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What COMIC BOOKS have you been reading?
Normally, I'm not a fan of Gerber. As a moderate liberal, I find his political venting to be shrill and annoying. His attempts at humor are often crude and heavy-handed, especially anything involving Howard the Duck. But he did his finest work with the Defenders.
There were a few overlapping storylines during these Defenders issues. There is a bizarre group of villains known as the Headmen, and each member had a deformity or super power involving their heads. A fictional equivalent of the KKK tries to incite a race war. A team of freedom fighters from the future gets stranded on Marvel Earth. The Defenders bring them back to the future and help them fight the alien race that conquered their Earth. Returning alien villain Zebulon is operating a satirical version of the Church of Scientology. Valkyrie ends up in a PG-rated storyline in women's prison, and her ex-husband hangs around the team as a mouthpiece for Gerber's rants. And then there is the mysterious Elf with a Gun.
Somehow, it all works. The ex-husband is a useful POV character and straight man to react to all the weirdness. The story takes wild twists and turns, but each story is brought to a decent conclusion, except for the Elf. Even the humor works, especially in this scene where the Defenders stand accused of being... Bozos.
pbs.twimg.com/media/B6HSE4-CUAAMJAP.jpg
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- Jackwraith
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It has to be noted that he did solid work in the early days of Man-Thing, too, which is where Howard first appeared.
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Whiteout is Rucka's first published comic. As you might expect, it's a murder mystery, but it's a murder mystery in Antarctica. It's a great setting, and Rucka pulls as much from it as he can.
A Cold War spy thriller where Moneypenny is the real hero, not Bond, Velvet is a more recent piece from Brubaker. He could do this in his sleep by now. The action moves, there are some good twists, I enjoyed it.
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- BillyBobThwarton
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Definitely leans more on the Daniel Craig "Bond as thug and assassin" interpretation. It leans hard on it. Each volume includes one brutal interrogation carried out by Bond, and you see him graphically finish every one of his enemies with a shot to the head or broken neck. I suspect they turned the blood black in the second volume to avoid some sort of censor.
If you can stomach that, it's a pretty great adventure comic. The villains and their henchmen and plans are appropriately grandiose, the writing is tight, the action is clean, and Bond escapes an assassination attempt by forcing a car crash and then taking his roller luggage out of the trunk and walking to the station after straightening his tie. Were either of these volumes competently executed films, they could easily make the top five Bonds of all time.
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- BillyBobThwarton
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Wicked is pretty well known, but twelve deities of diverse backgrounds take human form and reign as pop stars. I’ll keep reading it because there’s nothing like it, but it’s not really grabbing me. I don’t care much for any of the characters, and I just can’t get on Gillen’s wavelength. I know the man loves his pop music, but they may as well be the gods who incarnate as CrossFit and Peloton trainers for all it matters to me.
IDW’s ongoing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles run is entirely and unabashedly awesome though. I’ve read through volume nine, and it hasn’t yet failed failed to make me smile. It takes the same approach as Grant Morrison to Batman: it’s all true. Elements are drawn from every incarnation of the Turtles, and new storylines and characters still leave their mark. Just great.
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- hotseatgames
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I was surprised that apparently I still don't get to see the run up to it all, with Jean Paul Valley getting beaten up by Killer Croc or Bane.
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- Sagrilarus
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But I never cared for any of the characters and even hated a good deal of them. Everything around them was strong enough to keep me reading through to the end, but it's not something I'm going to look back on terribly fondly or recommend to anyone.
Looking back now, it seems odd to me that three of the characters are clearly modeled on David Bowie, Prince and George Harrison on the Sgt. Pepper album cover. The first two, at least, make sense for the associated characters' personalities, but for a comic that strove so hard to be of the moment and based on something as ephemeral as pop music, why throw back to artists who peaked decades earlier and were all dead by the time the series was done?
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Joel wants to and has managed to forget everything about his time as a Quiz Kid, but Michael wants to know if his father’s obtuseness is caused by his bizarre childhood as strange parental relationships. It’s really cutting and quiet.
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