CrazyforRAMU's Profile

It's fine, Gómez's art is solid like akways and North continues to provide the Four with good characterization, but I would have liked to have seen a little more tension or problem solving going on between Ben and Johnny.

The pivot toward Blood Hunt is one of the author's better ones. And setting that aside, the remainder of this issue is formidable. The pace is urgent, the dialogue is sharp, the art is dynamic. 8-Ball brings the comic relief, as usual, but he serves a greater purpose, too. The author draws a brilliant thematic link between 8-Ball and Shroud, charting a course toward redemption for both of them.
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This feels like an excellent return to form. The Charlie-Hulk-Bruce dynamic is front and center, as expected, and the author digs into it pretty deeply. The plot takes a single step forward, but it's a very carefully-considered one.

The art is marvelously creepy, taking full advantage of all that DPS real estate. It's fun to check in on Strange Academy after a few years, and Nic Klein' s visual take on the school and the students is compelling.

I guess suffering through the occasional guest artist is worth it if it keeps the main artist stoked to do issues like this.
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It's Big Dumb Event™ time! And, boy, this one is capital-B big and capital-D dumb. Sharp, fast-paced writing and exquisitely polished art make this an engaging and well-crafted opening chapter. And the twist ending is one for the record books.

The moving parts are awfully silly, though. "Ultravampires." And no matter how distinctively the new "Bloodcoven" is designed, well, this is Jed MacKay's favorite party trick, isn't it? A whole squad of new villains with cool gimmicks and appealing designs, curb-stomping the heroes by way of introduction. In fact, this issue reminds me of nothing so much as a Halloween remix of the "Ashen Combine" arc that started MacKay's Avengers.

But, when you accept the silliness--this is comics, after all--this is a HUGELY entertaining start to the event.
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The script is great, but the art makes me sad.

MODOK's monster scheme feels like a last-minute course correction, like the author realized too late that having the X-Men casually slaughter their way through Orchis's human clock-punchers pushed them too far into gray morality. Turning those clock-punchers into monsters doesn't actually fix the problem, though.

The art looks gorgeous, and the monsters feed Joshua Cassara's knack for b ody horror. Even the writing has perked up: The dialogue features some snappy lines (along with some clunkers), and the narration is, wonder of wonders, mostly in the present tense.

(Devil's Advocate: On second glance, most of what I'm counting as "snappy" lines are actually cheap twists on movie quotes. Not exactly Douglas Adams-level comedy writing.)

A few bits of character work are tackled with sincerity but without great depth. The event's big picture plot hardly moves at all. Though most of these scenes are fun, the sense that all the IMPORTANT stuff is happening in other titles is inescapable.

Stan report: Possibly Ms. Marvel's best X-Man performance yet. She makes significant contributions from the middle of the stage, not needing a spotlight, but not getting pushed into the background scenery.
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This is a collection of extremely fun, well-drawn scenes that don't seem to add up to anything yet. I mean, it's clear they WILL fall into an equation eventually, but for now, the series continues to dawdle when it comes to the big picture. I'm enjoying this, but I'm no longer expecting it to turn into anything special.

This is an acceptable chunk of plot development, unburdened by much in the way of character work. The art, as you might expect after #16, is great on the robotic characters and passable (a little dated?) on the non-robotic characters. The script features a few zingers. Some work, some don't, and the overall structure is still saddled with that damnable past-tense narration.

Oddly, the adjective that springs to my mind after reading this is "charming." It's endearing to watch Old Cable baby-step his way toward mental health. The art remains quite retro, but again, it's in a way that I like rather than one I find annoying.

Balanced against those vague good feelings is the fact that the conclusion is blatantly, objectively contrived. The author winking at the reader about excess exposition, unlikely coincidences, deep continuity cuts, and the frankly anticlimactic resolution does not excuse any of these things.
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The highlight here is certainly the art. All of it is polished and dynamic, and the softly-penciled, monotone flashbacks are a memorable high point.

Jane Howlett gets a backstory. Sadly, most of the flashback real estate is devoted to laboriously remixing Origin (2001) for her. But there are also interesting hints of Doc Savage/Indiana Jones-type adventures. I'm still hopeful that she c ould be a great character with better storytelling and material.

The limiting factor remains the cold prose. The words are never flawed, but never memorable. And structurally, we're stuck with the boring arrangement where the Wolverines stand around listening to several pages of exposition and then go stab something that needs stabbing.

The plot du jour is over-complicated and over-reliant on exposition. The continuity nods remain fun, though, particularly "Jack Palance Dracula." It's odd; I read most of Tomb of Dracula and hated most of it, but revisiting its star produced a burst of warm nostalgia.
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I'll just say it: The premise and a lot of the prose are pretentious, and that's the issue's mortal sin. Problematic to a smaller degree is the fact that the art often lacks clarity.

Yet at the smallest scale, the storytelling is excellent. There are tons of terrific panels, and the layouts are often boldly inventive. The protagonists' voices are superb. Deadpool is the right kind of fu nny, and Wolverine is the right kind of gritty.
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In the final issue, some nice positives spin in to counterbalance the persistent flaws in the storytelling. The need to wrap up the plot gooses the pace nicely. In their quest to articulate a moral, the Powers kids actually engage in some meaningful introspection. The art stretches out a little in a game attempt to portray Franklin's powers at their most cosmic.

The net result is still only what I'd call an average comic--and that's what I'd call it regardless of the reader's age. I think the only people who will find this series rewarding are major fans of the original Power Pack run equipped with the rosiest of hindsight.
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This beautiful, heartbreaking issue takes a character for whom my main feeling was mild contempt and transforms them into an absolute favorite. Somehow, this very sci-fi story is the most magical of the series.

Well, this is a delicious episode. The dialogue is sharper than a scalpel, the characters play brilliantly together, the plot moves forward, and the world-building twists Spider-Man fundamentals in intriguing ways.

The art is good, but not good enough to inspire the same sort of lavish praise the script does. Not from me, anyway. Facial expressions are absolutely vital in this issue, an d a few too many of them are at odds with the words. Visually, this feels like a computer game where the budget requires a little too much character art reuse.
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Boy, I really called it on #1: This series is the last chapter of the Destiny/Mystique saga + the "bonus features" disc for Rise.

It's working for me a little better this time around, I think mainly because the pace is picking up to match its companion title. The art remains very solid, and now the script is streamlined down to dialogue that's directly consequential or amazingly memorab le or both.
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It's an incredibly stylish final showdown, full of great visual moments and sharp dialogue. What pushes it to the edge of greatness is the Greek tragedy of it all, though. As everybody tells Blade, the Adana won this conflict in every sense but one, so Blade's victory is bittersweet at best.

My biggest regret is that this volume wasted its Hulk crossover (#7). A stronger hint that the A dana was responsible for unleashing the Mother of Horrors would have enhanced both series--and added some heft to this issue's assertion that the Adana's corruption continues after her death.
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The plot continues to develop at a furious pace, but it seems consequential here in a way that it just doesn't in Fall. Perhaps it's as simple as the difference between "These things happened" and "These things happened, affecting these characters in these ways."

This issue is thoroughly good, but not great. The relentless pace has drawbacks, like requiring terse dialogue and choppy sce nes, and minimizing the depth of characterization. The art has terrific polish, but the character designs (the faces especially) are a little too realistic. These look like real people cosplaying the characters (and not always the same people) instead of the characters themselves, ya know?
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The art is polished, detailed, and scrupulously clear. The script is stocked with plenty of "hoorah" moments; Wanda gets a couple and Carol gets a big one. 3-D Man's role comes to an excellent conclusion.

It's a pretty dang good "winning the big battle" issue. I think I'm just not a fan of the genre.

Nitpicks:

Any climactic battle that uses the word "minutes" this many times is probably not as tense as it wants you to think it is.

I appreciate that this arc doesn't require any crossover reading in the X-books. However, that does cause a distinct "scene missing" feeling between the fighting and the epilogue.

Even though Blood Hunt is being managed by this issue's author, the pivot toward the event still feels clumsy.
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Most of the character interactions are a lot of fun. So is the art; it's tremendously dynamic and perfectly polished. The plot leaves much to be desired, though. The Wizard and his boss aren't that interesting, and the script relies on a lot of exposition to move things forward.