The new website has been up for about a week now (though I haven’t promoted that fact yet). I haven’t had a lot of time to work with it, but have been filling in some content areas here and there. There’s still a lot of empty spaces to drop stuff in – the filler feature headlines are a tad vexing – but I’m getting there.

Watching traffic trickle in, though, it’s funny where I’ve gotten some random search engine views from. I moved a bunch of old blogs over to this site (stuff I done on Blogger and MySpace in the past), a few which mentioned movie celebrities. Apparently dropping a Kelly Clarkson or Hugh Grant reference in a blog pulls immediate metrics.

Silver is so dramatic.

I managed to get a little comic reading time in this week. Polished the trades for Marvel’s Annihilation #2 and #3.  I don’t usually go for any of the deep-space-crazy books from either Marvel or DC, but I’d heard so many good things about this serious (and the Abnet and Lanning books that spin out of it) I figured I’d give it a try. Plus, I got a good chunk of the series and related books on the serious cheap at Chicago Comic-Con ’09.

I read Annihilation #1 shortly after Con, and liked it quite a bit. Had never heard of any of these characters outside of Nova, but I immediately liked Drax the Destroyer’s character and arc. I was surprised to discover that Nova was part of a Green Lantern Corp-esque galaxy police force (the “Nova Corp”, ‘natch) as I hadn’t seen him in anything other than some New Warriors issues waaaay back in the day. Not that the Nova Corp stick around long. I enjoyed Richard Rider and his plight as the last of the Novas, and his trouble dealing with all of the power he’d been infused with.

Book #2 didn’t thrill me. I’m no Silver Surfer fan, and I’ve always though Galactus was a big silly. The Surfer arc left me underwhelmed, though I do get a kick out of Firelord and was happy he dropped in. Super Skrull’s four issues featured art with cool character designs but inconsistent quality. The cartoony style just didn’t hold up, and moments that should have been serious looked comical. The trade finishes up with Ronan the Accuser, an exiled Kree judge, jury and executioner prone to dramatic pronouncements and being a big jerk. The art and storytelling felt like something out of Heavy Metal or 2000 A.D., with a definite Keith Giffen flare (Giffen wrote the Surfer story, actually). Seemed a big tangled mess at the end with a bunch of random characters thrown in. And any more fan-service shots of Gamora and her warrior-thong and I might have tossed the book in disgust. I’m so tired of the super-comic ethos that powerful, intelligent women feel empowered by running around in no clothes. Nothing says comfortable fighting wear than a string bikini.

Annihilation #3 started and I felt like I stepped out of the movie for a restroom break and missed some really important stuff. There must be some offshoot stuff they decided not include in the trade, or they felt like the story was going on too long already anyway, but #3 starts with the various and sundry characters from the first two collections all teamed up and fighting the big bug-apocalypse. Nova’s problems with being super-duper-powerful are not mentioned, a bunch of new people show up that seem to be important but who I’ve not encountered before and everything has gone from a micro-story scale to a macro-scale. Things get really messy, and then they get tied up very neatly, in very short order. A couple of characters introduced in #2 don’t show up in #3, which is pretty relevant to how the big plot goes down, and I have no idea why they weren’t there. Either the off-camera stories I didn’t get cover their involvement and later absence, or the writer realized that keeping them around would pretty much negate their big flashy ending. Hmmm…

Then they padded out the trade with a bunch of character bios (many of which were already included in Vol #1 & #2) to make the book the same size and pricepoint as the others. Cause, you know, Marvel really likes to do that.

All harping aside, I enjoyed the book enough to keep reading to the Conquest extension and more Nova stories (but maybe that’s cause I’d already purchased the trades – $5 TPB bins are awesome like that).