My Weekly Pull - September 21st

We continue our whirlwind tour through my comic book buying habits by looking at week 3 of September.  The DC Reboot was really in full swing at this point, and I was starting to get real tired of reading all these books.  Seriously, way too many of them sucked or were straight up mediocre, which when you're reading 52 books, might as well be the same as sucking.

Marvel Comics
SPIDER-ISLAND CLOAK AND DAGGER #2
DAREDEVIL #4
SPIDER-ISLAND SPIDER-WOMAN #1

DC Comics
BATMAN #1
BIRDS OF PREY #1
BLUE BEETLE #1
CAPTAIN ATOM #1
CATWOMAN #1
DC UNIVERSE PRESENTS #1
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #1
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES
NEW YORK FIVE TP
NIGHTWING #1
RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS #1
SUPERGIRL #1
WONDER WOMAN #1

Everyone Else

THE ASTONISHING SECRET OF AWESOME MAN GN
GAME OF THRONES #1

From Marvel, I totally dug Daredevil, which isn't any surprised, as Marcos Martin is just as amazing as Paolo Rivera on art, so the trade was pretty wonderful.  Mark Waid's writing continues to blow me away as well.  Nick Spencer and Emma Rios continued to do some fantastic things on Cloak and Dagger, although the second issue wasn't quite as tight as their first.  Spider-Woman wasn't quite as exciting, acting as yet another instance to make me question whether I think Fred Van Lente is as great of a writer as I thought he was.  Seriously, the guy absolutely killed it with his Taskmaster mini last year, but everything I've seen since this has been rather regular.  Not bad, but not nearly as great as Taskmaster was.  Could it have been a one time thing?  Only time - and potentially me getting burned once or twice more - will tell.

The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man was actually an illustrated children's book written by Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is what got me on board.  The story was really cute, though obviously far more appropriate for a child reader than for myself.  It definitely made me want to share it with potential future children of mine.  That or find a present child and give it to them.  We'll see how that one plays out, I guess.

Game of Thrones was completely terrible.

Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as terrible as most of DC's books for this week.  I'll spare you most of my displeasure and focus on the books I actually liked for the moment.  Scott Snyder's Batman was amazing, which is completely unsurprising considering his amazing run on Detective Comics.  It's a bit lighter than Detective, which is nice change of pace.  And Brian Azzarrello and Cliff Chiang did what I thought they would and created a great Wonder Woman comic.  I can't wait to read the second issue.

I liked Blue Beetle, but looking back on it, I liked it less in retrospect than I initially thought I did.  We'll see how issue 2 plays out.  Supergirl wasn't bad, but it wasn't good enough to warrant buying a second issue.  Unfortunately, the same can pretty much be said for almost every other issue that DC dropped this week.  Well, DC Universe Presents just sucked.

Red Hood and the Outlaws fails for rebooting Starfire not even as a person, but a female object who only wants to have sex.  Catwoman fails for a similar reason, in that is just had a ton of cheesecake shots of Selina throughout, climaxing (pun intended) with her fornicating with Batman on the final page.  It was pretty terrible.

That being said, the absolute worst book of the week, and the entire month for DC, was Legion of Super Heroes.  The entire "New 52" was supposed to be a big reboot to bring in new readers, which is all well and good, except for the fact that Legion was completely unreadable.  It feels like it picked up in the middle of a storyline, and the entire thing was completely undecipherable.  I came out of the issue wondering what the hell had just happened, but not at all caring.  Sigh.

Anyways, the problem isn't that I didn't read any good comics (I read a bunch), the problem is that I read a bunch of terrible ones - and paid way too much to do it.  We'll see that this didn't change much for the last week of September, but there could be an upswing in the near future.

Riveting stuff, I know.