This time around, I’m going to be more of a guide to good books. Well, good books in my opinion. It’s still rambling, but less observational.
Superman. The world’s first superhero (in the classical definition of the word), icon of millions. And like almost everything that has been around for 70+ years, most of the time kinda boring. That is until Geoff Johns took over the. Well, not instantly. He did a story with Richard frikkin’ Donner, which was pretty good, but plagued by delays. Then came the Legion story, which was great, then the Brainac one with Gary Frank, which was fantastic, and that jazz led into the current status quo, World of New Krypton. Mr. Johns is not writing that anymore, but he’s got an apt staff of “replacements”: Greg Rucka, James Robinson and Sterling Gates over at Supergirl. They even have the little signs on the books to show in which order to read them. Nice.
The bottle-city Kandor has been found and reverted to it’s former state, and now 100,000 Kryptonians have their own planet directly on the other side of the sun. Superman, concerned how he usually is, left earth to join his fellow Kryptonians.
All this set-up for this little nugget of annoyance: Clark left Lois in like two panels! I mean, yeah, they’re grown-ups and she does know that she has to share her husband with the world, but come on: He’s leaving for a different planet! Not only that, he’s leaving to be with “his” people, the only people who are like him. He wouldn’t have to hold back the way he has to with Lois. I’m just saying…
The next thing I’d like to mention is Final Crisis Aftermath: Run.
Everyone who can munster up a bit of sympathy for an overweight E-List villain from the fifties, will hugely enjoy this romp. Mike Miller is an ass. Times a Gajillion. He doesn’t care for anybody but himself. He delusional. He’s ugly. He wears the worst costume ever designed. He’s repugnant. But at the end of the day, that doesn’t matter, because it’s fun to watch him fumble through his escape from…well, everyone. So far we’ve seen him getting nearly burned a couple of times, getting a power upgrade from a weird Nazi-doctor and rob his own family. Nice, clean fun…
And over at the House of Ideas:
So Spider-Man and the FF were “off-planet” for two months recently in the pages of AMS. While we did see repercussions for our web-head, we never saw what happened to the FF. We know that Peter decided to not deal with his friends immediately (big fan-fic opportunity right there), but to piss off JJJ instead. Well, while that is nice and everything, what did the FF do afterwards?
In my head, and this is purely speculative, they went home to find the place a mess. Franklin ran rampart, and his sister couldn’t contain him. This would make for a perfect one-shot between the issues: Imagine a young child, trapped in a building with vast machinery and all kinds of weird stuff. Imagine him trying things out, and getting in all kinds of trouble. The whole issue could be told as a flashback, and with a cartoony look to it. And the more I think about, the better the idea sounds: Franklin Richards, Son of a Genius.
Wait. There was comic like that. And it was awesome. Nevermind me, go ahead and read that!
There you go, shit to read. Next time, I’m really gonna look at Batgirl. Promised. I have a vast collection of posters…
Pete Schueler is currently residing in Berlin, Germany. He’s desperately trying to get his writing career somewhere. Where that is exactly, is not defined yet, but it should be somewhere where it’s visible. He’s been a comic book and pop culture geek all his life, but started reading them funny-books again on a weekly basis just three short years ago. In this time he matured from reading just DC books, to preferring mostly Indie titles. He still has a reverence for the Big Two and superheroes in general, and consumes them at a regular rate. The books, not the heroes. 
Merin on 
Captain Z on 
Benton Sartore on 
I dunno, Pete, the New Krypton stuff just leaves me cold. In fact it has me canceling my reading of Supergirl because I am so confused about what the heck is going on, it just dropped out of nowhere into the middle of the book and I don’t want to be picking up 3 other titles just to make sense of things. It was just about as bad as when the Supergirl title was hijacked for an issue or two over Amazons Attack, another storyline I hadn’t been following, wasn’t interested in, but now I had two issues of a book that make no contextual sense to me.
I have been wanting to give Franklin Richards a try, though – looks fun. And I almost read Run but decided to save the money instead. It looked like it could be good.