It's Almost Too Hot to get Excited For Any of This

It's not even June yet, what is this 90+ degrees bullshit? The solicitations for August are out, so is there anything worth being amped for?

Ann Nocenti and David Aja's Seeds is finally showing up, so that's one for me at least. I may not understand it, but I'm pretty sure I'll find it interesting. I usually do when it comes to Nocenti's work. That's the main thing from Dark Horse to catch my eye, although if Empowered & Sistah Spooky's High School Hell keeps skipping months it might still be going in August.

If I really have said enough is enough with Cave Carson, then there's nothing going for me from DC. But a few things I saw I'll mention anyway. One, it's apparently the 25th Anniversary of Knightfall (aka, Bane snaps Batman's back like a twig), if you wanted to feel old. Two, DC is doing another round of those team-up books between their characters and the Looney Tunes. Daffy Duck's running into the Joker, and they let Brett Booth draw the cover. As with the Flash/Speed Buggy issue that probably came out this month, I wonder why they let Booth draw that. Or anything, really.

Three, the Raven mini-series that's running is going to see the formation of a team of young magic users, which looks like it might include Traci 13, Dr. Thirteen's magic-wielding daughter, the one who dated Jaime Reyes for a while? I think it's her; the staff and the outfit look familiar. Now you know as well as I do the perils of buying a comic because a character you like that doesn't show up much is on the cover. Easy way to get disappointed, but I figured I'd mention it, at least.

Because it was two months late showing up, Bubba Ho-Tep and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers will still be an issue away from being done in August, if I'm buying it. Brian Clevinger's doing another Real Science Adventures, set in the Byzantine Empire (which actually starts in July, but I missed it last month, I guess). I haven't had great luck with Real Science Adventures, since I seem to require Robo actually be there to interact to care about most of the supporting cast, but if it sounds good to you, go give Brian Clevinger some money.  There's also a book from Steve Niles, Delta 13? It'll be on issue 4 by august, but people in space finding something bad on an asteroid? I haven't read a lot of Niles' work, and what I have didn't do a lot for me, but might be worth a shot.

Boom! still has Coda and Giant Days, they're doing their part to give me something to read. Hopefully I'll have the first issue of Coda here in another week or so. As for Giant Days, Ingrid is back, and that doesn't seem to be good for Daisy's state of mind. As she said, being broken up with Ingrid is just like dating Ingrid. At Image, Copperhead is wrapping up. Booooo, boooooooooooo. I know every other book Image puts out these days is a space Western, but I liked this particular space Western.

Paul Jenkins is writing a new series called Beyonders. I haven't read anything of his since roughly Civil War-era Marvel, about the time he gifted us the delightful double crap platter of Speedball-as-Penance and Sally Floyd berating Captain America for not watching NASCAR. And I had so much goodwill towards him from his time writing Spider-Man up to that point. Anyway, this book has some guy figuring out all the conspiracies he buys into are real and going on some sort of grand trip across the world with a flatulent Corgi(?). I don't know, sounds a bit like those National Treasure movies I despised when I describe it that way, but it caught my eye for some reason.

As for Marvel, there's nothing new that interests me. Infinity Countdown has become Infinity Wars. Silly me, thinking the first mini-series would be the end of it. There's some event involving those time-traveling teen X-Men called Extermination. A new West Coast Avengers book, but outside of Clint Barton, I don't care about anyone in the book (I feel like Gwenpool is character I'm not going to trust in anyone other than Chris Hastings' hands). Fantastic Four is starting up, by Dan Slott and Sara Pichelli, if that interests you. Marvel has marked the occasion by having Fantastic Four variants for most of their other books. The covers at least seem to depict different eras of the FF's history. So Liefeld drew the team from when Medusa was in Sue's spot. Art Adams drew the New FF he and Walt Simonson did as a joke. J. Scott Campbell drew the team during the stretch in the '90s when Sue started rocking that ridiculous outfit with the 4 cutout. I'm sure none of us are surprised by this. Although I didn't see anyone do a cover for that stretch where Luke Cage was on the FF. C'mon Marvel, you have a TV show starring him and everything! I thought you were all about trying pointless exercises to capitalize on that?

Here, let's look at this nice Iron Man cover by Alexander Lozano. That's pretty cool, right? Decent palette cleanser. There are some pretty good covers this month. The Michael del Mundo Thor cover was pretty nice, too. Very colorful. I'm idly curious how Dan Slott will write Machine Man. The NextWave version, the more classic version, or the split-the-difference approach Jeff Parker tried in his Red She-Hulk? Note: I'm not curious enough to buy it, just idly speculating.

In books I will probably be buying, Squirrel Girl's trying to keep Kraven and Spider-Man from fighting, Ms. Marvel's still trying to clean up whatever mess she and Bruno made this time, Madrox is still in a race against time, Domino is on the run. Those Squirrel Girl/Ms. Marvel things are still going. I wish they'd just call it a mini-series and be done with it, instead of all this vaguely similar one-shot titling. This month it's Squirrel Girl/Ms. Marvel; last month it was Ms. Marvel/Squirrel Girl. Yes, let's make it harder to keep track of whether the books are a continuation of each other. What a brilliant strategy.