My Comic Books This Week
Made my trip to the comic book store this week. On my pull list for this week was Runaways #13 and Beast Wars #1.
They got Beast Wars on my pull list by mistake, since I get Generation One, but I decided to go ahead and pick it up, thinking that maybe, as with the Generation One series, it's a reboot, so I wouldn't actually have to know anything about Beast Wars.
No dice. It's a side thread or some such, so I'll be taking it off the pull list. Maybe, at some future time, if I ever get around to seeing Beast Wars, I'll pick this up in graphic novel form or some such, but for now, I'm not bothering about it.
I do have a few comments...
A magnetron, invented well before Transformers the toy/cartoon/comic book existed (although not invented before transformers, the electronic device used to transfer energy from one circuit to another through induction), is a high power RF amplifier, used frequently in older radars. It consists mostly of a specially shaped magnet tube thing. Some of them get pretty powerful... I knew a guy who used an old SPS 10 magnetron to find metal bits lost in high grass. The name of this device, though, sounds close enough to 'Megatron' that I once had to explain to a rather drunk sailor who wanted an impromptu lesson in sensor operation that no, the leader of the Decepticons does NOT ride around in our SPS-64 surface search radar, thanks.
So when this thing showed a character (knowing nothing about Beast Wars, I have no clue whether he's new in this issue, or if he's been around) named Magmatron, which sounds even closer to magnetron, I did have to giggle.
This is what he looks like:
It strikes me as being extraordinarily silly looking. Like they tried too hard to come up with a bad-ass looking new leader. He also totally reminds me of this They Might Be Giant Robots comic.
The reference to the 'Pax Cybertronia' totally reminded me of a horribly fanish Transformers alt-u I once came up with that involved a corrupted Optimus who went by the name 'Tyrannus Pax.' That would both be a reference to his old name, and to Megatron's quote.
Turns out, that Magmatron dude transforms into three separate animals.
However, what he says as he transforms causes me to go into giggle-fits, because it reminds me of some mind scarring robo-porn that I was recently exposed to. This also leads me to wonder which of the three components has the robot mode penis, and where the three animal mode... peni? Penises? fit while he's in robot mode.
Now, understand... I'm not saying that, if you enjoyed the Beast Wars cartoon, you won't enjoy this comic. I'm not saying that if you enjoyed the Beast Wars cartoon, you will enjoy this comic. I haven't seen enough of the Beast Wars cartoon to really know one way or another. These are the ramblings of someone who's never seen the show.
I finish this completely unhelpful review with a blown up scan of one of the alternate covers for this issue, a cover I don't actually have:
Please note that neither of these characters actually appear in the comic. They appear to have been included in this 'Completist' cover solely to give the artists an excuse to draw deformed, oversized roboboobies.
Next is Runaways #13, which I consider by far the superior comic book. Now, I have the first three Runaways graphic novels, but between moving and everything else, I don't have the issues that fall between the third one (which was originally a mini-series) and this issue, so I've got a bit of a gap that I'm hoping to later fill in with more graphic novels. Even so, the story was easy enough to follow, for a couple of reasons. (1) They give a 'previously, in Runaways' summary on the first page, and (2) it's pretty much a self-contained story featuring Molly and none of the other characters, anyway.
There's also a brief summary of the character's themselves on this page, even though most of them don't appear in the comic itself. They're pretty amusing, though:
Nico Minoru: Daughter of Dark Wizards
Gertrude Yorkes: Daughter of Time-traveling Despots
Chase Stein: Son of Mad Scientists
Molly Hayes: Daughter of Evil Mutants
Victor Mancha: Son of Ultron, a killer robot
Old Lace: Genetically Engineered Dinosaur
I notice that the alien-chick who had the hots for the magic chick has gone AWOL, while Victor Mancha is new. The idea of naming a Dinosaur Old Lace still continues to amuse me, just as I continue to be pleased that they have a dumpy, non-super-modelish female to control him? Her?
Molly continues to be the most adorable superteam muscle EVER. Really, she's the combination of two different character stereotypes, but since those stereotypes are at such odds, it doesn't fall flat. She is the team muscle, the team brick, the team bruiser. She's also an adorable, naive, gullible young girl, and if she weren't a Runaway, she'd totally be at home writing Mary Sue fanfiction and dreaming of growing up to marry Wolverine. When she finds herself a member of a completely different group of runaways, she naturally introduces herself as, "Princess Powerful." Her team-assigned code-name is actually "Bruiser," but she likes "Princess Powerful" better. She cheerfully and honestly gives these new kids her real and true background, but given how wild it is, they don't believe her at first. One of the kids replies, "Yeah, right. And I'm the son of the Black Panther." The sarcasm is lost on little Molly, who promptly responds, "Really? Your dad's mask is cool. It has little ears."
So you get lines like that from a character who can punch through walls without breaking a sweat throughout the whole comic, but in the end, she's still just a lost, confused little girl. Unlike the other Runaways, she never witnessed as many of her parents' horrible deeds, and while she does believe them (due to things that happened in previous issues), there's still a hint of uncertainty. "Basically, my mom and dad turned out to be mutants. Evil mutants. I guess. I thought they were nice, but they were trying to kill pretty much everyone on the planet. Supposedly."
In the end, she curls up for a nap on a bench, and dreams of waking up and finding out it was all a dream, and her parents, as nice and loving as she remembered them, were there to hold her and keep her safe.
The issue is adorable, amusing, and saddening at parts. Watching my favorite comic books, the X-titles, go downhill once really bothered me, and Marvel really annoyed me by doing that/allowing that to happen. In all, I only follow a couple Marvel titles these days but... this one I really enjoy.
I'm also still reading several of the ElfQuest graphic novels I picked up a couple weeks ago. I really love the ElfQuest series, and need to poke my comic book shop to get me the graphic novels I'm missing. Of course, I could order them over the internet, but if possible, I'd rather get them from there.
Winnowill there is an evil, creepy, healer who's occasionally compared with spiders (note the pattern of the hair), when she's not compared with a snake. However, the similarity between her and Arachnae ends there.
For one, Winnowill is way creepier than Arachnae (sorry, 'Nae). She is a healer who belonged to a group of elves that closed themselves off from the world. Their leader made their world so safe that her healing powers were no longer needed, and so they began to turn in on themselves, eating away at her. The whole business eventually drove her to insanity. Stunts she's pulled includes reforming an elf capable of levitation so that he had wings attached to his arms, hollow bones, and other changes allowing him to truly fly; mating with a troll and then torturing her own off-spring, driving him more insane, possibly, than she is with pain-games; shutting down the mind of a rock-shaper member of her group so that in the end he becomes nothing more than a breathing door-opener, existing in a weird state of waking catatonia; filtering out the wolf-blood of a part-Wolfrider baby (Wolfriders are part wolf, so that, unlike the other elves, they can eventually die of old age) to turn him into a pure elf; and those are just starters from relatively early in the series. She's a trip. I didn't even touch on some of the wilder stuff.
So, anyway, that's my comics run-down. Maybe I’ll do this again next week.
They got Beast Wars on my pull list by mistake, since I get Generation One, but I decided to go ahead and pick it up, thinking that maybe, as with the Generation One series, it's a reboot, so I wouldn't actually have to know anything about Beast Wars.
No dice. It's a side thread or some such, so I'll be taking it off the pull list. Maybe, at some future time, if I ever get around to seeing Beast Wars, I'll pick this up in graphic novel form or some such, but for now, I'm not bothering about it.
I do have a few comments...
A magnetron, invented well before Transformers the toy/cartoon/comic book existed (although not invented before transformers, the electronic device used to transfer energy from one circuit to another through induction), is a high power RF amplifier, used frequently in older radars. It consists mostly of a specially shaped magnet tube thing. Some of them get pretty powerful... I knew a guy who used an old SPS 10 magnetron to find metal bits lost in high grass. The name of this device, though, sounds close enough to 'Megatron' that I once had to explain to a rather drunk sailor who wanted an impromptu lesson in sensor operation that no, the leader of the Decepticons does NOT ride around in our SPS-64 surface search radar, thanks.
So when this thing showed a character (knowing nothing about Beast Wars, I have no clue whether he's new in this issue, or if he's been around) named Magmatron, which sounds even closer to magnetron, I did have to giggle.
This is what he looks like:
It strikes me as being extraordinarily silly looking. Like they tried too hard to come up with a bad-ass looking new leader. He also totally reminds me of this They Might Be Giant Robots comic.
The reference to the 'Pax Cybertronia' totally reminded me of a horribly fanish Transformers alt-u I once came up with that involved a corrupted Optimus who went by the name 'Tyrannus Pax.' That would both be a reference to his old name, and to Megatron's quote.
Turns out, that Magmatron dude transforms into three separate animals.
However, what he says as he transforms causes me to go into giggle-fits, because it reminds me of some mind scarring robo-porn that I was recently exposed to. This also leads me to wonder which of the three components has the robot mode penis, and where the three animal mode... peni? Penises? fit while he's in robot mode.
Now, understand... I'm not saying that, if you enjoyed the Beast Wars cartoon, you won't enjoy this comic. I'm not saying that if you enjoyed the Beast Wars cartoon, you will enjoy this comic. I haven't seen enough of the Beast Wars cartoon to really know one way or another. These are the ramblings of someone who's never seen the show.
I finish this completely unhelpful review with a blown up scan of one of the alternate covers for this issue, a cover I don't actually have:
Please note that neither of these characters actually appear in the comic. They appear to have been included in this 'Completist' cover solely to give the artists an excuse to draw deformed, oversized roboboobies.
Next is Runaways #13, which I consider by far the superior comic book. Now, I have the first three Runaways graphic novels, but between moving and everything else, I don't have the issues that fall between the third one (which was originally a mini-series) and this issue, so I've got a bit of a gap that I'm hoping to later fill in with more graphic novels. Even so, the story was easy enough to follow, for a couple of reasons. (1) They give a 'previously, in Runaways' summary on the first page, and (2) it's pretty much a self-contained story featuring Molly and none of the other characters, anyway.
There's also a brief summary of the character's themselves on this page, even though most of them don't appear in the comic itself. They're pretty amusing, though:
Nico Minoru: Daughter of Dark Wizards
Gertrude Yorkes: Daughter of Time-traveling Despots
Chase Stein: Son of Mad Scientists
Molly Hayes: Daughter of Evil Mutants
Victor Mancha: Son of Ultron, a killer robot
Old Lace: Genetically Engineered Dinosaur
I notice that the alien-chick who had the hots for the magic chick has gone AWOL, while Victor Mancha is new. The idea of naming a Dinosaur Old Lace still continues to amuse me, just as I continue to be pleased that they have a dumpy, non-super-modelish female to control him? Her?
Molly continues to be the most adorable superteam muscle EVER. Really, she's the combination of two different character stereotypes, but since those stereotypes are at such odds, it doesn't fall flat. She is the team muscle, the team brick, the team bruiser. She's also an adorable, naive, gullible young girl, and if she weren't a Runaway, she'd totally be at home writing Mary Sue fanfiction and dreaming of growing up to marry Wolverine. When she finds herself a member of a completely different group of runaways, she naturally introduces herself as, "Princess Powerful." Her team-assigned code-name is actually "Bruiser," but she likes "Princess Powerful" better. She cheerfully and honestly gives these new kids her real and true background, but given how wild it is, they don't believe her at first. One of the kids replies, "Yeah, right. And I'm the son of the Black Panther." The sarcasm is lost on little Molly, who promptly responds, "Really? Your dad's mask is cool. It has little ears."
So you get lines like that from a character who can punch through walls without breaking a sweat throughout the whole comic, but in the end, she's still just a lost, confused little girl. Unlike the other Runaways, she never witnessed as many of her parents' horrible deeds, and while she does believe them (due to things that happened in previous issues), there's still a hint of uncertainty. "Basically, my mom and dad turned out to be mutants. Evil mutants. I guess. I thought they were nice, but they were trying to kill pretty much everyone on the planet. Supposedly."
In the end, she curls up for a nap on a bench, and dreams of waking up and finding out it was all a dream, and her parents, as nice and loving as she remembered them, were there to hold her and keep her safe.
The issue is adorable, amusing, and saddening at parts. Watching my favorite comic books, the X-titles, go downhill once really bothered me, and Marvel really annoyed me by doing that/allowing that to happen. In all, I only follow a couple Marvel titles these days but... this one I really enjoy.
I'm also still reading several of the ElfQuest graphic novels I picked up a couple weeks ago. I really love the ElfQuest series, and need to poke my comic book shop to get me the graphic novels I'm missing. Of course, I could order them over the internet, but if possible, I'd rather get them from there.
Winnowill there is an evil, creepy, healer who's occasionally compared with spiders (note the pattern of the hair), when she's not compared with a snake. However, the similarity between her and Arachnae ends there.
For one, Winnowill is way creepier than Arachnae (sorry, 'Nae). She is a healer who belonged to a group of elves that closed themselves off from the world. Their leader made their world so safe that her healing powers were no longer needed, and so they began to turn in on themselves, eating away at her. The whole business eventually drove her to insanity. Stunts she's pulled includes reforming an elf capable of levitation so that he had wings attached to his arms, hollow bones, and other changes allowing him to truly fly; mating with a troll and then torturing her own off-spring, driving him more insane, possibly, than she is with pain-games; shutting down the mind of a rock-shaper member of her group so that in the end he becomes nothing more than a breathing door-opener, existing in a weird state of waking catatonia; filtering out the wolf-blood of a part-Wolfrider baby (Wolfriders are part wolf, so that, unlike the other elves, they can eventually die of old age) to turn him into a pure elf; and those are just starters from relatively early in the series. She's a trip. I didn't even touch on some of the wilder stuff.
So, anyway, that's my comics run-down. Maybe I’ll do this again next week.