Holy craps, you guys...!

So listen, yesterday was a pretty awesome day. For one thing, COMICS! And we'll get back to that. But the other thing that was so awesome about yesterday was that I spent like 3 hours at Shannon's apartment with our dog, Seamus, and he was fan-freakin-tastic! Seriously though, I played with him for like an hour, and I'm pretty sure he's like a week away from learning how to play fetch with a tennis ball. I'm pretty pumped about that because that's the kind of stuff that I really want out of having a dog. Basically, for me, the benefits of getting a dog are as follows:

Companionship + SuperHyperFuntime + Fetch - poop = GET A CUSSING DOG!!!

On top of the SuperHyperFuntimes and almost Fetch stuff, he actually let me know when he had to go outside to use the restroom so I didn't have to yell at him the whole time I was there with him. Hooray for good days with puppy!

In other news, yesterday was Wednesday, today it is Thursday. I- I- I'm so excited. I'm so excited... about the fantastic comics I picked up yesterday. So let's dive right in.

Batman -- Written by Scott Snyder; Art by Greg Capullo and Jonathan Glapion

On the DC side of things this week, I think I found a winner. Batman #1 is one of my favorite picks since the New 52 reboot. Definitely a good part of what made this book so good was the fantastic writing of Scott Snyder, who also wrote the issue of Swamp Thing I read and reviewed last week, which I also highly praised. One of the things I loved so much about the writing of this issue is that it does such a good job of giving you all the detail you need to understand Bruce Wayne's/Batman's history in such a clever and natural way. Listen. In a single page, the creative team lets you know about all of the present and former Robins that have ever worked with Batman, lets you know what they're up to now, and throws in a joke about Alfred have higher security clearance than any of them. Awesome. Other than that, the story just got you really engaged and did a great job of establishing the status quo in Gotham where everything is going to crap but Batman is there to clean up the thugs and Bruce Wayne is there to throw money at it. Because that's how it works. In short this story shows us three things in order to get the Bat-Ball rolling: 1) Batman is a brooding, bad-a**, super-detective with some friends who are also pretty bad-a**; 2) Bruce Wayne has more money than he knows what to do with, so he figures that he might as well use it after all these years to try to make Gotham a better place; and 3) Alfred is still pretty boss. The comic also does a good job of setting up a nice big mystery for Batman to solve and really draws the reader on to want to pick up the next issue. I only read through this issue once, so I didn't have a super detailed look at the art, but so far it looks pretty great. There's a good balance of the darkness and depravity of Gotham without going too over the edge on making Batman look like he's going purely on 'roid-rage. Like I said, this is one of my favorites of the New 52, so go pick it up.

Invincible Iron Man #508 -- Written by Matt Fraction; Art by Frank D'Armata and Salvador Larroca

Moving on to the Marvel side of my picks this week, I'll start with Invincible Iron Man #508. Now, there's a lot going on in this book because it's tied into the whole "Fear Itself" event series, but let me simply say that this is just a solid comic book. Since the Fear Itself event kicked off in April, this series' set of tie-ins have been getting a lot of positive buzz. I didn't pick up most of the titles up until this point because I wasn't really wowed by issue #503 when I picked that up in the first part of April. But a couple weeks ago I decided to read through the intermittent issues since then and really liked what I saw. The best thing about this series right now is that the creative team is really putting Tony Stark/Iron Man through a major sort of faith crisis in that he's actually having to have some sort of faith. Taking a man who is totally reliant upon technology and reason and plopping him in the middle of a war between Asgardian deities that is bound to destroy Earth one way or another sort of makes one think theologically for some reason. Anyway. Great story going on here if you wanna get caught up on it. Not great if you're just trying to pick up something to try out, though.

Hulk Vs. Dracula #1 -- Written by Victor Gischler; Art by Ryan Stegman

Yeah. It's that awesome. I was actually very pleasantly surprised by this comic. I was really just expecting a bunch of vampire jokes and the uber-Fear-hammer-powered Hulk to just smash the crap out of everything, and that part was certainly delivered upon, but the book was a lot smarter than I thought it would be. The art was pleasant, not offensive or kitschy at all. And the story was fairly engaging. I'll probably pick up the subsequent issues just to finish the 3-issue mini-series, but I don't think it will be a chore to read them.


So that's it for this week, dear friends. I hope these comic reviews aren't totally turning you off to checking in occasionally. I'll eventually deliver on some of the other things I said this blog would be about when I restarted it in July. Until then, remember this: the Hulk may be fighting Dracula, but he has yet to surf a Dracula-bot all the way from Dracula's Moon base into a small Midwestern town. Top that, Marvel creators!!!

Leave lots of comments!!!

Every dog has his day

This weekend, the wonderful Shannon Pringle and I were visited by some dear friends of ours from our time in Yellowstone National Park last summer. They stayed at Shannon's apartment for the weekend, and while I was working on Saturday morning, they convinced her to go to the Atlanta Humane Society to look at puppies. Shannon and I have been looking into getting a dog for a little over a month now, so this wasn't a huge surprise, but when I got off work, I got a call from them telling me to come down to the Humane Society to look at a dog.

When I got there, I pretty much knew that the dog lying in Shannon's arms would be coming home with us. It only took about 45 minutes from the time I got there for us to finish up the adoption process and take our new puppy home. So now I proudly present the newest member of our little family.

Everyone, meet Seamus Took (Pringle/DeBord)! He is a 4-month old Beagle mix and He. Is. Awesome. So far he's been really great, though he still could use some work on figuring out when he's allowed to pee and what not. We got him a crate yesterday and he didn't hesitate before climbing in there and sleeping for like 6 hours. I guess that's been most of what he's done since he got home. Which has been good for us, so we actually have time to hang out without freaking out that he's chewing on something.

So life has been changing rapidly for us these days, but things are going really well. Thanks for reading. Updates on Seamus's growth and life with us will definitely be forthcoming.

I'm not quite dead yet...

So it's been like 2 months since my last post. My bad folks. I know you've all been wondering, "What could have happened?! Was Jordan consumed by some strange sort of hybrid bear-velociraptor cosmonaut from an alternate dimension?!" Well, fear not, gentle Readers, for not only was I not viciously eaten by aforementioned cosmonaut, but we have become close friends. Her name is Paulette. She loves to cook, watch foreign films about balloons, and travel through space and time in her specially designed Wiener Mobile.

In other news, today I am going to celebrate my blog's glorious return from silence and obscurity by actually delivering on one of the subjects which this blog was intended to cover. Namely, I will discussing a few of the comics I've picked up in recent weeks.

Of course, the biggest story in the comics industry at the moment is the recent reboot of DC Comics ENTIRE LINE of comics (new Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, etc. comics). This is a pretty big deal for comics readers and non-readers alike, since this move was intended both as a way to reenergize the line for long-time fans and to open things up for curious would-be readers. I've been reading Marvel comics pretty much exclusively since I started reading comics in April (especially Thor comics and some Spider-Man and Avengers stuff), but this event seemed like an appropriate opportunity to dive into another line of comics and see if DC had anything I would appreciate. Here's what I've come up with so far.

Action Comics #1 -- Written by Grant Morrison; Art by Rags Morales and Rick Bryant

Now, for one thing, the reboot has been such a huge deal for long-time readers because of comics like Action Comics, which, before the reboot, was one of the longest continuous running series EVER. Before the line relaunched a few weeks ago, Action Comics was well into the 900's! As you can tell, Action Comics is a Superman title, so having a relaunch of the series that introduced one of the most seminal and recognizable of all super-heroes is a fairly big deal. What is fantastic about this comic, however, is that the creative team didn't just pop out rehashed origin book. We're all familiar in some degree with Superman's origin story, especially if anybody has watched about 3 seconds of Smallville. So instead of saying, "Hey, this is where Superman came from, as if you didn't already know." Morrison et al actually gave the reader enough credit to assume he/she could INFER any changes to that origin story by inserting those types of changes in this story about Superman before he was the complete Superman we're all most familiar with. On that note, this story is about Superman's early career as a super-hero concerned more with social equality and the equal distribution of justice to rich and poor alike than he is about stopping giant meteors from crashing into the planet. So we have a bit of motivation for the character, but I think the greatest thing about this comic is that it promises serious growth for the character. We all know what Superman will be like some day, but in this series, we get to watch him become the hero we know. At this point, the best the young hero can do is leap tall buildings and show some exceptional levels of strength. Yet, in the comic, when he is required to try to stop a runaway train, he can't quite accomplish it. Now this may be more of my bias about the complete Superman, but I was never really interested in him before because he was basically a god. It's nearly impossible to defeat him. But this Superman gets overwhelmed by a train. I don't know, but this seems like a character that I want to see developed. Definitely a recommended comic for anyone interested.

Alright, well that was a ludicrously long review of a single comic, so for the rest, I'll just give quick blurbs. Send me a message if you'd like a more complete review of any of them and I might write them up as a separate post. Thanks for reading.

Batgirl #1 -- Written by Gail Simone; Art by Adrian Syaf and Vicente Cifuentes

There were elements of this book that I liked, but there's a lot of history to this character that sort of gets brushed under the rug. Good art, but the dialogue and the captions were confusing at times.






Batman and Robin #1 -- Written by Peter J. Tomasi; Art by Patrick Gleason and Mick Gray

This was definitely one of my favorite books so far. Tomasi is taking Batman in a new direction concerning his memorialization of his parents, but there is still a lot of darkness in the book, especially with Robin, who is Bruce Wayne's son, Damian, in this comic. Damian has grown up under the tutelage of a man basically obsessed with death and justice, so one could understand that he would have a very dark, pragmatic outlook on life. On top of that, his dialogue makes him out to be a total wise-a**, which is pretty awesome. Great, great book with very good art and dialogue.

Batwoman #1 -- Written by J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman; Art and cover by J.H. Williams III

This book honestly let me down a bit. The cover art and previews of the first few pages I had seen of the book in comics blogs looked really promising as far the art goes, but the artists sort of seemed to give up after a while and it dropped off. The dialogue was pretty good, but there were at least three scenes where Batwoman and her sidekick Plebe were changing into or out of their costumes, thus yielding several panels of side-boob. Not really what I'm looking for, thanks. As for the story, the villain looks really interesting, but I don't think it'll be enough to get more of my money. 

Swamp Thing #1 -- Written by Scott Snyder; Art and cover by Yanick Paquette

Ok, this book was absolutely brilliant. Snyder has done a great job of incorporating Swamp Thing, who was previously a sort of fringe character for the DC Universe, straight into the mix. The art of this book is really really interesting and fun, and coupled with the writing, makes for an entertaining, yet creepy book that perfectly embodies a sort of horror/superhero genre. Definitely going to be following this one.



Alright, that's all for today, kiddies. For more info on these comics and the rest of the new DC Comics line, go to the DC Comics website. For better informed reviews of some of these comics and general comics culture related news, go to ComicsAlliance.