So sometimes when I say that a book is forgettable, I’m making a prediction that turns out to be incorrect; it might seem like it’ll be forgettable, but for some reason, it’ll lodge deep in my brain and stick with me for decades. But the benefit of being way behind on my booklogging, is that I am entirely able to declare a certain set of books as being thoroughly and definitively forgettable, because I have already forgotten them. Let us begin.
- Reginald Hudlin’s Black Panther: Four the Hard Way continues his run on the Black Panther. I liked the early volumes, but this one I don’t remember at all. Except that looking on the cover, it shows the Fantastic four and the Marvel Zombies universe, so I’m pretty sure they joined up with them and traveled there. Probably survived, too.
- Dwayne McDuffie’s The New Fantastic Four shows the Fantastic Four on the cover, along with Storm and the Black Panther. So I’m guessing I probably bought this because it crosses over with the Black Panther book? I don’t remember how, though.
- I’d think I’d remember Dan Slott’s She-Hulk: Planet Without a Hulk , since I’ve really liked earlier volumes. But I don’t. It’s probably good, though, really. Slott’s She-Hulk work has been quality. Quickly paging through it, it looks like it’s set around the Civil War stuff, which trips a memory in my brain that it was kind of awkward, because the dead-serious Civil War doesn’t combine well with the flip self-referentiality of Slott’s She-Hulk.
- Dan Slott’s Avengers: The Initiative: Basic Training has so thoroughly slipped my memory that I wasn’t even sure I read it, even though it was sitting on my “to be booklogged” pile. After flipping through it, some character names are familiar, so I probably did read it. But I sure as heck didn’t remember it. I think the most I can say is that the artist appears to have colored within the lines throughout.
- J. Michael Straczynski and Peter David’s Spider-Man: Back in Black and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Sean McKeever’s Peter Parker: Spider Man: Back in Black are both eminently forgettable. I remember that Spider-Man dresses up in black for some bullshit in-story reason that clearly boils down to “there was a movie going on at the time where he was in his black costume, so it seemed like a good idea.” Also, I think they’re supposed to be all dark and broody, which is rarely a good tone for Spider-Man. Also, apparently they’re totally irrelevant because they’re busy magically rebooting Spider-Man’s entire fucking continuity, which kind of pisses me off a lot.
- Brian reed’s Ms. Marvel, vol. 3: Operation Lightning Storm is apparently also a Civil War-related book. I’d hoped that the Ms. Marvel book would start to pick up steam at some point, but it doesn’t appear to have happened so far, so it’s looking fairly unlikely at this point.
- Brian K. Vaughan’s Ex Machina, vol. 6: Power Down is the continuation of a series that I’ve liked a goodly bit, but which seemed to be underperforming to its potential. I remember thinking that I wished they’d get on with some of their big reveals and move along the overarching plot. Did they do so in this volume? Fuck if I know.
- I can hardly stop rolling my eyes at the very concept of Jeph Loeb’s Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America and Ed Brubaker’s The Death of Captain America . Stupid stunt deaths of characters who are clearly not going to stay dead are lame, lame, lame. Combine this with the aforementioned Spider-Man magic retcon, and it’s like Marvel is suddenly determined to go back to the bad old days of the ‘90s and throw away their recent artistic and financial success. So, best to forget about this entirely.
- This is cheating, because I just read it recently, but J. Michael Straczynski’s Silver Surfer: Requiem is already on its way to oblivion in my memory. But since it’s still fresh, I remember it being a very weird book. Straczynski kills off the Silver Surfer in a really low-key elegiac way, and it only occurred to me after I was done reading the book that he killed off a forty-year-old character. Is the Surfer really dead? It seems unlikely, but I cared so little while it happened that you never know. It’s not like anyone would really get upset if he weren’t kicking around the Marvel Universe any more, you know?
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