Peter David's remake of The Blob

Is it petty to drop one issue of a comic? Well, maybe. But $3 for X-Factor #36--I could be persuaded to part with $1, probably, but a whole $3 feels like giving Marvel an unearned reward when I could buy a hot chocolate and a bagel instead and actually receive joy from my purchase (except that bagels in this part of the world are uniformly horrible, but that's another story). It's a pretty low day when the ad pages are more attractive than the actual comic content, yet here we are. How many times can it be said? Comics. Are. A. Visual. Medium. So even though Peter David's scripting might be the same as ever, it can't save the issue when Larry Stroman's art continues just this side of horrific, a nightmare world where objects, background, physiques all shift, puddle, move and mutate from one panel to the next; even if he does try to lighten it up by drawing random kitty cats and birds and bunnies instead of proportions and perspectives and anatomy, the color palette is dourly unappealing as well.

Although the comic is still intended as noir, it now has the same noir feel as, say, feeding the entire script to The Maltese Falcon through Babelfish--English to Finnish to English--and then re-enacting the end product with Quizno's puppets. Though it looks like next month, people go back to vaguely resembling people instead of a head I once tried to sculpt out of hamburger meat. So, who knows. Hopefully the magic will come back.