Have Yourself a Morlock Little X-Mas

It's Christmas Eve at the X-Mansion. Cyclops and Rogue are trimming the tree. Jean and Gambit are in the kitchen preparing a big Christmas Eve dinner. Beast is in his lab. And Professor X is hovering by the Fire. Everyone is in good spirits. Everyone, except for Wolverine. To escape the cheeriness, Wolverine agrees to help Storm and Jubilee with some last minute shopping. Later, at an approximation of Rockefeller Center, their ice skating session is interrupted by a runaway ambulance. Our heroes discover that some Morlocks have stolen the ambulance in order to get medical supplies for Leech, a young Morlock in trouble. The X-Men follow the Morlocks into the sewer to see if they can help. Will Leech recover or will this be the saddest X-Mas yet? Spoiler alert: he recovers.

Rating: Teddy Bear%

Comic Three-In-One

Amazing Spider-man: Unintended Consequences

Spider-man is so squeaky-clean he's basically the Mickey Mouse of superheroes, except that everybody he knows or cares about dies terribly because of him.

RATING: 70%





New X-Men Vol. 6: Planet X

In one of the greatest X-men storylines of all time, Xorn turns out to be Magneto, takes over Xavier's school, incapacitates the X-men, conquers New York, kills Jean Grey, and gets decapitated. Don't worry, these aren't spoilers; every one of these actions was retconned out of existence 5 issues later.

RATING: 75%



Squadron Supreme: Power To The People

NO.

RATING: 1%

Comic Three-In-One

New X-Men Vol. 5: Assault On Weapon Plus

Cyclops and Wolverine mount an offensive against The World, a secret location where time is accelerated so that generations of genetically enhanced humans are born each minute. Also, there are flying cyborg whale cops GRANT MORRISON!

RATING: 71%

The Punisher: Girls In White Dresses

Yeah, justice is done in horrible violent fashion, but my heart just isn't in it after Garth Ennis left the book. Dropped!

RATING: 58%

Ultimate Spider-man Vol. 12: Carnage

I just don't understand why a week after Peter Parker's friend and surrogate sister is murdered he has to serve detention. Somebody needs to find a new guidance counselor for Midtown High.

RATING: 73%

Comic Three-In-One

The Incredible Hulk Vol. 3: Transfer Of Power

Bruce Banner gets framed for murder, but don't worry the victim turns out to be a zombie double agent so she wasn't really dead dead after all.

RATING: 13%




Amazing Spider-man: Until The Stars Turn Cold

Successful Spider-man formula: Fight joke fight, cry fight cry, joke fight serious talk.

RATING: 81%




New X-men Vol. 3: New Worlds

Introducing Fantomex, the mutant whose power is for a flying saucer to emerge from his mouth to fly him around. Thanks again, Grant Morrison!

RATING: 62%

Comic Three-In-One

Amazing Spider-man: Revelations

Aunt May finds out about Peter Parker's secret identity, and also terrorists fly airplanes into the World Trade Center killing thousands.

RATING: 72%




New X-Men Vol. 2: Imperial

Professor X's twin sister is born as a cloud of psychic ability and then grows up to be a mean old lady who takes over a space empire. I'll take six of whatever Grant Morrison's having.

RATING: 79%


X-Force Vol. 2: The Final Chapter

Obviously not as surprising as the first volume, this one is still pretty good and funny as it follows the most conceited team in comicdom, and that includes a team that calls itself "The Fantastic Four."

RATING: 69%

Comic Three-In-One

Supreme Power: Hyperion

I dunno, I guess you can just imagine that the alternate future presented here where Hyperion has taken over Earth represents the conclusion of the Supreme Power series, since it never actually gets resolved.

RATING: 62%


Ultimate X-Men Vol. 8: New Mutants

Boring, endless Bendis-talk, although there is a great single issue here where Logan is sent to deal with a kid whose powers are just to kill everybody around him accidentally.

RATING: 67%


Sandman Vol. VI: Fables & Reflections

A collection of standalone issues, with the retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice being the strongest. I guess only half of my Sandman trades move the story forward, but whatevs, it's still great writing.

RATING: 71%

New X-Men Vol. 1: E Is For Exitinction

Grant Morrison's X-Men run was the most exciting and different direction the book had been taken in decades, so of course exactly one issue after he was done Marvel retconned it all away. Who better to follow one of the greatest writers of comics today than Chuck Austen? We can forget all that when we read back through his book, and the first trade captures the nuances of all the cast (Wolvie, Cyke, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, and Beast) perfectly, while adding the complications necessary to bring said characters to life. Sure, it's cool to hate Cyclops, but Morrison turns his dickishness into a kind of charm.

RATING: 95%

Ultimate X-men Vol. 7: Blockbuster

At this point, Mark Millar left the book, Brian Michael Bendis took over, and the whole thing began a 60 issue spiral into being a complete directionless mess. Oh well, at least Bendis is capable of writing Ultimate Spider-man in a hilarious manner, and he guest stars here as some group is after Wolverine for some reason, who cares.

RATING: 65%

Comic Three-In-One

Doom

Dr. Doom is cool, this comic sucks, parallel earth, yawn.

RATING: 26%





Ultimate X-Men Vol. 6: Return Of The King

Everybody's favorite X-Man, Cyclops, saves planet Earth from Magneto amid a lot of great action, dialogue, etc.

RATING: 84%




Star Trek: Gold Key Comics

I'm not sure they ever really "got it," since the first issue ends with the Enterprise destroying an entire planet because there were man eating plants on the surface.

RATING: 47%

Comic Three-In-One

Ultimate X-Men Vol. 5: Ultimate War

The Ultimates take on the X-men after Magneto blows up the Brooklyn Bridge in the name of mutantkind, and while Chris Bachalo's art is great as always Mark Millar never really tried to make any sense as to why the Ultimates went to arrest the X-Men when their enemy did something terrible.

RATING: 48%



Batman: Cataclysm

A magnitude 7.5 earthquake strikes Gotham and it's up to Batman to save it? Shouldn't Superman or Green Lantern or one of the countless other heroes with near limitless powers be helping out rather than Batman, whose only power is immense wealth, and his harem of child sidekicks?

RATING: 42%




Thunderbolts: Justice, Like Lightning...

It was a brilliant idea, in the wake of Onslaught killing most of the major Marvel heroes to create a supposed new replacement band of heroes who are revealed to be villains at the end of the first issue. Unfortunately, based on this collection it looks like the book didn't have much direction past that idea, and sort of meandered around while the "heroes" plotted to conquer the world/started to like being heroes.

RATING: 56%

Comic Three-In-One

Fantastic Four: Nobody Gets Out Alive

Mr. Fantastic is dead, so Ant Man takes his place, and not even the good Ant Man.

RATING: 22%



Universe X Volume 2

This is better than Volume 1, with a really satisfying conclusion, but it's just so dense that it doesn't have much rereadability.

RATING: 71%


Ultimate X-Men Volume 4: Hellfire And Brimstone

Kitty Pride joins the school, and Jean starts to Phoenix out in a story that's kind of directionless if you ask me and I think you did.

RATING: 73%

Ultimate X-Men Vol. 3: World Tour

This is fine I guess. The plot is the Ultimate version of the X-Men are on a book tour for Professor X, but then Professor X's crazy superpowered son breaks loose and starts killing a million people. Nothing too remarkable except it's an interesting combination of my favorite comic artist Chris Bachalo and my least favorite comic writer Chuck Austen.

RATING: 61%

Ultimate X-Men Vol. 2: Return To Weapon X

Ultimate X-Men really sucks now. I mean, it's probably the worst comic I get, but for some reason I force myself to buy every Ultimate comic that gets put out. It used to be really good (see vol. 1), but then it got only pretty good starting with this volume, and I can't seem to remember if the downward trend continued. In this book, all of the X-Men get kidnapped and forced to act as soldiers for some military group, but luckily Wolverine saves the day. It's fine, but it kind of seems pointless to revise the history of these characters if nothing new was going to be done with them.

RATING: 63%

X-Men: Mutant Genesis

If you bought comics in the year 1991, then you definitely bought the first issue of this story. It was X-Men #1, and we were all sure it was going to be worth a hundred thousand dollars one day. Well, turns out Marvel knew this and made five variant covers and produced enough copies of this issue to ensure that it would never again even be worth cover price. In conclusion the 90s were the worst decade in comics. Oh, wait, I should review this story. The first four issues are really good, actually, dealing with Magneto and his desire to be left alone/make a haven for mutants in space on an asteroid. Unfortunately that's over Russia, and international trouble ensues. The second story in this trade paperback sucks so don't bother reading that.

RATING: 56%

Astonishing X-Men Vol. 1: Gifted

Sorry to post two X-Men comic reviews so close, but I breezed through this storyline in like a day. As I mentioned below, there have only been a couple of X-Men storylines I've loved, and Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men run is one of them. Whedon is terrific at small character moments and dialogue (and also big action scenes and twists), and Cassaday can draw some real purty pictures. Now that they are done and all four storylines are collected in trade I recommend picking it up, because it won't be six goddamn months between issues, thank you John Cassaday. This first collection involves the team dealing with the aftermath of Grant Morrison's run (which is something else I love - this comic actually treats Morrison's run as though it happened, while the rest of Marvel just retconned it out), and also touches on the idea of a "cure" for mutants which is discovered by some scientist. There's a lot of political discussion regarding whether mutants would be forced to take the cure etc, but also there's a lot of punching and explosions and one fastball special.

RATING: 87%

X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills

This is one of the best X-Men stories ever written, although there are a lot of really hokey/dated/unintentionally racist elements. In the early 80s, the previously terribly selling X-Men books began their surge that would last until today, mainly once they started being more political and using the X-Men as analogies for how minorities of all kinds were/are treated. Back then, it mainly meant racial minorities, but today the X-Books are often about how homosexuality is treated in society. This graphic novel, written by now awful Chris Claremont, deals with a crazy evangelical minister William Stryker who uses his clout to incite hate crimes against mutants, and also to design a supercomputer for Professor X to use and inadvertently kill all mutants. It's pretty good, except for one part where Kitty Pride runs into a street gang that is literally made up of every non-white ethnicity you can think of, so that's racist, but hey, it was the 80s and you couldn't throw a stone without hitting racism.

RATING: 67%

Ultimate X-Men/Fantastic Four

This is just a two issue thing that was included in some trade with some other useless stories. The plot is this crazy girl (Ultimate Mad Thinker) is trying to get revenge at Reed Richards because she used to like him so she steals Cerebro from the X-Men. Mike Carey is kind of difficult to follow sometimes, because it often feels as though he is rushing through his stories and leaves things out, and Pasqual Ferry's art is my least favorite art in the universe. So this book's not that great, but if you want to pick it up here's a link.

RATING: 37%

Ultimate X-Men Vol. 1: The Tomorrow People

When Marvel first announced their "ultimate" line of comics, a "rebooting" of some of their popular franchises, I was at first totally opposed. Mainly because of the cover art you see to your left; it looks like Wolverine is a teenager or something, and I thought it was going to be very childish rehashings of classic tales. It turns out that the books were in fact awesome, and this first volume of Ultimate X-Men is no different. I don't really recommend going to the store and picking up the latest issue, because you would be totally confused, but go to Borders or something and read the first 5 or 6 volumes of Ultimate X-Men in the store, and you won't be disappointed. It's a strongly sophisticated analogy of government fueled paranoia regarding terrorists and our reprehensible treatment of homosexuals in contemporary American society and it's got a lot of explosions.

RATING: 80%