What I Bought 5/3/2017 - Part 1

One comic that I wanted came out this week, and I was pretty sure neither store in town would have it, so I didn't even bother to go look. But I do have books from last month, so let's look at those, starting with the last issues for two books.

Great Lakes Avengers #7, by Zac Gorman (writer), Will Robson (artist), Scott Hanna (inker), Tamra Bonvillain (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - I'm surprised Deadpool doesn't have his own weight loss supplement, aka him coming to your house and slicing parts off.

The team defeats Dr. Nod with Maneuver 33, which really needed to be accompanied by the phrase, "My immortal brain needs beer,", but Mr. Immortal is an alcoholic, so probably it'd be more a call for help. Fresh off their victory, which has given Detroit bragging rights over Green Bay - well it's not like the Lions or the Pistons have done anything for Detroit on that front in the last 10 years, or 50 in the Lions' case - they're told they've been fired by none other than Deadpool. And that's how the book ends, the team sitting in stunned silence as they learn of their cancelation.

When Bertha is fighting Dr. Nod at the start of the issue, she's a couple stories tall. During the fight, the drugs wear off and she shrinks back down while fighting her agent and the doctor's assistants. And it's about that time the wolf-girl shows up. But since Robson didn't really draw anything around them to give a sense of scale, I thought Good had gotten into the drugs to become a huge wolf-girl, rather than Bertha having shrunk to closer to her normal size. The agent and the goons show up in a van full of the drug, so i figured they loaded themselves up before fighting, and you can see in the panels where they fight Bertha is various large people and some bricks. There's nothing to give it scale.

Having Dr. Nod's teeth apparently not grow with the rest of his flesh, so that he's a blobby-looking monster with a huge mouth and relatively tiny teeth was kind of nifty. I'm not clear on how Bertha's powers work, beyond having control over her mass. Presumably she'd need to increase bone density to support the extra mass, but would that extend to teeth? Anyway, it was a little touch of the absurd to the visual I liked.

The book was probably always doomed to a short life, but I would have liked to see it come together a little more. I'm still not sure what Gorman's overall plan was for the book. He had something in mind, but it didn't get very far along. Oh well.

Patsy Walker, aka Hellcat #17, by Kate Leth (writer), Brittney L. Williams (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Clayton Cowles (letterer) - Playing as yourself in a video game would have to be strange and frustrating, especially if they made you a joke character like Dan Hibiki, or Phoenix Wright in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. "My attacks are better than that! Iron Man doesn't have a huge shoulder cannon!"

Patsy receives a letter from Jennifer Walters, telling her Jen negotiated her an excellent deal on various rights related to her childhood adventures and so she's freaking rich. Patsy takes her friends to the mall, where they are menaced by a couple of her fans pretending to be villainous vampires, who actually have crushes on each other. So things are resolved with a minimum of fuss, as Jubilee notes Patsy hasn't sent many of her enemies to jail over the course of this title. Ah well, HYDRA Captain America would probably just let them out again, so why bother?

So the book ends on an upbeat note. Like the GLA, Patsy doesn't seem sure what she's going to do next, but she has options, and she satisfied with where she's at in life. A check for an amount so large you doubt its validity will do that for ya. I'd hope she would keep the temp agency going, even if she hired someone to run it. Probably a lot of people using that to help pay the bills.

I appreciated the letter from Jennifer Walters bit. Reminds me of Cable sending Deadpool a psimitar in the last issue of Cable/Deadpool (after Cable had been absent from the book for the final 10 issues thanks to Mike Carey's X-Men run). I don't think Jen leaving the book was entirely Leth and Williams' call - I imagine they could have kept her in, given Marvel's lax approach to inter-book continuity these days, but it might have been an awkward clash with Jen's new title - but it's nice to acknowledge these characters are friends. And friends wouldn't just entirely forget about each other. If a person really matters, you'd at least check in with them somehow.

The fashion sequence thing was a cute callback to Patsy's earlier books I assume. And it got Jubilee back in the classic yellow jacket and huge pink sunglasses, which is appropriate for a return to her mallrat days. And Williams draws it very well, like I figure there are certain artists it would be a weird look, but with Williams it doesn't seem out of place at all.Also, in looking at the panel of her room, I notice there's a picture of her giving Dr. Strange bunny ears while Ian laughs and Wong, well Wong is probably suppressing the laugh. The shock lines combined with the brighter, deeper color in the panel where Patsy's tossed the cross at the Somnambulisters was a good attention-getter. Then the color fades to a duller pink in the next panel because these aren't actual vampires and they can't keep up their acting. The defeated posture and 'Ahhh, help,' were a funny combination.

So the Patsy Party is over, but it lasted longer than I thought it would. That's something.