The Week In Review Preview

Three parts this week. Part 1 about the 40 issues epic of Rotworld.

Part 2 is on All New X-Men #8 and how much fun this book is and what it shows up.

Part 3 is about Sex, Joe Casey and the Age of Ultron. Are the best comics from Alternative publishers or not?

To mix things up a clip from each part.

A final note is Joe Casey in his back matter basic talks about the best stuff is going on in the alternative publishers, a better word then independents. His remarks are that Marvel and DC are so stagnant that he finds it hard to believe almost every blogger and others he reads still have Marvel and DC dominating what they talk about. I’m certainly guilty of an over focus on Marvel and DC myself at times; it is like we are all locked into a death spiral. Heck out of everything I have read this week Sex was the best of the week. In defense of the cape and cowl set, Joe’s work is building off our familiarity with that genre to tell his story. It speaks of an obvious affection that Joe has for the material. I think that stagnation is what causes writers to try and do as much as they can to change things up. Tying the first two parts to this diatribe, Animal Man and Swamp Thing wanted to change the characters in a profound way going forward. I guess they succeeded, but DC can hit the reset button at anytime. 



The crux of the story was the original Angel trying to determine what the hell happened to him to become the Angel he saw in front of him. To be truthful I’m not 100% sure what the heck the Angel is today. I know he was taken over by Apocalypse (in a way) and was killed by Psylocke and then returned as blank slate. He appears to have metal wings and apparently can heal people; this current version also does not have a past and is slowly developing into a person. The new Angel refuses to tell the old Angel what happen and the old Angel freaks out. He can’t take it anymore; he does not want to be in the future. Warren (old Angel) goes to the basement of X-Mansion and tries to access the time machine. His friends confront him and he is going off the deep end. He appears to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, 


 

When these series first started I was excited about the books. Lemire and Snyder are both favorite writers and the characters are ones that can be interesting with the right type of stories. Although Swamp Thing is a hard character to make interesting I figured Snyder could make it work. Animal Man is a little easier and I had faith Lemire could do wonders with him. After essentially 20 issues of each book (counting the Zero issues and Annuals) we finally reached the end and it and it left me cold. I followed the whole darn thing and the pay off was not there. Even the death of Cliff (Animal man’s son) felt hollow. The only “death” lately that has felt like it had an impact to me at all was Damian, but that is because I liked the character.