Monday, 4 January 2016

The Comics Ramble Post-Christmas Catch-Up


Always a good time to get some reading done, Christmas, and digital comics make it all the easier as I can just sit in a corner digesting Turkey and pretending to listen to my mother as I read stuff on my laptop. So, a few choice cuts that piled up as I prepared to move and that I finally powered through over the break:

Starfire: a surprisingly good series. Sex-obsessed, of course, because this is Palmiotti and Conner we're talking about but setting up Starfire with a Florida town as her "patch" is a good match. Her relationships with the local sheriff and coast guard captain are absolutely lovely. And Dick Grayson turns up at one point, which at the moment is a sure fire sign of a fun issue.

New Romancer: Promising, mainly since it doesn't pretend Lord Byron wasn't an utter shit at times. At one point he waxes lyrical about how he never met his daughter Ada and Lexy, our modern main character lady, calls him on the fact he straight up abandoned the girl.

Bombshells: Structure is awful (these nine-parters are not coherent stories, they'd be better off naming each chapter individually) but the overall premise is strong and, frankly, it's all design porn made to sell toys so there's a pretty low bar to jump and this sails high above it. I was sold as soon as Batwoman turned up as a masked baseball player who fights crime but if that hadn't worked then Supergirl and Stargirl as Night Witches would certainly have done the trick.

Dark Knight III: The Master Race: bwahahahahahahahahaha!!! Awful yet intriguing. Or, to put it another way: a modern Frank Miller comic.

Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat: Amazing. I love that they've retconned the old '60s Patsy romance comics to be comics that exist in-universe written by her mother about Patsy's teenage hi-jinks. There aren't enough straight-up comedies in comics so this one's very welcome.

Titans Hunt: Dan Abnett tries desperately to sort out the continuity nightmare of the New 52 classic Titans? Curious premise but I'm three issues in and it's grabbing me but that might just be the Doctor Who fan training kicking in to make me love this kind of continuity wrangling. Just about everything Abnett writes featuring Dick Grayson is gold but he's practically shackled to the Finch “kill everything” version of Donna Troy and Lobdell's “no such thing as recovery” Roy Harper.

Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl: This comic is insane and I especially loved the issue that seamlessly switched from guest DJing to magical duel. Beyond that the series has a fantastic spin on the age-old idea of what it means to sell one's soul. 

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