womzilla | Making a note

Marvel is about to quasi-reboot their line--the Marvel NOW project is a lot of cancellations and new #1s and a lot of shuffling of creative teams. (Matt Fraction writing Fantastic Four? Hells bells, of course I'll buy that.)

I just want to note that right now I am buying 14 Marvel ongoing monthly titles. One of them has already been announced as ending with no replacement, Kieron Gillen's brilliant Journey into Mystery; others have been restarted with creative teams I'm not interested in following (Brubaker's Captain America, Fraction's Mighty Thor). I'll check back in January to see how many I'm buying then.

I also note that right now I'm buying more DC main-imprint titles than I was before the "New 52" relaunch--18, up from 11 in August 2011--so it's quite possible I'll end up getting more Marvels after the relaunch; I just don't think it's likely. DC has actually shown some cleverness in recruiting new writers from the indies (Jeff Lemire, Josh Filakov), from outside comics (China Mieville), and getting good work out of writers who had been away (Paul Levitz, Marv Wolfman). I don't see Marvel doing that; almost all the writers who have been announced so far for Marvel NOW are already working for Marvel. (The one exception so far is screenwriter/comic actor Brian "Brian from The Sarah Silverman Program" Poesen for Deadpool, which is a great choice.)

Anyway, as I said, just leaving a record.

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About the only way I can afford to keep up with Marvel & DC continuity is by checking out the collected trades and hardcovers from the library; I've been working the snot out of the inter-library loan feature.

Can't say I've been knocked out by what I've read of Fraction, either in The Five Fists of Science, The Invincible Iron Man (I actually preferred Adam Warren's "Hypervelocity" storyline, Stuart Moore's work on the "Director of S.H.I.E.L.D." / "With Iron Hands" arcs, and the "Haunted" and "Execute Program" arcs by Daniel and Charles Knauf) or Thor (Straczynski and Gillen did a better job, IMHO). I've missed out on Casanova and The Immortal Iron Fist, though; I may have to remember to pick up some of those from the library.

IMHO, what I've read of the FF since Walt Simonson's tenure (and, really, I wasn't as fond of his stint as I was of Steve Englehart's; but then again, Marvel's suits made him change everything back to the way it was after they'd hired him to shake up the status quo) has been mostly blecch; I enjoyed the late Dwayne McDuffie's stint when Black Panther and Storm replaced Reed and Sue (including his use of Kirby's "King Solomon's Frogs"; and there was something about T'Challa's punching out the Silver Surfer that reminded me of the Kree-resurrected Midnight [from Marvel Special Edition Presents: The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu #16; also from some Englehart-scripted issues of Avengers] jousting with Norrin Radd in space when Englehart wrote the Surfer's own mag); but Mark Millar's? Not so much.

Brubaker and Greg Rucka were pretty alright on Gotham Central, and Brubaker on his own is good on some of his Criminal arcs (Bad Night was especially toothsome), and I've a grudging liking for his Incognito minis (both of which I bought, largely due to

ratmmjess's pulp essays in the back, if truth be told) and Sleeper (which I checked out from the library); but I'll never warm up to his Captain America, largely because he was the guy who wrote "The Death of Captain America" arc (even if he also wrote Captain America: Reborn). Then again, the whole Bendis/Brubaker emphasis on Steve Rogers as being a super soldier first and foremost irks me no end, particularly after the work that Englehart, Stern, and Gruenwald did to flesh him out. (Another reason why Kirby's run on Captain America in the mid-seventies, after Englehart's run and fill-ins by John Warner, Tony Isabella, Bill Mantlo, and Marv Wolfman, irks me so much in hindsight.)

I'm currently picking up the Fury: My War Gone By mini by Garth Ennis and the Russ Heath-like Goran Parlov; I'm liking it more unreservedly than I liked the earlier MAX mini Fury by Ennis and Darick Robertson (I missed out on their Fury: Peacemaker), but that's about it right now for me actually buying current Marvels or DCs.

Fraction's Casanova is extremely good, a complex psychedelia about multiple timelines and superspies and, well, just everything. And his run on X-men was first-rate; I've never read his Iron Man, and am mostly enjoying his Defenders, though it seems like it's moving more slowly than it needs to be. I agree that his Thor has not been of the first water, but I think FF will play to his strengths. I mostly liked Waid and Weringo's run on the series in the early part of this century, and I did like Mark Millar and Brian Hitch's short run, in part because I liked the way that Millar stitched together the narrative across three apparently unrelated titles (1985, Old Man Logan, and the "Masters of Doom" story). I have never warmed to Jonathan Hickman and skipped his tenure on the title.

Brubaker's Captain America is mostly interesting for Jack Barnes, but I've enjoyed it well enough overall. I seem to have a fondness for Cap and a wide range of tolerances for how he's presented. As to Criminal, I think that Last of the Innocents is probably the best work of Bru's career.

Making a note

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