With only a few episodes left remaining in the entire series, I think most of us were expecting a little more action in the Season 7 premiere. Even though we didn’t see any early deaths, there were still plenty of appearances to make things intriguing. Everyone is on the board after Episode 1, with reigning champion The Debt Payers in first place and scoring a maximum seven points for having his entire team appear in the premiere. Money For Nothing, Pod For Free is in second with five points, with most of the league tied at four and Many-Faced Team not far behind with three points.
The Scorecard is below with individual team scores after the jump.
Continue reading You Win or You Die: Season 7, Episode 1: Dragonstone
I’m interrupting the regularly scheduled Wednesday new comics post in order to heap acclaim upon some of the best things I’ve read through the first half of 2017. With the Eisner Awards ceremony just a few days away (which, by the way, I’ll be attending for the first time; pretty excited about that), it felt like a good time to bestow some additional accolades upon the hardworking creators whose passion for comics continues to push boundaries and enrich the medium.
Royal City – Jeff Lemire
Yeah, I get it. We live in a bubble. Despite feeling like I don’t need to hear it anymore, I nonetheless am amused and bewildered when I come across the kneejerk closed-minded right-wing reactions to even the vaguest of protestations. Case in point: the first three Amazon reviews for the digital edition of CALEXIT, the latest subversive gem from Black Mask Comics, courtesy of Matteo Pizzolo and Amancay Nahuelpan. If they had called this book about organized resistance to an oppressive, fascist America something like, I don’t know, Secret Empire, maybe some folks would have bothered reading it before ranting. Instead, bozos like DonkeyKong777 and Lochstar chime in with insightful bon mots like “progressive bull corn” and “liberal wet dream.” This wasn’t thrown together as reactionary propaganda; the truth is, Pizzolo and Nahuelpan started working on CALEXIT long before reality started eerily mirroring the fictional dystopia they were crafting for in the book.
We’re pretty familiar with the routine at this point. Marvel’s big summer event simmers with lead-in stories and “road to” developments before kicking off with a Free Comic Book Day prologue. Then we hit the main event, and queue up the requisite mini-series, including the anthology book with short stories from a variety of up-and-coming creators. And, of course, the tie-ins. Everyone has a tie-in. Occasionally these crossovers enhance the main storyline, and in some cases they’re downright essential. It’s increasingly problematic, in fact, that more and more of these comic book events are inscrutable in their own right and require following a good portion of the ancillary material. Sometimes the connection is tangential, but the plot trigger results in a decent one-shot or two-part tie-in. More often than not, however, it just seems like Marvel’s cheap way of selling more copies of their books.
can feed my addiction on a pretty much constant basis. It’s only a matter of time before there’s a
Once again, Valiant Entertainment requests your attention. Last month, for Free Comic Book Day, the company led with a story pulled from Matt Kindt and Tomas Giorello’s outstanding X-O Manowar relaunch. That book also contained a preview of this week’s Secret Weapons by Eric Heisserer, Raul Allen, and Patricia Martin. This isn’t the same Valiant super-team from the 90’s, however. And, as such, much like the new X-O, it serves as a great jumping-on point for readers looking to find out what the fuss is all about.
For many people my age, Spider-Man, Batman, and the X-Men, are their definite heroes. I can only translate that to the popularity of each of their animated shows. For the past few years, I haven’t really been keeping up with the ol’ webhead. While I have enjoyed parts of Dan Slott’s years-long Spider-Man run (Superior Spider-Man was excellent), overall, I haven’t found it clicking with me. I’ve always liked the low-stakes drama of Peter’s social life/job while dealing with street-level villains, so Slott’s corporate Parker and his globetrotting adventures hasn’t been my thing.
Last month, Marvel gave us our first look at the new Defenders series as a back-up feature to the Free Comic Book Day edition of Secret Empire. And this week, Brian Michael Bendis and David Marquez introduce us to the full cast of this street-level vigilante superteam. Marvel Studios continues to hold sway, which is why this Defenders squad is unlike any team of that name that we’ve seen in the comics (a Defenders team with no Strange seems odd). But right away, you can tell that Bendis is driven by more than just the typical company mandate that resulted in phoned-in Guardians of the Galaxy comics or the tedious Civil War II. Bendis is here because he loves these characters. And if the story doesn’t convince you, his afterword says, in no uncertain terms: “I love Daredevil so much.”
Blame it on the Time Gem, that re-imagining of Doctor Strange’s Eye of Agamotto for the MCU, warping temporal conventions and mortal publishing schedules. This week’s Doctor Strange #20, the culmination of Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo’s brilliant run on the book, comes a week after issue #21. Weird, yeah? One might say strange, even. Or maybe Marvel was just really eager to get the first issue from the new creative team on the stands for its Secret Empire tie-in. The real reason for the twisted release schedule, however, can be found in the afterword of this week’s book: “Why, you ask, is issue #21 already on sale? DO NOT BLAME KADAVUS! Blame the incompetent editor whose buffoonery has put him on the edge of infinite torment!” Well, sure. It’s well-established that comic book editors are all buffoons, so I’m sure a slight delay on an oversized book brimming with mind-bending Bachalo splash pages and interior art from the legendary Kevin Nowlan can fall squarely on that moron’s shoulders.
