Cable’s Out: Avengers: X-Sanction #2 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. Also rage, but mostly spoilers. Look at it this way: it’ll save you four bucks.

God damn you for making me do this, Jeph Loeb. I defended you after Heroes hit the skids. I didn’t scream at you for Ultimates volume three. you brought Jason Todd back from the dead and I didn’t insist you take his place (Yeah, I know it was actually Clayface impersonating Jason in Hush, but you planted the filthy idea in Judd Winick’s head). I tried, man.

But Avengers: X-Sanction is so wretchedly and abysmally bad it boggles my mind. For a time travel story it is heartbreakingly tiny in scope. The storytelling is flawed and full of holes, and required every character involved to act like a complete fucking idiot. As an event, it makes me miss Fear Itself, which is like being nostalgic for a canker sore.

The Dame Wore Tentacles: Fatale #1 Review

I am probably not the best person in the world to review Ed Brubaker’s and Sean Phillips’s Fatale, because I’ve spent the past several months, on my wretched morning commute, plowing through old crime and detective novels. Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Richard Stark; basically anything with a meaty crime in the middle of it that isn’t a comic book, if only so I dont have to attract a conversation with a comic book fan on a city bus. Have you seen us? We can be… awkward. But I digress.

The point is that someone like me would be the prime audience for Fatale, which if distilled down to its elevator pitch would be: “Philip Marlowe vs. the Cult of Cthulhu and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, provided Brigid’s powers of seduction were somehow supernatural in nature as opposed to the half-decent set of jugs that women need to seduce dudes in real life, by which I mean it’s okay if she only has one.”

So in short, I generally liked this book a lot… but someone like me is supposed to.