FF issue 1

I know I’m a bit late to the party here but I haven’t read many comics over the last couple of weeks since I’ve had my head stuck in “Game of Thrones” but here it goes.
FF issue one was, over all, very disappointing. The death of Storm was very interesting, especially the aftermath issue, but this follow up just doesn’t live up to that.
I can’t fault the writing much. Hickman’s a talented writer whi8le Epting ‘s art is decent, as always but the book just didn’t live up to the hype.
One scene that irks me is the tour that Sue Storm gives to Spider-Man. She takes him around the recently redecorated Baxter building while we the reader, get a look at the future foundation characters.
But the tour just seems so lazy and rushed. The only good thing about it is that it is consistent with the rest of the issue.
Also, very little is mentioned of grief and that I’m both thankful for and annoyed at. Johnny’s death is the perfect opportunity to change the characters. The closest we to get to seeing this is Ben moping for a while.
As I’ve mentioned, the art is decent but nothing special. It is not the best work Epting has ever done but it’s still better than some.
Really, the only flaw is with the pacing. I am confident that the writing will improve during the following issues.

Ancestor

This book has been out for quite a while but I have only recently read it and I felt the urge to review it.

I spotted this book while searching for something new to read. It was cheap and had a great premise: "Scientists on an island try to clone an ancient monster so they can use its organs in transplants. Everything goes wrong." Sounds good, right? A simple action horror. Something easy to read. Fun.

no no. Fun is not what this book offers. You could honestly get more fun out of raping a cactus.

One of the worst aspects of this book is the characters. Everybody is a stereotype. not even that, they're all a parody. The main character seems to be a parody of every action hero in fiction!

But that's not as bad as the bad guys. A German scientist who's obsessed with getting the Nobel prize is not the major bad guy, more of a dick who doesn't help things. But the major bad guy, beside the flesh eating monsters, is a European, money hungry psycho with lots of guns. His brother sends him to the island to make sure things don't go wrong. They're so generic that it's almost offensive. If this psycho had a curly mustache and an English accent, I would have had to put it down and forget about it.

They're not even slightly fleshed out. Do you remember Gremlins? Do you remember when Phoebe Cates' character would try to talk about a traumatic incident but she'd be interupted? Well, every character has a whole bunch of those moments but nobody interupts them.

for a while, I thought that maybe this was a sequel and that the characters were already fleshed out in an other book and that all of the explanatory dialogue and flashbacks were there to reminder the reader of the previous book. But, it turns out that there is no previous book.

I know, I know "it's just a bit of fun." If the plot was as fast paced and fun as promised, I would have forgiven Scott Sigler for his awful characters but three quarters of the book is dedicated to the details of cloning. I know too much about cloning now. What's worse is, it reads like wikipedia. This makes the book so slow and boring that the last few chapters, where the ancestors start killing, is sort of silly and out of place.

and by the time the plot actually kicks in, I have already guessed who survives and how they get away. I had to imagine the "rat creatures" from "Bone" as the ancestors just to keep myself amused.

Quotes on the book and on Sigler's website say that this book is fast paced, well written, original, scary etc. These quotes say that the writer is the next Steven King. I'm guessing that the quotes were cut off before the speaker could say "only fucking with you, it's awful."

So, to summarise: This book is a slow, boring pile of horse cum with horrible 2-D characters. If you want something easy to read, read the bus schedule.

The Losers

The Losers was good. I'll just get that out of the way for now. But it was good for one reason and one reason only; it didn't pretend to be anything special.

The film was really just the A team and I did spend most of the film waiting for Zoe Saldana to say "I pity the fool!" But it wasn't so much a bad thing that she didn't say that. After all, she was rather attractive and saying things like that would make me picture her with a Mohawk which would be a little bit weird... yet interesting.

But the plot wasn't the most important bit of this film so it's odd that I, a plot favouring man, enjoyed such a simple film. But the soundtrack worked with the action scenes which seems to be a rare thing in modern action films. I have to admit,I've had enough of classical music during explosions. After so much of it it now sounds to me like several dogs farting, causing said explosions. It's just pure annoying.

So it was fun to see an action scene with "Don't stop Believing" being played over it. also, I can't believe that they managed to make "Black Betty" not cheesy when it was played during the first fifteen minutes of the film. But then again, maybe that's because most of the film was pure cheese.

Another thing I liked was the dialogue. the characters interacted with each other pretty well, even if those interactions were pissy arguments most of the time.

And now the bad points.

While the characters were fun and fairly well acted, some of the characters just seemed like extras. For example, most of the time I forgot that Óscar Jaenada was even in the film and I couldn't help but shout "who the fuck is he?" Every time he appeared on screen. This is actually quite a let down since some plot points relied on the audiences opinions of a character to succeed.

But I did mention I don't give a fuck about the plot in this movie.

Over all the movie was fun if a little bit short, considering the amount of characters in the movie. But it didn't make me want to go out and buy the comic book so I guess it was a bit of a failure in that respect.

The Weekly Reread!

OK, so every week I'm going to reread something. It may be a comic book or it might be a novel or some poetry. Alright, it's most likely going to be a comic book.

This week I reread The Goon: Chinatown.

I forgot how good this book really is. It was among the first Goon books I ever read. I immediately loved the moody style of the art. It has lovely water colours as well as cartoony penciling. The mixture of the two makes for a very unique and interesting style.

The writing itself is also very awesome. It's a serious story about characters who are usually featured in comical stories. It was nice to see how Eric Powell could write such a serious story without losing the comical edge that these characters have.

This time around, I really noticed how sad it is. The Goon is betrayed by his true love for reasons unclear. The pages towards the end with Goon staring at himself in the mirror were very effective. It's just a few pages showing only the Goons face. With each page, he gets even more upset. Add to that Powell's amazing art and it's quite effective.

But the point is! If you've never read this before, you have to read it! Especially if you're a fan of the Goon and all things Powell.

Dead man punishing...

yeah, so Frankencastle is old news now but fuck it, here goes nothin'!

So this arc of the Punisher is pretty decent in my opinion but I've noticed a lot of hate for it. I reckon I've sussed it out; people are stubborn. People look at change and they shit themselves! And they can't take a step back and just read the bloody story.

There's been a lot of focus on his death, though. People are counting it as Marvel restoring equilibrium too fast, yet again. How can this be? since everybody knew it was coming? I mean... I know I saw the adverts and read Tony Moore's blog... maybe I'm the only person who can see Punisher adverts now? Honestly... that'd be kind of cool. I could be a superhero who holds the secrets of Punisher issues of the future! But I may be too tempted to use these powers for evil...

So, for those of you who are bitching about him being changed and all that; remember when he was black for a little bit? It's a phase!

But here... just for you... I will use my powers and show you one of the adverts I saw with my powers.