and Jo Chen (Cover)
On sale May 5
FC, 40 pages
$2.99
Ongoing

Brad Meltzer concludes his blockbuster run on Buffy Season Eight! After last issue’s climactic encounter between Buffy and the unmasked Twilight, the Slayer army’s entire mission has been altered and the true nature of the threat they face has been revealed.
Everyone is in place to confront the Big Bad once and for all as Buffy’s most epic season races toward the final arc, written by Joss Whedon!
• Executive produced by Buffy creator Joss Whedon!
• Final issue of Brad Meltzer’s game-changing arc on Season Eight!

I am such a geek.

I’m so behind with my comic waffle. Got a bumper week of new stuff to read so here are some highlights form the last fortnight …

Angel comic is very hit and miss but new writer Bill ‘Fables’ Willingham may be able to sort it out:

Gotta love those floating purple telepathic fish. Only in comics (probably).

Buffy has also been a bit crap/good/crap recently but they ‘leaked’ (on purpose) a big future revelation (not spoiling it here for non-comic website geeks) and sales may go up. Anyway:

I am such a nerd.

Other odd Buffy plot (which is not a spoiler now) is the slightly iffy Xander/Dawn thing. Here’s the blatant justification from Mister Whedon:

Not all my comics are TV tie-ins but…

I should stop now.

That issue of New Avengers was quite fun. Art currently being done by Stuart ‘Nextwave’ Immonen if that means anything to you. It does to me.

Meanwhile, Spider-Woman is still pretty but sloooooow:

She thinks too much, bless her.

While I remember, Talk About The Passion Magazine issue one arrived and is wonderful. You can buy it here and look at my column*

*Not a penis reference.

Honest.

A break from the 2009 lists with some comics waffle, although these are also kind of Best Of in their own way:

Warren Ellis has been writing those X-Men geezers (and birds) this year so it’s been a slightly slow at times experience with loads of good ideas thrown up in the air and some of them stuck. The current story is a bit too similar to another one going on in the same fictional universe but it’s good stuff and looks pretty so all is forgiven.

Another anthology mutant title (Nation X) has a nice bit of Mike Allred art this month and some mutant urinal chat rule-breaking:

Meanwhile, over in Uncanny X-Men, Storm has gone all regal:

Psylocke is back and only slightly less convoluted than before:

DC Comics’ highlight of the year has to be the current run of Detective Comics with the Bat Woman tale as it is a work of bloody art that is crying out for an oversized hard cover collection:

James Robinson’s Justice League is taking shape nicely, using an interesting mix of characters. I am rather biased as I’m a massive fan of his work:

Gotta love them funny-coloured aliens!

Tomorrow will probably involve more lists of some sort.

I could blog about packing up the bloody office, orgasnising a sales conference and attending it while some men move the office contents to a new location and then having to unpack it all over a period of several days, making me rather tired, but I won’t. I’ll show you some pretty pictures from comics instead:

Doctor 10.0 is still having fun over in those wacky comics, and is currently getting in a pickle with an Orgon, a Draconian and a Sontaran. As you do.

Mike ‘Lucifer’ (the comic he wrote, he is not the devil) Carey’s X-Men run is a jolly good load of fun, and not just because he included a cameo from long lost (perhaps for the best) 80s character Ariel. No not that one, the other one. You know, from that Fallen Angels miniseries you’ve forgotten about but I remember buying in Basildon.

Meanwhile, in Gotham, District Attorney Kate Spencer (this is becoming like a Manhunter fansite) goes for a swim and meets a Dick. Mr Grayson of course.

Not a lot happened in my finally-found issue 4 of Phonogram Singles Club but they did play some good tunes.

Early period every time, none of that generic anonymous mix & match R&B tat.

So do I. I also like Phonogram. Talking of Phonogram writer Kieron Gillen…

He also writes the new S.W.O.R.D series for Marvel featuring a rather belligerent Lockheed.

It stands for Sentient World Observation and Response Department in case you were wondering. Blame Joss Whedon, he created the idea.

With Jamie working in sunny Milton Keynes for a couple of days (boo hiss boo) I had time to catch up on my comic reading and this might seem like an easy way to fill a blog post up with pictures but… you’d probably be right.

Astonishing X-Men still exists in a ‘Continuity? What continuity?’ state as it does so like its slow writers and artists which make it difficualt to place chronologically. Never mind, it currently has Phil Jiminez drawing Warren Ellis’ freaky stories and he’s a great fit because he can draw people and things very well indeed. The characters still have a tendency to lapse into Ellisisms occasionally but I can cope with that.

X-Factor (no not the nothing-to-do-with-music TV ‘talent’ show) is still consistently entertaining and amusing and the 200th issue is almost here!

While DC are bringing black loads of dead characters as super zombiefied Black Lanterns in Blackest Night, Marvel’s mutants have their own dead-rising-from-graves problem in Necrosha. It could be horribly crap but so far is quite nice. Well as nice as resurrected slightly-possessed versions of old dead folks can be.

Talking of the revolving death door, Psylocke has a mini series of her own where they look like they’re sorting out some of the shit done to her character since someone had the dumb idea to turn the telepathic English rose into an Asian ninja because it was more “cool.”

Spider-Woman’s new series sure is pretty but not a lot has actually happened yet.

Kate Spencer has pissed off Two-Face in Manhunter (in her back-up strip in that other Batman book called Streets of Gotham). Oops.

James Robinson’s Justice League mini series is still going strong. I am glad to hear that Congorilla and Mikaal will be turning up in the regular series soon too, as every book deserves a super boffin gorilla and a blue gay alien Starman.

Right, time to read some more comics…