COOL SHIT 7-21-11

G.I. JOE: COBRA CIVIL WAR: SNAKE EYES #3: Snake-Eyes captured by Khallikhan?! Alpine seriously wounded? Helix versus impossible odds? And Iceberg trying to get Alpine down the mountain before a bunch of snow vipers kill them? Khallikhan’s interrogation of Snake-Eyes alone is worth the price of admission. And what with Slice and Dice hanging around in the shadows, anything can happen. Hell is coming down on these characters. Get in while the getting’s good!

THE TRANSFORMERS #22: Dude! Dude! DUDE! How many times have we seen Optimus Prime face off against Megatron? No matter how bad the repercussions, we all know how it’s going to work out. Nobody is going to permanently die. But this time, it’s different. It’s far more interesting than it’s ever been before because IT’S NOT A BATTLE TO THE DEATH. It’s a fucking conversation, perhaps one of the most important to ever happen in the Transformers universe. We finally get down to the differences (and some of the similarities) between the two mortal enemies. In fact, at some points they almost seem like friends reminiscing about the damage they’ve done to each other. If you were ever a fan of the Transformers, you need to read this issue. We even get to look into the past, to see a young Megatron more interested in peaceful rebellion, more interested in rhetoric, more interested in reasonable solutions to intolerable problems. I can’t tell you how much of a hard-on I got from this book.

LOCKE AND KEY: CLOCKWORKS #1: Just as things are coming to a head, writer Joe Hill brings things back to the past, back to revolutionary America, to the root of the Locke story. Finally we get a glimpse of how things started, how things got so crazy, at Keyhouse. And finally, the Lovecraft connection is complete, with references to Shub-Niggurath, the Goat of a Thousand Young. Things are quickly coming to an end in the world of this series. Now’s the perfect time to get on board (especially since the TV show is coming out pretty soon).