Bah Humbug!

Christmas is over for another year, there’s torn wrapping paper and spilled eggnog all over the house, and we still didn’t get what we really want (a pony), so it’s time to get right back to reviewing comics.

Captain Britain and MI:13 #8

Spitfire’s in pretty severe trouble, having been severely mangled, but Blade runs off Plotka with a sword made from pages from magical books, then shows Spitfire how to use her vampiric nature to heal herself. The government manages to capture one of the indestructible Mindless Ones, but is then stuck with a whole bunch of other Mindless Ones with no way to capture them, too — time to Run Away! Captain Britain is trying to figure out how to escape from a dreamworld that gives him illusions of whatever he wants — including illusions of ways out of the dreamworld. And the whole team gets betrayed by someone they never expected.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Blade’s Wordsword is pretty nifty (but, like he says, not much good in the rain). Heck, pretty much every page that has Blade or Spitfire is guaranteed awesome. The rest of the group hasn’t been too interesting lately…

The Age of the Sentry! #4

Cranio, the Man with the Tri-Level Mind, is up to his old tricks, stealing a time machine to unleash chronal chaos. The Sentry manages to capture him, but the mixups in the timestream has created a new version of the Sentry who operated during the 1940s. The new Sentry packs a gun and attacks beatniks, but he helps save the regular Sentry from his arch-foe, the Void. Eventually, they figure out how to send the Golden Age Sentry back to his own dimension. Later, the Sentry teams up with the Blonde Phantom, the new leader of the Avengers, as they try to track down a kidnapped rock band. This leads to another of the Sentry’s terrifying modern-day hallucinations. Will the two heroes be able to survive an attack by the Mole-Men? Will they get to rock out with the band at the end?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I love the Silver Age freakiness of this title, but I’ve started looking forward to the Sentry’s scary freakouts, where everything gets dark and nightmarish and bizarre. Did these adventures ever really happen? Are they all the Sentry’s hallucinations? Is it all a bedtime story told by bored parents? It’s head-trippy, and I love good mind games.