Comics I Bought This Week: October 15, 2009

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

The Walking Dead - 66

Strange tales - 2

Strange Tales Masterworks - 2

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

"Nova: Volumes 1-4, Annihilation Conquest, Knowhere, Secret Invasion, and Nova Corps" by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and a bunch of different artists

A friend of mine hooked me up with these four volumes of "Nova" trade paperbacks to check out. I haven't read any Nova comics since I was a kid in the late 1970's. That original Nova series was one I always wanted to be good, because Nova looked real cool, but was pretty mediocre. It had excellent covers though. And a great tagline, "The Human Rocket".

These comics, from the last few years, were written by the writing team of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. I know these guys have been writing comics for a couple of decades now and I remember them as solid super hero writers but I can't remember the last thing I read by them. It's been that long since I've seen their work.

Each volume has different artist working on it but they are all pretty similar. I think Sean Chen's work in volume one is the strongest but there is really not a lot to complain about. As long as the modern over rendered super hero style is okay with you. It's done pretty well here.

The story picks up after something called "The Annihilation War" where all of the Nova Corps (yeah, basically the same thing as DC's Green Lantern Corps) were wiped out except our hero, Richard Rider, the Nova Prime. He has the Nova Corps' "Worldmind" in his head talking to him. Worldmind was the brains behind the Nova Cops and the repository of all their knowledge.

For the first two volumes Nova is flying around in deep space helping worlds deal with various emergencies related to the cosmic war that just ended. He's flying around putting out fires and having adventures all while trying to make up for the destroyed Nova Corps. It's entertaining stuff generally.

In volume three Nova returns to Earth to get involved with fighting the Skrulls in the big Marvel "Secret Invasion" crossover. I'm not much of a crossover fan and haven't read one since the 80's but for Nova's part the volume was pretty well done. In volume four the Worldmind rebuilds the Nova Corps to protect the galaxy but all the action still takes place on Earth.

All in all I enjoyed "Nova". I like the first two volumes best. They were good stories of cosmic adventure on far off worlds. The last two volumes were more Earth bound and still good but didn't have the sense of adventure of the first two. They were all much better than the boring old original run. So if you're in the mood for some fun, solidly done cosmic adventure check out "Nova".