Comics I Bought: May 1, 2008

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got four new comics plus a hard cover collection:

Local - 11

Usagi Yojimbo - 111

Ex Machina - 36

Grendel: Behold the Devil - 6 of 8

The Facts in the case of the Departure of Miss Finch (HC)

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

Spider-Man and the Black Cat - "The Evil That Men Do" by Kevin Smith and Terry Dodson

I'm not a fan of writing bad reviews. Especially for comic books. Sometimes reading bad reviews can be fun because there is generally more entertainment in trashing something rather than praising it. But I don't like to waste my time dwelling on bad work. I'd rather dwell on the good stuff.

Usually I don't have to write bad reviews because I'm only doing this for fun and all the stuff I reviewed lately has been comics that I bought. I'm pretty discriminating so most of the comics I get are okay at worst. Not this book.

I like Kevin Smith's writing in general. I've enjoyed his movies and some of the comics he's written but not this one. It's a boring mess. The art is fine. It's the writing that's a mess. Spider-Man and the Black Cat as detectives? What? And somebody tell the writers over at Marvel comics that mutants are not a separate species from humans. That stupid notion has always driven me crazy. They are a mutation of humans. Hence the word "Mutants". A person with six fingers is still a human. They just had a mutation that made them grow an extra finger. Now Smith is writing about "Human mutant hybrids"? What? He's taking a nonsensical idea one step further.

And another annoying Marvel writer thing: Daredevil is not going to clutch his ears in pain when he hears a warning siren go off any more than a normal person would. Cats don't. Bats don't. Nor would any other animal that can hear better than us.

Some Daredevil writers have, for decades, mixed up two different definitions of the word "sensitive". Definition one: "Quick to detect or respond to slight changes, signals, or influences". Which does not mean definition two, "Easily damaged, injured, or distressed by slight changes".

Just because a dog can smell a thousand times better than us doesn't mean it's easily hurt by odors. Quite the opposite. A dog is better equipped to handle them. Yet writers love to use noise against Daredevil because his ears are "sensitive". Yeah. sensitive in the first definition not the second. He would have a normal human tolerance to noise if not better. That has always annoyed me.

But anyway enough dwelling on the bad stuff. Stay away from this disappointment of a Spider-Book.