*Getting a little tired of the relentless Thor cross-promotion. Thor meets X-Factor!  Thor meets Power Pack!  Thor meets Deadpool!  Thor meets Howard the Duck!  Only one of these is fake.

*Maybe Marvel should tone it down a bit with the existential threats to the universe.  They are coming a little too often these days.  Zombies, Kang, the Chaos King, the Cancerverse, the Elder Gods and who knows how many others have tried to destroy everything.  And that was just in December.

*I’ve discovered I really prefer comics to have superheroes or the supernatural.  No matter how good other stuff is, I still prefer something super in my comics.

*Week 37 of DC’s 52 really gives away one of the biggest secrets and best mysteries of the whole thing.  Maybe the biggest/best, since I haven’t finished it yet.  I really hate when a cover gives away a key plot point.

*So I’m reading Countdown to Final Crisis and I note that the Monitors refer to human beings in the collective as “man.”  Why would they have our gender pronoun bias?  That’s either offensive or lazy writing.  Talking to you, Dan Jurgens.

*I really, really hate the crazy re-numbering and then again also re-numbering stuff that Marvel does.  The latest issue of Iron Man is #500.  The issue before that was #33.  Annoying and convoluted nonsense.

*Really looking forward to Age of X.

*Saw Scott Pilgrim last night, it totally lived up to the hype and is one of my favorite movies of the last 2-3 years.  Now on to the comics.  Last time this happened was with Kick-Ass.  Loved the movie, then read the comics and loved them even more.  Expect the same of Scott Pilgrim.

*Is it me or is Brian Michael Bendis‘s Luke Cage the best Luke Cage ever? (Hint: It’s not me)

*Am I the only one who thinks that Salvador Larocca‘s Tony Stark is the spitting image of a dark-haired Sawyer from Lost?

*I understand that the Walking Dead Weekly series is a cynical cash-in on the new popularity of the Walking Dead after the television series success.  I’m okay with that.  It still brings one of the greatest comic book series and zombie tales to more people, since the original early issues are expensive to buy, individually-speaking.  Sure, you can buy them in the trade paperbacks cheaper, but nothing beats the feeling of issue-to-issue reading of the series…

*Chaos War is over and the ending was pretty good for a mediocre series, overall.  Hopefully Fear Itself will be better than Chaos War or Shadowland.

*One thing I like about Chaos War and some other recent Marvel stuff is the fact that the usual “pow” and “wham” exclamations have been replaced with other words that are simply exaggerated.  From Chaos War #5, we have “Haikooooom” after a very good Haiku reference, “Gutssss” as Hercules gets hit in the stomach, “Chsstbsster” as Herc gets punched through the chest, “Godyslam” as the Chaos King gets slammed to the Earth and many others.  Some of them require you to think a bit more and try to figure out the connection, but they are very cool.  Don’t know who is responsible for them, Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente, Khoi Pham or someone else.  I’ve seen them elsewhere, but can’t remember where.  Whoever and whatever is the source, I’m a big fan and I encourage more of this.