Comics I Bought: April 23, 2009

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

The X-Files - 6

Mr. X: Condemned - 4

Ex Machina - 41

Savage Dragon - 147

100% Paul Pope - Hard Cover Collection

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

Angel: After The Fall Volume 2: First Night by Joss Whedon, Brian Lynch, and Various artists

They really should have made this the first volume. I'll say that right off the bat. Instead they had the first volume of the story start months after this one. Weird. It was a storytelling choice but I think the wrong one.

To recap: the Angel TV show ended with a big battle about to start. A cliffhanger. Then the comic series started months later (in story time) with the whole city Los Angeles transported to hell. Things had been happening off camera for a while and we were thrown into the middle. Volume 1 wasn't well executed and was confusing.

I liked this volume much better than the first. It's a thin volume made up of short stories. Each story tells what happened to an individual character on their first night in hell. Each story is also drawn by a different artist. There are a wide variety of styles but they all work together pretty well. The variety of art is one of this collection's strengths.

"First Night" is mostly about the set up information you need to understand volume one. Why didn't it come out before volume one? I don't know. Except that's the way Whedon wanted it.

There is not much else to say about this book. It was pretty good and I enjoyed it but there is no real story here. It's all the same story over and over. What happened to so and so on the first night L.A. got sent to hell? It was all variations on a theme. Not a bad thing but not a lot to talk about. It's the specifics of each person's story that make them interesting.

I would say that this volume, like the first, is for Angel fans only. I liked it better than the first but I still can't see it appealing to a general comics fan. And if you want to check out some Angel comics I'd start with Volume 2.