Been too busy with life to keep this updated the last few weeks, have a serious backlog of music to review, but fortunately nothing in comic book that looks like it probably won’t suck in the last few weeks… but…

Since Warren Ellis appears to have retired (hopefully temporarily?) from comics, my only really contact with (new) mainstream comics recently has been perusing whatever it is Brian Michael Bendis has worked on — usually something like 2 new books/week :P — and maybe Jeff Parker’s work on Thunderbolts/Dark Avengers — and running down the Abnett & Lanning recent run of Guardians of the Galaxy (although I missed that completely until after it was over…)

The end of Warren Ellis & Stuart Immonen’s Nextwave: Agents of HATE was one of the driving factors that ended up with me giving up on comics a few years ago (along with the end of Ellis & Cassaday’s Planetary and a bunch of other factors…) But it was finding out about Immonen & Bendis’ run on Ultimate Spider-Man that was one of the factors that led me back into the comic book store a few years later. Stuart Immonen really plusses everything he works on, and he tends to work with those few really good writers… it should be some kind of testament to his ability that his work actually got me to read a Spider-Man comic after ~30 years…

There’s another Immonen out there: Kathryn Immonen…. whose work as a comic book writer I also really really like. My first exposure was probably that Patsy Walker: Hellcat minseries, and she’s also got a stint on Runaways, and a few other miniseries – Pixie Strikes Back, Herald, and Wolverine & Jubilee – for Marvel. The pair of Immonens also did a couple indie books together – Never as Bad as You Think, & Moving Pictures – which are A+.

The thing about S. Immonen, the thing that he gets that a lot of comics artists don’t get is the feeling of dynamics, the feeling of motion… his panels appear to be snapshots of stuff in motion, which is something that significantly disappeared esp in the 90’s with adobe photoshop & photo-ref… While the thing about K. Immonen is that she ties her stories in with a real sense of myth- & legend- level sense of wonder. She manages to catch a wave of storytelling (ref the Hellcat miniseries) that mirrors a timeless wonder of fairy tales (ref similar to what Mignola did in Hellboy.)

Anyway… earlier this year I was doing my daydreaming, y’know – what would I do if won the lottery type of stuff… and basically I would’ve bought or started a comic book publisher, and hire a dream team… I’ll have to recreate that list, but it would probably be something like: Stuart & Kathryn Immonen, Darywn Cooke, Colleen Coover, Brandon Graham, James Stekoe, Matt Howarth, Gabriel Ba, Fabio Moon, Paul Pope, Mike Allred, Jay Stephens, Skottie Young, Tonci Zonjic, Jeff Parker, Evan Dorkin, and hopefully Warren Ellis, Brian Michael Bendis, and Alan Moore, maybe Matt Fraction (if he can get nack to Casanova groove)… and just set them free to do whatever they wanted to do — as long as what they did was FUN, which was something that comic books have been sorely lacking (since about the mid-80s.) And as long as Kathryn Immonen & Colleen Coover would work on a Night Nurse/Hellcat/Shanna the She-Devil anthology title… and somebody resurrects Nextwave, Agents of Atlas, and Guardians of the Galaxy… but I digress…

Well, what does any of this have to anything…. I was just about to give up on paying attention to mainstream comics (yet again) — largely because of the atrocious Avengers vs X-men crossover event (which everyone involved should be thoroughly ashamed of) {…but that’s another story…} — when Marvel announces their rebranding of most of their core titles under as “Marvel Now” (whatevs). Significant is Bendis & S Immonen launching something called All-New X-Men, Fraction & Allred working on FF, Bendis moving to Guardians of the Galaxy, & K Immonen taking over writing on Journey Into Mystery….

So, I manage to get a couple of my wishes…

Frankly, the idea of reading (much less buying) an X-men comic fills me self-disgust and repulsion – I think I’d rather scoop my own eyes out with rusty spoons than read more of the X-men, especially after the terrible Avengers vs X-men… So, it is gonna be interesting to see if my <3 for Stuart Immonen overrides my anti-<3 for Marvel post-AVX. Consolation prize is that I can at least read Kathryn Immonen's Journey Into Mystery launch sans conditioned responses. Journey Into Mystery #646…

bonus from last week:
All-New X-men #1 will (GULP!) be checked out on Wednesday’s comic book store visit…