I bought 107 new comics in 2021, an increase of 34 from the previous, blighted year. Still the lowest total for a year where comic distribution wasn't completely disrupted for over two months. Actually, it would have been higher, but between Vault apparently soliciting books to come out a month earlier than they actually do, and the second issue of Grrl Scouts slipping into January, the total came out a bit lower than I expected.
High Point: It's a beautiful book. Rodriguez does most of the inking and coloring himself, changing up styles to match whatever vibe Al Ewing's going with for this Magical Metatextual Adventure. The whole "Kirby Science" look in the Sixth Cosmos was probably my favorite so far, especially the fight between the Silver Surfer and Zota. The Surfer either gifting or cursing baby Galen with the knowledge of all those lives he's going to devour in the next Cosmos was an interesting moment.
Low Point: I still don't understand what Ewing's talking about with Strange letting his magic do what it likes. He can bring it out, but he can't actually make it do anything? Plus, comics that are commentary about comics are not typically my bag.
High Point: Kivela's very good at showing us a world slowly losing to ice. Where you can see glimpses of what it was, maybe what Van remembers, but that's being buried. Which explains part of why she sees staying as a dead end, but also why others want to try and reverse what's happened. Along those lines, Van's ability to rationalize basically any action she takes. To insist looking to the past is a waste, while ignoring she's using emotional blackmail on a holographic recording of her mother to get what she wants.
Low Point: That said, what Van's after seems to keep shifting. Get in touch with other scientists, get off the planet. No, track down the guy cloning her son. No, destroy the alien thing she created so it can't be used, or just use it herself to remake the world. I guess that's adaptability, and again, she can rationalize whichever course she takes, but it gets to the point I'm wondering if she even knows what the hell she's really trying to accomplish.
Freak Snow #1: I don't know, some crazy guy living in a post-apocalyptic winter wonderland going on some made-up quest to alleviate his guilt complex or something.
Giant-Size Black Cat #1: The conclusion to Jed MacKay's Black Cat run, where he and C.F. Villa show us why Felicia was trying to get together three of the people with Infinity Stones inside them. As conclusions go, it works pretty well, though I hate to see Felicia get caught. At least it's only temporary.
Grrl Scouts: Stone Ghost #1: Jim Mahfood returns to his Grrl Scouts universe, but with three different characters this time, focusing on one lady's attempt to retrieve her dead lover's remains from someone he owed a debt to. Mahfood's continued the evolution of his style from where it was in Magic Socks, and I like it a lot better here. I think partially because the coloring seems to match the art style better.
Impossible Jones #1, 2: Karl Kesel and David Hahn's book about a thief who gets caught in a super-science experiment and decides to pose as a hero while hunting down the member of her crew who betrayed her. They're trying to do a lot of worldbuilding really fast, but it's mostly working for me.
High Point: The first issue, when Larry Hama had Danny knock the head off a zombie, horse-riding warrior with said warrior's own arm. Also, Taskmaster was there, which is always good. David Wachter drew zombie destruction pretty well.
Low Point: It really feels like Hama needed to pad the thing out for six issues before getting to his conclusion because the heroes spend a lot of time running from one plan to the next, even though nothing they're doing is having any effect. Protect the dragons, forget that, protect that gate, forget that, bring the Heavenly Cities to Earth to unite the heroes. Ooops, that didn't work at all. The whole thing just feels pointless, like the cast is a bunch of idiot teens in a slasher movie running around like chickens with their heads cut off. And there's a whole thing about a lady wanting revenge on Danny that never gets any sort of proper payoff.
High Point: Magenta King's designs for the kaiju are pretty cool. Good sense of scale and the right amount of creepy to feel like a real horror, rather than somebody in a rubber suit. The interplay between Jenny and Aiko is pretty funny. Grumpy old lady master and smart-mouthed drunk kid is usually a good mix, and Dwonch and McKinney don't disappoint there.
Low Point: The fact that it's very obviously just part 1 of something larger. There's no real resolution at the end of the mini-series, since I wouldn't say Jenny has really even begun to confront her issues with her father. Which isn't even getting into the whole thing about the looming threat of the monster that killed him that the story ends on. I guess they were waiting to see what the reception to this mini-series was, but I'm not sure if this ending helps or hurts.
Kaiju Score #3, 4: The second half of Patrick and Rem Broo's story about whether Marco was finally going to be able to pull off a dream heist, or if there was going to be one little detail he forgot that tripped him up like all the times in the past. Although in this case there were really a lot of things that tried to trip him up.
High Point: Nieto's depiction of how people transform, with skin rotting away and revealing bug features underneath, is suitably freaky. You can completely understand Max or anyone else being horrified and confused to see that. Rosi's ideas of how people would react are pretty bog-standard - Ford is your typical, "This is a sin from God of our sins" power-grabbing looney toon - but they're bog-standard because they work. Especially in the U.S., where people have used God as an excuse to do heinous shit before this was even a country.
Low Point: It works for the setting, but I wouldn't mind if the coloring was a little brighter. There are a lot of panels that are just too murky. The thing with the flashbacks means we get introduced to characters in the present without any idea who they are, so any impact of their arrival is muted.
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