Jordan's Picks of the Week!!

The Flintstones #10

Ok, so last week I reviewed the odd Booster Gold/Flintstones cross over, and it piqued my curiosity of this Flintstones series. Now, I’ve heard some pretty good stuff about this from my friends, but never gave it a shot until tonight. And honestly, this might be the best book I read all week. I was very surprised at what I found here.

One of the things I really liked about the Booster Gold cross over was the writing by Mark Russell. Well, turns out he’s the regular writer of this series. And that is a very good thing, because he’s quite funny. Now, we might just have similar senses of humor, but I found myself laughing at a lot of this book. But, it also had these really great moments of social commentary, which I also love. There was some pretty damning stuff in here about drones, the budget for war and defense, materialism and at one point Fred Flintstone actually said, “If we’re looking for places to cut back, then I say racism is the most expensive luxury we have.” Wow, that was definitely not a moment I was expecting from a comic about the Flintstones.

The art was by Steve Pugh, and I really enjoyed it. The characters were much more human than in the cartoon, but still had a cartoonish sense about them, like Fred’s very heroic chin. Pugh was able to work really well with the Flintstone’s prehistoric setting, making everything feel like a modern city, like in the old cartoons.

There were a couple of plot lines running throughout this entire issue, and I found myself wanting to see more of each one. Much like the Booster Gold crossover, this is the best kind of odd, and I think I will be subscribing to this series after reading an issue.

X-Men Gold #1

Well, as I said last week, X-Men Gold looked pretty interesting to me, so I read it! Coming right off the heels of X-Men Prime, we get the first half of the blue and gold team (not to be confused with the blue and gold team of Booster Gold and Blue Beetle).

This version of the X-Men sees a group of mutants after a war with Inhumans, and still (always) trying to gain the trust of humanity. In the team this time around we have Kitty Pryde (as leader), Storm, Nightcrawler, Colussus, Prestige (Rachel Grey/Summers, whatever her name is now), and Old Man Logan. This is a well rounded team, and it’s not too big, not too small. It’s got a character for everyone, and it feels like the main X-Men team. I know blue will have some big X-Men, but they are all younger, time traveling heroes, so they aren’t as experienced.

So, we have a pretty standard fair here for the X-Men, their first outing together, and they are already a good team, thus we can skip the learning to work together part. Writer Marc Guggenheim does a good job of taking the familiar, making it new, but not giving us the origin story of a new team. We don’t spend pages and pages recruiting people. No, it’s right into the action. And, as far as story telling goes, artist Adrian Syan does a good job in depicting the X-Men. They look heroic. But they also look human in their display of emotion.

I’m excited to see where the dynamic of the team goes. X-Men is one of those interesting titles that tends to shake up its teams a lot, always giving us something new. Also, for anyone reading this

issue, there’s a cool sort history section in the back that walks you through pretty much everything that’s happened to the X-Men up to this point in manageable chunks. And for a team like this, that’s very handy!

Black Cloud #1

Black Cloud is a new book from Image that I had never heard of but, as Image continues to grow, I thought I’d give it a try. In short, it’s a book about stories, and about dreams. So it really got my attention. I kind of like stories, and view them as important, you might say.

This book is kind of tough to explain. The main character, whoever she is, basically has the power to take people into stories and dreams. It’s a cool concept, and we could really see some creative scenes come out of this. The first issue alone was full of things that amazed me. It was very original and fresh. For this, I have story tellers Jason Latour and Ivan Brandon to thank. They are both credited for story, while Brandon did the script. The art, done by Greg Hinkle, is also nice to look at. It’s not cloned super hero story art, but something unto itself. It especially helped to add a bit of magic to the dream scenes.

However, what really convinced me to buy this book was the coloring. Major props to Matt Wilson for that. I flipped through this in the store, unsure of what it was, and saw the coloring of what would turn out to be the dreams, and instantly decided to read this. The dreams are in black and white, except for bits of color, and they really pop. I won’t try and oversell this, especially as many readers probably don’t flock to a book fort it’s color, but when pick this up and you’ll notice how nice it is to look at.

Oh yeah, and there’s no ads! Wow, way to go image, all story, no filler.

Review by Jordan Kirian