I am aware that we are half way through October before I am getting this up but I as George Washington famously said, “shit happens”.

First lets get the run down of all the goodies in this months box:

• Deadpool Vs. Thanos 1 from Marvel Comics
• Dangergirl 1 Exclusive Comic Block Variant from IDW
• Mirror’s Edge: Exordium 1 from Dark Horse
• Mad Max: Fury Road 1 Exclusive Nerd Block Variant from Veritgo
• Saga T-Shirt with Prince Robot
• Green Lantern light up ring

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Solid box top to bottom.  Not only did we get a Green Lantern Ring and awesome Saga T-shirt but we got four comics this month instead of our normal three!  I’ve mentioned this before but part of the promise of the Comic Block has been that we will occasionally get exclusive variant covers and graphic novels.  While we have gotten variant covers o’ plenty there has yet to be a single graphic novel.  Perhaps next month?  I did read all the comics in the box and below are is my rundown of each issue.

Mad Max: Fury Road 1

Witness!  From the best I can bet this comic book takes place between Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome and Mad Max: Fury Road.  It starts with a couple page run down summarizing the events of the first three Mad Max movies which feels like way more information then we actually need.  It then has Max go to Gastown to participate in a Battle Royal style Thunderdome situation in hopes to win a V8 engine.  Max is victorious however killing of one of the members of the Buzzards gang attracts their attention.  The Buzzards find where Max has been hiding, steal his engine, stab him, and tie him to the ground to be left for dead.  Max passes out and a mysterious woman frees Max and bandages his wounds.  The comic ends when Max wakes up.  The mysterious woman enlists Max’s service for an unknown job in exchange for saving his life.

The comic was so-so.  It spends too much time recapping the old Mad Max movies and not enough time moving the plot forward.  Very little actually happens.  The art is really inconsistent.  At times it looks great and extremely detailed, but at other times the faces of people look like mushy blobs.  They also go to great links to make Max not look like Mel Gibson or Tom Hardy which is a weird choice and distracting.  This is only an issue 1 so it’s job is really just to set things up but I wished we had gotten a little more.  With so little happening I wasn’t able to form any strong ties to anyone or anything so don’t have a lot of motivation to find out what happens next.

Deadpool Vs. Thanos 1

Deadpool has been up against a lot.  He’s been up against X-Force, Hawkeye, Carnage, and now Thanos.  I’m a little unsure on the actual plot of what happened in this comic, there were a lot of moving parts.  There was some stuff about Death being kidnapped and so the dead on earth were unable to actually die.  There was a fight between Deadpool and Thanos for the affection of Death.  Thanos kind of killed Deadpool and then brought him back to life so they could team up and find Death.  It was a little confusing, but there were a lot of jokes, breaking the fourth wall and talking about tacos.

I have real mixed feelings about Deadpool.  I like him in theory but I find most of the fourth wall breaking and jokes to be more gimmicky than actually funny.  The comics I have read with Deadpool up to this point have been ok but because of all the jokes and such there never really feels like there are any stakes.  There were some genuinely funny parts in this comic but not funny enough to get me to buy more issues.

Mirror’s Edge: Exordium 1

If you don’t already know Mirror’s Edge is based on a video game for PS3/Xbox360/PC that came out in 2007.  It was fairly groundbreaking at the time for being a first person shooter that involved little to no actual shooting.  It is based in a futuristic society which “runners” use parkour moves to navigate around the city delivering messages.  If I remember correctly the game sold ok but not stellar.  Everyone loved the aesthetic of the world but the game itself was painfully short (4-6 hours long) so people didn’t want to shell out 60 dollars for it.  I played it back in the day and remember liking it but also it giving me head aches from moving around so fast.  Also, if I can bitch for a moment I really hate when games allow you to have weapons but actively do things to discourage you from using them.  Either take the weapons out or make them usable don’t half ass it.

Anyway, they are finally making a sequel next year after being in some form of development over the last 7 years so this comic is most likely a tie-in or prequel.

The comic begins with Faith (our protagonist) on a mission.  She gets two guards to chase her in order to allow her team access into a building in order to steal data.  While running from the guards she accidentally interrupts some sort of deal between rival gangs and gun fire erupts.  Faith tries to get away but is captured by the gang working for the crime lord Dogen.  She is taken to Dogen who is impressed by her work and offers her a job.  She declines and leaves, trying to steal some of Dogens art on the way out.  Faith returns to her base of operations and their leader Noah is mad at her for the risk she took going on a rogue mission in the first place.  The comic ends with Faith going back to Dogen and accepting his employment.

This was a really great first issue of a comic.  A lot of things happen but they are presented in a controlled manner in which the reader can actually follow along.  They keep talking about this beatlink thing which apparently most of the advanced runners have and Faith does not.  Not having a beatlink is a slight to Faith and a cause of animosity between Noah and Faith.  Call me old, but I actually side with Noah in this when he is angry at Faith for her risky behavior.  He seems fairly reasonable and Faith just seems like a brat for not wanting to listen to him.  Overall I really liked the comic and will probably pick up more of the issues as they come in.  While I didn’t love the original Mirror’s Edge game, I did always like the world it created and liked revisiting it in this comic.

Sidenote I really liked that Dark Horse didn’t have any ads in this comic until the very end.  It was a real pleasant reading experience to be able to go through the story and not be distracted by ads every other page.

Danger Girl: Renegade 1

I don’t know about you but I find this comic is best read while playing Mystikal’s Danger (Been so Long).  So I know nothing about Danger Girl, and as if the comic was reading my mind, it was filled with exposition.  It even took a pause halfway through to explain exactly what the Danger Girls are.

It starts off with Danger Girl Abbey Chase at age 12 running through the streets of Egypt.  This scene was amazingly over the top.  At one point she’s literally climbing a stack of woven baskets filled with snakes.

Abbey and her handler David move to Norway where there some more exposition about her Dad being on some super secret mission.  The two are ambushed and David dies in the struggle.  Abbey manages to escape and the comic jumps 13 years to a 26 year old Abbey in the Amazon jungle.  Abbey is once again being Chased (see what I did there) and narrowly escapes a villainous woman with a snake eye (literally).  The comic ends with Abbey giving  more exposition and a glimpse of the weird emerald the Snake Lady was trying to steal from Abbey.

This comic was all well and good but nothing in it really grabbed my attention enough to want to read more.  The over the top villains and ominous dark family history was just so typical that it almost felt like a parody.  On the plus side the art was at least good and like Mirror’s Edge there weren’t ads in the interior of the book.