Weekly Crisis Comic Book Reviews for 01/04/08

After another week of delayed comics, the Weekly Crisis is back on another Friday to give you the skinny on the books released in the Weekly Crisis Comic Book Reviews! This week's edition is my first "all Must Read" edition since I started doing reviews, sporting four out of four Must Read comics. I probably could have got that up to five out of five if I had time to review Teen Titans: Year One, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow's Quick Shot Reviews. Anyways, enjoy the reviews and see you tomorrow, it's the weekend and beer awaits!

Comic Book Of The Week

ANNIHILATION: CONQUEST #3
Written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning
Art by Tom Raney

It was a toss up between this and Thunderbolts as my Comic Book of the Week, but, in the end, Conquest won out in my eyes by the smallest of margins. Both are Must Read books and easily the best from this week's crop of books.

Conquest hits the ground running this month, picking up from last month's cliffhanger ending (you know, the one where Ultron put his fist through Moondragon's chest). ~~Black~~ Adam Warlock responds in kind by tearing through some canon fodder Phalanx drones before Ultron turns his attentions to him. High Evolutionary takes the most prudant course of action and teleports as far away from the giant army of robots. Just as Ultron is about to capture Adam, the Evolutionary destablizes the star the station was hiding at, apparently killing everything and everyone on board.

The remainder of the issue focused on Starlord and his loveable losers. They continue to place charges around the Babylon Spire in an attempt to take it down and allow help in from outside the currently inpregnable bubble surrounding Kree space. Unfortunately, Blastaar, who had been intentionally taken prisoner earlier in the series to feed the team information, has finally come under the sway of the Phalanx Select program and promptly leads them to Peter and Gabriel where upon he blasts Gabe into oblivion. I should have seen this coming when Gabe lost the Uni-Force, but it's still sad to see him killed off. He was one of my favourite Starlord team members, right up there with Groot and Mantis. On top of killing off Gabe, they end the issue with a reconstituted Ultron, fresh off his supernova 'death' earlier in the issue, readying to pull another Moondragon on Starlord, himself. Hopefully Mantis has some way out of this for Peter next month.

Verdict - Must Read. This is like bottled awesomeness in paper form with pretty pictures. If you aren't reading Conquest, you're a DC fanboy. Ya, I went there. Now go buy it!

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #17
Story by Paul Dini
Story consultant Keith Giffen
Scripts by Tony Bedard
Art by Pete Woods and Tom Derenick

I'm not sure, but this might have been the best issue of Countdown (to Final Crisis) to date. It still had those annoying quirks randomly littered about the issue, but there seemed to be way more good than bad in this issue.

The main crux of this issue was dealing with Bob, the formerly good, but now evil Monitor. Bob basically goes on a killing spree, wiping out the Earth-51 heroes as the Challengers try their best to get Ray Palmer to safety. Bob even has time to make a "Flash has to die every Crisis" joke as he kills this world's Barry Allen. The ease in which he wipes out the Earth-51 heroes left me wondering why he didn't one-shot kill Donna or Jason. I'm gonna go with the "it's magic" excuse though and quietly move along.

After wiping out a handful of heroes, Bob's a little tired and lets Kyle spirit Ray Palmer away while he laments his bad luck. Giving him no time to be emo, the rest of the Monitors stop by for a chit-chat. It's revealed here that Solomon, or the Monitor formerly known as the bad Monitor, has it out verbally with Bob and we find out the two of them have been conspiring since the start to stop Ray and prevent the Great Disaster. On top of that, they hoped to combine all the Monitors into a giant mecha Monitor. Okay, I made that last part up, but they want to reform into a single Monitor like in the pre-pre-Crisis DCU. This results in Solomon killing Bob in an attempt to gain his power in some Highlander-like Monitor power stealing thing. It goes badly as the Monitors are now too unique to recombine into a single Monitor.

Before the other Monitors can gasp and yawn over this turn of events, Monarch shows up with his whole freaking army and establishes a beachhead on Earth-51 as he declares war on the Monitors now that they were outside their protective Monitor bubble home. It was one of the better scenes in Countdown and makes me wish the entire series had been done similarly.

Oh ya, there was a bunch of Mary Marvel crap this time around as well. She fights Eclipso. Both lose their powers somehow. Just when you think her story can't get any worse, she ends up joining the Amazons at the end. They should use magic to retcon this whole storyline away.

Verdict - Must Read. Despite having some Mary Marvel stuff, I think the evil Bob / Monitor / Monarch stuff easily outweighs the bad and is actually entertaining if you don't pick it apart too much.

DETECTIVE COMICS #840
Written by Paul Dini
Art by Dustin Nguyen & Derek Fridolfs

I honestly wasn't going to pick this issue of Detective up after reading the solicit. It made it sound like the focus was on some loser globe-based villain when that is taken care of in like 3 pages. The rest is all dealing with Ra's renewed assault on Batman's life. My question is, why couldn't the actual Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul storyline be half as entertaining as this epilogue?

Basically, the issue starts with Batman hunting down some 2-bit criminal that has a fixation on stealing globes and maps. After a short fight, where the fat villain puts up way too good a fight against Batman, it is revealed Ra's leaked the information on the villain's whereabouts so that he could reclaim a globe he had thought lost, which contained locations of all known Lazerus Pits.

Batman insults Ra's, prompting him to reveal he is moving to Gotham, where he plans to focus all his attention on killing Batman, starting now. In case you weren't sick of them after the last crossover, Batman is now attacked by a billion ninjas, all of which go down quicker than the fat globe collector in the opening pages surprisingly.

After making it back to the cave, Batman decides to take the fight to Ra's. He locates Ra's new home through housing records showing a billionaire buying a downtown skyscraper. He promptly knocks the entire building out with gas in the vents and proceeds to put an ass whooping on Ra's. Not content with just the beat down, Bats decides to create a false identity for Ra's and committ him to Arkham for life. And that's not all. He doctors his drug charts so Ra's will be so drugged up, he won't be able to form words or be able to move his limbs. He'll be a drooling idiot until someone eventually breaks him out of there. This is probably the coolest thing Batman has done in-continuity since taking down the entire Hyperclan himself.

Verdict - Must Read. Batman being a crazy nutjob badass is always a Must Read for me.

THUNDERBOLTS #118
Written by Warren Ellis
Art by Mike Deodato

Remember when Venom ate that guys arm? That was pretty cool, but how could Ellis possibly top that? Well, this issue answers it by having Venom eat everybody! Well, not everybody, but definitely a couple guys. And no, not just arms, but the entire body, piece by piece. However, I get the sneaking suspicion that Venom might not be a Thunderbolt member much longer...

This issue takes a different turn than what I was expecting based on last month's issue. I thought the prisoners were going to use their powers to escape and kill the Thunderbolts, but they were no where to be seen this issue. They might be responsible for Swordsman's actions, there was no indication of it here.

Not that that's a bad thing though. There's a lot of incredible stuff that happened this issue. Norman continues to go insane. Not sure if this is due to Moonstone's messing with his pills or from the prisoners, but he's the only one seeing that Green Goblin mask and is quickly cracking under all the pressure this issue. Next up is the Zeus blowing up in the hangar, killing multiple guards in the process. It was later revealed to have been caused by Swordsman, which I'll get to in a bit.

Venom, who I talked about briefly above, went insane and started killing and eating entire platoons of guards. Apparently the symbiote is tired of Scorpion blaming it for killing and his being a general pussy and is taking control of his body, which led to the various eatings and killings. Finally, Swordsman undying love for his sister has caused him to go insane, shave his head and start calling himself Baron Strucker, after his nazi father. He's bought off dozens of guards at the base and started taking it over so that he can force Norman to give him the clone of his sister. Again, not sure if this is because of the prisoners doing a mind job on everyone or if Ellis is just dismantling the team he put together.

There was one thing I didn't really understand. There was a scene that showed random anti-Thunderbolts posters with random sayings on them, kind of like "Thunderbolts are the secret police". Showed them in subways and on bus stops and other assorted places. Something to do with the current storyline? Future story? Beats me.

Verdict - Must Read. This issue was just plain awesome. Everyone on the T-bolts is losing it and I'm loving it. Venom hasn't been this good since he was first introduced and this arc is shaping up to be better than the last one.

2 comments:

Deicide The Everliving said... 1: Thunderbolts was pure ownage this month. Awesome issue!

I think all is the work of the psychics. The goblin mask, the symbiote threatening Gargan, Swordsman losing it... Everything caused by those psychics! I can't even begin to imagine where this story is going, and that is awesome! The only flaw I can find in this issue is its delay (it should have come out in October!).

Tiago José "Deicide" Galvão Moreira; January 5, 2008 at 9:21 AM
The Dangster said... 2: oh man, the best panel on Detective comics 840 was when Batman kicked Ra's out the window.; January 5, 2008 at 5:04 PM