en-US Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:16:35 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus9290898378 Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:16:35 -0700 /review/show/22542227 Ian is currently reading House Corrino by Brian Herbert
]]> Review2410977994 Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:15:20 -0700 /review/show/2410977994 Ian gave 2 stars to Doctor Who: Web in Space (Paperback) by David Bailey
bookshelves: sci-fi
An Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) story featuring his companions Amy and Rory.
Answering a distress call, the Doctor and his friends board the Black Horizon, a spaceship which has become entangled in a mysterious diamond web amid an asteroid field. To further complicate matters, the ship is under attack by soldiers from a conquering robot empire.

To be perfectly honest, this book was a bit boring.
There's nothing you can point at and say "There! That's bad" (well, maybe one thing, but I'll get to that) but by the same token, there's nothing you can point at and say it's good either.
The concepts introduced, the robot empire and the space spider, simply don't have enough room to develop into anything particularly interesting. I feel like the book probably would've been better if one or other of those elements was dropped altogether so the plot could focus on the other, but here we are.

The element of the book which you could perhaps point out as being bad is the little robot sidekick that Rory gets. He's called Messy (unfortunately) and is there for comic relief (without actually being at all amusing).
It's a pointless addition which actually leaves less time to develop the new human sidekick Sam. And, of course, the true irony is that the Doctor (in the form of Tennant's Tenth in 'The Waters of Mars') is on record as hating 'funny robots'.

* More reviews here: * ]]> Review7445320826 Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:21:22 -0700 /review/show/7445320826 Ian gave 4 stars to Bearers of the Black Staff (Legends of Shannara #1) by Terry Brooks
bookshelves: fantasy
Book one of the Legends of Shannara duology, set five hundred years after the Genesis of Shannara.
For five centuries the peoples led into an isolated valley and sealed behind protective magicks have lived in peace, but the discovery of two monsters from the outside world by the Trackers Pan and Prue reveals that the people of the valley are imperilled once more. As Pan and Prue try to raise the alarm, the Grey Man, last Bearer of the Black Staff, seeks to understand the threat posed by the world outside the valley.

It has been a very long time since last read any of the Shannara books (I think 'Straken' was the last and that was twenty years ago!) and I haven't read the Genesis of Shannara trilogy which this book follows on from (albeit with a 500-year time jump), so I wasn't sure how well I would get on with this story. Ultimately, though, Brooks does a good enough job of setting the scene and not relying too heavily on previous lore, so that you can easily pick up this book without any knowledge of the Shannara series outside of it.

I won't claim that I loved this book (certainly not in the way I did 'Elfstones...', 'First King...' and 'Ilse Witch') but it is a solidly enjoyable fantasy story with a compelling core group of characters and some impressive set-piece scenes.
If I was to make one criticism, it would be that the villain from within the valley seems to want to indulge in evil schemes more or less because he's an evil schemer. He's almost a caricature and, as a result, I found him more annoying than compelling.

* More reviews here: * ]]> Review7443428677 Sat, 29 Mar 2025 12:28:22 -0700 /review/show/7443428677 Ian gave 3 stars to The Mighty Avengers, Vol. 2: Venom Bomb (Hardcover) by Brian Michael Bendis
bookshelves: graphic-novels
Book 2.
Spider-Woman reveals to Iron Man that the Skrulls have infiltrated Earth, but before he can react to the news the population of Manhattan begins transforming into Venom symbiotes. Iron Man then discovers that the symbiote attack is the result of a biological weapon developed by none other than Doctor Doom, whom the Mighty Avengers then have to confront.

Weirdly the venom bomb event and the confrontation with Doctor Doom felt far less momentous than they should have done, seeming little more than minor annoyances to be dealt with before moving on.
I suspect it's a combination of the Skrull secret invasion overshadowing these 'lesser' events and this team of Avengers being fairly uncharismatic.

Also, as with the last book, 'The Ultron Initiative', Bendis continues to make use of too frequent thought bubbles usually just filled with the character having obnoxious thoughts. It must be a specific choice, since Bendis' concurrent series 'New Avengers' doesn't feature them, but it's not a good choice and it undercuts both the dialogue and the scenes in general.

All that said, there is stuff to like here.
I particularly liked the interplay between Tony Stark and Victor Von Doom, with their respective intellects, armours and technologies going toe-to-toe. They are an intriguingly matched hero/villain combo and it was nice to see that play out. I especially liked some of their dialogue, such as the scene where Tony threatens to have Sentry fold Doom's armour in half with him in it or the bit where Doom points out that, following the Civil War, more people hate Tony than hate him.

* More reviews here: * ]]> Review7443020310 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:31:05 -0700 /review/show/7443020310 Ian gave 4 stars to The New Avengers, Vol. 7: The Trust (Paperback) by Brian Michael Bendis
bookshelves: graphic-novels
Book 7.
Having discovered that the Skrulls have infiltrated Earth, the New Avengers are almost torn asunder by mistrust, worsened when one of their number switches to the side of their enemy Iron Man. However, they are pulled together as a team by an encounter with the magical supervillain known as the Hood, who has begun gathering together an army of supervillains and who intends to target them where it will hurt the most.

This book served to remind me just how much more engaging this team of Avengers is when compared with their contemporaries in Iron Man's Mighty Avengers.
I'm also a sucker for an underdog story, so seeing this team of fugitives facing the terrifying implications of the Skrull invasion without any of the resources to deal with it was pretty powerful. The Hood and his crew also prove to be a genuine threat which takes a real toll on the team (not to mention what happens to poor Tigra).

Overall, another strong outing for the fugitive Avengers.

* More reviews here: * ]]> Review7440601658 Fri, 28 Mar 2025 14:16:07 -0700 /review/show/7440601658 Ian gave 3 stars to The Mighty Avengers, Vol. 1: The Ultron Initiative (Hardcover) by Brian Michael Bendis
bookshelves: graphic-novels
Book 1.
Following his victory in the superhero Civil War, Iron Man uses his new unprecedented position of power to found a new team of Avengers, comprising of Ms Marvel, Wonder Man, Sentry, Black Widow, Wasp and Ares. The team is immediately put to the test when Mole Man resurfaces and a new version of Ultron takes control of Tony Stark himself.

Surely this is no-one's favourite Avengers line-up of all time, especially considering that this is the post-Civil War sellout Avengers. Nevertheless, there is some interesting mileage in the team dynamic, particularly in how the abrasive former-villain Ares and ticking-time-bomb Sentry fit into it.

In order to establish this new team, Bendis trots out some tried-and-tested villains to face in the form of Mole Man (seriously, just leave the poor dude alone underground) and Ultron.
It's nothing particularly new, except the fact that the new Ultron is, for some reason, a hot and naked copy of the Wasp made by melting Iron Man.
No, seriously.

This would all be perfectly alright if not for one big misstep in how the book is written.
Bendis inserts thought bubbles after (approximately) every third speech bubble and often the things the characters are thinking are completely contrary to whatever they've just been saying. And when that's not the case, the thought bubbles are just them thinking spiteful things (Carol mentally calling Janet a tramp) or the men sexually objectifying the female members of the team.
This book would've easily been 20% better without all of those thought bubbles and their often objectionable contents.

* More reviews here: * ]]> Review7438293070 Thu, 27 Mar 2025 15:13:20 -0700 /review/show/7438293070 Ian gave 4 stars to New X-Men: Childhood's End, Vol. 3: Nimrod (Paperback) by Craig Kyle
bookshelves: graphic-novels
As the superhero Civil War rages, the young mutants of the Xavier Institute reel from a series of devastating losses. When the futuristic Sentinel Nimrod is reactivated those young mutants have to take on the threat, despite knowing that it almost certainly means their deaths.

This was actually my first encounter with this particular iteration of the young X-Men and the only character I really knew was X-23. Despite that, this book very quickly got me invested in the plight of these young mutants.
They've lived though M-Day, are living in a mutant ghetto 'protected' by the Sentinels of the O*N*E, and have seen dozens of their friends and fellow students murdered by the mutant-hating zealots known as the Purifiers. They are very much beaten down and defeated when this story begins and then they have to muster the strength and determination to face Nimrod, a foe far beyond their weight class in terms of power. It was very easy to become emotionally invested in their story.

I also liked the scene where Carol Danvers (in her Ms Marvel incarnation) arrives as the Institute seeking to recruit the X-Men for Iron Man's pro-Registration side of the Civil War but is then given a thorough dressing-down by Emma Frost, who uses her powers to highlight for Carol all of the times the Avengers were conveniently absent when mutants were being persecuted. It not only conveys the justifiable bitterness Emma feels but also points out the hypocrisies of Carol and her ilk.

Overall, despite not having read volume 1 and 2 (at least not yet) I really enjoyed this book.

* More reviews here: * ]]> Review7435233802 Wed, 26 Mar 2025 18:17:43 -0700 /review/show/7435233802 Ian gave 3 stars to The New Avengers, Vol. 4: The Collective (Paperback) by Brian Michael Bendis
bookshelves: graphic-novels
Book 4.
In the wake of 'House of M', the Avengers are trying to keep the secret of those events out of the hands of SHIELD; something which becomes far harder when in Alaska a mutant is empowered with all of the energies of those who lost their powers on M-Day.

It's hard to say why, but I just didn't entirely buy the threat posed by the Collective.
Perhaps it's because they supposedly have all the powers of the 99% of depowered mutants and yet most just glow and blast the Avengers with generic energy blasts. It's not an interesting use of those powers and I also didn't like that the recipient of them is just some random guy called Michael. Would've been far more interesting if it was someone like Onslaught or even Apocalypse, someone whose empowerment actually meant something.

One other thing I didn't like about this book is actually probably an intentional writing choice but still interfered with my enjoyment of the story; Maria Hill.
Having the Director of SHIELD be so aggressively obnoxious was really grating and it took me a little while to remember that this is the story directly before the events of 'Civil War' (by Mark Millar), where she'll turn her 'cape-killers' against Captain America on the bridge of the Helicarrier. So, it is all probably intended to be building up to the Civil War, but it still annoyed me.

How the story unfolds other than those gripes is perfectly enjoyable, but they really did limit my enjoyment of the book as a whole.

* More reviews here: * ]]> Review7434663311 Tue, 25 Mar 2025 17:44:29 -0700 /review/show/7434663311 Ian gave 3 stars to The New Avengers, Vol. 3: Secrets and Lies (Paperback) by Brian Michael Bendis
bookshelves: graphic-novels
Book 3.
The New Avengers, joined by mysterious new member Ronin, head to Japan in order to break up a meeting between Hydra, the Hand and the Silver Samurai. They are then forced to confront the complicated history and loyalties of Spider-Woman and decide whether she can be trusted as a member of the team.

Sooner or later every Marvel hero or team has to take a random detour to Japan in order to fight some ninjas and this is that for the New Avengers. Is it jarringly nonsensical? Yes, but it's still fun to see heroes fighting ninjas and I did enjoy the role Ronin had to play.

More interesting to me, however, was getting the condensed history of Jessica Drew AKA Spider-Woman, who is a particularly interesting character to me and exploring the details of her complex loyalties and personal struggles. It does feel a little rushed, but I still found it engaging.

* More reviews here: * ]]> Review7432165578 Tue, 25 Mar 2025 14:00:21 -0700 /review/show/7432165578 Ian gave 3 stars to The New Avengers, Vol. 2: The Sentry (Paperback) by Brian Michael Bendis
bookshelves: graphic-novels
Book 2.
As the New Avengers begin to come together cohesively as a team, facing foes like the Wrecker, they find themselves confronted by the Sentry. Sentry is one of the most powerful superheroes on the planet but the problem is that no-one remembers him, often not even himself.

I really liked Paul Jenkins' 'The Sentry' and was particularly intrigued by the idea of a hero so powerful but so flawed that the very memory of him had to be erased from the minds of the world. This book revisits the character and those concepts but, it has to be said, with much less finesse.

If anything, this feels like a speedrun of how to rehabilitate and reintroduce Sentry as quickly as possible, and that feels like something of a betrayal of Jenkins' original story.
Weirdly, in fact, Paul Jenkins actually appears in-universe in this story as a comic book writer who seemingly 'created' the Sentry. I think Bendis was trying for 'meta' but actually just ended up with 'weird'.

So, as a way of catching-up the uninitiated and reintroducing Sentry to the Marvel Universe, this is a perfectly passable book but, for me, was let down by how much lesser it felt than Jenkins' origin story of the character.

* More reviews here: * ]]>