New Warriors #2 (Comics Review)

Where one leaves off, another picks up. That seems to be Marvel’s motto of late, especially with their All-New Marvel launch/relaunch of certain titles. Marvel doesn’t exactly have all that many teen superheroes, unless you count some of the X-kids from their various team books. With the recent cancellation of Young Avengers, Marvel launched a new teen superhero book, New Warriors, last month and it seems to be stylistically somewhat similar to the other series. But this brings back (apparently) an old team but with some new faces, so things are certainly interesting.

The first issue was a bit all over the place, and was just about good enough for me to recommend it to you, the readers of this blog. With the second issue however, I am starting to have some serious doubts because this too was all over the place but much more than the first issue. The pacing was odd and the story just didn’t quite click with me either. There were some nice moments here, but I confess that I felt lost most of the time. And the art is okay, no major complaints about it, not at the moment at least, I must say.

New Warriors #1 (Comics Review)

If anything, February has been a bigger month for Marvel and its All-New Marvel NOW! launch than January was. More titles, a bit more oomph in general, and just as interesting in the final tally. And given that January was a pretty damn good month for the publisher in terms of unit sales and market share, I’m thinking that February is going to be equally good. I mean, when you launch these many new #1s and with many of them getting their sequel issues in the same month, that’s going to add a lot of padding to your wallet. Like a lot.

But that’s fine, as long as the titles being released are decent. And New Warriors #1 is kind of entertaining I suppose. There’s an overload of characters and everything is basically frontloaded at the reader as far as the team’s makeup is concerned, but that’s fine. This is not a group that I’ve really read about before (I hardly remember what I read in Civil War), so there’s that charm about them that I drew me to the title. Beyond that though, I can easily see this as being a good replacement for Young Avengers, following the cancellation of that title recently. Art is good, story is decent. All good.

Comics Picks of The Week 22.01.2014

So this past week proved to be a rather busy week. Lots of comics came out and I think there were something like 30 titles I was interested in, not to mention my huge backlog which stretches quite a bit too. Still, I read quite a few, and I’m mostly happy with them. Interestingly enough I read almost twice as many Marvel titles as I did DC, which was a surprise considering that I enjoy DC far more and find it to be a much easier universe to get into. But, I suppose its the whole All-New Marvel NOW! relaunch at work since three of the titles I read were part of this.

My Superior Spider-Man read-through continued as well with Volume 2, which I really, really enjoyed, and will have a review going up soon for the first two volumes. I couldn’t really be bothered when the title launched last year but now that I’ve gotten a taste of it, I want more. Doc Ock as Spider-Man is really interesting and really good.

Anyway, here’s another edition of this new feature. Full reading list, as always, is available here and all my comics reviews are available here.

Advent Review #9: Infinity by Jonathan Hickman (Graphic Novel Review)

This year has certainly been the year of mega-crossovers and events. Barely does one stop when the next one begins. With Marvel, it was, first, their Marvel NOW! relaunch last fall, which was quickly followed by the universe-wide Age of Ultron, and then immediately after that we delved into TWO crossover events. The first of these was Avengers and New Avengers scribe Jonathan Hickman’s grand space opera Infinity and the other was Battle of the Atom (Part 1, Part 2) for the primary X-Men team books and was penned by multiple writers. And barely has either event finished that we are moving on to the next event: Inhumanity, which has already begun in bits and pieces but won’t kick into overdrive until next year. And not to forget, Marvel’s Ultimate universe is also undergoing its own event right now, Cataclysm which just might see the destruction of that setting.

So indeed, there’s been a lot going on at Marvel next year, including their All-New Marvel NOW! relaunch of certain titles from the current range and which will see some new books debuting as well. Through all of it, I’ve stuck with only two events: Battle of the Atom and Infinity. The former event had a really good start in its first month but fizzled out completely in the second. The latter, which I just read back-to-back (just the core event issues), has been a much better read, primarily because of its incredible scope which covers a lot of different characters and teams and organisations within the Marvel-616 universe and thus giving the reader a good taste for all of it.