Craig's Reflection

 This is a bit of a mess really. Morrison throws you straight into the surreal world inside their head with no allowance made for actually easing the reader into it - although it's soon clear that this is all just a insulin-related hallucination whereby Joe's surroundings, toys, house, family, friends are converted into a fantastical world with analogues of each of the real world things - essentially he has to go downstairs, get a bottle of soda and drink it, and turn the light on, then all's ok, violently rammed into a Tolkeinesque filter of good vs evil, prophecies made and fulfilled, and weird names.   Perhaps more David Eddings than Tolkein, but you get the idea. Fab art by Sean Murphy with some nice design discussion at the back - actually that's the best bit of the book, and in fact I would have loved 160 pages of Murphy's discussions over the final comic to be totally honest.

 Given it's been years since I read these volumes - in their original Eclipse forms anyway, let alone as and when Warrior came out way before that - and I personally mythologise how good they are the time came to actually read them once more....do they still hold true today? Wow yes. Worse, so many tropes of modern comics originated in these books, such that the oft-made claims by Moore that superhero comics now are still slavishly following his ideas from that long ago....well it's all true.  He's right. On the stories themselves, it's weird how much I forgot about the originals - the seeds laid in book one that only come to bear in book three, the names of the other characters, the Qys in their human form, the sheer amount of stuff that I remember being confused about back then but makes perfect sense now.  If nothing else, my appreciation for Moore's writing is now greater than ever. I didn't want to buy the omnibus as I have the original paperbacks and Marve...

 Was this the first use of Judgment Day as a comics series title?  Seems overused now, but this version (from 1997) or so was Alan Moore working for Liefeld after his split from Image, taking previously stupid superhero tropes and giving them a twist.  This trade collection from Checker Book Publishing Group puts together the main Judgment Day storyline plus what feels to be launching points for an entire line (which presumably never materialised). Moore is Moore is Moore - if you like his writing (and let me state here I love it) then it doesn't matter that we have no idea who these characters are, it's the story that carries us through - Youngblood are a superhero team, one of them gets murdered, another one has blood on his hands, whodunnit? The heroes themselves are typical early Image fare and so is the art - long legs, huge breasts, clenched teeth and fists, and that's just the men.  Ridiculous anatomical aberrations nearly wreck the story - it's very hard to f...

Spidey has always held a place of affection in my heart, being the first comic I regularly bought as a young kid - the UK black and white oversized reprints from those days.  Had a pair of letters printed, won a no-prize, all the usual jazz. As a character and a comic he suffers from the usual soap opera problem - nothing really changes, reset button gets hit every now and then, he just doesn't age.   Such that affection these days is for specific storylines or runs - JMS's run, taken as a whole, not bad (apart from the Gwen storyline more so than the One More Day bollocks). And now this book from Chip Zdarsky and Mark Bagley.  What if you took Spidey starting in the 60s and actually allowed him to age, get married, have kids, and (spoiler alert) die?  In many ways this is the only Spider-Story you ever need, as it touches many bases of his lengthy publication history....but.....but....but....you sort of really need to know the events being referred to (Civil Wa...