Robin Annual #7 and DC Infinite Halloween Special Reviews

Halloween has come and gone, and the spookiest night of the year usually leaves us with just memories and potential cavities. However, sitting in the dentist’s office with only a People Magazine from 1996 to distract you is hardly anybody’s idea of a good time. So do you fork over hard-earned (or borrowed from Mom) money to buy these? Well, if you trust my opinion (and you should trust my opinion), read on and find out.

Teen Titans #52 Review

I don’t know about you, but I was not a fan of the Teen Titans relaunch. Young Justice filled the spot of “young superhero team” admirably well, and so for that team to be broken up (and the book canceled) in order to capitalize on the Teen Titans name, well, I at least expected the new Teen Titans to deliver. It wasn’t meant to be. For me, it was as if Peter David (writer of Young Justice) was a master chef and had the recipe honed to perfection, and Geoff Johns inherited the recipe only to add his own ingredient of “failsauce,” be it the Superboy baby daddy drama, the abandonment of the Bart Allen readers grew to love as Impulse, and the abandonment of a Wonder Girl who actually had her shit together. The One Year Later jump didn’t help matters much, with our boy Robin experiencing his very own obsessive Clone Saga, and fights with Slade I couldn’t bring myself to care about. So when I heard that Sean McKeever, writer behind “Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane” (at least, that is the title of his which I’m most familiar with) was taking over at issue 50, I was practically jumping for joy. SMLMJ demonstrated he was an excellent writer of teenagers, and I looked forward to what he would bring to the characters.

Spoilers after the break

What if…Marvel looked to their old letters pages for new ideas?

A title created in the seventies, “What if…” was a collection of one shots showing what would have happened if one thing changed in the well-known back stories of Marvel heroes, as narrated by the Watcher– what if Gwen Stacy didn’t die on the bridge, what if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four when he got his powers, and so on. More often than not, these stories ended in tears and reassurance the status quo of 616 was meant to be. However, reading one of the issues, I was struck by items listed in the back, where they printed the most popular story suggestions from Marvel readers. Here are some of the most interesting (read: lulz worthy) :