LIKED
– Glee continues to impress, but here is the weird thing: in the United States it is doing slightly sub-average numbers, but in Canada it is a runaway hit getting a boffo huge audience. Someone has to explain how that works, beyond the simple and obvious truth that we clearly have better taste in teevee than you Yankees do.
– I don’t generally say much about them because they’re consistently good without being particularly showy about it, but anyway: Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy and War of Kings and all the other Marvel “cosmic” comics books are excellent. It’s just worth saying, because these books don’t get the praise that Iron Fist or Hercules (rightly) get, but Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are writing the best outer-space superhero books since – well, their run on Legion of Super-Heroes. (Meanwhile, over at DC, they’ve given the “cosmic” franchise mostly to Jim Starlin, and that is… Not Working Out.)
DID NOT LIKE
– I finally played Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage and do not understand the mega-high BGG rating it has. First off, given that it’s a total redesign, it would have been nice if they had bothered to come up with a better way to handle armies than the old-school “let’s stack counters in a precarious, easy-to-topple stack” design. (Also, although I can appreciate the spirit and artistry of a die with Carthaginian numbers on it, in practice it is completely stupid.) More importantly, though, the game hinges around the battles, and the battle system is entirely too random for my tastes: even drawing mass numbers of battle cards, too many battles were lost after one or two piddling exchanges. Put this in the “a bunch of 50-year-olds were feeling nostalgic for a mediocre game” category.
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The various cosmic books get pretty strong press at the comics boards I’ve been on.
I hate to rag on someone whose work I used to enjoy immensely, and I wouldn’t exactly say that Starlin is totally hopeless handling DC’s cosmic stuff, but Death of the New Gods was pretty dire, and whoever edits Strange Adventures really needs to give Starlin a kick in the ass and say “get on with it, already!”
It’s kind of sad to have to admit that Marvel’s cosmic milieu was refreshed massively by taking it away from its long time custodian, Starlin, and handing it over to some fresher talent.
I have absolutely been loving the Nova/Guardians of the Galaxy/War of Kings trifecta. Super excited for Realm of Kings too.
If you’re liking their cosmic output, try their Authority run which is wrapping soon. Also great.
And I’m excited for to try someone other than Starlin and Johns on the Legion for awhile. The fact that it’s Levitz makes it better.
Because Glee isn’t actually all that good?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s cute and it has its moments (the gag reflex joke in episode 2? was hilarious), but it meanders more than a drunk Alzheimer’s patient.
Glee is huge in Australia too
i think non-American countries have a higher tolerance for the singing type shows
i mean we don’t get True Blood or The Wire on free to air but we get Glee? WTF?
Fortunately Glee is doing well enough in the US, and doing very well in its desired demographic. It has revenue streams that no other show has besides Idol, so I think it’s going to redefine what it means to be a ‘hit’ TV shows. If it keeps selling iTunes tracks, and manages to shift albums, and has a successful summer tour next year, it’s a hit. And I think it will do all of those things. (And if the tour comes to Toronto, I am totally going.)
I think my favorite issue of Nova so far was when he visited Earth post Civil War, and unlike everyone else telling off Tony Stark (the national pastime at that point in Marvel), Nova could legitimately say he was outside of Stark’s authority-especially since he hadn’t been doing anything on Earth for a while.
Two things: do Canadians actually spell it teevee?
And yes, Starlin is..not great. Was he at some point (I’m not being snarky, I’m really curious).
Glee’s doing well enough that it’s the first freshman show of the season to be given a full season rather than a 12-episode run, at least. And I’m loving it, so far! Loved High School Musical, too, which is a completely different animal once you get past the “singing in high school” thing.
So let’s say I’ve decided to get into this Marvel cosmic revival thingy. Where should I start?
PMMJ:
I can loan you the Annihilation trades, at some point. That’s the jumping-on point for this whole revival. I’m on the fence about continuing with it, but there’s some fun to be had.
Well, Starlin’s done after Strange Adventures is over. And DC will be focusing their cosmic stuff in the really quite good R.E.B.E.L.S.
I’d say, track down the trades of Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy. If you want to go back a little further, I’d say the actual cosmic “relaunch” would be the Annihilation crossover event, also available in trades.
(As far as the past work of Abnett and Lanning goes, I was a huge fan of the “Legion Lost” 12-issue series. Am I alone in that, or is there some love here for it too?)
(The Nova miniseries, which refreshes the character pretty heavily and sets up the ongoing series, was probably my favorite part of Annihilation.)
So, Annihilation’s worth it then?
I’d say that Annihilation is probably the best Big Two major crossover event, quality-wise, of the past decade. Possibly longer. The stuff since has been generally good too, with peaks and valleys, but Annihilation is like a blueprint for how to do event comics.
My wife’s enjoying Glee, so I’m watching/in the room with it until it wears thin for her. The implication there being that I’m NOT enjoying it, because, well, I’m not.
At its core it has the most tiresome feature of the traditional musical: the contrived soap-opera-level drama driven by clashes between worn-out stereotypes of, well, virtually everyone. The ‘love-torn leads whose love is inappropriate to their situations/stations’, ‘sassy black girl (optionally fat)’, ‘fabulous effeminate boy’, and the so-far totally character-stalled ‘conglomeration of “80s nerd” and “90s handicapable”‘. And I didn’t remember the ‘stuttering Asian punkette’ until I went ‘wait, is wheelchair dude the only one with obvious impairment? I thought there was another one.’, so I’m having difficulty counting her as a check in the ‘non-stereotype’ column, given she’s had roughly 15 seconds of screentime.
The ‘life-frustrated teacher’ and ‘not-sane school counselor’ are just dry and withered roadkill on the desert road of modern media, but somehow their dessicated corpses have been rolled out for this puppy as well, because, you know, what good is the enervating pointlessness of high school drama without the framing provided by the enervating pointlessness of adulthood drama?
As seems common to stories back through at least Paradise Lost, the antagonists provide the only interesting elements: the military-minded cheerleader tyrant and the (recently added) MILF-hunter footballer, along with the head cheerleader who (at least in the last episode I saw) momentarily glimpses outside of her cliche.
Even for all of that, you could WORK with these elements, counter the expectations of the roles, and make something interesting and new… and the show hasn’t. Or, it hasn’t for me, yet. I’m hoping my better 2/3rds tires of it soon.
Oh, and sometimes they sing. Sorry, left that part out.
Right then. So, Annihilation, then Guardians of the Galaxy, and possibly Nova? In that order?
Gotta agree with equinox216 on Glee… when I watched it, I found myself thinking “I could watch this or not watch this… it really doesn’t matter”. I suppose it at least didn’t grate on me. But I’d rather save my time. If it has an amazing story arc I suppose I’ll hear about it; but the “high school musical” singing aspect of it… meh.
Archer seems pretty funny though, one episode in.
Re: Hannibal, might I very respectfully suggest that you’re doing it wrong. (Which might still mean you’ll not like the game, since you may not like doing it “right”…) Were there too many piddling fights between tiny stacks? I certainly don’t find fights with Hannibal in them random, he’s got a pretty big tactical edge. It can be more about manoeuvring than the fights, as well, with the judicious big fight when necessary. Mind you, I’m no expert either. But the 2 games I played were very satisfying, everything felt like it tied into each other so well. Your mileage obviously varied though.
The order in trades is roughly
Annihilation vols. 1-3
Nova vol. 1-2
Annihilation: Conquest vols. 1-2
Nova vol. 3-4 / Guardians vol. 1-2
That brings you up to War of Kings, which they haven’t started collecting yet.
All three are worth your money.
did you download that enormous rar yet because I would like to delete it
I figured that “Glee” wasn’t doing that well in the U.S. because Fox didn’t realize that every tween who was into “High School Musical” was already glued to the Disney Channel.
And on the subject of “Cosmic” books: I know that comic books have to do this balancing act between the real world (to help the reader suspend disbelief) and the fantastical world of superheroes. But given how many threats from beyond the stars both Marvel and DC have brought to the Earth, coupled with the super-science available thanks to metahuman geniuses, not to mention the bits salvaged from battles with aliens, why the hell doesn’t either Earth (or one of the infinite ones, for that matter) have at least one decent space-based weapons platform with a bunch of very nervous personnel pointing their guns at whatever could possibly be mistaken for Galactus?
I would assume this new Spider Woman series is supposed to provide some answer to that question, but I haven’t read it yet.
But I think the main reason why they wouldn’t do that is because of super villains. They have enough trouble keeping them from taking over terrestrial army bases and weapon sites, why put one in orbit where it’s even more vulnerable? Just off the top of my head, it’d be under the threat of Doctor Doom, Magneto, MODOC, AIM, and Hydra. And all of those five would be able and interested in taking it over, too.
Now, placing one in orbit around another planet….that could be interesting.
As the other guy playing Hannibal, the problem with stack-toppling has actually gotten worse, due to the extra-thick counters Valley Games uses. Chalk that up to unintended consequences. I can imagine Titan would have similar problems after the redesign.
It was my understanding that SWORD provided the first line of defense against space-based threats, although it’s really more of a diplomatic corps than a military one. Probably, most of Earth’s people are comfortable at this point with letting the Fantastic Four handle things if it gets dicey.
Yeah, it’s probably too late at this point, but not only is REBELS really good given that it’s by Tony “Negation” Bedard, but DC is going to try to push it first with lots of house ads/previous, then by adding Captain Comet and Adam Strange to the book, then by a big Blackest Night tie-in and the ring promo, and then by a crossover early on with Robinson’s new JLA run.
It’s too little, too late, though, I imagine. You screw up the launch of a C-Level comic and there’s no saving it later and they screwed up the launch something fierce by not tying it to anything or giving the average “Is this Comic Important?” DCU reader a reason to care.
Glee isn’t a preteen show. It’s Arrested Development in preteen show drag.
@ps238principal: I believe that the upcoming SWORD mini-series will address that. Especially since it looks like Gyrich will be taking the agency over…
“When it’s SWORD vs. HAMMER, only ARMOR can save the day!” Are there any other threat-specific agencies?
And Karla’s right. Calling Glee cliched is like calling House formulaic. Both descriptions are accurate but reductive, since it’s all in the execution.
A little late on the “Cosmic” discussion, but over at The Weekly Crisis we put together a War of Kings Primer, detailing everything that you need to know to jump on to War of Kings (this was months ago). It includes the reading order, summaries, and other things.
http://www.weeklycrisis.com/2009/03/war-of-kings-primer.html
But anyway, I would definitely recommend hunting those trades down, because they are amazing.
@ascendance: even using the higher-value chits? *shrug*
I actually love the musical numbers in Glee and, as equinox216 so eloquently stated, the villians, but I can’t stand the rest of it. It’s just full of itself, and mean.
I’m also not pleased that both of the semi-normal characters are guys, and their love interests are crazy women. Why can women never be the semi-normal characters in a world gone mad? Oh, and the part where we’re supposed to root for the marriage to break up – I’m not real big on that either.