Ixnay by Night

On 6/15/2018 at 10:04 PM, JasonT said:

The first issue of A Walk Through Hell (Aftershock Comics) was stunning. If he can maintain that standard, it'll raise the bar for horror comics.

Read the first two issues of A Walk Through Hell today, and while the second issue didn't maintain the momentum of the first, that first issue was goddamned amazing.  That opening sequence literally took my breath my away.

Yeah, I'm glad they're including # 120, that's one of my favorite issues.  Here's my ideal issue line-up:

Saga of the Swamp Thing # 37 (for posterity)
Hellblazer # 4 (Waiting for the Man, Delano's entry)
Hellblazer # 27 (Hold Me, Gaiman's entry, though not one of my favorite issues it's exclusion would be a huge omission)
Hellblazer # 40 (Forty, Ennis' entry)
Hellblazer # 120 (Desperately Seeking Something, Jenkins' entry)
Hellblazer # 140 (Locked, Ellis' entry and a good basic horror story)
Hellblazer # 213 (The Gift, Carey's entry)
skipping Mina entirely
Hellblazer # 238 (The Smoke, Diggle's entry)
Hellblazer Annual # 1 (Suicide Bridge, Milligan's entry)

I think that would give a pretty good overview of the series as a whole while sticking to the single-issue story motif.

Maybe because we've been so starved for good Hellblazer stories, I've quite liked Seeley's run.  When compared to the awful stories that Kadrey, Ming Doyle, and Simon Oliver shat out, Seeley is like Delano in comparison.  Had he come on board after an actual GOOD writer, though, I'd say I wouldn't hold his stuff up so highly.  Long story short, Good Old Days hasn't offended me and has me interested in the story in a way that hasn't happened since the Earth 2 story years back.  

5 hours ago, JohnMcMahon said:

Fashionably late as always, I'd have stuck to single issue stories for this yoke myself.

That's been a problem of all the anniversary hardcovers DC has been putting out in recent years, they pick random chapters of stories that make no sense without context.  For example, the Batman HC wanted an issue from Snyder and Capullo, fair enough given that team's popularity, so they choose...Batman # 2 from the New 52?  I think had they gone with a series of oneshot stories for the Hellblazer HC it would have made for a much more satisfying read, but would also have more casual fans going "where's Dangerous Habits?"  

I'd rank Punisher as # 1, more so the MAX run with Goran Parlov and Leandro Fernandez.  Those are some incredible comics.  Preacher would fall at # 2, then probably Hellblazer.  Amazingly, I have never read Hitman.

I'm usually a pretty big Garth supporter, but I could only make it through the first trade of The Boys.  It was certainly okay, just not enough to make me want to read more.  He does tend to swing wildly between mediocre and great, his two Ghost Rider minis with Clayton Crain were perfect evidence of that.  "Road to Damnation" was everything I don't like about his writing while "Trail of Tears" was fantastic.

I do find it kind of funny that the 30 Year Celebration of Hellblazer omits the entirety of Milligan's run when he was writer with the longest tenure on the book.  "Suicide Bridge" or "The Cottage" would both be welcome additions, I think.  Still, I'm happy to see this collection, and in a related note it seems that Vol. 20 of the Hellblazer trades that comes out in January will be collecting both the first half of Diggle's run and "All His Engines", which is kind of a strange place to put that story instead of with Carey's run.  Guess we'll be seeing "Pandemonium" collected in those volumes as well eventually.

Here I am, still waiting for more issues of FELL.  

3 hours ago, Lou K said:

Let's see. This is just the second issue o the second volume.

Vol1 is 13 issues and an annual

Sherlock Frankenstien four issue series (this is traded I believe)

Dr. Starr four issue series (third issue just came out)

And now Age of Doom is just on it's second issue.

I highly recommend this title. Can't get enough of it

Thanks!  I'm definitely going to check this series out!

I've been curious about Black Hammer, how many volumes have there been of that so far?

DC solicits for August were released yesterday, no new issue of Hellblazer.  Looks like its cancelled at the end of Seeley's current arc in July.  Maybe it'll get another relaunch with all the other DC relaunches in the fall?  They "cancelled" Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps as well, and that's rumored for a relaunch by Morrison of all people, so who knows what they'll do with Constantine.

Regarding all the slang, is Tim Seely English or American?  I always assumed he was from the States, no particular reason why though.  If he IS American that could be the cause for the overabundance of slang, he's going too far to fake the authenticity.  I'm still digging his work on the series, though, FAR better than Kadrey, Oliver, or Mina.

Well, for the first time since it started Wild Storm: Michael Cray has finally captured my interest with the newest issue, which introduces that world's version of Constantine.  I actually cared about what happened to Cray and it was more than the usual "DC hero gets bent into a maniac" plot device of the first six issues.  Slow burn, yeah, but interesting enough that I'm glad I didn't drop the series after that stupid Aquaman/Chthulu mash-up.

Aren't there supposed to be two more spin-offs to The Wild Storm coming at some point?  I remember hearing that in the initial press release, that it would be Michael Cray, Zealot (I think?), and ultimately Wildcats (again, I think?).

I highly enjoyed Avengers # 1, I think Aaron's "getting the band back together" motif is played out nicely, if a bit on-the-nose in the bar scene.  I actively like all of the characters he's bringing into the team, with the exception of Captain Marvel I suppose.  Here's hoping he can eliminate some of the stigma surrounding Carol after all the shit stories she's had in the last few years.  The character I'm most excited about is, of course, Ghost Rider, and I happen to really like Robbie Reyes.  He's no Blaze or Ketch, but I think maybe Aaron said all he had to say about those two in his Ghost Rider run years ago.  His take on Robbie seems to fall in line with what Felipe Smith was doing, but skewing him more toward the traditional Ghost Rider status quo, which I appreciate. 

And yeah, the Celestials were all killed off by Archangel's children back in Remender's Uncanny Avengers run.  I think Aaron even halfway nods his head toward that, when he has Thor wishing he had his ax, which of course is the weapon that was used to kill the Celestials in Remender's story.  I blame it on Secret Wars resetting everything.

Just read the final issue of Kelly Thompson and Pere Perez's Rogue & Gambit mini-series, and I highly recommend picking it up when it's released as a trade.  The whole mini-series was fantastic from start to finish; those two have always been my favorite of the X-Men, and this story is one of the best that's featured them and probably one of the best X-Men stories in a long, long time.  

I had the opposite opinion of the Thanos Annual, I found it to be a colossal waste of time and money.  I liked the last story, with Frazer Irving on art, but the rest were inconsequential filler at best and horribly annoying at worst.  I adored Cates' Thanos arc and am eagerly awaiting Cosmic Ghost Rider, but this one was one I wish I had skipped completely.

Yeah, the Losers was a good read at the time, but it's not something I could see holding up for repeated read-throughs.  I did really get a kick out of the movie, though, mainly due to the amazing cast.

1 hour ago, Christian said:

Yeah, I would have told you to skip the Stine Man Thing book, but everything else you bought is good (well, I don't really remember the Wells' New Mutants series, to be honest).

Oh, Thor: Ragnaroks is the Oeming book, not from the Roy Thomas run. Oeming's Thor still felt epic to me at the time it was being released, and his Beta Ray Bill minis I remember really liking. So, I'd say that was worth a look too.

I thought Stine's Man Thing had a lot of promise after the first issue. It seemed like Stine was channeling Gerber for that first issue, but my god, did that book get horrible immediately after that first issue. I thought that Stine's captioning was a joke in the first issue, but he kept it up throughout the entire series, and it read like a prose novelist who has zero understanding of how to write for comics deciding to describe in exact detail everything you can see in the artist's panel. Plus, it's not as Stine's prose is captivating either, it's just annoying.

Infernal Man Thing was a real gem though.

I've read everything BUT the Zeb Wells New Mutants and most of the Thor: Ragnarok collection.  I really loved Oeming's "Disassembled" arc back in the day, but didn't read the follow up Blood Oath or Beta Ray Bill minis, so looking forward to delving into those!

And yeah, you've hit the problems with Stine's Man-Thing exactly.  The captions and thought-bubbles were a distraction, that I just started to skip over in the later issues.  It read like Stine was trying like hell to write like Steve Gerber, complete with the issues running into one another with little resolutions, but it failed on just about every level.

Anyone else take advantage of that $.99 Marvel trade paperback sale on Comixology last week?  I grabbed quite a few, some classic stuff I haven't read in ages:

Tomb of Dracula: The Complete Sereis vol. 1
Werewolf by Night: The Complete Series vol. 1
Excalibur Epic Collection vol. 2: Cross Time-Caper
Infernal Man-Thing
New Mutants by Zeb Wells Ultimate Collection
Vision: The Complete Series
Thor: Ragnaroks
Daredevil Epic Collection: Hearts of Darkness
Man-Thing by R.L. Stine

I've been reading through that Stine Man-Thing series, though, and it's appallingly bad.  I'll have to re-read that Gerber Man-Thing collection immediately after to wash the Stine series out of my brain.

On 3/18/2018 at 5:39 AM, JohnMcMahon said:

This week's Cray answers that Constantine question.

Time for another Transmet reread, love me some Spider J,  the first story has been totally undercut by the arrival of smartphones though!  The notion that the only reporting from a riot would be via a text feed broadcast on television sounds ludicrous in a time where we have children live streaming their school shooting to the world.

Yeah, as prescient as Transmet was on a whole lot of things, some of it still feels really dated to the late 90s/early 2000s.  

And god damn it, Michael Cray is really pissing me off, but I keep reading it like a tool.  I really want to support anything Wildstorm related so the characters/concepts don't fade away, but Cray has absolutely nothing to do with that universe OR his previous incarnation.  It's nothing but an excuse to pull a "Ruins" with DCU properties, it's terrible in the extreme.  The other two Wild Storm spin-offs are supposed to be coming this year (Wildcats and another one, Stormwatch?  I don't remember), here's hoping they're more than just a trademark name bolted onto something totally unrecognizable.  

On 3/16/2018 at 1:55 PM, A. Heathen said:

I was just going to mention this.

I was interested because Pornsak was an editor with Mike Carey and Mike said good things ( okay, Mike says very few bad things, so he said doubleplusgood things)

This was an exquisite first issue.

As we were talking about Gideon Falls, I really liked the slow burn but wished it had been longer,  but infidel uses the capacity so well. And it's horror. 

Also agree on the art, but it's Aaron Campbell. I can see why you thought that though 

Oops, Aaron Campbell it is!  I've been reading a lot of post-Ennis Punisher MAX stuff lately and Lawrence Campbell was the artist on a lot of those, guess his name was stuck in my mind.

Read the first issue of Image's INFIDEL series that came out this week.  Not too bad, kinda slow but seems to have an interesting horror premise.  Plus, the artwork by Lawrence Campbell is really great.

I'm only interested in Damned if Constantine gives Batman proper dog-fucking etiquette.  I have a very specific fetish.  

I wouldn't say that about Amazing Spider-Man, that it's been derailed since "One More Day".  I thought the "Brand New Day" era stories, up through about # 600, were all quite good to really excellent.  The writing team approach, with guys like Slott, Waid, Wells, etc. did a fine job to win me back to Spider-Man after I got tired of JMS' run.  I think the big mistake was to change that team approach and give the book whole-hog to Slott, which is about when I tuned out for good.

I agree, and Fabbri's art took a serious upswing in quality with this issue.  Maybe it's because he's actually getting an interesting story to draw this time?