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I noticed that the library had all four volumes of Whedon and Cassaday's run on Astonishing X-Men, so I checked them out. And, well, I bailed out after the first chapter.

The art is beautiful, as it always is with Cassaday, and with the collections there's no problem with the fact that it takes a really long time for him to draw his beautiful pictures.

It's the writing. Everything just felt kind of askew, like I was watching a group of actors playing the X-Men. And it was so slow, and it felt like another round on a treadmill I've been on before and wasn't really missing.

I think I'll put the time into reading something else.

Now I've seen Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, and glad I am of both.

Iron Man is such a jewel. My pick for best superhero movie yet? Maybe so; it certainly doesn't have a lot of competition. This is the role Downey was born to play, in the way that Shelly Duvall was born to play Olive Oyl. I was impressed at how smoothly the origin updated, and of course I'm pretty much always up for corporate schemers as the villains. And the action. Wow. The action. I am in looooove with the flight sequences. I was also pleased to see the secret identity thing go out the window. Yeah, it's a venerable supers convention, but it just plain doesn't work for a lot of characters anymore, I think. Have I ever mentioned how much of a sucker I am for building-and-testing sequences? It's true. Give me good forging and experimentation and I'll follow you anywhere. So this was pretty much gadget porn for Bruces.

Thumbs up, and then another one, and the robots will put some more up.

Incredible Hulk is not that reliably excellent, but it worked very well for me. In the first big fight, in the Brazilian bottling plant, I suddenly realized that they were giving me reveals paced as if in a horror movie. And really, it's a werewolf movie. The escalating revelations, and wow, the sense that transformation hurts, this is classic horror-movie territory appropriated well. It occurs to me that I haven't seen a lot of use of that idea in the comic, and now I want to. Roth and Hurt were fun as antagonists, and Roth suggests someone who's both uncovering layers of suppressed crazy and finding new ones to dig through, which is a good act. The "days without incident" timers were very effective—the scrolldown from 158 to 0 had a nice little emotional wallop in it, I thought. Oh, and the CUNY biologist whose name I'm not remembering, the hyper guy, reminded me so very, very much of people I'd see at Caltech on Seminar Day.

So again, happy thumbs up.

Oh, and two great soundtracks.

This is such a remarkable time to be a superhero fan.

It's been a long time since I bought comics regularly—I'd stopped before I left Portland, and was only able to do it for a year or so here. And then I really stopped altogether except for the very occasional graphic novel or scan. But now that I can get to a good library, I get to play catch-up some. And it's really interesting to look at works I missed at the time.

Take House of M, an event sort of mini-series written by Brian Michael Bendis, pencilled by Olivier Coipel, and inked by a variety of folks, with colors by Frank D'Armata. This came out in 2005-6, but I come to it fresh. I read none of the work leading up to it, nor anything following on it. I'm looking at it as someone thoroughly familiar with the Avengers and X-Men of days gone by but expecting not to really pick up on all the nuances.

Y'know, this is a really darned good book. It's an epic tragedy, that builds on the classic sense of what super-heroes do, and confronts them in a situation where business as usual cannot be done.

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