S.H.I.E.L.D: This Is Not How the World Ends

Questions:

1. Do you like alternative history stories where famous people in history create and use devices that are fantastic even by today's standards?

2. Do you like comics that kind of take place in the Marvel universe, maybe in a slightly different reality, but still feature a lot of the characters that you know and love, and thus have the freedom to do different things with those characters?

3. Do you just like head trips?

If so, the recent Marvel comic S.H.I.E.L.D. is for you. Just based on the title, you might think this comic has to do with with the agency of the US government, S.H.I.E.L.D., which has a vague area of influence, but basically seems to do whatever the writers at Marvel want it to do. Police superheroes? Check! Combat terrorist networks? Check! Participate in secret wars against extra dimensional threats? Check!

Instead, this organization is one that has been secretly protecting Earth from all manner of threats, starting with and ancient Egyptian fighting off the Brood, to what seems to be the 50s or 60s. The organization features the great minds of Da Vinci, Newton, Tesla, Michaelangelo, Nostradamus, and the grandfathers of Reed Richards and Tony Stark. The book starts off taking you through a number of these scenarios, and always as the lone brave man goes to fight the unstoppable threat, they speak the catch line: "This is not how the world ends". Maybe I'm just a sucker, but it gave me chills every time.

I loved this book, the art was wonderful, the retro/futuristic technology constantly being used was very creative, and it was well written. My only complaint on it, is one that I have with a lot of "miniseries" these days, which is that none of them ever seem to resolve the story, it's not like you get a complete arc, but just a teaser, and hopefully there's going to be another volume, at least in the case of S.H.I.E.L.D. there is one comign out soon, but really, there's no resolution at the end of this arc.

If you want to read the story all in one shot, you're going to have to wait awhile yet.

Comments

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week. While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but...

Y: The Last Man: Even Spambots Cry After Reading It

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that Y is the saddest story I have ever taken in, with an emotional punch like a locomotive (or a bomb if you will). No work of fiction has ever destroyed me emotionally like this has. That being said, the story may be a tragedy, but gettin there was a lot of fun. The story starts off with every male mammal on the face of the Earth being almost simultaneously wiped out by some kind of illness. With the exception of English major/escape artist Yorick Brown, and Ampersand, a capuchin monkey that he's volunteered to train to help people with disabilities. There's no apparent reason as to why they survived, they just did. At the time the plague hit, Yorick's girlfriend, whom he was about to propose to, was on a trip in Australia, while he was in Chicago. Naturally he sets out to find his true love. Along the way he picks up the companions 355, an agent of a secret government organization called the Culper Ring, and Dr. Allison Man...

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

This appears to be a time for disappointing sequels, although for awhile there, we got a lot of top tier extremely competent sequels. I guess no trend can be permanent. The first Boondock Saints was one of those rare creations that had just about the optimal amount of everything, it was balanced between being believable, ridiculous, funny, and brutal. Balanced is the last word I would use to describe the sequel. The dialogue is terrible, just about everyone in the movie talks like a middle school bully. There are honest to goodness slapstick comedy moments, such as a mafia liutenant getting smacked in the face with a salami, and then a follow up seen where he's forced to wear headgear and can't speak properly. The tone of the entire movie is just so very different from the original, that it feels like it was made with a different director/writer, with a different vision for what the movie should be. All the more sad, since it's the same writer/director, Troy Duffy,...

Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

Search This Blog