Well, I’m struggling to stay awake after a long shift at work, but I thought I’d still chuck up some comments on this week’s comics (at least the ones I’ve read tonight).

While I was saying last month that I was thinking of trade-waiting on JSA, I still ended up getting this month’s issue.  And I’m glad I did.   While the Kingdom Come stuff is stuff not working as well as I might’ve liked, the appearance of Gog, a soul surviving God of the Third World is an interesting idea.  Especially with us witnessing the birth of the Fifth World Gods over in Final Crisis.

Also I found it interesting that Gog seems to have been the mystery “burning man” from DCU #0.  Although I’m sure it was said somewhere else that that was supposed to have been Darkseid, the description also seems to fit Gog, going by what he said in this issue.

Unless its hinting to a parallel between Gog and Darkseid?   Its fairly cliche for these seemingly benign Gods to turn out to be nasty in some way.   It’ll be interesting to see how this arc plays out.

Meanwhile, over at Marvel, this week brought us Secret Invasion #3.  I must admit, this event is doing a cracking job of keeping the issues flowing.  The fact that the two Avengers books are so closely tied in is really helping keep up the momentum on this one.

That being said, I don’t feel either issue 2 or 3 has had the same punch as the first issue.  I’m really enjoying the story, but the main title’s been lacking that really epic feeling an event should have.    Saying that, I am pretty tired at the moment.

I don’t really buy the idea that Iron Man’s a Skrull.  While I thought Civil War was in many ways a badly-handled event, I’ve always felt that registration made a lot of sense, and the whole thing had left the Marvel Universe a more interesting place.   While it’d be nice to chalk some of Tony’s more dubious actions up to “he was a Skrull”, I think it’d be a real cop out.  Especially since the creators have said previously there was no unseen force manipulating the Civil War.   I think Skrull Spider-Woman is just messing with Tony’s head.

Did we really just see Echo getting killed off though?  That was unexpected.

Rann-Thanagar Holy War #2 didn’t grab me as much as the first issue (again, I’m knackered, so I suspect that is colouring my enjoyment of the books a bit tonight).  This felt very much like an issue which was just slowly moving things along, and introducing a main part of the mystery (the anomalies appearing over Rann).

I was really happy to see the Weird turn up though.  Admittedly, in light to the fact this series is a direct sequel to Mystery in Space, this makes a lot of sense.  But still, when he was revealed, I was slightly kicking myself for not realising who the ghost was.

My main interest in this series is still currently the Captain Comet plot.  We’re doubtless going to see him face something that forces him to confront his demons, but I’m interested in seeing where it goes with the subplot of him pretending to be his own nephew.

I’ll also be very interested to see if this series does resolve the Rann-Thanagar War, once and for all.  Its been running since Infinite Crisis, so Final Crisis does seem the logical place for it to draw to a close.  However, I do feel its invigorated DC’s non-GL space titles, and I’d like to see more of a cold war-style conflict replace the out-and-out inter-galactic war we’ve had for the last few years.

It would be good though, to have a series really focusing on the war.  While its been used to spark a few titles, it doesn’t feel like we’ve really delved into it in any way since the original mini.  A mini-series really playing up the fact that this is a huge inter-galactic war could be interesting.  There’s still some untapped story potential here I think, but I do also think it needs to move on soon, before it becomes stale.