Kreniigh's Profile

Less a life-changing decision than a completely expected status quo restoring decision...

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.

I liked the series as a whole quite a lot. There were some interesting interpersonal relationship, and the moral ambiguity of the main character elevated it beyond a standard alien invasion story. But why was it named War Wolf? Not War Bear?

I guess if you hate the Morrison run, you wouldn't be a fan of this issue. I loved it.

Hostilicus? Really? Looks and sounds like a villain from a Saturday morning kids' cartoon, and doesn't fit Annihilus's theme at all. Remember Annihilation? I can think of at least two writers at Marvel now who'd have found or created something more interesting using actual continuity.

"You're gonna need more than just a shield if you're gonna be... CAPTAIN AMERICA 2099!"

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.

Wasn't that bad.

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

Solid.

This series was great, beginning to end.

Y'know what? This was all right.

This looks like something I would like in terms of the premise, but I could not get past the dialogue.

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.

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.

Perfectly cromulant; not essential.

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.

I can't even think of a pithy comeback to the race fear in these user comments.

Um, who won?

This was a really good series.

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

Confusing but in a way that I enjoy being confused.

Oh come on, that main story was pretty amusing. "What? You're a LITERAL bum!"

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.

I'm just sayin', if Mark Waid had written this we'd know exactly which Legionnaires were attacking, and maybe what planet they were from. And that would have been better than just generic bad guys.

Is it just me or do all of the critic review snippets for this title sound AI generated? "The Witcher: The Bear and the Butterfly should be perfectly aligned with your expectations from the setting and characters. My recommendation: a fantastic conclusion to a four-part comic series for Witcher fans of all kinds." Anyway, a good ending to a good series.

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)

Oh that cover! The fact that it's dead serious and not intentional parody is just beautiful.

Continuity, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin'?

Please, "No More Phoenix".

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Ah-hahaha just needed to point out Russ's review on YDRC: "The desire to go into the characters pants is something that's absolutely necessary at this stage." THIRSTY

It says something about the size of your supporting cast when you need to caption all of them so the reader can keep track -- two issues in a row. Either you're the Legion of Super-Heroes, or you have too many characters.

Needs more Wacky.

Really loving this new version of the Priest.

As random and ephemeral as reading Mad Libs.

THIRSTY BIZARRO HATE BOOBS ON COVER!

Pretty generic.

Great fun, but it just stopped instead of resolving.

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

"Moira was always a mutant with reality-resetting powers" was part of a really great story, so it largely gets a pass for not fitting very well with decades of continuity. "Tiny faeries rule Central Park" is not. They're not interesting and they don't fit at all.

I'd read this if it were ongoing.

BAYTOR!!!

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.

"...terrifying journey into a gruesome challenge that will take a miracle to escape." LOL these solicits

"Wowsie!" - Chthon

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

Why is Mon-El on the cover?

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.

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

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.

Looking at the user reviews for this series so far, I wonder if it reads best as a collected story. Reading it all in one go, I can see how it felt slow as individual issues, but I did really enjoy it.

Somewhere maybe there is a universe where I'd be interested in this ever-expanding line of alternate Spider-Men, but it's not this one. Al Ewing's "Venom Horse" backup strip in last week's Venom War seems to be a sneaky criticism of the phenomenon of proliferating alternates: "...pure simulacrum, with no reference to reality at all. At this stage, signs merely reflect other signs. Anyway, I'm Venom Horse!"

"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."

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.

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

I do not envy Gillen being tasked to wrap up Hickman's abandoned plotlines and bring things to an editorially-mandated reset/outcome. I think this was about as good as could be done with this mess, and while maybe a bit rushed and cosmically/temporally vague, in another writer's hands it could have been just a big knot of fight scenes or worse. I wish more of Krakoa's potential had been explored, but Shared Universe Nonplasticity is the real antagonistic Dominion here and Editorial is its hand.

Seriously is that headband part of her head or something?

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.

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?)

Reads like an outline of a story no one asked to hear, with cool action moments taped on. The characters don't really feel like they have agendas; they're just being dragged along by the plot.

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

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

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

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.

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

One problem with Gang War is a really unclear idea of what action is happening. Sometimes it seems that everyone is fighting in the streets everywhere, and it's chaos to the point where you can drop a guy off a skyscraper in the financial district and no one will notice. But here we also have a big corporate building exterior and interior where everything looks like a normal work day. I guess for a big crossover it's better not to be too specific and let writers use the situation however fits their plot.

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.

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".

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.

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

Who fell TO THEIR DEATH! ?

Oh no, Mister Roper's gonna evict Tony if he finds out he "proposed" to Emma and really isn't gay! Now Tony's gonna have to set up a fake date with Northstar but it's at the same time as a date with Emma and he's gonna have to go back and forth between the two dates! Womp womp.

Why is there a smog monster in 1556?

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.

Oh, it's the War Doctor.

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.

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.

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

Granted it is not true in every variant Gwen, but WHY. ALWAYS. WITH. THE. F'ING. HEADBAND?!?!?

Everyone's out of character and stupid decisions are made.

Poopy.

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.

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.

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

I know he has a British accent in the movies but when did Thor start saying "bloody" all the time? Between that and the scruffy beard, I started hearing his voice as John Constantine. Next he'll be calling Jane 'luv'.

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.

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.

Tynion's creator-owner work contains stories that are arguably deeply Lovecraftian without leaning on the usual tropes -- cosmic horror rooted in the insignificance of humanity in the face of incomprehensible alien powers. It's his skill in characterizing the people forced to confront these horrors that makes these stories hit hard.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Spoopy.

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.

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.

Satisfying end to the story, although as some have pointed out, the supporting cast isn't very well developed. Still, good to see all the 'wokery'!

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

THE LEGS WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE LEGS

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

I'm not giving this a score because I just don't understand it. Was anyone demanding The Story About All The Character's Alternate Versions, starring Gwen Stacy wearing different Marvel super-hero identities like skins in a video game? Who is psyched to see Wolverine But It's Gwen Stacy (or is it Gwen Stacy But It's Wolverine?) run out on stage for a few pages, as shallow as a character can be? I guess this just wasn't made for me.

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.

No.

A story taking place in the margins of a bigger story tends to follow the same formula of near-misses and consequence-free incidents. It can be good if the bigger story was written with the marginal one in mind and leaves hooks and questions that the marginal one can be built upon. It can be enjoyable if the bigger story is still fresh in the reader's mind. But here, neither applies. No shade on the creators, but this was not a great idea from the start.

Just did a flip-through. Is there anyone left who gets excited by "here's a new version of THIS character" any more, or has a reaction other than "oh god, ANOTHER new version of a character"? It's like Wife: Have you got anything without new alternate character versions? Waitress: Well, there's new alternate character versions egg sausage and new alternate character versions, that's not got much new alternate character versions in it. Wife: I don't want ANY new alternate character versions!

It's like someone playing with a giant set of Marvel Colorforms. Why not just draw Miles heads over the heads of all the characters in Secret Wars and sell that as a story?

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.

"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.

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

I usually like Russell's work and don't disagree with his viewpoint, but this felt like a real misstep from the high concept of the series. The Wrong Earth is powered by the contrast between Earths Alpha and Omega; they should be polar opposites, but here Russell is adding shades of grey to Alpha, and that just doesn't work as well as when he does the same to a cheery concept from the past like the Flintstones.

Geez, you can just say, "I don't like the queer stuff"; you don't need to pretend that you're giving it a 1 or a 2 because it has bad pacing or the plotting is weak. We already know just looking at the score (or your username) that it's because of the queer stuff (or the progressive/political stuff).

That is a cover that really makes you want to read the issue.

Perfectly cromulant.

"I! AMM! YUU!"

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.

I really don't know what Hickman's plans were for Moira, but I doubt this mess was it.

Banshee Skinsuit Moira deserves to go down in X-Men "worst moments" history with Austin's exploding communion wafers and Professor X's unspoken love for Jean.

Bafflegab.

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

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.

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.

In volcanic ocean, shark jumps YOU.

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

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.

Um, wut?

Woke woke wokety woke?

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

"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.

Fails on every level. Everyone acts out of character and makes baffling choices. None of the corporate skullduggery makes any sense. The plot contradicts itself from issue to issue (remember that bit where Monet disappeared through a hole in the ceiling last issue?) And worst of all, it's just plain boring. This series runs a close second to Fallen Angels for the Krakoa era worst title, only because the art is better.

As far back as the first Nomad stories, Captain America has never hated America, but has always been willing to criticize those who would twist its ideals in service to hate and division. Englehart, Gruenwald, and DeMatteis all wrote Cap as someone with ideals that would be considered 'progressive' today.

Terrible plan, terrible crisis, terrible resolution.

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.

I don't understand what this book it about or what the motives of the characters are. I like Angel and Monet as the leaders of this organization but not a single other character is playing a role that feels natural.

I read this series in one go, and it was perfectly cromulant. Good art, characters with interesting powers, a few twists, some fight scenes... If this had come out as a miniseries in the 80s, it would probably have been received better. Some of critics seem to be taking it to task just for being a miniseries, or (ironically for something that started out as an event tie-in) for not having much of a point in the larger universe. But I liked it just fine.

Not a review (except to say that the vampire thing is past its due date), but seeing LOUISE in all-caps in the solicitation made me immediately picture a Bob's Burgers crossover.