Reading Comics 167 "Comic Bento"

Last week somewhat atypically I didn't have any new comics to pick up, so instead I bought Green Lantern Vol. 2 The Revenge of Black Hand, the second of three New 52 era Geoff Johns collections, and I enjoyed reading that material again a great deal.  I don't have all of the Johns Green Lantern collections (not even close), but now I have all three New 52 volumes.

So, as long as we're on the subject of collected editions, let's talk Comic Bento.  This is one of those subscription services that sends you a bunch of stuff in a box every month.  I figured I'd give it a shot.  May was my first month, and by now I've read June's material as well (boxes ship at the end of the month).

As far as May's shipment goes, here's what I got and what I thought (anyone unfortunate enough to follow me on Goodreads already knows):

1) Marvel's The Avengers: Black Widow Strikes (Marvel) - just an absolute train wreck of a mess that completely wasted an opportunity to do something useful with the one cinematic Avenger everyone wishes would get a little more decent material.  The most disappointing part for me is that the writer is Fred Van Lente, whom I first discovered through Action Philosophers, Comic Book Comics, and Incredible Hercules (alongside Greg Pak), all of which was exceptional material.

2) Green Hornet Volumes 1 & 2 (Dynamite) - an adaption of Kevin Smith's lost movie; not nearly as embarrassing as Black Widow Strikes, and technically, the best stuff in an otherwise mediocre at best selection for the month.  But it's still disappointing both from a guy who's watched Kevin Smith movies and read Kevin Smith comics.

3) Predator: Prey to the Heavens (Dark Horse) - total waste of space.

4) Star Trek: Countdown to Darkness (IDW) - This was by far the biggest disappointment of the two shipments to date.  The original Star Trek Countdown was a terrific selling point both for the 2009 movie and IDW's Star Trek comics in general.  Apparently time has not been kind, because neither is true of Countdown to Darkness.  I mean, I know that IDW's Star Trek efforts have considerably lapsed in recent years (the ongoing Abrams-continuity series I haven't really made an effort to read, but I have read good material within it; John Byrne's New Visions photo comics are easily the best thing the company has done, however, and are the strongest argument against what I'm saying), but this is still shocking.  It wastes time on an irrelevant and terrible Robert April tangent and barely features "the Mudd incident" at all, and by the time it features "John Harriman," it's the end of the story.  I mean, really?  (If Pat makes a comment, he will reiterate that he hates the Abrams era on general principle, so there's that.)

June's shipment was better, with caveats:

1) Captain America: Winter Soldier Ultimate Collection (Marvel) - Features the contents of the first two volumes from the Ed Brubaker era.  A decade ago I would have been very happy to be reading this, because I was in fact convinced to join the bandwagon early on and loved what I found, to a point.  But then it degenerated when it became clear that beyond the return of Bucky, and the complicated way it came about (ably represented in the Captain America: Winter Soldier movie), Brubaker really had no idea what he was doing.  He's just not a superhero guy, and I think he realized that (thank goodness), but only after driving his creative legacy into the ground for anyone worth their critical muster.  Still, I'm happy to have this material in my collection again, if only to commemorate it at its peak.

2) Captain Midnight Volume 1: On the Run (Dark Horse) - Between this and the Predator volume, I don't know if it's Comic Bento or Dark Horse itself that wants to make Dark Horse look terrible in these boxes.  I could've sworn that writer Joshua Williamson responded here when I last wrote about Captain Midnight trying to offer a defense of my calling the character what I will now call a blatant knockoff of Captain America, maybe the comment was deleted at some point (I had Google+ comments for a while).  Either way I'm no longer taking either one seriously.  You don't get a free pass unless your bad material is atypical, like Van Lente's Black Widow Strikes.  (But seriously, Fred Van Lente, what the heck?)

3) Terminator: Revolution (Dynamite) - Strippers have been inserted.  For some reason.

4) The Valiant (Valiant) - Easily, easily, easily the best thing from two months of Comic Bento and kind of making up for the quality of everything else, and perhaps not coincidentally the most recently published material; in fact three of the four issues was originally released this year.  I've become a real fan of Valiant's comics, whether from The Death-Defying Doctor Mirage or Divinity.  When it was originally launched, the most prominent comic in the schedule was Robert Venditti's X-O Manowar, which I finally had a look at when Venditti replaced Johns in Green Lantern.  And at the time, I dismissed Valiant on what I thought was pretty mediocre material.  But apparently that was premature.  Jeff Lemire (Descender) and Matt Kindt (MIND MGMT) wrote The Valiant.  After a slow start they really nailed it, and convinced me that I absolutely have to check out Lemire's Bloodshot: Reborn, because Bloodshot is easily the breakout star of the story, which is bold enough to introduce a dramatic game-changer in his adventures.  Over at Goodreads I compared The Valiant to the next logical progression from Marvel's Ultimate comics, with all necessary freedom to do the best possible comics.  And it looks like Valiant really is.

On the whole, I'm not overly impressed with Comic Bento's quality control.  In an effort to be everything to everyone, it's going for the lowest common denominator.  I guess it's unfair to criticize the approach, and in some ways the company hobbles itself by trying to bring together a theme for each box (May's was movies, obviously, while June's was time travel; July's is supposed to be "the little guy").  The hook, and the argument against hasty judgment, is that every box is a complete surprise, and there's always going to be an appeal to that, because (hope against hope!) there's always the chance that The Valiant will find its way into the assortment, and not just terrible stuff like the Predator and Terminator collections.  And really, seeing something like the Captain America volume is a good sign, regardless of how I feel about Brubaker now, because there was a time when I would have been perfectly happy to come across something like that randomly, just like Countdown to Darkness.  I figure three boxes is a good representation of Comic Bento's overall worth, so I'll give this trial run one more box.

We'll see.