You know, I’m not trying to pay a lot for some of the comics that I need, but books like V can be hard to come by, even in cheap bins, so when I saw a stack of them at my LCS for about $3.00 each, I decided to grab a few. After all, there’s not that many issues of the series overall and I don’t have that many left to get. And with these comics, which fill holes in that run, I probably should have just put them in the series and started reading from the beginning because it’s pretty tough to read a series via the holes in your collection.

That being said, when I finally get all of the books in the series, I’m going to have to do some sort of reread and maybe even podcast coverage because these continue to be solid and I continue to be fascinated by the expanded universe of V. My favorite of what I’ve read has been the novel East Coast Crisis, which has a whole slew of new characters taking on the Visitors when they invade New York, but that’s not something that the editors of this book were interested in adapting or bringing into the series in any way, even though they do have a story in issue #9 where our heroes head to New York and meet the mayor, who is a Visitor in disguise.

I completely understand why you want to stick with the main characters of the TV series, and what’s in this particular set of issues are some action-forward bits involving most of them, especially Diana (who is easily the most memorable and most interesting character in the entire show). There’s a two-parter involving a Carl Saga-like astrophysicist going on a suicide-bombing mission that fails in the way he thought it would but makes him a martyr, and in issue #11, the Visitors are going on a harsher offensive into Los Angeles and there’s a new wrinkle in the storyline–an alien prince who is the son of the mysterious Leader.

Cary Bates is on writing here and is as good as he is in the many Bronze Age Superman issues he was writing around this time, and the art team of Carmine Infantino and Tony DeZuniga is surprisingly solid as well. At this point, I’ve only got a few issues of the series left to buy, and I’m looking forward to a more thorough look and maybe even a podcast episode about it.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Keep.