Monday, December 10, 2007

Thoughts on some other comics I recently bought...

Buffy: Season 8 #9 - Count me among the people for whom this thing is just 'meh'. I don't really get why 'No Future For You' necessitated 4 issues when it seems like, at most, a two-parter. But my problem is mostly that it's a retread: Faith has to have a crisis of 'faith' in Buffy and her own self-worth, which was already done to death in the TV shows and doesn't do much of anything new for us. Her new status quo with Giles seems somewhat interesting (though I don't totally get the necessity of operating out of Buffy's reach), but I could have just as easily done without the story that led to it. (It fits into the big bad's plan, of course, as explained at the issue's close, it seems to me that the story should still manage to stand on its own.)

The Umbrella Academy #3 - I bought the first two issues a week before this issue was released. Had I written about those, my comments would've been positively glowing. As it is, this issue is more perfunctory - the characters have been introduced and their rather odd relationships established, so this is the first big-battle issue where we get to see that the anti-hero really is a hero, that the sister who betrayed them really does care, etc. These clichés aside, the first two issues - featuring such quirks as the gorilla-body transplant, the 60-year old time-traveler in a 10 year-old's body, the orchestra whose symphony will end the world - have earned plenty of goodwill. And Ba is always incredibly, especially when he cranks up the Mignola-ness to an appropriate level.

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