Winter Soldier: The Bitter March, Rick Remender, Roland Boschi

I haven’t heard good things about Rick Remender’s work, but I kind of like this run on Winter Soldier. It begins by following Fury and another SHIELD agent during the Cold War, as they begin to go up against the Winter Soldier. But slowly, Bucky’s memories surface in the Winter Soldier, changing the whole course of the story.

Ultimately, it doesn’t change anything about the Marvel universe — Bucky might as well never have resurfaced, really. In a way, that makes this a bit of a cheat: we see a little of Bucky’s struggles against the Soviets who control him, but it doesn’t really mean anything. It doesn’t show us anything about Bucky we didn’t already know. It doesn’t pick up on where we left him in the last Winter Soldier comic, with the love of his life unable to remember who he is. With everything he’s come to care about destroyed.

It’s a fun spy/action story, but nothing more.

Rating: 3/5

Loki: Agent of Asgard, Al Ewing, Lee Garbett

I think I needed more of Journey into Mystery and general Thor comics to really understand what’s going on here, but it’s a fun ride anyway. It continues the kid!Loki storyline — except he’s all grown up now, thanks to Billy Kaplan of the Young Avengers. So we get to see Loki living in Midgard, with a fancy apartment and an unfortunate resemblance to Harry Styles. We get to see a bit more of the “new” Loki interacting with Thor, and the continuing saga of many Lokis that is the whole plot with Loki dying and then kid!Loki but it’s not really kid!Loki and —

Yeah, it’s confusing. But Loki’s capers are fun, and no doubt it’s going somewhere brain-twisty and fun. I like young!Loki a lot, and along with all the Hiddleston fangirls, just want to see that he’s been misunderstood and twisted into his role. And more than that, I hope Loki’s still playing with my head. I don’t really think we ever can or should get some kind of solid answer about where Loki stands on the moral continuum. He’s wildfire, unpredictable; the comics do take that aspect of the trickster Loki from Norse myth and play with it most excellently.

Oh, and the scenes with the Avengers in the tower are perfect.

Rating: 3/5

Gambit: Once A Thief, James Asmus, Clay Mann, Diogenes Neves

I vaguely remember Gambit from watching X-men cartoons as a kid, I think. But I don’t remember him well enough to just jump in like this and actually care about Gambit’s inconsequential adventures that’re his own damn fault for messing with stuff he doesn’t understand for the heck of stealing something. I mean, sure, if that’s Remy’s character, then… okay? But I know he has fans, and surely they’re for something more substantial than this? Right?

So yeah, not impressed with this. The art is great, but the stories are just… I had difficulty, honestly, remembering the names of the two dimensional characters he was running into.

Not one for me, I think.

Rating: 1/5

FF: vol. 1, Fantastic Faux, Matt Fraction, Mike Allred, Laura Allred

I think this one definitely requires more background. It might be volume #1 of the FF Marvel Now books, but it clearly follows an ongoing story involving the Fantastic Four and… possibly a lot of other people? I had no idea who a lot of these people were, other than Johnny Storm and Scott Lang. (Where does that fit with Young Avengers? Isn’t he Cassie’s dad, and isn’t he dead? Or did he come back amidst the timeline crossing?)

Anyway, there were fun aspects to this — the line “All of you pale before our hetero-normative cisgendered classification of family!” is a winning one, and there’s some other good one-liners. Which I’d kind of expect from Matt Fraction, really. There was a really nice bit where he fit in a trans* character, dealt with sensitively, yet in such a normal way — it barely caused a blink, and yet it worked well. I liked that bit a lot. Oh, and She-Hulk is great.

Overall, though, I don’t have enough context to really enjoy this. Too bad the library’s collection of comics is generally spotty.

Rating: 2/5