Ultimate Spider-Man #155

In addition to this being an accurate representation of my feelings right now, I have to say that #155 may be my favorite issue of Ultimate Spider-Man ever. The series right now is without a doubt as good as it has ever been; probably as good as anything in the Ultimate line has ever been.

It's more or less a tradition to give Peter brief moments of happiness every now and then, only to ruin them shortly afterward. On the surface, in fact, this is essentially the same thing that's happening over in Amazing Spider-Man with Big Time, but even if this whole Death of Spider-Man storyline hadn't been teased to death over the last couple months, I think this issue would be notable for throwing so much sudden happiness Peter's way while still carrying an undercurrent of sheer dread. Part of it is due to Bendis - in particular the fact that he's been writing the title for ten years now and it's possible for one to sense his ebbs and flows after all this time - and part of it is just because it's the Ultimate U and Anything Can Happen.

Over in Big Time, making Peter happy is pretty much limited to taking away his financial worries and giving him something approaching a steady girlfriend (but let's not dwell on that), because the rest of his world is so fixed in stone after all these years. But here, Bendis can give us a reconciliation with JJJ that feels honest and legitimately earned, and reconnections with both Kitty and MJ that carry the weight of the entire series (or most of it, in Kitty's case) behind them. There's just nothing happening with Spider-Man right now that even touches the current Ultimate status quo, and I'm both excited and terrified to see what happens next.

On another note - I'm glad that I had a lot to say about this one, because after months of indecision, I've come to the conclusion that this strip, #100, will be the end of Half-Assed Commitment as it's existed thus far. There will be more coming to this site in the near future, if only because "half-assed.com" is too beautiful to go to waste, but you'll have to tune in next Tuesday at the usual time to find out what's next. Cheers!

Daylight Savings Time

'nuff said.

Onslaught Unleashed #2

The original Onslaught story back in '95 was the first Marvel Comics story I ever read. Even 15 years later, I recall it mostly fondly, and I think the gist of it holds up pretty well for 90's material. It's nicely poignant that this would be my first Onslaught reference since my second strip ever, and what I'm pretty sure is the first time I've referenced an issue (and a spoiler, to boot!) the day it came out. I'd apologize to readers of Onslaught Unleashed, but I don't think there's more than four of five of them out there. Ah, well.

Ultimate Captain America #3

I'm always telling people how patient I am - but nothing makes me more impatient than being told something is going to happen at a certain time and it doesn't. A couple weeks ago, I waited thirty minutes past the scheduled time for a certain bus to come. If I hadn't already checked the schedule, or if the schedule had told me that I'd have to wait thirty minutes, I would have been totally cool with it. But because it was supposed to have come, I absolutely lost my mind waiting for that damn bus. I think that's probably the worst form of psychological torture I can imagine.

Charlie Sheen Theatre

As there's not really anything intelligent to add to this, I want to talk about something else for a minute.

Am I the only one who thinks it's really obvious that Age of X is the Matrix? Maybe not literally, but some form of collective brainwashing? The first thing that clued me in was Hellion's arms - if this is actually a drastically changed timeline of some sort, what are the odds that he'd just happen to have lost them here too? And then Kitty showed up in an anti-phasing suit. And then the thing with Scott seeing the same dog tag info on more than one person. Obviously there's a connection of some sort to 616's actual physical reality (otherwise Hellion's hands and Kitty's phasing wouldn't mean anything), but every single thing about this story screams artificial reality - Fortress X is all there is here; there's nothing outside of the Force Walls whatsoever. I'd even go so far as to posit that this is all the work of someone with positive intentions - trying to show the X-Men how much worse thins could be.

Usually I suck at anticipating things like this, so I'd just assumed that everyone else saw it until I read AICN's two-person review of the story so far, and their reviewers don't seem to have any idea yet. Am I missing something, or am I just that amazing?

Invincible Iron Man #501

Stomach Flu Comix.

'nuff said.

April O'Neil

And I did indeed make up about half of it - the first panel is real, the rest, while representing true information, is extrapolated and not literal. He's explained to me before the thing about April not being a real person within TMNT continuity, but I always tend to put it out of my mind for the sheer lunacy of it. Apparently it was some sort of Kirby homage - her "father" had a crystal that made anything he drew in pencil come to life briefly; April was drawn with a pen, and therefore remained corporeal much longer.

This concept didn't go over very well, it seems.

The Tempest

I got a Kindle a week or so ago, and the first thing I did was download a free copy of The Tempest, which I started reading around six months ago. I'm absolutely loving the text-to-speech function, but it doesn't really mesh well with Shakespeare - or a play format at all, really. It'd great for burning through an entire issue of Time while you're doing the dishes, though.

The only thing that's kind of disappointing me is the fact that lots of books don't seem to come with the actual cover art. It's be black and white, granted, but I'd still prefer that to generic text and a publisher logo. I don't know what the deal is there.

Fantastic Four #587

With the debatable exception of #86.1, I believe this is the first time I've done a genuine callback - which is to say, you won't really get today's strip unless you read and remember #70.

I was thrilled to learn about Johnny's death, though that's not to say I have any ill will toward the character. But Ben and Sue are historically very mistreated in this series, so killing them would've been bullshit, and Reed is the best thing about the series these days, so that wouldn't have done either. Johnny's great as a foil for Ben and an entry point for young readers, but no one is more in need of a time out than ol' Hotfoot. And that's really all we're talking about here - I mean, there's dead, and there's comic book dead, and then, waaaay past comic book dead, there's Fantastic Four dead. I hear tell that Reed once built a machine to abduct Ben from Heaven after an earlier death of his. When you've defeated Heaven itself, I guess the Negative Zone should be pretty simple, huh?

Superman #708

One: yes, folks, the Boy Scout did it again. The lesson for creators should be clear here: don't touch Middle America with a ten-foot pole.

Two: when all is said and done and this webcomic of mine is but a distant memory, it will all have been worth it if for no reason than that it forced me to learn how to properly spell "Cincinnati".

The Steelers

Essentially a real exchange between myself and my fellow comic shoppers today. Football clearly isn't a major concern in the hallowed halls of Half-Assed Commitment, but I do live in Pittsburgh, and hey - there's no reason I can't be topical once in a while, right?

Point One

Very nearly included in this strip - one panel of two guys walking along the ground holding a rope, one saying to the other "Why are we walking like this?" Unfortunately, there were way too many actual HAC panels I wanted to use. It's a shame, too; it would've been hilarious for one or two people.

For the record: I thought Iron Man #500.1 was really pretty cool. Having actually gone to the trouble of reading Demon in a Bottle, though, it seems like the modern version of Tony's rock bottom doesn't match up very well with what originally happened. Good thing there's decompression nowadays.

Ultimate Spider-Man #152

In no way do I voice this complaint lightly, and I'm not coming down on Lafuente or Pichelli overall - both have done some great work on this title and elsewhere - but something is going seriously wrong in this issue. I can only assume they had a really tight deadline to hit in order to keep Death of Spider-Man on track, because there's some outright inexcusable stuff in here - the Black Cat sequences are pretty good, but the entire "now" sequence following Peter and Co. in Queens is full of warping, excessively-sketchy figures, confusing atmospheric effects, and worst of all - page 15, panel one.



The more time I spend looking at that picture, the more confused I get. Get a rough sense of how wide the car on the left must be overall, then try to transpose it to what's passing for the street's right "lane". It's almost like it's supposed to be a tiny one-lane street, but then the white lines wouldn't make sense.

And then there's the mailbox that couldn't quite fit the entirety of the word "Parker".

Oh, and Peter's kind of floating back there, isn't he? I could go on and on.

Avengers #9

Meh - not much to say about this one. This arc of Avengers is definitely better than the first one, and the art is way better, but I'm getting a little weary of Steve and Tony yelling at each other constantly. It might have been better to do the Illuminati fallout circa Siege rather than wait until they were finally starting to make amends and then fuck it all up again.

The Cape

Honestly? The Cape is better than I was expecting. It's very simple, but not idiotic simple like Heroes was at its worst; just very uncomplicated. And it's nice to see Summer Glau playing a character who's got her shit together, instead of some form of kook. My only serious complaint right now (caveat: I've only watched the first two episodes so far) is that the pilot should've been at least ninety minutes if not two hours. A lot of the simplicity I'm sensing could have come from the simple fact that they squeezed at least a feature-length movie's worth of plot into one 44-minute episode.

But that said - "Secretary of Prisons"? Really?

Notary Service

Today's strip is dedicated to my now-ex-job in the copy center of a well-known retail operation. I won't mention which one, but it rhymes with "Shmaples". Today I began working in the copy center of a law firm - it's a lot of the same kind of work, but after bouncing around all sorts of customer service positions for the vast majority of my twenties, I have at long last joined the stable nine-to-five workforce; complete with stable nine-to-five benefits. I may continue to use the aforementioned retail operation as the backdrop for any amusing copy center musings that come to me, just because...well, because I really like the background I made for it.

Black Panther #514 - Addendum

Seriously, though - hold a page of Black Panther next to a page of another Marvel series; the text is like half the normal size. It'd actually be easier to read if I downloaded a bootleg and looked at it on my monitor.

Attention VC's Joe Caramagna - I'm callin' you out, pardner.

Black Panther #514

I'm really liking this whole Black Panther: The Man Without Fear thing, and that's coming from someone who reads very few Black Panther comics. BP's premise has a lot of potential, though, and every once in a while someone will come out of nowhere with a left-field take on the character that really intrigues me - the last time was Jason Aaron's Secret Invasion tie-in that was basically Wakanda vs. the Skrulls a la 300. Most of what interests me about the Panther as a character, actually, stems from his status as the leader of a country - which makes the current series all the more impressive since it's basically your typical 616 urban-vigilante story with the hero character's personality being somewhat different than, say, Daredevil's. Maybe that's it - at long last, I might just be sick of Matt Murdock. The emerging supporting cast here isn't exactly the most unique ever, but they're at least as interesting as Foggy & Co.

Ultimate Captain America #1

Okay one caveat to Tuesday's comments regarding the Ultimate line: the solo Utimates miniseries have been awesome, and seem likely to stay that way. Captain America is only one issue in, but neither Jason Aaron nor Ron Garney have let me down in the past, so I'm excited to see more of Ultimate Nuke (and let me tell you, it's hard to say that with a straight face).

And Ultimate Thor? Jonathan Hickman? Forget about it. Even Carlos Pacheco's art is more engaging this time around when compared with his work on the first New Ultimates arc, so either Hickman's design influence is just that huge, or Millar really has lost something in my eyes.

In any event, here's hoping these don't stop with Thor and Cap - I'd suggest giving Warren Ellis Hank Pym if he wasn't already dead. Captain Marvel would be fun, maybe.

Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ulti-- Christ, that's a long title.

If it wasn't supposed to be part of this whole Death of Spider-Man thing, I probably wouldn't be bothering with NANU (heh - "nanu"), but as is, I'm cautiously optimistic. 2010 was the first year in the Ultimate line's existence where I didn't buy every single title, which is another way of saying I got sick of the Ultimates.

Jeph Loeb's New Ultimates, if it can be said to exist at all, is every bit as annoying and forgettable as Ultimatum, but that was expected. What's caught me by surprise is how little Mark Millar's Ultimate Avengers is grabbing me. The first story arc was pretty good. The second arc was alright, though I'm not really a Ghost Rider person. And now this vampire business - I just cannot make myself care.

What's funny about it is that I'm absolutely crazy about the current incarnation of Ultimate Spider-Man. I wish the art wasn't changing around so much, but between Bombshell, den mother Aunt May, and super hero training, this is the most fresh and exciting paradigm Peter Parker's been stuck into in all the time I've been reading comics. Here's hoping the Death crossover brings some of that enthusiasm over to the Ultimates, rather than bringing my apathy to Spider-Man.

Axel Alonso

With all my knee-jerk snark out of the way, I don't really know enough about Axel Alonso to offer a terribly intelligent reaction to his promotion, or to Joe Quesada and this "Chief Creative Officer" business. Greg Land is absolutely an albatross around the X-titles' neck, but whether Alonso has anything in particular to do with his ubiquity, I couldn't say. What I can say is that Second Coming was hands-down the tightest, most coherent and well-executed Marvel event I've read in years and years, so to whatever extent that was his doing, Marvel's in good hands. I guess we'll see.

Invincible Iron Man #33

One thing I love about doing this strip - every now and then, if I really have trouble coming up with an idea, all I have to do is call my roommate over and ask him a random comics question and within 30 seconds, a strip will emerge almost fully-formed from our actual conversation.

I'm crazy about Invincible Iron Man at the moment, but the whole Detroit Steel thing, the app thing in particular, just doesn't excite me as much as other aspects of the series - I'm probably the one person who would be thrilled if it focused way more on the corporate material at the expense of the action. I'm really excited to see what Fraction's going to do with the Mandarin this year, though.