News of the Right

Astonishing X-Men #25: Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi take over for Whedon and Cassady and actually make changes to the X-Men (the most prominent and well-advertised of which is their move to San Francisco)! The dialogue is banterful and the watchword for the series is “CSI”. My only complaints are Armor (she’s the latest ingenue? Ugh. Hardly a worthy successor to Kitty or Jubilee) and her tiresome “make me and X-man” paean; the clunky depictions of Ororo (the Julie Taymor-inspired headdress can hardly be aero-dynamic); and the dark, muddy colors (seriously. Hold the issue at arm’s length and page = my cake in MacArthur Park). B+

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight #16: Yay seeing Fray again! Yay Dawn as a centaur! Yay Kennedy and Willow! Yay Kennedy threatening Buffy! Yay getting back to the Big Bad for the series (finally!)! A

Manhunter #32: As ever, Manhunter stands free from the “events” twisting the DCU inside out this year (though the subplots bump into Batman’s and the Justice League’s Big Players), and she’s doing just fine without that mess because she’s already in plenty of trouble. What I like most about Manhunter is that it’s free to develop interesting plots and relationships that don’t need to be reconciled to 70+ years of baggage. I see folks have been accusing Marc Andreyko of pushing his liberal agenda in this arc, but the questions are “is this a problem if the story is set in El Paso?” and “Is Kate herself is a liberal?”; I mean, she hunts down criminals and has killed several of them during her time as a hero. Is this liberalism? Conservativism? Anarchism? A+

Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam #1: I wanted to like this series, especially after the enjoyable Shazam and the Monster Society of Evil, but I’m still a bigger fan of the classic Shazam! Family stories from the 70’s. It’s a cute comics, but Captain Marvel is just a Billy Batson in a bulkier body, unlike Smith’s version which showed them as two separate personalities (they could even talk to each other). After the horribly odd and poorly-paced Trials of Shazam! and the ridiculous abuse of Mary Marvel in Countdown, I wonder if anyone knows how to write these characters well. C+

Heresy #1: It took me three reads to get into the story of Heresy mostly because of the art. Not that the art is hideous or anything, but the photo-realistic style makes it difficult to distinguish one dark-haired guy from another; luckily, the dialogue repeats the characters’ names enough times that I was able to sort out who was who before I lost interest, which would have been a shame. It’s a mystery story, so not everything is revealed at once, but what we learn connects post-Tsar Russia with a modern experiment with (I’m guessing) reanimated tissue. Pre-order at Ape Entertainment. B+

Stephen King’s The Stand: While not available until August, I got a sketchbook of the adaptation this week. The art looks good, but I’m always wary of adaptations; they never seem to carry the tone of the books through them, which should be the easiest thing on the world to do with the right artist. Look at Gaiman’s Neverworld comic or The Dresden Files - the artists were completely wrong for what the books are about, to say nothing is the useless and distracting the extra-textual material that took away time from actual textual material. I’m not saying this is the case for The Stand, but my first red flag (hee hee, pun) went up when I saw the nuclear explosion on the cover.