Weekly Comic Book Reviews 8/19/06

I only have a couple of comic book reviews for you this week. Rather than review every issue I read, I'm picking out significant issues. Beginnings and ends of stories primarily.
Image via Wikipedia
Annihilation #1
Writer: Keith Giffen
Artist: Andrea Divito
Publisher: Marvel

Annihilation is Marvel's other summer event series. The lead up to this four mini-series featuring Nova, The Silver Surfer, Ronan the Accuser, The Super Skrull and an array of Marvel's cosmic heroes and villains facing off against the invading army of Annihilus ably assisted by Thanos. The death rate was considerable, Quasar and The Super Skrull are just two of the clear victims so far.

Now we have the Annihilation mini-serie s itself and it seems that writer Keith Giffen plans to say focussed on Richard Ryder (Nova). In this first issue he continues to re-work the character of Nova in to a more mature and cynical individual.

The tone of this comic very much reminded me of the war comics I occasionally read as a child which is definitely a nice change of pace. However, since most of this issue involved telling me about things that have already happened, it did lack a sense of urgency which you would think would be present in the situation we're presented with.

Ultimate Fantastic Four #32
Writer: Mark Millar
Artist: Greg Land
Publisher: Marvel

This issue marks not only the end of the current storyline, Frightful, but also the end of writer Mark Millar's run on the title and in leaving he wraps up things quite neatly, leaving the field wide open for the next occupant.

Not only are the Frightful Four taken care of, but Millar finds a way to tie up the situation with Doctor Doom (at least until the next writer wants to play with the character).

While reading this issue, I found myself thinking that the Ultimate Fantastic Four were really behaving an awful lot like like regular universe Fantastic Four (not that that's a bad thing really). The only bit that seemed really out of character was Reed Richard's casual destruction of the Frightful Four. I would have expected a lot more agonizing over that from him.