Deathstroke has always been catnip to pre-teen boys, in every shop I've ever gone into. That said, it's usually about the "badass with guns" more than the "horrifyingly logically amoral" part. I hope.

I'm still a little bit confused by their pitch of Catalyst Prime as "super-diverse creative teams" being the same line as "three out of seven books written by Joe Casey", but YMMV.

IMO it was an underwhelming book for the huge hype it got but an enjoyable enough S&S romp.

I love Cliff Chiang but I haven't even looked at Paper Girls because I end up going "Self, you know what you think about BKV's middle-run doldrums followed by gratuitous shock endings" and thinking "Maybe when it's all done".

Deathstroke is kudzu plotting and moral ambiguity in one delicious bundle of "I find myself re-reading earlier issues and going OHH".

There's an essay to be written about the Dixon Era of late 90s/early 2000s DC and how the characters he really built up fared afterwards. No one else seemed to have hooked on to Connor Hawke, for instance, but the dynamic he built in Birds of Prey (which was his baby) changed a lot but lasted.

And now UA is being taken over by Zub and my knives are all out for him after this Thunderbolts run. I find it so much worse when someone talks a respectable game and then comes on and writes a stinker then when I don't hear anything from them and it sucks.

Yeah, I haven't dug in because I was absolutely fucking mad about the initial setup, but now that it's done and the reception from people I generally don't think suck too much has been positive… (that's a compliment, really)

The dumb bros thing continues, he wastes all the immense potential of Moonstone and what she does when she thinks the leadership is inadequate, but it's the way he handles the last issue that pushes it over for me from "dull" to "actively enraging and stupid".

Superior Foes was a stealth Thunderbolts book. Boomerang was very much in the mold of Parkerbolts, the new Beetle was a pickup from a one-off in Bru's "Zemo trolls Bucky" arc, and it had Abner in a supporting role. And he wrote some great Zemo and Fixer in that Beetle issue. He clearly knows and loves 'em, and…

I came into it loving the Thunderbolts and being neutral-to-"has real potential" on Bucky, and it's made me despise Bucky and hope he dies a miserable horrible humiliating death, because the book has been nothing but "BUCKY AND KOBIK (and these other losers) NOW MORE BUCKY". It's even weirder because Zub talked a…

I very, very greatly enjoyed the massive meta shit that Spencer took on the last ten years of Zemo characterization, from Bru's "regressing to troll Bucky" to Waid's "random Hydra involvement" to Hopeless' "Bagalia shenanigans" and Remender's "just pretty evil now".

A huge plus for this book is that there's continuity, and yet every issue is a gratifying stand-alone story that can be enjoyed on its own.

Does the archaeology part involve 1) stupendous amounts of alcohol and cigarettes 2) profs sleeping with students 3) someone cataloging a few thousand pins? If not…

I was over the moon because when it was announced Bemis did a CBR interview that was all "I'm not reading the older stuff too much, we want to do something new" but this was very engaged with and had clearly read the Gerber mini closely, and productively.

I loved Foolkiller. Really. No joke.

Moonstone is powerful but Graviton is absurdly broken…so make it all about the psychological relationship of the two characters instead of power levels wank or even intricate action plotting, bam!

I'm waiting because he's said he pitched something smaller/more niche/more personal.

I think he was more successful (and I admittedly often forget where he left off and FabNic picked up) with Graviton and the Thunderbolts. Every interaction of Moonstone with Graviton is pure gold.

The thing with Kyle being Hispanic is that it was an (IMO) shitty Judd Winick retcon, wherein his missing father who we'd met in a few issues as a secret agent of some kind turned up again and hey! he's Mexican! Kyle had been notable for being the child of a single mother and close to his mom, a different dynamic…