Mike BensonRecensioni

1337

1138

Definitely better than Deadpool: Corps. Other than that, nothing special.

Short summary: Leviathan is a perfectly good continuation of Dini and Nguyen's work on the first Streets of Gotham collection.

The title story starts off the collection nicely - The Huntress tracks Man-Bat across the city, and both of them end up in over their heads when they crash into an old church. Dini does a good job of blending Huntress's wit with the spooky situation. My one little grumble here is that it seems like this would be a natural place to address the cross iconography Huntress uses, but it doesn't come up once.

"In The Bleak Midwinter" is a sad, Christmas one-shot featuring Humpty Dumpty and continuing the Zsasz story from the first collection. Really well done.

When I first read through the collection, I wasn't really a fan of "Hardcore Nights", but I enjoyed it a little bit more on the second pass. It's a pretty good Batman mystery story, but ultimately forgettable. (This is where I drop a star.)

The collection gets rounded out with "The Heroes" and "Final Cut", which wrap up the Zsasz storyline and reveal the identity of Abuse. This is another bit that I originally wasn't a huge fan of, but came to enjoy more. I still have mixed feelings about the reveal of Abuse as a little kid -- while he works as a nice complement to Damian, I feel like there could have been more done with him than we see in this arc.

All in all, Streets of Gotham continues to entertain (and Nguyen's art continues to wow)

This definitely has a good hardboiled, noir feel to it. The character of Luke Cage is well suited to a story out of Prohibition-era Harlem. He has been in prison, and is now free. It seems he may get some help from an old friend who is not a big mobster, and a white man hires him to investigate a murder. But it is not all as it seems in this tale of betrayals and murder. Is someone trying to set the Power Man for a fall? In addition to a pretty good story, the art in this volume helps the story along nicely. Whether you like comics or not, if you like a good noir story, you will probably like this one.

The TPB starts with a story about Huntress and the Man-Bat that doesn't quite turn out exactly like I thought it would. There's also an Oracle sighting, which happens too infrequently. Then a Commissioner Gordon and Batman mystery which is the most interesting of the three stories, and then the final story is a Robin story.

It's interesting that the Streets of Gotham series seems to be more than just about Batman, which doesn't always happen in the Gotham titles. And the art is okay, but not my favorite Batman art by a long shot.

Not pulpy enough, and not Deadpool enough, a very disappointing experience. Cable was great, though.

A nice adaptation of the Luke Cage story. Cage fits the noir genre better than most of the other marvel heroes in this series.

Well, I didn't find this trade to be as good as the third in the series, but it was still a decent read. Marc Spector's run into a brick wall - his friends have deserted him, Marlene has abandoned him, his god has forsaken him, and now the Thunderbolts are after him. There only seems to be one solution to get out - Marc Spector needs to die. Of course, this is comic book land, so of course no one really dies (and stays dead, at least). And considering that there's another book in the series, I think the reader can guess that Moon Knight doesn't really bite the dust.

The only reason I picked up this trade was because it was something like 85% off the cover price at the used book store, but I'm glad that I bought it. I like Benson's Moon Knight better than Huston's; Huston seemed like such a hardcore Moon Knight fanboy that he had to make Marc Spector the biggest badass to ever strut in the Marvel Universe. While MK is still a psychotic badass in these comics, he does have his redeeming moments at the same time - particularly when he breaks down and says that he wants to be a hero. Plus there is some wicked awesome Suydam cover art included in this trade, which perfectly fits the character of Moon Knight.½

A collection of exceptionally well-written one-shot Batman Reborn stories (in which Dick Grayson has filled in for the presumed-dead Bruce Wayne, and Bruce Wayne's son Damian is Robin). The best of the group may be the final story, in which Damian goes nearly solo against Zsasz, learning a few things about not jumping to conclusions, humility, and the virtue of accepting help from others on occasion.

Loved this book! No super-heroics, just good characters and a deep - if slightly confusing at times - plot. The ending was knockout! Can't wait to read more in the Noir series.

I haven't been thrilled with how Deadpool has been written recently (no names mentioned, *cough*Daniel Way and Victor Gischler*cough*), but this miniseries is great.

Mike Benson really makes the character funny, even though he employs the Pool-o-vision and "white boxes" gimmicks that I have come to loathe. There's actually a discernible plot, which is unfortunately too rare nowadays when it comes to Deadpool, and recurring characters that aren't horribly butchered (hello, Outlaw). And the jokes are actually funny. No, seriously! That's a rarity for modern Deadpool, too.

The art for the Suicide Kings mini is pretty good, but I don't care for Shawn Crystal's art in the Games of Death one-shot.

Frankly, I wish that Benson wrote Deadpool more often. Maybe then his solo series would actually be worth buying.½