Best Comic

Well, this is the week I've been waiting for, apparently, because the quality meter shot way up!

Here's the list:

All-Star Superman #10: Another awesome comic in a series of awesome comics. Superman becomes more human and real with each issue of this series. It's pretty spectacular.

Blue Beetle #25: Blue Beetle delivers a great climactic battle with the Reach and makes them look like chumps. Amazing how Rogers can take 2 panels away from the action and take a microscopic look at some very powerful emotions before zooming back to action. My only complaint is that they bring back the Justice League International characters (Guy, Booster, Ice and Fire) which kinda distracts from the core plot. I'd rather the reunion wait for a comic less climactic to do this.

Countdown #5: The journal writing goes on as we see how the great disaster unfolds and kills off the earth, creating the last boy on earth, Kommandi! Meh. Still, some good storytelling that now seems totally off-topic.

Countdown to Adventure #8: Wrapping up the adventures of Animal Man, Adam Strange and Starfire, as well as the Forerunner story. Decent enough. I wonder if Forerunner will go off and mother a race of SUVs?

Green Lantern #29: Finally, a good issue of Green Lantern! The story delves back into Hal's childhood and his relationships with his family. It's nice to get away from the whole "every color of the rainbow" lantern corps for a minute and get some character development going.

JLA Classified #36: A standard Wildcat issue. Writers seem to love Wildcat.

The Mighty Avengers #11: Dr. Doom gets his iron butt handed to him by the Avengers in a very satisfactory way. Suspicion is cast upon Spiderwoman as a Skrull plant. I think Bendis is putting in waaaayyy too many thought bubbles.

The New Avengers #39: More Skrullnanigans here. It's interesting that the Skrull heroes are somewhat sympathetic. Maybe this secret war will be better than the Beyonder ones.

Wolverine First Class #1: Better than I expected, a tale of Wolverine and Kitty Pride's first adventure. However, I think I will mention here how weird it is that Marvel loves sticking Wolverine with a daughter-figure every chance they get. It's almost creepy.

XMEN First Class #10: A decent issue about cyclops. Unfortunately, the humor that is usually present in this title is contained only in the first couple pages, and it doesn't really show itself much there, either.

So, the best comic? I'll go Blue Beetle, but only because it has inertia from the issue before it. Hooray comic industry for making my day a good one!

Appleseed: Ex Machina

Ok, so last night I watched this new CGI film, and it greatly exceeded my expectations. The voice acting was decent, the art and animation were really really good and the architecture was just fantastic. The story didn't hold many surprises, but I didn't care in the least. Awesome job!

Best Comic

I'm thinking about renaming this series "What I Read", since I'm having such a hard time finding outstanding comics this season. Maybe the big two are prepping for their big summer spectaculars and are too busy to quality check their stuff. Maybe I'm becoming jaded. Who knows?

Anyway, this is what I grabbed this week:

Brave and the Bold #11 -- Superman and his anti-universe duplicate team up and fail at their mission. Lots of exposition, not enough everything else. Waid is losing his focus on this run, I think. The Challengers of the Unknown, being the focus of the current run, need a bit more attention in terms of character development if they are going to be in multiple issues. In a single issue, you can just take the surface characteristics of the team and that'll work. Put them in multiple issues and readers begin to wonder why the characters act the way they do.

Countdown #6: One of the best of the series... no one talks. It's all written by an uninvolved third party in journal form. Superheroes act as the vector for the disease which is dooming the universe. It's still Countdown, though. I can't really bring myself to care.

Incredible Hercules #115: Comics reviewers have been raving about this book, so I grabbed an issue. It was pretty decent. Hercules is a lot like I remembered him from the salad days when Walt Simonson was writing him in the 80's.

Invincible #49: Somewhere, Invincible went from a boy who loved being a superhero to a man who is taking things way too seriously. As his enemies grow in numbers and his social life becomes more complex, the accumulated story-barnacles from the past 48 issues is starting to weigh down the title character, making him less fun, less likable. Let's see what he does in issue #50.

Iron Fist #13: Another highly rated book. I'll have to back-collect to figure out what's going on.

JLA #19: The JLA get lost on an alien planet. Really boring. Why isn't McDuffie writing anymore? Was it his month off?

Shadowpact #23: Another book that went from fun to dark. They're losing a team member per book, now, with the Swordsman out last issue and Blue Devil depowered in this one.

The Order #9: I read that they're going to cancel this book. It looks like the authors heard this and decided to kill off the team. This particular issue has the Order's butt handed to them. Let's see how they get out of this one...

Wolverine Origins #23: As I mentioned last week, it's odd that Origins takes place in the present while the regular book takes place in the past. This was another long book of Deadpool and Wolverine slashing at each other with wild abandon. Notable is the fact that Deadpool seems to have planned this really well and Wolverine is taking a lot of damage.

So, the best comic book this week? Hard to say, and I don't have a snarky animated movie reference to throw at you. I did finish watching the Venture Brothers Season Two DVDs, and they were great, but I already launched Henry Killinger at you last week. Well, maybe next week!