So there was the fiasco with Red Hulk (let’s call him “BullshitHulk” for short) doing some sort of idiotic shit with gravity in order to “hold” Thor’s hammer.  That was dumb.

Then evil murdering Magneto in Ultimate land can somehow just stroll around holding it?

OK, maybe his hammer is just a toy/false hammer/something over there in Ultimate land… but it’s still annoying.

Resurrecting Steve Rogers/Captain America really annoys me.

Marvel stuck its balls out there with killing him – and at least did it better than DC did with Superman or Batman, but now it looks like they are undoing everything like a bunch of pansies.  The leaste they could have done was use the Truth version “original cap” instead of Steve. Sigh.  Whatever.

The Batman death was horribly executed.

Seriously.  How unclear was that?  A “fake” death in the main series that led to a death in the crossover series that happened in the wrong sequence?  Or some junk?  I don’t remember really.  Revealing ALREADY that Bruce is still alive is really dumb.  I mean, we know DC has even less balls than Marvel when it comes to these things, and Bruce WILL be back – but don’t show us that already!

Cosmic comics in the big two are having a mini-golden age

Marvel AND DC are both putting out some killer “cosmic” books these days.  The whole Annihilation cycle at Marvel was awesome, almost every issue buy-worthy (I waited for the trades), and DC didn’t isn’t doing too shabby lately either with the current Green Lantern & Corps & Co. incarnations – The Sinestro War was excellent, as was almost everything between then and now leading up to Blackest Night.

Sure, I think Hal Jordan is tired and played out as a character, should have stayed dead, and John & Kyle should still be the main GL, but that’s probably just because I’m a later generation of GL reader.  “Legacies” were the one thing I really valued in DC over Marvel, then they went and shat on both their functional legacies (GL & Flash, both resurrected) while Marvel showed some big balls in creating a legacy character out of Captain America (and potentially Black Panther, but I don’t think that will last).  So yeah, ignoring that I don’t like Hal Jordan as a character, Geoff Johns & co are turnning in stellar (no pun intended) work over there – if I had cash flowing like water I’d actually buy this stuff – and I did buy the Sinestro War finale…probably the only DC book I’ve bought in ages.  Some people are turned off by the whole “Rainbow Corps” thing, but I love it – it’s “wide-screen space opera” at it’s best.

Back over on the Marvel front the new Guardians of the Galaxy book is awesome  – it’s only had 1 slow issue out of 12 so far, and the new Nova book is very good as well.  Not to mention War of Kings – THAT SHIT is looking awesome so far.  The Darkhawk branch seems a little weak thus far, but I suspect that’s because it’s from a different writer.

One thing both cosmic universes have in common is that they’ve both got a heavy guiding hand in the way of being driven by one creative team – Geoff Johns @ DC & Abnett & Lanning for Marvel.  The internal consistency and continuity generated by having a whole line orchestrated by a single point of contact is really beautiful in the way that just sharing an editor isn’t.

I just re-read the entire Grant Morrison X-Men run this weekend.

And it still stands up quite well.  In hindsight, the only thing that bugs me about it was the poor characterization of Magneto.  It’s not entirely his fault though, as he was just following up on a few years of shitty mcshitty Magneto writing.  Honestly, I think Mags shined best under Claremont – he was a real character that you could empathize with and still think was wrong.  I’m not sure if I’ve seen a post-Claremont Magneto story that I actually liked.  Some, like the Joseph clone thing, were *decent* but not good/excellent.  Morrison’s writing was topnotch, and I can buy him being Xorn in disguise – sure sure, except the issue from Xorn’s perspective where he’s hanging out with the Chinese dude – that issue makes me think he just pulled the Magneto thing out of his ass near the end.

One thing he definitely did right was Emma & Emma/Scott.  Which brings me to my final point.

I’m afraid all this Dark X-Men/Osborn bullshit is going make Emma obnoxious and useless and uninteresting again.

Just a hunch, we’ll see.  I like her and Scott together, breaking them up and injecting all this unecessary drama annoys me.

Avengers: The Initiative 14: Unlike Hannibal Tabu,  I really enjoyed this issue.  In fact, I may actually read it again (pssst, that’s really high praise from me, I rarely read something more than once inside 5 years).  While I agree that Triathlon’s (sp?) sudden moniker change to “3-D Man” seemed to come out of nowhere…I have to wonder if it didn’t.  The way he was talking about it it sounds like they got their powers from the same place.  Time for some research…

SNAP!  Triathlon is actually directly related/tied to the original 3-D Man!  Dan Slott, you continuity whore, you haven’t let me down yet!  I love that guy.  And not just because he actually commented on my blog once.  So yes, this actually makes pretty good sense and ties in wonderfully (in the magical comic book coincidence way) with the Skrull invasion bit.

Uncanny X-Men 499 – Nothing too surprising here, but still a nice X-read.  Colossus gets angry…so we’re seeing some of that death rage leaking out maybe?  /eh I dunno.  But yeah, all it all it was decent, and we get a brief connector “sort of” showing us how/why they wind up in San Fran.  Oh, and a new *hood of Evil Mutants is forming….

X-Men Legacy 213 – OK, we know Charlie is going to survive, but I have to admit the end of issue cliffhanger really left me wanting 214!  Mike Carey is also doing a great job (taking lessons from Slott? :) ) on using continuity to create new and wonderful storylines.  Continuity is in no way an encumbrance (in my opinion) to a writer who really loves what he’s working with.  Such a difference between something by a writer of this caliber and something by…I don’t know…Jeff Loeb?

PS. Jeff, isn’t it a bit weird to have the Ultimate universe being secretly invaded by ROBOTS at the same time 616 is being secretly invaded by ALIENS?  Now if the Squadron Supreme universe gets secretly invaded by AMAZONS (from the moon!?) we’ll have a sweet little triumphrate of stupidity.  Hint: It’s cool the first time, and hey maybe even the second time…but don’t do it at the SAME TIME!

In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m finding volume 3 of the Ultimates horrid and trite.  Even Joe Mad’s revered pencils look like…well, shit.  Dark, muddied shit.  Blame is laid at the feet of the colorist, whom I understand will be allowed to finish the series, but will not ever be working for Marvel again.  This is a pretty high priority gig to blow in such a way.  I wonder if they’ll get the pages re-colored for the trades?  That would be sweet, then at least I can enjoy looking at them.

Oh, Sabretooth gets mauled by 2 tigers.  That’s…kinda amusing.

The previews for Ellis & Bianchi’s Astonishing X-men run, on the other hand, look beautiful!  So much of a better use for him than that horrible abomination of a Wolverine story Loeb did.

Runaways 30 – Aww, a somewhat-overused-but-still-touching sci-fi/time travel ending and a new Runaways addition AND gorgeous art means this issue is great.  I think I missed 29 though, going to have to look that up.  Definitely picking up the trades for this.