The impact of Marvel's policy to increase the price of their ongoing series to $3.99 had its first effect on my regular comic buying this week. Dark Avengers #1 and The Mighty Avengers #21 both came out this week but I left them on the shelf. Both comics are not…
The Brave and the Bold: The Lords of Luck (issues 1–6) and The Book of Destiny (issues 7–12) by Mark Waid, George Perez and Jerry Ordway I like the idea of The Brave and the Bold – a book about superhero team-ups; you can have many different characters (rather than…
Issues #1–5 by Greg Rucka and various artists Renee Montoya is a great character – going from a character created for Batman: The Animated Series, to being a Gotham police officer in DC comics, to being one of the central characters in the excellent Gotham Central, being outed as a…
[Full title: Ultimate Hulk Vs. Ultimate Iron Man: Ultimate Human] issues #1–4 by Warren Ellis and Cary Nord Ellis seems to have a free remit to write more or less what he wants for Marvel, especially the Ultimate universe (his run on Ultimate Fantastic Four, the Gah-lak-tus trilogy) – all…
A strange week for comics, with the hype and queues for the variant cover of Amazing Spider-Man #583 and the mess Marvel made of allowing the retailers to order it correctly. However, it all passed me by because (a) I'm not in America and (b) I don't read Amazing Spider-Man.…
The Dead Boy Detectives #1–4 by Ed Brubaker, Bryan Talbot & Steve Leialoha I've been reading a lot of books from the library over the Christmas period, so expect me to share my thoughts with you on a range of different collections. This first trade paperback is something I didn't…
By Kim Newman Growing up reading Empire magazine, I was aware of Kim Newman as a film critic and journalist, usually reviewing the genre end of cinema and writing articles about movie monsters or fantasy. He is now a contributing editor, still reviewing, and has his own page of Direct…
Captain America #25–30 by Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting & Mike Perkins The media frenzy and the blip in interest in comic book shops (how many reprints of issue 25 were there?) caused by the death of Captain America was astounding. (There is a nice little summary of what is…
I have never read the books by Cornelia Funke but, being a fan of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books, the premise is too intriguing to ignore: 'silvertongues' have the power to bring things from books to life when they read aloud. That's a good concept. Having a gift certificate for…
I thought this week was going to be absent of books from the big two, so that I could revel in the smugness factor of only buying creator-owned comics from smaller publishers (well, Buffy is sort of creator-owned), only for Marvel to ship New Avengers #48 late and bugger that…