Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Anticipatin'

I'm also a respondent to Brian's recent call to arms, and appreciate the opportunity to post here. (Num104, I'm with you.)

Here's a list of three comics that I look forward to reading this evening (in addition to big guns like JSA and Superman).

I was all geared up to snark about recent issues, but they've exceeded expectations:

New Excalibur #2. (I was there at the genesis of this title [man, do I feel old]; liked the first issue.)

Sea of Red #7. (Great start, though it hit a bit of a rough patch in the middle; nice previous issue.)

Spider-Girl #93. (After some grumbling about the title's quality, #92 grabbed me again; looking forward to the latest.)

Oh, and don't get me started on Marvel's Essential Spider-Woman!

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Spider-Girl #93: Heck yes. I was annoyed by the Venom-Goblin storyline at first, but it's going in a much more interesting direction than I expected. This series seems to have a tendency to go in a holding pattern for a while with single-issue stories that are reliably fun but mostly don't stand out and then crank up the volume when you least expect it. I fully expect this storyline to be as great as the Fury/Black Tarantula/Lady Octopus epic of two years ago. I'm not going to give in to the snark side by grumbling about how absolutely everything in the Spider-Man mythos these days has to revolve around the Goblin legacy. Instead, I'm going to concentrate on how amazing it is that DeFalco manages to consistently make Clone Saga characters like the Scriers and Kaine not suck. And he brought back Kristy Watson! How cool is that?

I'm also looking forward to Marvel Team-Up #15. Yes, it does have annoying overhyped white-elephant characters Araña and X-23, but more importantly than that, it has Gravity! I honestly wasn't expecting Gravity to ever appear again after the end of his (great) miniseries. I hope he won't be crowded out in this arc's large cast of characters.

I'm not sure whether I should get Essential Spider-Woman or not--the title has a reputation for being fairly mediocre, but it has some great writing talent on it. (Archie Goodwin, Mark Gruenwald, and oddly enough Michael "Bugfuck" Fleischer.)

12/07/2005 7:31 PM  
Blogger Melchior del Darién said...

I agree with what you've said about Spider-Girl; DeFalco is doing some interesting stuff in this book. It's as if the alternate universe setting has set loose all kinds of creative energy.

I'm afraid I can't offer any objective advice about the Spider-Woman run. Like Bendis, I've been convinced that Jessica Drew is one of the most excellent people in the Marvel universe since I was thirteen, and have been eagerly awaiting a compilation like this. Those comics capture (or are trapped in) the story-telling conventions of the time, concepts of marketing and branding, and explorations of comic-book feminism. I also first read them at the age at which certain comic book stories can make a big impression. They're interesting to me, but ...

12/07/2005 9:58 PM  

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