Pandemic Comics

Besides my own books, almost all of my reading during the pandemic has been comic books.  Because they're short and easy to pick up and put down at will.  I didn't go to comic book stores before that but since those were closed my two sources were Comixology and Amazon Prime.

On Amazon Prime they have a lot of Marvel's Star Wars ones.  I already had read the Darth Vader and Doctor Aphra series on Amazon Prime.  There were a couple of other ones I hadn't read yet.

Having watched Clone Wars and Rebels on Disney+, I decided to read a couple of standalone miniseries Darth Maul comics.  The Darth Maul series by Cullen Bunn takes place before Episode I.  Impatient with waiting and wanting a challenge, Maul abducts a Jedi Padawan and duels with her.  This gives him a new respect for his enemies.  This miniseries was OK, though not as good as the TV shows.  Better was the one called Darth Maul:  Son of Dathomir.  It takes place after Palpatine defeated Maul on Mandalore.  Maul attempts to rebuild his criminal empire, which would lead into his cameo in the Solo movie.  This one wasn't bad, though if you hadn't watched Clone Wars recently then it might have been a little confusing.

The other Star Wars series was the Poe Dameron series.  Oddly Amazon Prime had volumes 2-4 to borrow but I had to buy the first volume from Comixology.  So I waited until it went on sale and then bought it.  It's a fun series that like the Star Wars Resistance show tries to fill in some blanks between Return of the Jedi and Force Awakens. 

It starts shortly before Episode VII with Leia giving Poe command of Black Squadron, which is just 4 fighters for the most part.  She sends them to look for Lor San Tekka, the guy played by Max von Syndow.  They have a couple of near misses where they get in trouble with Hutts and the First Order.  One particular First Order officer named Terex, a former Stormtrooper-turned-pirate-turned-First Order officer, makes it his mission to hunt down Poe, until he gets a cyborg implant installed by the First Order that basically lobotomizes him.  After freeing himself of that, Terex decides to go back to piracy to explain why we don't see him again.

Meanwhile Poe and company have to help Leia rescue Tekka after he was captured.  For the most part the series was fun.  On the whole more fun than Doctor Aphra, which as I said before was only fun in the first two volumes.  The fifth volume, which I also had to buy when it was on sale, takes place after the Force Awakens.  The first issue mostly creates an explanation for how Poe got "thrown from the crash" of the TIE he and Finn stole while his jacket remained.  Basically the jacket got stuck and so he slipped out of it when he escaped.  Then some friendly aliens gave him a lift back to the Resistance base.  Because why not?  The rest of the volume mostly follows the rest of Black Squadron as Leia sends them to recruit allies after the destruction of Starkiller Base.  That's to explain why they weren't in The Last Jedi.  The squadron goes to a couple of planets but only run into First Order forces until Poe borrows a fighter from a Hutt to rescue them.  This wasn't all that good because like Rise of Skywalker and Resistance it was trying to fix what Rian Johnson broke.  It makes sense that after that volume they cancelled the series altogether.

Besides that I got a couple other Marvel ones from Amazon Prime

The first two volumes of Captain America by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Like I said in my Goodreads review it was a bold move to hand over the whitest superhero to a black author.  The only real drawback to these 12 issues is that it takes place after the "Secret Empire" thing that I hadn't read.  I got the gist that thanks to the Cosmic Cube Steve Rogers was a secret Hydra agent who somehow took over America until he was stopped and a different Steve Rogers came back to replace him.

So in this Steve Rogers is back and trying to be Captain America, but America doesn't really trust him.  Things get worse when someone is murdered and the weapon appears to be Captain America's shield.  Steve surrenders himself and ends up in prison until Sharon Carter and the "Daughters of Liberty" help him to break out.  At some point I should get some more of the series to see how Steve can redeem his good name--if he can.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin was a meh miniseries that was probably free on Amazon Prime because the movie was supposed to come out this summer.  Natasha Romanoff and her friend/lover/husband Ivan are injected with something back in the 50s that allows them to not age as fast.  In the present someone is using nanobots or something to turn Black Widow's allies against her.  And then somehow she blasts off into space to fight Robo-Ivan.  Like a lot of Black Widow comics, this hasn't really had any lasting impact, at least I don't think so.  If we can ever see the movie, maybe it'll prove otherwise.

I also bought a couple of Transformers comics that were on sale and I hadn't caught up on.  Unicron was the conclusion of IDW's Transformers series before it was rebooted to correspond to the new series of toys.  It gets most of the Hasbro-verse of GI Joe, Rom, and Visionaries into it as Unicron threatens to destroy the universe until they sort of poison Cybertron to kill him.  Hooray.  Requiem of the Wreckers was a second sequel to Last Stand of the Wreckers.  The Wreckers were sort of an Autobot version of SEAL Team 6 or Delta Force.  This last double-stuffed issue doesn't really add much and wasn't really necessary.

Two of my favorite series were from Marvel, which is unusual for me.

Spider-Man: Life Story was a neat 6-part series.  Each issue checks into a certain decade of Peter Parker's life.  The first issue takes place in the mid-60s with Peter dealing with issues relating to Vietnam.  Then the second issue takes place in the 70s.  And so on with Peter aging normally so that by the last issue in the 2010s, he's an old man going on one final mission to save humanity with the new Spider-Man, Miles Morales.  It works in a lot of the most famous Spider-Man stories like the death of Gwen Stacy, the black parasite suit, the Clone Saga, and Civil War.  Because it's only six issues it has to compress and mash up some things that I don't think work as well as they could, but overall it was a great read even for casual Spidey fans.

The Immortal Hulk is an ongoing reboot Hulk series by Al Ewing.  In the dumb Civil War II story Hawkeye kills Bruce Banner--at Bruce's request when he thinks he's going to turn back into the Hulk.  This series starts off like the old TV show with Bruce having risen from the dead and traveling discreetly around the country, searching for places affected by gamma radiation.  There's also a reporter who is on his trail.

Eventually Bruce's Hulk gets into a fight with Sasquatch, the Canadian Hulk-like hero.  And then somehow he winds up in a weird gamma radiation Hell called "the Green Door."  Emerging from that, Bruce and the Hulk take over a shadowy government agency.  Most of it was good, though it was a little disappointing when it starts veering from the more down-to-Earth first issues to weirder stuff, especially the last issue where some alien race at the end of time is trying to create something to destroy the Hulk, who by then has killed the rest of the universe or something.  It's a lot like Grant Morrison's New 52 run on Action Comics where it started off as a pretty grounded Superman story and then just kept getting farther away from that, so I'm a little wary about continuing this series, but I'd probably try at least one more volume.

A couple more odds-and-ends:

Nightwing: The New Order is an Elseworlds comic where Nightwing uses an alien weapon to take away superpowers from everyone.  He starts his own not-so-secret police force, but then things start falling apart when his own son is diagnosed as having the metahuman gene.  He has to run from his own police force and join with some of the few heroes left to make things right.  There are some good concepts but it wasn't really given enough time to fully explore them.  The superhumans losing their powers was done better in Tom King's novel A Once Crowded Sky.  The thing with his son is like in the Amazon TV series The Man in the High Castle.  Just saying.

Spider-Man and the X-Men takes place after Wolverine "dies" and Spider-Man takes over teaching for him at the Jean Grey School for Mutants or whatever it's called.  Spidey and his class of misfit kids have some wacky adventures and run into trouble with villains and heroes alike.  It's fun but not really essential reading.

Superior Spider-Man: Full Otto:  The original Superior Spider-Man was about Otto Octavius (aka Doctor Octopus) taking over Peter Parker's body and becoming a "superior" Spidey.  This new version takes place after some thing with clones where Doc Ock gets a sexy new non-Peter Parker body and goes to San Francisco to become a superior Spider-Man.  It of course doesn't go that well.  It was OK but not as good as the original series.  Maybe if more issues were on Amazon Prime or something I'd read them but not something I'd pay a lot of money for.

And a couple of smaller press comics:

Freshmen was a series from the 2000s co-created by Seth Green of Family Guy and Robot Chicken infamy.  As you'd guess then, it's kind of a foul-mouthed, potty humor take on superheroes.  A bunch of freshmen are near a science lab when an experiment goes wrong and gives them powers.  Not necessarily traditional powers.  One couple only has powers when they're near each other.  One guy's "power" is having a really huge dong.  And so on.  The nerdy kid who really wanted superpowers wasn't around at that time to get any, but he tries to use his knowledge as the team leader.  It was OK but not really great.  As funny as they might be, some of the "superpowers" really had no practical application.  For decency reasons the guy with the huge dong couldn't really be involved much so they finally just wrote him off by saying he went out to Hollywood to work in porn.  With a little better planning it could have been better.

Die is a series my Blogger buddy Arion turned me on to.  It's like a gritty version of the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series.  That was about a group of kids who are transported to a fantasy world based on Dungeons & Dragons and they have to find their way home.  In this case a group of British kids were transported to a fantasy world a long time ago.  They came back--except for one of them--but many years later they're brought back to the fantasy world and have to deal with the consequences of what happened back then.  Interestingly one of the dudes in the real world seems to be a girl in the fantasy world, which isn't really explained.  At some point I need to look for the continuation of the series.

There you go, a lot of pointless rambling about comics.  Because, why not?