World War Hulk #2 of 5

Written By Greg Pak

Art by John Romita Jr, Klaus Janson and Christina Strain

Marvel Comics $3.99

The fantastic four rush to the scene to try to stop the hulk, but are stopped pretty quickly. The Human Torch can’t burn hot enough, Storm has no effect on him and Reed and T’Challa are pretty much useless. The Thing tries to trade blows with him, but is pummeled so quickly, it’s barely a fight. When he’s through, he beats Reed’s body to hell and back, which was an absolute delight. He ends up a flat, stretched out mess, laying at Hulk’s feet with Stark, just like the Hulk wanted. I like that before the fight begins, we see Reed and Sue fighting, as they still aren’t back on good terms after Reed’s insane douche baggery during Civil War.

This issue is everything you’d want in a Hulk story. All the build up has worked towards this smash fest of anger, resentment and hate. Even the Hulk’s best friends get their asses handed to them on the drop of a dime. Pak manages to get through a lot of story in Incredible Hulk and deliver the action in World War Hulk, combining the stories from both to make some pretty efficient comic book plotting. He’s in perfect form as the event he must have planned at least two years ago comes into play.

I was glad to see Pak include all the moronic Americans in the book, as they would certainly come out parading with signs both claiming the end was near and the beginning had already started, saying Hulk was a messiah and the anti-christ all wrapped up into one package.

As a reader who generally thinks most of Marvel’s superheroes are egotistical jerks who essentially serve others to serve themselves, this series is proving to be a lot of fun. It’s like going to court and watching the lawyers get beat up.

As the city crumbles and virtually everyone he’s ever known struggles to survive, Dr. Strange seems to believe there’s only one “hero” that can save them, but he doesn’t say who. He seems to be spending the issue trying to summon someone. I think it’s going to be either Thor or Banner. Probably Banner.  Dr. Strange will likely be one of the most interesting characters in the series, obviously.  Marvel has a fortuitous goldmine on their hands, but they don’t really seem to know what to do with him, but I think Pak knows.

World War Hulk: Gamma Corps #1 of 4

Written by Frank Tieri

Art by Carlos Ferreira, Stephane Roux, Sandu Florea and Will Quintana

Marvel Comics $2.99

Well, this makes perfect sense. In an attempt to stop the Hulk, five gamma-induced humans are given similar powers(or so it seems in this issue) as the Hulk and will be recruited to stop him. It makes perfect sense that Stark would want these guys to go up against him, if he ever manages to crawl back out of the massive hole the Hulk buried him in, as their powers are similar. This plan doesn’t have a chance of working, but it should be fun to see a half dozen hulk-powered people battle it out.

I was actually really surprised by this issue. By the looks of the cover, which looks awful, though the inside art is actually quite nice and fitting for the style that the story is told in, I thought that it was the Hulk with a bunch of fighters, like he’d made more friends to go against Stark and Richards. Instead, a team has been bred to fight him. Okay then. It’s written decently enough, not that anything real besides an introduction to these characters happens and some chatter about Nick Fury being gone from S.H.I.E.L.D., as the issue ends with the team being informed they’re finally going to be given the chance to take down the Hulk. I assume next issue they will fail miserably.

Now I’m thinking that Nick Fury might come back and save the day in October, once nearly everyone has had their ass handed to them. That would be really fucking cool.

Martha Washington DIES

Written by Frank Miller

Art by Dave Gibbons

Dark Horse Comics $3.50

She dies in all caps, what a way to go. I’d never read Give Me Liberty, in fact, I’d never even heard of it. This one-shot serves as an end to the life of the lead character of that series and an advertisement for the collection Dark Horse is printing next year. In this issue, Miller kills off his wise old character, spreads some rumors about her so that the reader doesn’t really know who she is unless they read the old series and he makes a pretty intriguing character sketch of a wise old revolutionary who only appears on 9 pages of her own death comic.

It worked. There’s some thoughtful narration on freedom. liberty and the like, and how we fight for it, how we always fight for it and how after we die, people will still fight for it. Everything appears to take place in the future, in a dystopic ruined version of America. It worked, Miller has me willing to buy some huge collection with this commercial that I paid for. That is essentially what he’s done with this book, he’s convinced people to pay almost four dollars to buy an advertisement for a product that isn’t even for sale yet. That’s talent.

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: The First Death #1 of 2

Written by Laurell K. Hamilton and Jonathan Green

Art by Wellinton Alves and Color Dojo

Marvel Comics/Dabel Brothers Productions  $3.99

Apparently the Guilty Pleasures adaptation of the novels have been pretty successful. I even saw that the people at Borders had posted up a comic book rack with the comics in the horror section where Hamilton’s novels are. That made me pretty happy, because there seems to be this hard separation between a large amount of comics and traditional literature readers. Being avid fans of both, I like to see everybody conveign and have a good time with a good story. Hamilton must have been happy with all of the sales, because, to my knowledge, she has no real history writing comic scripts, yet she designated this story, with 100% new material, for a comic book and helped write it herself.

The First Death is a two-parter that promises never before seen story and appears to occur before Guilty Pleasures, as Anita says she’s never been in the all male, all vampire strip club that she spends so much time in in the miniseries. It took me awhile to get into the miniseries, something like five or six issues, but I finally liked it. I think it was the dense amount of narration and long speech bubbles that made it hard to get through. Until this year I’d been mostly reading superhero comics, which have little important dialog, and sitting down with a comic book and spending a half an hour reading it felt strange and entirely out of place. But now I’ve rather enjoyed it. The writers manage to get a huge amount of story into an individual issue by using tactile, relevant dialog only and using the hell out of narrative boxes. It achieves a much more complex and detailed story than one is used to seeing in most comic books, especially one with a Marvel logo on it. Personally, it’s a welcome change.

Though Brett Booth did the cover and was the art supervisor of this issue, he doesn’t actually do the inside art. This was kind of disappointing for me, I’ve become a fan of his pretty quickly. At first I found his art to be kind of weird, disjointed in a way that made perfect sense, but it looked different. His sharp, detailed designs just stood out from the pages of Guilty Pleasures. Then I bought the first volume of Magician’s Apprentice and got to see six more issues of his work, by the end of the second issue, I really liked his stuff. Instead, in this issue Alves uses a softer, more gentile approach to character designs and uses a more generalized, less detailed attention to the little things. This, accompanied by less colors, results in paler characters and dull backgrounds.

The story focuses on a series of child murders, which is proven to be done by vampires. Anita is called in to help the police with their investigation and, as part of finding suspects, she attends Guilty Pleasures, a male vampire strip club, for the first time. This also serves as her introduction to Jean-Claude, the vampire who runs the club, with his victorian style clothes and hyper-sexualized masculinity that makes Anita incredibly uncomfortable. This book isn’t bogged down by the unnecessary inner-dialog of odd, out of place sexual thoughts that Anita has that plagued the Guilty Pleasures series, which makes for a much better read. Along with a generally more focused plot line and a faster pace, The First Death looks to be a pretty good read, better, I should say, than the first mini-series.

Grifter and Midnighter #5 of 6

Written by Chuck Dixon

Art by Ryan Benjamin, Joel Benjamin and Saleem Crawford

Wildstorm $2.99

In general, I haven’t really cared about this min-series, to me it just seemed like another way to feel like people from The Authority were around in the Worldstorm universe while the actual Authority comic stays on hiatus, but this issue was a little different. By a little different, I mean it was actually good, all around, and it made me think of it as something other than a substitute for The Authority while it’s hiatus wrapped up. It felt like a way to show Grifter while Wild C.A.Ts is on hiatus.

But it does this more effectively, because Midnighter has his own comic book, where you get these fine tuned single issue adventure stories in the style of a Star Trek episode. They’re all self contained and very safe. Instead, this series has been mounting a cause to make these characters have to work together while showcasing two very interesting characters who don’t get much attention due to being parts of teams and generally being written poorly. Chuck Dixon has caught his stride as far as writing dialog between Midnighter and Grifter, it’s just a shame that it’s happened on the second to last issue of this miniseries.

Chasing the giant evil aliens(wow, new concept), they discover that the aliens have been on earth longer than mankind, and that they’ve been tricked several times in order to actually try to kill these things. The premise is kind of hokey and rather dull, but the actual interactions, the dialog and art are actually pretty entertaining. Ryan Benjamin’s pencils work great in this series, where dull, dark shadows consume about half of the page layouts, but what he’d drawing is detailed enough to be interesting. The rest of the art team really shines once they get out of the dark, letting the backgrounds shine with vivid colors that have been so absent and repressed in those dark cave scenes.

I’d say if you stopped reading this, pick it up, but it wouldn’t be a good time to start. Personally, I just want to read some Authority and Wild C.A.Ts, but I want anti-gravity boots too.

Stormwatch P.H.D. #9

Written by Christos Gage

Art by Andy Smith, David Baron, cover art by Mike McKone and David Baron

Wildstorm $2.99

Stormwatch has been absolutely one of my favorite comics of the worldstorm launch that hasn’t been written by Gail Simone. Since the worldstorm relaunch, Christos Gage has continually proved himself as a fantastic storyteller and a writer quite capable of crafting character-driven fiction that is as enjoyable without being meaningless.

Gage has spent these nine issues showing his abilities of characterization and plot, when he puts them together, they are incredibly fun to see unfold. The characters in Stormwatch are so refined, so well-developed, some of them are downright loveable, like the Machinist and Black Betty, and some are so much fun to hate, but they’re all fun to read. This issue takes hold of these well-defined characters and puts them in a murder/mystery story, but I never thought of it as a genre story until I began to write this post. Jackson is shot in the head with a laser, but only high level people from the department would have access to him and it would be incredibly difficult to sneak up on a psychic. A newer twist on an old idea, but it’s done without the old routines, instead taking time to focus on individual characters, all of whom are suspects, and letting the reader come to their own conclusions until the final panel where the mystery is wrapped up.

On the other side of the coin, I pretty much hate the art.  I think Andy Smith is all wrong for this book, he’d be better suited on a darker, more moody piece, not this character driven exploration book that Gage has created.  Really, I wish the art was closer to the first four issues, that stuff was great and so well suited for this comic book.

This is a self-contained story that is done rather well, you wouldn’t absolutely need to read any other issues to enjoy this because Christos Gage makes everything simple for the reader who isn’t looking for much other than a fun story, but if you’ve taken the time and gotten the rest of the information, you can delight as you see everyone stress each other out and act out as you question whether they’re guilty or not. Either way, it’s great fun and definitely worth the three dollars. But seriously, this is one of the best superhero comics going right now, run out and grab it!