Colossus has been doing it for years. And his skin is "organic steel", which is pretty heavy bullshit. But yeah, this is a world with telepathy and people who can heal whole limbs in a few minutes.

Also, I stand by Bullseye > Joker. He just up and kills people, cause he loves it. Yeah he's a merc, but rampages let you kill more people then, say, overly contrived terrorist plots. While he was in the thunderbolts, everyone had killswitches in their blood, but bullseye was never allowed any freedom on the team and only used in case of extreme emergencies. Venom on the other-hand was given days off to roam around town.

Also, I've noticed the Adamantium escalation. It used to be just wolverine, but now people are covered in it, soldiers have clips full of bullets from it, and, at one point in world war hulk, they have 50 cal. machine guns going a few minutes with them only using adamantium darts.

I suppose superman might bemoan the similar Kryptonite inflation, where it used to be really rare, now everyone has got hold of as much as they'd ever possibly need, and a new type gets rolled out every few years. "FEAR MY MAUVE KRYPTONITE, IT GIVES YOU HERPES"

There isn't a mauve kryptonite, right?

Well it makes sense for characters connected to Weapon X, like Agent Zero a.k.a. Maverick and Cyber (who got eaten by beatles, BTW, so his adamantium skin was recycled) but everyone else? Meh.

Yes, the combat system is great, makes you feel badass, the stealth takedown gameplay is great, and I think it even puts a good showing in having collectibles Metroid-style to encourage exploration. Some of the Riddler's "riddles" were lame, but the perspective puzzles were probably the coolest bonus "find the thing" in any game I've played. I also liked the Arkham narration chronicles, they were pretty well written and acted. The "interview tapes" where they clearly wanted to get their money's worth out of the Batman villain voice actors they hired could have been radio drama levels of awesome, but ended up being really poorly scripted.

The story is not bad, but it's in its own separate universe, and doesn't really relate back to DC Comics canon. I really liked this game, and greatly prefer it to Assassin's Creed, etc.

It's actually arriving with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (which I've already finished, I just loved it enough to rent twice), which I've just noticed the comedy of. If I can like a semi-mindless brawler like ultimate alliance, surely I'm gonna go crazy for The Batman Being A Badass.

I've flicked through a lot of the recent batman stuff, and I was kind of interested. Having Damian Wayne as Robin being a total dick is kind of amusing. I just hope I pick up an issue where Batman is all pimp-slap disciplining. That could get me into this.

I'd like to see some dick-slapping before Bruce gets back.

[quote="xenomouse"][quote="Rhoe"]I'd like to see some dick-slapping


I mean Uhhh
uhh
uhhh
I gotta go.

EDIT: to prevent a double post!

So I got home, saw Arkham Asylum on the kitchen table, put the game in, and didn't put it down 'till it was finished. Man, that was a brilliant game. Easily the most satisfying combat I've ever played. If this is the standard of brawlers now, I will throw my computer out the window in tribute to the Brawler Gods.

Battle Pope is kind of fun.

Noble Causes is pretty good mainly based on it's premise
Fell is a trip
I don't know how Chew actually is, but it continues to be very popular so that might be worth a look.

And a course The Walking Dead

Furthest I've gone out of my comfort zone on superheroes was reading Pulse, but that's cause Luke cage is in it a lot.

I wouldn't say Blackest Night ended up being bad, but it was a bit disappointing. I'd recommended reading Sinestro Corps Wars or The Green Lantern Corps if you're looking for a GL book. It follows Kyle Ratner and Guy Gardner as the semi main protagonist along with a good cast of alien lanterns It has been one of the most consistent titles out there.

I got the 8th and final volume of Perfection (aka Pluto ) today. Urasawa is a living god. Everything with eyes should read its goodness.

I've just read Wanted.

It wasn't as bad as I expected.

My favorite Batman story is No Man's Land. Huntress plays a decent sized role in it and it introduces my favorite Batgirl. Rucka did a decent novelization of it if the trades are too daunting.

Watch New Frontier if you already haven't and like Hal Jordan. Blackest Night isn't bad, but it is too damned long. If you count the lead in that shit started to feel like it was never going to end. There are a bunch of good Hal stories but off the top of my head and at work I can't list most of em.

Do all of Frank Quitely's people still look like Jay Leno?

If you like anthology, I'd suggest checking out Batman 80-Page Giant issue. It show some of the current and newest batman characters during a snowstorm in Gotham.

I'm been reading anthology such as Girl Comics & Breaking Into Comics The Marvel Way, The (original) New Mutants, and I'm thinking about getting back in to Supergirl after reading issue #50.

[quote="God"]I wouldn't say Blackest Night ended up being bad, but it was a bit disappointing.

I haven't pick up the late issue yet, but the cover for Brightest Day #0 is certainly telling me not to bother.

That looks exactly like Justin Timberlake.

Oh give it 20 years Jeremy. Drugs can do wonder to the body .

THANKS A LOT VOLCANO, NO NEW COMICS COMING TO ENGLAND THIS WEEK.

[quote="Jeff Smith"]My conclusion is that some people aren't smart enough to read comic books.
A sad, but 100% accurate, statement.

Well, Bone is beloved by furries, so it might turn your kid into a furry, but I doubt it will encourage them to smoke and to gamble.

[quote="ReadingIsDumb"]i only recently got back into comics because my friend was reading the blackest night series i really liked it i'd appreciate any recommendations you guys have. i really liked blackest night, 100 bullets, and i'm reading through a lot of the ultimate series marvel put out recently, but dont know where to go after i finish.

Give Invincible a try. It's probably the most consistently good non-Marvel/DC superhero comic on the market today. Plot is a bit like Ultimate Spider Man (first run before Markie Mark shitted up that entire universe) only with a lot more weight behind the characters and actual passage of time. Same goes for the other Robert Kirkman epic book The Walking Dead.

If you enjoyed Blackest Night, go give the Sinestro Corps Wars a read as its basically the beginning of all of the DC lantern stuff. Same goes for Green Lantern Secret Origins. If you're looking for something currently on shelves, Geoff Johns relaunch of the Flash has been excellent. Both the Flash Rebirth and the first issue of the new monthly were great. Finally almost all of DC's current Bat books have been excellent. I'd say the side character books (Gotham City Sirens, Batgirl, Red Robin) are the best books of the current "Bruce Wayne is DEAD!!!!!...notreally", but Streets of Gotham is also an amazingly good title.

Hope that helps.

[quote="furyk"][quote="ReadingIsDumb"]Geoff Johns relaunch of the Flash has been excellent. Both the Flash Rebirth and the first issue of the new monthly were great.

I heard the monthly's good so far, but I'm going to have to disagree about Rebirth. It was six issues of the DC universe sucking on Barry Allen's choad. If the reader has no idea who Barry Allen is, they might question why the DC universe would imbibe so much choad when Barry never really does anything that interesting or inspiring in the mini. Yes, he gets a massive power upgrade and is turned into the god of all speedsters, but he's still so damn vanilla. And all the retcons were pointless and have forever cluttered up any sense of elegance or coherency to the origin of the Flashes. But if you like Van Sciver's art, there's at least something to like about Barry Allen: Truck Full o' Choad, because it's pretty swell here.

Not theirs, his. Geoff Johns has a major hard on for most characters he grew up with so he's gently stroking the shaft of them all... over and over and over again.

[quote="Spankminister"]The top 20 worst Liefeld pictures feature got me to dust off the old X-Force comics I had lying around. The series does start out with horrid Liefeld, then goes to Nicieza, which is better, but still totally 90s, then to Loeb, who is actually a decent writer.

Also, picked up some G.I. Joe thing by Larry Hama for free comic book day. Some of the new G.I. Joe books are actually pretty decent, but Larry Hama, Chris Claremont, etc. should probably retire. They have not changed, and either I have, or comics have, because I don't think you can make every speech bubble shameless exposition anymore. Every page is chock full of, "Well, if it isn't Billy, my son who tried to assassinate me but then who I brainwashed into joining Cobra, how did your mission go with Destro, my lieutenant who is always about to betray me sort of like Starscream you'd think I would know better by now?"

Maybe it was the Crimson Viper who was disguising himself as Cobra Commander, and therefor he didn't know any better.

[quote="HeartOfMadness"]It amuses me how hard Johns tries to sell the idea of Hal Jordan being TOTALLY AWESOME, but really, he just ends up having Hal seem like a self-obsessed jerk-off.

See, I thought that was just Hal Jordan's character. It is beyond me how he has fans, I thought basically everyone had moved on to Kyle.

One thing that also bugs me about comics is the Batgirl debate of "Cass sucks, she's a Mary Sue" vs. "Steph sucks, she's a fuckup." The reality of the situation is that Stephanie had a brief, interesting stint as a Robin who was pretty human, and struggled to live up to the impossibly high bar of having Batman as your boss. Cassandra was interesting while she was a superhero with ability and no training, and Oracle/Batman had to become the superhero parents to guide her. Then, both characters were basically thrown in the shitter with a combination of terrible writers, and stupid storylines that basically ruined both beyond repair. I think there were a lot of great stories left to tell, but as usual, it all gets tossed away for Big Dumb Event, and they pull the usual twists out of a hat: amnesia/turn into villain/comic book death/back from dead.

[quote="HeartOfMadness"][It amuses me how hard Johns tries to sell the idea of Hal Jordan being TOTALLY AWESOME, but really, he just ends up having Hal seem like a self-obsessed jerk-off.

Well, here's the inherent problem with trying to take a property back to the Silver Age while still maintaining the modern characterization style that is targeted at adults: it doesn't always mesh.

Take Flash and Green Lantern. In the 90's, modern writers revitalized these characters by giving them human flaws and failings.

With the Flash book, these flaws were attached to Wally West instead of Barry Allen, so you could still keep the characters fairly consistent. Barry Allen was a more innocent Flash for a more innocent day. He could stay a paragon of virtue and heroism because, hey, he was dead. Likewise, you could keep Wally from ever measuring up to Barry Allen, because Barry Allen was dead, and you can't compete with a dead man. But with Barry back, Johns wants to keep him the embodiment of hope and heroic perfection while at the same time making him more human and sympathetic. Guess what? It couldn't be done organically. You would have to sacrifice one for the other. So Geoff retconned him some murdered parents to get him some artificial sympathy. And now Wally is forced to compete with a living Barry Allen who is both all-moral and all-powerful. How can he compete? He can't. So that's one great character who will soon be shuffled off to obscurity. And another character who is somehow less than the sum of his parts.

With Hal Jordan, he wasn't out of the game for as long as Barry, and he already had the perfect modern reboot in a story called Emerald Dawn. This story cast him as a drunk driver who finds an alien power ring, and actually spends the first part of his heroic career in prison, occasionally slipping out to do the superhero thing. This was an awesome characterization. It was experimental and interesting. And then Jordan actually did a heel turn and became one of the galaxy's greatest villains, Parrallax, before ultimately reforming and sacrificing himself for the universe. But Johns likes his heroes squeaky clean, so instead of building on what was done, he retconned Hal so that he was never a drunk driver, and he only became a supervillain by accident. He got rid of Hal's darker side, but yet he still tries to write him as if he's still the same troubled character.

You shouldn't be able to change the major events of a character's life without changing the character. Barry Allen now lived his childhood as an orphaned loner who was raised by different people, but he's still the same cheerful, clean-cut, optimistic guy. How does that happen? Hal Jordan no longer has the drunk driving or murder to plague his guilt, and yet he's still the same haunted man. How does that happen? Bugs me to say it, but bad writing.