Comics of December 26, 2018

I hope everyone had a great Christmas. Mine was great. We had a big party with the extended family – I’ve got a big family on my mom’s side and everyone gets along, even if my one cousin’s kids are a bit … crazy. Also on Christmas Eve I had my best swim workout yet. My previous best two were 1 – the Michael Phelps Beijing challenge in August (all 17 swims he did in Beijing in a single workout, in a 50m pool), and last month, swimming a total of 4km in a single workout, in about 2 and a half hours. On Christmas Eve, I swam 4.5km in 1 hour and 40 minutes. That’s half a kilometer further in 50 fewer minutes. Evenly split between the four strokes as well.

Anyway, this post is later than it would usually be on a Wednesday I’m not working for a couple reasons – one being that I also bought a video card for Boxing Day. A really good video card entirely paid for by my Christmas bonus. Because the rest of my day is also looking fairly packed, I most likely won’t have any full comic reviews. After all, I need to install this new video card and test it out, I’ve got a workout to burn off some of that extra turkey I ate yesterday, and I’ve got a games night with friends of mine.

The comics I picked up this week are Fantastic Four 5 (the 650^th issue wedding special) and Uncanny X-Men 7.

Fantastic Four 5 is great. The main story covers the wedding itself, which feels perfectly nice and simple for Benjamin Grimm’s personality. In-between that, there’s a look back at a lot of the earlier comics with The Thing and Alicia, including how they met. It does mention the brief period where The Human Torch married a skrull disguising herself as Alicia Masters, in a way that’s amusing. It also shows the bachelor party, which is equal parts entertaining and dramatic. This comic really does have a bit of everything, looking at what makes all four members of the Fantastic Four special, while rightfully focusing mostly on The Thing. Fans of Marvel’s first family should make sure to pick this up.

Throwing in those flashbacks also feels like a good way to honour Stan Lee, even if this comic was most likely fully written before Stan Lee passed away.

Uncanny X-Men 7 is good. This takes place sometime after the previous issue ended, where Legion teleported X-Man and a small group of X-kids to the Age of Apocalypse universe. They find themselves running for their lives, and also disagreeing with how they should handle X-Man. This feels like the most focuses issue in the series yet, and it’s great to see the kids get some of the spotlight for a change. It makes for what is arguably the best issue in the series so far. If you’ve been enjoying Uncanny X-Men so far, you’ll likely enjoy this too.