Graeme gets comics!

Only a couple though, I spent far too much money on books (at the Forbidden Planet signing on Thursday) and couldn’t quite stretch the bank balance to cover everything else that I wanted!
Without further ado, here’s what I came home with...

B.P.R.D: The Black Goddess #1



I’ve always fancied seeing what all the fuss was about B.P.R.D (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) and, as the opener in a story, this looked like as good a place as any to jump right in. Maybe I should have started somewhere else as the fact that ‘Black Goddess’ appears to lead on from another storyline made me feel like I was in at the deep end and struggling to stay afloat! I had a look for ‘Black Goddess’ on the Dark Horse website and found the following,

The Black Goddess is the second of three arcs pulling together threads from the beginning of the series -- and leaving the B.P.R.D. and the world forever changed.

I guess that will teach me! The comic itself is all about setting things up for future events and it looks like I’ve got some reading ahead of me if I’m ever going to catch up... In the meantime though, I’ve got a lot of time for Guy Davis’ atmospheric artwork and I particularly like the character of Johann Kraus (a disembodied ectoplasmic spirit that has to live inside a containment suit). Can anyone tell me where I should start with B.P.R.D?


Amazing Spiderman #583



I have never picked up a Spiderman comic until now, one look at the cover and you’ll know why I did this time ;o) I’m not American but it’s hard not to get caught up in the ‘feel good’ attitude towards Obama’s presidency and buying ‘Amazing Spiderman 583’ was my geeky way of getting in on it all ;o) As a quick aside, this cover isn’t the one that I ended up with (yellow background, no flag) but it was the only one I could find via Google. It’s a shame then that the story itself isn’t that good, a ‘who’s the real president?’ story that is resolved quickly and with little real fuss. I actually prefer the other story, ‘Platonic’, which looks at Betty Brant’s friendship with Peter Parker. Talking of which, I don’t read Spiderman but was aware of him revealing that he is Peter Parker. Betty Brant doesn’t seem to know though and neither does Obama, what’s going on there?

I couldn’t say for certain whether #583 is a cynical attempt by Marvel to cash in on what’s going on but I can say that it’s still a cool thing to have in your collection. It might even tempt me to pick up more Spiderman comics in the future...