Tuesday, September 30, 2008

COMIX I READ LAST WEEK



DAREDEVIL #111


Lady Bullseye is, I guess, an okay (if not desperately original) character idea, but that costume is a god damn mess. As a child, Lady Bullseye was inadvertently rescued from slavery by Gentleman Bullseye, and soon after she discovered that she was born, like all Japanese people, with the instinctive ability to kill with her bare hands. Now she has turned her talents towards killing Daredevil's allies, probably in some harebrained scheme to make Bullseye fall in love with her. I guess that's women for you.

Meanwhile, Matt goes to bed with Dakota North, the supermodel-turned-private detective (a totally plausible career change). This in spite of the fact that his blind wife is locked away in an insane asylum, stemming from recent events that he's indirectly responsible for. What a dick!


CAPTAIN AMERICA #42

Here we see the new Captain America finally unravel the plot that killed Steve Rogers and nearly sent the country spiraling into anarchy, a conspiracy made up of:

The Red Skull
the mad Captain America from the '50s
an evil businessman
an evil politician
an evil psychiatrist
an evil scientist who exists as a giant green face projected onto a TV with legs

and so on. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what happened in this issue, and I've read it twice. The plot involves a number of betrayals and several people switching their brains into the bodies of other people and I'm sure someone will make sense of this but that person is not me. What's notable here is that Brubaker is able to make the new Captain seem like something fresh, despite Bucky being every bit the relic that Steve Rogers was. This is a good comic book!


KING-SIZE CABLE SPECTACULAR

This is the most preposterous series I have ever read. The premise: two years after the Decimation that wiped out all but 198 mutants, a mutant child has been born. A melee ensues, and finally the X-Men are able to secure the baby from the various factions who seek to control her. The fate of mutantkind could hinge on the survival of this child, and Cyclops makes the only reasonable decision to ensure her safety: he hands her over to his estranged son, the paramilitant zealot from the future, who straps her to his chest and takes her to a post-apocalyptic New York where gun-toting lunatics are constantly trying to kill them both.


Look at the size of that gun! He is constantly firing that thing off, inches from the head of a damn little baby! He might as well forgo the gun and just fucking throw her at people. I know we are talking about a comic book, but this strikes me as untenably insane. I didn't actually read this latest issue, but if it's anything like the previous seven, it went something like this:

BISHOP: HAND OVER THE GIRL, CABLE!
CABLE: NEVER!!!!!

and then they shoot at each other for 45 pages.