Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

X-Men Gold

This Week In X: Astonishing X-Men, Generation X, X-Men Blue in Venom, & X-Men Gold

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It’s the eighth week of new comics in 2018, and This Week in X we have the end of two series while two arcs hit their midpoints and one just starts heating up.

  • Astonishing X-Men #8 (of 12) finds Charles Soule delighting in making flashy, early-90s style comics.
  • Deadpool vs. Old Man Logan #5 (of 5) winds up as a slightly sub-par Deadpool story that looks pretty darn good and gives us a strong new character.
  • Generation X #87 (final issue!) puts a wrap on a series that had more heart than action, and which included the best character voices of the entire X-Men line.
  • Venom #162 (Poison-X 3 of 5) continues the X-Men Blue squad’s space adventures in a big, fun way.
  • X-Men Gold #22 is a comic book that exists and has pages with words on them.

Learn more about how each of those series reached their current issues and hear which ones I’d recommend picking up. Plus, learn what new X-collections are out this week, including All-New Wolverine, Astonishing X-Men, classic Cable & X-Force, and one of my favorite Excalibur stories of all time!

 

The Pull List: Justice League, Mech Cadet Yu, Batman, Giant Days, X-Men Red, & more!

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My pull list just keeps getting bigger and better! This week, The Pull List is twenty-six issues long with seven new number ones, four issues with Batman, and an average rating of 3.17.

What did I pull this week? Well, I’m still not caught up on my Superman, but I’ve got a pretty big cross-section of DC and Marvel on my list, plus a handful of smaller publisher titles!

  • Aftershock Comics
    • Monstro Mechanica (2017) #3
  • Boom! Studios
    • Giant Days (2015) #35
    • Mech Cadet Yu (2017) #6
  • Dark Horse
    • Incognegro – Renaissance (2018) #1
  •  DC Comics
    • Batman (2016) #40
    • Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles (2018)#2
    • Justice League (2016) #38
    • Milk Wars: Mother Panic / Batman Special (2018)
    • Swamp Thing Winter Special (2018) #1
    • Young Monsters In Love (2018) #1
  • Image Comics
    • Paper Girls (2015) #20
    • Twisted Romance (2018) #1
    • VS (2018) #1
    • Witchblade (2017) #3
  • Marvel Comics
    • Avengers (2017) #679
    • Black Bolt (2017) #10
    • Black Panther – Sound And Fury (2018) #1
    • Hawkeye (2017) #15
    • Iceman (2017) #10
    • Infinity Countdown (2018) – Adam Warlock One-Shot
    • Rise of the Black Panther (2018) #2
    • Rogue & Gambit (2018) #2
    • Runaways (2017) #6
    • Spider-Man (2016) #237
    • X-Men: Gold (2017) #21
    • X-Men: Red (2018) #1

Marvel/DC Issue of the Week: Justice League (2016) #38, DC Comics

4.5 starsJustice League is finally back to being amongst DC’s most exciting books every month with Christopher Priest at the helm for the first time since Darkseid War in the latter part of New 52 in 2015.

Marco Santucci’s pencils on this are brilliant right out of the gate! Flash’s one-man reenactment of Sandra Bullock in Gravity is riveting and an absolutely amazing blend of real science and comics magic. It plays out over a League realizing just how reliant they’ve become on technology, both to back them up and to tell them what to do and where to be.

What makes the story unusual is that Batman is the physical representation of that weakness – not Cyborg. As a brilliant tactician who is just a regular man, Batman uses technology to enhance his detective skills and the breadth of his knowledge. Yet, that can easily be used as his own Kryptonite when there’s a situation he cannot strategize his way out of.

Just as Flash keeps emphasizing “I’m only a scientist, not an engineer” as he tries to arrest his free float through space, Cyborg is an engineer first and a tactician second. He’s not Batman. He “doesn’t want to be the boss.”

What happens when Cyborg has to take charge of the League in a way that’s greater than just Boom Tubing them from place to place? Can he fake being a leader with engineering in the same way Flash fakes being an engineer with science?

I don’t know, but I am transfixed by this Christopher Priest arc!

Small Publisher Issue of the Week: Mech Cadet Yu (2017) #6, Boom! Studios

4.5 starsWith the way this book has been going, it’s going to be really hard for anything to excite me more in a week that it’s on the stands.

If you haven’t seen my breathless catch-up on this Greg Pak/Takeshi Miyazawa series in this week’s Back Issue Review, here’s the skinny: years ago a giant semi-organic robot crashed to Earth and bonded with a pilot, and ever since then four mechs descend into our atmosphere each year.

To find the four pilots that will bond, the US maintains a Hogwarts-esque Mech Academy to train the best and the brightest. We need them, because a race giant Kaiju monsters named Shargs are constantly creeping into our orbit and can only be repelled by the mechs.

We’re in the middle of the second arc of this book now after it was extended past a mini-series, presumably for just being unbelievably excellent (and also selling a few copies). I cannot tell you the last time I got this nervous about characters in a comic book being in peril.

This series continues to perfectly toe the line between Pacific Rim and Harry Potter, and I just want there to be 20x as much of it so I can keep reading more! [Read more…] about The Pull List: Justice League, Mech Cadet Yu, Batman, Giant Days, X-Men Red, & more!

This Week In X: The debut of X-Men Red, plus X-Men Gold, Rogue & Gambit, and Iceman (February 7, 2018)

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It’s the sixth week of new comics in 2018, and this week in X brings a massive new team book debut with it – X-Men: Red!

X-Men: Red #1 has the outstanding Tom Taylor putting Jean Grey in the driver’s seat of her own X-squad in the absence of both Xavier and Cyclops as guiding forces for mutant-kind. Seeing Jean as a leader is always a thrill, but does Taylor’s take hold up for me?

Plus, a new arc in X-Men: Gold #21, another romantic issue of Rogue & Gambit #2 (but maybe not in the way you think), and a story wraps up in Iceman #10.

This Week In X: All-New Wolverine, Generation X’s big moment, & more!

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It’s the third week of new comics in 2018, and it brings a batch of five X-titles that vary very widely in quality.

We have another installment of “Orphans of X” in Tom Taylor’s All-New Wolverine (2016) #29, Declan Shalvey’s Deadpool vs. Old Man Logan (2017) #4 (of 5), a pivotal issue of Christina Strain’s Generation X (2017) #86, a new arc in Greg Pak’s Weapon X (2017) #13, and an epilogue to the “Negative Zone War” in Marc Guggenheim’s X-Men: Gold (2017) #20/

I’m incredibly impressed with All-New Wolverine and Generation X, and several different shades of disappointed with the other three.

(Weirdly, YouTube decided to only feature a low-res version of this episode.)

This Week in X: Excalibur Returns (sort of) in X-Men Gold, X-Men Blue climaxes, and more!

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It’s the second week of new comics in 2018, and that means a whole new batch of X-Men comics books to help you catch up with!

This week brings five books with it – mid-arc issues of the two Ed Brisson old guy books in Cable #153 and Old Man Logan #33, the middle installment of Matthew Rosenberg’s Phoenix Resurrection, a climatic turn of events in Cullen Bunn’s X-Men: Blue #19, and an adorable pair of standalone stories in X-Men: Gold Annual #1.

None of these books are a must-read, but it’s nice to read a week of X-Men that’s solid across the board… well, except for one book, as you’ll hear in just a minute.

Don’t feel like reading right? You can watch the video version of This Week in X! This is not the same material as the full post below, although some of my opinions in the video overlap with the post.

Love the video? Love this post? Please let me know, because “This Week In X” is a pilot right now – there is no guarantee I’ll continue it past the end of this month unless folks are clamoring for more! [Read more…] about This Week in X: Excalibur Returns (sort of) in X-Men Gold, X-Men Blue climaxes, and more!