Stuff I Read This Week: Episode 3 or Maybe It's Not Too Late for Disney to Buy DC Comics, Too....

Superior Spider Man #4: For those of you who've kept up, I've had a running deal with a friend of mine that I would give Dan Slott four issues to make lemonade from the lemon that is the Spider Man franchise's current direction. After that, I'm washing my hands of the whole thing until the story returns to status quo (which we all know it's headed towards). It's the fourth issue and this title receives a stay of execution...just barely. We see the return of Massacre, a bush league baddie from "Amazing" who isn't terribly spectacular. Apparently, his gimmick is that he is biologically devoid of human empathy....which is completely different from most other psycho killers. It doesn't matter much that Massacre is only an inch above average, anyway. He's just a device to advance the current character conflict: It turns out that Otto Octavius in Spider Man's body is more like....well, Batman.

On the plus side, Giuseppe Camuncoli's visuals are some of the best I've seen from the SM universe in the past five years or so. It delivers a sort of balance that creepy when need be as well as light hearted at times. Slott even manages to sneak in some truly comedic gems like Otto's reaction to Peter Parker's level of education. The fundmental problem is still the same is its been, though. No matter how good the small laughs and easter eggs thrown in are, it's still an attempt to put strawberries in a shit sandwich. It's kind of like putting The Rock in a G.I. Joe movie....wait.

Bottom Line: Decent kicks, decent villain, great pencils, but it's still an awful state of affairs. But the small reveal on the last page has bought this book a few more issues in my rotation. 7 out of 10.


Justice League of America #1: Okay, I received some feedback from a couple of readers complaining that I haven't reviewed any DC titles yet. There's a reason for this: a majority of them are fucking terrible which makes if perfectly appropriate that the Justice League titles would be the flagship books of the "New 52" initiative (By the way, a year and a half later, can we go ahead and stop calling them the 52 new?). In this series, the government has decided that the "Big Seven" is too much of a wild card to go unchecked, something that I could almost swear had been decided ages ago. As a response, Amanda Waller and Steve Trevor assemble eight B and C students of superheroism to be accountable to the government or, if need be, take the JL down. Because if anyone could take down people like Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman....it's Vibe and Katana. First of all, I'm pretty sure DC tried to sell us this same Kool Aid with Justice League International with minimal success if any at all. And that one had Batman in it. Between Steve Trevor behaving like a jilted Twilight character over Wonder Woman and Hawkman being portrayed as crooked asshole space cop (which, sadly, is STILL better than the first two issues of Savage Hawkman), DC's forced attempt to Marvel-ize their continuity is so sad and unreadable, if you hold it up to your ear, you can almost hear Geoff Johns saying "Oh, fuck it....why not?"

Bottom Line: This book is the summation of virtually everything that's wrong with the majority of rebooted DC books. 4 out of 10.