Thursday, February 20, 2014

New Comic-book Night - 2/19/13

It's been a couple of weeks since New Comic-book Night for me -- mostly because of the weather.  Once again it decided to snow last Wednesday, and this time a veritable blizzard visited my area.  Since comic-books are definitely not worth getting into an accident over, I waited until this week to pick up my haul. And since it had been a couple of weeks, plus many of my pull list titles come out during weeks 2-3 of the month, quite a haul it was indeed.


Among the list are two of the last three New 52 titles I still collect, and the only two I get in print form: Supergirl 28 and Batgirl 28 (the third, Wonder Woman, I get digitally, and I'm a couple of months behind on that).  Also in the mix was Thor, God of Thunder 19, my only Marvel comic.  Rounding out the list of seven were four titles from the smaller "independent" companies -- two regulars on my pull list from Image (Ghosted 7 and Alex + Ada 4), and one regular (Red Sonja 7) and one one-shot (Red Sonja Berserker) from Dynamite.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

New Comic-Book Night 2/5 - a little late

Unlike last week, during which we had a snow storm, this week I was able to get to the comic-book shop on New Comic-book Night (Wednesday). I picked up both this week's and last week's comics as a result.  This two-week sampling included three items from the pull list - Lazarus 6; Suicide Risk 10; and  Thor, God of Thunder 18.  I also violated my rule against picking up titles only for the crossover, and purchased Green Lantern/Red Landerns 28, a "flip book" issue (two stories printed upside-down from each other in two halves of the book) that represents part one of the new Supergirl story arc "Red Daughter."  I'll explain why I violated my anti-crossover rule in my brief summary below.

Because I usually reject crossovers, the comic-shop owner noticed GL/RL 28 in my purchase stack and expressed surprise.  As we discussed it, he said something quite interesting and undeniably true of Supergirl -- that he can't even express to people who she really is or what her comic is all about. "Peter David's earth-born angel stuff was easier to explain than who this character is," he stated.  And I could not disagree.  Kara Zor-El has been such a mess since the H'el on Earth arc (and really, since long before that -- basically since issue 8), that the character has come to seem directionless and, frankly, pointless.  Frankly, if it weren't Supergirl, I'd have dropped her book a long time ago.  The only good arc in the entire thing so far was the first arc.  After that, it went completely off the rails.