Kick-Ass #6

I just read "Kick-Ass" #6 last night.

I like Kick-Ass. I like Mark Millar and I have always like John Romita jr. I'm just not sure how much I liked this particular issue.

JRjr draws mobsters like no one else. Eversince his work on "Punnisher: War Zone", I have thought that gritty, street level heroes were his forte. He's okay on X-Men and Spidey, but Romita does suits and blood like no one else in the business.

I thought the inking by Tom Palmer was a little overly loose on this issue. I think Romita needs tighter inks in order to prevent the art from looking sloppy.

I like this series, but I'm seeing more and more decompression in the writing and the art, and I think that they could pack a little more into each book to help pick up the pace. the first couple of issues kept the tempo high, but it's been slacking up lately. Millar has written high-action, yet dense comics before (see the first six issues of The Ultimates), so I don't know what he's trying to do here. I would guess that he's having a tough time filling 22 pages of script, and it feels like he's cheating here, and pulling 17 pages and drawing them out.

In any case, I like the origin of Big Daddy, but I think it could have been better. I think that they could have gone further back in time to see an even younger Hit Girl, and really take the time to flush out their story and characters.

I like the comic, I like the creators and I like the characters, I just think that this latest issue is the weakest one thus far, and it was especially disappointing considering how late the book was. I hope that Millar is able to pick up the pace a little next issue, and that the inks get a little tighter to make the book feel more crisp and sharp.

I also find it very amusing that the movie has already started casting, considering the origin and nature of the characters is only now being looked at in the comic. Millar must be a hell of a salesman.

New Mutants #1

My favorite comic growing up was X-Men. A close second to that was The New Mutants. To this day, my favorite comic character is Cannonball, and just his presence on a comic cover makes me want to pick it up.

As such, the relaunch of New Mutants, starring all my old favorite characters, was pretty much a lock on my pull list.

I read the first issue yesterday over my lunch hour, and I will say, straight away, that I enjoyed it. This book looks to take the place that Jim Shooter's departure on Legion of Super-Heroes left in my pull list, and has a similar feel to it.

Illyana, 'Berto, Xian, Amara and Sam all make the team, and set up the book against an old X-Foe in Legion, and I'm excited to see where it goes from here. I also like the present, but not overly heavy-handed placement of this book firmly grounded in the current continuity of the X-Books.

The art was nice, but not great. I'm hoping they can get Bret Blevins, even if only for an alternate cover. The story was okay, too, if not fantastic. But the nostalgia was fantastic.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I went to see it last night.

I wish I had something awesome and insightful to offer that wasn't completely covered by the rest of the blogosphere already. The first 5 minutes of the movie really are the best five minutes of the movie, and the rest of the film really just lets you down from the high expectations it set.

The rest of the movie was a convoluted mess. It at times adhered to the continuity of the X-Trilogy, and other times it just chucked it out the window. It had a cool cast, but it watered everyone down so much, that no one got enough screen time to really be cool. This movie needed 4 characters to work: Wolverine, Stryker, Sabretooth and Silverfox. That's it. If this movie was recut, and done to really flush out the characters, then the drama of the action would have been fantastic.

Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson was cool, but "Deadpool" was 9 kinds of lame. Have him in one or two scenes, let him mouth off a little, and then leave the rest alone. He ended up being to this movie what Angel was to X3, just in the way of the real story.

Same goes for Gambit and Blob, who were both there for no good story telling reason. They just ate up screen time that should have been reserved for exposition.

Wolverine says, in the movie, he was the best there is at what he does, but at no point in the film before he says that is there any reason to believe it. He mostly has just moped around and got in his team's way. It would have been nice to see him actually do something that would make Stryker's gamble with the adamantium make sense.

All in all, it had a few bright spots, but I think Wolverine was an exercise in wasted potential, choosing to try and fill the movie with as much "cool stuff" as possible rather than trying to tell a simple story of love lost and revenge.

As far as hero movies go, this one ranks around Blade III, Spider-Man III, and Elektra.