Comic Book Moments of the Week for 10/03/12

 

October arrives but Avengers vs. X-Men ends in today's Moments of the Week! What awaits the Marvel Universe now? NOW! We also have a truly great story in Action Comics, John Layman takes over Detective Comics, and Daredevil: End of Days finally sees print. There's always more, so let's hit the jump, where we'll laugh, cry, play flag football and break the boundaries of the comic page!

Action Comics #13

Superman is trapped in the Phantom Zone while one of Jor-El's enemies Xa-Du escapes. But Superman gets help from the greatest superhero Krypto! Phantom Stranger is also showing up in the Zone, where we find out how much willpower Superman is capable of:

Superman rips Xa-Du back to the Phantom Zone, and in these moments, we see what true friendship is:

Good boy, you're finally reunited. The backup story shows how Krypto was always with Superman, from his days as a baby on Krypton even following the ship all the way to Earth:

Oh man, that onion chopping place across the street is starting up business again. And I just stubbed my toe and hammered my thumb. It's like these things only happen when I'm reading these pages,how weird is that? This is a great issue from start to finish, and pretty accessible to any new reader.

Amazing Spider-Man #695

Dueling face offs, who wins? Phil does, as the Kingpin gets Ty Stone to fire up his Spider-Sense machine that has a super effect on everyone in the Spider-family:

This is Marvel NOW!, now! Starting from the top left to right, we have All-New X-Men, the Lizard, Captain Marvel, Avengers Arena, FF, Hulk, looks like Paladin and I take it that's the dying Dock Ock in the bottom left corner?

Avengers Academy #38

Avengers Academy vs. Jean Grey School, in....flag football? With a limit on powers so you can't hurt anyone? What has this world come to? Hawkeye should be shooting at the other team, not at the flags!

Rockslide always wins because he just doesn't care, this is why you can't let him get inside your head.

Avengers Vs. X-Men #12

Cyclops is in full crazy mode now, tearing up cities and no end is in sight until the Wonder Twins arrive. Seems that the Phoenix represents order, which tried to bring back balance when Wanda let chaos take over with no more mutants. The voodoo that they do so well weakens Scott, where we have this insight into what he's thinking:

 

Scott lets the Phoenix go, who then goes to Hope. Hope controls it now, going White Phoenix, and fixes the world from what Scott did, but Wanda tells her it's not her role to play a god:

So, no more Phoenix, but Chaos Magic still seems to be around. And the X-Gene is turned back on. So in the end Cyclops was right. He had no real evidence that it would work, but he was right. Cap has a hard time accepting he was wrong:

Come on Cap, that's the best you can offer? You didn't help mutants more? Anything more recent you want to apologize for? And you didn't really help mutants with Wanda walking around and facing no consequences for her actions, did you?

Did Cap really ever meet Xavier over the past fifty years? Saying that to the guy who was basically his son, that's a guilt trip won't really work. So there we go, Cyclops gets what he wanted, at the cost of being the pariah of the superhero world. Cap is a jerk. Wanda caused the whole thing but everyone looks the other way. Xavier is dead. Wolverine is now, for all intents and purposes, the leader of the X-Men. While not as bad as Secret Invasion in terms of being a summer event, and having a few bright spots over the thirteen issues, it was a book that never matched the writing and artistic talent attached to it, and the series always felt biased to the Avengers. At the very least NOW! does have some really good titles in the pipeline.

AVX: VS. #6

The final issue of the fight tie-in sees Hope and Wanda fighting a few days before the final battle, where Hope comes closest to actually making Wanda pay for M-Day.

Only a few million more punches and Wanda might be forgiven for what she did. That's not the highlight though, as we get a bunch of one page fights that should have been given more time in earlier issues:

I'd be lying if I said any of those three fights were not the best fights in the series.



Uncanny X-Men #19

I'm sure that was cathartic for Scott. This issue takes place during the final battle, where Cyclops is basically everywhere in time, and even comes to the white border of existence (pretty clever nod  by Gillen):

That's not cool Jean, no one called you an idiot when you were going crazy. Captured and depowered, we also get a scene that has Cyclops create the new mutant rallying gesture:

Take that, world!



Daredevil: End of Days #1

Years in the making, we finally get Daredevil's version of "The End." The issue opens with Matt being killed by Bullseye in front of a crowd of Hell's Kitchen citizens, with his billy club being jammed into the side of his head in a pretty graphic fashion. Ben Urich's final article for the dying Daily Bugle becomes a story of his friend, where he tries to interview people who saw the fight. We then flash back to when Matt took over as Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen, and from there things go different than what we've seen:

They fight. For pages, almost like a more violent version of The Quiet Man.

That happens five years ago, and Daredevil isn't seen until the day he's killed by Bullseye. So what happened in that time, and who/what is Mapone?

Detective Comics #13

John Layman starts off his run on the series by making the Penguin think about his legacy, and how he gets no respect. So he'll buy out the naming of the new children's center, and also he planned on having Bruce Wayne murdered by ninjas. Typical Gotham gangster life.

The Penguin trolling Bruce Wayne for the respect of the city is a novel approach to the character, this should have some legs as a subplot.

Earth 2 #5

Wesley Dodds, Earth-2 style, and his "Sandmen" seem to be super spies/teleporters. He's also Canadian now.

Grundy can never die. They might not have had that rhyme because their world was being invaded, but everyone of the new wonders is trying to stop the threat, and the World Army calls in for help from the big enemy from the zero issue:

His response is to just nuke the city, that seems to be Sloan's go to plan. Meanwhile Alan tries to contact the Grey in the spirit world, leaving the others to hold the line until he arrives. The Grey's reason for fighting is pretty odd:

The Grey sure seems to be short on patience, any new life will probably take the same amount of time to get anywhere. As a bit of a bribe, the Grey offers Alan something to stop fighting:

And for the moment he accepts. Uh oh.



Harvest #3

Ben calls in his favor, and in doing so it's Matsuda's daughter who becomes his bodyguard, the same one he saved in the first issue.

Robin Hood, with organs? That's a new concept.

And that's where we saw the first issue's opening operation come into play. All those patients he cut open, he's going to absolve himself by taking the organs back.

Uncanny X-Force #32

Surprise surprise, Evan doesn't trust Wade and he gets captured. Meanwhile Mystique imitates the Summers family and runs into her son from another world:

This new Brotherhood are experts at smooth talking, aren't they?

This could be a last page cliffhanger leading into a reversal in the coming issue, but with the series coming to an end soon, they might go ahead and have AoA Kurt go down the same path Iceman did.

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