John Buys Comics: Why Doesn't John Remember Last Week's Reviews?

Brevity is once again the order of the day! Uh, not because I’m drunk again, though. No, this time it’s simple procrastination - if I don’t curtail my wordcount I won’t write anything at all.

Captain Long Ears, by Diana Thung

In common with Calvin and Hobbes: a young boy has crazy imagination-fueled adventures with a stuffed 

animal. Crazy space hijinks.

Unique to this book: a compelling and more-accurate-than-usual look at the emotional life of a child, a very cool combination of imagination-adventures and reality. An obsession with poop, including one of my favourite poop jokes of all time (on the last page). An ending that manages to be happy without being sappy. Just terrific on all fronts.

Justice League: Generation Lost No. 2

It’s only the second issue, so I may be completely wrong, but at this point [Generation Lost] looks like it has a far better chance of hauling the DCU out of the rape-and-murder hole that it’s had one foot stuck in for the last few years than its biweekly sibling Brightest Day, if only due to the fact that the latter’s narrative arc (at 10% completion, natch) looks like it’s going to involve things getting bad and then better. All of the returned characters are going to have some terrible trials and tribulations and then emerge triumphant and the mass happy ending is going to change things FO-EVAH.

In contrast, what has happened in Generation Lost so far has been incredibly encouraging. I may just be reading what I want to here, but it looks like Giffen and Winick are actually going to be examining some of the reasons/events behind the darker storytelling trends that have been the norm for a while now. If Max Lord is alive and nobody on Earth including Wonder Woman remembers that she killed him, is she still a murderer? Hell, how does that change the perception of how events played out afterward?

Anyway, nobody was killed with a knife.

Mystery Society No. 1  

You know I love stories of paranormal investigation, and it’s actually kind of awesome that the main character is a smug asshole - it’s an underused heroic archetype! I think that I need to call a SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT on it, though - right now this is essentially a pile of interesting ideas. It’s going to be how they’re deployed that swings the Like-o-meter one way or the other - you can cram your comic full of as many psychic 1950s teenage girls and skull-masked undead… teenage girls as you want, but by god you’d better come through on some tasty plot or I will... not read no more.

So watch out.

The Brave and the Bold No. 34 - The Legion of Super-Heroes and the Doom Patrol are two of my favourite things of all time. How does mixing them together produce such a tepid and uninteresting comic? Maybe the second part of this story will retroactively make this one better somehow? I command you to wait for my analysis! Bite your nails with tension!

Green Lantern No. 54/ Green Lantern Corps No. 48 - See now, this is what I was talking about. Have most of this portentous stuff in two reasonably self-contained books and I’m kind of okay with it. Also: the triumphant return of Dex-Star, rage-fueled kitty!

War of the Supermen No. 4 - Superman is home! No more military/industrial conspiracies! Whoopee!

Detective Comics No. 865 - Hey, wait. So Vandal Savage is the Biblical Cain, and Cain from Sandman is kind of Cain, and Rage-Entity the Butcher is strongly implied to be Cain… that’s a lot of Cains. But Vandal Savage is also still a caveman? I don’t know how smoothly the two origins jibe.