John Romita, Jr.Besprekingen

I recently re-watched the Deadpool 2 movie, which features Juggernaut as a villain. This put me in mind to dive into the archives and unearth this slim graphic novel. Nothing Can Stop The Juggernaut, written by Roger Stern, with art by John Romita, Jr. and Jim Mooney, comics heavyweights all, remains one of my all-time favorite Spider-Man tales, and comic-book stories in general. Juggernaut's wake of destruction as he traverses NYC, Spidey's valiant efforts to thwart him, wonderfully rendered in word and image, are the sorts of things I love about sequential-art stories.

Glad it didn't take too long to read, or let's say skim.

1010

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I only ever read this first volume back when it was huge but I remember loving it at the time, still do. Going to continue with the rest this time.

There’s a bit of snobbery when it comes to Mark Millar’s over the top violence, and yes it probably does appeal to kids who just want to see something nasty. This would be pretty dull though if he didn’t also write decent characters.

4,5
http://www.planocritico.com/tag/homem-aranha-quadrinhos/

3,5
http://www.planocritico.com/tag/homem-aranha-quadrinhos/

Cape may

highly entertaining, i read some of the reviews after i read it and they are right, goes places i never thought it would. very tempted to go see the film tonite.

Some light fun, but it never really pushes the envelope and it can feel pretty tame and boring at times. A shame, this series could have had such a huge cultural presence

I loved the Kick Ass movie. While browsing through the library, I saw this graphic novel and thought I would check it out.

The movie was admirably adapted from the film. I would give the film a slight edge because I liked the Hit Girl character a lot more in the film than the book.

Only a few months have passed since the first book's ending. While Dave Lizewski trains to better himself as a superhero, Mindy Macready struggles with a normal life. Inspired by the events in Kick-Ass, several citizens are inspired to don the mask and fight alongside the hero. But a world of superheroes is nothing without a challenging nemesis. Embittered by the slaying of his father, Red Mist organizes his own team by gathering people from all over the world to take down Kick-Ass, Hit-Girl, and their superhero brethren. How far will each side go to live up their comic book fantasies? Who stands in the way? And will Mindy have to break a promise she made in order to save the city?

Maybe it's the fact that Kick Ass 2: The Movie hasn't even begun pre-production - I'm only assuming here - but this book is way better than the first one. Way better than anything I ever read by Mark Millar. If I could, I'd marry this book. That is, if I didn't know there was a third book on its way.

A big step up from the previous volume. Small scale crimelord supervillain The Hood breaks out of prison and starts collecting Infinity Gems where the Illuminati (the secret Marvel cabal of powerful heroes, not the secret religious society) have hidden them. A fun, simple and yet powerfully dangerous premise that unearths secrets and frictions among the Avengers and pulls on decades of established Marvel continuity without making the book feel reliant on it to follow or enjoy the story. It's nothing truly special, but it's solid, and it's fun.½

OK, but fairly forgettable, sadly. No real effort is made at making the reader care about the characters -- if you're not previously invested in one, they won't win you over here, excepting perhaps only Spider-Man with his non-stop quips (and let's face it, he's not the one people won't know from before). But if you're familiar with most of the primary players, the story is, at least in conception, pretty decent. The execition is too chaotic and shallow for my tastes, as the feared Immortus / Kang the Conqueror arrives from the future to warn of an Ultron-induced apocalypse to be averted. Do the newly re-formed Avengers trust this, from a source so unreliable? And the story does pack a couple of nice twists and turns, and the banter is as per usual for Bendis spot on, but for the most part, the story is a slugfest without much of significance or worth remembering happening.½

It was brutal and bloody just like the first volume. The movie, meanwhile, had a tighter, meaningful narrative that was more restrained in its action. Both are good.

Apparently I'm in the minority here in that I didn't think this series was all that shit hot.

According to the various notes, this started life as a 64-page graphic novel, that got expanded to 144 pages. Apparently a lot of the expansion was the terrible Elektra section in the middle.

I guess the overarching storyline was the maturation of Matt from broken child to differently-broken adult, but as I read this, it felt more like three vignettes playing out over the original five issues: The death of Matt's father and his revenge on them (where he kills most of them), the appearance and disappearance of Elektra, and the saving of a young teen from the clutches of Kingpin.

Of the three, the only one that really resonated at all was the first one, and even that seemed to contradict the tone and feel of the original Stan Lee/Bill Everett run. Especially when the pre-Daredevil Matt happily kills a bunch of goons. Daredevil doesn't kill wherever possible, but he sure as hell has no problem with it here. And even when an innocent woman dies, he agonizes over it for perhaps a couple of panels, then it's forgotten.

The Elektra storyline is simply bonkers, and she's completely psychotic. There's literally no underlying reason they should fall for each other, other than they train together at the same elevated level of physicality. Whatever.

And the last bit with the Kingpin is flat-out unbelievable, even by comic book standards.

This was not that great. And sorry, but John Romita Jr's art is ridiculously overrated.

This has been, for the most part, a series of diminishing returns. [b:Hit-Girl|15984355|Hit-Girl|Mark Millar|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1370817554s/15984355.jpg|21738672] and [b:Kick-Ass 2|10871925|Kick-Ass 2|Mark Millar|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1338335209s/10871925.jpg|15787215] weren't very good, going for gore over story.

So, I was pleased to see some additional characterization in this last KA story. It's still dumb, over-the-top, and excessively, gratuitously violent. But it does, for the most part, wrap up the story of Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl, which is what it was supposed to do.

Millar has developed into one of those guys that can't issue a statement without some sort of personal PR, a trait that has become more and more irritating as the years pass. And he couldn't resist it in the final pages of this comic either, shamelessly plugging either directly or indirectly, something like five of his other works. He then goes on to plug them again a few pages later in his Thank You sign-off. He's becoming that annoying author on Twitter who's only tweets are variations of "Buy my books!"

And John Romita Jr., the artist. I'll leave it as this: I'm not a fan, never have been, have never understood what all the hoopla is about.

Overall, I only picked this up because I knew it was the end. I'm glad I did, because it was better than the last two volumes, but still, not worth all the hype that Millar foists upon it. He's capable of so much better.

Mark Millar impressed the hell out of me with his Ultimates run. It was rich in detail, firmly set in the real world and the art was impressive. Everything that the Ultimates was, Kick-Ass is not. Details are sketchy (a 12-year-old girl can flush out every known high-end organized crime guy? And they're all in the same city?), it's nowhere near the real world (yes, there's mention of Twitter and various movies, etc, but again, she has full run of a prison, including death row?) and the art...well, the art is by John Romita Jr. which always fails to impress me.

Still, the story is stupid, violent fun and it never tries to be anything more than that, but as I read this stuff, I just can't help think that Mark Millar is now trying to out-Millar himself with over-the-top storylines, while at the same time chasing that Ultimates/Civil War dragon of huge sales. It feels a little forced and a lot empty.

This is a big, bloody mess. I'm not sure if Romita Jr gave up more control of the visuals to Tom Palmer, but the art was actually a little better than the standard, horrible Romita Jr offerings. He still draws people as squat creatures and children with insanely large heads, but really that's not what you read Kick-Ass for now, is it?

So, on to Millar. He seems to be attempting to make each Kick-Ass outing more bloody and disgusting than the last. I think his death of Mother Russia in this one pretty much is the high point (low point?) of the violence so far.

Overall, the story is dumb, but dammit, it has flashes of genius in it and that (and the movies) are the only things that keep me coming back.

The story was pretty good, but not top notch. I found the artwork a bit uneven, with some great spots, and others just average.

I love Chris Claremont's writing - he weaves stories together better than most writers - I can think of only a few that have his talent. This book covers so many characters, and develops them bit by bit - I am glad that we have such a long line of his storyline in the Uncanny X-Men.

See my blog note on it:

http://gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com/2006/05/quick-booknotes-on-some-graphic-novel...

This is one of the longest collections I've read, clocking in at 19 individual comics (Avengers Prime 1-5, Avengers (2010) 1-12, New Avengers Annual (2011) 1, Avengers Annual (2012) 1). This is the "prequel" to "The Heroic Age", the time after Norman Osborne has fallen as well as Asgard and the Sentry.

Pretty normal stuff, Infinity Stones getting stolen and almost destroying the universe, old Avengers coming back to destroy the current Avengers, though I did enjoy the Avengers Prime more with it's time hopping to meet the children of the Avengers in the future and a crazy-smart version of the Hulk.

The art in the Prime series was better too, the regular avengers art was completely sub-standard and awful.½

I watched the two films one evening and decided to check out the source material. Definitely was not disappointed. Great art, great story, and pretty funny too.

I read this 4 years ago. I just read it again. My opinion has evolved. It's late and I'm too tired to explain why, but it's a neglected masterpiece.

I don't have the energy to finish many books these days. I don't know why. Something broken inside of me. But comics? I can read. I can finish. The obvious answer would be that I can finish them because they are silly & dumb. But that can't be right, because I can't finish the dumb ones.

I can still finish the great ones, though. The ones that speak with that quasi-cinematic vocabulary. The comics that are frozen films, with light and sound replaced by drawings and text. Moving without moving, speaking in silence, and all the rest.

I suppose it's a kind of childhood magic. The sort of thing that seems so strange as an adult thinking now which was perfectly ordinary back then.

It's not nostalgia. The comics I liked back then, overwhelmingly, tend to disappoint me now. It's more that the juxtaposition of the way I see now and the way I saw then creates it's own aesthetic effect, a kind of anti-nostalgia.

A moment of freedom from the past? A new past? I don't know. I don't know why this works for me now, while so little else does, but it does. And I am grateful.