GOTHAM CITY SIRENS...MARVEL DIVAS (is that the book's name?)...what's going on here? Will we have DARK HORSE DAMSELS next? IMAGE WOMEN? I like how these books are masquerading as vehicles for strong female characters when really they're just an excuse for cheesecake. And doesn't the Marvel series rather redundantly have Hellcat and Black Cat in the team?

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And Ash and Jack Burton are a little too similar to team up, imo.

Guess I'm saving money.

I heard a Cat has its own Twitter, I think I'll join to read that. 1:30PM, Licking my ass. 2:00PM Licking my ass. 2:30PM licking my ass. 3:00PM licking my ass. 3:30PM puking up ass hair ball. 4:00PM licking my ass.

Plus you never would hear a movie critic (or at least one of any standing) say he didn't like older movies. What would you think of a critic who says he didn't like Golden Age films, like that Maltese Falcon or Citizen Kane, or never watched the works of DW Griffith or Chaplin?

Sorry to go off on a little rant there. To each there own and I doubt this takes away from you love of the medium or your ability to review them, But you got to admit it sounds strange for a comic book critic to say he doesn't like Golden Age & Silver Age comics.

Plus, look at the woman writing The Twilight books. She never researched any other vampire novels, movies or the folk lore and God does it show (glittering vampires?).

Ehh, I told this to Baytor already...

Early comic book might be the same as early Silent Films, but show me a director who doesn't appreciate Murnau, Griffith, Dryer, Eisenstein or even Edwin S. Porter and I will show you someone who is probably a sub-par director.

Not saying you are wrong, just stating my opinion.

As for being for "10 year old cretins", the same could be said about the film industry, even when Chaplin and others worked in it. Film has long been looked down as being somehow "inferior" to theatre, especially in the first half of the century. It was mass entertainment, and mass entertainment isn't known for being high brow.

Now I am not saying you are wrong in your opinions, I just saw it as being strange and a little bizarre for a comic book critic to say he didn't like the "Golden Age" of his medium. Of course, you could argue you don't think it is a Golden Age, everyone is entitled but it just struck me as strange.

And yes, since I do read superhero comics so that would just as easily apply to me as everyone else. But you can't criticize how old comics were written for kids without also pointing out how adult comics are still mostly about the characters FROM those kid comics. At least they were honest about the target audience; we just like to come up with excuses why we read something that should be exclusively for Liam the Kid.

Now excuse me, I am going to look at my Essential Avengers vol. 3...

And just for the record, I am not trying to insult you in anyway. I am just stating my opinion, which differs from yours. But at the same time I respect your opinion....

Except for Lee/Kirby. They were awesome.

Man, it is sad what he has become. One of the true greats in comics and now he is just bitter and obsolete.

Gotham City Sirens could've been a 9 but was indeed a 6.5 or 7, due to March's art. It was serviceable at best, missing both the fun and the sexiness it needed. Not exactly Dodson level. Still, will NEVER drop this book. Mixing "strong female characters" with blatant sexy fun is totally my thing, and Harley Quinn is my #1 favorite character in comics. Yes, I love Jessica Drew, but Harley is waaaay better.

Haven't read last week's Incognito, either, which doesn't indicate me loving it. I quite enjoyed the first two issues, but don't remember #3 very well, and fear the book is heading into "it's fine" but not memorable territory.

Lethal Legion, you say? Well, I will check the price on that and if it's $2.99, I'll buy it.

I personally wouldn't call Whedon's AXM a run for the ages. We'll see, but I don't expect it to be remembered that much. I felt it was fine, rather airless and slow. Not much fun at all considering who did it.

When all comics go to $3.99 I am going to cut my stack in half, because that is just ridiculous. Marvel is sneaky right now, varying the price of the same books from month to month. Very Sly.

Oh, yeah, they did. See, everyone forgot about it.

Spirit was obviously mint, and so was Plastic Man at Quality, Phantom Lady had some pretty provocative covers, Wonder Woman at DC during the Golden Age was just a brilliant study in using subliminal sex to sell and broadcast ideas; Captain Marvel is probably the best example of the superhero as child wish fulfillment ever; Captain America was actually a damn good horror comic; Batman and Superman varied in quality issue to issue; and Airboy was pretty good.

My unsung title of the Golden Age is Harvey Comic's Black Cat. I think it holds up pretty well, and I think the extra stuff in the back like the jujitsu lessons are just awesome (and predating Punisher's similar advice in the 80's and 90s by four decades).

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Of all the nits to pick, but he has done good work as both writer and artist (Next Men, for example) and I would still check out something he did (unlike his x-partner, Claremont.)

I mean, what is the point of these heroes if they are not working for a better future? Imagine showing a GI during WWII a film that says "hey, guess what? You failed and the Nazis conquered the world!"

The other thing is taste changes. I am a movie aficionado, so I can watch a lot of old or foreign movies. Most people can't, However, I do laugh when people say "Oh, it was good for its day" when describing Citizen Kane or some Film Noir like Out of the Past or Kiss of Death. Sorry, but it is good for any day, it is just that the audience taste and expectations have changed. The style of that film is no longer in a manner that audience members can appreciate; they can’t handle the acting styles, the b&w film and the expressionism. So people laugh at those movies and call them old fashion, which they are because those images have become so redundant (of course, in 30-40 years people will be laughing at modern movies just as much and finding them, redundant – robot testes might become a film trope).

The same thing with comic books. Modern audiences find old comic book stories redundant and want something else besides just super-hero fantasy - they want the illusion of sophistication and adult subject matter; just like guys in the 70s wanted the illusion that they were tackling social issues and guys in the 40s wanted them to tackle Nazis. Each generation expects something different out of comic books, but it doesn't make one generation intrinsically superior to another. It just means there tastes are different.

I could also point out how all these advances in comic books they have yet to come up with better characters than the big guys who appeared in the Golden or Silver Age, or have come up with more mind-blowing events than the original Galactus Trilogy, the death of Gwen Stacy, or death of Phoenix (first one).

I hope I don’t sound condescending, that isn't my aim. I am just stating my theory of how one era might be more “advanced”, it doesn’t necessarily make it better. Most of it is a matter of taste. Personally, I am a fan of older books because A) it is the era I grew up in so I am inclined to like them more; and B) to paraphrase Kuryakin, they seem to be less interested in ass-fucking Batman in prison.

If we want to get technical Superman is a ripoff of Jesus. Does that mean I need to commit the new testament to memory to be a comic reviewer?

It's fine to show reverence for forgotten times, honestly it's how we progress as a society, but to fault someone for not liking these pieces seems a bit extreme.

With each year I see scenes, snippets or ideas that have come from books past. It's kind of our nature though. Take the common tenets of humanity and find new ways to articulate those ideas into the voice of the current generation.

As a theater major I was always ostracized by my erudite counterparts becasue I could not stand doing Shakespere(sic). My tolerence level for poetry is about 20 minutes not 4 hours plus. Does this mean I hate theater , far from it - Durang, Stoppard, Neil Simon - I love them all.

Time marches on and changes us. Appreciate the old stories for what they were and where they brought us. And hey if you love reading the oldies and the modern stuff, more power to you.

Silver age, I mostly associate with DC, and while I can appreciate a lot of it, I've had to admit that I'm a DC-curious Marvel Zombie.

Chronologically, I suppose that early Stan/Jack/Steve Marvel heroes fall into the Silver Age, but I associate it more with the Bronze Age, which means that I started reading comics as a pre-school kid in the Tarnished Bronze Age and became a hardcore reader during the Marvel Horror/Kung Fu/Blaxploitation/Dinosaur era, which I still the standard that I judge comics by.

However...I don't expect a modern comic to be written like those Bronze nuggets, although I do expect it to elicit that same level of excitement. A comic book can be anything except boring and be okay. It can be stupid as long as it's not boring.

I recently E-Bayed off a lot of my Bronze age comics. So many of my favorites don't hold up. The art is amazing but the writing is often the trouble. Not that even popular, current comic writing is much better. I wanted to like WANTED but it never got any further than wanting.

Mostly, what I got out of studying Golden and Silver Age superhero comics is empathy for people who don't like the comics I grew up on.

There was a chat online with some of the creative people doing the excremental FLASH GORDON for Sci-Fi Channel before the show aired, and they were taking questions, and this was before they had even done any casting annoncements etc. My question: "So, before I even know anything about your show, I already know that you're definitively not going to allow Ming the Merciless to be Asian, and will instead go with the new anti-Capitalism trope of making him a rich, white businessman. Why can't an Asian be a bad guy?" There was a significant pause and my question got a reply: "We're really excited about the new direction we're taking FLASH GORDON and hope you give us a chance!" ****ers. They were pwned and they knew it.

My point isn't how cool I am. Similar to the crap with Aang being white for THE LAST AIRBENDER WHICH ISN'T CALLED AVATAR ANY MORE THANKS TO M. NIGHT WUSSING OUT, the PC efforts only HURT the material. Ming is Asian. Aang is Asian. Mandarin should be Asian, too.

Easy folks it was purely for humor....I will send this to three of my Asian friends to atone.

When I was there last month we used the Garmin GPS and the closest shop was 200 miles away (which we just naturally assumed was on another island).

While I did end up staying next door to Lindsey Lohan and had a charming conversation with Kirstie Alley in LAX the vacation somehow felt incomplete without buying any books out there.

I was at LAX once I saw the almighty boxer of Aliens there, Charles S. Dutton. He saw me eyeing him up, but I knew that he had spent 10 years in prison for stabbing a guy before he became the original Roc and was too afraid to talk to him.

You have to drive to get to anything on the island and since we were for 5 days we saw the ENTIRE island.

She gave me one chance at trying to find one on GPS, when I asked if she wanted to hop over to the big Island to visit one I recived her icy stare of death....

No. I don't think a dman thing was missing. And let us not forget Damien is a 10 year old raised by assasins. not even in the same league as the slow kid next door that still has to have velcro shoes because bunny ears confuse him.

Perfectly fine as a stand-alone issue, but here we go again with disjointed stories between all of the titles.

Look, I don't expect the stories to be seamless, but you have Emma in AXM as one person and here as another.

Beast is tripping through time in the last issue of Uncanny meanwhiel he's been incarcerated for months in this.

What am I missing?

Here's my problem -- AXM was out of step during the Wheedon time (which I was cool with), but since Ellis took over it has been in-step.

not trying to be a continuity prude, but Uncanny 512 just came out last week and everything was honkeydorey in that and 511. Now all of a sudden the X-Men are equivalent to Hitler -- out of the clear blue.

I guess I am just projecting my own personal opinion. I work in the film business, and I am a huge fan of older movies. It was the old guys who built the language and grammar of the medium. And when a director comes into my editing bad and doesn't have any knowledge of the classics, I know I am in for a long and painful job.

Oh, and Optimous Douche, I read the Bible once a year, alternating between Old and New Testament. I'm agnostic, so I need to keep up on it to drive my religious friends nuts by pointing out there hypocrisy.

Deathstroke and Terra where lovers during the Judas Contract story, and she was supposed to be 13 and he was God knows how old.

And in later stories he is shown as an HONORABLE villain (and even has a sit down with Changeling). The guy was fucking a 13-year-old and he is honorable? WTF?

As far as missing a page, I guess I just don't know what to do if the comic doesn't tell me if its to be continued or The End.

Kuryakin's excellent mock-Millar pitch should provoke a mock-Millar pitch-a-thon. I'll go first. "The guy you think is Reed Richards isn't-- he's actually Franklin Richards, from the future! And he's been pretending to be Reed for years! That's right-- Franklin Richards has been fucking his own mother! This is the most awesome comic ever!"

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