parakkum

Three brief reviews:

Demo (Brian Wood, Becky Cloonan) - Demo is a series of stories billed as being about young people at crossroads in their lives. This vague description does accurately describe the collection. We primarily picked this one up because littlestar is quite impressed by Becky Cloonan, especially her ability to switch between styles. I was happily surprised to find myself liking Brian Wood's writing work on this one as well, as I've found his stuff a little annoying in the past. Here he hits it pretty well, and the stories are themed enough to feel conceptually linked, but nowhere near enough to make it an obvious "stories on this topic" anthology. Becky Cloonan continues to perform very well.

Ultimate X-Men Volume 12: Hard Lessons (Bryan K. Vaughan and others) - Vaughan continues to perform well in this most recent Ultimate X-Men collection. This is more of a series of unrelated stories than the prior trades, and it includes one story that also appears in the Ultimate Annuals collection. Nothing standout exceptional here, but the quality continues and I like that Vaughan resists the temptation to "Authority-ize" his characters. Everyone can't be that ironic and macho all the time.

New Avengers Volume 1: Breakout (Brian Michael Bendis and others) - I am not a regular Avengers reader, but I gather that they broke up sometime in the recent past. This book (briefly nicked from kwc's shelves) tells the story of a new set of Avengers coming together after the precipitating event of a super-jailbreak. This book was merely lukewarm for me for a couple reasons. Having Spider-man and Wolverine as Avengers isn't very compelling, nor is the idea that SHIELD's super-prison can be cracked open by Electro. As Spider-man says, he's a Spider-man villain and is, as such, pretty second rate. I just wasn't inspired to read more after the first trade.