One-paragraph reviews: Spider-Man, Fear Itself, Last Mortal, Supergirl

Amazing Spider-Man #661
Written by Christos Gage, art by Reilly Brown; Marvel

I probably wouldn't have bought this issue if I had noticed that it was written by Christos Gage before leaving the store. I read the first few issues of Avengers Academy, and while I like the characters, the weak scripts and occasionally even worse art prevented me from enjoying it. I've always been a bit puzzled by the generally positive reviews of it I see online. Here, we get the same level of quality I've come to expect from Gage: an all right story, mostly bad dialogue, and scenes that somehow ring false. No complaints about the art, though.

OKAY

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Fear Itself #2 (of 7)
Written by Matt Fraction; art by Stuart Immonen and Wade Von Grawbadger; Marvel

I had mixed feelings about the first issue. The story was better than I had expected, but I was really turned off by the pretentious attempt at "relevance" that steered clear of any actual political commentary. In the end, although I was curious to see what would happen next, I decided not to bother with the rest of the series or crossover event. Then I started reading Journey into Mystery and was surprised by how awesome it was. Since it seems like an important tie-in, I figured I would give the main series another try. Aside from the annoying and utterly pointless soundbites from the news that occasionally intrude on the narrative, Matt Fraction seems to have abandoned any effort to connect this story to what's going on in the real world. In fact, there isn't much of a story here at all. We see various characters pick up the hammers that fell from the sky and get transformed into different beings, which is repetitive and boring. Meanwhile, the Avengers are in full crisis mode, but it's not clear exactly what they're reacting to. In one of the most unconvincing pep speeches ever delivered, Steve Rogers talks about "incident zones" and tells his troops that people will be hurt, scared and panicking. I guess these "incidents" occurred in other books. I'm not going to start buying more titles to figure out what's going on. In fact, I regret buying this one. I'm just going to stick to Journey into Mystery from now on and hope that the story remains self-contained enough for me to be able to make sense of it without paying any attention to this.

AWFUL

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Last Mortal #1
Written by John Mahoney and Filip Sablik; art by Thomas Nachlik; Image

Nice black and white art, but I couldn't really bring myself to care about the characters or what happens to them in this issue. The hook of this series is that the main character apparently can't die, so it was a bad idea to not explore that in the first issue. As an idea, it's not really strong enough on its own to just throw it at the reader on the last page. It might work once this is collected in a trade, but for now if the goal is to keep me buying the issues, I need a little more to go on. Especially considering this wasn't much of a twist, since I already knew what the series would be about based on the promotional material. I may or may not pick up the next issue. It'll probably mostly depend on how heavy my pull list happens to be next month. I know how unfair it is to judge a book on a single issue, but unfortunately that's the economic reality I have to deal with.

OKAY

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Supergirl #64
Written by James Peaty; art by Bernard Chang; DC

This concludes the "Good Looking Corpse" story that Nick Spencer started four issues ago. Looking back at the full story, I have to say it was pretty disappointing. We'll probably never know what Spencer intended to do with it, but we know that he left after only one issue because his editors apparently didn't like what he was giving them. So Peaty was almost certainly following an editorial mandate here, which makes it hard to hold him responsible for the story's failure. Does it really come as a surprise to anyone that when you take one writer's idea, have an editor twist and bend it out of shape, and then hire someone else to hack out the scripts, the results are not very good? What you get is a flat, somewhat pointless story that feels like nobody's heart was really in it. Bernard Change's art is pretty good, although this last issue feels a bit sketchier than the others, and there's a lot of ugly digital blur effects (the bane of my existence) added by the colourist.

NOT VERY GOOD

Quick Reviews: Batman, Red Robin, Batman and Robin, Invaders Now, One Month to Live, Daytripper

BATMAN #703
Written by Fabian Nicieza; art by Cliff Richards.

Fabian Nicieza fills in for Peter Milligan, who was originally announced as the writer for this filler issue before Tony Daniel returns as regular writer and penciller. Given the last minute change, I'm assuming this was a bit of a rush job, but FabNic uses the opportunity to expand on a theme he's been exploring in Red Robin, namely, Vicky Vale's snooping around the Bat family, trying to expose their identities.

This is billed on the cover as "A prelude to Bruce Wayne: The Road Home." In other word, this is pretty much prelude to a prelude to the actual Return of Bruce Wayne, which will presumably take place in the final issue of said series. It's not a bad story, but it seems a bit unnecessary (much like the previous two issues from Grant Morrison).

Where the rushed nature of this job is most apparent, though, is in the art. There's an appalling lack of detail in Cliff Richards's lines, especially when it comes to facial expressions. And Damian looks like a 17-year-old girl instead of a 10-year-old boy.

RED ROBIN #16
Written by Fabian Nicieza; art by Marcus To and Ray McCarthy.

This was probably the weakest issue of Red Robin since Nicieza took over the title. I'm not sure why it was so unsatisfying. There's too much narration, not enough action. It seems like nothing much happens and this is just more filler setting things up for Bruce's return. It's possible that some of what ended up in Batman this week was originally supposed to be in this issue, which would explain why this all feels a bit redundant. The most exciting part of the issue is probably the short blurb at the very end of it where Nicieza teases some of the changes that are waiting for Tim after Bruce's return. Tie-in events often interrupt the flow of ongoing titles, and I think there's a bit of that going on here. Hopefully once that's been dealt with, the pacing will improve. I have faith in Fabian Nicieza. Meanwhile, Marcus To's art remains excellent.

BATMAN AND ROBIN #14
Written by Grant Morrison; art by Frazer Irving.

This is another really good issue from Morrison and Irving, although it didn't quite blow my mind the way the previous issue did with its shocker opening. I don't even know what else to say about this. The next issue is going to be epic and I can't even... Words fail me.

INVADERS NOW! #1
Story by Alex Ross and Christos Gage; art by Caio Reis.

I decided to give this a try, because I was curious about this old-school team featuring Captain America (the first and the second), Namor and a bunch of characters I've never heard of before, including one that looks an awful lot like Martian Manhunter. This wasn't very good. The entire issue consists of this green guy gathering members of the old team, most of which have died and returned to life in one way or another. They're all conveniently hanging out in pairs, spending a lot of time reminiscing about the past while fighting monsters or villains, when they are summoned. Then they all gather in Steve Rogers office, where we are told for about the fourth or fifth time that they are the only ones capable of saving the world. And this is all because of this terrible thing that happened during WWII, the "darkest chapter in their history."

Maybe things will pick up in the next issues, but this was just about the worse possible introduction to a team of (to me) unknown characters I could've imagined, and it does nothing to make me want to continue reading. I've come to the conclusion that I'm really not a fan of Christos Gage at all. His dialogue is really terrible. (I haven't yet given up on Avengers Academy, which he's also writing, because I'm interested in the characters and the story, but that title is also on probation at the moment.)

ONE MONTH TO LIVE #2
Written by Bob Williams; art by Koi Turnbull, Shawn Moll, Mark Irwin and Allen Martinez.

I wasn't entirely convinced by the first issue of this five-part weekly mini-series, and now after another issue I'm still kind of on the fence. It's an interesting premise, but the execution is strange. The decision to have a different creative team on every issue (including different writers) is definitely a weird one, but it's kind of an interesting experiment. I was really annoyed by some stereotypical "urban" thug in the first part of this issue, and then by Spider-Man's totally off-key sassy dialogue.

For example: "Time to shake your booty on the catwalk and announce your brand name. Work it, girlfriend. Show Spidey the voguish heroic apparel that's going to be simply everywhere this season." Any one of these sentences would have been bad enough, but all three of them in succession is just ridiculous.

I can't really recommend this, although now that I'm two issues in and still kind of curious about where it's going, I figure I'll probably keep reading it.

DAYTRIPPER #10
Written and drawn by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba.

This series has been amazing and I was almost apprehensive about reading the final issue, afraid that it wouldn't live up to expectations. I still don't fully know if it does and I'm kind of reluctant to comment further at this point, because I feel like I need to let it sink in and probably re-read the full series in order to better process it.

All I can say is I highly recommend this series. I've resisted reviewing any of it until now because I always felt that it would be better appreciated as a complete work. I'll write more about it at some point in the future.