Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose #48 ~ I've always found Raven Hex quite sympathetic, for all that she's usually causing mayhem for someone or other. She's not especially nice, but life hasn't been nice to her either - it seems like every time she starts to let her guard down, something happens to make her fight again, and you can't help feeling for her, and wanting to see her get a little happiness just once. This issue brings her back to the fore, after a period of lying low following the destruction of her haven New Avalon back in the Shadow Witch arc - since then (when she was nearly killed) she hasn't had a hand in any of Tarot's serious adventures, just showing up now and then in lighter moments - usually in a bad mood, naturally. This time the tone is much more serious; the issue is a combination retrospective/reaffirmation, retelling Raven's history - through her own eyes, rather than Tarot's perspective as we had seen in early issues - and following through her past to the person she is today. Raven's return to her old haunt, the Forbidden Tower, throws up some new surprises for her to deal with, which she does in a rather nasty fashion - but again, there's a tragic note to her that makes her a could-have-been heroine rather than a villain, and when she's ruthless and unfeeling, you feel sorry for her rather than being turned against her. It's not an action-packed issue, but rather a refresher course on (in my view) Jim Balent's best creation. The ending is ambiguous - Raven's up to her old tricks, and could turn against Tarot as she did before, but there's a self-awareness to her that suggests she's not inevitably doomed to do so - it'll be interesting to watch her appearances subsequently, and see which way she turns.
Mighty Avengers #8 ~ Bit of an odd issue, this. Manhattan has been overrun with Venom symbiotes - and any way you look at that, it's spectacular - but nothing really happens with the symbiotes. They just rampage aimlessly until a solution is reached, whereupon they turn back into normal people (and dogs, and pigeons, and so forth - the Venom animals were quite a fun touch, actually) - the meat of this issue is just stuff that happens incidentally along the way, such as Hank Pym having given Janet an updated formula allowing her to grow to giant size, the New Avengers dropping by and, afterwards, Carol deciding not to try to arrest them, Hawkeye being a jerk, and Tony ruminating on the implications of the Skrull infiltration. None of these things are really connected to each other, or to the symbiotes, they just sort of happen randomly, so the issue as a whole doesn't feel like it has much of a coherent story to it - by the end, the impression I had was that it was really just set-up for the Mighty Avengers to go bother Doctor Doom. I imagine it could've been done in a couple of pages, except that I guess the idea of Venom symbiotes invading New York was too cool to shortchange like that - but with no guiding intelligence behind the symbiotes as such, there's really not a lot to the story. Bagley's art is good, not dissimilar to Cho's (though of course not as polished - few artists are), and my only technical criticism is that the lettering on the Iron Man armour's info-captions is a bit difficult to read - pale green over gold doesn't make for a lot of contrast.
Countdown to Adventure #6 ~ Or, as it will doubtless be known to history, the Forerunner Gets Laid issue. I'm really taking quite a liking to Viza Aziv - whether by chance or design there's a strong sense of culture behind her actions, which makes her often surprising and always interesting. The drawback is that she can come off as a one-dimensional killing machine (as she seems to in Countdown itself), but when she's put in a situation where she has to do things other than fight to succeed, she really starts to shine, with her mix of quick-thinking competence and naivete about most things not related to combat. I honestly could happily read years of her quest to find those on her death list, scouring the universe for ways to locate and reach them, and occupying herself along the way however she sees fit while her crew tag along for various reasons - sadly, since Countdown has already blown the ending of this miniseries, and indeed here her crew locates the Source Wall in two days (shouldn't it be a little more difficult to find?), it seems their adventures aren't destined to last beyond the next couple of issues.
On the other side of the issue, the Animal Man/Starfire/Adam Strange story gets a bit of a boost, with Strange finally getting back to Earth, Alanna being pretty awesome, and some decent dialogue between Kory and Ellen about who feels what for Buddy. But at the end of the day, not a lot happens again, and the next two issues are going to have to work pretty hard to be surprising - given the slow pace the story's taken so far, it doesn't seem likely that so much is going to happen in the finale that it'll be able to take any but the obvious storytelling route: Kory charges up with solar power, purges Rann and San Diego of the Lady Styx virus with solar energy, everyone goes home happy.
Avengers: The Initiative #9 ~ The K.I.A. arc continues, with a fairly thorough explanation behind what's going on, which was only hinted at last issue. Again this main storyline is the backbone on which a whole bunch of character moments are strung - like Mighty Avengers, in fact, but with a more cohesive feel to it, and much more going on. Taskmaster gets some dryly funny moments, another Skrull is revealed (are there any left back home on Skrullworld, or wherever?), Trauma continues his rapid progress from annoying emo kid in issue #1 to trained, stable, interesting superhuman therapist and revisits his actions during World War Hulk, Cloud 9 gets some closure on the angst she's been feeling since blowing up a Hydra agent back in issue #2, Thor Girl gets a crush (not for long, though)... As before, the only real problem with this title is that it feels like a condensed version of a much deeper, more detailed story, and I'd really like to see the full stories behind all the bits and pieces we see here. The cliffhanger is a neat one, playing off events in the Avengers: The Initiative Annual.
