Star Trek: Khan #4 (Comics Review)

The wind-up has now begun. In October IDW started this new tie-in series to this year’s Star Trek: Into Darkness and its been an interesting ride of sorts. The first two issues were quite decent and I kind of did enjoy them to a fair degree, but the third issue wasn’t so good. It was sort of expected I suppose, since this is an origin series, and there is a lot of ground for writer Mike Johnson to cover here. That was indeed one of the problems with issue #3 since it pretty much moved through the entire story at a very fast clip.

The new issue does thing slightly different. It tells a more focused story, for starters, but the art is still a bit off, largely in terms of how the characters are drawn, their faces particularly. This is the penultimate issue of this mini-series, since issue #5 next month is the end and we will, hopefully, get to the beginning of the movie itself and see how things were brought to that state with Khan, or rather, John Harrison as he was known in the first half of the movie.

Green Arrow #27 (Comics Review)

With last month’s Green Arrow #26, the current creative team of Jeff Lemire, Andrea Sorrentino and Marcelo Maiolo began their next arc for the series, carrying on what’s come before and taking the series into new territory while also showing that there’s a big direction for everything that’s happened so far. I jumped on the series with Green Arrow #23 and its been quite a fun ride so far. The creators have done some incredible work and they keep improving, with each issue truly better than the last and the consistency is just mind-boggling.

And now, with Green Arrow #27, it looks like a higher bar has been set, overall. I’m no stranger to mind-bogglingly great cliffhanger endings in comics, or in related media. CW’s Arrow, based on Green Arrow and his lore over the decades, has done some similar things and done them well. Everything I love about that show is reflected here, almost everything since the comic is doing some different things, but overall, there is a great synergy between the two in terms of exploring Ollie’s history and his role as a hero, which is damn fantastic.

Black Widow #1 (Comics Review)

Just earlier this week I was listening to Kelly Thompson’s podcast with Sue from DC Women Kickin’ Ass where they talked about gender parity at Marvel and DC, both in terms of the characters and the creators. And a point was raised that Marvel has done less than DC, or that DC is currently just better with it. The podcast was released just after NYCC last year, and some of the news that came out at the time was about Marvel’s All-New Marvel NOW! initiative which would mark the first big step forward in the company’s Marvel NOW! relaunch of its titles, with a slew of new titles, and a few restarts as well. In light of that news, while the creator gender parity hasn’t increased any, the character gender parity certainly has. And new title Black Widow is at the leading edge of that.

Black Widow should be familiar to anyone who’s been watching Marvel movies for about four years now. Under Scarlet Johannson, the character has seen a revival of sorts and she’s quickly become a fan favorite with the fandom demanding she get her own movie. I concur. This is why I was so taken up with the idea of a Black Widow solo comic because I see it as a great step forward to make that happen, though there’ve been a number of Black Widow titles over the years. With this new series, Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto deliver something truly amazing.