Friday 13 June 2008

X-Force Special: Ain't No Dog

What's cool about X-Force Special: Aint No Dog?



A fly flying upwards?


It soon becomes apparent that this is a Wolverine story currently in progress, so to speak. A guy hanging from a chain with dead people around. Fairly normal for a Wolverine story...


I like how Logan is portrayed as quite, quite mad. The lengths he'll go to just to get his kicks... Cooler than the kids at school with their smoking.


The next cool bit is in the 'flashback' where Cyclops and Wolverine have a name-calling match. Despite Jean Grey being dead currently, they still dislike each other.


Next comes the sudden Mob, all baying for blood and quite possibly every other bodily fluid. Mobs are always cool.


Then, Wolverine is just hanging around quite unbothered by the masses of people below him. Because he's Wolverine.


And mobs are solved by doing something cool, for instance:


As so:


That's it for story one of the "Special", next up is a solo Warpath story. It's set-up nicely showing him having just mutilated a bunch of Purifiers, as seems to be X-Force's MO currently.


For some reason Warpath then goes hunting for a bear. He even states he can't be bothered to cook it and no mention is made of it causing anyone trouble. It's cool though, because he's fighting a BEAR!


But what is the coolest part of this comicbook?


The promise of more gory issues of X-Force, of course!

Though my main problem with this comic is the fact it actually did nothing more than give Warpath a tiny bit more character. And show that there are 5,000 Purifiers to every 3 Roman Catholics...

Monday 2 June 2008

Giant Size Astonishing X-Men #1

What's cool - and not - about Giant Size Astonishing X-Men?



First let me bring everyone up to speed. Aliens brought Collossus back to life in the early issues of Astonishing X-Men. Ignoring a couple of story-arcs in-between, the X-Men found that these aliens, from the planet Breakworld, were trying to get rid of mutants as a whole and eventually the planet Earth. They were also told that Colossus was destined to destroy Breakworld. Taking the fight to the aliens, the X-Men and Agent of S.W.O.R.D Abigail Brand (and generic agents) arrived and managed to get into the delicate core of Breakworld with Colossus poised to be the destroyer or the saviour. Oh, and Shadowcat is inside a 10-mile bullet that's just been fired at Earth.

Let me start with the Not Cool... Get that out of the way for what is quite frankly a spectacular finish to Joss Whedon's run.



Emma Frost's powers. She's a high-level telepath with the secondary ability to turn her body into diamond. Useful, no? Only problem is, she can't use both at once. When in diamond "mode" she can't use her telepathy at all. It's been documented in a number of places. So whether this was an artist error, colourist error or editor error, it's still wrong.



Agent Brand is shown to have powers (later explained fully) but once again I dunno who's fault it was, but she uses her left ungloved hand before using her right hand because the left one has a glove on. But since she has fingernails visible, I'm guessing it was an artist error that wasn't caught by the colourist or editor.

Now, complaints are over. This issue has everything you'd want in it!

Passion!


Heroes punching heroes!


Humour!


Suspense!


There's not really much to explain that wouldn't be so much better if you read it. There's a few things I'd like to post about but I've told myself that this isn't a review blog nor a spoiler blog. If someone says to you "What's so cool about the X-Men?" I would like it if you went "Ahh, look at this blog and check out the X-Men tagged posts!"

So: What's the coolest thing about this comic? A Spider-Man panel.



See if you can connect the dots so I can still say I post no spoilers. 10-mile bullet travelling from another planet. Spider-Man's webs have the strength of steel. Hanging from buildings that are many decades old.