Pop and Lockjaw
Ms. Marvel #8
Kamala Khan has just gotten herself a pet — Lockjaw, the gigantic, teleporting bulldog of the Inhumans. She gets him to teleport her to one of the Inventor’s hideouts, where she fights off a giant robot and rescues a fellow student who was being used as the robot’s brain. And the next day, she gets attacked by another giant robot — but this time, she finds that her powers aren’t really working anymore…
Verdict: Thumbs up. Great art and writing, a fun new co-star that’s likely to pull Kamala deeper into her Inhuman background, and fantastic characterization of Kamala, her family, and her classmates and teachers.
Astro City #15
Ellie Jimson has been arrested and charged with masterminding a recent spree of robot-based crimes. But Ellie is too scatterbrained to be a genuine villain. And after her robot friends show up to rescue her and she returns to her old home to meet her nephew Fred, her memories and her wits start to return to her. She remembers being a collegiate robotics genius, close friends with a fellow genius named Vivi Victor, who eventually turned on her and used a device to map her brainwave patterns to use to program robots, wrecking her mind in the process. Vivi went on to become a global supervillain, and now she wants to completely destroy Ellie’s life. Is there any way Ellie can fight back?
Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a neat twist on the rivalry between Reed Richards and Victor von Doom, just gender-switched, aged up a few decades, and focused more heavily on robots.
Today’s Cool Links:
- Nice overview of stuff we’ve all talked about before: girls deserve their own imaginative space on their own terms, same as boys — and toy/media companies are shooting themselves in the foot when they don’t offer options for girls who want to play in the boys’ playgrounds.
- The Tumblr Adventures of George Washington made me laugh and laugh.
- Ya wanna distribute religious material in schools? Oopsie, now the Satanists get to do it, too. And by the way, you’ve got to check out the kids activity book produced by the Satanists — it’s legitimately adorable.