Monday, October 12, 2009

Confessions of a sick fan

Since I haven't really had the funds to hit my LCS as of late (and I'm up late/early with a cold), I thought I'd just put out a few confessions of mine about comics I already bought and read & those I plan to read.

CONFESSION 1: I have not enjoyed Kathy Immonen's run on Runaways

In the course of trashing a few new books, The Hurting mentions that they think Immonen had a lot to fix from Whedon's lateness-plagued run and Terry Moore's somewhat unfocused run on Runaways.

Now, let's be fair here. I thought Moore's run was lackluster at best but he left her with the kids in a safehouse in California, minus a few members of the previous cast. Even with a new addition who was a plant-controlling mutant time-traveler, it wasn't like they'd all been transformed into middle-aged Cyborg Zebras and stranded on Mars in the year 2525 or something. So, how did she then chose to start her run? Immonen starts out with the random killing of the iconic dinosaur portion of the team and blowing up their Malibu base. I mean, seriously? Why not just burn all of Molly Hayes' hats while you're at it? This is the team that non-comic readers recognize as the one with the Goth Chick, the little girl in the funny hat, the other ones and the dinosaur. Sheesh.

She then followed that up with a second issue that was comprised almost entirely of people yelling at one another while sitting in rubble. Fun! I have no idea why anybody wouldn't immediately fall in love with this wacky comic about teens with superpowers.

I have to admit that I didn't even follow my traditional "3 issues to be fair about it" rule because I'm damn poor and I don't like to waste money on things that don't make me happy. It hurt because this is an all-female team writing and drawing a book about a team lead by a teenage girl (with Molly "Always Awesome" Hayes). Also, I liked that Hellcat series a whole lot and they hinted Gert was coming back, so I definitely wanted to like this book. I wanted to like this book so bad that the cognitive dissonance from hating it kind of gave me an ice cream headache.

What I'm saying here is that, while I wasn't the biggest fan of their runs either, I don't think it's entirely fair to lay all the blame at Terry Moore and Joss Whedon's feet for Runaways not shining as brightly as it could.

Whew. Glad I got that out there.

CONFESSION 2
: After nearly two decades reading comics, I still have very little idea who about 2/3'ds of the JSA are.

This doesn't stop me from loving the holy crap out of Eric Trautmann's tense, well-plotted JSA Vs. Kobra mini-series or Palmiotti and Conner's fun, excellent and ongoing Power Girl series. And yes, I know, Wikipedia is my friend. I'm just lazy and have enough vague knowledge about all their personalities and powers from various crossovers to be satisfied. For instance, Bell Girl and her husband Hoodie Man find a corpse! Freckles McWhirlwind is horrified! And so on and so forth.

In seriousness, the fact that they're spinning them off into two books now instead of one makes a lot of sense because as near as I can gather, there's 42 members on the team. If the JSA teamed up with the X-Men, I think they'd outnumber the population of Nebraska.

Also, if they really did kill off Mr. Terrific like I've been hearing from folks, this Checkmate fan's gonna be more than a little ticked off. I'm just sayin'.

CONFESSION 3: Planetary #27 finally coming out makes me happy.

No real addition to that one. I mean, I could be a whiny fanboy about it, but hell, I'm just happy it's finally here. I'm going to save up five bucks, track it down and buy the crap out of this one, just for completion's sake, if nothing else. I just hope that, after all these years, the art in it is rather astonishing.

*cough*

Sorry.

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