Friday is payday. More importantly, Friday is new comic book day. I headed down to the local shop and picked up whatever comics I had missed in the past couple weeks. Let’s see what we’ve got:

Thunderbolts #116
The Amazing Spider-Man #543
The Sensational Spider-Man #40
Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #23
Invincible Iron Man #21

While I was there, I decided to pick up a couple of DC oldies as well. I grabbed a copy of DC’s “Countdown to Infinite Crisis” as well as the “Tower of Babel” JLA trade paperback as well. Both came highly recommended by a number of people I talked to.

I haven’t read all of my pick-ups this week but I’ve already gotten through the new issue of Thunderbolts as well as the new Amazing Spider-Man. ASM got a pretty big amount of flack from the members of the Marvel comics message boards. They felt like it was more of a transition or filler issue than anything else towards “One More Day”, which comes out next week. I can see what they mean but I didn’t really have any problem with it. It was by no means a good issue but it was necessary in order to get us to the events in OMD. At least, parts of it were. To be honest, I’m hoping that Aunt May is killed off. She’s been nothing more than a burden for Peter and Mary Jane and I think that there’s more places the story and the characters can go with her out of the picture. Will that happen? Probably not. Even if they do decide to kill her, she’ll probably just come back from the dead…again.

Thunderbolts was…Thunderbolts. What else is there to say? They’re awesome. It just seems like they keep getting better and better. Last issue, we saw Venom bite the arm off of Steel Spider. We also saw Bullseye get electroshocked and beaten into some place between being alive and dead. This issue was a little bit quieter but featured a couple jokes about Venom being the cannibal cop that everyone feared. The group also used the arm eating as a tool to scare and then catch unregistered heroes. The interesting part about this was that Venom didn’t enjoying being seen as a monster that would eat you if given the chance. Go figure.

While I haven’t read them yet, I’d have to imagine that both Sensational and Friendly Neighborhood are probably disappointing. I haven’t seen a solid story come out of either of those since…well, ever. Iron Man will probably make up for those two so I’m not too worried.

On the DC side of things, I’m planning on jumping in around where Infinite Crisis took place so the Countdown issue seemed to make the most sense. As for JLA, I love hero super groups. What can I say?

Thanks for taking the time to read through my thoughts. Comments are, as always, welcome.