Comic Sans ...

Random – As of late I've been reading a lot of graphic novels. I recently found that through our library collective I'm able to put holds on books from any library in the system and as it turns out that system has a bunch of comics. So I've taken a break from novels as I wait for the Horus Heresy stuff to be released in mass market paperback (I refused to pay more than $10 for bolter porn). I've been catching on on stuff that I missed.

When I was younger I spent every dollar I had on comics and was big into them throughout the early nineties. High school and college took my interests in other more social directions and as such I pretty much abandoned buying monthly comics. I'd still pop into the books stores on occasion and pick up stuff that the cover caught my eye but I wasn't really following much. Flash forward to the early 2000's and I got back into gaming and started picking up some trade paperbacks to see what I missed and wasn't really impressed so comics once again took a backseat.

With the boom of comic movies I found myself back in the comic shop picking up random books and was lucky to find some stuff that was really good. As an adult I can't really justify dropping $50+ on comics each month to keep up. So with the amount of trades the library has available I'm catching up again.

The first thing I checked out was the complete run of Classic Deadpool. The series started strong but towards the middle things got really weird and I started to lose interest. Then it picked up again at the end of the series and transitioned to Agent X. That run of the book was really fun and I was a big fan. There is an arc that is a play on Three's Company with Titana and Constrictor which was also really good. The book is really all over the place and Deadpool's nemesis T-Ray is a super lame character which drug it down for me quite a bit.

Next up I re-read the Infinity Gauntlet. It doesn't hold up as well as one would expect but I still really liked it. Part of the issue I think is how lightly killing half of the universe is handled. One or two pages doesn't have quite the impact you'd expect.

The Infinity Gauntlet lead me into some of the more recent Cosmic stories. I used to really liked the 31st century Guardians of the Galaxy. I really like what they're doing with the Marvel Cosmic stories War of Kings and Annihilation . So much so that I have every single thing that has Marvel, Cosmic or Thanos tagged for a hold so I can read it.

I also gave the Marvel Zombies stuff a second try. The first time around I didn't really like the first book. That hasn't changed, the concept is way better than the execution in my opinion. With the third series and the ones that came after the story was much stronger and I really enjoyed what they did with Machine Man and Howard the Duck. It was a fun read and kept me engaged throughout the whole story.

Finally I picked up Thunderbolts and some of the Civil War stuff. Not a big fan of the Initiative. The concept was good and it started strong but they just couldn't keep it up and I lost interest towards the end. The Thunderbolts was the same it started strong with a cool team and then transitioned to something I had no interest in. (I picked up the first issue of the current series for the cover and hated the interior art).

In summary it seems that comics are way to hit or miss for me these days. When I find something good it's amazing. But when it's bad it's awful and much of what's out there doesn't interest me, so I'm going to stick with my current plan of only buying covers I dig to use as art in my game room and make use of the library for the rest of my reading. If you're interested in what I've been reading check out the link to Shelfari in the sidebar, this is a cool little site that helps me keep track of what I've read and share it on my blog with the widget.