New Comic Day August 9

Fables #52

So this looks like the beginning of the end for our friendly fables. In retribution for Bigby burning down the sacred grove, the leaders for the Adversary get together to plot the final invasion and destruction of Fabletown and our mundy world. In addition, we get to see more of the Red Riding Hood subplot and a neat backstory about Rapunzel illustrated by Gene Ha. In addition to that, we get introduced to a few new faces in the Adversary's army: the Nome King from the Oz lands and Hansel, the Inquisitor General for the entire imperium, to name a few. All this adds up to another excellent issue in an excellent series.

Emissary #3

Wow! Two issues of this in two weeks = awesome. We see the Emissary exhibit more powers (teleportaion of himself + healing powers) and tell the mob to stop being so mobbish. He struggles to understand why people are acting the way they do and the female FBI agent (forget her name) does a good job of trying to explain it. Though I can see why Cronin thinks it's boring, I really like the premise of showing how people would react to this type of event for the first time. There's still not a lot of characterization from the supporting cast which is too bad since issue #1 made it look like that would be the main focus of the book. Next issue should be interesting as the Emissary takes on the Pope.

Ultimate Spider-man Annual #2

I can't decide if I liked this annual or not. Even though it's a self contained story and we get to see Spidey interact with some ultimate characters we haven't seen in a while (Daredevil, the Punisher, and Moon Knight) with some decent fight scenese, the story seems to exist solely so that Captain Jean DeWolff can take a cue from her regular Marvel Universe counterpart. I didn't care for the lack of explanation for how both Moon Knight and the Punisher escaped custody either. This wasn't nearly as good as last years annual which focused on Peter starting to go out with Kitty Pryde of the X-men.

Ultimate X-men #73

This is the second part of the "Magical" storyline where the shite hits the fan. Here is is revealed that the Magician has been using his powers to mess with the heads of the rest of the X-men, making them do/say/beleive things they normally wouldn't do/say/beleive. There are some theories that the Magician is an illusionist similar to Proteus from the regular marvel universe which makes sense because he seems uber powerful enough to hold his own against the entire X-men team. The last page reveal of Jean phoenixing up and confronting the Magician was cool so I look forward to next issue. The art isn't the best which is a surprise as this is one of Marvel's big titles so you'd think they'd have some stellar talent on it.