If I’m…using this…stupid abacus correctly…it seems…I’ve purchased…Gosh darn it!  I’ve purchased eleven books.

• Uber #1 (Read it!  Soaked from the opening splash!  Memorable, for sure.  [Tell me you weren’t like, “Pull it, you Nazi bastard!  Pull it!]”  Then comes the twistory upon which the story is built.  After that, some obnoxious Nazi name dropping, followed by, as one might expect, violence worthy of the Avatar brand.  What I didn’t expect: Gillen’s got the Reich stuff!  He’s already made Hitler and his Nazi posse a more interesting lot than the post-Schism, pre-NOW! X-Men he so painfully mishandled.  Looks like I’m down for #2!)

• X #1 (Read it!  Not bad.  Nguyen’s art is fine, never really spectacular.  So’s the story.  It is what it is: a #1.  Willing to give Swierczynski more time: I mean, Bloodshot‘s bangin’ and–at its core–this isn’t so different.)

• Chin Music #1 (Read it!  Story’s sort of all over the place.  But, like Swierczynski, Niles has earned my precious patience.  [I’m not handing it out as freely as I had, say, when I first came back to comics and tried to stick with too many New 52 books because I loved the characters and the stories just had to get good at some point, right?]  Harris’s work, as expected, is fantastic.  Lovelovelove the layouts.)
• Suicide Squad #20 (Read it!  Change is here!  And Ales Kot lets us know two panels in–just in time to support the upcoming release of the collected Change, Kot’s crazy little mini for Image that only recently reached its own form of flatulent enlightenment.  Blatant self-promotion aside, in this first issue from Kot and Patrick Zircher, we’re treated to a kick-ass Suicide Squad circa Adam Glass’s New 52 nod–before SS shattered to boring bits with some awful pacing and the relentlessly regrettable Regulus claptrap.  Man, I wanted to take the shards to my wrists and–I thought better of it and simply dropped the darned thing from my pull-list.  Safer.  Now, I’m back on board, and so is the sexy storytelling–the spirit of spontaneity–that sucked me in from the get-go.)

• Batman #20 (Read it!  Convoluted.  Irrelevant.  Everything we’ve come to expect from the keystone Batbook.  I hate myself for having bought it because, at this point, I know better.)
• The Rocketeer: Hollywood Horror #4 (Never excited to see a good mini go–for a few reasons, actually.)
• Justice League of America #3 (I really want to like it.  We’ll see.)
• Batman and Red Hood #20 (Thanks to Peter Tomasi, I may have found a way to satisfy my need for a monthly Batbook.  Would make dropping Snyder’s  that much easier.)

• Archer & Armstrong #0 (Still hate dinosaurs.)
• Harbinger #12 (As solid a monthly series as your bound to find.)
• Battlefields: The Fall and Rise of Anna Kharkova #6 (End of an arc–an Ennis arc.  The mourning period begins now.)

That’s what’s in my bag.  What’s in yours?

Turning pages,

Scott