Showing posts with label Red Robin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Red Robin. Show all posts

Wednesday, 25 November 2009

Matt's Mini Reviews


The Black Knight #1 - One Shot

BoldI love one-shots, epic runs can be great just like a great album by a fantastic band, but some time you get those one hit wonders, those catchy tunes that are just short and sweet. And I love my comics to be that way alot of the time. Throw in some knights of the round table, a magical sword to rival excalibur, action and adventure, and this is a real hit for me. It reminds me of the current Immortal Weapons books, the way beautiful tales of old are told around great little characters. If you like Arthurian Legend, (be warned that the dialogue is written as such, but it suits the style of this comic) with nice slick art, I would definately suggest picking this up. This is real hero vs villain stuff and it was fantastic.

5 out of 5



Red Robin #6

I gave it to this issue, where new artist joined Marcus To joined, to be the decider as to whether or not I would continue to pick up this series... and it's dropped. I believed this title was to deal the hunt for Bruce Wayne but writer Chris Yost has hardly dealt with this at all, instead focusing on Tim becoming leader of the League of Assassins, rediculous and totally out of character imo. Geoff Johns wrote the character better in a few panels of his Adventure Comics last month than Yost has in this entire series. And when Bruce does retun it will be well advertised and no doubt in a special mini series so as DC can charge $3.99 per issue, therefore making this series pointless to me. Marcus To does are fine job on pencils but his style is much like many other artists around, and nothing special to write home about. Pointless book and not very entertaining. Avoid

2 out of 5

Friday, 7 August 2009

Whoah! That's a lot of previews!

Cover to Deadpool #13, gotta be a contender for cover of the week

Over at CBR we have the following Marvel previews for comics on sale 12 August.
Click the links below to be taken to the preview of your choice.


Ultimate Avengers #1 preview can be found over at IGN here.


I’m looking forward to this. I haven’t liked any of the previous Ultimate titles that much but the art looks great and I’m a fan of Millar’s writing, most of the time. Plus the story sounds good (spoilers on!). From what I know Cap goes AWOL after finding out the Red Skull is his son! The rest of the Avengers then have to hunt him down. Sounds really cool to me, and I love the Red Skull twist.

IGN also has a nice 8 page preview of Daredevil #500. Including a back up story with art by David Aja, as seen above! That makes me very happy. Check out the full preview here.


Over at Newsarama they have a preview (art only) for the upcoming mini-series NOMAD: GIRL WITHOUT A WORLD #1 here. I know Flips the Page will be dying to see that if he hasn’t already.

Finally over at DC’s The Source you get a preview of Batman #689 here. Great cover by Andy Kubert as always. It’s a shame he’s not doing the pencils instead of Mark Bagley.


You also get a preview of Red Robin #3 here.

I’m not a fan of the artwork on this title so I was please to also find out at the Source that “Starting in November with RED ROBIN #6, Marcus To (Aspen’s Soulfire) will step in as the new ongoing artist on RED ROBIN, taking over for Ramon Bachs, who steps over to launch AZRAEL with writer Fabian Nicieza.”

So the good news is that Red Robin gets a new artist, the bad news is that Bachs steps over to Azrael, a series I’m looking forward to. Hopefully I’ll prefer his work on that title.

That’s wraps up previews day I think. Thanks for all your comments this week, they’ve been great. Seems I’m getting around 300 hits a week on my site and that is fantastic. I’m really glad people like to keep coming back to my little blog and I love chatting with you all and reading your comments.

Please also check out the other site I write for; A Comic Book Blog if you get a chance. There are lots of great writers and articles over there and is definitely worth a look.

Have a great weekend guys. What will you be up to? I’ll be reading loads. I've got the Ghost World tpb to read, I’ve also bought lots of old Detective Comics issues really cheap this week. Ones written by Alan Grant, who is one of my fav Batman writers, so I look forward to reading them and trying to catch up with my other huge stack of comics I haven’t got round to reading yet, all the while trying to avoid doing work in the garden that my girlfriend wants me to do!

-Hex

Thursday, 2 July 2009

Round up of news & previews 02/07/09

Quite a lot of news and previews today so I’ve just done one round up post. Read on!

Looks like there may be more than one Flash on-going title from DC after the Flash Rebirth mini series. Nothing much else that exciting or news worthy from Dan DiDio this week.

Dan DiDio: 20 Answers & 1 Question over at Newsarama.
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/070901-Didio20.html

Newsarama have a first look at the Immortal Weapons; Iron Fist back up story. They have been provided with 3 pages of art that looks great (Not sure who the artist is but it still looks like Travel Foreman’s work to me). The preview shows some great street level action as promised by writer Duane Swierczynski. If you’re an Iron Fist fan this is definitely worth a look.
http://www.newsarama.com/php/multimedia/album.php?gid=1155

5 Page Preview plus covers of new mini-series The Marvels Project # 1 from... you guessed it, Marvel! Due out 12/08/09 written by Ed Brubaker, art by Steve Epting.
http://www.newsarama.com/php/multimedia/album.php?gid=1156

Some good stuff over at DC’s blog the source today:

First, a 7 page preview of Red Robin # 2, showing Tim continuing his quest due out 08/07/09, then another extra early preview of what his buddy Superboy is up to over in Adventure Comics # 1. Check out the previews here:
http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/


Another breaking story on the site was the following:

Superman,Batman, Wonder Woman and the heroes of the Justice League will join forces with Teshkeel Comics’ THE 99, the award-winning original superhero group based on Islamic culture and history.

THE 99 team, which debuted in June 2006, was recently identified by Forbes Magazine as one of the “Top 20 Trends Sweeping the Globe.” Not too shabby, huh? In THE 99 — created by Naif Al-Mutawa — are a team of superheroes, including Jabbar the Powerful and Noora the Light who must collect 99 gems encrypted with the wisdom and power of the ancient Dar Al-Hikma library of Baghdad, which are spread across the globe.

The mini-series will be penned by incoming AZRAEL scribe Fabian Nicieza, who’s no stranger to THE 99, having written the series previously. We’re saving the artistic announcement and official release date for another day, once we’re ready to show off some of the art. But can you blame us for spilling the news? We didn’t think so.

I’ve never heard of The 99 before. What is it with DC and all these other character they are using lately? First Milestone, the Red Circle, now The 99!??!? I’m all for it as long as the stories are good and Fabian Nicieza is a good writer.
Have any of you guys come across these Islamic characters before? Let me know.

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

More Mini Reviews - Last weeks comics

Green Lantern Corps # 37

– 4 out of 5

I won’t spend long on this review I just need to let you know this book was great, and if your looking forward to the upcoming epic Blackest Night make sure you pick up this preview arc. I bought the occasional GLC issue prior to Prelude to Blackest Night but this ‘Emerald Eclipse’ arc for me has been not stop excitement and just class story telling by Peter Tomassi. This issue does not let up (Spoilers)- Ion commits suicide (we think) by plunging into Daxam Red Sun and turning it into a yellow sun, thus giving the captive planet of Daxam, basically a world/ army full of Supermen, and all the while the rest of the Green Lanterns are having to deal with a prison break on Oa. Great stuff. Next issue will be an all out brawl I’m sure between the Daxamites and Sinestro Corps and I can’t wait. Get it.


Red Robin # 1

–3 out of 5

This was a read I enjoyed, but I was still a little disappointed as I was hoping for more. The art by Ramon Bachs was okay but nothing spectacular. Chris Yost is a writer I have come to admire over the last couple of years from his work at Marvel and Image, but this was a pretty standard storyline and script for an opening issue.

Tim Drake (or Tim Wayne as he now likes be called) is sure that Bruce is still alive, although we are not really told why. He decides to go globe trotting searching for clues (though what kind of clues we are again not told). During the globe trotting he cant help but get mixed up in local violence in the cities he goes to, providing the action for the issue, which is done pretty well, but is just standard stuff (Girl kidnapped, then rescued by Tim, blah blah blah).

There are some nice flash backs scenes to confrontations between Tim & both Dick & Damian as to why brat boy should take up the position of Robin and Dick makes some good points in that Tim has now grown to be his equal. Tim then makes the decision to go on his quest for Bruce and dons the Red Robin costume to avoid ties back to Batman. I’m sure the future issues will expand on the reasons why he believes Bruce to be alive and why he has decided to search for clues around the globe. It was a good enough issue to have me check back next month and there was a nice last page reveal of a certain person interested in the exploits of the new Red Robin, but overall an average read. Check this out if you’re a Tim Drake fan, or if you want to know how Bruce returns, as I think this will be a key book in that story.


X-Men Forever # 1

– 4 out of 5

Now this was a book I was unsure I would like, but really had a fun time reading. I was a big fan of the X-Men title from about issues 1-60 in the early 90's and this is that same X-Men team in a sort of alternative reality courtesy of Chris Claremont. You don’t need to have read the X-Men issues 1-3 to know what’s going on, the first page catch up is fine and does it’s job well. I love the characters in their old uniforms and this was a nice old school X-Men adventure where their job was to take down the powerful mutant Cortez who had previously taken out Magneto. That’s the main plot, the sub plot is that there are some serious love triangles going on plus it seems Nick Fury and the government will be taking a much larger role in the running of the X-Men in future issues. Art by Tom Grummet is pretty good but don’t expect the detailed feel of early 90’s X-Men artists like Jim Lee or Andy Kubert (which I would have preferred) but as I am treating this as an alternative reality I’m okay with it. I look forward to the next issue which will be out in only 2 weeks, which is a bonus. A strong first issue and def a pick up for old school X-Men fans or fans of the original X-Men animated series.

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

Red Robin 1 - Preview @ IGN Comics

Great 6 page preview of Red Robin 1 @ IGN Comics. Plus a nice variant cover by JG Jones as shown above.

See the preview pages here - http://uk.comics.ign.com/articles/992/992749p1.html