Thursday, January 5, 2012

Wolverine and the X-Men: Alpha & Omega #1

One more review tonight, and it's by Brian Wood, a writer and illustrator of much acclaim... But one who I know very little about... I have to admit, I am actually quite unfamiliar with his work, so this mini will color my early opinion of Wood... Let's see how this turns out.

Wolverine and the X-Men: Alpha & Omega #1(of 5):

Summary: Pissed that he was being treated like any other student at Wolverine's school, Kid Omega(or Quintin Quire if you prefer) manages to trap Wolverine in a weird fantasy world inside the Ol' Canucklehead's... um, head. Unfortunately for Armor, she was too close to Wolvie when Omega trapped Wolvie and is forced to go along for the ride. Omega hides the two bodies and heads to his room, pleased with what he'd accomplished. As for Wolvie and Armor, the two don't seem to know that they had powers, but aren't surprised when their powers manifest during various times of trouble. Wolvie ends up getting shot in the head, and since Omega dialed his healing factor way down in this fantasy world, Wolvie is knocked out for a while. Meanwhile, Wolvie's body gets up and begins to storm along, demanding Omega gets out of his head.

Thoughts: Man, Omega is one of those kids you'd really love to just beat the hell out of... Just sayin'... Anywho, this was a pretty good first issue. We don't know how Omega managed to take such control of Wolvie(you'd think his psi-defenses were better than THIS!), nor how none of the rest of the school realized that a) Wolvie was gone, and b) something fishy was going on telepathically. Right now, everything is still being set up. We don't know much about the fantasy world, we don't know why Armor is there with Wolvie, and we don't know why Wolvie's body is up and about, considering his mind was otherwise occupied. But I'm curious enough to pick up the next issue, so that's something.

Score: 6 1/2 out of 10.“Just seemed like the thing to do” is as good an excuse for that as any.

9 comments:

  1. If i remember correctly this is exactly the kind of Kid Omega you wanted to see in Wolverine and the X-Men, guess you don't have to worry about him being watered down anymore right? And while i sort of agree that the other x-men should notice wolvie's absence you have to keep in mind that wolverine appears in at least 5 comics a week nowadays so maybe they just think he went off to play with x-force,the avengers, the new avengers, alpha force (the canadian guys) etc...
    I also think that armor is probably just a victim of circumstance

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  2. Exactly. I'd rather see evil, scheming Kid Omega as opposed to good, but acting bad, Kid Omega any day.

    I like the excuse for the other X-Men not noticing Wolvie's absence. You can almost see them saying, "Oh, I guess Wolvie is off doing one of his other 35,000 things, let's carry on without him." Agreed with Armor. Even Omega seemed to say as much when he dragged her into the basement.

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  3. Now what DC?


    http://www.newsarama.com/comics/december-2011-comic-book-sales-charts-120106.html

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  4. Now I have to say that sales are worrying for comics overall We dont know how Digital sales are working but looking sales month after month I feel like the Comic industry is dying, Dont know 100.000 for a best selling book don't sound like a succes (be Marvel or DC)

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  5. Eh, the comic industry has had it's wild swings for years now, Alien. People have been saying that the industry, in it's current form, was going to die since like 2000, and it's still here. I'm seriously not worried that the print portion of comic books is going to die away until Marvel or DC stops printing certain series and only releases those series in a digital format. But that whole, "The comic industry is a dying breed!!!" thinking has been around for a while, and yet the industry is still here, so I'm not worried. At least not yet.

    As for the sales chart, I can't say I'm surprised. I think we were talking about this two months ago, and I said that by February Marvel would have retaken the top spot... I guess I was off by two months! :P The thing that annoys me the most with DC is that I now firmly feel they didn't need to do the reboot at all! All they needed to to was cancel their lower selling books, renumber other floundering books(JLA, Wonder Woman, Teen Titans), give cult favorite characters their own series(Animal Man, Jason Todd)and merge the pre-reboot DCU with the Wildstorm and Vertigo universes and they'd probably be in the exact same spot! Now they're starting to lose those fans who only picked up the first few issues to collect them as collector's items or to sell them on eBay, while they've pissed off other, more loyal fans(like me!), which is going to cost them down the road... Seriously, if they hadn't done the reboot and had left Steph as Batgirl, I'd still be collecting Batgirl. If Wally was still Flash, I'd still be picking up Flash. If Barry wasn't in JLA, I'd be picking up JLA AND JLI! And that's just off the top of my head! Marvel renumbers series all the time and gets a bump in sales for them, DC should have followed suit and not done the whole drastic reboot that they did... IMHO of course. And then on the other hand, you have Marvel, which is continuing to chug along, and is building towards the Avengers/X-Men series which is going to climb to the very top of the sales charts(probably taking most of the X and Avengers books with it). The Spring/Summer could be a very tough time for DC...

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  6. I just read the previews for Wolverine 300 and X-factor 230(240?) and both of them point out how wolverine is always everywhere.

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  7. Which would definitely explain why nobody here would be looking for him! Poor Wolvie...

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  8. You have been reading comics long before than I started, so if you arent worried, me either. I just would love to see mi fav comics selling millions of copies.

    One thing I am sure is comics are not going to disappear since they are successful movie franchises and they have a lot of merchandising around them, but i think they are going to change to adapt at this times.

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  9. Yeah, sadly I think the days of the 1,000,000 book sellers is gone forever, but hey, you never know! I mean I have no idea, because I was WAY too young and not into comics at the time, but the early 90's sounds like the perfect storm of events which led to so many books selling insane amounts from everything I read. A #1 Spider-Man, a #1 X-Men, the first X-Force, the idiotic collectors who thought Spider-Man #1, X-Men #1 and X-Force #1 would be worth a billion dollars in a few years and they could retire off of it, polybagging, trading cards, holographic covers, the early 90's were just full of crazy, first time stuff! Then of course you get the collectors realizing the comics they had were so plentiful that they would never be worth any money at all, which led to Marvel over-shipping books, which led to the bankruptcy, which led to the decline of the comic book industry, which led to motion pictures saving the industry, which led to the rebound of the industry, which led to today. If the industry could survive all of THAT, I'm sure it'll outlast you and I.

    Of course, you never know, maybe digital comics will be the way of the future. But I don't see actually physical comic books ever dying off, anymore than I see actual books dying off in favor of all digital(the Nook, the Kindle, etc). But yeah, with so many comic characters successfully branching out into other forms of media(movies, TV shows, video games), the comic industry as a whole will be around for a long, long, LONG time... In what form? Who knows...

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