September 11, 2019

There’s a lot of stuff going on with my life right now. None of it is strictly bad mind you, but it means I haven’t really found the time to do as much fiction writing as I would have liked this month. Two weeks tomorrow, my brother is getting married. There are a lot of changes going on in my department at work, like how we’ve lost a lot of good people lately (some moving out of province, some going back to school, and others moving to other departments … you get the idea). Without saying too much, I might be one of those people switching departments soon. And there are other things that I’d rather not share to random strangers online. But like I said, nothing is wrong – life just keeps getting in the way of my plans.

I still found the time to read this week’s comics today though, while also finally catching up on Powers/House of X. So here we go. This week I picked up Powers of X 4 and Red Sonja 8. Here are my first impressions.

Powers of X 4 is … confusing. The storytelling in this issue is very dense, and doesn’t seem to be directly connected to some of the other things going on in this series. At least not yet. I won’t say too much about the other issues that I just caught up on, but I enjoyed both #3s and Hose of X 4 much more than this. This one, like this pair of minis, will be hard to judge properly until the full series finishes. A re-read of the entire House/Powers of X run after it fully releases probably won’t hurt either. Still, there are some interesting ideas in here. It’s at least worth checking out if you’ve been reading these minis up to this point, but this is definitely a terrible jumping on point.

Red Sonja 8 is great. The first 5 or 6 issues of this series showed Sonja’s guerrilla tactics working very well against the invading empire, but the last couple of issues are showing Emperor Dragan employing strategies that seem to be working. It makes this war story a lot more compelling when he seems like a genuine threat instead of a foolish king leading his troops into endless ambushes and traps. This series started off as fun, and now it’s getting straight up brilliant. This series is an easy recommendation for Red Sonja fans, or those curious to check her adventures out.