So, What comics did you buy this week?

[Tom Foolery]

The Batman Who Laughs 1-7, + Grim Knight oneshot. The evil Batman from another universe who got Jokerized, and his henchman, an evil Batman who uses guns liberally(think Punisher+Batman) hatch a plan to destroy Gotham by dousing everyone with Joker toxin. Batman gets infected and slowly starts turning into the Batman Who Laughs. Wayne Tower is demolished. Batman enlists the help of Commissioner Gordon and his sociopath son James Jr to help him stop the evil Batmen. This arc predated the Year of the Villain stuff in Batman/Superman. I’ve barely read any of Snyder’s Nu52 batstuff or Dark Metal where BWL was introduced, but this was fairly solid stuff.

Batman:Last Knight on Earth 1-3. Prestige mini from Snyder and Capullo that capped off their Bat epic started in Nu52. Set in a bleak apocalyptic future, a clone of Batman wakes up from a coma and along with his sidekick, Joker’s head in a lantern, tries to make sense of the hellscape that Earth has become over the last decade. Sort of had an Old Man Logan vibe to it. Also entertaining. Snyder goes two for two.

Batman:Urban Legends 1. This new ongoing is mostly in the new boxes, so I only read the first issue. It’s sort of like the old Marvel Comics Presents, with multiple short chapter stories going across several issues, but focusing on Bat family characters, and in Prestige format for each issue, so $7.99 a pop. The first four stories featured Red Hood and Batman, Harley and Ivy, the Outsiders, and Grifter as Lucius Fox’s new bodyguard. Decent stuff, but ouch on the price. Yeesh.

Three Jokers was also in the pile, but I read and commented on it when it came out. And the giant ass dumb plothole in it still has me perturbed. Avoid. Or don’t. I’m not your supervisor.

[jjreason]

That entire Batman Who Laughs & Deathmetal scene completely turned me away. I don't know why, but visually it just created more than a lack of interest, it created disinterest. I'm just not edgy enough for death metal themed heroes & villains I guess.

[Diabolical]

I skipped The Batman Who Laughs (and the stuff afterward) and The Last Knight on Earth because it was Snyder/Capullo. Their whole Batman run was vastly overrated.
The only good thing about the idiotic Court of Owls is the rising value of Batman #1.

[Tom Foolery]

“Overrated” is exactly how I would describe what I’d read of Snyder’s Batman run up to that point. I think I bought his ‘Death of the Family’ arc and was very meh’d by it. And then I dabbled with his revised/expanded Year One mega arc with the Riddler and was actively bleahhh with that one. I’m missing 1-3 and 7 of his NU52 run, so once I get the books all in one box, I fully expect to go back and read them at some point, but with very low expectations.

But here’s some more Bat stuff.

Batman Universe 1-6. A few years ago, DC started doing 100 Page Giant issues that were exclusively sold at Wal Mart. It was fresh content mixed in with mostly reprint stuff. More on that later. Some of the fresh content was rereleased in this reprint Direct Market series written by Bendis with art by Nick Derrington, who has a kind of Mike Allred/Paul Pope vibe to his art. Bendis had just come over to DC and was having a blast playing with all the new toys in a Batman adventure that featured cosmic wormholes and time travel as Batman chased the Riddler on a heist of a faberge egg secretly hiding a White Lantern Ring inside of it. Team ups with Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Thanagarians, Jonah Hex, Nightwing and fighting Vandal Savage. Bendis has a distinctive cadence when writing dialogue after all these years, but since it’s DC you could tell he was enjoying it.

Batman:Black and White 1-4. A six issue Prestige series(the final two issue are in the newer boxes) featuring todays top talent telling stories in monochrome. As always, some stories and art were better than others. YMMV. I liked how each story was accompanied by a bio page for the creators, so you knew what they were famous for. Nice touch.

[Tom Foolery]

Batman Giant 1-4. In 2018, DC started doing these 100 page giant sized issues exclusively for WalMart. The more I did research into these, the more I discovered that they did, like, a LOT of these. 16 issues of Superman, 7 of Wonder Woman, Flash, Justice League, Titans, Teen Titans, even Swamp Thing had some. There’s even some super rare ones like a Detective Comics oneshot that’s going for stupid high prices because it was so obscure. Batman had 14 issues. The experiment was so successful, they did a second run a couple years later, but this time, they were also doing Direct Market versions of the same issues(albeit with different covers). This second wave only lasted a few issues for each “series” and in some cases only one issue. This was the first time I became aware of them, and started getting the DM versions when I could find them.

Anyway, there were two new stories per issue, one focusing on Batman, and the second on one of his supporting characters; these 4 issues had Batwoman, Signal, TwoFace, and Nightwing(the NW story was Tom Lyle’s last work I think) and three reprint stories in each issue. The cool thing is that first four issues of Snyder and Capullo’s Nu52 Batman series were in the reprinted stuff, and I just happen to be missing 1-3 of that series, so I read those “missing” issues and can now catch up with the rest of the run. The new stuff wasn’t bad, but wasn’t remarkable either.

Batman Beyond 25. From the Rebirth series. I only has this issue because it had a cool foil cover. There was some unifying ‘theme’ that month for DC covers. Since I don’t have any of the other 50 issues in the series, not really into Terry’s adventures. I didn’t know his little brother was the new Robin.

So the only thing left is a tidy run of Detective, but since I just read like 80+ issues of Batstuff, I’m gonna skip Tec and circle back around to it later.

So next up is some Black Cat, Black Panther, Black Widow, etc.

[Tom Foolery]

Black Cat 1-12, plus an Annual. Jed MacKay and Travel Foreman did this short ongoing that spun out of Spencer’s ASM run. Felicia and her “crew” team up with the Black Fox to plan a master heist of the NYC’s Thieves Guild’s hidden plunder vault. Black Fox was the mentor to both Felicia’s dad, and the father of Odessa Drake, the current head of the Thieves Guild and Felicia’s nemesis. So there’s history there. Odessa believes Fox killed her father. Anyway, this overarching story gives excuses to break into the Sanctum Sanctorum, Rand Corp., the FF’s new Yancy St HQ, as well as visiting Madripoor, and finally stealing from Tony Stark So, a who’s who of guest stars, Dr Strange, The FF, Iron Fist, “Patch”, Iron Man etc. as each heist gets another essential component to the master plan. Then…the book ended with issue 12 because the Pandemic and the big heist was never resolved. But wait!

Black Cat 1-3. The second series returned with MacKay writing after a short hiatus. The first three issues were a King in Black tie in where Cat has to rescue Dr Strange from his Knull prison. The rest of the new series is in the new boxes, so I don’t know if the original heist ever got executed. Overall, it was an okay run. Cat’s new henchmen they tried to give personalities too, but they were fairly dull. One’s a mad scientist type, the other’s a big brutish muscle. But Felicia interacting with the other Marvel characters was entertaining.

Black Knight:Curse of the Ebony Blade 1. Only the first issue of a new Dane Whitman mini; the rest are in the new boxes. But he gets his head chopped off in the first issue, so color me intrigued enough to find out what happens next when I get around to the newer stuff in a year or two.

Black Order 1-5. After they were resurrected in Avengers:No Surrender, the former minions of Thanos accept a challenge from the Grandmaster to disrupt an alien Empire and defeat their Emperor. There was a rebel superteam that the Order teams up with, and I feel like they were an ersatz homage to some DC or maybe Image team, but I couldn’t quite figure out who they were referencing. The story itself was fairly average.

Black Panther. Ta-Nahesi Coates had a 25 issue run that only recently ended. However, I only have nine sporadic issues as this was one of the VERY few ongoings I wasn’t getting. So I'm gonna skip it until I fill in more of the run. The gist of the series was that at some point in the past Wakanda invented interstellar travel and went and formed a Wakandan Space Empire somewhere, and T’Challa heads into outer space. Or something like that.

[Tom Foolery]

Black Panther and the Agents of Wakanda 1-8. Spinoff from the main Avengers series. The Avengers “support staff” which is just an excuse to throw a bunch of lesser used heroes together on a team. Janet VanDyne, Gorilla Man, Broo, Ka-Zar, Dr Nemesis, Fat Cobra, Roz Solomon, John ‘Man-Wolf’ Jameson, Mockingbird, American Eagle, etc all led by Okoye and T’challa. Written by Jim Zub, with art by Lan Medina, the ‘missions’ Zub came up with were way more fun and interesting than the team themselves. First off, the Sentry possessed by the Void(again) has infected a small Oklahoma town and the AoW have to shut him down. Then they discover the moon is infected with a plant-child that is the offspring of the planet Euphoria and the Elder of the Universe, the Gardner. Next, they stop Deadpool from breaking into an abandoned SHIELD facility that has a rogue Nick Fury LMD using AIM nanovirus to reawaken the obscure 2005 team, the Livewires amd spread the AI virus. Finally, three dragons attack Avengers Mountain looking for the ‘traitor’ who it turns out is a tiny Fin Fang Foom hiding in a wastebasket. Foom helps fight the dragons before he re-absorbs them into himself. Crazy Marvel antics using some underutilzed characters. Fun stuff.

Black Widow 1-5. Indie Horror directors, the Soska sisters wrote this story about Widow heading to Madripoor to take on an online torture/snuff website for rich elite assholes. She enlists the aid of Tyger Tyger and faces off against Baron Zemo, Madame Masque, and Sabretooth before finding the real culprit was Tyger’s henchman/tech genius.

Web of Black Widow 1-5. Novelist Jody Houser and artist Stephen Mooney craft a tale of Widow once again trying to clear the misdeeds of her past(it’s amazing how much they’ve milked that one single line from the Avengers movie and made it like the defining characteristic for Nat for the last decade in the comics) while dealing with possible memory issues because y’know she’s a clone with implanted memories after HydraCap killed her in Secret Empire. And someone posing as Widow is publicly killing the benefactors of her previous work in the Red Room, so she has to clear her name and find the real killer. I really liked Mooney’s art.

Black Widow:Widow’s Sting. A oneshot that came out around the time of the movie. Widow has to infiltrate Maggia don Silvio Manfredi’s organization to find out what happened to the last agent SHIELD sent it. Meh.

Black Widow 1-5. The current series(well, it just ended this week with issue 15) by Kelly Thompson and Elena Casagrande. Missing for three months, Nat wakes up living a life as an architect with a fiance and a one year old son in San Francisco. Her allies Hawkeye, Yelena, and Bucky track her down, but aren’t sure if they should ‘wake’ her because she seems happy. The brainwashing is a plot by a consortium of her enemies; Snapdragon, Weeping Lion, Madame Hydra, Arcade, and Red Guardian. Wonderful covers by Adam Hughes.

So that’s it for the ‘B’ box(except for that Detective Run). Next up is the Fantastic Four, Firefly, Flash, Guardians of the Galaxy, and whatever smaller series are in that box. Excalibur might also be in there, but I’m gonna wait until I get to Hickman’s X-Men stuff before I do any other X-related titles.

[Tom Foolery]

Before Dan Slott’s FF relaunch, here were three short series in front it in the box.

Exiles 1, 4-10. The recent 2018 series. I’m missing 2, 3, 11, and 12. 2 and 3 are ridiculously expensive right now and I will doubtfully ever find copies within my price range.
Blink is “retired” from Multiverse saving and living in the Bahamas. But the Tallus appears before the Unseen on the Moon, and Blink has to recruit a new team of Exiles to stop a deranged Kang variant overpowered with thousands of Galactuses he’s consumed from destroying countless alt universes. There’s an animated Wolverine, a post-apocalyptic Old Lady Kamilla Khan, Wild West Black Panther, an Iron Lad who didn’t time travel to start the Young Avengers, and the super expensive Valkyrie from the movies, and the even more expensive Captain Carter. The run was pretty pedestrian.

Falcon and Winter Soldier 1-5. Sam and Bucky get caught in an internal power struggle in a resurging Hydra between Zemo and a wannabe rival. Good, but not great story by Derek Landy.

Fallen Angels 1-6. Part of the Hickman X-stuff. I thought the idea of Kwannon being exclusively Psylocke now after Betsy Braddock had assumed the title of the new Captain Britain and the two were separate people again to be very intriguing. Psylocke recruits X-23 and the boy Cable to investigate a new threat of a cyber-narcotic while she adjusts and navigates the new mutant order on Krakoa as well as her own newfound persona. A very moody and grim tale. I much enjoyed it. I’m not sure if it was always meant to be a six issue series or if it didn’t meet sales expectations.

Okay, now I’m jumping into the Fantastic.

[Tom Foolery]

When Dan Slott started his new Fantastic Four series, the First Family hadn’t had an ongoing since James Robinson’s mercifully short(ish) run had ended and Hickman’s epic Secret Wars event doubled as a finale/coda for his memorable run on FF way back in 2015. Reed, Sue, the kids, and the Future Foundation were presumed dead to the rest of the world and were using Franklin and Molecule Man’s near omnipotent powers to recreate, and add to, the decimated Multiverse post Secret Wars. Meanwhile Johnny had joined the Avengers, the Thing may have joined the Guardians at one point(it was awhile since I read those books. 2015-2016? Yikes!) and even co-starred in an updated Marvel Two-in-One ongoing. So Slott had a lot of work to do to slide the pieces on the board back into place for a new series.

1-3. Resetting the series in the first arc was tough, and I was feeling underwhelmed by Slott’s new book. But this first story had a lot to accomplish, so while I was reading it, I was thinking ‘weak’ and hoping the rest of the book wouldnt be disappointing, in retrospect it wasn’t that bad. Johnny and Ben are still grieving, but trying to move on with their lives. Ben proposes to Alicia and asks Johnny to be his best man, which sets Johnny off because the deceased Reed should’ve been his best man. Just as they have a moment of closure, a giant cosmic constellation “4” appears in the night sky. Reed, Sue, and the rest have been confronted by a new cosmic entity called the Griever, who’s “job” it is to witness the entropic end of all things. She’s been undoing all the new universes Franklin made, so Reed put out a call to ALL previous FF members. The third issue brings a Fantastic Legion to the far side of the universe to defeat Griever and the FF are happily reunited.

4. The FF return to Earth to find the Baxter Building home to a new super hero team called Fantastix after Peter Parker Industries was forced to sell it when the company imploded. Reed and Val deduce an attack by the Wrecking Crew is just a PR stunt gone haywire, but decide the new team’s intentions are heroic(they just have an unscrupulous PR guy) and let them keep the building. Instead they move into Alicia and Ben’s brownstone at 4 Yancy St.

FF Wedding Special. The ladies throw Alicia a bachelorette party. And Ben goes to Ryker’s supermax to talk to the PuppetMaster and ask for his blessing.

5. The oversized Wedding issue. Sue recalls how she goaded Ben into going on their initial flight, and how she inadvertently gave him the name Thing, so she surreptitiously fostered Ben and Alicia’s courting as amends. Ben’s Bachelor party. And finally the wedding is almost cut short when Galactus appears over Latveria, but Reed throws up a four minute chronal inhibitor, so they can finish the wedding before having to go save the world again.

6-9. Galactus is back! The FF head to Latveria to assist Doom in repelling the Devourer after Doom broadcast world wide that he would save everyone. The entire thing is a plot conceived by Doom to trap Galactus by using his new cosmic powered Latverian super heroine Victorious as a lure and then trap him with help of the FF to use as an unlimited power source. After this, he imprisons the FF in specially designed cells for trespassing on Latverian soil, even though his plan was predicated on their arrival and assistance (Classic Doom!). But as always, Doom miscalculated, and Galactus is gonna blow unless the FF can escape and reverse the process. Sue uses her invisibility powers to ‘erase’ Doom’s armor while he’s sending a galaxy wide broadcast, so EVERYONE see’s Doom’s scarred visage, thus ensuring Victor’s reinvigorated wrath against the Richards clan.

10. War of the Realms tie in. The FF and its other residents protect Yancy Street against frost giant invaders during a block party.

11. Val and Franklin have to take their Fantasticar driving exams from the DEMV, the Dept of Extra-normal Motor Vehicles. Cute stand alone issue.

12-13. Ben turns human once a year, so he and Alicia are going on their Honeymoon. Which gets interrupted by a Puppet Master controlled Hulk. Hulk vs Thing!

14-19. Point of Origin. The FF donate their original rocket to the Smithsonian, which gets Reed and Johnny all nostalgic about building a new rocket and finally finishing their original mission, which was a FTL flight to a neighboring system called Spyre. The citizens of Spyre have built up the FF as world ending catastrophe should they ever arrive and have built their entire society around defeating the ‘Four-told’ by bathing citizens in cosmic rays to turn them into super heroes, or banishing the ones that turn into monsters to the city’s lower levels. The twist is that Spyre’s leader is the one who bathed the FF with excess cosmic energy to try to kill them before they ever arrived, thus creating the Four in the first place. One of the Spyran heroes, named Sky, “soul-bonds” with Johnny and returns to Earth when they are done. This arc did a lot of retconning of the FF’s origin, like making Johnny a legit back-up pilot for NASA, having him go thru the necessary training even at a young age. They briefly introduced the two legit astronauts that were supposed to go on the mission with Reed and Ben, before Sue and Johnny snuck in. Stuff like that.

20. Wyatt Wingfoot is having a problem on his reservation with Mole Man, and Johnny and his new soulmate Sky intervene and play diplomat.

21-23. Empyre tie in. While the main team is off world dealing with the main Empyre event, Val and Franklin recruit Spidey and Wolverine to help protect two young Kree and Skrull children from Cotati kidnappers. Ben and Alicia end up adopting the alien kids, the Kree boy Jo-Venn and the Skrull girl N’Kalla.

24. This was the issue that had the 4 Alex Ross variants, which are in a different box somewhere, and I don’t have the regular cover in this box, so I didn’t read it, but the gist was it was a flashback tale where Iceman was unofficially the first FF back up member, predatung even Spidey.

25-28. A powerful alien called Cormorant shows up on Earth looking for some cosmic weapon macguffin thingie and blows up the Baxter Building looking for it, then heads to Latveria to do the same thing, before finally heading to 4 Yancy St. Reed had trapped some Zero Energy from the birth of the universe in a special box and hid it deep under the Baxter Building. Franklin uses up the rest of his power to try and stop him, but Cormorant opens the box and realizes its not whatever he was looking for and leaves. Now the energy has been released and is gonna destroy everything, until Val collects it with a teleporter she was working on and turns it into a portal that opens up to everywhere and everywhen in the universe all at once, dubbed the ‘Forever Gate’. The Future Foundation returns amd Refugees from the destroyed universes start pouring thru the gate with Griever in pursuit. Reed makes a deal with her to send her to the end of time so she can watch everything end and she agrees.

29-30. Were King in Black tie ins where Johnny, Sky, and Ben get Knullified into symbiote monsters in Knulls attack on Earth.

So that’s the old box. The series is currently up to issue 42 in the new boxes. For the most part, its been an enjoyable series.

Next up are some FF oneshots, and maybe a miniseries or two in there.

[jjreason]

I really enjoyed the wedding issue. That was my formal jumping off point after collecting Marvel Two in One & whatever else led to the relaunch.

[Tom Foolery]

I really enjoyed the wedding issue. That was my formal jumping off point after collecting Marvel Two in One & whatever else led to the relaunch.

Adam Hughes splash page of the ladies at the strip club is fucking priceless. Sue saying “clockwise. Now counter clockwise” to Alicia, and She-Hulk screaming in the background is one of the funniest fucking comic panels I’ve seen in the last decade or more.

Which I cannot attach because of an invalid something.
https://m.imgur.com/25UjUXA

[jjreason]

Priceless.

[Tom Foolery]

A few more FF related books.

FF:Prodigal Sun(or Son?). Oneshot that’s part of a set of one shots crossing over with Silver Surfer and Guardians. A cosmically powered adventurer named Prah’d’Gul crashes in the Savage Land and stirs up the Swamp Men clan. Ka-Zar and Shanna enlist the aid of the FF to stop him from breaking into the High Evolutionary’s abandoned lab/fortress. Ka-zar’s ttenage son, Matt hits on Val. Eventually the ‘bad’ guy gets bored and heads into space. I think this was just an excuse for Peter David to make up a new character.

FF:Negative Zone. A mold culture that Reed lost track of turns up in the Negative Zone and has become sentient. The FF has to destroy the new species before it gets back to the main universe to wreak havoc.

FF:4 Yancy Street. After the FF moves into the neigborhood, slum lords and real estate developers start evicting long time residents. Ben Grimm steps in to make things right.

FF Grand Design 1-2. Tom Scioli compacts 50 years of FF stories down into two issues. I dislike Scioli’s art style, but reading his annotations in the back of the book was interesting.

FF:Grimm Noir. The fear lord D’Spayre starts hassling Ben and Alicia’s next door neighbor, so Ben has to go to the fear realm and do some clobberin’.

FF:Road Trip. The family goes on vacation to the Grand Canyon and Reed investigates a nearby meteor impact, which turns out to be a booby trap from the Mad Thinker to destroy the FF with their own powers. But they use their big brains and figure out how to stop it.

FF:Antithesis 4. So, somehow I missed issue 1, and issues 2 and 3 are the Alex Ross variants, so I didn’t read this until I get the first three issues.

Future Foundation 1-5. Short lived ongoing. When the FF came back to Earth, they left Alex Power and Dragon Man in charge of the Foundation, tasked with finding the recently destroyed Molecule Man. Alex confuses The Maker for Mr Fantastic and breaks him out of an alien prison, then they have to stop him from destroying the universe or whatever. But they also bring back Lyja the Laserfist and Rikki “Nomad” Barnes, who hooks up with Alex’s sister Julie. The Foundation returned to the main series during the Forever Gate arc. I’m annoyed that Artie and Leech have not aged since they were introduced back in the 80’s. All the other New Mutants, X students, Power Pack, Franklin and Val etc kids have aged up, but Artie and Leech still look six years old.

I’m gonna read Rosenberg’s Punisher real quick, then come back to the ‘F’ box for Firefly and a healthy run of Flash.

[Tom Foolery]

Read Matt Rosenberg’s 16 issue run of Punisher. I found it enjoyable enough. Definitely an improvement over the two previous series. The events leading up to this run, and Rosenberg’s previous “Legacy” run, were where I felt things were problematic. HydraCap had recruited Frank into doing Hydra’s dirty work, and once Frank realized he’d been bamboozled by his hero, he decided Hydra was now target numero uno. While I get that Frank has a boner for Cap, I don’t think he’s the kind of guy to blindly hero-worship anybody and would never have been put in that situation. But I can’t fault this series or writer for the dealt hand of the previous story’s set up.

1-5. The series starts out with Frank as a bogeyman hunting Hydra while Zemo is trying to legitimize Bagalia status as a nation. Frank kills Bagalia’s UN Ambassador, The Mandarin and becomes public enemy #1 in doing so. Zemo unleashes every known criminal organization by putting a bounty on Castle’s head and several heroes try to reign him in as well. Ultimately, Nick Fury betrays Frank and hands him over to Zemo in exchange for leaving the U.S. permanently.
6-11. Frank is in a Bagalian prison, and Zemo has Jigsaw impersonating him killing innocent civilians all over Bagalia. Several other prisoners, most of whom are political dissidents and not guilty of anything, join Frank in staging a prison break, and then he goes on a rampage, fucking up the entire country making a beeline for Zemo’s fortress. Zemo makes a last minute escape after nuking his own country to distract Castle and heads back to NYC.
12-16. Back in NYC, Zemo requests help from Mayor Fisk to take Frank down, and they bring in an army of Hydra goons posing as UN peacekeepers and the Thunderbolts to lock down the city. Frank is forced to accept help from Black Widow and the team she recruited for Castle, including Night Thrasher, Moon Knight, Danny Ketch, and Rachel Cole-Alves for the final showdown with Fisk and Zemo. In the end Fisk “kills” Zemo( that’s in quotes because Zemo has since turned up alive) to diffuse the situation and Frank fakes his own death to prevent Fury taking him into custody.

Annual 1. An absurd tale where Castle and JJ Jameson accidentally get launched into space and have to team up to fight the Brood and get back to Earth. It was a completely ridiculous and convoluted premise, yet still enjoyable.

Punisher Kill Krew 1-5. After the events of War of the Realms, Frank follows through on a promise he made to a father whose family was killed by Frost Giants. Borrowing one of Thor’s goats, Castle heads across the nine realms, rescuing/recruiting Foggy Nelson, Juggernaut, and Black Knight along the way to get revenge for the father, and a bunch of orphans whose families died in WotR. Goofy, entertaining series from Gerry Duggan.

Back to the ‘F’ box.

[Diabolical]

Rosenberg's run was one of the better ones since Rucka's great run.

Rucka's run ended with Frank in a Stark prison at the bottom of Lake Michigan. When Thunderbolts came out, suddenly there was Frank with zero explanation on how he got out. In fact they still haven't explained it, so my personal theory is that Frank is still down there and everything since then had been an imposter.
Real Frank is gonna be pissed when he finally gets out.