Sleeper, for sure. It's still the best thing Brubaker/Phillips have done, which is saying a lot.

What film festival? And what flicks are you planning to catch?

It's all available in one very affordable hardcover. Must-buy for Sorrentino fans! I don't think the characterization is as strong as OML, but it's a lot of fun and the artwork is incredible.

The council of Phoenix hosts is really fun. I really dig that Hopeless included the Phoenix Five hosts in that batch too. I wonder how they're going to handle the visual similarities between Jean and Hope - even their costumes are almost identical. I'm glad they addressed it here, but I think the general solution that…

Year One was pretty great! As described in my post earlier, it's the first one that really grabbed my spouse's attention. Now she can't get enough of it.

I think his work on Green Arrow is even more impressive. I feel like he used a lot more single-page splash pages, most of which caused me to pump my fist in excitement over how awesome they were.

Right, and collecting them separately basically gutted one of the stories. And it's the Vol. 1 of Rebirth, so it'll be the one that new readers are most likely to pick up after seeing the movie.

I'm really not excited about Gert coming back, or that Alex is already back too. I still love the Runaways characters but in my head, the Vaughan/Alphona is impeccable and could just stand alone.

Got to see Baby Driver at a press screening last night and loved it. Very crowd-pleasing. It's like Edgar Wright decided to make a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Another factor is that none of Lemire's team books mentioned above were written under any great circumstances for creative freedom. Black Hammer could (very loosely) be considered a team book and it is fantastic! Extraordinary X-Men had to deal with a clusterfuck of an awful status quo and he did probably the best he…

Father figure JJJ in Silk is probably my favorite depiction of him outside of Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man. Love that character.

I really hope Lemire/Sorrentino move on to a creator-owned Image book next. Sorrentino's been moved over to Secret Empire, but I really don't think it's his best work. His signature style and opaque depictions of characters really suffers when there are splash pages where you're supposed to recognize individual heroes…

Guardian Devil is a really… interesting book. I remember loving it when I first read it back when I was 16 and at the appropriate age-level to appreciate Smith's antics. This was back when the Bendis run was coming out, along with the Ben Affleck movie. I remember a lot of (uninformed) people claiming that Kevin Smith…

Black Hammer Vol. 1 - What a nifty series that surprisingly turns out to be a long-developing passion project for Jeff Lemire. His description of this series as an Essex County take on superheroes is dead on. I wonder how the many references to existing stories and characters would go over with a newer reader, so I'm…

Growing up, Cannonball was always my favorite X-character. Mostly because his true superpower was being a nice boy.

I think a big problem is that Apocalypse himself is pretty boring and his powers are canonically vaguely defined. Age of Apocalypse is his most famous story and he's almost incidental to it. Although he looked pretty silly, it was a close adaptation to how he actually is.

I really liked Franco in 11/22/63 because it featured him in "actually trying" mode. Hopefully this is the form he takes with all of his mini-series work.

Also shades of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, but The Graduate is likely the closest read.

I'm really surprised her appearance was overlooked here. It was one of those moments that felt so real - running into an ex when you're at your lowest. Dev was clearly in a bad state yet pretended everything was going peaches in a way that felt very human. He didn't even ask her the basic questions that would come up:…

I first thought it was a flashback too, then rewound it and saw she wasn't wearing her ring either. They explicitly made it a point to show her engagement ring in bed the last time.