News Mon, 04 Dec 2006 07:14:47 CST Vu

Books
jimcleave @ 2006-12-04 01:33:00

Some fun stuff I've read in the past year or so:

(excerpt)

JLA/AVENGERS: THE COLLECTOR'S EDITION OVERSIZED, SLIPCASED HARDCOVER (Aug 2004)

JLA/Avengers — Finally got a chance to read it. Boy this was fun! If you hated the 1990's "DC Vesus Marvel" story as much as I did, read this. As with most of Kurt Busiek's stuff (he's one of my favorite writers in the superhero genre), it feels stylistically like the fun Bronze Age comics I grew up with—just enough angst to make the characters human, not so much as to dull the senses—and for the art, this was literally George Perez's dream project for twenty years. My only two minor complaints are that, because his mind is being influenced by some cosmic whatchamadoo for most of the story, Superman acts out of character (and Perez draws his face a little funny, for some reason); and also that because it's officially just an Avengers story, Spider-Man gets only a very brief cameo (but, on the plus side, that means Wolverine never shows up either). Apart from that, this story totally rocks. Busiek actually tried to keep it as canon in later JLA stories, despite its having been an intercompany crossover, but Infinite Crisis (DC's most recent once-a-decade continuity purge) seems to have erased it again. Pity.