Weekly Comic Revew for 4/4/12

Well, my living room is still a mess but thing to be pretty well set-up for now. Time to start getting caught up here.

Avengers Academy #28 – This is the second part of the “War with the Runaways”. Following the obligatory hero vs hero battle, the two teams head back to their time period. While there though, we see a little background chatter the Avengers are unaware of in which Reptil is referred to as “the Chosen One”. It should be interesting to see what they have in mind for him. Once back, Nico uses her staff to make everyone understand what the other side has gone through. The two teams reach a middle groan that is barely acceptable to both sides. Like the Young Avengers, I’d like to see the Runaways more. Both teams need to get their own books back.

Avengers vs. X-Men #1 – The most over-hypes story of the year finally gets going. This one is labeled “Round 1” and had 3 base covers. The main one showing Cap fighting Cyclops, and ones either Cap or Cyclops in color and the other in black and white. I picked the one highlighting Captain America stating “I’m with the Avengers!” Tho the Avengers are high an mighty, the X-Men have turned into adults having children’s temper tantrums since House of M. I’ve never been less interested in their titles. The issue shows a number of things leading up to the big events. Nova crashes to Earth and warns the Avengers of the coming of the Phoenix Force. Scott is beating up Hope to teach her how to fight. (What an asshole he is in the issue. Not that he hasn’t been for a while but he’s really pushing it.) Of course, this causes Hope to channel the Phoenix Force and kick his ass. (Yeah, Hope!) Of course, this triggers Tony Stark’s sensors and the Avengers run off to Utopia. Cap talks to Scott and of course Scott goes overboard and blasts Steve making a helicarrier of Avengers to uncloak above the island. This obviously isn’t going to go well. Am I going to pick up the rest of this and follow it? I don’t know. If I wasn’t running this blog, the answer would be no. I might watch it through just to keep reporting on the “big” event. I wonder if there will ever be a vessel for the Phoenix Force in this universe that isn’t a red headed female. (In an alternate one, there was a black haired male who had it in the time of the Guardians of the Galaxy.) Also, how does Tony Stark plan on destroying something as powerful as the Phoenix Force. He’d have better luck against Galactus! Not sure what they have planned here.

Danger Club #1 – We’ve seen it before. Big galactic threat. The heroes run off, fight, and home back to lick their wounds. This title takes an interesting look at things though. What if the heroes never made it back? Well, the kid sidekicks are left trying to figure out what to do when that happens in this Image Comics title. One kid hero, Apollo, who is quite powerful is pulling some of the kid heroes together and making them fight each other to prove themselves to him. (What an ego!) A few others (a Robin wanna-be, a magician, a young Nick Fury wanna-be, and a stereotypical Asian girl in a giant Robot) have teamed up to try to be what their adult counterparts would have wanted them to be. I’m really not sure where things are going from here but I guess something is up (Isn’t something always up?) and Kid Vigilante (the Robin wanna-be with a really lame hero name) is trying to pull together people to stop it. We’ll see how things go.

Green Arrow #8 – Green Arrow escapes Leer, runs across some dwarf, goes back with one of the triplets, sees what Leer’s doing, and runs away again. Meanwhile everyone is wondering if Ollie is alive or not. Really, I’m disappointed with the title. This is turning into another New 52 failure and is on warning of being dropped by me like a number of other titles already have.

Hawk and Dove #8 – It’s the last issue of the title. They push together a conclusion of the latest story line in no great effort of story telling and leave the pair to continue their crime fighting. It’s actually a pretty lame issue to go out on. I really wanted to enjoy this book but they aren’t even trying. Go away, Rob Liefeld.

Night Force #2 of 7 – This issue gives us a little more background on both Zoe Davis (who it seems had a child but doesn’t remember it) and Officer Duffy (or more precisely, his father). There’s lots of pieces to the puzzle of this story and Baron Winters knows some of them but not all or even enough of them. It should be interesting to see where this goes as more unfolds.

Red Lanterns #8 – More pieces of all the puzzles start to come together. We learn a little bit more about Abysmus and his creator, Atrocitus. Rancorr looks for answers about himself while Guy looks into his history on Earth. Also, a sickness infects the Red Lanterns linked to their main power battery which could lead to the distruction of this corps (but probably not… or at least I hope not. We need to keep Dex-Star around at least until they make a plushie of him. 😉 ). Lots going on here.

Stormwatch #8 – This book was my big surprise of the New 52. I checked it out on a whim and it’s probably the best book of the current line-up. This issue continues the gravity miners story as J’onn reveals what he knows about them. Midnighter takes Jenny Quantum in to save Apollo and turns on her which I’m sure is going to make for some bad blood for a while. The dynamics in the group as well as the oddity of some of the team members is what really makes this title interesting.

Well, that really didn’t take too long despite having a kitten laying nearby who wanted her belly rubbed. (She’s lucky she’s got me. I’m still looking for someone to rub my belly. 😉 ) But back to the review. There were some really good and some not so good titles this week. Red Lanterns and Stormwatch both easily rose to the top. Danger Club would probably be my 3rd choice. We’ll have to see if it continues to be worth checking out. There’s actually sometime about Danger Club that reminds me of the old King Hell title by Rick Veitch title, Brat Pack, which was also about kid sidekicks. That was a lot darker and bizarre a comic though. Maybe if I ever get things caught up and can find the time, I’ll do some posts about old titles that I’ve found interesting. For now, I’ll just try to work on current events. I’ll try to get this past week’s comics done on Tuesday.