Not A Hot August, More Lukewarm

Marvel actually has a few things that interest me in the August solicits, which is more than they can usually say. No, I don't mean Absolute Carnage. Why in the hell would you do an event to deliberately evoke memories of Maximum Carnage?

Granted that Magnificent Ms. Marvel will be up to its 6th issue, meaning it's sink or swim time for the book (having read issue 3 yesterday, I'm currently undecided). There's a Gwenpool mini-series, but it's being written by Leah Williams, not Chris Hastings. And it seems like Gwen's trying semi-villainous stuff like unmasking Spider-Man to remain relevant. Which was a story Hastings did already.

There's a Power Pack Grow Up one-shot by Louise Simonson and June Brigman, catching up with the kids now that they're older. Might be worth looking at. There's a She-Hulk Annual where Bullseye tries to pin one of his murders on her? Not sure how that works, or how Bullseye is going to avoid horrific injury in the first two panels. There's an Agents of Atlas mini-series that promises to address where the heck the previous team is, in a back-up story. Not tricking me into buying the whole thing just for that.

I chose to ignore the Spider-Man: Symbiote mini-series, since it's being drawn by Greg Land, but PAD is doing a one-shot with Rick Leonardi based on a fan submitted idea from before Secret Wars for Spidey in a black costume. Might be worth a look, although the $4.99 tag is daunting.

As for DC, Dial H for Hero is wrapping up, the only two new things I felt worth noting were; 1) August's issue of Green Lantern is going to involve a multiversal Lantern Corps, and 2) they're bringing back WildCATS with Warren Ellis and Ramon Villalobos as the creative team. I haven't been paying attention to The Wild Storm book Ellis has been writing, so I'm sure I'd have no idea what was going on in here, if I were inclined to buy it.

There wasn't much else out there that caught my eye. Giant Days is having the cast say their farewells to Sheffield as finals approach. I can't shake my impending worry the series is ending. Then what will Calvin read and laugh at? The world is so joyless and bleak! Speaking of which, Smooth Criminals is MIA for the third month in a row. There's Test, if I'm still buying it after 3 issues. Having not seen the first issue yet, who knows. The fifth volume of Infinity 8 is up to its second issue, of course I haven't seen the last two-thirds of volume 4 yet. But each is its own story, so that probably doesn't matter.