Dennis Hopeless

IvX was... surprisingly good? I don't know what I was expecting per se... or, well, I do. AvX was so drastically one-sided. The X-Men were right and the Avengers were dicks and caused the entire mess that then had to be cleaned up. This one though, it was actually legitimately complicated with logic and ambiguity and complexity on both sides and I really enjoyed it!

And! All the tie-ins were relevant and interesting and expanded on the story in fun and interesting ways (barring a few small show more "that character definitely wasn't at that battle" art inconsistencies at places).

Now specifics, All-New gave us some sweet Bobby moments, some catharsis for Scott, a wonderful epilogue and a bunch of other story points. All in all, a great ending to Hopeless's fantastic run on this book. show less

I just...love...Cloak and Dagger. And this is a much-needed improvement in their relationship from Shades of Grey—still not perfect, but more balanced, more honest.

One of my chief frustrations with superhero comics is the way characters will progress through a given story arc only to be returned to factory settings at the end, blank slates prepared for their next outing with a new set of writers and artists. I get it. I do. But it's disappointing to lose all that character development show more over. And over. And over again.

This happens with Cloak and Dagger too, alas, but...it's a little more believable. Because when you have a partnership that is more a symbiosis, and one of you boils with light whilst the other freezes in starving darkness, there are actual forces pulling on who you are and who you want to be that make backsliding and immaturity and painful striving for an impossible normality realistic.

Do I always agree with the way a creative team conveys this? No...and I love this duo best when they lean into the way they need each other. But I never quite feel as if the conflict stirred up by Cloak being Cloak and Dagger being Dagger—and each of them inextricably bound into the other—is wholly contrived. And I can love the tension when I know it will be resolved in a moment of connection and tenderness. (Which, come to think of it, is part of this team's factory settings.)

...Does this really have anything to do with this specific book? No. But I had to say it somewhere, and here seemed like the most compelling place. My apologies if you were expecting more of a review than an encomium. show less

Dennis Hopeless has a good run chronicling the life of Jessica Drew, Spider-Woman.

The book starts poorly, as Drew is mired in a Spider-Verse crossover driven by Morlun and the Inheritors -- a multiverse saga I gladly skipped at the time. But even she is tired of all the cosmic superhero garbage and the book pivots to let her return to her private investigation career and become a street-level hero who gets involved in cases involving bank robberies, kidnapping, and domestic violence with the show more help of reporter Ben Urich and a reformed(-ish) super villain named Porcupine. Eventually, she becomes pregnant and the book really hits its stride as she copes with a baby bump while bumping bad guys onto their butts. Her childbirth is of course, appropriately ludicrous for a superhero, involving aliens and a black hole.

The Civil War II event makes an unwelcome intrusion, and toward the end an unnecessary romance is shoved into the book, but hey, it's all good as Hopeless leans into the amusing cringe of the relationship.

I regret I didn't get to this series earlier, but it's nice to have it all under one cover now (well, except for two issues that are part of a "Spider-Women" crossover sequence and collected separately).

FOR REFERENCE:

Originally published in single magazine form as Spider-Woman [2014-2015] #1-10 and Spider-Woman [2015-2017] #1-5, 8-17, with additional material from Amazing Spider-Man [2015-2018] #1. show less

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review!

3.5 stars! The Kármán Line follows a space station crew, who has their life on the station recorded as part of a reality show. All goes well, until one day, each member of the crew gets a private message from their governments that read "ABORT MISSION, RETURN ASAP" The rest of the story focuses on the crew and how they plan to survive the trip from the station back to Earth. The novel was too show more short! The fact that it's so short hinders the story a bit, making it feel a bit more rushed than it should be. The characters were mildly interesting, but two of the men looked so similar, I had to go back and reread a few pages to figure out who exactly was the one to go out of an airlock. I also greatly disliked the ending and that it was so abrupt. It felt like the story was meant to be longer, but got cut off instead? I did like the concept for this novel, it's a pretty fascinating concept. A reality show that basically treats a space station like a hype house? Fascinating! But it fell a bit short for me. The intrigue was well crafted, and the mystery is what compelled me to read this novel so quickly. The art style was completely fine, very traditional American comics. I was distracted by the one female astronaut looking just like Kara Thrace from Battlestar Galactica, but I think that was a coincidence. Also, minor heads up, this novel has a few spicy scenes in it. I got blasted in the eyes, only a few pages in, with a spice scene. The spicy parts were fine, they made full sense within the plot, but man it still was a whole jumpscare. show less