A whole LOT of very solid comics last week. We can’t review everything in-depth, so the least we can do is give you a quick-hit letting you know what we thought of an issue and whether it is worth picking up.
Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #6 – Talk about not being what I expected! I was honestly starting to lose the narrative in issues #4 and #5 of this series once Spider/Wolvie ran into that Luke Cage-looking guy with the diamond-encrusted baseball bat. So, I really wasn’t looking forward to this issue at all, but it really came together nicely. Silly me, how could I doubt Jason Aaron? The guy still hasn’t told me a bad story. This issue dispenses with the diamond-encrusted baseball bats and Mojo and finds Peter and Logan stranded in the Wild West where Peter finds love and Logan comes to realize how much he likes Peter. I’ll need to reread this entire series, but I think it might just be one of those modern classics that you could just hand to people as a good Spider-Man/Wolverine story. Really nice art by Adam Kubert. Grade: A-
Uncanny X-Men #537 – Kieron Gillen has got a nice little story going on in Uncanny and it is making me very optimistic about how his run on Uncanny might turn out. The story in this issue follows the deposed Powerlord Kruun from Breakworld as he attempts to exact revenge upon the X-Men who caused him to lose power during Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run. What makes this story work so nicely is that Gillen is only playing with a few of the X-Men at one time. Less is always more when doing an X-Men story! Most of the action in this issue is Kitty-centric as she has to find a way to get help when no one can hear her. Her solution is pretty darn clever. I wish the Dodson’s could do all the art on Uncanny and it should be a law that every issue that the Dodson’s do illustrate feature Kitty and Emma Frost because they draw the hell out of those two characters. Grade: B
The Tattered Man – This one-shot from Image by Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray is a very straightforward. It’s Halloween and some druggie kids take advantage of the holiday to get an old man to open his door, they bust in wanting drug money and get a little more than they bargained for. There are some parts of this story that are a little familiar, but the execution is really tight and the creators bring it home by not being afraid to kill a few characters who you would usually think are “safe”. The highlight of the issue was probably the old man recounting his background as a Holocaust survivor (just going to show that you can tread familiar ground if you do it well). Nice art, especially on the design of the supernatural force of vengeance that shows up. Palmiotti & Gray could have a nice creator-owned winner with this and this could easily become an ongoing series. Grade: B
The Incredible Hulks #629 – This was a very good conclusion to a pretty good story arc that teamed up Bruce Banner/Hulk his ex-wife Betty/Red She Hulk. The story has lots of good Hulk moments. What Pak does really well is sell the “Oh no! Now you’ve made him mad!” moment. You know, the scene where the bad guy whacks the hell out of the Hulk, Hulk goes flying 15 miles through the air and smashes into the ground, but when Hulk climbs out of the crater you just know that the other dude is in HUGE trouble. It’s hard to capture that moment, but Pak does it really well. We also get some really good Banner/Betty stuff in this issue. Betty wants to be with Bruce, but as Red She Hulk, she has other plans. The only downer in this issue is that I don’t see how the ending jibes at all with what happened in Fear Itself #2 where Banner and Betty are working out their issues in a rain forest. Is there a writer who cares less about that sort of contemporaneous action than Matt Fraction? Great art by Tom Grummett too. Grade: B
Spider-Girl #7 – There are some good elements in this issue, but the negatives kinda balance things out. The good is seeing Spider-Girl teaming up with Spider-Man to take down some bad guys. We’re so used to Spider-Man being “the kid” who is always the one being childish and inappropriate and annoying the piss out of the other heroes, that it is kinda fun to see the role reversal and Tobin handles that really well. There is also a very creative moment when Spider-Girl overwrites the code of a murderous robot’s AI with the game Angry Birds to keep the robot from attacking (unless someone acts like a pig, of course). But, the downsides are here too. For one, I don’t want Spider-Man in this book. Nothing screams, “This character cannot carry his/her own title!” like having Wolverine or Spider-Man co-star. The other problem I’m having is that this issue is full of Spider-Girl punching out room’s full of commando guys. Spider-Girl has no powers and is a ~80 pound teenage girl. I don’t care if she was “trained by Captain America”, she just can’t hit hard enough to have her main attack being punching and kicking 230-pound guys. Watch some MMA and get creative with how these undersized characters can take down a bigger dude! And we have a classic Marvel cover fail that shows Spider-Girl punching Screwball (who isn’t even mentioned in the issue). Grade: C
Calvario Hills #1 – Sometimes it is good to try something different and Calvario Hills is definitely THAT. Written and drawn by Spanish writer/artist Marti, the issue has two stories. The first deals with a jumbled tale about gun rights and race relations in America and possible linkages between gun ownership and racism. The second deals with a post-Presidential Richard Nixon in a plot to flee the country with his massive loot and his involvement with a secret society of the Catholic church. The art is the highlight here. There’s nothing gaudy, just straightforward B&W cartooning. It made me think of Charles Burns. The downside is that neither of the stories is very good. For one thing, as an American, I just don’t understand the international fascination with the minutiae of American politics when we’re not talking things like the “War of Terror”. Do Spanish folks really care about American gun laws? The other problem is that Marti gets so many things wrong about the way the US really is. This is kinda the USA as it would have appeared in a bad 1970’s stereotype: out of control gun violence, raging racism against African Americans, Nixon trying to flee the country, etc. Still, it’s worth a read just to be more worldly. Grade: D+
-Dean Stell
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