Wot I ave bean reeding

[angelophile]

Caught up with my reading a bit, anyway. Read a few comics this week, but can't be bothered to review them all, so I've just picked out a choice few, including Marvel Zombies, New Excalibur, Apocalypse/Dracula and Young Avengers.

I also finished reading the first of the books I bought the other day, Two for Texas by James Lee Burke. An enjoyable, if fairly light read. More of a long short story than a novel really, it could have done with a bit more meat on its bones. Basically two escaped convicts, one old one young, exit a Louisiana hell hole of a prison and move south into Texas ending up with Sam Houston's near the Alamo. The historical detail is nice, there's some delightfully descriptive phrases and the writing is solid, but there's a tendency to skip over detail rather too quickly. The fall of the Alamo is covered in a couple of pages when it would have been nice to get a more detailed description. Similarly, the main characters only seem roughly sketched out. I see that it's been adapted as a movie, which probably works well, and as a taster of the writer's work it's solid, but I would have liked a little more fleshing out of the action, characters and historical detail. Not bad though.



MARVEL ZOMBIES #5
The joke was wearing thin by this last issue which was heavy on splash pages and very light on story and the black humour that's made the series so enjoyable. Not exactly a damp squib of an ending, but certainly pretty predictable. Still, there's some sick fun to be had, particularly as the zombie Red Skull goes up against zombie Captain America. While the last couples of issue haven't lived up to the potential of the first two, his has still been an excellent off the wall concept that deserved to become the sleeper hit it has been.

NEW EXCALIBUR #6
Ah, Chris Claremont. When he does old school daftness I can't help but love him. Well, he's on top of his game here with another great fun issue. It's never going to win any awards, and there's logic holes all over the place, but I don't expect hardboiled from an Excalibur book. I expect daft. And I'm not disappointed. I couldn't help but feel a fanboy surge of joy at seeing Black Tom Cassidy again – back in the hands of his creator, saddled with a comically silly accent, stripped of the godawful tree schtick that other writers stuck him with and all but twirling his moustache at the end. Pantomime villain he may be, but it's such fun to see him again. Sad that Claremont is suffering cardiac problems and I hope he recovers soon. It also means he's not gonna be writing the next couple of issues, with Frank Tieri standing in to script his plot. Hopefully he'll have the same sense of cheese. I hold out hope judging by:

APOCALYPSE DRACULA #3
Frank Tieri is normally entertaining. Apart from the woefully misjudged Weapon X mini last year, I usually enjoy his work. Sometimes I love it, occasionally I hate it (the Neverland issue of Weapon X is still my amongst my least favourite comics ever). But more often than not I think it's okay. Nice to see here he's risen above just okay to produce a miniseries that's genuinely enjoyable. People will argue maybe Pocky and Ozzy aren't acting as they did in the past, but frankly I don't care. This is good stuff. Dracula's been a credible threat to Apocalypse through the past 3 issues while only appearing in about a panel an issue. The focus instead has been on not Dracula's sirelings, but Apocalypse's. The idea of little Pocky babies is entertaining and served the story well. In every other respect this story has so far pushed all the right buttons, dragging out every Dracula cliché you can think of (vampire bats, blood drained bodies, the undead rising in a morgue, Van Helsing). It simply boils down to this – the ride has just been bloody good fun. Tongue firmly implanted in cheek, this is Dracula in the style of the Buffy/Dracula crossover and all the better for it.

YOUNG AVENGERS #11
This title seems to have lost its way some and I'm not really enjoying it as much as I was. Two origins are revealed this issue – those of Hulkling and Asgardian, and as everyone expected they're not what anyone expected. Or supposedly. In actual fact you're probably have to be blind not to have seen the origin stories coming after last issue.

Frankly, I'm disappointed. When the title started it seemed like they were playing with our expectations with the advertising campaign. Instead of junior versions of Thor, Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man and so on, the characters promised to be something new and different. By setting us up to expect the "junior" versions of Marvel heroes, they were able to pull the rug from under the readers.

Except they haven't pulled it very far. In this issue we discover three of the characters are entirely related to the Avengers. Just different Avengers. That spoils it a little for me – I wanted to see new characters playing on the idea they might be copies of old characters. Instead we find they ARE old characters. With Vision being old Vision too, we've ended up with a Young Avengers team that IS just younger versions of the old Avengers. Disappointing.

The creepy undertone that two of the characters might be the result of an incestuous relationship isn't really appreciated either, neither is the letters page praising the writers for making one of the girls on the group a rape victim. Wonderful. I'd be more surprised if there was a woman on a superhero team that wasn't a rape victim, judging by the way comic writers have been treating strong female characters lately.

The art continues to be gorgeous though, but while this book is still entertaining, it grows increasingly a disappointment.