Comics I Bought This Week: June 18, 2011

Jun18
on June 18, 2011 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Comics I Bought This Week

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got three new comic plus a hard cover collection and a graphic novel:

  • Ruse – 4

  • Flashpoint: Grodd of War – 1

  • Teen Titans – 96

  • “Iron Man Vol. 7: My Monsters”

  • “Speak of the Devil” by Gilbert Hernandez

    • And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

    “The Starman Omnibus: Volume 5” by James Robinson, Peter Snelbjerg, and a bunch of others

    Here we go with the fifth Starman volume. It reprints issues 47-60 plus a few specials that came out at the time which was 1998-1999. Once again, Starman was a series I didn’t buy at the time so this is my first time reading these.

    These issues are the “Starman in Space” run. At the end of the last volume Starman left Earth in a rocket ship looking for his girlfriend’s brother, who was also a super hero named Starman, who supposedly had died in space while off on a mission with the Justice League. In this volume he’s in outer space on a quest. Plus there are a few stories about what is going on in his hometown, Opal City, in his absence.

    I’m not sure if it was just me but I found this volume, especially the first half of it, a little depressing. Just after starting his quest Starman gets sidetracked with a couple of time travel stories. One in the Legion of Superheroes era and one on Krypton fifteen years before the planet blows up. There is a lot of talk about knowing how and when characters are going to die. I found it all a bit of a downer. Starman even “Died” a couple of times during his travels in space. Other than that the stories were fine.

    The volume also has Peter Snelbjerg taking over from Tony Harris on the pencilling chores. He’s not as photo realist influenced as Harris but I liked his art. It’s graphic with a lot of shadow play and is generally good but sometimes the basic drawing lets me down. I’m not sure why because most of the time the drawing was solid. As with every volume of Starman there are individual issues drawn by artists other than the main one. I Found the issue by Craig Hamilton to be especially notable.

    Overall I thought these issues were enjoyable but I didn’t like them as much as the other volumes that took place on Earth in Opal City. It’s just a better setting for stories than space. I prefer stories of the weird things that go on in Opal City to space empires and space royalty. Why do comic book writers like royalty so much? Still, if you’re into Starman this is a decent volume to pick up.