So Red Robin number 5 is actually good. Instead of getting knocked around more he actually gets his act together and makes a solid decision. I'm not going to write a lot about it. I'm sorry, I just wont take my word that it's good and read it. i will say something about this though...
 
Whoever designed the new Robin costume needs to be kicked in the groin. green boots with red laces, a yellow cape with a black hood. dont publish that $#!%. Who was your editor? who let Quietly get away with this if it is his fault? I know super hero costumes are supposed to be crazy and i know Damien is supposed to be a killer, but he ain't color-blind, yo! he looks like a half-Christmas kid's show host or some $#!%. now that i actually am starting to realize i can like Damien and still like Tim Drake... i think they need to fix that crap. hurry.
 

I spent more than 10 years of my life in a comic store spending my time, money, and energy drawing writing and traveling for comics. Nothing every came out of it besides a deep feeling of self-satisfaction. I never got famous... hell, i never even finished a book. But i read a lot and had a lot of crazy discussions. I know more about comics than the real world, i think. i think! i definitely know more about music than comics though. to the point... for some reason i continually pick up Incredible Hercules. I was looking at my small and relatively finicky selection of comics, and I'm like, "Why Hercules?" I finished the recent story-arc and the answer came to me in one word, in one panel in the heat of the action of the book. 
 
Nurp...

Am i the only one excited about the New Mutants? do people not realize that this might be the most well developed character set in all of the marvel universe? We watched them grow up from children. I mean actual pre-teens and then teenagers. We watched the team crumble in the end under the weight of each of the characters growing up and moving on and if you were an avid reader you wanted to cry when they killed Doug Ramsey. I myself never accepted Leifield's X-force as a viable replacement. I did then and i still think Cable was doo-doo. At that time, Bishop was basically a better version of Cable without the transmode virus and actual useful uncommon abilities. Anyway... The "Real" New Mutants... Now they're back and the only mistake i can see the book making would be an effort to try and bring back Doug Ramsey. It's the same mistake they continually make with new mutants stories. As if he was the most important thing to ever happen to the new mutants.
 
In the last issue they recounted the events that happened in the small town that Legion was terrorizing. They even have the utter nerve to pull out that old technicality about Legion's personality absorbing psyche when they drop the bomb about the little girl that Karma was "trying" to save. suddenly you realize that still have that old edgy "Life is harder than you" aspect that made the original book so good. Magik is back and more twisted than ever. It's been a long time since we've seen the chosen princess of the underworld teleporting about in her wicked splendor. Sunspot is back to his clowning and overconfident self. And warlock is flying around. It feels like this book was actually done by someone who knows something about the characters. it's a nice change. Now if they could just fix everything they've broken about Rhane then we might actually be able to have a revival of good team composition again.
 
but alas... Warlock arrived with a photograph of the team at Doug Ramsey's grave only to find that there was a big hole where his body should be. *Sigh*
so close... so close. I'm anxious to see what happens, but skeptical. i expect the ball to be dropped, but i'm hoping they dont drop it.

please start the video now and try and read this review while watching the video.  
most likely you will get as much out of my review as i get out of every issue of blackest night if you read it in this manner.
 
I could sit here and write a long assessment of exactly what the story is about and what I've learned and how it is... in fact, in my original blog, i did... but i thought to myself, i could complain and whine like a teen titans book back when Dick Grayson was leading them or i could embed this video of Ai No Corrida and we could watch the sexy blond dance around. Both of these things have the same caliber of intellectual merit in my opinion. Only one of them will actually hold your interest and not cause you to groan with dismay at each and every scene switch while swallowing almost 3$ a wipe. One of them will not trudge up uninteresting characters long dead. One of them will not turn your favorite comic book characters into group therapy poster children. One of them might cause you to smile and/or dance and i can guarantee the other will not. One of them also takes something like 3 minutes while the other had been going on way too long now.

I'll tell you what's good. Adventure Comics has been nothing but bad ass. It is the veritable life raft in my comic book cesspool. 
Let me explain before you start throwing your favorites at me... yes i do actually like other books. but not these.  i have been very dissatisfied to the point of dropping several books from my pull box recently. Batman and Robin are excessively close to the hatchet. Morrison seems to be doing a lot of build up on sick themes for no reason. People are losing fights for the sake of drama (Damien the assassin-Robin versus Scarlet? WHO THE #$@$ IS SCARLET?! - this kid was trained by the "league of assassins" and he cant beat a chick with a mask chemically bonded to her face and a couple knives... yea okay.) and it's not making any sense. I like drama when it's within reason. The idea of a good comic for me is to get lost in the story, to read and then somehow believe that it could be amazingly true, no matter how fantastic. That being said, why would the world's top killer eat a bunch of super model's faces on the way in to town? Thematically, the best killer is always the one that no one knows about... anyway i digress. Adventure Comics. Love!
 
The book's main story follows Superboy (Conner) living in Superman's hometown, his shadow, with his dog, Krypto (who is awesome) and his mother. He is exploring the idea of who he is as "Superman" and as a "Lex Luthor". he does it in an interesting way. he has a checklist of things the two are notable for doing. Superman / Lex Luthor, arch enemies, combined in one person. he wants to know who he is and which one personifies who he is. his friends list consists of a very small few. People journey to Smallville to visit him from time to time. Cassie ( Wonder girl) comes through and instead of making a stupid dramatic scene about her getting close with Tim Drake, he's like, "Whatever! I was dead, baby. Now give daddy some of that welcome home goodness." end  of story, end of drama. good book. 
 
This issue, Tim Drake (Red Robin, one of my favorite characters), Adventure comics does in three pages what Red Robin couldn't do in EVER. i actually got into it, i cared about what was going on with Tim, i sympathized with both of them. you could really see the best friend dynamic working in the book, they piggy-back off of the understanding the two have between each other. Tim tried to tell him what happened, being an honest friend and a straightforward batman. You want to see them do more together. They are your World's Finest next generation. it was awesome. In short, instead of writing this book about a teen-angst-ridden super hero kid... its a book about a Superboy who died, remembers it, and is returned to life and treasuring every moment of it and works hard trying to understand it. every page of this book is a damn treasure. Even the legion stuff in the back. I miss the old themed costumes of the legionnaires, but the stories seem to be back together. They have a lot of heart and comedy.
 
Well I'm off to go wipe my ass with the latest Blackest Night installment. 
Peace.

This is my first blog entry on comic vine.
its going to be my comic blog, and i'll probably post on both my own website as well as this one just for the sake of catalogging.  
 
So I'm collecting comics again lately and i have been going through a lot of ups and downs in reading them. I have been making a checklist of the comics that i have an interest in and i have actually started a pull list where i collect these books. It's frustrating though, because i am someone who read books for a long time and i get used to good writing. Not all writers though, are good. Some of them churn out garbage and write kiddy-dramas.

Now i know you're thinking, "Well what do you expect it's comics." if that was the truth then the Joel Schumacher batman movies would've done better. People want better stronger stories. A lot of the good stories and comics are making movies. People reject the ones that deviate from the comic stories to create an easy action film type product. They hate the ones that reinvent the characters, and they loathe the ones that expect you to just assume that a villain is bad or a hero is good. these are truths. yet, still they persist.

here is a brief rundown of my feelings for the books i am collecting currently:
Now. Adventure and Action comics are both in my list because of the Superboy and Nightwing story lines. The Superboy storyline is being written magnificently well, while the Nightwing storyline is very confusing, convoluted and ridiculous (i'll go into detail about this stuff in a later blog).
This leads me to Batman and Robin, the former Nightwing is now batman and the new robin is a child assassin that is a cloned embryo of Bruce Wayne mothered and trained by Talia Al'Gul that desires nothing but to follow in his father's footsteps and has the will and courage to do it. People don't like him, readers i mean. I understand that, i don't like him either, you're not supposed to. but i love reading him. The book is good, but we're running into some inconsistencies in the story to further the story of late. i like it, but i don't like it.
Red Robin has the same problem; from-the-hip writing. Just when you start to understand a character, they suddenly kill or remove them from the story.
The Amazing Spiderman gets into peter's life and head and gets awesome, i was addicted for at least 5 issues or so and then boom. clones. I quit reading Spiderman because of clones last time. now i cant follow the story at all. Sorry Spidey, I'm removing it from my pull list... again.
The Sinister Spiderman is a great book. Mac Gargan is the Spiderman you love to hate. you know deep down he is eating these girls he is macking on. You know he is worse off now with the modified symbiote than he was with the original venom symbiote (which anti-venom destroyed) but you keep reading and waiting for them to say it.
X-force is a good book and could be better if they'd give it some breathing time. but no, its action action action. That's good and everything. But why should we care about Laura or the HAMMER agent who's she's running with if we don't have any reason to sympathize with them or care about them really. Oh oh.. more effing clones. clones of Laura, the clone they said they couldn't clone when they introduced her. Removed!

(am i being too harsh?)

Fantastic four... amazing. Artwork = Amazing. Writing = Amazing. Character Development = Fantastic. i don't even like team that much and the book has been great.
Iredeemable: This book is great. The story is riveting and its one of those nail-biter titles that leaves you wondering how the characters are going to make it out of whatever jam they're in. Thank you Mark Waid. Thank you, sir.
Invincible: This is the best superhero drama i have ever read and i mean that sincerely. Kirkman knows how to do a book about superheroes, as opposed to a crappy superhero book where everything is always exploding around them and numerous villains are always trying to kill them.

Planetary... the last issue came out last week. so... yea. I'm kind of down about that.

i have decided to write about these books. Not so much because i think you care, but moreso because i want you to have somewhere to come when you need the opinion of a dissatisfied hater. I have always been interested in the hater myself. I used to be a wagon-riding fan boy and i became deeply cynical. When superman died i was floored, then he came back to life and a bit of my soul died when he returned. Hal Jordan did the same. Now Barry Allen, Captain America and soon Bruce Wayne will killing me. The X-men destroyed my idea of the shelf-life of good book and good characters as people kudo'd gambit, boo'd Nightcrawler, and vanished Longshot. for five years i shunned comics baffling people with my vast comic book knowledge coupled with my deep loathing of them and my comic nerd brethren. well I'm back. and now i wish to do what every good older nerd does... point out the foibles and flaws of other writer's jabs and efforts at writing characters we love.

by the way... my comic nerd brethren... i love you all and i strongly urge you to take pride in who you are and what you do. you are the elite members of an elaborate fraternity of imagineers, the likes of which have shaped both the music and movie industry if not the whole entertainment industry itself. I'm serious about this. on a personal note, i was friends with and went to school with Calvin Irving while he was drawing Chapel and then working for Danzig's comic label. I don't think i'll ever know what happened with him, as we lost touch on and off when he moved south to work for image, but one day i was shocked to hear after recently recieving a call from him and even seeing him, he had comitted suicide. we all get depressed or down from time to time. i just really dont think you should let it get to you. life is hard, but if you get through it, it can be awesome.