Amazing Spider-Man #657 & Uncanny X-Men #534

Two more reviews for today, this time the comics come from the House of Ideas as opposed to the Distinguished Competition. One was exceptionally good, the other one was... well, pretty horrendous. Just by looking at the post title, it should be easy to tell which is which...

Uncanny X-Men #534:

Summary: Two stories going on here, both of which involve characters I can't stand... I guess we'll start off with the character I hate the most. The Whore manages to run away from Sebastian Shaw long enough to get into his mind and make him forget who she was, and more importantly, who he was. With Shaw's threat eliminated, The Whore and Shadowcat leave. The other story deals with Lord Summers The First heading to Lobe's base with his army of diseased mutants. Lobe sics his investors(who are hopped up on drugs that give them mutant powers) on the sickly X-Men(yes, this is actually happening), but the investors are new to their powers and as such can't defeat the sickly X-Men. Lobe has enough(I actually had enough ISSUES ago!) and presses a button which makes the mutant disease even stronger, dropping the X-Men to the ground... But wait, since the investors(and Lobe) were also full of mutant genes, the disease affects them too. Lobe deactivates the flu, and everybody in the room, the investors and the X-Men are all cured. Lord Summers has the Stepford Cuckoos go through Lobe's head to find where he was holding the mutant creating drugs, and Storm destroys them. And then Lord Summers tells Lobe he'd be suing him and my mind nearly explodes from the sheer stupidity of this all...

Thoughts: Good GOD was this awful! First of all, the ending was SO obvious that I was calling it from LAST issue! I mean, we had TWO writers working on this book(Matt Fraction and Kieron Gillen), one of which I KNOW can do better work than this, and this story STILL sucked! Ugh. I just want to throw this comic out the window and pretend it never happened...

Score: 3 out of 10.If only this would really happen...


Amazing Spider-Man #657:

Summary: This issue gets underway with Spidey arriving at the Baxter Building after hearing about the death of FF member, the Human Torch. Spidey tells the FF how devastated he is, and how Johnny was the closest thing to a brother he ever had(I'm sure Ben Reilly would take exception to that!). From there, each member of the FF reminisces about a time they were with Johnny and Spidey. Thing tells a camping story about the Matchstick and Spidey, Sue relates a hilariously awesome story about the time she was arrested for indecent exposure thanks to her brother and Spidey, and Reed talks about the time he took Johnny and Spidey into outer space. In the end, Reed tells Spidey that Johnny had left a message for him in the event he died, and Reed plays the message. A hologram of Johnny comes up and the Matchstick tells Spidey that since he was apparently dead now, he wanted Spidey to take his place in the FF, since the FF was the best family a guy could have, and Spidey would be a perfect fit seeing as that Spidey was considered a part of the family. Johnny puts his holographic hand out and the rest of the FF and Spidey do the FF hand thing, which ends this issue.

Thoughts: I actually enjoyed this comic a lot. The story itself was really, really solid, although the FF here(especially Thing) was WAAAAAY different than the FF that appeared in FF #1. So that right there hurt this comic. I mean in this comic, Thing was sad, but spoke to Spidey about what happened, and was his regular self. In FF #1, Thing was acting like some sort of insane shut-in, who didn't even want to see Spidey, so the lack of cohesion between the two books definitely bugged me. Everything else here was perfect. From the stories each member of the team told(especially Sue's, which was laugh out loud funny at times), to the uber-schmaltzy ending. If only FF #1 was more like this issue was...

Score: 9 1/2 out of 10.I rue the day I had to see this...