3 comics things I liked and didn’t like, including the real Wolverine, Ice Cream Man, and New Mutants without Jonathan Hickman

By Zack Quaintance — Hey hey hey hey hey, welcome to the weekly feature that I ripped off (concept-wise, from the nation’s best national basketball reporter, Zach Lowe). This week there were three total comics things I liked and didn’t like. There might have been more, but, as you’ll see in a second, I was a bit more out of touch with comics this week than usual. 

Anyway, let’s do this!

1. Wolverine...no, that Wolverine

I found the panel sequence above oddly satisfying. I don’t even know why, really. I guess it just reminded me of the Tom Taylor-panned run of All New Wolverine that started back in 2015 and was objectively good times. It also seems like a mild dig at editorial, who presumably demoted the Laura Kinney character back to X-23. Again, I’m not super invested in any of this, but I do like when people take digs at power, no matter how inconsequential. 

2. Ice Cream Man #17

This is kind of cheating, since I already wrote a glowing review of this book and included it in the week’s Top Comics to Buy, but! I saw some online criticism of this issue (as well as some praise) that only engages with it as a weird Superman parody. That’s a take, sure, but it’s also missing a key point that we should understand about superheroes, lest these fun stories start to indoctrinate us into worshiping the always-fallible individual because it makes the world simpler and more comforting. Sigh, what a shit week in the news, eh?

3. New Mutants without Jonathan Hickman

Look, I really don’t want to belabor this one and I understand the nature of delays, but I want to read Jonathan Hickman and Rod Reis’ New Mutants in space arc. These in between issues are a totally different comic that I’m not trying to read but I am compulsive so I’ll be damned if I don’t buy the issues in between the ones I actually want. Oh dang, is this actually a me thing? …

Until next week!

Read this week’s comic book reviews here!

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.