Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Fast Thoughts - The Week of 10/22/08



BIRDS OF PREY #123 - Well, THAT was anti-climactic. The last issue ended with the promise of a big show-down between Babs and The Joker and we get... nothing. And to add insult to injury, most of the issue is devoted to giving us background on "The Syndicate" and the comically awful ideas used to make these guys worse than your usual group of robber-barons. Like it wasn't enough that one of their number is Gizmo from the Fearsome Five and they were willing to bring The Joker in as a partner.

Case in point: the CEO of "YourSpace", we are told, has gone out of his way to make it easier for child predators and serial killers to gain access to the personal information of young children using his service. This is all part of the plan to gather more material for his secret underground porn empire. And then there's the head of the "auction" website who has kidnapped numerous people and forces them to live in an underground Utopia he built, killing them if they fail to care for the collectibles in their new homes...

This kind of thing seems more appropriate to a Garth Ennis Hellblazer storyline than to an issue of Birds of Prey and it doesn't speak well of a story when The Joker is the least disturbing baddie in it.


FINAL CRISIS: SUBMIT - A must read if you plan to get Final Crisis #4. I discussed most of my questions about this book in my review of that issue, but the short version is that the background we get for Mark Richards (aka The Tattooed Man) doesn't gel with what we've seen in the past. Still, this is Grant Morrison working with a vastly underrated character and spelling out a little more detail of the post-Anti-Life Earth. Worth a read, even if I am confused as to how this fits a few things.


HELLBLAZER #248 - An awesome issue, all around. Not just for the first half in which John handily undoes the plans of two villains who are united against him but for the second half in which John makes his peace with Chas regarding... oh.... most of the events of the later part of the Mike Carey run. And the last page and the set-up.... wow! If you aren't reading this, you should be.

2 comments:

  1. I skimmed the BoP in the store and my thoughts on reading about the Child Abuse Facilitator Guy was "Are you fucking kidding me?" I can't believe the only place I'm going to be seeing Kate Spencer next year will be on this book...

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  2. *nods* I'm starting to really regret wishing for Tony Bedard to be given a chance on this book.

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