Do the weeks seem longer to anybody else? I know I’m working a lot, but damn, the weekend seems to take forever. Anyway, new comics, good stuff all around, like X-Men and Spider-Man.

Comic Book of the Week goes to Absolute Superman #7 for an awesome new origin for Brainiac.

Meanwhile, The Museum of the Uncanny Kickstarter was a success! So I will have a new short comic story entering the world sometime soon. Hopefully you all ordered your copy and will get to read it! Beyond that, I’m loving Andor, Doctor Who and The Last of Us, obviously, and continue to slowly make my way through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Fun game.

Comic Reviews: Absolute Green Lantern #2, Absolute Superman #7, Amazing Spider-Man #3 and X-Men #16.

Absolute Green Lantern #2
Writer: Al Ewing
Artist: Jahnoy Lindsay
Letterer: Lucas Gattoni

Sadly, this series just isn’t working for me so far.

We flashback to Abin Sur announcing himself to the crowd gathered around him, that he’s there for judgement. Sheriff Guy Gardner tries to reason with him and gets judged, and then killed. The other cops open fire and Abin Sur starts slashing them with green energy. It’s a panic. Hal Jordan picks up one of their guns and points it at him, but John Stewart talks him down and the alien retreats. While talking it out later, John reveals what seems to be a yellow ring and says he has a way to stop Abin Sur.

Comic Rating: 5/10 – Alright.

The bookend/framing device of this issue is Hal and Jo having a conversation in the diner, each one now imbued with some alien thing. But through their discussion and the flashback story, we still don’t know anything about either alien thing. The flashback that takes up most of the issue is interesting, but it’s still all just spooky mystery. I’m eager to find out what this new Abin Sur is about, and what the new Green Lantern is about. Buuuut this second issue doesn’t give us anything. And, quite frankly, I want something.

While I appreciate that having multiple GLs is often core to the concept, it’s also not working for me in this series so far. The comic isn’t able to focus on any of them for long, so we don’t get a strong understanding of their personalities. Especially since some of them, like Hal, are quite changed from their classic comic version. And Jo Mullein just isn’t as well established a character as DC probably hopes, and she’s our GL so far…though, again, we don’t really know anything about what that entails yet.

TL;DR: The new Absolute Green Lantern series is not giving us enough information to glom onto to really start getting invested in the series. The spooky mystery is the main focus so far.

Absolute Superman #7
Writer: Jason Aaron
Artist: Carmine Di Giandomenico
Colorist: Ulises Arreola
Letterer: Becca Carey

With the first arc concluded, it’s time to take a break and expand the world.

This issue features the origin of the Brainiac that runs the Lazarus Algorithm. He started out as a worker drone on a Brainiac Collective spaceship, brought to life to shovel the dead bodies of used up Brainiacs into the furnace. He went quite mad, you see. And then discovered that everybody on his ship was dead. So he promoted himself to be in charge and somehow made it to Earth, where he’s still quite mad. He’s studying Superman and experimenting on Christopher Smith. Also the Brainiac Collective still exists out in the universe, and he converses with them to learn about Krypton and 3D print some Kryptonite.

Comic Rating: 9/10 – Great.

Brainiac has been bubbling away in the background since the beginning, so a proper origin and introduction was definitely called for at this stage in the game. And this origin story is fascinating and horrible in equal measure, and I loved it. The story draws on some things we could have known about prior Brainiacs and then establishes itself as unique. I love the idea of a Brainiac drone rising to power through sheer dumb luck and his own lunacy. I love that he’s only one part of a larger collective that still exists out there in the world, and he might even be a rogue agent in the face of that collective. Just a lot of really neat ideas packed into this alternate origin story. With exquisitely creepy art to match!

Also to note, it’s a little weird reading this new Brainiac origin story so shortly after watching the fifth season of the Harley Quinn cartoon, which also does a big Brainiac origin story episode. Weird synergy there. This Absolute Brainiac is definitely wilder.

TL;DR: We get the full origin of Absolute Brainiac in this issue and it’s as weird, wild, creepy and psychotic as one could hope for.

Amazing Spider-Man #3
Writer: Joe Kelly
Artist: Pepe Larraz
Colorist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: VC’s Joe Caramagna

I don’t know why I’m reacting so badly to this new Amazing Spider-Man direction; it’s just not working for me.

Spider-Man fights Itsy Bitsy, who banters like Deadpool. She wins and takes him somewhere private because she’s also super into him, then tosses Spidey in the river. He manages to get himself to Aunt May’s apartment, while having distorted memories of a time he stole Uncle Ben’s jacket as a kid. He gets Norman’s help investigating Itsy Bitsy and they discover that the drug is being put into soda. Spidey goes to investigate and gets ambushed at the soda plant by Hobgoblin.

Comic Rating: 6/10 – Pretty Good.

We get our first real taste of Itsy Bitsy in this issue, and I find her immediately off-putting, but I also feel willing to give her a chance. She’s definitely got a bit of Deadpool to her, but she’s also just so over-designed that it’s bugging me. She’s got so much going on that her weird personality is almost too much to take. But…I dunno. I’m willing to give her a shot. And I’m still willing to give this comic a shot even though I really, really don’t care. I don’t like stories where the main character is drugged and goes through weird hallucinations, and that’s all these three issues have been. Peter is so drugged that his flashback memories are warped and twisted, so we don’t know what’s true. The idea that he had a phase as a kid where he hung out with the wrong crowd is interesting, as is the fact that one of those crowd is back in his adult life and giving Peter a job. But this comic does not care about that stuff. The returned friend and the new job aren’t even set dressing. And that’s what I want to read about! I just don’t really care about Spider-Man being drugged and fighting another super-villain threat.

TL;DR: The new Amazing Spider-Man has some interesting ideas sprinkled throughout, but they are overshadowed by an uninteresting and all-encompassing plot.

X-Men #16
Writer: Jed MacKay
Artist: Netho Diaz
Inkers: Sean Parsons, JP Mayer & Livesay
Colorist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: VC’s Clayton Cowles

Who doesn’t love a new squad of completely original evil X-Men?

The X-Men battle the 3K X-Men, who we first met in issue #1. They’re the former Orchis goons who had their x-genes activated in adulthood, only now they’ve all got costumes and codenames. Wyre has trained them to be X-Men, and we get a really big fight. Meanwhile, Cassandra Nova is guiding the giant monster to attack the city, so Magneto takes an experimental drug to temporarily get his powers back, and he uses them to control the giant Sentinel in order to fight the giant monster.

Comic Rating: 9/10 – Great.

I’m so old. I remember when this was done all the way back in 1998, the Cerebro X-Men! Good times. Anyway, this was a fun fight issue that really gets elevated in the final pages, with a big reveal that pays off a lot of what has come before. Heck, a lot of things from the very first issue of this relaunch get paid off in this comic. The 3K X-Men were characters in that first issue, though they weren’t this well-defined. I’m not even sure if the powers were the same. And then we first saw the big, defeated Sentinel in that first issue, and here Magneto turned it into a giant robot mech to fight the giant monster! That’s flippin’ awesome and raises the quality of this issue by a lot on its own — though it was already good quality to begin with.

I applaud the work put into designing and drawing these new adversaries. They look damn good and have a wide variety of different styles, like any good X-Men squad. And the fight scene is a hoot. Everybody gets a moment to shine or fail, and it’s a nice back-and-forth. I hope MacKay has more planned for these jabronis and they’re not just a one-off threat. Of course, I’m still waiting on the members of O-Force to come back…

TL;DR: Really entertaining fight issue between the X-Men and a whole squad of new mutants, really elevated with the long-in-coming pay-off at the end of the issue.

The comics I review in my Hench-Sized reviews are just the usual comics I grab from Comixology any given week, along with a few impulse buys I might try on a whim. So if there are any comics or series you’d like me to review each week, let me know in the comments.

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