Hollows #1 – Review

By: Chris Ryall (writer), Sam Kieth (art) & Robbie Robbins (letters)

The Story: A post-apocalyptic world illustrated by Sam Kieth!

Quick review: I guess the story for this series is an interesting twist on the post-apocalyptic genre, but the real attraction is the Sam Kieth art.  There’s simply nobody else who illustrates a comic quite like Kieth.  Heck, you don’t even see many artists trying to ape his style.  The world is full of mediocre Jim Lee-clones (DC?) and more than a few bad Alex Ross clones, but nobody is trying to do what Kieth does.  Weird.  Not being an artist myself, I can only assume that Kieth defies copying for some reason.

Quick Hits Reviews – Week of May 11, 2011

Try as we might, there are always a few titles that don’t get the full review treatment here at WCBR.  What can we say…  Those guys publish a LOT of comics and it’s hard to get to them all.

 

The Incredible Hulks #628 – If you’ve followed the news, you’ve probably seen that Greg Pak is ending his LONG run on this title around issue #635 or so.  And, he is really going out with a bang.  This has been a very fun story arc that follows Bruce and Betty Banner as they try to retrieve Pandora’s Box from a bunch of bad guys in a flying fortress.  The Banner’s aren’t getting along all that well, so there is lots of fun, biting banter between the two.  Sometimes it even plays into the story as in one place where Hulk needs to get angrier and she starts telling him that he stinks and when that doesn’t work, she starts telling him about her sexual activities with other men since they broke up. It’s pretty funny, and great superhero action abounds.  It certainly doesn’t hurt to have Tom Grummett drawing the comic.  His classic superhero style doesn’t really have a bad panel in the whole issue and he really nails those scenes when Hulk-action happens and you can almost feel the ground shaking.  Great stuff.  Grade:  A-   

 

X-Men Legacy #248  – A lot happens in this issue as we see the X-Men recovering from Age of X.  Ironically, this mop-up issue ended up being stronger than the actual Age of X story was.  The first part of the issue deals with Emma offering mind-wipes to X-Men who want them, and as you can imagine, not everyone wants the same service: Cannonball wants it all gone, but Frenzy wants to keep her memories of her relationship with Cyclops.  We also dig into Legion a bit and Xavier and Nemesis’s new plan for helping him cope with his personalities.  I’m (personally) not that excited about Legion being a part of ongoing stories, but we’ll see what we get.  There also looks to be some more Rogue/Magneto/Gambit love-triangle stuff going on.   Yawn… But….the big news is that it looks like the X-Men are finally going to go find Rachel, Polaris and Havok who have been missing in space for ~5 years (since the Brubaker run on UXM).  THAT is a story I’m looking forward to seeing.  The art is a bit of a mixed bag.  Jorge Molina has some great panels and some others where characters look funny, but the storytelling is always solid.  Grade: B-