Some penguins....undead penguins!

For Celia. :-)

Note the scan wasn't really modified from the original, I just shrinked it and cropped it.

Credits: Marc-André Houle

Went to the comic book shop. All is good. On the pull list this week: New Avengers #14, Silent Dragon #6 (final), and JLA:Classified #16.

Let's star with the New Avengers. Now over a year old this title just changed artists. Bendis is still writing but we get Frank Cho on pencils and I can't say it's for the best yet. He's generally competent but he does annoying crap like inking these lines that run off the figures for no good reasons, artistic or otherwise. That's just crap. Obviously the colouring teamis handling the bulk of the chore of keeping the art vibrant and interesting. Storywise it's typical Bendis exposition material. You have a lot of talking and zero action which is fine since a little exposition was needed. This episode is all about Spider-Woman and how she got her powers back. Now if you're a fan of that character that's all fine and dandy but this is a team book and I'd have liked a little bit more stuff about the other Avengers....maybe some form of sub-plot about some of the other team members.

Silent Dragon was the end of a short mini-series. I kinda like the surprise ending, I didn't at first but now it's growing on me. The art is still solid but the script was a tad confusing. I think I'll have to re-read the entire series now that I have all the issues. All in all a solid effort. I think the series could have used more issues to give the setting some added life.

JLA Classified is really an old style comic book by Ellis. The heroes are really, really undefeatable. Seriously all they have to do is show up. The bad guys are really, really evil and kinda stupid. Not kidding. And the world is a better place because super-heroes are here to keep us safe. Superman is awesome, Batman isn't a dick, everyone is playing in-character (except Wally West who might be a little too scientific for my taste, the character was never depicted as such by...well...anyone...ever). The art is rather uneven. Guice's pencils seem to be over-inked and the colour really doesn't benefit the book at all, a complete miss by th art department. Storywise I'd say it was rather simplistic, fun but without any type of sophistication which is alright for a short stint but that would get boring pretty quickly. Personnally I can't wait for Nextwave, that's gonna be a lot more fun and Imogen is really bringing his best work to the table.

All in all it was a fairly good week for comics. :-)