Fear Itself The Fearless #9- I don’t have much to say since the story is decent but nothing too special. What I will say is that I love this cover, not because it’s by Arthur Adams (who I do like), but mostly just because of the expression on the face of the horse. Seriously. That horse has more expression than anyone else on the cover and that expression is ‘HOOOOOOOLY SHIT’. Read that in Mr. Ed’s voice.  Yeah. See, stuff like this helps make inventory nights bearable.  B

Road Rage #1- While this wasn’t a bad comic (and it was dense which is actually not too bad for the $3.99 price tag), I really just wasn’t that interested. They note Stephen King and Joe Hill as the writers but it’s adapted by Chris Ryall, and I seriously hate it when they over hype a title with big names and deliver something short of the press. If you say it’s written by Joe Hill, I friggin’ expect it to be written by Joe Hill and I mean scripted by the guy. No offense to Ryall, but I’m not buying a book for his name. Hell, at this point I’m not buying for King’s name, I’m looking for Joe Hill. Moving away from that rant for a moment, I will say that the Nelson Daniel art is nice and a good fit for the tone of the project. You might just be pulled in by that aspect alone and not care about the details of the scripting. It’s definitely an in-house IDW style though, and I start to cringe a little when I open a book and can associate an artist with a publisher not because the artist works a lot with the publisher and I recognize this, but because I look at it and just feel like I see the same stuff from IDW all the time.  So overall I’m kind of meh on this and I think it’s a toss-up depending on if you like stories about bikers getting run over by trucks or not. B-

Jim Henson’s The Storyteller HC-I have only seen a handful of episodes of the original tv series but I always enjoyed them, so I was interested to see how Archia would pull this off. They did a great job with the Tale of Sand hardcover and it seems like they want to honor Henson with high quality storytelling. This book is no different and it’s a good hundred pages in a nice package for the  $19.95 cover price. It really only took a couple talents (specifically Roger Langridge, Colleen Coover, Jeff Parker, and Paul Tobin) to make this worthwhile, but everyone involved stepped up to produce a great collection of stories. Tom Fowler’s art for ‘Old Fire Dragaman’ is fantastic, and Marjorie Liu and Jennifer Meyer’s ‘Puss In Boots’ was also really great. The last story, which is an adaptation of an unproduced teleplay , was a nice treat as well (and also a bit creepy). I’m a fan of Colleen Coover’s style so that section alone was well worth it, although I wish it was longer than eight pages. The best thing is that this is a great book for young children as well and a great adaptation of numerous folktales from numerous cultures.  At this price point and quality this is something all stores should stock in their kids section and push onto as many customers as possible. A

Thief of Thieves #1- Well, at least it was only $2.99. Like most projects I read from Kirkman that aren’t Walking Dead or Invincible, I just found this to be a bit lackluster. Even Walking Dead and Invincible only carry my interest so far as they have their own formulas that have become overly repetitive. I do like Martinbrough’s art and I am ok with Spencer’s scripting, but the entire package just fell short of the energetic message Kirkman included at the end of the book. I get a little tired of his announcements and write-ups because while he does make some good points many of them are old points and other are just…..well, questionable at best.  If you scroll down this thread a bit you’ll see a scan of an article where Kirkman not only went on to defend Rob Liefeld as an artist, but said that Liefeld was the Kirby of our generation.  That…..that is very wrong. Up until that moment I still liked Kirkman but it truly tainted everything he touched afterwards.  I hate to be that judgmental (no I don’t), but that’s just the way I work. But back to the topic of this book, I won’t say it was crap and I’ve certainly read worse, but it feels like it depends too much on the hype of both Kirkman and Spencer and while I don’t dislike Spencer I don’t really understand why he’s a big deal at the moment.  You can even argue they chose Martinbrough for the artist because his style sorta kinda looks like Charlie Adlard from Walking Dead. Just check out that first page and you’ll see what I mean. So for those of you who think these guys can do no wrong you’ll probably like this but for the rest of you readers you can probably save your money. Or go get it from the library when it’s traded and make a judgment call afterwards. B

Deadpool #49.1- I think I’ve already mentioned a few times how much I hate the Point One specials as a retailer, but as a reader and someone who actually likes Deadpool when he is done right I have to say this was a piece of crap and a major waste of money. First of all it’s just a recap of this entire current volume of Deadpool, so there is no benefit to people who have already been following the series. The next problem is that it’s actually a musical, which if there’ anything I hate is a comic trying to actually focus on musical lyrics. It just doesn’t translate to me and it’s very counterintuitive to the medium.  The art is fine because I actually like McCrea, but considering nothing useful happens in the issue I consider it a waste of talent. The Point One gimmick needs to die a horrible death as soon as possible because while I can almost applaud the desire to have a reader friendly jump on point the sheer amount of reader friendly jump on points being published pretty much makes me think Marvel considers its potential future fan base to be a bunch of idiots. Which if people keep buying these gimmick issues….D