Comics this week

Magic: the Gathering #1- It’s been some years since I had played Magic: the Gathering but there is always a soft spot in my heart for the Multiverse. So when I heard that IDW is doing a long-running series on Magic: the Gathering, I thought I give it a try. If there was one thing this debut issue got correct, it was the artist and colorist they choose. Artist Martin Coccolo and colorist J. Edward Stevens both did some excellent work in this issue. They look like a good combo IDW should keep together. However the story was poor. Writer Matt Forbeck sort of assumed you know the backstory of Magic: the Gathering. The issue jumped from Ravnica to Fiora and back to Ravnica without pause, assuming that readers know what the planewalker Dack Fayden meant by moving between planes. In a debut issue, Forbeck should really have explained what a planewalker is and what they can do to new readers who are picking up the series for the first time. He didn’t and I believe this made the issue hard to follow.

Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time #19- The chase continues as Moiraine, Lan and Nynaeve chase after Rand, Mat and Perrin. Reaching Whitebridge, they discovered that they had just missed Rand and Mat. Meanwhile Elyas, Perrin and Egwene left the troupe of the Tinkers, traveling on their own way from danger. If there’s one thing this series has managed to do, it is to show off the adventure of the early books of the Wheel of Time series. This is also the part when the books to comic conversion work the best. The Whitebridge itself is a just in point. Showing it off in a picture is something you just can’t do in a book.

Villains For Hire #3- Sigh; I just knew it. To my non-surprise, it was revealed that Misty Knight was being used by someone to attack the Purple Man. The action between the 2 crews was passable but it’s hard to imagine a series with C-list villains dueling it out with each other having the legs to last a running series. In many ways this issue shows why Marvel decided to run the mini-series but with the no. of issues being cut from 5 issues to 4. Writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning put in a solid shift on the series but it just isn’t good enough to be memorable. Unless something changes in the last issues, I think this mini would be the last we ever see of Villains For Hire.