1st issue Challenge

This is the place to discuss the episodes of the Comic Book Page podcast, the Comic Book Page website or pretty much anything else of interest to the Comic Book Page community...

Moderator: JohnMayo

GABE!
Special Reviewer
Posts: 385
Joined: Mon Jan 17, 2011 11:05 pm

Post by GABE! »

BadDeacon wrote:Overall, and except for a few stand outs, week three was pretty so-so.
Wait until you get your 4th week of books. I was surprised at how many I liked from this week.
BadDeacon
Reviewer
Posts: 248
Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 2:44 pm
Location: San Frantastic, CA
Contact:

Post by BadDeacon »

GABE! wrote:
BadDeacon wrote:Overall, and except for a few stand outs, week three was pretty so-so.
Wait until you get your 4th week of books. I was surprised at how many I liked from this week.
Cool.

Before I got any books at all, I went through and noted how I thought I would like the book, based on what I had heard and seen from previews of the book. There have been some surprises, but about 50% of my impressions have been spot on. Week 4 had the second most books I was looking forward to (after week 1), so it looks good to me.
Image
BobBretall
Master Reviewer
Posts: 5522
Joined: Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:44 pm

Post by BobBretall »

BadDeacon wrote:Overall, and except for a few stand outs, week three was pretty so-so.
Just show how different people react to different stuff. Week 3 was my best week, I added as many books from week 3 to my pull as week 1+2 combined.
Paul Nolan
Special Reviewer
Posts: 314
Joined: Sat Jan 22, 2011 6:54 am
Location: Southampton, UK

Post by Paul Nolan »

I'm still surprised by people who think they should be liking all 52 titles. Make something for everyone. Not everything for someone.

(side note: its a nice coincidence that a load of the new 52 reviews come on page 52 of this thread)
Image
BadDeacon
Reviewer
Posts: 248
Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 2:44 pm
Location: San Frantastic, CA
Contact:

Post by BadDeacon »

BobBretall wrote:
BadDeacon wrote:Overall, and except for a few stand outs, week three was pretty so-so.
Just show how different people react to different stuff. Week 3 was my best week, I added as many books from week 3 to my pull as week 1+2 combined.
It is really interesting to see how people vary! There are a number of books that I thought were perfectly reasonable books, but the character or story just isn't that interesting to me.

Interestingly enough, this has pointed out the types of books that I seem to enjoy: non-superhero books, female super heroes, and Superman.
Paul Nolan wrote:I'm still surprised by people who think they should be liking all 52 titles. Make something for everyone. Not everything for someone.
I personally didn't expect to like everything, part of why I wanted to try each title was to see what I would and wouldn't like.

What I did expect going in to this was for there not to be bad titles. A lot of these books seem perfectly decent, as I mentioned above, but they just aren't stories or characters I am interested in.

There are only a couple things that I thought have thought have been pretty bad, and most of the things I thought have been bad have just been aspects of books, not the entire thing.
Image
boshuda
Special Reviewer
Posts: 341
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2011 8:59 am
Location: Western NY

What I liked surprised me

Post by boshuda »

Paul Nolan wrote:I'm still surprised by people who think they should be liking all 52 titles. Make something for everyone. Not everything for someone.
I'm surprised by what I liked. I expected to dislike the Superman and The Dark (Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Frankenstein, etc) books, but I loved just about every title in those lines. On the other hand I thought I would love The Edge (Stormwatch, Grifter, Voodoo, etc) and Young Justice lines, but found no titles I loved and very few titles I liked in Young Justice and I loved half of The Edge books while very much disliking the other half.
HassanT
Master Reviewer
Posts: 1006
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2007 3:17 pm

Post by HassanT »

The last week of the first month of the new 52...

My favorites were Aquaman and the Flash, which wasn't a real surprise. Actually, let me take that back. I was surprised on how well the Flash story was written.

I also enjoyed All-Star Western, I, Vampire, and Justice League Dark. What was a surprise was that I enjoyed the first two books more than Justice League Dark. All-Star Western was a lot more than Jonah Hex in Gotham. The story choices they made for this book was very interesting. I really love I, Vampire, especially after the second time I read the book. I never read the original series, but the first issue really sold me on the concept. JLD was a good first issue but was not "blow-my-socks off great. That said, a lot was established in the first issue.

Teen Titans was different but enjoyable. As well as Voodoo. Actually both books I enjoyed more after the second read. Green Lantern: New Guardians is the 4th GL series and is good but not the strongest GL title.

Batman: The Dark Knight was ok. If you like Batman, you will like this book. It is the weakest of all the Batman books DC has put out.

Superman was good but not great. It was the weakest of the Superman titles that DC has put out. It did remind me of the 70s and early 80s Superman books, in a good way.

The biggest disappointments were Firestorm and Savage Hawkman. I am surprised about how average the first issue of Firestorm was, especially with the creators involved. These two books was also more of a departure on how the characters were prior to new 52, so maybe my opinion was a bit bias from that.

The worst book of the week was Blackhawks. The art was really not good and the story was ok at best.

BTW, I did give some of the new 52 titles to my daughters to read, about 10. When they are done reading the titles, I will let everyone know what they thought.
Paul Nolan
Special Reviewer
Posts: 314
Joined: Sat Jan 22, 2011 6:54 am
Location: Southampton, UK

Post by Paul Nolan »

Paul Nolan wrote:I'm still surprised by people who think they should be liking all 52 titles. Make something for everyone. Not everything for someone.
Just wanted to express that none of these 'people' who I'd got this feeling from are on this site. Just a plethora of comments scattered around the web. :oops:
BadDeacon
Reviewer
Posts: 248
Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 2:44 pm
Location: San Frantastic, CA
Contact:

Post by BadDeacon »

Pounded through the week 4 books last night and this morning. This week was the most cut and dry of the weeks. I either really liked, or had no interest in most of the books. There are only a few that still could go either way, or that I am marginally interested in.

Aquaman – This book was hilarious, and good. I don’t know how long the “Aquaman is the joke” joke can last though.

The Flash – Flash runs around, beats bad guys. Yawn. Not bad, just not something I’m interested in. I'd read it if it was handed to me though.

Fury of Firestorm – I had enough of high school when I was in high school. This did nothing for me.

Savage Hawkman – Not bad, just did nothing for me.

Superman – This was an “alright” Superman story, and I really appreciate the fact that there was an actual whole story in this issue. Solid, but not spectacular. I like Superman as a character, but Superman stories seem to need to be spectacular for me to like them.

Batman: The Dark knight – This stories cast shadows of boredom around me. As the shadow engulfed me, I became the boredom, as I became the shadow. One face!

Green Lantern: New Guardians – Kyle! This got green because it was Kyle Rainer, the greatest of the Green Lanterns. Kyle’s one of those characters that I can read and thoroughly enjoy, as long as the story is decent. This story was decent. I really liked it.

Justice League Dark – Interesting characters, interesting story set up. Not the normal super heroics. I liked it.

I, Vampire – I think I liked what I read, but I’m not sure. This issue was very hard to follow. The only reason this isn’t a big fat red is that I think that what I read was pretty good. The storytelling in this was really horrible though. The “jumping between two different scenes that don’t make any sense” may be some avant-garde storytelling method, but it seemed to eliminate the basic notion of telling a story.

Voodoo – Thar bee boobies! A lot of my reason to rate this highly is my trust in Ron Marz to make this an interesting story. He transitioned Witchblade from a cheesecake character to an interesting book, and I think that this issue set up enough to do something interesting in this book. I think Voodoo looks better as a woman than as a lizard though.

All-Star Western – I have heard over and over, “Jonah Hex is really good!” I always dismissed it, because I’m just not that interested in westerns. This was really good. The most satisfying read of the week.

Blackhawks – As far as I am concerned, Bloodshot is the only nanite-powered character I need, and will ever need. This wasn’t very interesting to me.

Teen Titans – No. I hoped, based on how much I was surprised by Superboy, that I would be surprised by this. I wasn’t.
Image
BobBretall
Master Reviewer
Posts: 5522
Joined: Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:44 pm

Post by BobBretall »

5 books that I liked enough in Week 4 to make it straight onto my pull list:

All-Star Western #1 - My favorite book of the week, I loved the combo of Jonah Hex with the mystery element.
Aquaman - I like how Johns met some of the slams against Aquaman over the years head on & made him "cool".
Flash, Teen Titans, and I, Vampire were all really good comics. On Titans, it seemed to fall into the same problem zone as a lot of other team books, I thought they could have introduced more of the team members, but I still liked it.

Green Lantern-New Guardians - Not bad, just didn't really grab me.
Justice League Dark - This issue was all over the place. I'm going to need to read another issue or 2 to form an opinion.
Superman - I didn't really like this take on Superman, but Perez is stepping down so I may stay a bit to see what the next creator brings to the table. Tying this in to Stormwatch, which I disliked, didn't help matters either.
Voodoo -All cheesecake 1st issue, but given how this ended, I'd like to see where this goes next issue.

Batman, The Dark Knight - Finch's art doesn't ring my bell AND I really disliked the Two-Face redesign at the end. I don't need to read that many Batman books, so I can skip this one easy.
Blackhawks - Hassan was right, I really hated this. I didn't care about any of the characters or what was happening with them.
Firestorm - Yikes! I didn't like the character designs of the new Firestorm and the personalities and stilted set-up for the clash of personalities between Ronnie & Jason was really weak.
Savage Hawkman - After the initial silver age version, Hawkman has gone from one confusing/convoluted incarnation to another. This follows in that proud tradition, I had a hard time following the thread of what was supposed to be going on here, not something I want to read any more of.
keith71_98
Visitor
Posts: 21
Joined: Thu Jul 14, 2011 7:12 pm

Post by keith71_98 »

I really, really liked All-Star Western. Perfectly paced and sharply written. Lot's of fun.

I really was surprised about Blackhawks. Perhaps it was the nostalgic feel from being a G.I. Joe fan from the 80's, but I was interested. Wasn't a favorite of mine but I'm gonna give it a few more issues. Same with Hawkman.

I certainly agree about Firestorm. Neither main character made me care about them. They were moody and annoying and some of their dialogue was really, really weak.
GABE!
Special Reviewer
Posts: 385
Joined: Mon Jan 17, 2011 11:05 pm

Post by GABE! »

Last of The Greats Intense story that reminds me a lot of Rising Stars and Irredeemable with a twist ending. The art though, looked very rushed and unfinished. I think I only noticed 5 backgrounds and everything else was really bad colored blue space. I'll keep getting this in hopes the art sharpens up.
deeplots
Visitor
Posts: 11
Joined: Mon Sep 12, 2011 11:06 am
Contact:

Post by deeplots »

Based on all of the people liking All-Star Western I may have to go pick it up from the store.

And since I just got the second printing:

Swamp Thing - I really enjoyed this issue. I've only read a little bit of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, so I was a little confused by some of the stuff mentioned in this issue. But it got me interested in what's going to happen next, I'm really curious in the concepts of the Green and the Red. Hopefully my questions get answered in future issues.
HassanT
Master Reviewer
Posts: 1006
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2007 3:17 pm

Post by HassanT »

The Last of the Greats #1 - I picked this book up based on the strength of Joshua Hale Fialokov's work on I, Vampire and the interviews he has done on the different podcasts, including CBP. Generally, I stay away from super-hero books outside of DC/Marvel because when I read an independent book, I want something different. I thought it was an ok book until the last few pages. The ending is what sold me on this book. One weak aspect of the book is the art. I don't think it is bad but I also don't think it is good either.

The Strange Talent of Luther Strode #1 - I wasn't interested in this book because of the over-the-top violence that was previewed back when the book was first solicited. However, decided to picked up the first issue off the rack when I was at a LCS. I really loved this book. Not because of the violence, but because of the great characterization and art of the book. I thought this was a very strong first issue and I will be sticking with it.

Near Death #1 - I picked this up because of the internet buzz it received. I thought it was a good comic book, not great. It read more like a TV pilot on a network channel. I might try the second issue, but right now I am on the fence.
GABE!
Special Reviewer
Posts: 385
Joined: Mon Jan 17, 2011 11:05 pm

Post by GABE! »

HassanT wrote:

The Strange Talent of Luther Strode #1 - I wasn't interested in this book because of the over-the-top violence that was previewed back when the book was first solicited. However, decided to picked up the first issue off the rack when I was at a LCS. I really loved this book. Not because of the violence, but because of the great characterization and art of the book. I thought this was a very strong first issue and I will be sticking with it.



I also really enjoyed The Strange Talent of Luther Strode #1 It's kind of what Kick (bleep) should have been.
Post Reply