Dragon Age:  Mage Killer #4

I mentioned this when last I reviewed this series, but I feel the need to mention it again;  I really love these kinds of comics.  The idea of taking a pre-established world like Dragon Age and expanding upon it, even in small amounts, has always appealed to me, and Dark Horse does it better than anybody else in the comic business.  

When those expansions move to pre-established characters, however, sometimes it's a little bit of a shaky transition.  A great example of this is Star Wars where Dark Horse added some of the most memorable ideas in the history of its franchise themselves, but, whenever they seemed to focus on characters from the movies and events surrounding them, it was always a bit of a mixed bag.  When Marvel took it over again, they failed in the previous area and succeeded strongly in the latter.  

Which isn't really a bad thing.  Dark Horse knows where its best works lies.  But cameos such as this issue presents do stumble into that issue, making the last story dropping our heroes into the middle of the Inquisition cause for a bit of an eyebrow raise. 

Starfire #10

Starfire has been somewhat of a frustrating series thus far.  It's incredibly hard to follow and understand because it puts so little emphasis on Starfire's history and therefore makes it difficult to track if she's the same Starfire she was before the New 52 or if she's in the infancy of her character or some odd amalgamation of the two, and that makes it hard to track her evolution as a character.

At times, she seems so unaware of Earth customs that you'd have no choice but to guess that she's only just freshly arrived on the planet, and there's plenty of evidence of that being the case, but whenever she runs across someone like, say, Nightwing, their history seems to be there and alive, making those moments of Earthly innocence seem like oddities, or, worse yet, pure stupidity.

Last issue really was permeated with those problems by showing Starfire at her most unaware and terrible, and rushed art direction only served to make that case worse.  This week, we enter the largest action sequence the series has seen thus far, with Stella, Atlee, and Kori entering Atlee's subterranean home of Strata, and Kori losing consciousness, and that very well may hide some of the character issues within.  Chances are, however, things are only about to get more complicated.

All-New X-Men #5

Coming off of what may have been my favorite issue I've reviewed since starting this particular trek into the weekly grind of comics that come my way, All-New X-Men has been a surprise hit for me.  While I was somewhat a fan of its last run, it was too bogged down in time warping nonsense and a sense of genuine, ever-present dread that I simply had a hard time following it in the long run, and it also fell into the trap of worshiping the characters (and specifically Jean Grey) to a point of making every character surrounding the original X-Men seem either inept or cruel.

This series, however, serves to balance the scales by focusing solely on the young hero dynamic, almost exclusively on their own, and it's worked very well up to this point.  Last issue focused heavily on the relationship between Laura in her attempts to literally become The Wolverine while her loving partner in young Warren worried and lost a bit of himself every time he was forced to heal after taking substantial wounds that could have been minimized by working as a team.   That particular excellent issue is signed by an ending that seems to have The Blob beat her so badly she might never come back from it.  

Will this issue stand up to how good the last one was?  Let's not waste anymore time finding out.