Astonishing X-Men #31
Creators: Warren Ellis and Phil Jimenez
Warren Ellis continues his run on X-Men by continuing to put them in outlandish sci-fi scenarios. Agent Brand of SWORD is in trouble, and the X-Men swoop in to the rescue. Some vibrant Jimenez art makes for great action scenes as all the principal characters see a little action. It all seems mundane enough to be an episode of the cartoon (albeit with more blanked out cursing) until the last two pages take a bizarre and crazy turn and plunge us into what we have to assume is the rest of the arc.
I love this book, and would read it no matter what. It just happens to also be a great individual story.
grade: A
Dark Reign: The List – Secret Warriors
Creators: Jonathan Hickman and Ed McGuiness
If James Bond and Jason Bourne were the same guy, and they were played by Clint Eastwood while trying to act like Dennis Hopper, you’d have something close to the awesomeness Nick Fury is supposed to represent in the modern Marvel Universe. I don’t know that he ever quite gets there. For one thing, it must be very hard to be such a high-level fighter when your one eye prevents you from having any depth perception. But I digress.
The two main things we are meant to glean from this story, I guess, are that
1) Nick has everything under control, and can pretty much do anything he wants. If this is true, one wonders why he hasn’t been busier fixing things, although the Secret Warriors book is doing a good job telling some of that story.
2) The super secret organization that has been running the other super secret organization is actually being run by yet another, even MORE secret organization. I love spy fiction, but I fear that we are quickly approaching some sort of recursion error.
Also, McGuiness draws Norman Osborn like some sort of fell vampire lord, which is a little disconcerting.
grade: C
Daredevil #501
Creators: Andy Diggle and Robert De La Torre
This is a jumping on point, a new start for a new writer, an epilogue to the big events of #500, and a prologue to the upcoming arc. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and they do cover it. However, in the process we get 2 pages of action and 20 pages of brooding and talking. I found that to be too high ratio. This book has been very good for quite some time, so I expect things to get better. However, this whole issue was really just catch-up with very little actually happening.
grade: C-
Deadpool #900
A guy walks into the doctor’s office with a frog on his head. The doctor asks him, “What seems to be the problem?” The frog says, “It started with a bump on my ass.”
One-liners can be really funny. They work best when you don’t over-explain them or wait for the laugh. You just say them quickly, and the funny part will make people laugh before the dumb part makes them think you’re an idiot. By the time they realize you’re an idiot, they’re already laughing and can’t really call you on it.
Deadpool is the comic book version of a one-liner. The longer a Deadpool story lasts, the less I find myself interested. Deadpool works best in short, frenetic, violent bursts. You can laugh and goggle and not think about the fact that this is a character that has very little actual personality. Because of this, Deadpool 900 is a perfect venue for some great Deadpool stories. There’s a send-up of CSI, a funny but slightly creepy childhood memory story, a ping-pong match against Doc Oc, and one of the best stories I’ve seen messing with the fourth-wall convention. None of it is deep. The body count is high, the laughs are fun, and you don’t notice that it’s probably stupid until a while after you read it. I’ll take that any day.
grade: B+
Michael is old enough to know better, but still reads comics. He writes about them to make himself feel less nerdy. 
