Whats everyone reading?

[judgefloyd]

I would not dream of asking Garth Ennis about the Bible!  Although I'm sure he'd be entertaining about it.

Now I'm catching up on my London Review of Books sub and reading some long articles about Indian history.  Turns out Ghandi wasn't as nice as I'd thought and Nehru screwed things up a bit.  Next up a fun article by Terry Castle, my favorite literary lesbian

[mogzilla]

Is that american 'cry of the werewolf' still black and white, or have they coloured it?

I'd very much like a colour edition, if only so it would finally settle all those arguments as to 'what to give newbies to get them into dredd'.

SBT

only colours are from what i assume are the first pages in the centre spread? the other more modern strips are lovely though especially with carl critchlow on the following story.

[Zarjazzer]

Star Wars The Jabbah Tape written by John Wagner for it is he and art by Killian PLunkett a weird extra to the Shadows storyline basically following two swoop scum from that story. Okay but an oddball adventure.

[Emp]

The Apocalypse Codex, 4th book of the Laundry files by Charles Stross. The British secret service vs Cthulhu types, whats not to like?

[bluemeanie]

Batman issue 13

May be the best single issue I've ever read. Seriously.

Cant remember being so wired after reading a comic as I was after this one. Granted I'm a Batman/Joker fan but still..... daaaamn. Main story blew me away then the Jock backup story put a nasty spin on it all.

Just brilliant

[Emp]

That a self contained story?

[bluemeanie]

Nah, its the opener to the bat titles crossover that's bringing back the Joker

That said, it really works as a single issue being that its the first part. Just got the wife to read it and she's got pretty much zero Bat continuity knowledge. Got to her too, especially the Jock ending

Cant recommend it enough

[Emp]

Wouldn't go out of my way to pick up a bats comic but i do love a good Joker story...might have to pick this up.

Still on the hunt for a paper back of Joker origins and short stories that came out in the late 80s. A book that i had an lent out.....

[Colin YNWA]

That said, it really works as a single issue being that its the first part. Just got the wife to read it and she's got pretty much zero Bat continuity knowledge. Got to her too, especially the Jock ending

Synder swears blind that the Batman story (what is it 4 parts?) is self contained, if not the individual titles. He managed that in Night of the Owls so I hope he does here.

[Link Prime]

That said, it really works as a single issue being that its the first part. Just got the wife to read it and she's got pretty much zero Bat continuity knowledge. Got to her too, especially the Jock ending

Synder swears blind that the Batman story (what is it 4 parts?) is self contained, if not the individual titles. He managed that in Night of the Owls so I hope he does here.

Good to hear Colin, couldn't be really arsed tracking down the (sold out) tie-ins.
And as I mentioned in another thread: I LOVED Batman 13.

[TordelBack]

Uncanny X-Men: Fall of the Shi'ar Empire, Brubaker and Tan.  Bloody hell, am I glad I got this from the library, and didn't have to pay for any of it - and I generally enjoy X-doings and their silly space outings in particular. 

In quasi-spoilery summary, the world's dullest X-team embark on an interminable character-less space-quest-thing to a bland space empire with awful, awful hair, featuring some of the worst character designs and face-rendering I have ever seen committed to paper.  This apparently ran for what must have been 12 long, long months during the Marvel Civil War event in 2008 as a 'self contained' X-antidote to everything else crossing over.  Chummer, you would have been better off embracing the crossover. 

Look, Brubaker and Tan are obviously very talented chaps, but this is poor, poor fare indeed. There's extensive back matter where they congratulate themselves on their extreme cleverness in creating this and its predecessor Dark Genesis, which story I now know I will forever avoid, said cleverness mainly consisting of inventing a third secret ripped-from-his-mother's-womb-by-aliens Summers brother to go with Havok and Cyclops and making him super-dooper-dooper powerful so he can go all evil and beat up everyone and fly through space killing people.  Meanwhile, all those cool x-characters you know and love speak with exactly one identical voice (as do all the aliens), and do very little except kill people left and right while muttering about not ever killing people. 

And then as a dramatic finale they kill off a peripheral space character that I quite liked back in the '80s to zero emotional or plot effect.  And then to add insult to injury the Shi'ar Empire [spoiler]doesn't fall[/spoiler]. It's shi'ite. Avoid.

[Greg M.]

There's extensive back matter where they congratulate themselves on their extreme cleverness in creating this and its predecessor Dark Genesis, which story I now know I will forever avoid, said cleverness mainly consisting of inventing a third secret ripped-from-his-mother's-womb-by-aliens Summers brother to go with Havok and Cyclops and making him super-dooper-dooper powerful so he can go all evil and beat up everyone and fly through space killing people.

It takes Dan Abnett to eventually do something half-way interesting with Vulcan / Gabriel Summers in 'War of Kings', where he basically plays him as Caligula. Even then, there's a limit to what you can do with an entirely unnecessary third Summers brother (we all know that infamous set-up was for the mercifully sidelined Adam X the X-Treme anyway, thought I believe Claremont makes Gambit the third Summers in an out-of-continuity mini-series.)

As for the actual X-team though - the disappointment is that on paper this is a fantastic team, but it just doesn't come across that way. Nightcrawler, Havok and Rachel teaming up with space pirates? That should be gold. (If Abnett and Lanning had written it, maybe it would have been.)

[TordelBack]

...the disappointment is that on paper this is a fantastic team, but it just doesn't come across that way. Nightcrawler, Havok and Rachel teaming up with space pirates?

Well, Havok and Lorna have never done much for me, but Nightcrawler and Rachel have previously shown themselves to be great characters, not least when they were together in Excalibur.  Here, what the hell is going on, why are they here?  I don't think Kurt does one interesting thing the whole time - he never cracks a joke, or swashbuckles, and he randomly teleports a Skrull guy into the vacuum of space to (presumably) die prior to discovering that he has a magic spacesuit that saves him. Huh?  Rachel wanders around in a belly-top version of her mother's 60s costume looking by turns vacant and dazed and then magically makes herself a new, even more awful leather hip-hugger costume and then kills lots and lots and lots of people.  Prof X spends the whole time unconscious or being tortured, and Darwin  and Thunderbird are complete voids.  And the damn thing is as long as Watchmen.  UGH.

[Greg M.]

I don't think Kurt does one interesting thing the whole time - he never cracks a joke, or swashbuckles, and he randomly teleports a Skrull guy into the vacuum of space to (presumably) die prior to discovering that he has a magic spacesuit that saves him.

If memory serves, you are absolutely right - and the sad thing is that this is a scenario that at first seems like it's going to be tailor-made for him. Intergalactic highjinks! Piracy! Grand cosmic fuzzy elf adventures ahoy, right?

No. He does none of it. Mind you, I think the last time Kurt was a fun character was probably the mid-90s. Though he was my favourite of the X-Men, I was almost glad when they killed him off, as he'd become a kind of joyless mutated wallpaper. I remember when Fraction took over on Uncanny in the wake of multiple interviews where he declared Nightcrawler his favourite too - and he then proceeded to do pretty much nothing with him either. You wouldn't think he'd be a hard character to write well, would you?

[Professor Bear]

They've fixed Nightcrawler now - he's been killed off and replaced with a grim and angsty murderer in the apparently popular X-Force.  I'm sure if he had any fans they would be most grateful for this.