I had no intention of seeing Man of Steel in the movie theater; I was voting for Monsters University. I’ve grown quite tired with the constant universe rebooting. We all know where Superman (or Batman or Spider-Man etc) came from. Can we not waste another 2+ hours and $millions to retell that. Why can’t we just tell new stories? These characters have such rich histories and such iconic villains that it just seems so pointless to keep hitting the same notes. Additionally, while I liked Snyder’s Watchmen, I was NOT a fan of Suckerpunch. But my parents wanted to treat Danielle and I to a nice dinner for our wedding anniversary and Man of Steel was the movie that would get us out of the theater in time to make out reservations.

The thing I like the most about Twitter is the ability to interact with creatives in real time.  In the past you had to write a letter to a writer, artist, musician, etc and hope that, maybe, they’d actually read it and that, maybe, they’d feel compelled to reply with something more than boilerplate.  I started following Paolo Rivera after meeting him at Baltimore Comic-Con.  (Related topic: meeting a bunch of creators in person at Baltimore Comic-Con helped make them more “real” to me.  I’m not a jerky person, but it really does give me pause when I post a criticism to someone on twitter.  Unlike these guys.)  So when Paolo tweeted something from his blog that I wanted to comment on, I kept failing the captcha he had on the comments.  I tweeted and (to my surprise) was retweeted by Paolo:

One always wonders if and when those classes you take in high school will be important.  For me, as an engineer, most of my high school classes were laying the foundation for the classes I’d take in college.  I’ve used plenty of those classes in my work and personal life.  One of the classes that has served me well all these years was Speech and Debate.  You don’t realize how long a minute is until you have to talk for a minute in front of class.  It has helped me with college presentation and work presentations.  Most recently, the following two video reviews were completely ad-libbed.  I didn’t even have any notes to go off of.  (In the AvX video I did take the comic with me to remember the name of the penciller)

Start here before FF Fantastic Four By Jonathan Hickman # 1 - Volume 1 I’ve always been a Fantastic Four fan, but it’d been a long time since I last read F4 when I picked up FF. Being as this was a #1 of a new title, I was very confused about what in the world was going on with the Future Foundation. I knew what’d happened to ellicit the name change, but that’s about it. Well, if you read this book, it will all make sense. Right from the beginning you meet one of the future members of the FF. And later on you meet almost all of the rest of them. This TP also introduces the Reed Council which is the whole reason for the the first FF story arc. Hickman is like Marvel’s Grant Morrison. If you really want to understand FF, you are really going to need to AT LEAST read his run on F4. By the end of this TP, almost EVERYTHING from FF had been setup. I’d say, about 15-20% has yet to occur.

Not Feelin’ It Astonishing X-Men # 36 - Monstrous, Part 1 The only story arc in Astonishing I haven’t read yet is Exogenic. I am really not liking this one. I know this is the first issue, but I’ve also read the third one due to when I got into Astonishing. I really, really hate this art style. It just looks weird and almost like a super deformed (in the manga sense) version of the X-Men and I don’t think it fits with the previous art style or tone of the book.

It was OK Uncanny X-Men # 539 - Losing Hope I was hoping this was linked to what happened in Generation Hope #8, but sadly it does not appear to be. We do get to see how M-Day has affected some former mutants, and that’s neat. We also get to see why Wolverine acts so strange around her. (Although an astute reader probably already guessed why) This issue felt like a very fast read and I wasn’t left as satisfied as I’ve been with recent Gillen works. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

Injecting some fresh blood into the X-Men Generation Hope: The Future is a Four-Letter Word # 1 - TPB We live in a world where the big comic companies are in financial trouble. We’ve got so many things to occupy our attention and many of them are free. So we’re drowning in reboots and revamps and retellings. Ghost Rider is a woman now. Captain America is back for the umpteenth time. So it’s quite refreshing to see Marvel going in a different direction with the X-Men. Rather than doing a reboot so we can see the X-Men when they first became X-Men, they are introducing new, young mutants.

Good Focus on the New Guy Batman, Incorporated # 7 - Medicine Soldiers I like this Batman, Inc issue because it mostly focused on the new guy with Batman playing a very small part. The dynamic between Man-of-Bats and Raven is played very well. There’s a lot of history here and you can feel it. The only bad thing with this issue is the same as all the other issues, it feels like these books need to be a bit longer. I feel like too much story is getting compressed into too few pages and the story’s suffering a bit for it. I think it’d be best if these were all two-parters like the series-opening Japanese story.

Glad I Waited Uncanny X-Men # 535 - Breaking Point, Part One I just got back into comics in May after a 10-12 year hiatus. boy have I missed a lot! So I’ve been working my way through the trade paperbacks and hard covers to get caught up on just what happened to one of my favorite Marvel teams. I was going to read this issue when I saw in issue 534.1 that it involves the Breakworld which was mentioned as returning for the first time since Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men. So I put this issue aside and finished reading my Morrison New X-Men so I could read Astonishing X-Men. All of this is a very roundabout way of saying - it’s perfect for me! It’s as though things are picking up where that story left off. We have Kitty still intangible and even Danger (the embodiment of The Danger Room) still around. The only thing different is that Beast is gone because he is now with the Secret Avengers. (And Armor was left behind on purpose) And so this storyline is awesome for me, but what about the regulars?

A Fitting Followup to Morrison’s Run Astonishing X-Men Omnibus # 1 - Astonishing X-Men Omnibus I came into this right on the heels of Morrison’s run in the Ultimate 3 Volume collection. I know there’s an Uncanny Volume that takes place between the two, but it doesn’t look like it contained anything that kept me from understanding what was going on in this story. (Plus this Omnibus version has an intro to the X-Men that explains where Professor X is)