As we can see, I'm not doing well at the daily updates. I'll try harder. Two nights ago, Ben kept waking up every 2 hours or so, moaning and whining. I say "woke up" except that his eyes never opened, and I don't think he was conscious at any point.

So I was kinda a wreck yesterday.

Plus I promised Tzipora that I'd finally clean my room, which mostly entails taking 9 months worth of comics and properly filling them on my bookshelves.

This is a five hour job, sheesh.

Anyway, that's why no update yesterday.

Let's start off sorting through the comics for the week of 8/4 (Which, incidentally, was Ben's 10 month birthday, hooray!)

BIRDS OF PREY #71: A solid issue though the cover was a smidge deceptive. I'm also a little meh on the drama of the ending, but like I said, solid issue. OK.

DCCP: SUPERMAN: I don't think you're likely to find another comic book every again that features both Stan Lee and Paul Levitz writing. And I was quite surprised how much I liked both stories. Art by Darwyn Cooke and Keith Giffen also helped. But Stan's story was genuinely charming -- if the "Just Imagine" books had been this sweetly written, they coulda been a big hit. I mean "SUPERMAN! How did you find me?" "Hey, I'm Superman." is just fun. Very Good.

SWAMP THING #6: And so, the original mini-series ends. Actually, this is a decent way to end things, because the story could go virtually anywhere from here, yet there's at least a moment of potential happy endings for just about everyone. Good.

Y THE LAST MAN #25: Is this the first we've seen of Beth in 2 years? Anyway, another solid issue, though I'd really like to see a few things come to a head pretty soon. Good.

JUSTICE LEAGUE ELITE #2: I don't think I like any of these characters, to be honest. And a book without likeable protagonists isn't likely to keep much of an audience. Eh.

CAPTAIN AMERICA & FALCON #6: I really liked the first half, while I thought the second half descended into nonsense. On the other hand, the "new" Falcon scenes were super excellent. Hard to grade this one because of the abrupt shift in tone, so let's split the difference to an OK.

TRAILER PARK OF TERROR COLOR SPECIAL #1: What's odd is looking at the line work here, some of these stories would probably look better in B&W.... Otherwise, this is sub-EC stuff, tremendously not scary, nor "trashy" like the title might make one hope. Eh.

EXILES #50: Cute set-up. Exiles is sometimes neat because you can do things that you can't do in the "regular" books. I mean, a precog is one of the most powerful of powers, isn't it? You'd rule the world in 6 months with that, it seems. But you can't do that in X-Men. Anyway, Good.

JUSTICE LEAGUE ADVENTURES #34: Top Notch "Big 3" story from Stuart Moore. Possibly my favorite single issue of this run. Very Good.

BATMAN 12-CENT ADVENTURE: Well, it's cheap so you can't really complain (though, as always, I find cursive captions to be a pain in the ass to read), and it is absolutely worth the money (and I don't mean that snarkily), but I'm pretty unsure if this works as an "intro" to the Bat books -- If I wasn't much interested in the bat-titles in the first place, the content here wouldn't be drawing me back, stunt pricing or not. OK.

DETECTIVE #797: The first "real" (numbered) bit of "War Games" and it is mosly a lot of running and shouting. *shrug* It's not bad, but I'm not at all excited about gang wars in Gotham. I kinda liked the back up story better, even though literally nothing happens. OK

FIRESTORM #4: I like the protagonist OK, but this is way too fast of a ride, with too little dealing with the "how does this all work?" question for my dollar. I sorta don't think this is going to make it out of the first year. OK.

ULTIMATE NIGHTMARE #1: I suppose the set-up is fine, but I breezed through reading this in less than no time. Looks nice, reads well, but super-fast. Let's see what #2 brings. OK.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #63: Very good and very strong up until Conners shows up. What was he doing there, again? Just a big "duh" moment. Good.

ULTIMATE X-MEN #50: Now with 20% more soap opera! Dunno, well told, but don't care. Eh.

X-MEN THE END #1: Wow. Really don't care.

That's all I gots read so far this week, more later.

-B