Asgard Falls and Tony Stark Has Selective Memory

Hell hasn’t quite frozen over, but the dead are walking around and somehow after enduring Avengers Disassembled, Civil War, Secret Invasion, and Dark Reign it looks as though we’re almost at the end of Bendis’ grand story arc.  If the numerous house ads are any indication, then we get a whole new team of Avengers after this is all over.  And we can finally bid adieu to the aberration that is the seemingly all powerful Sentry.  Bullseye did us all a favor in Dark Avengers 14 and killed his wife, by dropping her into the Atlantic Ocean. I’m certain that Siege 4 will be end.

And its not that I don’t like cosmic powered characters.  I just like them to have a grounded context.  The Phoenix storyline in the X-Men, we all cared because we thought that Jean died and then was reborn as the Phoenix.  Then she became Dark Phoenix and then the Shiar decided that she should die for her crimes.

Great Reads

Siege #3

The President of the United States and the Joint Chiefs have finally figured out that Norman Osborn played them for fools with the siege on Asgard.  The President decides that Norman and his cronies are guilty of treason and have to be taken down.  Luckily, this is also about the time that Captain America (Steve Rogers) and the outlawed Avengers show up in Broxton along with Nick Fury.  At some point during the battle everyone gets to tee off on Norman in his Iron Patriot armor.  Captain America does it.  Tony Stark even gets in on the act, but only after he takes delivery of a special gift from Steve.  Prior to all this Tony had been in a coma and had destroyed all of his armor– or so we were led to believe.

Somewhere, Steve found an old briefcase of Tony’s that had classic Mk V armor in it.  Tony for the first time in months has his genius and his suit back.  His first act, he overrides the Iron Patriot since it was based on hacked designs of his own armor. I can’t quite figure out why he didn’t do that during the World’s Most Wanted storyline.  The best scenes in the book were when the Sentry destroys the floating landmass that is Asgard causing it to crumble to the ground.  And when we see Norman with some kind of Green Goblin mask or maybe his face just morphed– at which point Spider Man socks him.

Iron Man 24

This takes place in Broxton, just before the events of Siege 3.  Tony gets his grove back thanks to efforts of Dr. Strange, Jim Rhodes, Maria Hill and Pepper Potts.  The last two women are interesting since it dawned on them that Tony slept with both of them when he was globetrotting and trying to erase his brain while evading capture by Norman Osborn.  Normally having two women pissed off at Tony would make for some fun storylines but– surprise Tony won’t remember.

That’s right.  Tony erased his brain and went into a coma.  He got out of the coma and “rebooted” his brain with an older backup mirror of his brain.  It seems that this brain was pre-Civil War or before Tony turned into the Marvel Universe’s biggest douchebag.  So he literally knows nothing about the last two years, even though he participated.  The last page of the book has Tony pouring over newspapers and files trying to catch up on what he missed.

Good Reads

X-Men #522

This one was actually fun.  The good news is that Magneto has succeeded in steering the runaway planet killing bullet that Kitty Pryde is trapped in back towards Earth.  The bad news is that now a planet killing bullet is speeding towards Earth.  So the X-Men do what they do best and figure out how to save one of their own from certain doom.

And not a moment to soon because The Second Coming is upon us.  There are only 181 mutants left on Earth after the Scarlet Witch’s proclamation during The House of M.  Scott has moved the X-Men and any other mutants who want refuge off the coast of San Francisco to the island known as Utopia.  Cable has returned from the future with Hope, the first and last mutant to be born since M-Day.  So now begins the struggle to protect Hope from anti-mutant forces.  Should be fun.

Disappointing Reads

Batman & Robin #10

Ughhh.  Didn’t we just go through this in Captain America?  Bruce Wayne is lost in time or some such mess.  He’s be leaving clues in the past and its up to Damian, Dick, and Alfred to sort it all out.

Millar & McNiven’s Nemesis #1

It you want a book with hereto unheard of levels of violence and destruction, then this is the one.  Granted the creators made pains to point out on the cover that they’ll make Kick-Ass look like shit.  Well sort of.  At least when someone dies in Kick-Ass there is an intimacy to it. In this book, we get collapsing skyscrapers, commuter trains derailing, Air Force One crashing onto rush hour traffic– its just overload.  Maybe its because some of this stuff happens in real life, its boring to see it in comic book.

I think I’ll stick to my licensed characters who don’t grow much and get retconned every twelve to twenty-four months so that they conform to their silver screen versions.  The creators tell us, how great the book is because its new character.  Ok, but how about some depth all I got was that in this world there is only one super villain in tights and he’s the world’s most feared terrorist.  He likes to kill cops for fun.  The book opens on his execution of  the police chief of Tokyo and then we go to Washington D.C. where he downs Air Force One so that he can get to D.C. top cop.  What am I supposed to do with that?