What I Bought 4/10/09

Funny how things work. I'm on a weekend, take the opportunity to visit the comic shop, figure I'll pick up my comics, having not received any in over 2 weeks. I get there, Jack has everything from this week I'm looking for, but, ha, ha, he sent me the previous two weeks worth of stuff last Friday. Yet I've seen nary a staple of it, though I am almost certain it arrived at my address today, what with me being away for said long weekend. 'Cause that's just how these things work. So hopefully we'll get that figured out soon. Ah well, we have four books to cover here, so might as well, right?

Booster Gold #19 - Two Booster Golds on the cover? Somewhere, Guy Gardner's head just exploded. Or maybe that was Max Lord. Though it's never pretty when heads that are already rotting explode. Extra smelly, don't ya know.

Well, at least I know what Rip was up to during this whole mess with the knife and Glowy Rex now. Helping Starfire escape her captors, so she can venture to Earth and Nightwing can have another girl to sleep with when he's not making goo-goo eyes at Oracle. What? That's how it seems to go. It's not great for Starfire, but that's how life goes sometimes.

The Boosters flee ancient Egypt, Booster from earlier in the series gets his memory wiped, and current Booster and Skeets fix everything. Except Michelle's gone. Fled somewhere she can't be controlled by Rip or Booster. I got it! She's the Black Beetle! That's the only explanation! Relax, I'm not serious. Or am I? I need some laughs out of this book. It seems more serious lately, even compared to when Max Lord was using OMACs to kill all the heroes.

Deadpool: Suicide Kings #1 - Poor Deadpool. He just can't seem to help getting screwed over by people. Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Wade sees offer for job paying 200K, visits location listed, kills "competition", learns employer owes large sum to mobster, will pay Wade 1 million to kill guy. Wade gets blamed for supposed apartment building of mobster being blown up, now is targeted by Punisher. Tombstone is involved.

Oh goody. I like Tombstone. I'm glad Benson is following Brubaker's lead and leaving Tombstone in his old-style black suit look, and not that crappy black leather look they went with post-Spectacular Spider-Man #200. I hadn't realized, though, that Tombstone was far enough up the chain that people could owe money directly to him. Good for him, though. Out of curiosity, Roscoe's Chicken & Waffles? Is that like an IHOP, or Huddle House? I'm not familiar with it, but apparently it's the food of choice for Mr. Lonnie Lincoln. I like Barberi's art when he draws Wade doing violence, not so much with the faces, or the hallucination scene. Things were looking a bit sketchy, not too finished.

Exiles #1 - As Jeff Parker tries to salvage the concept. This is the basic assemble the team, give us a quick intro to them, drop them into the problem issue. Noticeably absent from the opening sequences that show our characters' deaths is Blink. She's also the one that starts things in terms of intros, and explaining powers to each other and stuff. All of which makes me think she (and Morph/Timebroker) are hiding things from them. That's never a good start for a team.

So Parker does a decent enough job of giving some ideas of who these character are, personality-wise. Polaris is forceful, maybe a little cocky, Forge is the noble, self-sacrificing type, Beast is a little nuts, Panther's kind of a light-hearted fellow, that kind of thing. And Witch is reckless, when it's something she cares about. I thought that was pretty impressive, giving us a little idea of who they are, just from the moments before they die. I liked Espin's art as well, especially combined with Anthony Washington's colors. There's a solid simplicity to the art, in that Espin doesn't have a whole bunch of little lines, and Washington's colors make things bright, and sort of cheerful looking. It belies the severity of what they're doing (keeping the Multiverse from collapsing), but it maybe implies the sort of oddness of just picking a bunch of people who were about to die and saying "prevent reality's collapse".

Secret Six #8 -Deadshot needs a chaperone for a date with Jeanette. Scandal runs into the dancer that posed as Knockout for her birthday back in #1, and viola, chaperones. Imbecilic white supremacists try to louse up the works, get killed, remarkably, not by Deadshot. It just occur ed to me that Floyd's attempt to restrain himself is like Guy and Tora's trip to the Ice Capists, only more deadly.

So it's kind of touching to see Scandal struggling with whether to move one from Kay or not, and to see Floyd actually being made uncomfortable by Jeanette. I guess he's used to women being freaked out by the whole "I don't give a crap about nothin', I'm just a killer" schtick. I also liked that Liana had a more optimistic view of humanity, and the Six didn't laugh in her face. They were actually nice, the sort of thing that makes me actually care about the Six.

I'm trying to decide about Carlos Rodriguez' art. Sometimes I think the expressions are excellent, but other times the faces look lopsided, or maybe the eyes are too small for the face. Course, given my exposure to comic art over the years, Rodriguez is probably drawing things in proper proportion, and I'm just too messed up from years of '90s art to realize it. I don't know.

I have nothing to say about Ragdoll's dreams except that I consider myself fortunate that these were likely fairly tame by his standards. It was cute, it was strange, let's leave it at that.