"One More Day" is a separate issue here. It probably deserves its own thread. As I said to one of my college pals the other day, I stopped reading Spider-Man during the MacFarlane administration and have never really regretted it. If you want quirky, quippy Spidey action, you want Bendis's Ultimate Spider-Man-- which, admittedly, has lost 10,000 readers since Bagley left the book, but, still, it's Bendis and it's Pete and it's not bogged in Mephisto bullshit.

(Paul O'Brien, for those of you who don't follow comics, also analyzes Marvel's sales figures every month or so. I have the November 2007 ones in front of me as I type.)

>I'm also reminded: have we seen anything in Mighty Avengers recently
>that indicates we might get a new issue soon?

Fucked if I know, I don't read any of the Avengers books. :)

>not that DC is without it's screwups - for the love of all that's
>holy, get a solid goddamn team on the Wildstorm properties and get
>them timely. (Gene Ha on 'The Authority': "There is no #3 script,
>there may never be a #3 script." Grant Morrison, stop fucking around
>please.)

Christos Gage appears to be the Designated Wildstorm Savior at the moment, as Friday's Comic Shop News lead story revealed. He's out to crash the Carrier, make the Night Tribes the undisputed lords of Eastern Europe, and otherwise reboot the status quo.

I really liked Gage on Marvel's weird, quirky, poor-selling Union Jack mini-- like Paul Cornell, he operates well in unusual, small-market situations. I'm hoping he does some good stuff for Wildstorm, not that I'm reading those books.

>I dunno. I'd like to see something high-profile, on time, and
>generally good.

Sadly, The Order's likely to be cancelled next year sometime-- sub-30K sales on an Initiative title can't be good, for as fucking fascinating and quirky as the title is. *I* like it, really I do, but it is a hard book to *love,* given that it's largely a perverse take on team dynamics. (None of the Morituri stuff has appeared, btw-- no one appears to be headed for certain death by issue 12, for instance.) I also know that it's not high-profile.

Ultimates 3 is a complete Loeb-turd. I have very little hope for the Ultimate books when Ultimatum starts in the spring. Kirkman's leaving Ultimate X-Men with 93, which makes me wonder who the hell is taking over and what they'll do with the goddamn mess of 1990s 616 plotlines he's created.

Punisher War Journal remains relevant to Initiative continuity, features the goddamn Punisher, and is brilliant, but it's lost 60% of its audience over the first 10 issues per these here sales figures. I don't know what the deal is there.

There are a bunch of X-Men reboots going on this year, too. The Carey X-Men is becoming X-Men Legacy. New X-Men is over and Kyle and Yost are moving on to kill half the fucking universe in X-Force. Exiles and New Excalibur are both gone in favor of one New Exiles title, and there's a mysterious Young X-Men book that may or may not be Fraction's turf coming up. New Excalibur's being rebooted under Paul Cornell's writing as Some Other Book. Astonishing X-Men: Second Stage is supposed to start sometime, but that may be in 2009 for all I know.

I doubt that *any* of these X-books will be a compelling read. I have some slim hope for Paul Cornell. I don't know that Ellis will be able to hold a schedule-- he's already annoyed me with newuniversal and Desolation Jones, with their screwed-up artist issues and schedule shit, so I don't know that Astonishing will come out often enough or at all to keep my attention.

I see nothing on the horizon for Avengers, and Iron Man's got the movie coming...

...which does nothing to help the fact that in the MU, Iron Man is a *dick,* and dicks do not sell mainstream comics to moviegoing Americans. Marvel should have aggressively moved to put an end to this "Tony Stark, unlikable fascist" bullshit the *minute* Favreau signed on to do the movie, and they didn't, and it's going to bite them in the ass sales-wise. They had a chance to really expand the market for Iron Man and they're not taking it.

>You got that in Ed Brubaker's Captain America - say
>what you will, he had the balls to break one of the Believed
>Unbreakable Rules, and he did it pretty damn well and set a lot of
>very interesting things up.

Brubaker is very good at what he does, with the exception of Vulcan in X-Men, and even then I'm not sure that that's all that it appears to be. Immortal Iron Fist is another one of those books that's quirky and very genre-faithful and a rousing good read. Which means it'll probably be gone after 25 issues.

>The one hope I have is with the new story arc in Robin - they may be
>redeeming Leslie Thompkins and bringing back Stephanie 'Spoiler'
>Brown.

Heh, someone else I was talking to the other day dumped DC entire after DiDio refused to give Brown a memorial, because Girls Couldn't Be Robin....

I can't really speak to DC. I like Green Arrow/ Black Canary and ignore anything else they put out in the mainstream DCU.

>(and as far as the Wolverine thing is concerned, one of the more 'dude
>what the HELL' moments of X-Men history was that Len Wein, had he
>gotten to use Wolverine more, would have revealed that he was an
>actual wolverine mutated to humanity by the High Evolutionary, who did
>funky stuff like that. Maybe that was where Jeph Loeb got the idea.
>But yeah, he needs some time off.)

Loeb's story, to be fair, uses mutant *wolves,* not wolverines. I got that bit wrong.

But, you know, *wolves do not improve the overall issue here.*

Ard Sumhenner
that Janice chick
Usual Suspect and general menace

MA #6 finally shipped, thus ending Frank Cho's regular involvement in the series, which, AIUI, is the main cause of the series' delays. Marvel's website claims 9 January for #7, which would cover the Venom virus storyline that got recapped in an issue of New Avengers in order to set up what that series is doing with The Hood.

>>holy, get a solid goddamn team on the Wildstorm properties and get
>Christos Gage appears to be the Designated Wildstorm Savior at the

I've been reading some of the work he's been doing, such as post-Ennis Midnighter and the recently-ended Stormwatch PHD, and rather enjoying it.

>>You got that in Ed Brubaker's Captain America - say
>>what you will, he had the balls to break one of the Believed

I've been reading Bru's Cap, and finding it surprisingly enjoyable, even with no actual Captain America in it. I continue to be shocked that I actually like the whole Bucky/Winter Soldier thing.

>>The one hope I have is with the new story arc in Robin - they may be
>>redeeming Leslie Thompkins and bringing back Stephanie 'Spoiler'
>>Brown.

By which I should hope they mean that Steph never died and she and Leslie had some sekrit purpose that required faking the death and Leslie's culpability in it. "She was dead but now she's alive again" neither absolves nor necessarily redeems Leslie.

>Heh, someone else I was talking to the other day dumped DC entire
>after DiDio refused to give Brown a memorial, because Girls Couldn't
>Be Robin....

That's also astoundingly annoying, along with the rest of Didio's tendencies towards o'erweening smugness.

>I can't really speak to DC. I like Green Arrow/ Black Canary and
>ignore anything else they put out in the mainstream DCU.

Although if what happened at the end of the last issue actually sticks, I'm probably pretty much done with that. That was both cheap and randomly gratuitous.

Gage has a good handle on the odd-couple teams. (Union Jack was teamed up with *Sabra* in that book, and there was some shit about Batroc the Leaper, and, gee, it was all a great breezy superhero read, actually.) He's preferable, in Marvel's B/C-list bullpen, to Daniel fucking Way.

Speaking of guys named Way, I have an insane love for Dark Horse's Umbrella Academy-- and I *hate* My Chemical Romance, so I shouldn't, by rights, like a comic by its lead singer and primary lyricist. But, there it is. Umbrella Academy is fun, and the art is great, and you should all at least give it a look-see.

>>I can't really speak to DC. I like Green Arrow/ Black Canary and
>>ignore anything else they put out in the mainstream DCU.
>
>Although if what happened at the end of the last issue actually
>sticks, I'm probably pretty much done with that. That was both cheap
>and randomly gratuitous.

So was what happened at the end of the Wedding Special. I've never known Winick to express any particular annoyance with that one character, so I'm crossing my fingers. For all I know, there's an Earth-2 version of that character just off-panel to the left there.

Ard Sumhenner
that Janice chick
Usual Suspect and general menace

I'm rapidly regressing into an Iron Fist fanboy... it's just plain fun comics, without any of the whole Civil War baggage. I'll ride it as long as it lasts....

^_^

(Please, god, kill me.)