the vynsane asylum

9 books this week, making it my largest splurge in a while. Mind you, I didn't buy any last week, so it's a 2 week bunch.

X-Men First Class Special 1
FN Spidey Annual 1
FF 546 (my final issue)
X-Men 199
Wolverine 53
Uncanny 486
Cap 26
Mighty Avengers 3
Something the hell else #whatever - I'll update this later once I figure it out.

My smallest week in a LONG time.

New Fantastic Four. A good first story arc. Sadly, it looks like Reed and Sue are already mended and headed back to the team. That bites. Yeat another copout rolling out of Civil War. Hopefully Hulk will come back and kill Sue like Reed killed Hulk's wife. That won't happen, but it should.

Captain America. Gee whiz. Nothing happens and this is still a fucking better written book than most of the shit out there.

X-Men. Precursor to the big 200th Issue mext month. Somebody is going to die!!! yay! Death to mutants!!

Countdown. The second weekly book from DC rolls right along. Jimmy Olsen must Die!!

Remembered my other book. It was Fallen Son part 3. I haven't read shit yet, and am WAY behind. Time to get crackin', and there's nothin' that gets me crackin' like Frank Cho drawn Avengers titties.

Only picked up 2 this week:

Star Wars Legacy #12 - Hey, something semi-interesting happens! Nice to see a familiar face - Artoo Detoo.
Now what the fuck happened to Threepio?

Criminal #6 - The Eisner nominated series actually worth reading is back with all new crime-noir goodness from Brubaker and Phillips.

Illuminati 3
Silver Surfer Requiem 1
Wolverine 54
Daredevil 97

Baracuda. Not as funny as the first couple issues. The amount of depravity exhibited by the characters is unnerving. Transvestitial Anal sex. Hemophiliac Pedarism. Garth Ennis scares me.

JSA. Continuing the confusing and underwhelming "first" team up of the new JLA and JSA ( as well as half the Legion of Super-Heroes). With so many characters running around ( well over 30 at this point) its hard to identify with any of them.

Silver Surfer Requiem. Didn't read it other than to get the gist that he is Dying and making his peace. I hope JMS does his Marvel continuity research and discovers that Zenn-La and Norrin's beloved Shalla Bal have been dead for centuries and were in fact hallucinative constructs put in his head by Galactus to keep him docile. He's been SS for a LOONGG time.

Silent War. BlackBolt speaks unto the Pentagon and whups Mighty Avenger ass. Awesome. Its sad the Inhumans dont have an ongoing series.

Illuminati. Better than last issue. All these alpha males in one room is a recipe for disaster. The image of Dr Strange's wish fullfillment of himself in a menage with Clea and Wanda Maximoff(?) was brilliant.

Teen Titans. I think I'm just sticking with this one until #50, but it has really lost the gloss of the first issues. is anyone on the team even actually a Teen anymore?

Daredevil. More awesomeness. I hope they don't kill Milla. Any blind chick that feels comfortable prancing around home in her bra and panties after getting attacked just a few minutes prior at a restaurant deserves a long happy life.

Countdown. Continues...Somebody give Jason Todd a real costume and codename already...

Barracuda #4 - Another good issue, but as EP said, not quite as funny. Next issue should be all sorts of awesome.
Barracuda is tryin' to finance revenge and The Punisher is approaching issue 50. Hmmm...?

X23: Target X #6 - Wraps ups semi-predictably and totally throws her previous continuity out of whack.

Star Wars Dark Times #3 - *sigh* What the hell is wrong with me?
Seriously.

Daredevil #97 - Matt Murdock is always totally fucked in one way or another, isn't he? You kids here are responsible for getting me reading this. God bless you kids.

The Boys #7 - I picked this one up because I heard it was all kinds of cool. And Garth Eniss' take on the Superheroes is hilarious.
The Boys are a CIA group set up to keep the fucked-up Superheroes under control. "Tek-Knight" can't stop fucking things (androids, beef, chinchilla, cups of coffee, ect), many of the superheroes are gay, Daredevil (implied to be him anyway) had AIDS so The Boys cut off his cock, " 'Captain Daterape is more like it.' "
Between Barracuda, The Punisher and The Boys, it seems like Garth Ennis has some serious sexual issues.

Here's what I got this week

Countdown. Mary Marvel becomes HOT Mary marvel in a black leather outfit?

Dark Tower. More Stephen King goodness with killer Jae Lee/Richard Isanove art.

GIJoe. Holy Shit! An awesome conclusion to the story. Cobra Commander is the evilist villain in comics. I love how he shot his own guy at the end for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON. WWIII should be fucking awesome.

Iron Man. Meh.

Loners. More of the same for the last three issues. It was good, but it's not really moving forward.

New Warriors. Best comic this week. Seriously. I wanna know who these New Warriors are.

Omega Flight. Not much happens. Except USAgent being a dick. That's alway fun.

Punisher. No Violence. ( Well, the cop emptying his piece into that skell) No titties. ( I dont consider scar tissue "titties"). Not great, but still better than most of what came out this week.

Uncanny X-Men. Start of a new arc with the brilliant Salvador Larroca returning to pencils.

Here's what I'm getting tomorrow. Sorta.

Countdown
Justice
Exiles
New Avengers
New X-Men
Nova
PWJ....oh I really shouldn't...
Sub Mariner
World War Hulk

Punisher War Journal #8 and Star Wars: Legacy #13 - There's $6 I'll never have back.

Tank Girl: The Gifting #1 - Haven't read it yet, but the main reason I bought it was the Ashley Wood art. The guy's awesome.

Yeah, why the fuck do I keep buying War Journal? It's a mystery. Although Frank laying into HateMonger with all the cracker and redneck insults was slightly satisfying.

Sub-Mariner was pretty good for a first issue. I'm intrigued by who he was talking to on the monitors in the final pages. My only gripe, and this is actually a pretty big one, is that the bomb that took out Bumfuck Whereever, Kansas killed MORE people than what died in Stamford and kicked off Civil War. 900+ people vs the 600 in Stamford. What the Fuck Marvel?!? Is this going to get adressed in ANY other Marvel book? Probably not. See, this is what your job as EIC is Quesada. You set the guidelines about what happens in ALL the books and then make sure your writers are adhering to it. It really rankles me.

Nova was okay. i felt like their should have been more of a dialogue/confrontation between Penance and Nova. Especially in light of recent events e.g Civil War and Annihilation. These guys have alot of history together as two of the original New Warriors. It was over too quickly in favor of devoting pages to Rider's parents, who were very one dimensional.


And finally the big one: New Avengers. I'm just going to go ahead and reveal what was dubbed as "the most shocking final page of the year in Marvel comics!!!" Echo kills Elektra in order to stop the thousands of Hand Ninjas overwhelming the Avengers Team. No big surprise there as its on the cover. The shocker is that when she expires....Elektra reverts back into a Skrull. On the surface, this seems like fanboy wank. And if it wasn't Bendis I would've rolled my eyes. But thinking about where this book has been coming from for the past 30 issues and where it's headed, the more I am realizing the widespread ramifications of this event. Its fucking awesome and it raises TONS of questions. How long has she been a skrull? What does this have to do with the mysterious character that hired Max "Electro" Dillon to break all the villains out in issue #1. How far back has this been planned? It's staggering the more you think about how and where Elektra has been seeded in the past thirty months. The whole year long story in Wolverine: Enemy of the State/ Agent of SHIELD. Previous Avengers appearances. Daredevil. IF the skrulls have been manipulating all this time...and then you think about what else Bendis has been writing KNOWING that the Skrull aspect was in the works. The Illuminati, etc...I really cannot wait to see where this goes. The ONLY thing that made this book not the greatest thing so far this year, was the fucking art. Goddamn. Oh, and what was with the freaky baby eyes on the very last page? What was the significance of that?

Eternal Padawan wrote:My only gripe, and this is actually a pretty big one, is that the bomb that took out Bumfuck Whereever, Kansas killed MORE people than what died in Stamford and kicked off Civil War. 900+ people vs the 600 in Stamford. What the Fuck Marvel?!?

That's the sort of thing that's always bugged the shit out of me. After seeing Galactus walking down the streets of Manhattan, shouldn't 9/11 be just an inconvenience of sorts to the denizens of the MU? And why couldn't Damage Control rebuild the towers? They've done it about fifty times before.

Why would there be an Iraq War in Marvel (I'm assuming there is). Wouldn't Saddam be a pussycat next to Doom? Or was Latveria part of the "Coalition of the Willing"?

I read a couple of years ago that there was a massive DC crossover in which Topeka, KS, was destroyed. That's a pretty big WTF moment. Blow up Coast City. Devastate Gotham. Wipe out Bludhaven. Fine and dandy. But don't you think comic fans in Topeka might've been a little pissed about that?

Or I always loved Transformers: Generation 2. The TF Universe was absolutely linked to GIJoe. First, Bumblebee was blown up by the Joes. Then, years later, Megatron was rebuilt by Cobra, and the Autobots had to return to Earth to stop him. But, then, as soon as the Joes go back to their base, Bludgeon fucking destroys New York. Didn't the Jugglers find that a bit odd?

Speaking of which, why did not a single other superhero in NYC react to Magneto taking over and killing off a shitload of Manhattanites? (Say what you want about who it was. It was fucking Magneto, and we all know it, and he's fucking dead now because Wolvie cut his damned head off. Fuck Quesada retconning the greatest story arc in recent X-Men history.)

What about the Avengers storyline where Kang came back, blew up WASHINGTON DC, killed tens of thousands, and enslaved humanity, including just about every hero out there, in giant contanment camps. It lasted for over two years in the books. Or when Ultron took over that Eastern European country and KILLED EVERYONE in it? Literally hundreds of thousands of dead. Then everybody gets in an uproar about 600 people in CT. This is why 24 sucked this season. The bad guys WON in the first four hours. They detonated a nuke! 10,000 dead. After that, who gives a fuck if Jack saves his girlfriend?

But about this Skrull business, internet rumors are saying this is how they will retcon everything back to normal. Captain America will live. Spider-Man can say a skrull was posing as him posing as Spider-man so his identity will be secret again. etc. I don't think it will be that rampant, but this IS building up to something big. Big big.

Well, apparently there's a third part to the ongoing mess (Civil War, World War Hulk, ????) that they're keeping under wraps and won't divulge anything about. Could be Skrulls.

Well, back to "What Comics..."

I may be in some big trouble.

My wife and I had agreed we'd cut back spending over the summer. Every time I buy a toy, she gives me the third degree. (I gave up long ago pointing out that she get McDonald's every day on the way to work, and I never eat out. Food, I mean. Or that I don't feel the need to buy the baby $60 worth of clothes every time I go to the store.)

Anyway, I ordered the Vintage figures yesterday. One package coming, expected to ship out today. In other words, arriving next week. Big box, no way to hide it. But not tough to explain.

The problem: I ordered four Transformers trade paperbacks back in January or so. I put them in two orders, which should ship when the two with the latest release dates came out. And I stuck some other stuff on the order. (They were running a 4-for-3 promotion on a bunch of CDs.)

So the issue is, one was supposed to come out in early July, and the other in late July. I guess IDW decided to get them out earlier because of the hype around the movie. So one packaged shipped on Monday, and I just got an e-mail that the other shipped today.

In other words, two more big boxes. I probably won't have any problem; just tell her I ordered them months ago and they came out early.

So, I guess I can add for this week (all IDW Transformers collections):

Infiltration
Escalation
Stormbringer
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