Sketch Reviews (January 19 2011)

If you don't pay attention and care, I resumed my Random Thoughts! posting yesterday after a few weeks off. I haven't given you a link, because I assume finding Comics Should be Good isn't too intellectually taxing. Pretty decent week for comics, let's get to it.

The Boys #50: Really strong issue. Standard length, but felt a little longer. Butcher is a right bastard -- and I'm surprised to see how Ennis writes Mallory. Not at all what I expected. This whole thing went down in a way that I didn't expect really. Could have read the PDF of this if I wanted, but waited for the actual issue. Glad I did. The 'bonus' stuff is some pin-ups that are fine and two interviews from the internet with Ennis. The one from the Beat is a nice inclusion since it's from 2007 and done after it was announced the book would resume publishing with Dynamite. The other, one from Newsarama, is fine, but a little puzzling since it's just some random interview from ten months ago. Why not use something more recent or just do a new one with Ennis instead of some random 'check in' interview that's out of date? That's not a criticism of the interview itself, by the way, since it's a decent interview. I'm just not sure why Dyanmite chose it for this issue. Anyway, a really good issue that provides some more depth to the conflict with the Seven and just how fucked up Butcher is. [****1/4]

Invincible Iron Man #500: Decided to give this a look, see what's what. It's a decent story that never really coheres into something AMAZING as it looks like it was meant to. The art is pretty great aside from the present sequences. It's a suitably big story for this sort of issue. Not the sort of thing that's going to make me change my mind about buying this title (or, not buying it as it were), but I don't feel like it was a waste either. The Iron Man 2.0 preview did absolutely nothing to make me want to read that series. I've liked what I've seen from Nick Spencer so far and will probably give it a look, but, man, those are not pages that hook someone. Sorry, but they aren't. I also loved the usual cover collage that Marvel does... if only to see how many fucking variant covers Invincible Iron Man has had since its inception. Christ. [***1/5]

Scarlet #4: This couldn't be issue five? That would have amused me. I loved the scene with the detective and the other scene with the fed, but everything involving Scarlet made me roll my eyes. Even the scene with her mother seemed 'just there' and didn't actually do anything. Maybe it's because everyone except for the detective and the fed seem to be operating on some primitive brain level... this is so fucking simplistic most of the time and it was refreshing to see a couple of characters rise above that. Maleev's photoreferencing continues to annoy me. Yeah, people do make those faces sometimes, but they just look awkward and dumb in a static panel. Torn on this comic. [***]

Later