make mine meandering

when you get your hours cut from 40 a week to 30, the first thing that goes is the excessive weekly comics budget. i had seven dollars to spare for comics last week, and i couldn’t find the zero issue of warren’s new thing, so i got thunderbolts 121 and secret invasion 3.

and now i’m done with both. as i said, i was waffling after secret invasion issue 2 dropped, the series took too long to get going, monthly for eight months, first issue 40 pages, each subsequent 20 pages for the same price, they’re just bleeding me here. and it’s not even like anything happened this issue! characters i’m not familiar with, because i hadn’t picked up any trades of the iniative or young avengers, got beat up by skrulls, then nick fury shows up with a gun from an old liefield cover and then that’s it. iron man swears he’s not a skrull, spider-woman is and says he is, and what the fuck ever. i’m done. i’m out.

there’s like twenty plotlines running through this book, and if this were a movie i could deal with jumping back and forth between them because in two hours it would all be over. but after nearly three months since issue one dropped, we’ve seen three pages of captain marvel attacking thunderbolts mountain, for example. i just can’t keep caring that long when there’s nothing there to even care about.

if i could go to marvel.com/secretinvasion six days a week and read a new page by leinil yu and keep up on the story, you know what? i’d still care. i’d probably be invested in the story.

i can’t. i’m not. you are blowing this.

i would have bought the first two issues of final crisis but the shop only had issue two. this is exactly what i was talking about in that ’save marvel’ post. i want to buy an issue of final crisis, but i can’t. because it isn’t there. and i’m not waiting weeks for my shop to reorder, when i can get online right now and get it from midtown in nyc.

(i mean, i can’t, i have no comics budget, so i’m actually trade-waiting this one already. but you know what i mean here.)

maybe i’m just depressed and that’s why i don’t care about it all. maybe if i had a good stable job and solid economics i’d be able to get excited about nick fury’s compensation gun and the can of whoop-ass he’s going to unleash upon the skrull armada for some portion of the next 22 pages in a week or so.

probably not?

anyways. thunderbolts 121 was a bit of a letdown after the pure gold that was 120. having now read the first volume of warren’s run which i picked up on amazon when i had money, i have the context for the backstory.

i kind of wish i didn’t. there’s no sympathetic characters. i don’t care about what happens, i’m not going to bother with the four issues i missed, and i’m not reading any further. i only liked 120 because it was norman osborne as the green goblin beating up other insane people. now he’s back to tommy lee jones at a desk and we got no ironic comeuppance, no collapse of the stupid system, and no justice. it’s just back to work, apprehending illegal superheroes by any means necessary, and i don’t want marvel to have a book about that. it’s a tremendously awful concept.

and while we’re on that subject, the initiative is a terrible idea. they’re treating regulated superheroes as a branch of the armed forces, when they should be a police action. you don’t make one superteam for every state, you put one superteam in every major city. they’re the seven star wanted level in gta. after the cops, swat, federal agents, and national guard have failed to stop you, they call in the supers.

so not only is iron man’s grand registration plan a crap idea, he’s doing a crap job of implementing it. and he’s got criminals doing his dirty work, and this is a horrid contrast to both any version of the character anyone ever liked, and the extremely popular movie that just came out and portrayed stark as a loveable rogue.

frankly, the idea that stark IS a skrull sleeper agent would be about the only satisfying payoff to secret invasion.

but i doubt it.