Tackled a bit more of the backlog pile tonight, with Invincible hardcover 4 (#36-47). I was considering dropping Invincible, after one too many encounters with the impossibly vapid relationship melodrama and meandering plot, but I think I'll stick with it and get book 5 when it comes out. This section didn't grate on me too badly, and while there wasn't quite enough ridiculous ultraviolence it mostly held my interest. And the art, man, can't get enough of the art.
Still, at times I wonder why I read anything by Kirkman. He feels required to make all his characters annoying argumentative morons and throw them in sandboxes for hundreds of pages at a time. None of it's what I'd call tightly plotted storytelling, either. Looking at the script in the back of this Invincible hardcover, it's 99% dialogue and just ludicrously sparse, which means that you could just give Ryan Ottley a 20 page outline of the entire Invincible story and he'd probably do a better job with it, since I don't even like Kirkman's dialogue.
Maybe that's too harsh. Invincible and Walking Dead, though, are definitely books I like more conceptually and during the small sections where meaningful things are happening than when I'm trugging through the annoying people arguing with each other.
