Kreniigh's Profile

This was amazing. Reading it felt like watching a really good suspenseful movie thanks to expert pacing and layouts, and some really creepy images (which are effectively subtle, until they're not). There's a page not far from the end that actually made me gasp. Highly recommended.

Lemire's art suits the story perfectly, and this is the best thing by Snyder that I've read.

Why is Mon-El on the cover?

If you're criticizing this story for being 'slow' or taking a long time to set things up, maybe you've never seen Aliens or you've forgotten how long it takes for the xenomorphs to appear in that movie.

Alien Vol. 1? This is at least the third Alien miniseries Marvel's released, but it's called Vol. 1, and the story has a title -- "Thaw" -- but that's nowhere in the collection title. It's as bad as the early Dark Horse days where every miniseries was just titled "Alien" or "Aliens".

This series is an interesting fresh approach to a franchise that's too often fallen into formula.

Perfectly cromulant, but What If stories work better as single stories instead of being spread out over multiple issues.

No, I'm sorry, I don't want to stomp all over anyone's enjoyment of this series but it's one of the worst things I've read in a long time. I mean this is literally MST3K level bad. The sitcom level of comedy was an enormous tonal mismatch with Aliens. But I'm not going to give it a low score because honestly its Golden Raspberry-ness entertained me 100x more than any of the endless number of Blood Hunt tie-ins released this year. I mean, Burke wakes up webbed to a wall in a scene right out of Giger Hell and his reaction is, "AGAIN with the...UGH...Like I haven't had enough already?!" and holy shit it's SO BAD but I am dying.

This series might have been better if it hadn't spent so much effort on really implausible explanations about why the general public doesn't know about the spiders. Maybe it needed to just not try to explain anything and lean into the absurdity, or maybe a better explanation could have been found. I like this kind of story, but this was a bit of a disappointment.

Poor characterization of Jarvis, and a terribly confusing and anti-climactic conflict based on ? something Kang did to the Vision? Plus half of the story is apparently in a different comic.

This sort of special is often an excuse to dust off old characters and move them through relatively generic lesson-of-the-week stories, but this one dove pretty deep into their backstories. It probably works best for long-time readers who like hefty continuity.

I'm probably one of the few people who likes Carrion as a villain -- his first appearance was right when I started collecting comics, and that's a point that most people remember most fondly (I guess that's why so many people like Kaine)) -- and I was disappointed that this featured a bunch of totally generic zombies instead of him. I would have liked to see Slott's take on the guy. That said, this was a perfectly cromulant tie-in to the event, maybe a little superfluous as it backtracked to answer questions I hadn't been wondering about.

The story here was fine but I don't understand the critics raving over the art. It's flat and many panels are hard to decipher.

No real complaints with this issue; it was pretty good. I do wonder about having Sin-Eater use a few spider-transformed lackeys as bait for Morlun, in a story featuring an entire team of spider-totem affiliated characters, though.

I don't understand why any of the villains in this are acting the way they are.

It's like Spider-Man gave Tombstone a bad coupon.

I haven't been looking forward to this story... It feels gimmicky, like the title came first and the story was built around it. It's always weird when the tone of a super-hero comic changes into realistic and lethal consequences when it's always been about beating the odds and cheating death (I'm thinking about the pre-Krakoa Rosenberg run on X-Men here). It's different if it's the ground rules, like Suicide Squad or Strikeforce Morituri. Not looking forward to the rest of this.

Reminds me of Spidey getting brutally beaten in a desperate, overmatched fight against Morlun, which reminded me of Spidey getting brutally beaten in a desperate, overmatched fight against the Juggernaut way back in the day. And while Tombstone's not in the same league, that last fight had Spidey getting brutally beaten a lot too.

No review of the content of this issue, but I guess this is how Peacemaker is from now on.

Welp, not surprising to see so many extremely high and extremely low scores for this one -- it's intentionally polarizing and I think many reviews are based more on its social positions than on the content. Personally I like the concept, but it jettisons logic pretty badly about halfway through. In my mind there's nothing wrong with most of its progressive concepts, but they're so clumsily glued together that nothing here resembles either the real world or the MU. I mean, Sotomayor University? Intergalactic Revolutionary classes? It's trying so hard that it just doesn't work as a story.

I can't even begin to list everything wrong with the plotting, dialogue, characterization, and art in this issue. Nothing fits together; it's a jumble of non sequiturs and random events. If I had to pick a theme it's the ongoing assumption in the writing that these characters and everything they do is super cool even when it's unearned.

The plot was a mix of overly vague and overly convenient, so it moved along to where it wanted to go without making a lot of sense. It's fine for the start of a story to raise questions, but here I'm not sure what questions I should be asking (other than, are church crypts really that casually accessible?) But I'm willing to give this the benefit of the doubt and a few more issues.

From the monster designs to the weird modern vernacular to the simplistic central conflicts, this could easily be an episode of a Sid and Marty Krofft show from the 70s.

"If you take something like Cthulhu... it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu's "strength," "dexterity," and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There's something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic." - China Mieville I would argue that this storyline reduces Illyria even further, not to a set of stats, but to an entity no more alien than a TV extra in a demon suit. Points for effort, but it was misguided from the start.

I've been a little hard on this series, but this issue felt like it was finally hitting on all cylinders.

Does a bit more telling than showing.

I must be the only person who's not blown away by the art. I think it would work better for me if there were more inked lines separating things... As it is, many panels look like blobs of colors running together. But to each his own.

The story is all over the place, the dialogue is too movie-quippy, Kirby's entire Celestial/Eternal mythology has been uprooted in favor of a giant robot punch-up, and having 1,000,000 BC versions of most of that team makes no goddamn sense at all. Why not just go all-out and have a "Captain America of 1,000,000 BC", inspiring cavemen with speeches about the Stars and Stripes? Jeezus.

2018 attitude, 1965 characterization. I grew up on Silver Age stories like this, where Stan Lee had to write everyone as hair-trigger aggros in order to work in a fight scene, and that was ok because no one was particularly devloped as a character. I guess that's what Aaron is going for here, what with Namor acting like Silver Age Namor again and all. Just feels kind of shallow today.

Why is Captain America wearing a headband? He doesn't have long hair.

Recommended soundtrack for this arc: Led Zeppelin. Every album, played simultaneously. I remember back in the day, reading the classic Moon Knight run by Moench and Sienkiewicz, having trouble deciding if it would be cooler to see Moon Knight possessing the Phoenix Force, or Khonshu getting into a fistfight, but lo, it turns out you can have it all! But one question remains: if Stone Age Black Panther had Thor's hammer, is there any reason he couldn't also have Spider-Man's web-shooters?

Aside from the fact that everyone talks like an agitated badass, this issue continues to warp Marvel history into something Cool!!!! that makes no sense -- for example, a place where Thanos has been around for a million years without doing anything noteworthy, and the Phoenix spends so much time on Earth it should have its mailing address here. And Mephisto outdoing Apocalypse for this year's "Forget All That, This Has Been My REAL Plan All Along!" award. Can't wait until this One Million BC nonsense is history.

I love seeing obscure characters from different corners of Marvel continuity, but Aaron's writing on this title reminds me of nothing so much as Mad Libs. "_______ goes back in time and runs into ________ (who in a different universe is a servant of ________), and ends up teaming up with _______." I prefer a little more attention to making things seem like naturally unfolding events and a bit less randomness.

When you keep your amps turned up to 11 all the time, it all starts to sounds like one big nonstop wall of noise. Turning them up to 12 doesn't correct this.

Nighthawk beating up the entire Serpent Society by himself off-panel is deeply uninteresting.

No.

Maybe this is a decent story on its own merits, but it has that big A.X.E. logo on the cover and is a tie-in to that event, and on that level it fails. It's normal for tie-ins to be inconsequential to the main event, but this one doesn't even appear to be happening in the same universe. It's a red-sky Crisis tie-in without the red skies or Crisis.

Random comments: Is Brandy a seize-the-day type who ignores Carol's advice to play it safe, or a play-it-safe type who takes Jane's advice to seize the day? A historical Ghost Rider who doesn't ride anything and behaves like ones of the Goon's kid sidekicks feels like a rejected idea from a What The--? comic. The nine-panel page of Brandy punching Mephisto was exactly like a Powerpuff Girls villain beat-up scene.

It opens with 'this fight has been going on for 9 days', which is as absurd as saying that a full-out nuclear war would last for 9 days. Both sides have Phoenixes, after all. And it's downhill from there.

The final page "MORE AVENGERS!!!" certainly reads like lampshading, because this series is already suffocating under piles of one dimensional variant characters, but one gets the sense that another bucketful being dumped onto the pile is somehow supposed to crank the Awesome up to 11. It's not; it's more like when you say a word over and over, it loses meaning.

Think of all the Julie Power fans they missed by excluding her from the cover.

I'm just exhausted with alternate mashup versions of characters. DC's multiple reboot versions, pre-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint, new 52, etc. etc. just wore me down over time to the point where I just didn't care, and now Marvel's getting me to the same point with this stuff. What if Tony Stark were Ant-Man? What if the Hulk had the Starbrand but lived in one million BC? What if there were new versions of Ghost Rider every 50 years? bleh

Didn't The Dukes of Hazzard do this exact story back in 1977? I remember getting really confused with all them alternate Duke Boys and wondering what happened to the 616 Boss Hogg.

Maybe I just need to let the "One Million BC" thing go. Maybe if it had been simply "Prehistoric Avengers" instead, it wouldn't bug me so much. But I just can't get past the idea that Odin and Laufey are over a million years old. Or that Thor is old enough that he was born during the lifetime of human characters (the Dr. Strange, Iron Fist, and Black Panther stand-ins) who were around in one million BC. But even beyond that, I don't even recognize this "I love everyone so much and I need to protect them" Phoenix. Or the "every character is in every era" succession of Phoenix hosts throughout history over in the main title. I think they're all Doombots and if I ever get to make a retcon to the MU, it's going to be that. Doombots.

BPRD and Abe Sapien are often titles that have ambiguous stories where the meaning has to be carefully teased out. This arc has been the opposite -- everything is shown in the art and then explained in the word balloons, often redundantly. What's this doing in the middle of the careening Hell on Earth finale?

Awwww.....

Ouch.

I love the way this series has swerved back into the doom that it seemed to have avoided back at the end of Hell on Earth.

It's just what it says on the tin -- a genre mashup. I was predisposed to like it because I'm a fan of Mutti's art, and the story, while very tropey, was interesting for seeing two different sets of tropes collide.

This series scratched a long-standing X-Files itch and I'd love to see more of these characters.

Well I haven't read a single issue of this series, but after reading the user reviews here month after month, I can confidently say that Tom King is an aberration without precedent; a fiendish amalgam of Charles Manson, Adolf Hitler, and Jim Jones whose lazy incompetence is exceeded only by his calculating dedication to debasing all that is good and worthy in the world; a cucumber-sandwich-eating pit of filth and moral decay; the very anti-life equation itself with designs on your light and hope. He personally hates each and every one of his readers like a Grinch on bath salts, each word a toxic seed of pretentiousness and bile designed to burrow into brains and fester. Hail this, the day of our deliverance!

As an idea, "Batman builds a robot that can defeat anybody" would be a good fit for the goofy late '50s Batman comic. I don't think it does the character or the story any favors to treat it seriously.

Nobody hold back now, how do you REALLY feel about this?

Actually didn't read it but these covers! They're just a jumble of pastel colors and blacks with no depth. I get that a lot of people love Di Meo's art but I'm just not seeing the appeal.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but Di Meo's art is like walking around with a pair of old-style red/blue 3D glasses on. The transition between pages 5 and 6 was sudden clarity out of confusion.

One of the best ghost stories I've ever read. Punches me in the feels every time I read it.

Please, "No More Phoenix".

Classic 'Locked in a Closet' trope with an unlikely pairing. Unexpected and amazing.

This was awful, the sort of crossover tie-in that's completely superfluous. The humor in Russell's story was way off tone for this story, and the JJJ story seems unaware of the character's recent relationship with Peter in favor of a reset to 1962's blame-Spider-Man attitude (or did I miss another memory reset?)

The first time this comic has pulled off the sort of should-have-seen-it-coming changes-everything kind of plot twist that the best seasons of the TV show achieved. My only quibble is that the ultimate villain's plan seems overly convoluted and is triggered more by happenstance than insidious plotting. There was nothing specifically set up to guarantee that Buffy would utter the right words; it might have never happened. And why not just get someone else to say them?

Good exploration of some of the ramifications of the supernatural mythology in the "real world", albeit a little on the nose in its reference to current events.

The social commentary is fine but the plot's getting a little blurry beneath it. Buffy voluntarily went into the camp to protect the inmates, so why is her focus now on escaping? There are hints of a sinister scheme on the part of the jailers, which conveniently gives our heroes something more tangible to fight against than 'systemic rights violations in the face of a crisis'. And magic is once again more of a metaphor for something than an actual system that makes sense -- wasn't it at one time a skill to be learned, not a power to be drained (before it was a drug, that is)?

This issue brings one of the biggest problems with Season 11 into focus: the protagonists' lack of agency. We've already seen one major conflict point where the gang agonizes over whether or not to submit to the government's plans, and reluctantly decides it's for the greater good to do so; here we have another. This issue also undermines the only time recently that they *have* taken initiative; all of their clever planning and action last issue is rendered moot when what they learned is simply made public knowledge. (And I'm still unsure about the logic of using detainees to manufacture the magic draining widgets, rather than anyone else in the world). Maybe it's a more nuanced threat this time around, but it's not very engaging to watch the heroes behaving so passively.

Every page is packed with so many weird dialog choices, non sequiturs, and inexplicable happenings that reading this issue was a chore. A certain amount of mystery is good, but I had to stop and wonder 'what is happening here?' 'who is this person?' and 'what is that character even saying?' with almost every panel. Baffling.

This was a really good series.

"THE BIG GUN IS BACK" indeed. What's Breakworld doing in this story? Oh, Ewing's using elements from Whedon's Astonishing run and leading up to a fairly audacious resolution to the Dormammu problem. Might have too much early Cable/X-Force nostalgia for most people, based on the reviews, but the plot and its use of past continuity is solid.

This comic does what it sets out to do very well (goofy fun), and it probably goes without saying that if you don't like this sort of thing or were expecting something more traditional, this isn't for you.

Surprised that Straczynski missed the obvious "SHUT the FRONT DOOR" joke.

OK, two things that bothered me about this series, and they are both the character who I assume is Bruttenholm. He is never named on page, and maybe I should have recognized him, but still that's pretty sloppy. And while going through his dialogue to figure out who he was, I noticed that every single thing he says is a question intended to prompt exposition. I mean, that's useful for the writer but when you read them all in a row it's a bit obvious.

Politics aside, the concept for this issue has some unrealized (maybe unrealizable) potential with Gwen's fourth wall breaking. She's absolutely right, as a person familiar with Marvel Universe history, to say that this kind of real-world conflict is almost always caused in the MU by the Sons of the Serpent or Hydra or something other than the uncomfortable truths of reality. And it's very odd to see her (presumably) proven wrong for a change. It highlights the disconnect that 'serious issue' stories like last month's Champions or the recent get-out-the-vote Ms. Marvel have in super-hero land, and I'm not sure why you would want to do that. It's like a Deadpool story about accidental toddler shootings.

OK, I get it, She-Hulk is arguing against preemptive punishment, so we know which side she's going to be on. The problem here is that the charges against the Jester aren't ever named, and Jen's defense summary specifically rules out a lot of possibilities. So we have to conclude that in order to act as a proxy for the Captain Marvel side, the court did in fact find him guilty of thought-crime. It's a minor detail, but it's typical of the way the 'high concept' of a big event crossover warps things around it to make its point. Oh, and with so little action in this issue, Bendis was only able to work in four "oh my god!"s and one "agh!". For those keeping up at home.

Wait. THIS is the ethical dilemma that splits the heroes? THIS? Punishing people for crimes pre-emptively is a hook that you an hang a civil war type story on (and it's already been done in Minoroty Report, but shush). And that's where this looks like it's going, until it swerves so far off the rails I can't even track the thinking behind it other than the plot dragging the characters along regardless of logic. Being alerted to Thanos's arrival has nothing to do with the ethics of pre-emptive punishment. It's like setting up a story where the ethical conflict is over abortion, and then having someone getting killed in a car crash on the way to get an abortion as the anti-abortion side's argument. It makes no sense and makes Stark look like a reactive idiot. Ugh.

Still waiting for Tony's point of view to make a hint of sense. It's like declaring war on 911 dispatch because your cop buddy responded to a call and was killed. Absolutely nothing to do with punishing people before they do anything wrong. I guess maybe the idea is that Tony is unhinged about Rhodey and he's acting irrationally, but then why would anyone take his side?

Bendis School of Writing: Come up with some cool scene or borrow a plot concept from a movie, then build your story backwards from that thing, without regard for characterization, continuity, or logic. This issue's flaws have been pointed out at length elsewhere, but the big three have to be: Hawkeye as a willing killer despite years of being written as the exact opposite; Banner's Hulkless status in TAH being ignored; and Carol's "plan" of bringing everyone who currently has a presence in Marvel titles (whether they belong there or not) to Banner's door in a blatantly provocative move . Awful all around. Nice art, though.

Remember that time when a person with telepathy appeared, and all the heroes got all worked up because even though it was a useful power, it could be misused to read people's minds and punish them for things they were thinking about doing? And then all the heroes lined up and took sides and started screaming at and killing one another and then someone said the titular line, "This is like some kind of CIVIL WAR"? Yeah, me neither.

I finally realized what the Ulysses dilemma reminds me of. You know how Q-tips have that warning not to insert them into your ear canal, but that's just to keep idiots from jamming them all the way in and hurting themselves, so everyone knows just to be careful when they insert them? With that in mind, I have written a helpful synopsis of the first 4 issues of this series: ULYSSES: I have invented a device to clean wax out of ears -- the Q-tip. IRON MAN: That makes me uneasy. What if someone jams one of those in too far? That could injure them! CAPTAIN MARVEL: Wax buildup is a huge threat. I am going to use those Q-tips! RHODEY cleans his ear with a Q-tip, but as he throws it into the garbage, he slips and breaks his head on the bathroom floor. IRON MAN: RHODEY NOOOOOOO! Your Q-tip killed Rhodey! MARVEL MARKETING: Looks like a CIVIL WAR is brewing! ASSORTED CURRENTLY POPULAR HEROES: Looks like a CIVIL WAR is brewing! We are all randomly choosing sides! NOBODY AT ALL: Guys, you can use a Q-tip if you're careful. Just don't-- HAWKEYE jams Q-tip into Hulk's ear. ASSORTED CURRENTLY POPULAR HEROES: Looks like a CIVIL WAR has started! Everyone pose in two groups facing each other! IRON MAN: Now that I understand how Q-tips work, I am even more frightened.

Things slowly continue to happen more because they're in the plot outline than because they logically follow from the plot or character personalities. This whole event feels like a handful of shocking but unearned plot points strung together with little regard for the story in between.

On its own, this is a perfectly fine story with a good art style. In relation to the wider universe, it's got a couple of problems... First, and this is a common one, it's set in the sort of "generic" New York crime scene where every boss and underling is always the same, always just out there doing mobster stuff, infighting, hanging out in villain bars, etc. no matter what happens in any given story. No matter who makes a bid to take over all the crime, no matter who succeeds or is killed or dramatically transformed, everything resets for the next story. I'm pretty sure the Owl and Madame Masque and Hammerhead have had different status quos in other books recently, but here they are being generic mob bosses again. But hey, that's how it goes. It's also a weird fit for Civil War II. The Kingpin's realization of how Janus's powers work only makes sense if, as is implied throughout the issue, Ulysses is predicting 100% of all criminal activity in NYC and the heroes are stopping all of it. If some crimes are slipping through, there's no reason for Fisk to think Janus is anything except lucky. That level of enforcement isn't reflected in any of the other Civil War II titles, where Ulysses and everyone else is busy with other things. Possibly the writers of these miniseries were given vague details of how the main plot works and had to fill some thing in themselves.

The first segment is such a pitch perfect example of the classic Tales From the Crypt genre that the issue's mutation into something more complex caught me entirely off-guard.

I really missed Ryan Browne after the end of that last series he did, something about Astroturf. Now I'm enjoying devouring Carts Wars each and every issue!

I totally don't understand the website critic who gave this a 4.0. If you're a fan of the series, you'll want this issue as it contains seriously crucial backstory. Plus it's just as good and funny as a regular issue.

Very satisfying ending to a great series.

I think for this series to work, you have to be more interested in "remember how these characters used to have grudges back in the day?" than "how have these characters evolved since those days when they were all about their grudges?" Norman makes a nice counterpoint to this, but it's not particularly compelling.

There's something to be said about taking an goofy old kid's show and tossing it into a cynical, ironic modern setting, but it's rarely something fresh. Did anything about this play off of the Banana Splits in particular? You could have grabbed just about any 70s Hanna-Barbera show and plugged them into this same plot and ended up with the same thing -- a predictable, by-the-numbers Robot Chicken sketch, right down to the rap show ending.

This is one of those comics where I keep getting stuck staring at panels to try to make sense of what's happening in them. The art's way too busy and sketchy for a story that has dozens of cameos that need to be identifiable. As an example, without the speech bubble where he identifies himself, Damage would have been just a black shape and a weirdly-colored partial figure (mostly arm). The coloring also makes it hard to distinguish who's who and what they're doing, with whole panels just being similar shades of unnatural colors. The story, eh, it's silly; really just a gobbledegook working-backwards to justify the bracket tournament which is the core. It peaks when Mister Terrific captures every super-villain on Earth in a few pages (granted, it doesn't stick), which begs a LOT of questions if it's taken more seriously than the most ridiculous Golden Age story gimmick.

Um, who won?

This got me thinking, hm, virus made Logan's adamantium skeleton get bigger along with the rest of his body, what if that didn't work and he was just a giant angry sack of flesh with metal bones stuck way deep inside? Or maybe the virus had Pym particles in it so everything got bigger. Does that mean Hank Pym could use Pym particles to target just Logan's skeleton and turn him into a man-sized angry sack of flesh with tiny metal bones stuck way deep inside? What would these Logans be called? Could they support one or two solo books? Would his healing factor eject the bones, or grow a tinier extra Logan in there? Be neat if he could open his mouth real wide and there'd be a tiny Wolverine looking out like some weird mutant xenomorph poking people with his tiny claws and going "Bub!" He could call it Bub. The Adventures of Fleshverine and Bub. He could team up with that glorpy clone of Miles. It would say "Spider-Man/Wolverine*" on the cover for sales purposes but with a footnote saying "* actually Glorpy/Fleshverine & Bub" as a joke. Does Deadpool have a weird fleshy blob clone? Oh, Glob Herman would be a shoo-in for that story, could you just imagine? They could fight that guy from the Headmen, Jerry whatever. Did they ever give that guy a real super-villain name? I think it's still 'Shrunken Bones' which is dumb. In conclusion, I just flipped through it but it wasted a LOT of potential.

This is appalling. Just when the Inhumans have had two outstanding series that developed the characters and moved the mythology along (Al Ewing's Royals and Saladin Ahmed's Black Bolt) here's a story that ignores all of that in favor of an artless massacre. There was a lot of interesting potential for future stories set up in those series, but it doesn't even seem that Cates has even read them. It's not just disregard for continuity that rankles, but the nullification of good stories for a cheap killfest with a poorly-developed set-up and a horror movie's disinterest in anything but getting from one death to the next. I was never much of a fan of the Inhumans, but this is just terrible.

As the full picture of what's going on slowly comes into focus, it seems that this is not the massacre it appeared, so points for that. However, it's still a grim fake massacre that's otherwise light on story and character. The writer's decision to ignore Ewing's recent excellent Inhumans backstory still gripes, especially when weird stuff gets shoveled in from left field like the Beta Ray/Lockjaw pairing.

When the twist was revealed last issue, I had hopes that this series might redeem itself, but this final issue nailed that coffin shut. Flat characterization -- none of these characters are individuals. Sloppy plotting -- how could a Vox be using Crystal or Lockjaw's powers *before* capturing them? And a sharp turn back into the wholesale slaughter the title promised (but looked like it might be off the table) -- Black Bolt didn't even seem to try to do anything but rush into fulfilling the series remit. And not a name or face to any of the dead, nothing to connect to or feel emotion for. Just "and the rest". This was miserable and I had expected more from Cates.

I just flipped through this, as I'm not a huge fan of symbiote stuff. It just seems like an endless stream of new characters, new names, new colors, new permutations, all fight fight fight and teeth. Reminds me of those sites where they use AI to mash up elements of old sci-fi movies into fake movie screenshots.

Has all the signs of a story written backwards from an intended conclusion. Nothing happening here follows logically from the stories leading into it, but it's all necessary to set up the next thing. Which is hard to care about at this point.

I really enjoyed the art. I like the twist, even though I saw it coming; it's perfectly in character for the person behind it, and I appreciate the way it undermines the typical bombastic, heroic death scenes super-heroes usually get. But it feels like getting to the last pieces of a jigsaw puzzle you've been working on for a long time, and finding that they don't fit. Maybe a page fell out explaining that the red mist killed thousands of normal people, and that's why Scott and Sunfire are so reviled. That's all it would take.

Maybe Promethea can be a member of the next Defenders team.

Woke woke wokety woke?

Pretty good but I never want to see fake profanity like "#$%#$@" coming out of Doom's mouth again.

I'm surprised that Hopeless gets the voices of these characters so wrong. Mordo quipping like a character on a sitcom? Ben Urich tossing out references to Larping? Who are these people?

Oh, it's the War Doctor.

Y'know what? This was all right.

There's a fine line between silly and sloppy and this wavers along that line.

I like the art, but the whole concept for this series feels terribly shoehorned in, like the writer is reskinning a non-Marvel story about magick stuff with X-characters. Apocalypse is the worst in this regard, almost unrecognizable in his actions and motivations. The plot skips around in a way that's difficult to follow, and is full of poorly-conceived ideas like beardy druid cults living deep underground and babies being able to turn into dragons, that all might work pretty well in a separate fantasy series where all the basic assumptions about the world are more fluid. And that moon and sun chart page -- what was that?

I've been fairly critical of this series, but I enjoyed this issue. It had good character bits and felt more connected to the rest of the X-line than most titles.

"Amber?! Unit disabled! He got me!"

Black black black black backgrounds black.

I am interested in these characters, so I enjoyed it.

Perfectly cromulant.

Oh yeah. An audacious issue that'll have you immediately flipping back through it and that's all I'm going to say.

Things Jessica Jones did not need: (1) being drawn to look like Jennifer Connelly; (2) being yet another in long line of wives/girlfriends being injured as a way of hurting a male hero.

This series was great, beginning to end.

THE LEGS WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE LEGS

Eh, this series is fine, but is it me or do the Nerd Initiative reviews for the first two issues look like they were AI generated?

I'd read this if it were ongoing.

STOP PICKING ON THE REAL LIFE PERSON WHO ACTS LIKE THE CHARACTER IN THIS! THEY ARE NOTHING ALIKE!

"Every act of mercy saves the world for somebody. And sometimes, in showing mercy to others -- we save ourselves as well." What kind of fucking loser wrote such vile, hateful garbage?

For all intents and purposes, an issue-long dream sequence leading to a foregone conclusion.

Needs more Wacky.

It's funny, going by comic books, there is nothing in San Diego other than ComicCon. The first time I read a comic that took place at ComicCon, it was funny. Let's just say, the humor is no longer inherent.

Why is there a smog monster in 1556?

Great fun, but it just stopped instead of resolving.

OK fine but they TOTALLY stole that cover from the magnificently underrated MCU classic MADAME WEB!!!!

This new test pilot direction is interesting I guess but when is Hal going to finally get back to his roots as the Spectre?

Has about as much weight and depth as a non-continuity "Marvel Adventures" title. I expect the next Jim Starlin story will include an explanation that this was just another one of those pesky one-dimensional Thanos clones that crop up from time to time. "It's Just An Action Figure, You Should Really Just Relax" award for casually ignoring the Armadillo's origin as a tragic monster, not a dude in home-made power armor.

Cates seems to be another excellent indie writer who's a bad fit for shared universe work. He may have a good idea for a story here, but like Death of the Inhumans it's awkwardly jammed into existing continuity. In an indie series, you can write a story in which it's reasonable to kill a bunch of the most powerful beings in the universe to prevent a cosmic tyrant from reincarnating in their bodies, and create a character who'd be likely to suggest it, but the MU is not a place where that makes sense, and Starfox is not a character who'd make that suggestion. (He's so far out of character here that I wonder if he's supposed to be Thanos... But all the other attendees are pretty dumb not to pick up on it.) Minor quibbles: I guess "Groot is a sullen teenager" has leaked in from the movies; I suppose next issue Hela will be referred to as Thor's sister. And WTAF is Howard the Duck doing at the meeting?

Kind of feels like the MCU Guardians plunked down into the Firefly genre. Not bad for what it is, but it feels disconnected from the 616.

Reads like the movie versions of the Guardians were swapped into Firefly. It might be a decent story on its own merits, but I'm not interested in Firefly starring the MCU Guardians cast.

Gwen's buried skeleton STILL having that damned headband on is one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I've seen in a comic in a while.

This was pretty good but it needs about 33% more wokery.

Did... did Clint just flat-out murder that guy? Mark Gruenwald is turning over in his grave.

Given the amount of cutting back and forth into established and ongoing subplots, isn't it about time Dark Horse started numbering this according to the "in a series" number on the credits page? The abrupt segues into scenes with Bruttenholm and Sandhu make no sense as part of a "first issue".

Solid emotional story beats for everyone! Zub made me feel sad for... Nanny? Great conclusion to the best Hickman era series.

Just wanted to say, in smaller images, the title font on the cover makes it look like this comic is called Halverine.

Let's see. Blade remembers the previous world because he's supernatural, Coulson is a sociopath who always hated the Avengers, Power Princess can kill Phoenixes, Mephisto can hand out Cosmic Cubes, the Phoenix has protected the Earth for eons, have I got that all right? And the cube that can rewrite reality is only good for shooting zappy blasts in a fight? And at the end the Squadron (including Power Princess, who's more powerful than the Phoenix) are locked up by... the government? For doing nothing wrong in a crossover event no one remembers? Mmm-hmm.

There's nothing wrong with producing artistic and thought-provoking work that foils expectations. But deliberately raising false expectations is problematic. This is essentially a documentary about the plight of vanishing wildlife habitats in Africa that has a gorilla shooting laser beams out of its eyes on every cover.

This new direction is like Banner getting stabbed in the chest so hard with a giant piece of Cates that his previous personality goes flying out of his head.

...doesn't Dr. Strange's body always pass out when his astral form leaves it?

As others have said, this felt too casually murder-y. And I'm unimpressed by the art -- it's unclear in places, like the page where it seems that the Hulk has torn off the monster's head, and the transformation page in the jail cell was... ambitious, but silly.

I mean, Ewing kind of whiffed the swing by not finding room for classic villain Goldbug, but here's a 10 anyway.

A decently told, if somewhat cliched, origin story... For a character with no connection to the Heavenly Cities mythology. I had hoped these issues would show something of the other six cities, but only the Fat Cobra issue touched that. How did this character become the champion of Unnamed Heavenly City #3? That's the story I wanted.

Hm, an empty, over-the-top violence fest is followed the very next week by a brilliant new direction full of intrigue and possibilities... Feels like July 2019 again. I enjoyed this as much as (if not more than) Hickman's first issue of House of X. Gillen is a master of characterization, and I have a lot of faith in his ability to wrap up his plots satisfyingly. This is going to be a great era.

Perfectly cromulant; not essential.

Solid.

I was talking to Jesus just the other day, he said this run was fine. Not His cup of tea but He didn't really have any problem with it. I said, Jesus, didn't you think it was too woke with all the feminism and what about that writer at DC and He said, whoa man, slow down, not everything is about politics.

Doom just doesn't seem like Doom here. I did get a mild buzz mid-issue from my "Bendis Agh!" drinking game, though. (Diablo: "Agh! Doom. Agh! Agh!")

On the level of 'What Happened', I kinda get it but I don't like it -- another silly alternate universe with more pointless alternate character versions, a vague new direction for Loki that's bound to be ignored by the overabundance of writers who'll be using him in the future, and something about the stones getting souls. On the level of 'Why These Things Happened', I'm sure it all makes sense in Duggan's mind, but for me, nearly every page contained things happening without any sense of cause and effect or story logic. I can't really say this event was bad, but just... baffling.

The last four pages were a weak ending, but the escalation of the main gag had me giggling uncontrollably.

I've been pretty harsh on Bendis's super-hero comics, but this is a great return to one of the series that made me a fan originally.

The early setup with Misty Knight is so plausible and convincing that it made me rethink Jessica as a sympathetic character; I was mildly disappointed by the shade this cast over her earlier series... Which made the later twist particularly satisfying. A very well constructed issue.

Great conclusion to the story and a great capstone to Jessica Jones' character arc under Bendis.

This was pretty good with a great high concept. I'm hoping to see the story continue. Rating 9 for the series as a whole.

"My dad's lab was like a pharmacological candy store, so I started real young. Next thing I know, I'm blowing lines of voodoo powder off the back of a monkey's paw I bought in Calcutta. Now I'm all out of wishes."

"I don't know yet if reading Justice League: Road to Dark Crisis #1 is crucial to understanding the main event." - ten-star critic review here I mean, it obviously isn't.

Nice art, but some weird non-sequitur dialogue choices in this one: "I took a new name," "Be careful Bogna. No one touches me," "Fear isn't power." I haven't had to work so hard at understanding what characters were talking about since the last thing I read by Ann Nocenti.

Brings a lot of plots together and rewards readers who have been following the series.

Only Grant Morrison would make DMT hallucinations (google "machine elves" for more info) a foundational part of the origin of Santa Claus and still end up with a comic that could play well to the mainstream. Well played, sir.

Can't fault Howard for ambition, but this was just a messy outline of the story she wanted to tell.

I liked the art style, which reminded me of Matt Wagner, but the panel-to-panel storytelling was so awkward that I kept stopping to try to figure out what the story was trying to convey. The writing has to share the blame on that point; it jumps around, never offers enough hints to make its meaning penetrable, and sometimes almost feels like sentences have been sprinkled into the panels like a cut-ups project. It's a very confusing debut issue.

The art was really difficult to follow, especially in the fight scenes. The two-page spread with Shark Girl going Grawl! was incomprehensible in some places. The lack of backgrounds didn't help matters. Maybe with a more engaging story these faults wouldn't matter as much, but I just didn't care about any of the characters.

"This epic story spans the course of 1,000 years and, for the very first time, connects all of DC's future timelines!" First, I am certain that past writers have connected all of the future DC timelines. Second, this issue does not connect these timelines; it simply shows some of them. What *is* the connection between Kamandi's world and Tommy Tomorrow's, beyond "one happened first"? That would have been more interesting.

Probably an accurate preview of Bendis's upcoming Legion series -- a huge team of beloved iconic characters standing around as background props for whatever meandering narrative involving minor Bendis stand-in characters dominates the foreground. Occasionally the roster will change.

Happy to see the Legion back, but... The problem of too many character has been solved by giving everyone in the Legion the same speaking voice, making them a kind of hivemind that spouts exposition. Some money could be saved on word balloon tails because it doesn't really matter who said any given line.

Superboy and the Legion of Interchangeable Characters Who Stand Around In Groups Speaking With A Single Voice. And I want to say I am baffled by the "Frichman tag" thing. Those tags are super useful for character ID in a comic with a cast this size, and it was a cute meta idea to say that they actually exist and the characters can see them. I'm totally on board with that. But then why the fuuuu would you constantly turn them around and cover them up and ruin their utility?!?

I couldn't hang a single personality trait on most of the members of this team. Hell, I couldn't even identify a lot of them or tell you what their powers were. Art's pretty, though.

It starts here! The new superstar hero of the 1000th century, Gold Lantern, in his bombastic debut! He has such an amazing story, wait till you hear it -- and it starts here! I'm psyched I can tell you, this is going to be an epic tale unfolding in coming months. Buy two copies because GL (that's Gold Lantern) could be the biggest breakout of this new Legion!

Part Three of the Amazing Story of Gold Lantern! The details are being released at a teasingly slow pace since the story started back in issue #6, in the background of what scoffers will call an overabundance of subplots about trials and Dr. Fates and whatnot, but I can feel the threads coming together slowly and man! I can't wait!

Part Four of the "Amazing Story of Gold Lantern" and it's a doozy. First, is that his knee on the cover? Later an entire panel to himself, where he plays a pivotal role in summarizing the things all the other Legionnaires have been saying! And a reference to Oa and its Elders, adding more to the rich Gold Lantern Club mythos. But wait, the action kicks into high gear a few pages later when he soars into the spotlight to catch the baddie! More secrets are revealed about the Gold Lantern Club and nothing will ever be the same! Looking forward to the next issue for more twists in the Amazing "Story of the Gold Lantern Saga"!

Spoopy.

A really enjoyable story, but the numbering system continues to be questionable. There's nothing self-contained about this 3-parter; if you don't know the history of the villains from previous installments, you're in the dark. Not to mention the mess it makes of the title on this site. I guess as a shameless marketing ploy it must pay off.

Unintentional humor there at the end, where the baddie gives a speech about "you MAY be wondering how I figured out it was YOU" and hints that someone may have given Cage up, when it's ridiculously obvious that the mayor and wife are these new "mystery vigilantes". Too much plot hanging on a premise that doesn't hold up for a second.

THIRSTY BIZARRO HATE BOOBS ON COVER!

This series is the Holy Bible of Dad Jokes. I admire Stine's ability to pack so much humor in, but "so bad it's funny" wears out its welcome fast.

Far and away the best of the new batch of titles, every issue.

Characters with personalities interacting with one another. Refreshing.

I'm enjoying Orlando's dense writing on this more than I have on his work for DC because I actually get most of his obscure continuity references (and have Paul O'Brien's annotations on House To Astonish to fill me in on the rest). It's still a slow read but I'm learning to appreciate that. I wish the art were clearer in some places, but Carlini's Cassandra Nova really shines.

Maybe it's OK on its own, but with hordes of vampires in Blood Hunt and hordes of zombiotes in Venom War, I'm past the point of exhaustion with infection-spreading hordes.

This was a really interesting series packed full of ideas and black humor, although if Gillen hasn't been the writer I wouldn't have found it, as the Avatar art style isn't really to my taste. This final issue was a hoot and a half.

I'm really not liking this flat, heavily shadowed art style that's showing up in Marvel titles lately -- Marauders and Moon Knight being two others. The panels just look like a jumble of black shapes and action lines with no depth whatsoever, and I often find myself having to stare at them to figure out what's happening.

This series was a little wobbly at first, but I feel like it's hit its stride. There are jokes here -- specifically the running Totino's gag -- that land better because they're already been set up, and having the framework of the series established gives all the riffing something comfortable to hang from.

I haven't been a fan of Humphries' work, but this was fun and I like the new baddies.

I like the Killuminati concept but this is definitely a comic where characterization takes a back seat. With only a couple of exceptions, everyone talks with the same generic quippy dialogue that the MCU popularized. (Clea's the worst)

I'm not sure which Zemo that's supposed to be, but for everyone to act like he's some kind of huge threat and then just let Carnage waltz off at the end is weird.

Epilogue: And they were never seen again, except for the ones briefly appearing to get killed by the big bad at the start of a future event.

If you play this comic backwards, it says "It's fun to get really woke!"

I found the art difficult to follow in a few places. The page where the vampire gets thrown off the ledge, and two pages later where someone I can't identify gets knocked out by I don't know what, in a panel that fails to resolve the action in the previous panel. That page also contains one of the sillier lines of dialog I've read in a while, "We came to save you, Vampire By Night!"

Reminds me a lot of the Secret Wars series where OML bounced from one random scenario to another without any real point. No matter what happens on any stop, there's no time to get invested in it because it'll just whisk away to the next in a few minutes. Also, 1812? Should we start calling him Really Old Man Logan?

The best Pathfinder series so far, both in terms of art and story.

As a reader of the Moench/Sienkiewicz run of Moon Knight when it first came out, I really appreciated the effort put into the first story here, and as a Stokoe fan, I really liked the second.