I’m back from the comic shop with only two new comics.

  • Age of Bronze 25
  • Strangers in Paradise 88 (only two issues left!)
  • I’m ambivalent about City of Others 1 that I picked up last week. About half of it was good and about half of it was mediocre. It started slowly and the artwork was not involving. Then it picked up and Wrightson’s storytelling got more involving. It ended pretty well. Overall I really wasn’t a fan of the plot but I still might give it one more issue to see if they can build on the good stuff.

    Week Twelve of my reviews of recent DC Comics.

    Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters 2-3 – I actually have two more issues of these series (4 & 6) but I could barely make it through the two I am reviewing. It’s not a terrible comic it’s just something I’ve read many times before. Uncle Sam is the spirit of the USA and someone in the government is corrupt, trying to take over the world, and using officially sanctioned government super heroes to do it. Uncle Sam convinces some of those heroes to fight with him against the government.

    In the last ten or fifteen years there have been a lot of comics trying to mix super heroes and politics together in a sophisticated way. Some have succeeded and some haven’t but this series mixes politics and super heroes in an old fashioned unsophisticated way. Yet Uncle Sam contains a lot of death and violence so it’s not old fashioned enough to have any charm. It’s yet another well crafted comic without anything to interest me in it. Check it out only if you haven’t read a thousand “the government is corrupt and we have to patriotically stop them” comics.

    Welcome to Tranquility 1-2 – I liked these two issues despite the goofy premise. Tranquility is a town of retired super heroes and villains. This story is about the town’s sheriff as she tries to keep order in this generally sleepy retirement village. Then a murder occurs and it turns into a mystery.
    It’s goofy and annoying in that the story could easily be told without the super hero elements. They seem shoe horned in at times. But it has a charm that outweighs the goofiness and the storytelling is good. Check it out for a fun little story.