She-Hulk # 22-30

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of She-Hulk # 22-30 (Marvel, 2007).



Here's a run of a title that I never really treated fairly. Some time back, I subscribed to a few books at an area comic shop to get a discount on a miniatures game. I was enjoying Dan Slott's run as the writer of Marvel's She-Hulk, but lost interest towards the end. Before I knew it, issues were piling up unread, then Slott left the title and, several months after Peter David replaced him as writer, I realized I had a small stack of Marvel superhero books that I didn't want to read.

I came back to them after several years and was pleasantly surprised. While never compelling, David threw some very interesting and neat threats towards our hero. No longer working as an attorney, as she did with such amusing results under Slott, but as a bonding agent, She-Hulk racks up some serious property damage while tracking down fugitives. I was really amused when the villainous Absorbing Man's references to his girlfriend, "the little woman," turn out to be literal, and there's a pretty interesting look at what happens when the authorities don't believe the only survivor of an alien attack foiled by our hero.

I'm not really all that familiar with David's work other than a run on DC's Supergirl that I enjoyed. Equally well-known among comic fans for his provocative, controversial and popular blog as his fiction, David's been doing this long enough to buck the slow-burning trend of taking forever to get to a story's climax. There are one or two misuses of splash pages in this title - at one point, artist Val Semeiks devotes an entire page to Iron Man casually sauntering into a courtroom - but David handles everything with confidence and wit, and apart from some terribly telegraphed plot "twists," this was not a bad read at all. Most of these issues are available in a trade collection called Jaded to which I'd give a mild recommendation. Not essential, but not at all bad for what they are.

Time for another short break here, friends! I have been rereading Sayers, along with some lengthy titles that I have already reviewed in these pages, and so I don't have anything new to share right now. I'll be back in a couple of weeks, and in the meantime, remember that I'm always happy to review your own work. PDFs are fine. I tend to focus on adventure or humor comics, detective fiction and food writing. See you later in July!

The Amazing Spider-Man: The Death of Jean De Wolff

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Amazing Spider-Man: The Death of Jean De Wolff (Marvel, 1990)



Here's a book I have not cracked in more than a decade, and yet it has moved with me several times and diligently been filed and refiled several times, the only color Spider-Man collection that I own. I found this copy ages ago in Athens, probably at the old Vinyl & Video store a few doors down from Mama Sid's Pizza in their three-for-a-dollar box.

I think that this book comes from a short-lived line of Marvel trade paperback reprints, aimed past the direct market at bookstores, and collects a four-part story by Peter David and Rich Buckler that originally appeared in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man in 1985. I really don't know anything at all about that title, and wonder whether it was going through a phase of having Spidey tackle more "real world," street level crime. It starts with the murder of one of the hero's confidantes, a police captain who apparently enjoyed dressing like a 1980s Cosmo model, and over the course of the four issues, Spidey and Daredevil team up to track down the nut with the ski mask and shotgun who killed her.

There's nothing wrong with the artwork, but I didn't care for Rich Buckler's style at all. The story has, pleasantly, aged very well for something so obviously inspired by the period concerns of vigilantism in New York. There are discreet references to the Guardian Angels and to Bernard Goetz, and it's interesting to me how well and how very effectively David slips these into the narrative without lingering on them. I have not read very many of Peter David's comics, but I did follow his later Supergirl run for a lot longer than the material warranted, and suggest that the little "kisses to popular culture" were pretty obnoxiously overt there. In this Spider-Man story, he's much more subtle and effective.

Spider-Man, here dressed in his short-lived black and white costume, works really well in a contemporary thriller like this one. Stripping away the melodrama and fantasy of superhero combat and grounding him in a world of screaming tabloid headlines and a terrified populace, the character really shines, with plenty of chances for his self-doubt and selfish nature to rise. Despite a printing error that reversed the order of two pages, this was much better than I expected it to be. Recommended.