So, What comics did you buy this week?

[Diabolical]

Dear Becky is basically an epilogue.

[jjreason]

Wanted a digital copy of Battle Chasers 10.... but I'm not paying over $5 for it. I'll wait for a sale.

[Tom Foolery]

Marvel shipped next week’s books with this week’s books because of the holiday and my guy just put everything on the racks. I ended up with 42 issues and spent a whopping $155.
But next week will be extra tiny because I bought all of my Marvel books this week.

[Tom Foolery]

After finishing up the comic sorting in April, I moved on to other projects like the Lego sorting. But I’ve been reading a few books as I go even if its only like one issue or half an issue before falling asleep. There were 8 unread boxes of the most current books when I started, but I’ve redistributed and expanded it to twelve boxes. But when I began reading, I decided to go in reverse order, so I started in the ‘U thru X’ box. Now that the Lego stuff is finished, I expect to get more reading done. But I also started playing Red Dead Redemption II (which was my “reward” for completing the comic and Lego sorting) and there’s a bunch of wedding stuff taking up my time.

I haven’t read a whole lot, but here’s what I finished so far.

USAgent 4 and 5. Finished up John Walker’s mini by Priest and Jeanty. Walker’s sister and the new USAgent are using discarded serum derived from an abandoned American Kaiju project to give themselves super powers and Walker has to stop them. Usually Priest does good work, but this mini was lacking and unfocused.

Mighty Valkyries 1-5. Jason Aaron and Torun Gronbekk continue the Legacy numbering(issues 15-19)of Jane Foster’s short ongoing Valkyrie book with this miniseries where the co-queen of Hel Karnilla makes a deal with the mystical wolf More so she can kidnap some Earth children and raise them as the next generation of gods. Jane and the recently found lost Valkyrie Runa must uncover the truth and stop the resurrected Fafnir from destroying Hel while also dealing with Hela’s fury with her wife and Loki’s manipulations. And also Kraven the Hunter thrown in for fun. It was okay and kind of meandered for me, but I do think the relationship between Karnilla and Hela is interesting.

Jane Foster and the Mighty Thor 1-5. Also continuing the Valkyrie legacy numbering(20-24). When minor Alpha Flight villain Dream Queen gives Thor amnesia and sends him to a pocket dimension, his Hammer seeks out Jane and she becomes Thor once more to find him and rescue him. It all turns out to be a master plan by Tyr to usurp his brother’s throne in Asgard , who is in turn being manipulated by the true villain Ares who feeds on the energy created by the conflict between Tyr’s invading armies of the dead including the Desir, and the protectors of Asgard including Sif, Beta Rey Bill, and Runa. (Ares was himself getting played by Amora who had her own even more secret agenda) This was a much more enjoyable straightforward top notch story from Gronbekk. Full of action and sacrifice.

The Variants 1-5. A Jessica Jones mystery where Jess thinks the Purple Man left a post hypnotic trigger to kill her family and she starts seeing Variants of herself from other universes. Started out promising, but ended up with just fighting an evil version of herself with the help of a bunch of other versions of herself. I was waiting a for a twist that didn’t happen.

Venom 1-20. After Donny Cates epic run that ended with the King in Black event, Al Ewing and Ram V took over as co-writers on this current ongoing Venom series. Eddie is the new King in Black and “ruler” of all the symbiotes everywhere. His son Dylsn has bonded with his old Symbiote and is the new Venom. When Eddie dies, he’s thrust into a pocket dimension where he meets all the Kings in Black after him, including the mysterious Meridius. But the twist is that Meridius and the other five KIBs he meets in the ‘Garden’ are all future versions of him and as the story progresses we see Eddie morphing thru these different stages as he tries to stop Meridius(who is the main villain and also Eddie’s inevitable future self) trying to manipulate events leading to the outcome that guarantees Meridius’ ascension. Meanwhile, Dylan is in the “present” dealing with the Life Foundation trying to attack Venom and jumpstart it’s next evolution, while also dealing with his dead time jumping father who is and isn’t a villain now from his point of view. The book crossed over with Amazing Spidey and X-Men for a couple issues for an event called Dark Web with Madeline Pryor and Ben Reilly teaming up to be villains. But mostly, It’s a clever wild trippy story telling device, but you have to be paying attention.
This is also the first ongoing book I’ve now caught up and am current with, so I’ll have to read each new issue as they drop or I’ll fall behind again

Venom:Lethal Protector 1-5. Dave Michelinie came back for a mini series set not long after Venom started being a good guy. (So basically after the original LP mini in the 90s) Justin Hammer puts a contract out on Venom and we get a bunch of obscure 80s and 90s villains like Humbug, Styx and Stone, and those three Hydra knockoffs of Cap, Spidey and Hawkeye. Remember those guys? BloodSpider? JaggedBow? Anyway, Marvel has been having some moderate success having creators come back and do minis set in the past. Peter David has done some black suit Spider stories, and a Joe Fixit mini. Larry Hama did a Patch mini, etc. This Lethal Protector book had a follow up called Lethal Protector. Not LP II or even LP III. Just straight up another Venom:Lethal Protector 1-5…like that won’t get confusing for people looking for back issues.

Anyway, now it’s onto the Ws. Wakanda, Wasp, What If, eventually Wolverine and Wonder Woman.

[Tom Foolery]

Back with more reading from the past month. Again, mostly reading one issue(or not even) before I fall asleep, so it’s slow going. I’m definitely buying more book than I’m reading, so I’m falling behind again.

Wakanda 1-5. A Panther spinoff mini. Each issue focused on a different character; Shuri, M’Baku, Killmonger, Tosin, and Okoye and fleshed out the history of Wakanda(there are some cool annotations in the back of each issue) but I am like three or more Black Panther ongoings behind, so everything was super confusing. For instance, the M’Baku in issue 2 is not the original(apparently that one is dead) and is instead his namesake from a Galaxy OUT IN SPACE that the ancient Wakandans from Earth travelled to and conquered thousands of years ago. Yeah, that’s how far out of the loop I am on BP lore. As it is, I doubt my brain will retain much of what I read.

Warlock:Rebirth 1-5. Ron Marz and Ron Lim did one of those retro-series(this one itself is a sequel to a retro Silver Surfer mini I haven’t read yet) that is set during the time Warlock was in the Infinity Watch. The High Evolutionary creates a “better” female version of Adam he calls Eve( I think somebody had already done a female Adam story back in the 80s but I would have to do internet research to confirm. And that character is a different character from the Infinity Crusade series. So there’s been TWO female Adam Warlocks…but I digress) who steals the Soul Gem from Adam and he gets all mopey and shit inside the Soul Realm until Dr Strange comes and rescues him and he goes and confronts Eve to get the Soul Gem back. It read very much like a 90s comic, but I’m a nostalgic sucker for Ron Lim art. It probably wasn’t that great but I enjoyed it, as if I had tracked down some missing Infinity Watch issues and plugged a hole in my run.

Wasp 1-4. For Janet’s 60th anniversary in comics, Janet and Nadia team up to fight the brain washing alien that killed Janet’s father way back in whatever super early 60s issue she was introduced in, and also ties the alien to Nadia’s mother and grandfather’s deaths. Al Ewing is always down for some obscure continuity retrofitting, and he does so here as well, tying W.H.I.S.P.E.R to HYDRA and the Red Room both with some retconned back history. Fun stuff.

Way of X 1-5. This was an ongoing that got shortened to a mini by Si Spurrier. Nightcrawler headlines a series about Kurt trying to etch out a new religion for Krakoans that are essentially immortal now. It started out very slow(it took me three nights to get thru the first issue because I was bored) but eventually Legion shows up and he, Kurt, and some other obscure X-Men discover that the psychic residue of Onslaught has re-emerged feeding on the psychic memory “entrails” of when Krakoans die, but when they get resurrected from their last save file, they are missing the final hours or days of their lives. And Onslaught is slowly infecting every Krakoan. Before Nightcrawler can do anything about it he has to teleport Mars’ entire moon before it destroys the planet and it kills him in the process, so he doesn’t remember that he figured out it was Onslaught before he died. This was followed up by an Onslaught mini later on. Started slow, but ended well.

Spider-Man:Spider’s Shadow 1-5. This was a What If mini where Peter kept and embraced the symbiote as his costume, turning him dark. He wipes out his rogue’s gallery, and Aunt May is killed before he decides to rid himself of the alien. It then attaches itself to Reed Richards who is then killed in a final battle before the Human Torch destroys the symbiote with fire, and Peter becomes the new member of the FF.

What If: Miles Morales 1-5. Four issues where Miles becomes a different hero in different universes, Cap, Wolverine, Hulk, and Thor, then in the fifth issue, they all team up with main 616 Miles thanks to some multiverse hopping shenanigans. I vaguely remember the Thor issue got a lot of flack when it came out for leaning into black stereotypes in the dialogue and such. I was annoyed with the premise mostly because the idea of What If was taking a pre-existing story arc, and making an important diverging choice in the narrative. These stories had to retcon so much stuff, like Miles father is running the Super-Serum program and his uncle was the original test subject, that it ceases to be a What If scenario and just becomes some random multiverse premise. And it’s hard to cram all the world building for each new issue AND also have a satisfying narrative and resolution in just twenty pages.

Winter Guard 1-4. Russia’s super team gets their own mini from Ryan Cady, spinning out of events in both Black Widow and the Avengers ongoing books. When Red Guardian and White Widow sneak back in to Russia to find some secret cold war hard drives, the Winter Guard is sent in to stop them. A crackerjack fast paced cat and mouse game ensues, with some Dracula thrown in for good measure. I thoroughly enjoyed this and would read the fuck out of a Winter Guard ongoing series. All of these characters have had long enough existences in the Marvel books to have rich complicated backstories.

Up next, a bunch of Wolverine bullshit.

[Tom Foolery]

Picking up the Wolverine ongoing after the X of Swords event.

Wolverine 11-12. Dracula and the new vampire nation in Chernobyl want Wolverine’s blood and they are using their mutant mole, Omega Red to get it. Omega Red becomes a willing double agent to secure his place on Krakoa, and Beast has the Five whip up a Wolverine clone body with UV blood genetically inserted in its DNA. Omega Red delivers the fake Wolverine body and it kills a bunch of the vampires.

13. During the first(?) Hellfire Gala, a bunch of the Terra Verdans send a saboteur squad to disrupt the Gala after they figured out Beast genetically modified all the Teleforonics to be complacent with Krakoa. After Sage realizes what a piece of shit Beast is, she negotiates a truce to undo the genetic tampering, pay them a billion dollars, and promise not to interfere with their competing drug business.

14-16. An Arraki pirate named Sevyr Blackmoor hijacks the Marauder to steal a bunch of Shi’R Logic Diamonds, which the Five use to power the ressurection chambers. Logan is tasked with tracking him down, but it’s all part of a bigger plot involving an ongoing fued between Blackmoor and Solem, the Adamantium skinned Arraki warrior Logan fought during the X of Swords event and the matching Muramasa Blades Solem and Wolverine stole from hell before the contest.

17-18. A conglomerate of Pharmaceutical companies, funded by a black ops CIA section tasked with surveilling/weakening Krakoa’s infrastructure, send a freighter full of defoliants towards Krakoa to kill its unique plant life. The frieghter is stopped by an X-Force team of Domino, Logan, and Maverick, but Maverick is secretly working both sides as a mole for the CiA X-Desk.

19. A stand alone story where some deep sea creature is attacking the Krakoan shoreline, killing mutants. Wolverine heads out alone in a boat to find it and kill it. I feel like the creature was in an earlier issue where Wolverine, Forge, and Namor go deep sea diving and encounter and/or unearth the creature, but I can’t remember which series it was in.

X-Lives of Wolverine 1-5. Started reading issue 20, and they made comments about a timey-whimey adventure Logan had been on, so I dug these two minis out and read them both. In X-Lives, Omega Red has discovered that Beast was having his mind wiped after he was interrogated by X-Force and leaving that part out each time he was resurrected. Also, the Five pointed out they could alter him so he wouldn’t need the carbonadium synthesizer to survive, and Beast told them no fuck off. Understandably, Arkady is salty and starts working for Mikhail Rasputin, the new leader of the Russian mutant enclave. Mikhail is using the stolen Cerebro Sword(at some point Magneto turned a Cerebro Helmet into a sword and it got misplaced). Anyway, Mikhail is sending Omega Red’s consiousness back thru time to possess people to assassinate Charles Xavier and his ancestors before he is even born/conceived. Jean Grey and Professor X send Logan back into earlier versions of his body to protect Xavier and stop Arkady. Lots of time hopping that dovetails into…

X-Deaths of Wolverine 1-5. In the aftermath of Inferno(which I haven’t got to yet) Moira MacTaggert is on the run from Mystique after losing her mutant power to resurrect. She gets some help from Jane Foster/Valkyrie, I was not aware she and Moira were friends. Faced with the conclusion she is no longer a mutant, she concocts a plan for immortality by uploading herself as a cybernetic virus with the help of some silicon valley dudebro. Meanwhile, a phalanx-infected Wolverine from the far future is sent back in time to hunt Moira down and kill her before she can bring about the mutant holocaust(the act of him coming back to kill her is what compels her to start the process…time paradox!) OG Wolverine wakes up from his adventures in the past, just in time to fight his future self, so the two minis were intertwined. I think they were alternating weeks of release when they came out.

Back to the main series. 20-23. Wolverine teams up with Deadpool(who’s been asking to join Krakoa and X-Force and getting blown off) to figure out who’s been making robot X-Men. After getting double-crossed by their former allies, Maverick and Weasel, they discover the perpetrator is Danger, who apparently got blown off when everyone moved to Krakoa and she has taken over the original Westchester school grounds to make her own family of X-Men that aren’t completely shitty to her. They leave things as a stalemate. But in a nice touch at the end, Logan invites Wade onto X-Force.

24-25. Part of the A.X.E. Judgment Day event. Wolverine and Solem have to team up once more when the Hellbride of the demon they killed to acquire the Muramasa blades comes gunning for them, and a Celestial gives everyone of Earth 24 hours to be judged worthy of living.

Only ten more issues of Wolvie and I’ll be current. Then a Patch mini by Larry Hama, and I’ll catch up on some Venom before getting to the Wonder Woman pile.

[Tom Foolery]

Wolverine 26-35. Beast goes straight villain. After a moral disagreement during a Danger Room practice, Beast and Logan trade words. Then Logan gets lured into a trap by the Merchant who wants to sell pieces of Wolverine to collectors, but Beast arrives and pays the full amount for the privilege of killing Wolverine himself and chops Logan’s head off. Durung the next resurrection, he prematurely wakes up the proto-Logan to make him more subservient and starts sending his new ‘Weapon X’ on dubious assassination missions. Eventually, Logan’s healing factor wakes him up(with some help from Krakoa) and he realizes Beast has gone full Col Kurtz. Logan tracks him down and KILLS BEAST. But Beast had a back-up plan and resurrects himself, going rogue from Krakoa. With an army of cloned Wolverines, and cloned Beasts he is following his own agenda. The Quiet Council is oddly indifferent to Beast going rogue, but Sage and Wolverine gather X-Force to go stop Beast once and for all. They manage to destroy his base and most of the Beast and Wolvie clones, but Beast and three Wolvie clones escape. Logan promises to track them down, but tells Sage he’s finished with Krakoa. I’m all caught up on Wolverine now, just in time for the Fall of X stuff.

I’ve been saying Beast has been descending into douchebaggery for at least a decade, going all the way back to shit he was doing in Bendis’ All New X-Men and even before that in Remender’s run. It’s about time he flipped the switch and just went evil.

Wolverine:Patch 1-5. Larry Hama came back for a retro mini set just before he took over the regular series in issue 31. When a family of enhanced Russian mutants escape a soviet research base, the Soviets, Madripoor’s Prince Baran, the Yakuza, and SHIELD all descend on the jungles of Madripoor to claim them for different reasons. Wolver—sorry, Patch and Archie Corrigan fly in and assist in keeping the mutants out of everyone’s hands, and it turns into a big clusterfuck when all the factions turn on each other. Fun getting classic Hama Wolverine again.

Marvel put out a new series of What If oneshots called What If Dark(the final fifth issue hasn’t come out yet). Here they are.

What If…Loki had gotten ahold of Thor’s Hammer? Deviating from Thor issue 231, Loki succeeds in stealing Thor’s Hammer, then kills Donald Blake and Sif. Then he kills Karnilla and steals her magic, and assassinates Balder with a hemlock arrow. Then he gathers all of Asgard’s enemies and they attack Asgard, destroying Odin and the other gods. But then Surtur turns on Loki and everything descends into a brouhaha and the nine realms are destroyed. Haha. Soooo…the Dark in the title is accurate. Walt Simonson wrote this classic tale, and Scot Eaton did a decent job of mimicking the art style of the 70s.

What If…Peter died instead of Gwen? Gerry Conway returns to tell an alternate tale where Peter grabbed Gwen instead of trying to web her, and hits his head on the concrete, killing him. Gwen takes his web shooters and makes a makeshift Spidey outfit. She enlists Harry’s help to draw the Green Goblin out. After trapping him in a web, she confronts him about killing Peter but decides to let him live. Harry, however, does not and shoots and kills the Goblin. Only after does he realize the Goblin was his father and he blames Gwen for “tricking” him into killing Norman. So he becomes the new Goblin, and Gwen is forced to becomes Spider-Woman to stop the menace she “created”. Dark.

What If…Venom bonded with The Thing? Ben Grimm returns to the FF after taking a break after Secret Wars. He has words with Reed about not ever fixing his condition, then he discovers the symbiote that Peter left with Reed and lets it out. VenomThing runs into Reed as he’s leaving and they fight. Later, Dr Curt Connors convinces Ben to come with him so he can fix him, but he bamboozles the symbiote away from him, then goes and kills Reed. The Thing shows up too late to stop Reed’s death, but he convinces the symbiote he’s the better host and after they rebond, Grimm kills Connors and becomes VenomThing permanently. Dark.

What If…Bushman killed Moon Knight? During Moon Knight’s 90’s series, Marc confronted Bushman in his nation of Burunda. In this version, Bushman gets the upper hand and kills Marc. Marlene Alruane and Frenchie manage to get Marc away, but he dies in Marlene’s arms. Then Marlene prays to Ra the Egyptian Sun God and becomes the hero Luminary. After a successful super hero career, Marlene returns to Burunda for a final confrontation with Bushman. She kills him, but is mortally wounded. As she dies, she is reunited with Marc, and Ra takes over her body on Earth. Dark.

All four issues were pretty decent. The final issue coming out is Carnage related.

The rest of this box is Wonder Woman, and I’m going to read those next three issues of Venom. I’ll get to them. I will.

[jjreason]

On vacation so I bought a small bag of floppies to pass some time.

Batman 126 (begin Zdarsky). Nowhere near Tom King or Nu52 levels of art or writing. Meh at best.
DD 14 (end Zdarsky). Haven't read it, so no opinion yet.
Storm 1 (Ann Nocenti writing so I figured it might be worth checking out but haven't yet).
FF legacy 701. Alicia Masters story. Made me kinda miss reading FF.
Excellent (season 2) 1. Just because Mike & Laura Allred. Haven't read it yet.

[Tom Foolery]

I started the Wonder Woman stuff, and also got around to getting re-caught up with Venom

Wonder Girl 1. The newest Wonder Girl, Yara Flor, got her own seven issue series. I only bought the first issue. Written and drawn by Joelle Jones, Yara returns to her native Brazil and reluctantly gets drawn into some superheroing. A promising start I guess, but not enough to get me excited about finding the rest of the series.

Sensational Wonder Woman 2-7. Short lived anthology series. I had the first issue in the older boxes, but didn’t realize I had bought the rest of the series. Each issue was by a different creative team. Some issues were better than others.

Wonder Woman 773-779. Diana is dead and living in Valhalla, but something is off. She teams up with the Norse squirrel god Ratatosk to chase half of the god, Janus(who split themselves in two) through a bunch of different realms including the fifth dimension where she teams up with Bat-Mite and Mxypytlk and Earth-11 where all the heroes are gender swapped. With the help of Deadman, she stops Janus amd forces them to recombine. This arc was so boring and the art was subpar in a lot of issues, that I had to take a break from WW and read…

Venom 21-24. Catching up with the current ongoing, Eddie Brock learns how to reconstitute his mortal body and then confronts Bedlam and defeats him, forming a new symbiote body. Meanwhile, his son Dylan is recruiting other symbiotes, including the new Toxin and some obscure golden age robot character, that they’ve retconned into being a symbiote for the eventual confrontation with his father. Then Eddie goes to Latveria to “borrow” Doom’s Time Travel platform so he can break the cycle of his own destiny. Doom obviously has issues with this, so there’s a Venom vs Doom. Also, somewhere in there, Natasha Romanoff gets her own symbiote.

Venom Lethal Protector II 1-5. The second retro mini by Michelinie. Silver Sable has been hired by SHIELD to proect some thingamajig, and she hires Venom on as part of her Wild Pack. They protect the doohickey and stop the helicarrier from crashing into NYC. Then another subplot has Cardiac stopping Vulture from kidnapping a scientist at the behest of Dr Doom, but Venom gets involved and Doom steals the symbiote from Eddie amd briefly becomes VenomDoom before Eddie gets the alien back and stops Victor.

Extreme Venomverse 1-5. A bunch of alt-reality Venom stories(three per issue) like Venom 1602, or Jeff the Landshark as Venom or Wild West Venom, etc. Half the time, Agent Venom Anne Weying shows up recruiting the Venoms for the upcoming Death of the Venomverse mini event.

Back to more Wonder Woman. Hopefully the stories get more interesting. There’s 20 more issues before the series ends with issue 800. But the good news is Tom King is writing the new ongoing that starts next month.

[Tom Foolery]

Finished Wonder Woman. It was a chore.

780. A stand alone issue where the world reacts to Diana returning to life. The Justice League welcomes her home and she saves some people on a sinking ship and the video goes viral, blah blah blah.

781-784. A villain called Image-Maker creates a bunch of WW duplicates out of easily shatterable glass and sends them out to hurt Diana’s friends and her reputation. She easily shatters them and defeats the bad guy and sends him back to the mirror dimension. The villain had also resurrected Diana’s boyfriend, Sigmund, from when she was in Valhalla and made him a temporary villain, but now he’s alive and decides to stay and help WW fight bad guys in the present.

785. Part of a crossover event with the other ‘WW’ books like Nubia and Wonder Girl called ‘Trial of the Amazons’. Somebody has murdered Queen Hippolyta and Diana tries to figure out who did it. Also there’s like some Amazonian competition to protect a Doorway to Chaos or something. I’m missing most of the rest of this story arc that got resolved in issues I don’t have.

787-790. Dr Psycho is back, but he’s rebranded himself Dr Cizko and he’s now a masculine radio influencer for incels(think Joe Rogan and other tiny dick energy personalities) getting guys all riled up with the help of some tainted milk(I kid you not, he’s peddling evil milk). Cizko and his newly re(?) formed Villainy Inc class with Diana and her crew. Eventually he’s defeated, but we discover he was being bankrolled by a mysterious shadow villain.

792. The mystery villain(it’s Hera, queen of the Greek gods) brainwashes Dr Minerva and makes her go feral. Diana uses the Lasso of truth to bring her back, and she joins Diana’s team to stop what happens next.

793. Stand alone issue. Batman and Superman guest star. A warning alarm goes off on the defunct JLA Watchtower satellite and the Trinity goes up there to fight some aliens who’ve been squatting there. Then the three of them bond some more and hugs and shit.

794-798. Hera reveals her master plan to get humans to start worshipping the Greek Gods again. Yara Flor shows up and teams up with Diana to fight Eros. Then Hera has the ancient wizard Shazam kill Zeus and she takes over the throne. This led to a separate mini series called DC Lazarus:Revenge of the Gods where WW and Shazam have to team up to stop Hera and the wizard and eventually Mary Marvel gives her Shazam powers to Diana to make her Shazam Wonder Woman and she defeats Hera. I’m missing like half the story.

799-800. Cloonan finished her run with a two part “Whatever Happened to the Warrior of Truth?” which is a riff on the far superior Superman and Batman stories. Diana is in a coma or whatever and it’s a bunch of different artists telling stories of her interacting with all her family members like Donna Troy, Cassie Sandmark, etc before she wakes up. Then there was a story by Tom King setting up his new ongoing series and introducing Diana’s daughter Trinity as the new WW in the future to Jon and Damian’s future Superman and Batman.

I was not impressed with Cloonan’s series. I don’t know if its just WW or what, but it always seems a slog to get thru.
There are a couple of $10 anthology oneshots that came out, and a Black White and Gold series, also an anthology type and that’s it for the Wonder Woman stuff. I am going to read them next, but as with all anthology type stuff, I predict some will be better than others, and leave it at that.

So the next thing to read is Mark Waid and Dan Mora’s new World’s Finest ongoing. And then a whole lot of X-Men reading to catch up with.

[Tom Foolery]

Mark Waid and (mostly) Dan Mora restarted a World’s Finest team up book last year. Waid has the continuity freedom to set the book in the “past” to avoid the constraints of whatever current shitshow is happening in the DC “present” and the series is better off for it. It’s mostly set towards the end of Dick’s tenure as Robin, so he’s older, but hasn’t reached that point where he chafed under Batman’s shadow and quit. Batman is wearing his classic blue and gray with the yellow bat circle on his chest. The full name of the series is technically Batman/Superman:World’s Finest, but I’ve got it in the ‘W’ box where it belongs.

1-5. Poison Ivy and Metallo team up after getting upgrades from an ancient trapped deity that broke out of an ancient prison. Clark gets shot with a kryptonite bullet, and they take him to Doom Patrol for Dr Caulder to do surgery on him. Supergirl and Robin travel into the past to find the heroes of ancient China that bound and trapped Nehza eons ago and find out how they defeated him. Upon returning to the present, Robin gets knocked loose and lost in the time stream. Meanwhile, Nehza is possessing both villains and heroes alike in the present, until Bats and Supes figure out how to trap him in the Negative Zone.
6. Stand alone where B/S find Robin in the late 1800s and help him solve a murder mystery at the circus where’s he been living while he waited for them to find the clue he left on how to find him in time.
7–11. A young man’s parents send him in a multiverse-travelling ship just before their world is destroyed(similar to Kal-El’s story) and he winds up on Earth. When he develops powers, Clark takes him under his wing, and Robin and the Teen Titans try to help him adjust to the survivor’s guilt and also using his new powers safely. Then The Key and the Joker team up and kidnap the kid to get him to reveal everyone’s secret identities(which he doesn’t know) and the trauma of getting tortured pushes him over the edge. The plot twist is that the kid shifts dimensions again at the end, and it’s revealed he grows up to be Magog from the Kingdom Come story. Which I had forgotten Waid wrote until he popped up on the last page. Pretty clever dovetail, or retcon or whatever.
12 was another stand alone. There’d been a humorous ongoing subplot about friction between Robin and Supergirl because of a date they went on that went badly. This is the story of that date.
13-17. When Simon Stagg is murdered, Bats and Supes think the main suspect might be Metamorpho. But then Jimmy Olsen uncovers evidence that results in Bruce Wayne getting charged for the crime. Clark can’t reveal he knows Bruce is innocent without raising questions about why he’d be so close to Wayne. Eventually, it’s revealed Professor Ivo forced Will Magnus to help him build an Amazo 2.0 that turned on them and he secretly implemented an AI revolution to take over the world. Bats, Supes and the Metal Men stop him using the original Amazo to download a computer virus to stop the new version. Lots of guest stars.
18. The beginning of a new arc retelling the story of the first time Bruce and Clark teamed up and figured out each other’s secret identities.

There’s also a spin-off series called World’s Finest:Teen Titans with the original team; Robin, Donna, Speedy, Kid Flash, and Bumblebee that’s on the third issue. I think it’s a six issue mini, but it might be an ongoing. Who knows. Waid’s writing that one also. So far, so good.

I read the entire series pretty quick. Waid’s got a fun grasp of DC continuity and throws lots of fun guest stars into the series. And I like Mora’s art style. He’s got a crisp “classic” look to his art, with just a tinge of an animation style to it.

Now to dive into the “X” mess. A couple X-Cellent minis, X-Corp, and then catching up with 20 or so issues of X-Force, before I get to Hickman’s main X-Men and all the stuff leading up to his departure in the ‘Inferno’ mini.

[Tom Foolery]

For posterity. Today I got

Alpha Flight 2
Amazing Spidey 34
Uncanny Avengers 2
Captain America 1
Cult of Carnage:Misery 5
Catwoman 57 variant
Gaurdians of the Galaxy 6
Harley Quinn:Black White & Redder 3
Loki 4
Nightwing 106
Saga 66
Uncanny Spider-Man 1
SW Bounty Hunters 38
SW Dark Droids:D-Squad 1
Strange Academy:Moon Knight 1
Death of the Venomverse 4
Vigil 5
What If…Dark? Carnage 1
Wolverine 37
Predator vs Wolverine 1
Wonder Woman 1 variant
World’s Finest 19
X-Men Annual 1
Dark X-Men 2

[vynsane]

you went to the the comic book store the day of your wedding. and i'm posting about it FROM your wedding.

[Tom Foolery]

you went to the the comic book store the day of your wedding. and i'm posting about it FROM your wedding.

BwahHahHahHahahah!!!

That is a perfect post to wake up to the following day.

[jjreason]

That is pretty funny. Well done & congrats Mr. & Mrs. EP!