JML

August 21, 2013 6:23 pm This was awesome! Everything that was missing from the first three issues was here. Goddamn you, Marvel, you've got me buying yet another X book for a little longer.

August 19, 2013 1:18 pm Damn, there's been a big leap in quality in these iFlashbacks suddenly. Maybe it's just because there aren't as many Chuck Austen X-books clogging up the works in this one.

August 15, 2013 9:56 pm I love the ban on politi-talk. It derails the conversation on so many sites I otherwise like, and let's face it: Internet political conversations are almost always just the same binary points we've heard a million times before bouncing back and forth with bad facts mixed in. I'm glad here I can just enjoy discussion about the adventures of spandexed folk without all that tediousness.

August 14, 2013 11:11 pm This half-sucks. I've really enjoyed his FF, but his F4 has been the height of meh. I'm betting Darla Deering will now go the way of any number of other Fantastic Four castoff characters: Lyja, Noah Baxter, etc., and just not get mentioned again.

August 14, 2013 9:00 pm The difference for me is that Bendis's dialogue, repetitive, shticky, and same-y though it can sometimes be, seems at least mostly drawn from observation of how people actually talk. Or at least from other dialogue that was keenly observant (Mamet, Sorkin). Overplayed though some of his dialogue his, it still makes my brain-voice mimic an actual human's voice... at least at its best. With Hickman's dialogue, it seems like he has to stop for a minute every time somebody talks to cobble together a cool sounding line. There's no flow, no sense that the line emanated from a living human being/alien/superhuman coming up with things to say in real-time. I have no problem with that in and of itself, but with Hickman the real problem is it's frequently ponderous, portentous, and joyless. When he lets loose like in the Manhattan Projects, or for some of the kids in FF, and just makes it a bit silly, I love it and think his crisp turns of phrase are great. Other times, like with a lot of the fortune cookiespeak in Avengers so far... it's a big turn off. I'm so divided on Hickman. Half the time I think he's the best thing going in comics and love the way his brain puts stories together. I like that it's different. But then the other half of the time I find his storytelling extremely cold and robotic. I think Avengers has mostly played to his weaknesses so far.

August 14, 2013 7:03 pm I really dug this, but I tend to like the slow interludes in things better than most people. Marko's beard was pretty awesome.

August 14, 2013 7:00 pm Wow, Hickman was really trying here. I liked it way more than I expected to. Hickman's stilted "honourable badass" fortune cookiespeak dialogue still frequently grated, but the rest of the experience made up for it.

August 14, 2013 12:12 am The second arc of this was slightly better than the first, I thought. Here's hoping the trend continues. This is still narrowly the best series being produced right now.

August 13, 2013 2:18 pm I'm extremely divided on Hickman: there were some parts of his FF run that I found mostly incomprehensible and other parts that I thought were the greatest stuff in comics. I thought Nightly News was crass and cynical but beautiful visually. His work on New Avengers is great because he's got the voices of those characters down and they're all in conflict over one issue, so it's very focused. His regular Avengers title is pretty much the opposite, a vomit of characters, locales, and plots that go nowhere with a gloss of the fortune cookiespeak over top. ("Fortune cookiespeak" was a great term for it -- good on you for coining it.) So far his best work by far has been Manhattan Projects. I think because he didn't plan that one out ahead of time, he's forced to just write the characters well instead of falling back on Byzantine plotting. I'm mostly enjoying East of West too. So I'm torn on this expensive-ass event book. I want to see where his Avengers stories have been headed this whole time, but I'm not sure it's worth it.

August 12, 2013 11:53 pm Goddamn it, this book is going to be five bucks? Ugggghhhhhh. I'm not even that excited about it. It just feels like I have to get it or all the previous issues of his Avengers books will have been meaningless.