I finished the Mark Waid/Chris Samnee Black Widow series this week. Not as great as their wonderful Daredevil run, but still a good, solid story. 8/10 would read again.

I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with Captain America.

I read the first volume of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina via Hoopla (collecting issues 1-5). I read the first issue when it came out but the delays on subsequent issues and a year long hiatus form new issues meant I hadn't gotten the rest of the series, so I took the opportunity to read it when I saw it was available via Hoopla. I quite enjoyed it, and look forward to reading the next volume eventually.

I am quite fascinated by Robert Hack's art, especially the colors, and I am curious as to the process. From the way the black looks, he might be using markers to spot the blacks, but the same line marks show in some of the larger swaths of color, while some seem more like water colors, so I am trying to decipher the process he uses. It might be multi-media techniques, or he might be coloring digitally emulating the pen strokes of markers and the muted palette of the water colors, but I am not sure. I'd love to see a page or two of the original art in person to get a closer look.

-M

Read some of the stuff I picked up at the LCS this afternoon while waiting for coats of paint and joint compound to dry while working on the comic room. Read Motor Girl #9. The more I read of Terry Moore the more I love his stuff and Motor Girl is quickly becoming one of my favorites of his. I also read the DC Meets Hanna Barbera tpb, collecting the 4 one-shots: Booster Gold/ Flintstones Special, Green Lantern/Space Ghost Special, Adam Strange/Future Quest Special and Suicide Squad/Banana Splits Special, plus the Jetsons, Ruff n Ready, Top Cat and Snagglepuss back ups from those specials. All were fun little romps, I expected to like the Suicide Squad special the least and wound up enjoying it the most. Howard Chaykin was still channeling golden age tv for the Ruff-n-Ready back up, a leftover from Satellite Sam it seems, and the jokes in their were wonderfully terrible, one so filthy he couldn't print the punch line but did ad a note to ask him about it if you ever meet him at a signing or a con (though you can fogure out the gist of the punchline form the joke's set up...

-M

King's Mister Miracle continues to look to me like he's trying to impose a story of his own on a very different story and characters that someone else created and that he hasn't troubled himself to look into very deeply.

Many people have taken existing characters and re-made them with success, artistic as well as commercial, but I think when you're dealing with a self-contained concept that was already considered (by me at least, I know many people disagree) one of the high points of the medium, it's bad form - something like DC trying to exploit Moore's and Gibbons's Watchmen (as opposed to Watchmen taking little-known characters, changing their names, and making them into something totally new).

He still has the escape hatch that this is all a hallucination or "unreal" in some other way, but I doubt that'll be enough to save it from the pitfalls it's been skirting since issue #1, if it hasn't already fallen in. Even the artwork is starting to lool less impressive, partly by association with King's writing, but also partly because of a certain sameness and unimaginative use of the 9-panel grid.

Loved the Flintstones series. Are you going to read the 6 issue Jetsons series?

Read a couple of more trades via Hoopla, checked out the first volume of Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, which I really dug. I like Oeming's clear simple style and he cut loose with his layouts and page designs on this. A lot of visual eye candy and crazy sci-fi lost world elements.

I also read the second volume of Green Arrow Rebirth, which was enjoyable, but didn't set my world on fire. It's good assembly line super-hero comics (complete with rotating art teams every couple of issues), but not anything special or memorable, and easily blends in with all the other standard super-hero fare out there. I liked the underwater train concept and the ensuing staging for the action in those issues, but the preceding issues on the island felt like a watered down regurgitation of Green Arrow Year One by Diggle and Jock and didn't do enough to make itself stand out from the other Green Arrow trapped on an island of hostile folks stories that are out there.

-M

Read the first volume of Shade the Changing Girl from DC's Young Animal line. It's the last of these series I sampled via Hoopla. Interesting take. I may be the only person on the planet who isn't a Milligan fan and I've only read the first handful of issues of his Shade series, but I enjoy the Ditko issues of Shade I have, and I enjoyed these too. A very different quirky take that very much courts an audience outside the traditional comic fan, but it was well done and had a lot of interesting subplots to keep the interest piqued.

-M