What I Bought 1/6/2018

I went running this morning, fortunately before the front moved in and the wind chill went below zero. I had to hop off the road because of an approaching vehicle and as my stride was bringing my left leg forward, my right leg slipped in the snow and slid right in front of the left. So my left knee has bruised the hell out of the right calf. Fun and games.

Let's jump into some comics from 2018. I have all the books I wanted from the last two weeks, so we'll work through those over this week and early next week. Going to start with a couple of mini-series.

Atomic Robo: The Spectre of Tomorrow #3, by Brian Clevinger (writer), Scott Wegener (artist), Anthony Clark (colorist), Jeff Powell (letterer and design) - I'm sure they'll prove useful, but those little robots creep me out. Make me think of ticks, bleh.

People are continuing to barf out robotic guts and collapse, and CERES is not getting anywhere figuring out the cause. Maybe if they spent less time taking down footage of the events from the Internet they'd get somewhere. Robo is continuing to receive the data secretly and recognizes the same signal ALAN, the sentient computer that was going to leave Earth (and eradicate all life in the process) used, and heads to Hashima Island to investigate. He encounters some strange creature, and what's worse, Helsingard in an even stranger body. Yes, stranger than his usual brain in a jar mounted on a robot body.

I still feel this is someone trying to cause a panic, and Helsingard would seem a likely choice, except causing fear isn't really his style. He tends to conquer or kill. Dr. Fischer got accidentally taken along. We'll see if he drags himself from the depths of depression to make a contribution (or if Robo actually notices and tries and address that). Robo's really been a lousy boss this entire mini-series, or maybe he's always been bad at being a boss.

 Wegener has a tendency to simply his style when the characters in the panel are in the middle or far distance, because he uses a thick line, and to attempt to add too much detail would turn everything into a muddle. But there are a few panels in here where things are almost vague shapes more than characters (the panel after the creature tears through the plane, for one). Also, whether it's Wegener's job or Clark's, they need to add a pupil to characters' eyes in those panels as well. Sometimes they get away with it, and others it like my eyes are drawn immediately to the empty white spaces that are their eyeballs. There's one of Lang and Vik in particular that bothers me. I can't concentrate on anything else in the panel.

That said, I like the design on the robot, and the fight between it and Robo is good (although I still wonder how Robo's not better at fighting after all these years). It's brief, but there's a flow to it. Let Robo and the creature fight it out for a couple pages, establish what they're up against. Then Foley gets involved with the grenade launcher, which adds another element (and they break up the fight by cutting to a panel of her doing something or reacting every three panels or so). Then throw in the surprise, last-page arrival of possibly the villain. Things go bad, things get better, things go bad ahead, things get better, or possibly worse. It's well done.

The best part was Robo stealing Richard Branson's plane to get to Hashima, and referring to himself in third person when Branson does the same while asking why he's stealing the plane. I like that as a little bit of revenge for all the grief Branson's giving them. Even better, the plane was wrecked five seconds into their arrival on the island.

And I'd love to see Robo outfit himself with a rocket punch. Why not? Oooh, and some of those gravity boots like Samus Aran has, so he can double-jump! I'm being entirely serious.

Rogue and Gambit #1, by Kelly Thompson (writer), Pere Perez (artist), Frank D'Armata (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - It seems like bad tactics for Rogue to be arriving at the thing she's going to punch at the same time Gambit's exploding playing cards get there. Let one set up the other, right?

There's a couples' therapy island where mutants are vanishing, so Kitty (who looks strange with short hair) sends Rogue and Gambit, since it would be better if the duo actually have relationship issues. Now let's face it, you could pick any of about 50 X-Men, and find at least 10 others they'd have relationship issues with, but yeah, those two have a mess of them, and Gambit is in theory good at sneaking, so sure, why not? He keeps trying to rekindle things, Rogue keeps trying to maintain distance. Because she's a reasonably intelligent woman. The last page looks bad, but is probably a misdirection.

Basically a set-up issue. Get the pieces where they need to be, explain why they're there, establish current dynamic between them. The book does that reasonably well, although I can't disagree with people who say this relationship needs to be left in the past. I think Rogue's experienced enough that she can tell Gambit is never going to be someone she can count on in a relationship. He insists that they could try just being friends, but can't stop flirting and hinting that she must still be into him. Then he gets indignant about her kissing Deadpool, and Rogue points out she's had to hear about his escapades from other X-Men plenty of times. Gambit is always going to be that kind of person.

(To be fair to Gambit, not a phrase I expected to type, he brought up Deadpool because Rogue is back to using her powers as an excuse to maintain distance, and he pointed out she had her powers during her little session with Deadpool. Although perhaps Gambit should take the hint.)

But even if this mini-series tries to draw a line under that relationship, and there's no guarantee it will, we know someone else will come along eventually and try to start it up again. The same way writers have kept drifting back around to Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne, even when that is a terrible idea (although thankfully that one has been mostly left alone the last 10 years, since one or the other of them has been dead or Ultron most of that time). So is there a point to this whole exercise then? I guess hope it can be entertaining.

And there were some parts I liked. Rogue deciding, if Gambit is going to bring up Deadpool, to use Wade to hit Gambit in his ego, where it'll hurt the most. The Danger Room session, where apparently Rogue/Gambit is a topic of much discussion among the students.

Pere Perez does a double-page splash of the Rogue and Gambit seemingly at each others' throats that is foreshadowing something. The background is one of those fragmented mirrors, where the shards are showing different moments from their shared history. There was one panel I thought Perez was trying to mimic one of the Kubert brother's '90s art (if you flip through the issue, it's the one in the lower right, with Gambit being carried by Rogue, and he's wearing a high-collared jacket), and maybe a couple of the others, but I can't be sure. Since most of the issue is talking, there's a lot of panels or people just sitting and talking, but Perez does a good job of making the body language clear and work together with the expressions and the dialogue. His work looks smoother than I remember the last time I saw it, which was either the Bryan Q. Miller Batgirl series, or that Power Man and Iron Fist mini-series from 5 or 6 years ago. But D'Armata's colors work also seems more varied and with greater depth than what I remember the colorists of those books doing, so maybe that's what's different.

Overall, I don't think there's anything wrong with the writing or art. Everyone involved is doing solid work. I'm mostly unsure about the point of it, I guess, and whether I care enough at this point to pick up the second issue.