Gint's 3-9-16 Pull-List Review

The last few weeks have been pretty busy, so schedules and books and when I can read them haven't really lined up. Fortunately, this week featured only one book, so it gets paired with one I missed last week.

Second Place:

Descender #11

Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen's Descender continues to explore new places, physically and figuratively. Nguyen's watercolors are insanely good. Watercolors, and paint in general, are a medium I never got comfortable with. I always felt they were too unwieldy. Maybe I should have tried harder? Regardless, I know what its like to use them, so to see what Nguyen is accomplishing is pretty impressive.

The last couple issues have felt a little slow. Lemire is setting up a few new characters and twists, and we finally get one of them this issue. But if you didn't know Tim-22 was a rotten piece of shit by now, you haven't been reading. I didn't want Psius to be the problem, but it sounds like most robots are bad news in this universe.

Descender continues to be inventive and unique. Lemire and Nguyen are really allowed to spread their wings with this one, and continue to deliver a great book.

First Place:

Captain Canuck #7

The second arc begins with Team Canuck (they don't really call them that) joining up with Equilibrium to track down and dismantle Mr. Gold's business. Enough time has passed for a new hierarchy to be put in place and this time its Captain Canuck, not his brother who is slightly out of control.

The flash forward picks up seamlessly from previous events. While there is a global danger aspect, Kalman Andrasofszky centers the focus on the good guys trying to find the bad guys: Canuck looking for Mr. Gold. Not every story needs to be a world-saving event, and if done right, like it is here, the more intimate story between characters with a history becomes more compelling.

At times, the Big Two have made me question whether or not I still like reading comics. Or whether or not I'm bored with the whole superhero genre. Captain Canuck reinforces the fact that I'm just tired of bad stories in the superhero genre.

Splash of the Week:

My man Dustin Nguyen knows his way around some watercolors.

-Gint