Blog Archives
12 Days of Best SFF Characters of 2013: Day #9
For this new seasonal list of the best SFF characters I’ve read this year, my ninth pick is the Asgardian who doubles up on Earth as a Norse god, the mighty Thor from Jason Aaron’s phenomenal Thor: God of Thunder from Marvel Comics, a new series that started last year with the Marvel NOW! initiative and has consistently been one of Marvel’s top comics of each month. I credit Jason Aaron and artist Esad Ribic for helping me break into Marvel’s comics full and proper with this title and its been a damn good read throughout its run till now.
Hit the break to see why I picked this character.
Advent Review #3: Wolverine and the X-Men Annual #1 (Comics Review)
Coming right on the heels of Marvel’s biggest and grandest event of the year, Infinity, is a tie-in issue for one of its longest-running series at present, Wolverine and the X-Men, which I started reading thanks to another event and am kind of liking thus far. I haven’t read Infinity till now, aside from the first couple issues which I found really confusing and laborious reading, but I do plan to go through it soon since all the issues are now out and I can read them back-to-back without any gaps. Seeing the Infinity logo on this issue made me think that this would be a direct tie-in, but its a side-story at best and focused on a single character.
With Battle of the Atom over now, I’m seeing that Wolverine and the X-Men is quite an ensemble book of various X-Men characters, young and old, inexperienced and experienced. That seems to be at the heart of this book, so its a bit strange to get an issue like this, which is focused exclusively on Kid Gladiator. But all the same, as an “extra” issue, it kind of does make sense in the end, particularly when by all accounts writer Jason Aaron is bringing the character back after a long absence. In the end, this issue has my thumbs-up.
Diversity In All-New Marvel NOW!
I’ve blogged about diversity in comics before. I’ve even talked about it extensively on Twitter and Facebook as well. As an Indian comics reader, comics diversity is something that I think about a lot, and being a reviewer has helped me to think about it in several different ways that I didn’t quite consider before. Diversity doesn’t just stop with gender, or race. It is much more. It is about religion, geography, physical attributes, mental state, health disorders, etc. One point I’ve iterated on again and again is that today, comics readers aren’t just white males in their teens and twenties and living in UK/US. They are much. Comics readership crosses all sorts of boundaries today. All sorts of people, from all walks of life and with all kinds of backgrounds read comics in this day and age.
Hell, comics aren’t just print anymore. They went digital and they have only been growing despite the ridiculous scaremongering from those who dislike the medium or are hopelessly wedded to their print collections to the exclusion of all else.
In a world like this, diversity is an important topic to discuss. And there are no better agents to discuss this topic than the Big 2, Marvel and DC. They are the giants of the industry who together make up about 67-75% (give or take a couple percentage points) of the market in terms of unit sells and market shares in any given month. They have the longest legacies, and thus the most material to contribute to such a discussion.
Thanos Rising by Jason Aaron (Graphic Novel Review)
Jason Aaron is, without a doubt, one of the best comics writers in the industry right now. He’s taken Thor: God of Thunder to stratospheric levels with his excellent writing and with the recent launch of the Thanos Rising mini-series, he was all set to continue that trend. He’s done some other work for Marvel before, and continues to do so, but really, its only his space opera styled stuff that I’ve read and he’s made me into enough of a fan that I’d follow him from book to book, no questions asked.
Which reminds me, I need to get a start on his Wolverine and the X-Men run at some point
Either way, with Thanos being such a central character to Marvel’s cosmic setting, I had some initial reservations on how Jason would deliver. And that’s nothing on his skills as a writer. Its just that Thanos is so much larger than life that there undoubtedly will be reservations. But an in-form Jason makes all these worries go away.
Note: This is a review for the Thanos Rising mini-series, which is 5-issues long. I’ve read the issues individually, rather than reading the graphic novel, which won’t be out for a few months yet.