Oh my goodness, this series of panels from Spectacular Spider-Man #82 is one of the greatest things I've ever seen.
Loved Astonishing X-men, but that Ultimate Spider-man may be my favorite part of having MU for the past year. I'm only on 63, so I just had to renew! These have become the default versions of those characters for me now.
It gets better, drags in the middle, then has a great final arc. The best character comes in super late.
Marvel Legacy: It All Starts Here Apparently the Legacy one-shot by Jason Aaron and Esad Ribic will be mostly by Ribic but will have contributions from a ton of other artists. Normally I'd be bummed that it's not 100% Ribic, but these artists include some great talent like Russell Dauterman, Chris Samnee, Jim Cheung, Stuart Immonen, etc. (I'm guessing each guest artist will only contribute a page or 2, largely focused on what they're drawing currently and/or in the fall.) Can't complain w/ talent like that.
Chip sketched the classic comic book Defenders (Namor, Hulk, Strange) as played by the Netflix Defenders (Charlie Cox, Mike Colter, Krysten Ritter), and that joke brings me much joy.
Really liked the third Wonder Woman trade. I really don't like the disjointed way they did these stories, but Rucka is amazing at writing her so it works. I thought they were going to address the New 52 arc, but it's whatever.
Today's WTG episode is a new comic book one. Any Planet Hulk fans here? Planet Hulk Also, as stated in the show notes, I totally got the name of one of the arcs wrong haha. Apparently I can't read or something.
I finished The Astonishing X-men (the Whedon/Cassaday run) and mostly enjoyed it. It had a great overall story arc, some great humour in it and I liked how it all ended. You can definitely see why Whedon ended up with the director jobs he did in the MCU. There were a couple of bits that bugged me, they used the R word in one of the comics (I guess this is more because of the time but it's still a little jarring to see it thrown out there so casually). Then towards the end of the run there's a random bit where Brand mentioned gang-rape for no apparent reason (which I guess says more about Whedon than anything). But yeah overall it was a good read. I'm now working my way through Batman: Court of Owls and I'm finding it excellent so far and it looks incredible.
Read Spider-Gwen #23 from the other week, and man, Hannah Blumenreich is just the best. Loved her MJ-centric story in this issue. Marvel giving her work based on her Spidey fan zine is great; hopefully they get her to do a whole miniseries or graphic novel someday.
Pretty excited to see what comes of Jupiter's Requiem. Legacy's climax felt a bit rushed, but I liked where they left off with it.
So I am finally reading Volume 3 of Mark Waid's Archie. I love how in the intro, he talks about how he didn't know how to write about teen girl drama in a European boarding school, so he got his friend Lori Matsumoto to write those parts. I mean, how many writers are that honest with themselves? I'm about halfway through and I'm absolutely loving it. I love seeing how Veronica is taken out of Riverdale and facing off with Cheryl Blossom, it's just a perfect context to see Veronica essentially confronting who she was before moving to Riverdale. I also really enjoyed seeing Jughead break character and work his butt off to help Archie plan his parents anniversary party while he's feeling so sad. It was really touching to see how much his friendship to Archie supercedes his apathy. My only complaint so far is that we've hardly seen Betty.
Based on the little bit I've read of Champions, Waid should do the same there. His current Avengers run w/ Mike Del Mundo is an underappreciated delight, but man, I do not care for his old man attempt at writing millennials, lol.
http://m.ign.com/articles/2017/09/11/influential-comic-book-writereditor-len-wein-passes-away-at-69 Damn that's big.