ACTION COMICS #854
BOOSTER GOLD #1 !!!!
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #6 !!!
FLASH #231 !?!
ROBIN #165 !!!
SUPER VILLAIN TEAM UP MODOKS 11 #2 (OF 5) !!!

Of course, I’m going to be reading more than these, but these are the only books for which I am genuinely excited.

MarkAndrew: Alias is a great comic. Admit it!!!!!

Yeah, that story where a guy said he was Rick Jones, but really wasn’t, that went for three whole issues? Fantastic!
And how she had that kid who wanted to be her assistant in that ongoing subplot that never went anywhere?
Awesome!
The ant-man relationship that came out of nowhere and left just as quickly, where Bendis had character moments only there for the sake of a plot?
Gold!
A character who may be aware he’s in a comic, but that has nothing to do with anything he does?
Incredible!
The same panel repeated over and over without even subtle changes made?
Radical!
Sudden cancellation to turn into an all ages series that even the writer doesn’t seem to care about?
Marvelous!

Shall I keep raving about it?

“the only other thing that was necessary for this story was that all of the club characters needed to feel off as well. as if they reached for these ideals that are present in the influences but fall a little short. none of them are quite up to snuff and they know it deep inside and thats why they still are awed by batman. he surpasses them on every level, hence him and robin’s more rendered and dimensional quality, deeper. this was taken into consideration as well when i did the first sketches of them.

“the whole idea here was to convey characters that have had real history that we haven’t been privy to. they were seen a very long time ago and that was pretty much it really. and grant wrote them as if they’ve been having lives and adventures all along and i wanted to see if i could make them seem as if they had stepped out of their own comics and into this one. so i imagined what those comics might currently look like but none of us have seen or read them. comics from another world? these clubbers needed to have distinct character traits immediately understandable becasue of the way the story moves with them. so i thought it would be an intersting challenge to see what affect ‘styles” would have on their personalities as i drew them. a nice experiment i think, which has produced interesting results. as i drew them i felt as if they were fully realized right away. they came alive.

“hope this all makes some sort of sense in an exsistential sort of way. and the other reason for doing this sort of thing is because its just plain fun and allows to sort of comment about comics within the frame work of a comic itself.”

I really like his notion that these other characters feel inferior to Batman and it shows because they are lame copies of other artists’ work. Cool stuff.

New Avengers continues to be same boring thing it always is, but hey – it had The Hood in it! My inner fanboy is pleased by this.

I am reading through my Geoff Johns Flash and it is not nearly as good as I remember (it is actually gutwrenchingly bad in some areas), but the Scott Kolins art went a long way in making me feel like I was reading something really good. It rose above the bare adequacy of Johns’ scripts. It makes it a whole comic to me to have a collaboration that exceeds the mere combination of a script and some art.

If you want to be REALLY politically incorrect, go with the original title (look it up; it’s kinda offensive).

I thought all the people who didn’t think art and writing were of exactly equal importance in comics were a dying breed.

I don’t think he was talking about importance, so much as personal preference. I pay more attention to the writing than the art, too, and am more able to handle a well-written book with bad art than vice versa.

But that’s just my predilection. The best comics have art and writing that work hand-in-hand, of course.

I guess these books sell, which is why DC keeps doing it. Luckily I didn’t pay for my copy.

MarkAndrew: Alias is a great comic. Admit it!!!!!

And it doesn’t make me want to buy this book more to find out they killed Jack T. Chance. In point of fact, it just irritates and depresses me, and makes me less likely to buy DC books in general because they keep killing off all these quirky B-list and C-list characters that I really like.

So apparently the spectrum of responses range from “indifferent” to “actively disliked.” Now why does DC keep playing the death card in the face of this?

These two statements are contradictory. Yeah, I miss books like Jinx and Total Sell Out, too. It sucks that books like Alias came along and ruined that.

And I had SERIOUS problems with Cover Girl this go-round. Not with the dialog – I can’t think of anything more annoyifying then a comic where people talk like they actually speak – But with the lack of motion.

Just too many talking heads. We have half the comic with our heroes tied to a chair, and most of the rest of it is either our heroes standing around some other guy tied to a chair while he exposition dumps and our heroes in a car.

Talking heads are fine on film where you’ve got actors to inject nuance and directors to play around with shading and stuff. (I know sweet FA about film and don’t really have the language to discuss it, so I’ll just kind of hope y’all know what I mean.)

But comic talking heads require a hell of a lot of skill to pull off, and come off poorly 90% of the time. You’re basically completely counting on the dialog to carry the scene, which is always going to be less awesome than good dialog and giving the artist awesome stuff to draw. (And I DID actually quite like the dialog here.)

Like they did here. It was a pretty fun series up till this point, and there were a handful of nice bits, but the creators needed to think more about “What would make for cool comics?” (Answer: Not people sitting.)

And the Only One who can save us is the GREATEST of the spaceknights:
ROM
That’d make all of this worth it, wouldn’t it?

I own a few Powers trade paperbacks, but I’ve never really been into it all that much. I just keep hearing how it’s far from the book it used to be.

X-Factor was quite clever, and I like being reminded as to why I’m still buying it, because the Pham art was making it hard for me.

The Green Lantern issue was solid, and definitely part of a greater whole, but you probably won’t like the rest, as it’s being written for GL fans who are able to shut their brains off. I’m only just barely able to do this, as I managed to enjoy the hell out of Rebirth, which was basically just pandering continuity porn.