The Weekly Haul: Reviews for May 30, 2008

Van Jensen

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book writer. In addition to ComicMix, he contributes to Publishers Weekly and Comic Book Resources. He lives in Atlanta, and his blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

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5 Responses

  1. MetalMilitia says:

    The only thing that looks bleak is your worthless reviews,get soem taste you Marvel Tosser.

  2. Alan Coil says:

    2 things about Astonishing really p****d me off—the price, and that they brought in the mainstream universe. Astonishing as written by Whedon was almost 100% free of the Marvel Universe, yet this issue brought in all these new characters. $4.99 for 32 pages of story is just way too much. Along with Marvel continually using card-stock covers so they can charge another $1 for 22 pages of story, this has p****d me off. I will not be buying Astonishing after this issue. And every time they pull a stunt like this will be the last issue of that comic I will buy. I will not stand for it.

    • Alan Coil says:

      Minor spoilers appear after the spoilers warning.Okay, I read Astonishing before bed last night, and I am still fuming this morning.What an incredible, stinking, pile of rubbish.Spoilers below. You've been warned.1st, a correction: it is 43 pages of story. And it could have very well been only 27 pages. That's all the X-Men story there is. The rest is Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and other shite. None of the 'the rest' is needed to tell this story. Doctor Strange and magic? Mass hallucinations? None of this crud or these characters were in any of the previous issues. Stuff gets introduced, then never resolved. Colossus demands of a character the nature of the weakness of the doomsday device. SPOILER, DAMMIT! It's to strike the device with a large object? That's it? Then that doesn't work? Enough complaining from me—I'll leave some for others.Furthermore, 12 pages of reprints of covers? Wasted space and paper. A 2-page spread of Spider-Man swinging over New York? Wasted space and paper. At no point in the previous 24 issues was the mainstream Marvel Universe any significant part of the story. All those parts in this issue? Wasted space and paper.As to the core story in this issue, I can at least say I liked it. Whedon does his usual writing tricks. I understand the plot twist of the final pages from a writing point of view, but I hate the last page from a reader viewpoint. I can accept that, though, from an intellectual approach.(You'd think at this point I'd be completely vented by now, but I'm not.)

  3. Anonymous says:

    And every time they pull a stunt like this will be the last issue of that comic I will buy. No. The prior issue should be the last one you buy. Otherwise what Merry Marvel Marketing Society will see is that sales dropped just after the expensive card-stock cover issue. And convince themselves that clearly more expensive card-stock cover issues are called for.

    • Alan Coil says:

      I agree with what you are saying, but I seldom read the Previews for Marvel and DC because so much is spoiled in Previews that it takes away from the enjoyment of the comic book, so I never know which issue is going to be too-expensive-for-the-value, AND I have a standing subscription list at my LCS, so it wouldn't be right to stiff the LCS. I tell them immediately if I decide to stop buying a book, but if there is one already in the pipeline, then I feel obligated to buy it.