Thursday's Loot - 5 January 2006

I picked up 4 measly floppies today: Day of Vengeance One Shot, Loveless #3, Jonah Hex #3 and the Star Wars: Purge One Shot. Okay, Purge sounds hilarious to me as a name but I’m hoping this is where we see Darth Vader as a bad-ass hunting down the remaining Jedi as opposed to a whiny kid in a silly suit killing smaller kids and Clone troopers killing Jedi. Talk about your let downs. I could go on but I’ll read this and report back.

Loveless #3
Okay, so I was a bit late on this one. Sue me. Number 2 in the series really had me intrigued but this one had me confused. I finished this book and want to drop the series again. I think I might. Whereas the last issue sort of explained how broken the characters were, this one just had me confused. One moment he’s with the union, the next he doesn’t have an arm, and then soft-porn. Whatever, it feels more pointless than loveless.

I rate this story: dropped like an ex-girlfriend I just stopped calling.

Jonah Hex #3
Now this is a western I like. Strange because I like it for all the same reasons I dropped a lot of other books. It’s simplistic and horribly obvious but fun in the summer movie blockbuster way more so than All Star Batman and Robin. So far these single issue stories have been pulpy goodness. They move along at fine pace and end up being rewarding. I was iffy about the first issue but the last two have been great. This is the dark and gritty Batman that we don’t get in the Batman titles. There’s a line of justice that can be violent, but it’s there and the audience is never too sure where the story is going. That’s good story telling. I find it strange that these single issue stories are much more compelling and exciting than the six to twelve issue epics. The character development is better, the characterization is better, the dialogue is better. Why? Editors. I think it was Rudyard Kipling that used to only edit with a small paintbrush and a bottle of ink. That way he could only remove things that were unnecessary to the story instead of bloating it. I guess that’s what these stories do, show us how bloated a lot of other works have become. What was once the standard is now the gem. I think this seems so good because it is just so damn unique these days.

I rate this story: The first I want to read when it comes out.

Day of Vengeance One Shot
Then there is this thing. This is a dead and bloated cash cow that is continually flogged by some faceless corporation. But you know what? It’s good reading. I didn’t read Day of Vengeance but I picked this up for the hell of it and really enjoyed it. I’m not a huge fan of magic. Whenever I played D&D or any sort of PC RPG I tend to avoid magic users but this I liked. It was straight forward, knew where it was going and got there. Badda-boom, badda-bing. It’s not literary perfection and if it was small enough I’d suggest reading it at the shelves then moving on, but you have money so give it a chance. This book had me enjoying magic users and it sets up a few plot threads for the year later or the next issue of Infinite Crisis – whatever. If you can’t get passed that then don’t buy this book.

There's an exchange between a talking monkey and a talking dog - how can that be bad. The explination about Blue Devil getting his trident back was also a chuckle. Plus there's heroics of the obvious as well as the harder self-effacing, sacrificing your comfort kind by agreeing to live in an unstable rock formation.

I rate this story: Fun if you don’t hate big events.