Something that you’ll hear me talk about once I finally release my Baltimore Comic-Con episode of Pop Culture Affidavit is how I bought a $20 mystery box from one of the booths (I think Third Eye Comics?). There were 25 comics inside plus a trade paperback as well as a few variant cover editions, so for $20 it essentially paid for itself. Of course, even upon buying the box I was pretty sure that it was going to be full of cheapie bin fodder. But I couldn’t pass up the deal.

Anyway, I read through much of the box pretty quickly and as you’ll see, it wound up being worth the money because there’s a few books that I actually intend on seeking out for completion (either of storyline of entire series), along with a trade that wasn’t too bad.

Let’s start with that trade, which is Justice League: The Darkseid War–Power of the Gods. Man, that’s a lot of subtitles. This is from the New 52 era where the Justice League book seemed to be focusing on ongoing storyline after ongoing storyline as well as Big Event after Big Event. I know that at some point, I read Forever Evil, or at least the end of it, because it led into another even that resurrected the Anti-Monitor, which I think was The Darkseid War? Honestly, as “New” as the New 52 purported to be, it just seemed like Geoff Johns and Dan DiDio doing the same crap they were doing with with shiny new #1s.

Anyway, in this book, each member of the Justice League has been granted the power of a god and they’re in various stages of embracing, denying, or being corrupted by said power. It’s pretty solid, especially since you have Peter Tomasi writing some of it along with Tom King (who I’m hot and cold on, tbh). The idea of what would happen if a superhero was granted ultimate power or used their power to its fullest to become a god is not a new concept (Miracleman, anyone?), but they managed to tell some interesting stories with some old tropes. Is it worth picking up other trades? Probably not. But most of this is available on the DC Infinite app, so it might be worth a digital read. Sell/Donate.

Titans United #3 (DC). I’m reading the current Titans book that’s sprung out of Nightwing, giving it a trial run to see if I really want to get back into this. Titans United was a miniseries that came out early last year and was seven issues long. I’m literally dropped right into the middle of things and to the creative team’s credit, I didn’t feel lost. I guess it helped that I knew all of the characters already, but the scenario seems to be that Blackfire has Connor (Superboy) Kent hostage and is trying to find her sister, and on Earth, the Titans are tracking and eventually get into a fight with Lady Vic, one of Nightwing’s old villains. When DC Rebirth happened, I read the first six issues of the Titans book and enjoyed it but not enough to keep going. This intrigued me, and I might go back and grab the remaining issues, especially since it’s fairly recent (and my LCS might have them) as well as it might have some “prologue” implications for the current series. Keep.

The Amazing Spider-Man (volume … I have no idea, there’s so many volumes of this series and Marvel didn’t give me one) #76 (Marvel). This is chapter two of the Beyond storyline, which I actually already bought because my kid reads all of the current Spidey books. I’ve actually not read any of them (really don’t have the time, tbh), but this was an interesting issue where Peter Parker is between life and death after a battle, Ben Reilly (the clone from the Clone Saga of the 1990s) is back and working for the Beyond Corporation, and there’s a lot of suspicious things going on. I enjoyed the book and might dig through their back issues to read the whole story, but I don’t need my own copies. Sell/Donate

Star (Marvel) #2. The second issue of a 2020 miniseries starring the supporting character from Captain Marvel who somehow wound up controlling the Reality Stone. It’s got some cosmic Marvel stuff and a hero who doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing as well as a team-up with the Scarlet Witch, but unlike the last two books that I found intriguing, this wasn’t enough to make me go back and buy anything else. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been following Captain Marvel beyond the films or the Carol Danvers stories I’ve read in old X-Men and 1990s Avengers books? I’ll take a pass on this one. Sell/Donate.

X-Men (2022) #1, Way of X #2, New Mutants (2019) #30 (Marvel). Ah, contemporary X-Men. I completely stopped reading the X-Books in 1993, and with the exception of the occasional single issue or miniseries (Phoenix: Endsong, X-Men: The End), I never went back. So the only things I know from the current iteration of the team is what I read in Previews every month, which isn’t much. The three comics are … okay? I liked the art in all three of them, I will say that. The new #1 for X-Men (legacy #645) was more of a character piece, the Way of X issue was a Nightcrawler story, and the New Mutants issue was a 40th Anniversary celebration. Out of the three, the one that was most interesting was New Mutants because it’s a huge blind spot in my X-Men reading. When I worked my way through the original books, I actually didn’t read any New Mutants that didn’t cross-over/wasn’t included in the Essential X-Men or X-Factor volumes I had. Prior to that, most of my New Mutants experience was via Rob Liefeld. So this was fun and makes me want to thumb through the New Mutants books on Marvel Unlimited.

The others? Fun for the moment, but even though they were “new” or “get on board” X-Men comics, they suffered from two problems I had with the X-books in the early 1990s. 1: They don’t seem to be taking place in the real world very much. It’s all Krakoa and Genosha and places that wind up being full of underground bunkers with gray walls that don’t require background art. I was always partial to the stories where the team was in New York or somewhere in the U.S. and there was a connection to the general public or the greater world. Take them out of there and I shrug. 2: Baggage. So much baggage. I kept wondering how the continuity was working or what I was supposed to know. Wasn’t this character dead the last time I read these books? Was there a reboot? Isn’t this one person supposed to be evil? That’s not enough for me to shell out $5 an issue. Sell/Donate.