An added day before the new comics means another day with which to file my review from 8/27: Jog Enjoyed His Holiday

Kick-Ass #4 (of 8)

Say, did any of you hear about that one comic book writer and the video he put out? I did too, and I've thought of absolutely nothing this week other than creator-owned comics by popular Marvel/DC writers. No wonder I lost all that money at the casino - I need to concentrate to get those random number generators on my side. I was obsessed, readers, and it soon became plain that the only way out was to conduct an investigation into an actual, real-live creator-owned funnybook by a top superhero scribe.

And this very week had not only one of those, but no less than the current best-selling creator-owned pamphlet-format series in the Direct Market:

I've actually been following Kick-Ass -- that bloody saga of a young man in a 'realistic' world who sets out with a costume and a dream to become an authentic goddamned superhero -- since issue #1. A lot of people didn't like that first issue much at all, but it gave me a smile. Granted, I'm the sort of person who would smile at a teenage superhero being electrocuted through his testicles, so I guess I'm part of the target audience, but even beyond that I found myself enjoying the little asides and bits of conversation.

I might have made a mistake there, though - I'd thought stuff like the lead character's out-of-touch pop culture referencing or his decision to kick off his crime-fighting career by picking a fight with random black kids spray painting a wall were indicators of his cluelessness. It really seemed to me that his actions had a way of undercutting his narration (insisting that he's a completely normal young man!), thus reinforcing the comedic insanity of dressing up like a fantasy character to fight crime in the real world. Even then it was sort of like pointing a cannon at a barrel of fish, but it did have penciller/co-creator John Romita Jr., inker Tom Palmer and colorist Dean White putting together an attractive cartoon world for everything to take place in, and it was all pleasantly unpleasant enough.

Now we're up to issue #4, casting news concerning the upcoming movie is all over, and the comic has gotten progressively less realistic to the point where I wonder if 'realism' itself wasn't the primary joke here. I got an email on Thursday declaring that Millar had ruined the series with this issue, which has Our Hero's low-ambition adventures bumping into the work of two actual superheroes, or at least gangland assassins with a thing for dressing up in costume and leaping across rooftops under the cover of night. They're cruel, violent and prone to shouting things like "Where the hell are you going, asshole? Off to phone your lawyer? Hoping someone cares about your underprivileged childhood?" at weeping, unarmed targets, which I presume is supposed to make them horrible yet appealing to the forbidden desires we all share, this being a Mark Millar comic and all. Relatedly, they also might be manifestations of the dark side of the lead character's superhero dreams, the ugly implications of running around outside the law made flesh and steel.

The problem with all that? It transforms the book into an especially typical superhero thing, with its idealistic young protagonist forced to consider the existence of those who've gone too far as well as more obvious antagonists; Millar does not use the fact that all of this occurs in a world where superheroes shouldn't exist at all to any interesting effect. Really, he seems more interested in the contrived comedy of the lead character pretending to be (ulp!) gay in order to get closer to the object of his teenage affection, which strikes me as bolstering one type of familiar contrivance (the superhero type) with another (the teen romance type) in hopes that something multifaceted will result.

And it doesn't help at all that the particulars are so dull - I'll grant that the generic mobster villains are maybe supposed to be uninteresting, given the story's milieu, but ultraviolent Hit Girl and Big Daddy are unadorned character types straight out of the Frank Miller playbook, and giving the former a dirty mouth and a specifically young age doesn't do much to burnish her - this kind of lil' lady killer character is also present in The Boys, where she isn't much more interesting, but at least Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson play up the alien nature of such a creature of contradictions, if only by having her sleeping on a table or something during the talky parts. Millar's version just seems more calculatedly vulgar, and therefore, in theory, funny.

But then, Millar does know his market, and keeping a project of this type nice and close to what's familiar in shared-universe Marvel/DC works, with added gore 'n cussing and a sprinkling of realistic grit... yeah, a little bit more of what the company-owned books can't quite offer has a simple, compelling logic to it, especially when dealing with a writer who's helped to define what today's superhero books feel like. For me, the series' progression has steadily devoured nearly everything I've found interesting or amusing about it. I should add that the art continues to be very nice, with colorist White adding a delicate texture to the mayhem with his washy hues (I particularly like when he adds a reddish sheen to characters' noses in close-up), which does drag this up to an EH, and it might even keep me reading long enough to see where this storyline winds up.

12 (and then some) Reasons Why

Because Jeff asked and David Brothers threatened, here are 50 things that I love about comics, including at least one comic that I really, really would love to write, in case anyone at DC Comics is reading and desperate (Actually, I think that the next weekly book DC does should be an anthology of work by internet critics, forced to do at least one strip each so that all the professionals get to point and laugh at us for a change. It'd sell like crap, but imagine the schaudenfruede!). Anyway - More reviews later this week, I promise. For now, click that "Click to read more" and... well, read more.

(Also, if "anonymous" called Jeff a fanboy, he/she'll love me.)

50 Things I Love About Comics, because two people demanded it.

5 Creators That I Will Buy Anything From, Sight Unseen
1. Kevin Huizenga
2. Bryan Lee O'Malley
3. Darwyn Cooke
4. Grant Morrison
5. Brandon Graham

5 Creators That I Would Probably Buy Anything From, But Would At Least Look At First
1. Jack Kirby (I know, heresy! But it's got to be late-period, and I admit it; Devil Dinosaur let me down hard.)
2. Paul Pope
3. Nick Abadzis
4. Eddie Campbell
5. Matt Fraction

5 Artists Who Continually Blow My Puny Little Mind
1. James Jean
2. Gabriel Ba
3. Jack Kirby
4. Kent Williams
5. Dave McKean

5 Pretty Much Perfect Comics, If You Ask Me
1. Seven Soldiers #1
2. Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness
3. Graffiti Kitchen
4. Or Else #2
5. Mister Miracle #3

5 Comics That Changed My Life, And Why
1. Uncanny X-Men #185 - The first one I read and thought, I'm going to collect these.
2. Animal Man #1 - When I realized that the Grant Morrison from 2000AD and this Grant Morrison were the same person, and then realized that Scottish people could write American comics, which oddly enough made them more real.
3. Cages #4: For the craft, and the realization that Alan Bennett didn't have a lock on monologues like that.
4. Graffiti Kitchen: My first auto-bio comic, I think? And the first one that, as the song goes, said something to me about my life.
5. The Invisibles: As a series, it weirdly mirrored my life for the five or so years it ran, and changed my idea of what normal was. Possibly for the better; I'm not quite sure about that yet.

5 Comics I Collected The Entire Run Of
1. Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol
2. Steve Englehart's The Green Lantern Corps
3. Green Lantern: Mosaic
4. Tom Peyer's Hourman
5. Marvel Super-Heroes: Secret Wars, the British version that also included Secret Wars II and all of its crossovers.

5 Characters That I Wish I Could Speak Like
1. Dr. Doom
2. Luke Cage
3. The Watcher
4. Namor, the Sub-Mariner
5. The Thing

5 Minor Characters I Love So Much That I WIsh I Could Write Them (and, just because, what I would do with them)
1. The Manhattan Guardian (Create a franchise of Guardian newspapers all across the DCU America, so that there'd be a Metropolis Guardian, a Gotham Guardian, a Los Angeles Guardian, etc. Hilarity ensues.)
2. OMAC (Turn him into DC's version of Iron Man during "Armor Wars", working for SHADE from Frankenstein.)
3. Dazzler (Make it into the romance book it so clearly wanted to be when it started, and bring back lots of minor supporting characters from other books for her to date.)
4. Rick Jones (When Epic was around and Marvel had no standards, I almost pitched an Ultimate Rick Jones book where he was this retro beatnik loser who idolized Kerouac teamed up with Ultimate Doc Samson, who was a former pro-wrestler turned radio talk show shrink. Together, they fought monsters.) See also: Snapper Carr.
5. Ralph Dibny (Is he really minor? I'm not sure. But I love love LOVE the idea of Ralph and Sue as the Thin Man meets Topper: Deadman and Wife, anyone?)

5 Items That Only Exist In Comics That I Wish I Owned In Real Life
1. The Time Bubble
2. The Cosmic Treadmill
3. Clothes made of unstable molecules
4. A Green Lantern ring
5. Weather Wizard's climate-controlling wand

5 Random Other Things That I Love About Comics
1. John Workman's sound effects in Walt Simonson's Thor
2. Death Note, in general
3. Being able to read all the old comics that didn't work in Essentials or Showcase format, like those Teen Titans and Defenders runs...
4. Newsarama and Comic Book Resources. Completely seriously, no matter what you may think.
5. 52's Oolong Island of Mad Scientists, which may have been the greatest one idea out of a series of wonderfully dumb and dumbly wonderful ideas.

This review is light on pictures because the book's the same way: Jog on the oddest release of 8/20

Faust Vol. 1

Boy, Tim Vigil sure has changed.

No, no wait - this is something else, in every sense of the phrase. Faust, just to get one thing out of the way right up top, is not primarily manga - it's an irregularly published Japanese literary journal, albeit one with a comics section, founded in 2003 by editor-in-chief Katsushi Ōta and published by book giant/Big Three manga publisher Kodansha. It's fashioned as a squarebound 'mook' -- a supple book with the glossy design and continuing features of a magazine -- and runs anywhere from 500 to 1200+ pages per volume. Vol. 7 was just released in Japan a few weeks ago.

The particular item we're looking at today is Vol. 1 of the English edition of Faust, a 432-page, 7.1" x 4.8" softcover, published by Del Rey at $16.95, with one eye doubtlessly fixed on the project's promotional quality. Here's another thing I'd best mention quickly - over 100 pages of this book's total space is spent on portions of prose projects that Del Rey plans to release in full, later on down the pike. They're largely self-sufficient portions, mind you, but still materials you'll be paying for again if you like them enough to continue.

Don't let that cloud your thoughts too much, though - this edition of Faust does function pretty well as a cohesive aesthetic endeavor. There's no credited editor (I think Del Rey's Tricia Narwani serves in that capacity), but Ōta's introduction sets the tone so neatly that he seems present throughout - everyone involved is very proud and enthusiastic of their mighty work, seemingly every contributor is a genius and a revolutionary that has already set the Japanese literary world aflame, and there's a grand, unifying theme at work, "that feeling of self-consciousness in early adolescence," transmitted through "an avant-garde crossover in which Japan's manga, anime, and video game-based pop culture collide, tempestlike, with the hottest young writers on the Japanese literary scene."

Then again, Ōta has elsewhere described the series as "escapist reading for young men without jobs, money, or girlfriends," so you never quite know.

Now, for longtime J-pop dead-enders like myself, the mere positioning-of-influence of 'manga' and 'anime' is going to raise an eyebrow. That's because manga is a very large, egalitarian thing, far greater in scope than the boy and girl-targeted samples that rule the day in North America (although that material does top the charts in Japan too), and a genuine force in the national reading of a people that's noted for such.

Anime, in contrast, is more of a marginal thing, overwhelmingly male-dominated and increasingly fixated on servicing the harder-than-hardcore otaku fanbase that can be relied upon to make the dvd and merchandise purchases necessary to push most productions into the black. There's exceptions -- Miyazaki being the most obvious example -- but an awful lot of it leans heavily on formula, panders frantically to fandom peccadilloes (like the dread moé) and writhes under the constraints of low budgets and ruthless schedules that sometimes render these alleged animations barely mobile. There's still good stuff, though. There always is.

But that leaves this project in an odd position; if you're seriously dealing with something as small and insular as anime-at-large, it's inevitably going to exert the most influence on things, simply by being so damned particular. And, sure enough, Faust is crammed to bursting with heavy-duty urban isolation, beautiful and menacing women exerting scary-but-not-unpleasant power over milquetoast young men, sci-fi/fantasy/horror concepts slamming head-on into arrested romantic development, and miscellaneous philosophical presentations presumably adding weight to the whole business.

The trick of Faust, and it's a pretty good one, is that it takes that lattermost trait especially seriously, and sometimes takes a few extra steps back to specifically consider the function of genre tropes in the midst of actual genre pieces, some of which (by the way) are actual franchise tie-ins or preexisting works that share in the anthology's concerns. Most of the stories are in the style of 'light novels' -- fast-reading prose fiction illustrated in a manga/anime-informed manner, often serialized in anthologies -- all the better for shoring up those pop cultural connections. They vary in quality, as you'd expect them to, but there is nonetheless a shared vision at work, one not so much present in the other light novels I've gone through.

Emblematic of the anthology's approach is The Garden of Sinners: A View from Above, one of ths volume's five long works and among its two 'excerpts,' deemed noteworthy enough that a bonus interview with writer Kinoku Nasu and illustrator Takashi Takeuchi is included in the back. Oddly, I'm not sure if the material ever appeared in the Japanese Faust - while there's some background info provided with every story, mostly author's bio tidbits and the like, there's rarely anything about where most of the material was originally published.

Still, it's made clear that the piece is chapter one of a seven part series, published online in 1998 to little reaction. It was only after Nasu & Takeuchi formed the amateur software group TYPE-MOON and authored the hit porno computer game ("eroge") Tsukihime that the material (included on a bonus disc and subsequently self-published for convention sale) took off, eventually becoming a smash seller for Kodansha (and COMING SOON FROM DEL REY) and spawning an anime adaptation in the form of an honest-to-god theatrical serial. Old-school too, with episodes running 50 or so minutes as self-contained units! It's currently up to episode 5 (of 7), unless the internet is whispering lies.

All of this background makes it especially interesting to read the 'part one' included in here, because it's such a fucking odd little thing. It's not particularly well written, lurching from one narrator to another with little warning and slathering every perspective with the same heavy narrative voice. It's pretty orthodox in plot, with a mysterious girl waking up after a two-year coma with the ability to see strange things, and the occasion to stab them with a trusty blade. There's a nice, bland reader-identification guy who's her friend and potential romantic partner, and a spooky/smart mentor-benefactor, and a tragic ghostly antagonist (for this chapter).

Yet Nasu is singularly uninterested in story beats, burying these very typical tropes under long, ponderous dialogues and night-wandering narrations that seek to render everything in sight a metaphor for young adult detachment, from the image of staring down from a skyscraper to mechanics of a floating body splitting away to haunt the living. Everything else is elliptical to the extreme - I think a major character is kidnapped at some point, but the act occurs between paragraphs, and is only even acknowledged by a passing comment made by the heroine before a climactic clash with the piece's antagonist, a conflict that ends with virtually no fuss or struggle.

I mean, I can't call this a good story, but it does throw itself into its themes with an admirable lack of inhibition - I've seen the corresponding anime serial episode, which cleans up the storytelling, dials down the chit-chat, explodes that one fight scene into a rooftop-jumping action set piece and modifies the heroine's personality into a more fan-friendly tsundere-type thing, thus making the tricky cerebral nature of the original stand out more.

The other of the book's excerpts is a short story from a xxxHOLiC tie-in book (COMING SOON FROM DEL REY) written by "NisiOisiN" -- best known in North America for another franchise novel, Death Note: Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases -- and blessed with a grand total of one double-page illustration by megastar creators CLAMP. It's a supernatural mystery story in which supernatural elements and a mystery steadfastly refuse to appear, leaving the series' nice, bland reader-identification guy and its spooky/smart mentor-benefactor character to discuss the balance humans maintain between happiness and anxiety, while some time is spent in the head of a young woman prone to screwing up her life at crucial moments; those latter bits are pretty effective, very particular and seemingly lived-through, enough to charge up the tale a bit. The story was actually adapted into an episode (#17) of the xxxHOLiC television anime; I'm not sure if many of its plots are like this. Regardless, it fits in neatly with the Faust approach.

The remaining three 'long' stories adopt similarly distanced/contemplative stances. I presume F-sensei's Pocket by one "Otsuichi" (with a few illustrations by Death Note's Takeshi "name value" Obata) will prove to be the book's crowd-pleaser, being a decidedly simple story about a proudly bitchy tattletale high school girl and her manga-loving girly nerd sidekick who discover various wonderful items from the classic manga Doraemon in the real world. It's all fun and games and fourth-wall breaking comedic asides (you can just feel the characters popping into SD mode) until the latter uses the magic technology to take revenge on everyone that ever picked on her, leading to a pulse-pounding showdown, tearful affirmations of the value of friendship and a nod toward the power of manga in informing people's worldviews. Somehow, this takes 60 pages to play out.

Even less impressive is Outlandos d'Amour, by Kouhei Kadono of Boogiepop and Others and the Jiken series of fantasy/mystery novels (COMING SOON FROM DEL REY). Its plot involves a nice, slightly less bland reader identification guy with the strange ability to see when other people are in grave danger, and the occasional tendency to summon lightening from the sky. He's wildly neurotic about his shy, beloved wife -- who may or may not be a Saikano-style girl weapon -- and spends time wondering if his abilities might be reined in to prevent him from hurting her, even if it means causing pain for himself. It feels incomplete, like a pitch for a larger project that didn't get accepted.

But then, as luck would have it, there emerges one genuinely startling work, a special little ditty called Drill Hole in My Brain. The saga begins with teenage narrator Hideaki Kato calling his mother a piece of shit, which is understandable considering that her spurned lover-on-the-side has just burst into Hideaki's home with an assortment of bladed weapons, slaughtered most of his family, and driven a screwdriver into his head. As Hideaki lays bleeding, he finds himself inside the head of alter ego Makoto Muraki, a junior high superhero with a hole in his head who fights aliens and humans made seemingly at random into superpowered enemies bent on destroying the world, which appears to be more-or-less like Hideaki's world, save for the phallic screwdriver tower jutting up from the ground. This will be the story's most subtle symbol.

Makoto, you see, is wildly in love with his first-ever girlfriend, Akana, who has a unicorn-like horn sticking out of her head - the two have sex via Akana sticking her horn into Makoto's hole, which doesn't actually give Akana a lot of pleasure, but Makoto doesn't try anything else due to anxiety over the size of his penis in comparison to her horn. This causes a rift between them, which is only made worse on the day the art club's vice president becomes an enemy and gets the desire to eat Makoto's hole out, accessing the world she believes is alive in his brain (not Hideaki's world, mind you - that's another one), although she eventually settles for fisting his head hole in front of the entire class.

This causes several important things to happen, including Makoto's realization that sex isn't a particularly special thing hardwired to True Love, just as Akana also becomes an enemy and threatens to obliterate the world, all while Hideaki tries to steer Makoto into finding the alternate version of himself (Hideaki) that also must live in this parallel world, in hopes of sorting everything out. Also: Makoto's penis falls off and is replaced with a flower-shaped super-clitoris that causes him to vomit bubbles, all while sinister government forces prepare a head dildo machine to keep Makoto in line, since a young boy so often is ruled by base bodily pleasures, much to the dismay of the older, wiser Hadeaki, who's stuck experiencing the trauma and angst and sexual confusion and dirty naiveté of adolescence all over again, in dramatic shōnen action form.

I don't know who the hell writer/illustrator Otaro Maijo is, although I'm pretty sure he's seen a lot of Gainax anime, since FLCL and Neon Genesis Evangelion loom large over his story. But he goes much farther into the broil of emerging sexuality than either of those works dared, allowing bluntly pornographic elements to seep in and mark boyish fantasy clashes as a prolonged struggle with the onset of all-consuming erotic desire, something that won't necessarily calm down as a boy grows. It's wonderfully funny, lively work (the translator is Andrew Cunningham); hell, we could use more comics like this, but as a story it carries out the Faust mission splendidly.

And there's other, smaller aspects of that mission in this book. Several shorter stories and essays are included, many of which (interestingly) take a concerned look at extreme isolation, as if knowing a segment of the otaku audience will be attracted to the project's features. There's also some comics, mostly high-gloss visual poems (see: Robot), three out of four of which are presented in a glossy color section, then repeated in tones immediately thereafter. The fourth sees NisiOisiN team up with artist Yun Kouga of Loveless (the manga, not the Vertigo series) for a story about a man interrogating a brilliant, imprisoned weapons designer; it all turns into a metaphor for longing to be the best while lacking the supreme natural ability some are born with, a concern that's surely popped into the head of many readers of boys' comics. Shit, did you expect anything less? So, while I can't say this material is much better than OKAY on the whole, it's a peculiarly forthright, coherent type of OKAY, one that'll probably hold some extra value for readers who've had their attention piqued. It does take its pursuits seriously, mining the culture and accoutrements of visual media for personal revelations from the inside, and occasionally striking something affectingly immediate and perverse, gold enough to pay off the sluggish and pretentious that I suppose will have to come up as well.

Abhay Writes about AIR #1, While Eating Wontons

I'm undecided on AIR #1. Well, not really: I think it's not very good. But, shit, I want to like it. It's an implausible comic book. Action scenes obey no logic; characters' actions make little sense; dialogue doesn't resemble actual human speech; none of the emotions seem real.

Fine. So: dream logic, then...? That seems to be how the book wants to be judged. The book opens with a wink to Salman Rushdie's SATANIC VERSES, perhaps to signal to readers that the book will traffic in a similar sort of magical realism. And-- and that's something, isn't it? Trusting readers to be savvy enough to not only catch that reference but to be able to infer a meaning from that reference-- isn't that something?

It's about flying, after all. Dream of flying, if I remember my Freud, are all about sex and erections. Personally, I like erections. But the relationship between the two romantic leads is just a lift from Stanley Donen's CHARADE anyways, so I don't know how interested I was in that relationship to begin with. Does anyone expect Audrey Hepburn & Cary Grant to be topped by a comic book?

I look forward to future issues where the main character of AIR rides a banana into a train tunnel. (If anything, AIR reminded me not of Rushdie or Pynchon, but Vittorio Giardino's creepy LITTLE EGO comics from early 1990's HEAVY METAL magazines. LITTLE EGO was a Winsor McKay LITTLE NEMO parody involving the dreams of a frequently naked European woman who... Why don't I use ellipses to avoid proceeding with this disturbing paragraph? It's not as embarrassing as Wally Wood's CANNON but ... dot dot dot...)

Anyways: I was frustrated with AIR, constantly saying to myself "but no human being would ever DO that." Even accepting that parts will be implausible-- it's interesting, but is it entertaining? The lead characters are just... dull. Even accepting that it's okay that everything that's coming out of their mouths is implausible, they weren't interesting. Nothing that came out of their mouths was funny or cool or intriguing. I didn't care if they kissed or had sex or blew up or all of the above at once. The main character just seemed ... I don't know, pouty, and ... describing sky-kisses in random narration boxes doesn't quite cure that, no. The male lead didn't seem mysterious and cool; he seemed, I don't know, like a lesser Antonio Banderas character. Some very unsubtle sex metaphors don't make up for that.

All the usual Vertigo critiques apply. The main character's design is DRAB. It's not enough to feature a female main character, and think the job done. Comic book characters, the great ones beg to be drawn. Artists sketch endless variations of those characters; fans get tattoos; grown-ups play dress-up. A great cartoon character is more than just a drawing of a person; it's a symbolic gateway into an entire fictional world. All of the successful Vertigo series have starred comic book characters. Agent Graves, Jesse Custer, King Mob, Spider Jerusalem, Yorick Brown; as a SCALPED fan, I'd happily argue on behalf of Dashiell Bad Horse. And I personally don't think that's a bug to comics; I think that's a feature.

The lead character of AIR is an ugly blonde in a neckerchief, and a severe ponytail. What's comic about such a miserable creature? I'll grant you, this matches the image in my head of the vast majority of the unpleasant, soul-dead flight attendants I've had the misfortune of dealing with in the United States. Air travel was drained of any drip or drop of glamour in the late 70's and early 80's-- the airlines stopped hiring Pierre Cardin after a while (so did the nurses). Was anyone alive for the Coffee, Tea or Me days? If that's a problem for you, fly in Asia. Fly in Asia where sex harassment lawsuits have apparently not yet found a receptive audience.

AIR exists in that glamour-of-flight-is-dead world. Which I actually find extremely interesting, so interesting that I almost want to forgive everything.

While some have derided the book for being vague as to place, I would argue that's the book's greatest strength. The reality of travel is once you step through security, once you're separate from your home, your luggage, your clothes, your supplies... Who are you anymore? You're anonymous; you're an ID in your wallet. You cross over to some fuck-ugly phantom world of Cinnabons, Au Bon Pain, magazine racks, uncomfortable seats, crying babies, identical anonymous spaces. Wondering, "Who the hell buys porn magazines in an airport? And where do they, you know, *use* it?" But someone does buy it and that means someone invariably uses it somewhere, and often too because there's vast swaths of porno in every airport you've ever been in. You could be US Senator, but step into an airport and anonymous gay bathroom sex suddenly becomes a reasonable, logical option.

Travel enough, and the whole world blurs. Here's Pico Iyer describing a Kazuo Ishiguro novel:

"[F]ive hundred pages of action, or its abscence, had taken place more or less in a hotel, in some unnamed foreign town through which a touring artist works through a labyrinth in a dream, surrounded by people and passions he can't begin to fathom. The book is a novel about a state akin to jet lag, a nightmare of disorientation and disconnection, and its main character, at some level, does not know who he is, whom he's among or who he is taken to be."

Or, of course, if you prefer a more vulgar reference, there's FIGHT CLUB, I suppose: "You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour."

Is there a comic to be set in that world? Maybe there is. Is that comic AIR? I had hoped that it would be, but the first issue's dream logic and fantasy conceits don't leave me encouraged that it's a good fit for me and my personal interests.

MK Perker's art is not competitive with other artists on the stands. Perker's storytelling is weak, his compositions are dull, his drawings only rarely have energy, and his characters lack appeal. The idea of the lead characters having sex is more gross than hot. For some unknowable reason, his editors leave him to ink himself; I can't guess why from the results. I truly, truly dislike being harsh to comic artists since they have a difficult job, especially where, as is the case here, the art on Perker's website is noticeably better than what can be seen in AIR #1 and this might be a poor example of what he's capable of...

Vertigo's typically indifferent colors don't help, of course: strap in for the color brown, everybody! Do they get a discount on brown? Is that how they keep the costs down? Seriously, dead seriously: What is with these people, and the color brown? Does anyone even know? This is an open invitation to any Vertigo colorist willing to do an interview about the color brown. Please explain.

Why don't Vertigo books look as good as Image books, if they have editors and can pay artists a page rate ahead of time? Of course, some might be asking why they don't have first issues which clearly explain a premise that retailers can repeat to potential customers, either, but... But I admire that they gambled on a challenging premise like AIR features, Salman Rushdie quotes and all, however ambivalent I might be about the results. I find the lack of a clear high concept here truly encouraging, personally.

There's this supporting character called Fletcher that's pretty much horrible; the reader's early hopes that he'll be obliterated in an air disaster are cruelly denied. A flashback isn't plainly indicated as such (though I think that can be chalked up to being a feature of the book's dream-like aspirations). The book focuses on some nonsense about competing secret-societies, which... call it Pynchon-esque all you want, it's dull and played-out material. That's all if you can successfully avoid thinking about the poisonous market realities that hover over this book long enough to enjoy it. The less said of the book's final essay, the better, though I would agree with the goodly Mr. Hibbs that having a final essay is something that can only help sell a comic to me.

Plus, the book's commentary on air travel isn't one I can relate to my own experience. The book is fascinated by air travel's relationship with terrorism, but... My own personal experience of air travel after 9/11 (and, heck, before) is not having to cope with terrorists or a fear of terrorism, but with bureaucracy, an endless, numbing bureaucracy. Sure, I have a healthy fear of terrorism, and crashing, and the fact they don't put enough fuel in the fucking planes. But I have more than a fear-- I have a fucking certain expectation when flying that I'll be negatively impacted in some way with the decaying, failed apparatus of the airlines, endlessly arrogant, propped up with government hand-outs, manned by underpaid illiterates, certain to delay and delay and lose luggage and delay some more, awful, awful, awful. A state of affairs which I don't actually blame on terrorism and 9/11, much at all, though reasonable minds can differ who's to blame...

So, I don't know. The book's one big visual moment-- the opening image, that worked, at least. As unbelievable as the rest of it was, that moment still worked. And the book's setting is interesting to me. The premise-- an intelligent adventure comic starring a stewardess? There's something there. The idea of ignoring its problems, having some faith, and looking at #2 anyways has a certain allure.

I don't know how this review sounds-- shit, I don't know how any of them sound, but... I really do want to like it.

Two Comics and One Not from 8/20

The Castro Theatre here in town is showing a sing-along copy of THE LITTLE MERMAID this week (through the 28th). There are two shows a day -- one at 2 PM and one at 7:30 PM.

Today, at least, the 2pm showing is all about the kindergartener (Ben starts on Monday, jeez we're nervous. He's not, however), and I quite imagine that the 7:30 show is going to be about the drag queens, but if you either like the film, or have a little kid, then I really recommend going.

What's nice about THE LITTLE MERMAID is that it works in nearly equal measure for both boys AND girls. Ben can barely stand SLEEPING BEAUTY or CINDERELLA or SNOW WHITE, because they are "too girly" for him, but he LOVES TLM, because there's also plenty of action and 'splosions and scary bits and stuff.

Even if you're an adult, it's really fun to watch the movie with audience response and call backs (we were instructed, variously, to make smoochy noises when Ariel and Eric are about to kiss, hiss and boo when Ursula shows up, go "woof! Woof!" everytime Max the dog does, wave glowsticks, or use those clapper-on-a-stick things at appropriate times, scream "no, Ariel, don't do it!" when she's about to sign the contract, and so on), and with everyone (well, all of the adults... most of the kids can't read the subtitled lyrics, actually) signing along with gusto. They had awesome gift bags for everyone attending (with crowns, and pearls, and glowsticks and poppers and even a dinglehopper!)

It was about 90% little girls (and 90% moms, too -- virtually no dads attended), and almost all of them wore a costume. They brought every single kid in a costume up to the stage, with the Castro's Wurlitzer playing Disney tunes to accompany them. Ben wanted to go up too, and since he was wearing a skeleton shirt, I told him to go for it. Since it was all kids, they declared them ALL to be winners, but I imagine the 7:30 show with be a little more cut throat...

Anyway, it was a blast, and I don't know if the print can tour or what, but if you're in the Bay Area, I thought it was totally worth making the trip to the Castro, one of the most beautiful movie palaces to grace the world, and see the film like this.

But I know you don't actually care about that... you want to know about comics...

FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #1: I'm gently torn on this one. On the one hand I would imagine that the audience for this is somewhat small -- if you're not already a LSH fan, then why would you want to see three iterations of them together? But maybe not that small, because at one time the Legion was one of DC's biggest books, really.

In a way, Geoff Johns' recent career has all about the fan service, and the fan service to a very specific period of time. Bringing Hal and the Corps back to their glory, returning to Infinity Inc, and now his what-if-Zero-Hour-never-rebooted-them LSH, I like virtually every move Johns makes. I, too, am of that very specific time frame.

Plus, y'know, George Perez. Who doesn't like to see him draw Cast-of-Thousands stuff?

So, yah, fanboy tingle, super-double liked this, hit every note I would have hoped, and so on.

On the other hand, there's a LOT of yadda yadda going on here -- virtually nothing HAPPENS in the comic, and that which does was either more or less shown before in the recent ACTION COMICS arc about the LSH, or, like in every Legion comic in the past (Have we EVER seen Takron-Galtos, and NOT have it involve everyone busting out?)

Lots of the yadda covers stuff that, frankly, I'd expect the audience for a LSH-centric tie-in to a CRISIS mini-series would way already know. There's something like 4 pages devoted to nothing more than Superman's origin, and his rogue's gallery. Who DOESN'T know that stuff? And would they buy a continuity-unknotting tie-in to a big-summer-crossover?

You have to give it up to Johns for doing what he said, and making this completely 100% accessible to people who don't know these characters or situations... but I really don't think that there's very many living humans who DON'T know them, AND would want to naturally buy this...

The problem with being that "accessible" is that it makes this pretty much 36 pages of set-up, and the story doesn't begin in earnest, really, until issue #2 (well, or I'll assume, at least). Still, with Perez drawing, you could have 36 pages focusing on the HOMEWORLDS of the Legion, and I'd still probably be happy, really. Had nearly anyone else drawn this script, I might have had to go with a high "OK", but, pushing my fan buttons with Perez art, I think I can say VERY GOOD. I'd need an actual story to call it "excellent"

AIR #1: Didn't work for me, really at all. The set-up situations were really too unbelievable, both in the acrophobe flight attendant, as well as the vast conspiric(ies) who go on multiple flights and multiple identities as they please.

Plus besides a few token words in Dutch, there's a maddening unspecificity in where we are at any given point in the story, and there's a lack of any consequence in what would seem to be from the outside, several suspicious and strange incidents happening to the same attendant.

I'll give it another issue or two to surprise me, but at this moment, I'll go with an EH.

Well, hrm, actually, I want to add points for it being the first first issue I've read in a LONG time which had something I very very much missed -- the introductory backstage text piece. I LOVE columns on process or "why are we doing this book" or whatever, so I'm going to bump this up to OK, *just* for that. Now, it wasn't a good example of it (it's a little too self-congratulatory and sure of "Good" Art for that), but damn it, that's the kind of thing all new books should have.

That's my opinion, but what did YOU think?

-B

“I Should Write Some Boring Reviews Of Comics," Said Abhay, Out Loud, to Nobody in Particular.

I'll try to avoid spoilers and skip the Jump; sorry if I screw up. THE ASTOUNDING WOLFMAN #7 by ROBERT KIRKMAN, JASON HOWARD, and RUS WOOTEN: I watched this video of Robert Kirkman the other day; he put out this odd video saying that established comic creators should focus exclusively on their own comics, and quit their jobs, and something-something-kids. But I had a weird time turning 30, too, so who am I to judge?

Anyways, it at least worked as a marketing video, and successfully reminded me that guy existed and that I didn’t really have an articulate reason why I don’t read his comics other than “Tony Moore stopped drawing them.” So, this WOLFMAN thing: it’s apparently about a werewolf who wears a drawing of a werewolf on his chest...?? Part of me wants to applaud, but it doesn’t get better than that: issue #7 is the BIG TWIST issue.

Having not read any prior issue, I had no emotional investment in any of what was happening. It’s funny to see a twist from that vantage point: it all seems so transparent, the things that writers do to push buttons. “Here’s a puppy with a gun to its head.” It makes the whole enterprise seem so mechanical. I don’t want to spoil this comic, but it’s drearily typical in terms of what it thinks is shocking.

There’s not much here of any noticeable interest besides the Twist. But if you liked INVINCIBLE, it's the same sort of thing. It’s similarly simple. The character design works. “Monster hero” is a decent character type no one else is doing very well right now. Characters explain their feelings at each other at numbing length and in precise detail. It’s easy.

Jason Howard is credited as “penciler, inker, colorist” instead of “artist." Which is kind of sad, if you think about it too much. Which I did. I think I spent more time thinking about that than any of the contents.

I’d rather watch more videos where Kirkman calls for the heads of the 5 Comic Families to assemble on a cruise-ship, though(?). That part was fucking excellent.

SECRET INVASON THOR by MATT FRACTION, DOUG BRAITHEWAITE, PAUL MOUNTS, VC’s JOE CARAMANGA, GABRIELLE DELL’OTTO, ALEJANDRO ARBONA, WARREN SIMONS, JOE QUESADA and DAN BUCKLEY: I don’t know about the story-- it takes Thor off the board, in order to service some unnecessary pregnant white woman subplot. Pregnant white women, puppies in danger, crying Chinese babies, cat up a tree, Jessica Tandy on a horse that's headed the wrong way, Michael Clarke Duncan crying while holding a decapitated teddy-bear, Meredith Baxter Birney dying of a Woman's Disease but making a video for the daughter she won't live long enough to see graduate—- sure, all those things work 99% of the time and get the audience on your side; I guess I’m just being a shit-bag, but the pregnant lady caught me in a bad, cynical mood. Not a good mood to be reading comics in, I guess. I’m not really a big fan of the Morgan Freeman narration, either; it's a little anxious to be taken seriously for a comic about Kirby gods fighting green aliens.

But: Doug Braithewaite, huh? That’s a reason to take a look at this comic; it’s a good looking comic book. Paul Mounts colors from his pencils, which is usually not a technique that I’m particularly enamored with. But here, it works: maybe because the unfinished feeling of the pencils somehow conveys these characters as being otherworldly, not part and parcel of our fully-inked reality, not just crappy Vikings with delusions of grandeur. I don’t think it would work on every book; besides, Braithewaite and Bill Reinhold on inks ala their PUNISHER run, say? That’s a pretty solid team I’d rather not see messed with.

I’d enjoyed the Jason Aaron BLACK PANTHER tie-in more, for going into the mindset of the enemy, and being more of a war comic. This one promises to be a little more epic in scale than that though, which might yield dividends in future issues. Heck, maybe the pregnant lady will work in the later issues, and this will end up being a weirdly moving Viking versus Alien comic about birth in the face of war or some shit. Who knows? Not me. Maybe Michael Clarke Duncan.

MUMBAI MACGUFFIN by SAURAV MOHAPATRA, SAUMIN PATEL, V. VENKATA SUBRAMANIAN, NILESH MAHADIK, REUBEN THOMAS, AND SETH JARET: This is the first time Virgin Comics has ever put out a comic I was willing to read. I’m not a huge fan of “Chief Visionary” Deepak Chopra, or I’m guessing “Chief Creative Officer” “Gotham” Chopra, either. I don’t really know much about Richard Branson, except I have the vague impression he’s some kind of doucher. Besides all that, they’re not a company that has me in mind. The company has been fairly open about being dedicated more towards pleasing Hollywood executives than comic book fans. I am not Ashton Kutcher’s agent.

The company employs Indian writers and Indian artists, but this is the first time I’ve ever noticed them putting out a comic about India, and not just peddling a watered-down version of the mythology. It was reasonable. Saurav Mohapatra’s scripts a dopey action-comedy in a mix of Hindi and English, and heaps together a Mumbai filled with gangsters, taxi drivers, hitmen, CIA operatives, spiritualists, and terrorists. It’s a silly mish-mash. It could be better-- the ending makes little sense, and it’d have been nice if they’d given the lead white character a personality, any personality at all. As for the art, the inexperience is noticeable, but it’s at least clear and the character designs are fun enough, even if there’s a definite need for improvement on composition, storytelling, and inking.

But it moves fast and it doesn’t take itself seriously, at least, and I guess I found it endearing despite its flaws, like a B-movie on at 2 a.m. on HBO that’s better than I’d have guessed: it’s not as good as REAL MEN or SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO, but I’d watch it all the way to the end. Light-hearted action-comedies set in the real world? I’m the audience for those. Indian comic creators, inspired by Japanese manga or French sci-fi comics, selling comics in America, swapping spit with Pico Iyer? It all sounds great in theory, before you add in Ed Burns or whoever pitching their shitty D-list movie ideas, or Chopra & Family hawking discount spirituality and crackpot nonsense to credulous westerners, or god knows what ridiculous business practices they’re almost certainly engaged in. There were Indian comic creators before Virgin, and if these guys can improve their game, let’s hope there’ll be Indian comic creators after these Virgin people are gone, gone, gone.

CRIMINAL #4 of VOLUME 2 by ED BRUBAKER, SEAN PHILLIPS, and VAL STAPLES: I don’t know. This arc, the main character is a cartoonist who sometimes visualizes his creation speaking to him-- hardboiled private-dick Frank Kafka. What do you make of that? I haven’t decided if I think it’s clever, or if I think it’s a Dabney Coleman vehicle. I guess we’ll find out.

Besides that, it’s the usual laughs and hi-jinks. As ever, the series’ dedication to un-cool, unpleasant fuck-ups is admirable, though the umpteenth lady character who’s an emotionally-damaged sperm-bank is maybe … I don’t know, maybe going to start getting weird eventually? There’s a fine line between “genre convention” and “skuzzy creep-o shit” that I don’t think has been crossed yet for this book, for me, personally, but… but that way lies Frank Miller, and, shit, I’d hate to see that happen to anybody.

TORPEDO 1936 VOLUME 6 by E. SANCHEZ ABULI and JORDI BERNET: IDW recently announced plans to reprint this classic gangster comic, but after I’d picked up a batch of the Bernet run from Bud Plant. Holy crap! Remember my hoity-toity line between “genre convention” and “skuzzy creep-o shit”? This book crosses that line, and the next line past that into “should I be embarrassed to be reading this?” territory. It’s not … It’s not as embarrassing as Wally Wood’s CANNON, say, but still: I didn’t know anything about TORPEDO besides that Bernet drew it, so I was surprised by what a cheerfully depraved comic it turned out to be.

For example: in this volume, the main character organizes a gang-bang—and that’s the least unpleasant part of what happens. You don’t root for the main character to win because you like him, so much as you want to see what horrible shit he’ll pull next. Bernet makes it all look beautiful, of course, but that fact that a dog with a boner playing with lit dynamite is being so well drawn? That sort of adds to the crazy of the whole thing.

I’m still trying to comprehend how Alex Toth worked on this series—how do you spot blacks for a gangbang? “Dear Steve Rude, Why didn’t you research the gangbang? Library card! Dedication! Silhouette! Dildo-play!” That’s not a letter you want in the mail.

SAMMY THE MOUSE #1 and #2 by ZAK SALLY: So, this is about an alcoholic rat either suffering from serious mental problems, or stuck in the middle of some kind of spiritual awakening— which is probably the same thing. The rat’s friends include other broke-down, alcoholic animal cartoons. The art’s got plenty of nervous energy, black & white with blue & brown accents—- the best bits summon up a sort of horrible run-down cartoon world broken down from neglect and mental illness.

The timing’s good; the storytelling’s fun; I’m clueless what any of it possibly means, but I like watching cartoon characters drinking, so I suppose it’s entertaining. Most of the comic’s been spent watching characters hang out; something larger seems to be happening, but there’s no telling what that is exactly. If the project is aiming for 300 pages though, at an issue a year… well, if I’m doing the geometry right there, which I might not be, there might be a pretty decent wait to find out what this is all about.

I don’t know how to judge it really, in the meantime. So far, it at least feels mysterious instead of random, but there’s no telling how long that’ll last. I liked #1 more than #2: #1 was funnier and had better drawings than #2. But I especially liked a panel in #2 where a hand’s absence is depicted by the vacuum it leaves in space. It’s a neat depiction of speed and shock: something should be there but it's suddenly not.

I’ve been re-reading old Jaime Hernandez comics though—early LOVE & ROCKETS stuff. I hadn’t been interested in his superhero half to the new issue (though Gilbert's Martin & Lewis bit was killer). But it got me revisiting things like Mechanics, 100 Rooms, The Lost Women— that brief rocket half of LOVE & ROCKETS. People dismiss that stuff since Jaime’s later stuff was better, but: the early Jaime work isn't exactly shabby. It’s not really fair to read stuff like SAMMY THE MOUSE at the same time; it feels so slow & under-populated by comparison.

That's not a fair place for me to be coming from, maybe. That maybe goes for all of the above. All of these reviews are so goddamn unfair. "Dear Steve Rude, Have you read Death of Speedy lately? Dildo-play!" He doesn't deserve that in his mailbox. Who deserves that? Nobody. Maybe Michael Clarke Duncan.

A History of Punishment for Adults: Jog reaches the last, black page on 8/13

The Punisher MAX #60

I think it's useful to compare this comic -- the last of writer Garth Ennis' run on the series -- with another thing Marvel released this week: The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe, a reprint of material from 1995. That was Ennis' first work on the character; he was 25 years old, though already a professional comics writer for over than half a decade.

It's not a very good comic. The What If...? type concept is that Frank Castle's family is accidentally killed in the middle of a superhero battle (instead of a gangland firefight) and the opening pages do have some nasty kick, with various Marvel superheroes standing around in their rainbow-hued spandex regalia, annoyedly discussing the collateral damage caused by their adventures, the implication being that wifes and children and such get unwittingly killed in many of those happy adventures you (the reader) so enjoy reading. The same idea is present in Ennis' current The Boys, but the Punisher comic does benefit from having all those famous characters standing around, being irritable, until Frank Castle empties a gun into the crowd without warning.

The rest of it's a below-average Marshal Law storyline, and a fannish one at that; it's bratty fanishness, yes, focusing on superheroes getting killed, but that's still not substantively different from Batman Can Beat Hulk Because, and it grossly undercuts the meanness of those first pages of the comic, the critique inherent.

But it is there, and The Punisher MAX is here, and right now it's 180 degrees away.

What's been striking to me about this final storyline is how different it's been from even earlier issues of the series itself. Ennis' Punisher has always been evolving, of course. Marvel also recently reprinted Welcome Back, Frank, which marked the start of the writer's prolonged association with the character, at the dawn of the Jemas era in 2000. That was the 'Knights' Punisher, a comedic take on the character cracking polar bears in the kisser and making fools of superheroes, although there were more 'serious' bits too.

Eventually, in 2004, the Knights version of the character was scrapped and the MAX version officially began (although the 'Vol. 0' MAX miniseries The Punisher: Born was released in 2003); it marked a break away from all prior continuity, taking place in its own private universe, one with few Marvel characters. Nick Fury was there (or, the version of Fury Ennis devised for his 2001-02 Fury MAX miniseries), and characters from Punisher history were occasionally featured (or alluded to), but all of them inhabited a closed-off world that operated in quasi-realtime -- each new storyline 'occurs' at the time its first issue is published in the reader's world -- much like the old Hellblazer, the series that first brought Ennis' work to North America.

That's not to say the MAX Punisher did away with comedy altogether; it'd actually be a pretty big mistake to call it entirely serious. Rather, it embraced a type of 'heightened reality' approach, stretching the emotions and activities of 'realistic' characters to encompass wild deeds and develop dryly absurd situations - it's all a bit like what manga writer Kazuo Koike does with some of his projects, though Ennis is more droll a writer, and I suspect far less inclined toward oddball improvisation. Still: the Punisher parachutes out of a nuclear missile! That stuff's right in there (Mother Russia, Vol. 3).

(and note that I'm leaving out the likely influence of prose crime writers, which I'm just not equipped to address, sorry)

Yet in the same way, there were long, cold, dark themes at work. Ennis has really used the longview well in this series - you can get a satisfying story out of the average collected volume (or even a given issue, although Ennis' skill with a cliffhanger doesn't always translate to individually great chapters), but the best effect is to observe how Ennis works his concerns over years of time, both in terms of his writing and the characters' fictional lives.

It's certainly the only way to fully appreciate one of the series' core themes, a very old one - that violence and retribution circle back to return to any given actor. I think it's something to note exactly how many supporting cast members get killed over the course of this series, and, on the flip side, how Ennis never allows any one villain to retain primacy for the whole run.

There's other concerns as well - the interrelationship between 'high' and 'low' crime, rich and poor (generally white and not-white), is a big one, reaching its climax in the extended The Punisher Shoots Enron saga of Barracuda (Vol. 6), which was chock-full of interracial, class-crossing chaos, in addition to the obvious satire. Note how Barracuda himself (by all rights, he shouldn't have ever worked outside of that storyline, so specific is his position) quietly shifts in Long Cold Dark (Vol. 9), still a tool of (different) powerful interests, but seen a little differently amidst the story's individual theme of parents creating Hell for their children.

That's just one way Ennis operates with a eye toward the expansive. But always, always, it's clear that his main character is doomed, no matter how great at killing he might be. We're all doomed, really, if you take the 2004 MAX one-shot The Punisher: The End as not the optional 'ending' for the character it was conceived as by its publisher (The End is a whole series of not-really 'final' stories for Marvel characters, in case you didn't know), but as the actual ending for the closed-off MAX Punisher world. There, international warmaking (a frequent motif in the MAX series proper) leads to a nuclear exchange with China, apparently wiping out most of the population of the US, and maybe the world.

"That's the trouble with a war you never want to end," remarks Frank Castle to a traveling companion, whom he'll later kill for his pre-apocalyptic crimes, regardless of how maybe people are even left in the world. It's a line that belied a total lack of self-awareness in 2004, but now seems just the opposite - Vol. 9 'ended' the story of this series, in terms of Frank's characterization, with his acknowledgement that he's done as much to create his horrible life as anyone else -- the people who shot his family, the Vietnam conflict that roused his taste for killing -- yet he still rejects any attempt to start over, and returns to The War.

Maybe, at the end of human time, he's making a little joke about how he'll be the last one left, burning in an irradiated city as he envisions a return to the place where his wife and children were killed, perhaps touching a bit of Morrisonian hyper-sanity and realizing that he's not going to Hell, but has always been there, because he's a Marvel comic book character that must have adventures into perpetuity, and so his wife and children will always be shot, and he'll always be mad, over and over, revival and revamp, new writers and artists, never, ever ending until they all blink from the culture's attention.

Man, that hits me a lot more than tossing Wolverine into an electric fence since his bones are metal and it'd totally melt his internal organs before he could heal... sounds kinda quaint, given the last 13 years of comics.

And so, here we are at the spectacularly-titled Valley Forge, Valley Forge: The Slaughter of a U.S. Marine Garrison and the Birth of the Punisher, Vol. 10, the last. Like I mentioned, Frank's story reached a sort of 'ending' in Vol. 9, so this one is a little different. It's the only one of Ennis' MAX stories missing the title character's famous narration; here, he's observed, puzzled over. We never once climb inside him, for what more needs be said? The action is often interrupted by text and 'photos' taken from a book written by the brother of a dead character from Born, and the chapters we read touch on prior themes of the series, though with a special emphasis on warfare waged on questionable grounds.

This is far and away the most political of Ennis' Punisher works; it's a little reminiscent of his Punisher-ish 2004-05 Avatar series 303, in that it functions on one level as a murder fantasy concerning men who start conflicts for poor reasons. It's also the most serious, concluding with no less than poetry appearing on the page as Nick Fury growls at television footage of wounded soldiers in Iraq. Poetry and song lyrics in comics are dangerous stuff, but Ennis -- so often pilloried as a fatally 'cool' writer prone to sneering at nerdy shit like superheroes while he makes his money -- seems intent on spending his final pages being as emotional as he pleases, no matter how silly he might look.

It works and it doesn't. The plot -- wicked Army and Air Force brass send good men to kill Frank so as to wipe out evidence of the nasty shit they've been pulling at varous points in the series -- operates well in accommodating Ennis' shift of focus away from the inside of Frank's head. There's little surprise that Frank copes with facing good men sent to defeat him by simply evading and disarming (due to his awesome skills) until they're forced to give up - when you're fighing a war that never ends, you're likely to outlast people with other aspects to their lives, after all. He runs circles around them for most of it, quick enough that the suspense seems lopsided, though I think that's attributable to seeing the Punisher how others see him, for once.

Additionally, by turning his gaze away from Frank, Ennis also redirects his grand theme. Here, Frank exists symbolically as well as physically, as the embodiment of Vietnam damage up and walking - it's something he's been known as at various points in the series, but in this storyline he's very much an instrument of delivering violence straight to the door of men looking to profit from bloodshed, what went around coming back around. That probably makes this one of Ennis' more pro-Punisher stories, although longtime readers know that Frank is just as doomed for his sins and everyone else.

Of course, those longtime readers will encounter some jarring shift in tone. I understand that Ennis wants to provide an immediately weighty capstone for his run, but all this rue and verse has a way of clashing with the actual details of the evil generals' scheme, which did involve a flesh-devouring virus, a sweet little girl, the aforementioned nuclear missile dive and the Punisher thrashing a miniature martial arts master to death by grabbing his leg and bashing him against things.

And it'll surely be up to each reader to decide if an in-story cultivation of a terrorist cell with the intention to execute a strike on foreign soil while covertly securing the use of a bacteriological weapon really synchs up allegorically to What Ennis is Really Talking About when he writes of "those who profited" from a shitty war started on shit grounds - and those prone to sudden explosions of racism in the Big Villain manner of the rest of the series at that! I'm not sure it comes across as convincing as it could; one of the benefits of writing 303 for Avatar was that he didn't have to speak so indirectly, with such potential for choking on those extra words.

Still, there's moments of some power in here, and a willingness to acknowledge the personal, human element inside grand moral flourishes. The artist, Goran Parlov, is excellent as always, his caricature-prone faces deftly wrinkling into pain and rage, and his action pages so sleek and hard you'll hear everything fine without sound effects. He's become sort of the series' 'regular' artist in the last few volumes, and he fits in well with Ennis' flowing tone, now gone over the falls to address real world concerns with unrestrained anger.

Feel free to query how any of this will look to someone hopping on at the end; I bet it'd seem a bit tinny, its super-character moving into combat with such assurance that inevitability seems at his back; longterm readers will get more kick out of the final issue's march of its villains to doom, because they know it's inevitable, from what Ennis has built from things he did not create. It's a GOOD final word for what's become a model of what a corporate-owned series can do, with a writer willing to glare so deep into its implications, ready to devote an awful lot of time and space to work-for-hire service, and renowned enough to get just what he wants away from the rigor of the shared universe.

It's work that'll inform the future incarnations, inevitably born again into that acknowledged perdition of further adventures.

No Wind in the Sails Tonight, But Here's Abhay and Secret Invasion #5 Anyways.

As part of my relentless pursuit to understand all things secret and invasive (e.g. your dad's hands), I attended a symposium dedicated to SECRET INVASION comic books, held at the 2008 San Diego Film Festival or "Comic-Con" as it's sometimes called. Within a half hour of arriving in San Diego, I was standing outside of the Hard Rock Hotel watching four bouncers rub a drunk, overweight, middle-aged Hispanic woman's face into the pavement while she yelled "Yo, why you gotta twist my thumbs? Why you gotta be twistin' on my thumbs?" But unfortunately, the entire weekend could not be that entertaining or make me feel that hopeful about my fellow man.

The way the panel works is about 20-30 gentlemen come into an auditorium, and sit behind a long table; each is introduced as having written or having watched someone write or having once had dinner with someone who wrote one of the SECRET INVASION tie-ins. Lead series writer Brian Michael Bendis, having won at comics, does not attend. The 20-30 gentlemen differ in various respects, though the majority of them seem to share an aversion for tanning parlors. Each is introduced in turn by a slideshow hosted by Panel Moderator and Marvel Editor-in-Chief, Joe Quesada.

Then, a pretty lady enters, and each man dons a Luchadore mask and gets in line to-- wait, no: then, the panel is immediately opened, without any delay, to a call for questions from the audience. The question-and-answer session begin, and a rather surprising fact quickly becomes apparent:

Despite the median age of these winners being about 27, apparently none of these people have ever read or even so much as encountered a Story before SECRET INVASION. In fact, they all seem confused if not maybe frightened by how stories work.

Here is my recollection of the question-and-answer session; these are all pretty nearly exact quotes, I think:

FAN #1: How does SECRET INVASION end?

JOE QUESADA: We can't say because the way a story works is that it has a beginning, a middle and an ending, and we usually try to tell you those things in a particular order. I can’t tell you the ending because we’re not done with the middle yet. Next question, please.

FAN #2: Joe-- at the end of SECRET INVASION, what will have happened to the characters?

JOE QUESADA: Aah, I see your confusion-- yes, sometimes people tell stories orally. In fact, this was the very origins of storytelling, and I'm sure anthropologists would assert that this tradition reaches as far back as to the Cradle of Civilization itself, that at the very Dawn of Man, somewhere in between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, that early, primitive man frequently indulged in oral storytelling. However, SECRET INVASION is exclusively being told through comics and is not being told orally. So I can't tell you what happens because words come out of my mouth, and not comic books.

FAN #2: I have a follow-up question. Will the heroes have defeated the villains by the end of SECRET INVASION, or will the villains have defeated the heroes?

JOE QUESADA: Aah, yes, that raises an interesting point. You "purchase" the comic books we sell using money that is contained in your wallet or pocket or grandma's purse. By "purchasing" our comic books, you get to find out the substance of the events that are depicted in the comic books you've "purchased". We are trying to make money by selling you the comic books. So if we tell you what happens in comic books that have not come out yet, we will not make any money. And that would be bad for us, financially. Next question.

FAN #3: First of all, I'd just like to say how you're all great, and this is great, and congratulations on being great. And I just think it's great that such greatness could be so great. It'd be great to rub your great bodies with a cheese greater [sic] and eat the great skin that I rip off. I think it's great that I said "[sic]" out loud.

JOE QUESADA: Thank you, sir. Do you have a question?

FAN #3: It's... there's... I want to know things.

JOE QUESADA: I think I see the problem. A question is a statement designed to invite a response from another person, with the expectation that the response will relate in some way to the original statement. Next question.

FAN #4: Heeeeey, how youse all doin’ today? I'm a huge fan of the Mighty Thor. Will he appear in SECRET INVASION?

JOE QUESADA: Yes, we are selling a comic called MIGHTY THOR'S SECRET INVASION FUNNIES which you should all buy. Thank you for that excellent question.

FAN #4: I have a follow-up question. What will the Mighty Thor be doing in the SECRET INVASION?

JOE QUESADA: Oh, I went a little fast there; my bad: if you read MIGHTY THOR'S SECRET INVASION FUNNIES, you will find out what the Mighty Thor will be doing in the SECRET INVASION.

[Disconcertingly Enthusiastic Applause]

FAN #4: I have a follow-up question. Will the Mighty Thor use his hammer at some point during the SECRET INVASION?

JOE QUESADA: I'm not sure if I'm allowed to answer that, but I will say this: maybe. Next question.

FAN #5: I don't want to know what happens at the end of SECRET INVASION. I don't want you guys to ruin it because I love the endings of your comics. But what will the middle of the story be like? What will happen in the exact middle? Also: will I like it?

JOE QUESADA: Good question. We haven't discussed middles yet. Now, the middle is the part between the beginning and ...

***********************

The overwhelming majority of fans didn't want to ask about SECRET INVASION-- they were there to "debate" the fact Spiderman wished his wife to the cornfield. Remember that? Apparently, dudes out there still care! Like: a lot!

The point of these debates as far as I could tell...?

On the one hand, fans want to provoke Joe Quesada into admitting that he made a horrible mistake of which he's deeply ashamed of, and then to cry and beg for their forgiveness, and then, for him to cry into the microphone "Spiderman is why my wife makes me pee sitting down" and then for him to hang himself from the rafters, and then for adorable children to beat his dead body with a stick until candy comes out, and then for one of the children to eat a piece and scream, “Oh, that is not chocolate after all, senor!”

Joe Quesada, on the other hand, does not want to do any of these things. Editor-in-chiefs typically won't admit they screwed up the flagship characters with whom they've been entrusted-- it's their weird little way of avoiding being fired from their jobs. That's my guess, at least-- one not shared by most Marvel fans, apparently.

I'd estimate that the Spiderman "debates" took up about 50 minutes of the 60 minute SECRET INVASION panel.

The other 20-30 people? For the most part, not invited or asked to say anything. Just there for decoration. Man-decoration.

At some point, Brian Michael Bendis was called on a cellular telephone. Some fan tried to ask "Why is POWERS being released on a quarterly basis during such an important storyline? The quarterly release schedule has destroyed the book's momentum-- when will that book resume a more timely schedule?" Unfortunately, in greasy dipshit language, that sounds like "YO, AY YO, WHY YOU SELL OUT POWERS, MAN? AAAY." Which just got a hearty "Fuck You" in response. Newsarama changed "Fuck You" in its panel report to ... "Boo You".

Boo-You.

*******************

So: sometimes, in observing Marvel comics from the lofty vantages of the internet, one wonders "Do they really think their fans are THIS stupid?" And the answer is: You bet, and they find out that they're right themselves, first-hand! I urge anyone complaining about Marvel comics on the internet: get thee to a nunnery, and watch one of these panels. The fact any Marvel comic features words that are polysyllabic-- Wow! They trust their audience that much!

So, the review of #5 after the jump.

AFTER READING ISSUE #5: I don’t know about you, but my hope is this issue is a giant fake-out.

At least, that’s what I’d like to see happen: for the characters revealed to be Skrulls at the end to turn out not to be Skrulls after all. I think it’d be something if the Skrulls saw Reed Richards’s device coming, and figured out a way to use his brains / arrogance against him. I think that’d be a pretty funny twist, actually. I guess that’s what I’m rooting to happen after this issue anyways— for all of the Marvel Superheroes to be accidental murderers. I think it’d be super-funny to see fans react to that. Plus: it’d explain how the Mockingbird “Skrull” knew about the miscarriage (or was that explained in a stupid tie-in?)...

I think that’s plainly what they want fans guessing. It’s just hard to imagine Marvel would interfere with the White Queen from the ASSORTED X-MEN comics. I get the impression she’s a popular character for them. This entire enterprise would be a more entertaining series if it were easier to subtract those kinds of thoughts / considerations from the game, but...

Were you alive for CAPTAIN MARVEL? He was before my time, and that’s not material I revisited in my Marvel inquiries. That character’s most often linked to Jim Starlin, and I don’t rank Starlin personally, at least for the sort of thing I’m usually interested in. With Marvel, I’m most interested in Marvel’s geography, so the cosmic, outer-space stuff is usually completely lost on me. Anyways, I don’t really find that whole Captain Marvel stretch of the book terribly interesting. Plus, I think Leinil Yu’s space opera moments are the weakest he’s been on the series—for me, he definitely seems more “on” for the Savage Land sequences.

Speaking of Yu:

Maybe they shouldn’t let him draw tears anymore. Maybe it’s not right for kids to be looking at that.

Most of the things they promised last issue haven’t happened this issue, but those promises were made with respect to the events transpiring in New York City. I’m perfectly happy not to be stuck in New York for another issue.

The “Skrulls Offer World Peace” spread isn’t terribly interesting to me. I suppose an argument could be made that the finale of CIVIL WAR showed the Marvel populace eager to embrace fascism, and this could be that earlier scene playing out to its logical conclusion. Still: "evil aliens who claim to mean well" is too ancient a bit of business for me to get excited over. Besides the fact it’s another thing BATTLESTAR GALACTICA did already, there was the V, TO SERVE MAN, etc. It's a little familiar.

Plus, the prospect of the Marvel Universe being controlled by Skrulls for the next year or so-- it just doesn't seem plausible. It'd be too distracting for too many books.

I quite like that Maria Hill scene though. That’s the issue for me, personally. I think I’m a pretty easy audience—- any big let’s-all-cheer moment, I’m usually pretty happy to cheer along. Plus, for me, that scene’s about Hill forced to embrace being a superhero in a way I’ve never seen from that character before. Granted, I don’t read all the spin-offs; I’ve hardly read all of her appearances, by any means. But I always got a “I’m the grouch who doesn’t like superheroes and superhero craziness” vibe off how she’s been written before. So, I like that the character wins in this issue by kind of becoming a sort of legacy character for Nick Fury. Not the boring kind of 1:1 replacement character; “here’s the new Flash, just a little different from the old Flash, but with the same exact name, powers, costume, and hometown” legacy character, but as a unique character who’s filling the spy-superhero role that Nick Fury used to fill while he moves on to fill some other role.

I don’t know if I’d call it intellectually satisfying, but "intellectual satisfaction" is what’s tripped me up with FINAL CRISIS. If I find anything distracting to that series, it’s not that I’m confused as to what’s happening, so much as disinterested by how familiar the themes seem. The character imprisoned in human form who’s forgotten his true place in a larger universe, especially. I imagine the Monitor character will eventually “awaken” in some way that’s both thematically significant and of some confusing importance plotwise—- but I won’t really care when it happens, so much as be ticking off a box in my head. Flattering myself for recognizing themes I’ve already seen a half-dozen times before isn’t doing it for me, this round.

While with SECRET INVASION, right this second, I want that “Oh, No!” moment of watching Hawkeye realize he shot his wife to death. Or— or something bad to happen to somebody. This is a series I don’t want to end well for the characters in it; things have gone way too smoothly for everyone so far, and for me, it's absolutely built a hope that they're hanging onto some kind of ace card for issue #8, and that #1 to 7 have been rope-a-dope. That could just be wishful thinking, and this could just be ... well... dope-a-dope. This could all just be one giant Boo-You.

Patience Is A Virtue: Graeme's getting bored with Secret Invasion

Here's the thing. When I got to the last page of Secret Invasion #4, and I saw Thor arrive and the glimpse of Captain America, I thought, okay, so #5 is going to see them getting involved and maybe something will finally happen in the series. Well, SECRET INVASION #5 made half of that come true, I guess. Just the less expected half.

The complete lack of Cap and Thor in this issue just made me concentrate on the incredibly weird pacing of this series so far: What was the point of teasing their appearance so blatantly when you're not going to show them at all in the following issue? Probably the same point as having nothing whatsoever happening for three successive issues, and then blowing your plot development wad on three climaxes this time around. And, while I'm asking questions, what point did the whole Savage Land plot serve whatsoever, apart from taking the Avengers out of New York? If all of the heroes who came off the Skrull ship were Skrulls - and if Reed Richards can just expose them all by building his Skrull Detector off-panel in a moment of prime McGuffin-ing ("They're undetectable! No, wait, I need someone to detect them now. Okay, Reed can build a detector, but I won't tell anyone what his discovery that changed everything actually was.") - then... okay, I guess? But what purpose did it serve, especially when the fake heroes didn't actually do anything apart from run around the jungle and get killed?

That's the problem with Secret Invasion, ultimately; it doesn't stand up to any real questioning. It's just a series of moments that probably looked cool in Bendis' head when he thought of them strung together in some semblance of plot without much thought to the mechanics of how they'd actually work (Of all the Skrulls on the Helicarrier, not one of them noticed that there was another Maria Hill hiding out watching the showdown? Really?). As a big summer blockbuster about explosions and people saying "Oh my God" to tell the audience that this is meant to be important, it works well, but as a story? It's just turning out to be kind of Crap.

I'll Make A Brand New Start of It: Diana Has A 2005 Flashback, 6/8

Oh, NYX. You came and you took without giving. So I sent you away. Fat lot of good that did. Even after three years, NYX is still on my Top Five Embarrassing Marvel Moments list: a 7-issue series written by the EIC himself, with delays between issues that varied from nine months to over a year. The jokes would practically write themselves: it took Lance Bass less time to come out, we'd have to send our grandchildren to pick up NYX #8, Quesada was retconning every issue as he wrote it... the whole thing was one big fuster-cluck.

And now, here we are with NYX: NO WAY HOME #1, and all that baggage is... well, still around, really.

So what do we have here? It's a six-issue miniseries by Marjorie Liu and Kalman Andrasofszky. While this is (as far as I know) Liu's first work in comics, she wrote an X-Men novel called "Dark Mirror" a few years ago - it was kinda-sorta okay but lacked any real connection to the characters. It's pretty much the same here, but before we get to that...

Okay, here's the thing. NYX, at the time, was part of a whole movement at Marvel to deliver "edgy" variations on familiar properties. The high concept for NYX, as I recall it (it's been three years and, quite frankly, it's not worth the few seconds it'd take me to research - again, we'll get to that in a bit), was a different perspective on the Marvel Universe's mutant population. Not even street-level, like Bendis' ALIAS; more like gutter-level, as far below Charles Xavier's watchful eye as you can get. Of course, Marvel isn't very good at being deliberately edgy, so you got things like X-23 being a prostitute.

So Liu's not starting out from a great place here. And, more importantly, Marvel's not exactly into "edgy" material anymore. You can tell as much from page 6, where Kiden seems to be injecting invisible heroin into her arm (although, bizarrely enough, two panels later we get a full-frontal shot of Kiden slicing up her arm like an emogirl who's just discovered that Penance used to be Speedball).

Now, the research thing. You know, I've gotten pretty used to recap pages as a quick way of getting up-to-speed on any given series. And I'm honestly surprised there isn't one here: again, these characters haven't been around in three years, and that's assuming someone was still reading when NYX #7 came out in 2005. I'd certainly given up by then. Liu tries to give us a brief summary of what happened, but that doesn't tell us about any of the other characters. And because I don't know anything about the other characters, and there's no room in 22 pages to reintroduce all the players, I'm pretty much not interested in the cast.

(In fairness, this is a problem Liu had before - "Dark Mirror" ultimately failed to really get into the characters' heads, they were all written in a very generic and middling tone, which is pretty much what we get here as well. The characters are just sort of... there.)

Now, it's altogether possible that Liu and Andrasofszky will carve out a halfway decent story from this mess - they've got five issues to go, and the set-up is ostensibly finished (as opposed to Quesada's run, in which six of the seven issues introduced new characters to the "team"). But we're off to a EH start, because I think what this comic really needed was a reason to care about these specific characters and to be invested in their story, and it doesn't deliver that.

You swear you've been bitten: Douglas reads three new Spider-Man comics and more

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN itself has had two skip weeks in a row, but we've gotten three other Spider-Man books instead--the new FAMILY series, a SUMMER SPECIAL, and a BRAND NEW DAY EXTRA. Reviews of all three, plus INVINCIBLE IRON MAN and FINAL CRISIS, under the cut.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN FAMILY #1: The final page explains that this is the new identity of SPIDER-MAN FAMILY--the fat bimonthly title that includes vintage Spider-Man reprints and done-in-one new stories--now that it's been brought into the Stephen Wacker-edited Spider-Man group. Despite the Brand New Day banner on the cover, though, only one story here takes place in the current narrative--an 11-page Aunt May story. It's billed as "Aunt May, Agent of F.E.A.S.T.," which is a kind of promising idea (looking into what she does at the emergency-aid agency where she volunteers), but the story itself is a dire string of clichés. The lead story, by J.M. DeMatteis and Alex Cal, imagines what might have happened between AMAZING FANTASY #15 and ASM #1; setting aside the fact that it adds nothing but maudlin tedium to the original stories, there's the problem that there are already some perfectly solid comics about what might have happened in that period--the AMAZING FANTASY #16-18 miniseries that Kurt Busiek and Paul Lee did back in 1995. (It's also got an error that drives me bats: if something shows discretion, it's discreet, not "discrete.") Then there's a dozy little throwaway set in SPIDER-GIRL's continuity, and a five-page prologue to MARVEL APES that mostly consists of an unfunny riff on the famous Spidey-trapped-under-a-heavy-thing sequence from ASM #33 and makes me want to steer clear of the miniseries. (Maybe MARVEL APES was commissioned because MARVEL ZOMBIES did so well, but that at least had a funny premise; making Spider-Man Spider-Monkey doesn't appear to go anywhere interesting.) The issue's filled out by a reprint of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #300, which it's kind of alarming to realize was almost half the series ago. It hasn't aged well, and the new material is AWFUL stuff.

Meanwhile, a bunch of Nathan Cosby-edited material that I'm guessing was commissioned for SMF has ended up as KING-SIZE SPIDER-MAN SUMMER SPECIAL. I will happily read anything by the Paul Tobin/Colleen Coover team, and their collaborations here are as fluffy and charming as usual, starting with the six-word Spider-Man bio on the first page (reproduced by Chris Sims here). Their big story teams up Mary Jane, Hellcat, Marvel Girl, the Scarlet Witch, Clea, She-Hulk and Millie the Model, and also involves enchanted shampoo; they're also responsible for a two-pager about MODOK and his chair, which, you know, MODOK. The rest of the issue's filled by a Keith Giffen/Rich Burchett Spidey/Falcon teamup that seems to have been sitting in a drawer for a good long while and might just as well have kept sitting there forever, and a totally ridiculous but amusing Chris Giarruso Mini-Marvels story about Spider-Man and Venom as rival paperboys competing for the Osborns' account. Quite GOOD, on the strength of the Tobin/Coover stuff, anyhow.

On top of those, last week we got SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY - EXTRA! #1, three stories that actually are set in current continuity, more or less--actually, they're evidence of how far ahead the Spider-team is planning. #567 comes out next week, but Joe Kelly and Chris Bachalo's gory Hammerhead story (which takes 18 pages to get through what could've been many fewer pages of exposition) is a prologue to a sequence that apparently begins in October, and Marc Guggenheim and Marcos Martin's rushed-looking piece (Spidey on trial--well, at a pre-trial hearing, actually--and being defended by Matt Murdock) is an "interlude" in a story that doesn't start until #582, which if my arithmetic serves me will be the first issue of 2009. Nice to know that they're taking the long view, and it's OKAY--Bachalo's art makes me wish he'd find some project he could really make his own--but still doesn't convince me that they're going anywhere special with BND, maybe because none of the writers has license to steer the franchise anywhere unexpected.

Surprisingly, that's not the case with THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #4, in which Matt Fraction is treating Marvel's third-most-overexposed character like he's solely in charge of him. There's a scene this issue where Tony Stark announces that he's buying (a very thinly disguised) Coca-Cola to distribute antiretrovirals (not "retrovirals," despite Fraction's dialogue) in sub-Saharan Africa, and I have no idea where that's going--but it's hugely entertaining anyway. And the core of this issue is a handful of conversations between and/or about Tony and Pepper that run with the way their relationship worked in the movie. I still don't think Larroca & D'Armata's photo-based faces, CGI-type backgrounds and heavily computer-modeled coloring work too well, even though they're more appropriate for this series than most others--it just ends up looking like a higher-tech version of SHATTER--but this is my idea of a GOOD time, and I'm enjoying the chutzpah of Fraction's approach.

And I'm continuing to adore FINAL CRISIS. My annotations to #3 are over here, but I think my favorite thing about this series is the economy of its death-metal attack--Green Arrow's personality nailed in a single line of dialogue, Supergirl justifying her cover feature despite the fact that she appears in two panels (not counting the death of her Nazi alternate-world analogue), the way every big plot development happens scarily fast and every visual gesture and line of dialogue seems to have some kind of thematic resonance. (Libra's hood viewed from behind in the swamp scene sure looks like some kind of monster with too many consonants in its name.) Plus: Clark Kent spouting self-pitying exposition like he's on a Mort Weisinger-era cover! EXCELLENT.

Justice is like a Hawk

Sorry for that title, heh, just been rereading WATCHMEN again.

HAWKMAN SPECIAL #1: If you had told me 10 or 15 years ago that Jim Starlin would be writing and drawing HAWKMAN, I would have probably been pretty, "Wow, that sounds AWEsome, let's order a ton!", but come 2008 my response was far more muted because Starlin has had a string of fairly mediocre books lately. Nothing particularly awful or anything, but neither nothing that I've thought was exceptional, or that sold well.

It's also marketed as a tie-in to the RANN/THANAGAR HOLY WAR mini, which isn't selling as well as it should either.

But, oddly, maybe this should have been marketed as a FINAL CRISIS book -- it talks more directly about "CRISIS-y" stuff than something like ROGUES REVENGE or REQUIEM did.

See, apparently Hawkman's origin has changed yet again, and no, he never was a reincarnated Egyptian through the ages, that was all a lie. He was... well the comic never explicitly tells you WHAT his new origin really is, but I think you're meant to infer that it has gone back to the Thanagarian one, but WHICH of those (Silver Age or HAWKWORLD) isn't at all laid out.

Which just leaves me sputtering "Buh? Wuh? Guh?" Does this make Hawkman the most rebooted origin of all? Seriously, doubleyou-tee-eff? I think DC might actually believes that the reason that no one buys a HAWKMAN comic in the long run is that they don't like his origin. But, really, it's just that, in the long-run, most customers don't want to purchase a comic of a second-stringer. Unless there's a splendid reason to.

Like, Mike Grell can get GREEN ARROW to sell as a mini-series, and the monthly that spun out of that started strong... but within a year or so (as I remember it, and not looking at a sales chart), the audience started slipping away, because, naturally, it was Green Arrow after all. Sure, then Kevin Smith can come on a new GREEN ARROW, and it sells like free money, but after he leaves, a year or so later, and it sells like Green Arrow does, again.

Hawkman is like this, The Atom, Spectre, The Demon, and a whole host of other characters. They're all great characters, really, be it visually, powerswise, or something like that, but they're not actually sustainable on their own. You can sell someone a mini-series about them, if it is good, but trying to do a monthly comic will almost certainly get you canceled within five years. These characters are great on teams, though, or playing off of other characters. Everyone likes them, but few want to buy them.

Sometimes what they try to do is keep changing the status quo. Look at The Atom. He's been turned into a barbarian, or reset to a teenager, or had his wife go crazy and had him go wandering the multiverse, and now he's (maybe... but maybe not since Grant hasn't shown it, and it really looks like that entire year of COUNTDOWN has been moved into "didn't happen" territory if Grant doesn't show it) Monitoring the Monitors.

None of the other changes stuck, and no other change like most of those CAN stick, because it takes him away from the DC universe-proper -- and to the extent that people care at all about The Atom, it is in the context of the DCU, yes?

Hawkman hasn't been removed from play before, but they play merry havoc with him all of the time, and now neither the reader nor the character have any idea who he really is -- Hawkman is explicit on that point at least in the comic, on his knees and clutching his head, even, when he says it. On the plus side, he's now one of "The Aberrant Six", which, really, just sounds awful. I'd rather be in the Inferior Five...

And reading between the lines in this book and things Starlin said in a recent interview, it seems like there's going to be a monthly Hawkman comic that he's going to write (and draw?), and I guess this is the set up for it.

Problem is, it really isn't a story. It's all set up. Things get subtracted, but nothing concrete gets added other than setup for some other story at some other ill-defined point of time. And I don't like the subtraction. "Reincarnated Egyptian warrior fighting a curse of destiny through the ages" is romantic, multiplies story possibilities, gives clear motivation, but allows you to fit any past version in at will, and allows any future changes to come cleanly. It's a dumb thing to throw away for a single storyline, just like killing off the Green Lantern Corps was dumb -- even if no one is using it at the time, it's the kind of broad "any story can fit in this box" concept that you don't want to pitch to the side.

The shame of it all is that Starlin draws Hawkman VERY well, with bold shots, and lots of cosmic, and really nice page and panel layouts, creating a book that moves right along even though it is essentially xx pages of two guys standing around and talking. Just looking at the art alone, I might have said "VERY GOOD" on the rating, because that's just some nice looking, dynamic comics art. But, there isn't a story, per se, and ugh, the "meta-story" is just plain AWFUL, and at the end of the day that's what matters to me.

What did YOU think?

-B

Ain't been here lately

Been just crazy swamped lately -- between trying to keep WATCHMEN in stock (no, seriously, we're selling a month's worth each-and-every day, so that's just nuts; then there was the comedy of errors as Diamond messed up a couple of orders in a row...), and getting rid of all of the Didn't-turn stuff from the store (first we've got to locate and pull it, then remove it from inventory, then removing the minimum points, so they won't reorder again, then getting them stickered and prepped for the big invite-only customer loyalty sale we've decided to do -- all in all a ton of frickin' work); plus I'm rearranging things throughout the store as I've got a little free space to play with having, y'know, removed 1400 GNs from the racks...

I know you don't care all that much when you just want reviews, but that's what's been going on. So today, my choice is between getting at the week or so backload of email messages that weren't Urgency Priority #1, or reviewing a little, and I chose YOU, pikachu!

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA ANNUAL #1: Huh. This may be a good example of Nostalgia being a armed bear trap -- it was kind of nice to see Earth 2 again, especially presented as though pre-Crisis INFINITY INC had just continued being published into the 21st century, and especially draw by Jerry Ordway, but for $3.99 (and feel free to call me crazy!), it mighta been nice to have had one of those, whaddyacallem?, stories, too.

For me, in a serial, annuals should be a CULMINATION of the story -- I'm especially thinking of that period of late 80s DC annuals that would have been roughly contemporaneous with INFINITY INC: build build build, then boom, the payoff in the annual; but this was nearly exactly the opposite, instead it is kicking off a story that is apparently going to pay off slowly (?) in the main parent book. It's a really really frustrating choice, made even worse by what appears to be a Deus Ex Machina appearance of the "real" Power Girl in a way that isn't explained or alluded to at all.

What's worse is otherwise I really enjoyed this issue tremendously. I like these characters, I miss them a little (in, y'know, a manly way), and I thought Johns did a good job capturing the elusive "feel" of it all (there's this one line about something like "Justice Society of Infinity, or whatever crazy thing Sylvester is calling it this week" that felt just precisely perfect to me), but, owies, it is $4, and I expect something more. AWFUL.

NEWUNIVERSAL: 1959: a prequel (and probable schedule padder) to the Ellis newuniversal comic, and Kieron Gillen does a pretty good job, except for the somewhat inexplicable decision to have Tony Stark and Iron Man appear in the comic, and in such a weird way too, effectively making it "the 'New Universe' is the Marvel Universe gone sideways", which sort of kind of misses the point of the original, doesn't it? And all while I'm reading the story, I'm thinking about THAT, rather than about the story itself, which really goes against the point of a story too. The art is relentlessly pedestrian, which hurts -- I'm not 100% sure what the conclusion with the baby was meant to be. Odds are, he shot it, and those lines are supposed to be blood, but there are somewhat similar lines in the before shot, too... A noble try at franchise building, but I'm fairly uncertain that anyone is interested in the franchise OUTSIDE of Warren's involvement. I sorta want to go with a low OK, but the art is so workmanlike that I think I'm going to say EH.

SUPERMAN / BATMAN #50: DICKBAT! Man, I can NOT believe that an editor let that cover go past, at least with those colors in that place. *shakes head sadly* the insides were fine, if you really WANT "Thomas Wayne knows Jor El" as an in-continuity concept. But, hell, Jack Knight did, so what not? OK

WILDCATS #1: What is this? Try #5, I think?

On the one hand, you've got to give them credit -- they've *actually* "destroyed the world", and are trying a post-apocalypse survival-type set up as a basis for an entire LINE of titles. That's a "Hail Mary" pass of the highest order, and it actually takes some serious stones to even try. It also does what people have generally asked for from their superhero comics: "let's see some consequences". So good job in trying.

I don't think it is going to work for a few reasons, however:

1) the event the consequences CAME from ("Number of the Beast") was poorly read, and not on anyone's radar whatsoever, especially as it is running during ANOTHER poorly read event (The DC/Wildstorm crossover), to make it seem like some portion of one of the two was rushed out. Maybe to get out ahead of Ultimatum in the Ultimate Universe?

2) There's not a sympathetic character here among the protagonists; and they're hard to distinguish between them and the antagonists presented, except in the cartoony-ness of the baddies wanting to "eat people" for no reason other than they can.

3) There's no real sense of threat. It is "the end of the world", "Devastated wasteland", etc., but none of it feels real at all -- the Wildcat's have an easily defensible position with power and supplies and whatever, working medical bays and so forth. And LA looks mostly the same, but with some broken windows.

4) That was a pretty non-cliffhanger cliffhanger -- there's nothing to drag me back for the next issue, or even the other three series, actually.

5) It is try #5 on these characters -- the audience really and truly do not seem to be interested in them unless you've got a big name doing it. And even them, its an uphill battle.

It's a good try and something that people have seemingly been asking for, and like I say, they deserve props for trying, but you have to grade on the final product, and I'm going to have to go with an AWFUL.

Huh, that's a bunch of bad reviews, isn't it? For something good, I'm really really happy with the (FINALLY!) TP of GRENDEL: GOD & THE DEVIL. It's not Matt's most subtle of work, but there's a heft to it, and a reality to the world building that helps sell it really well. Plus I love Snyder's art, and it's nice to finally (FINALLY!!) have this collected, with a terrific recoloring. VERY GOOD work, and it should be in your library, and is also my PICK OF THE WEEK!

What did YOU think?

-B

PS: Because someone mentioned it to me yesterday, and I did not know this, you can find Joss Whedon's DR HORRIBLE'S SING ALONG BLOG for free online at hulu.com. I had missed chapter 3 because of the limited time on it's original site, so this pleased me to be able to see it still on line, in a way that, presumably, is making Joss and co some money...

Jog Bought It: Apologies from 7/30

Narcopolis #4 (of 4)

This cover gets a lot more amusing if you take the nosebleed in the manga sense. Rarely has the struggle between liberty and ruinous desire been so aptly rendered!

And you sort of have to work to make a Jamie Delano comic even less subtle, don't you? It's one of his endearing traits as a writer, I think - not every book is going to be outstanding, but you can generally count on a uniquely loud experience. It's not white noise either - Delano frequently mixes similar tones into distinctly linked compositions, heavy things, ringing with dim portent. Frequent listeners will recognize many of this project's particular clangs and booms, as if Delano's first work-of-the-form in five years had to recollect echoes of what went before, so as to solidify the old intent once again.

You've got the garish, satirical sci-fi setting of 2020 Visions. A vision of tentacles as sustenance and prison, right out of The Territory. Terror-enlightenment as to all the world's suffering, a la The Horrorist. It all works pretty well together, like an index. I especially enjoyed the clash between 'bad' drugs, state-sponsored downers all, and "empathogens" that form naturally in caves, look like snot, and produce hallucinogenic truth sessions with the whole of screaming, exploited humanity. The moral is one all of us can support: grow yer own.

But setting aside its value as authorial stock-taking, Narcopolis unfortunately ends more or less as it began - a very adorned means of telling a simplistic, repetitive story, one dotted with character types that either shrug around under roles obvious from first sight or travel in arcs so plain they seem predestined. Our Hero is Gray Neighbor, a former bombmaker for EradiCare turned promising agent of T.R.U.S.T. (Together in Responsibility for Universal Security and Truth), who's been planning to "shoot hot into MamaDream's suckHole" (wreak havoc with the Big Government/Big Corporation/Big Church/Big Media drug outlet that runs the nation-city) since issue #1.

That's more or less what he does here, after having gone through a few dozen pages of children being mindwiped for playing the wrong games in the schoolyard, extraterritorial subHumans ("with black staring eyes") being hauled into camps en mass as obvious terrorists, citizens being complacent about the war on BadEvil as their rights are stripped away, and almost certainly a few too many personal flubs to believably rank as a top agent. I mean, I know Narcopolis is both a dangerous world superpower and mired in inefficiency, but don't they run tests for illegal drugs? Or assign a cadet at least a part-time supervisor he isn't sleeping with? It a type of satire that allows for endless retreat - any breach of plausibility is just one more sign of how fucked up this fallen world is.

Yet while it goes without saying that Narcopolis provokes its own enemies so as to spook its citizenry into a shell of consumerist complacency -- isolation breeding distrust toward anything beyond the borders -- at least the texture of the noise remains pleasing. Delano was always one of the more 'writerly' of the British Invasion comics scribes, and here he's crafted a neat little dialect of slogans, brands and buzzwords for his characters to use, with Jeremy Rock and Greg Waller (on colors) ably rendering an urban architecture of casino lights and vulgar literalism; why should a grand Cathedral try to hide the spiritual pornography within, when it can decorate the windows with hardcore action and shape the microphones like cocks?

Maybe I'm the one getting dazzled by surface appeal. This is a series so enchanted with its own metaphors that it has characters discuss a few of them, as metaphors, in-story, before launching into a finale that postulates deadly terrorism as the enlightened citizen's protest while simultaneously scampering away from having its hero kill too many people or anything really nasty like that. I guess I just respond to its qualities as a gathering of its writer's voice into dictating a thesis statement for a renewed comics effort, its citations accumulated over years of work. I'll call that EH as a whole experience, but you might hear it howling from farther down the BigStinkHole.

Here's a few manga I liked (or sort of liked).

Although you should keep in mind that I'm the kind of guy who thinks the best publishing news of the whole San Diego con is that Pluto -- Naoki Urasawa's Ultimate Astro Boy!! -- will be coming to US shelves in February 2009. Granted, it's still an ongoing series in Japan (a somewhat irregular one to boot), and only up to Vol. 6 as of this week, so it's likely to hit a production wall around Spring 2010... but still, PLUTO!! And 20th Century Boys at the same time!

But here's some back-to-front funnies you can buy right now.

Real Vol. 1:

Oh is it? This one's gonna need some context.

The writer/artist of this thing is Takehiko Inoue, who is a full-blown manga superstar. I'm not using that last word lightly. His reputation was built on a 31-volume basketball manga titled Slam Dunk, which ran from 1990 to 1996; it was one of the most popular features in the most popular manga anthology in Japan, the mighty Weekly Shōnen Jump, which in those days had a circulation of well over five million copies, per week. It is credited with exploding interest in basketball among the youth of Japan; there is now a sports scholarship that bears its name.

After the series ended, Inoue became less interested in shōnen manga, those comics for boys. Following the 1997 release of a silly sci-fi basketball webcomic, Buzzer Beater, the artist devoted himself to seinen manga, those for 'mature' audiences. In 1999 he began a swordsman opus, Vagabond, which is currently up to its 28th collected volume. And in 2001 he started up a side-project, a seinen basketball story, one that's managed to pull together seven volumes so far as it creeps onward - and unlike those boy comics, this one is Real. See what I did there?

Ah, but old habits die hard. Or maybe manga editors are hesitant to break them. Whatever the case, there's no hiding that Real -- at least in this debut volume -- is a dead-straight shōnen formula piece, its story structure practically out of a table of forms in the rear of a manga textbook, all of it fancied up with scratches and grit and hard-livin' times. And I guess I can't blame Inoue and/or his editors for not wanting to start too far off from the stuff that made the artist a legend, but all the tropes and tricks have a way of bumping into the real stuff.

All your favorite character types are present. Nomiya is a hoops-crazy fellow with an awful afro, a total goof... with raw, burning talent inside. Togawa is a fiery young man with clenched fists... striving to be the very best at his chosen vocation. And sure, Nomiya is a goof partially because he dropped out of school following a motocycle accident that paralyzed the young woman he was trying to pick up, and Togawa is broodin in part due to the bone cancer that has him confined to a wheelchair, but it all rarely functions as more than an especially colorful means of pushing enemies toward extending the hand of friendship, raising a fist in honor of perseverance and guts, and celebrating sweat-soaked victory. And defeat... unto greater victory, one might expect!!

Now, I don't want to go over the top here. This isn't something like, say, Gantz (a fellow resident of the Weekly Young Jump seinen anthology), where the notion of maturity seems to extend exactly 0% farther than added gore and naked. No, Inoue does pepper his work with some nice, lived-in details, like the plight of playing basketball in a limited-space city, or the economic doom that faces kids that don't graduate school - I particularly liked the running joke about Japan's draconian, scammish system of driver licensing.

But then we get back to the courts, where Togawa's disability functions primarily to facilitate the burning of rubber and the blowing away of stunned opponents. I understand that Inoue is trying to build a nice message about overcoming life's troubles, but I don't think his character's shōnen heat is terribly effective in delivering it - as the rest of Togawa's wheelchair basketball team grins over a loss, settled comfy into their positions ("I mean, what do you expect? We're disabled."), Our Hero lashes out with his fists, knowing that the path to Real fulfillment is that of a thousand boxers and bread bakers and martial arts winners in comics of the past, and thus his body's state is little more than a crucible for cooking up outstanding moves.

It's not that I'm at-heart opposed to boy's manga structures acting in an allegorical manner, mind you, but it all does have a way of making Inoue's pretensions toward grit seem... well, pretentious. And, about 3/4 of the way through this book, it's suddenly as if someone realizes the latent problems in interfacing with realistic disabilities on the plane of ninja superpowers, and the story launches into a detailed, fairly effective portrayal of coping with serious physical problems, one that unfortunately comes barreling into the story through a whopper of a plot contrivance. Still, it leaves one hopeful that Inoue will look a bit deeper than easy, friendly old motifs as the story goes on - it's only volume one, after all.

So, er, why is this a manga I (sort of) liked, as mentioned up top? Why is it still more-or-less OKAY? It all comes down to Inoue's visuals, at this point in his career a frighteningly assured evolution of the stylized shōnen realism of Tetsuo Hara (Fist of the North Star) and Tsukasa Hojo (City Hunter, on which Inoue apprenticed as an uncredited assistant), his sturdy figures powerful yet lithe, even a tiny bit feminine. VIZ's deluxe presentation preserves all of Inoue's delicate color sequences, which serve to add a dreamy texture to the rampant physicality. It goes without saying that the big basketball set pieces are flawlessly paced, mixing droplets of humor and observation into forward-rushing action, no movement less than perfectly clear.

You will understand how this artist got so huge (and, starting next month, you can directly observe his growth as VIZ rolls out Slam Dunk itself), even if you wonder where his art is going, so heavy with the shadow of past, youthful success.

Dororo Vol. 2 (of 3):

Of course, some artists can mix things up more effectively than others.

For an unfinished 1967-68 series many anticipated to be little more than an appetizer before the great Osamu Tezuka's famed Black Jack -- coming later this year from Vertical, also publisher of this project -- Dororo has turned out to be a damned effective bit of work. It's got a formula too: every storyline sees driven, cursed Hyakkimaru and his thieving boy sidekick Dororo take on a fabulously nasty demon and The Inhumanity of Man, before getting chucked back out onto that long road. Hyakkimaru was born as little more than a human slug, his wicked father having traded 48 parts of his body to 48 demons before his birth, in exchange for Earthly power, but the boy's had himself augmented with a man-made humanoid frame, with swords under his fake arms and many other nasty tricks; it's no wonder he's made for killing, since every demon he slaughters wins him back another organic piece of himself.

It's a far wilder way to cope with one's disabilities, and that's only the bloody edge of Tezuka's berserk entertainment aesthetic, one that thinks nothing of following fourth wall-breaking zaniness with the graphic, on-panel execution of young children. Tezuka's style is not a realistic one, in terms of drawing or storytelling or whatever, though the story he's telling is often bracingly dark; rather, blood and gags flow naturally enough from his pen that all of this comic's setting seems a mad hallucination, cumulative in its burrow through the unconscious.

(this is actually from vol. 1, btw) It's furiously good cartooning, pefectly complimenting Tezuka's tales of fox demons that inspire men to war so as to feed from the dead, and an evil god out to rip the faces from the faithful and wear them for vanity. A larger plot also begins to cohere, one I'm not sure will wrap up in a satisfying manner, given Tezuka's ultimate move away from the project, but the particulars remain VERY GOOD on their own.

Jog Liked the Mekon: Dan Dare still doesn't know it on 7/24

Dan Dare #7 (of 7)

Good lord, who'd have figured Garth Ennis could be so... traditional?

This is the last issue (FOR NOW) of Ennis' and artist Gary Erskine's revival of the beloved Frank Hampson creation, an extra-thick pamphlet with 44 pages of story and a $5.99 price tag. And it's exactly what you've come to expect, if you've been following the story thus far: vast clashes between warships on the sea of stars, gallant adventure in hostile territory, several noble struggles against impossible odds, and plenty of dialogue balloons pertaining to the spirit of England, its cooling embers, suffocated beneath the ash of avarice and indifference, slowly, heroically reddening to life once more under the stalwart breath of Daniel MacGregor Motherfucking Dare, space hero. It's a war story, as Ennis no doubt recognized from the originals. He's written a few war stories.

Yet I can't think of any Garth Ennis war story quite like this. There's no peering into the killing hearts of soldiers, no acrid struggle between decency and mayhem. No dirty jokes, no eruptions of gore. No rueful cartography of inhumanity's continent. No, this is an utterly up-and-up opera of battle, suffused with courage, valor, honor, fairness, respect, cooperation, sacrifice. With spaceships and psychic narcotics and a black hole machine, and a little green guy floating around in a tub. That's the best part - be it homage, affection, anything, whatever, Ennis seems to be using old-timey science fantasy as a means of basking in the glory of Good War, and the good values of Old Times, a solution to all the shit we've found ourselves in. I read Ennis' other war stories, and I wonder if he's whispering "and we'll all fight green men from Venus in space, too!"

He doesn't say it out loud, though. And I'm apt to hearing voices.

Fascinatingly, several of this series' particulars have mirrored another high-profile revival of the character, Grant Morrison's and Rian Hughes' 1990-91 Dare, from the pages of Revolver and Crisis. You've got your retired Dan Dare, pulled out of retirement by England's Prime Minister. The country's gone to shit and the old team have moved onto new roles, but Dare remains a potent symbol. Little does he suspect the Mekon (green fellow in the tub, archvillain) has cozied up to the human governance, and he wants to break Dare just as bad as he desires domination of Earth.

But the Morrison/Hughes project was damn nasty thing, heaping despair upon its protagonist as a means of screeching at the enduring Thatcher government, a perversion of the old Dan Dare ideals into cynical political gamesmanship. It's the type of story wherein the Mekon's capture of Dare sees an array of brutal dildos sprout from his tub for a whopping sodomy session. Our Hero eventually turns revolutionary, fission bombing shitty London and all its shitty politicians into the whiteness of a blank page, which is then revealed to be a literal blank page on a drawing board, because sometimes you just have to blast a concept clean to get rid of the muck, you know?

This series, meanwhile, is chocks away from page-the-first to page-the-last. Even as Ennis acknowledges the overwhelming problems in the world, with its craven leaders and government lies, it's all just another impossible fight for Dan Dare, Heart of Country, to inevitably win. Erskine's art can be a little stiff, but that's how the upper lips ought to be in this one, his green Treens almost like men in suits in a movie, one also armed with some grand, stolid battle scenes of mighty crafts clashing. Anticipate no subversion. No dildos! Maybe that is subversion for Ennis now.

His whole final chapter bounces between Dan's crack commando squad on the Mekon's mothership, a handsome ongoing clash in space, and a port-soaked Earthbound discussion, headed by Home Secretary Jocelyn Peabody, on the topic of a nation that's lost its way. It's the type of story wherein a determined young sub-lieutenant -- put in command by Dare himself -- is told by a mean admiral that the odds are simply too great, and withdrawal from battle is the only sane option, but then the ghostly voice of a dear, departed friend appears with phantom words of wisdom, inspiring words, and thus she stands up to the mean admiral and the fight goes on in the proud Navy manner, we dine amidst heroes tonight, men, be they dead or alive!!

Meanwhile, Dan Dare swats a laser beam out of the air with an electric sword, and allows the story's villains (whom Ennis is obviously having a blast writing) to meet their ruin together. Did you detect a slightly creepy edge to man-of-the-past Dare in earlier issues? "A strange, melancholy man on an asteroid, surrounded by knick-knacks and memorabilia. Trying to live in some long-gone past." It's gone now, and it's perhaps your (and my) fault for seeing his posture as anything other than space medicine for an ailing body. "No doubt a source of enormous amusement," rues Joss, but we know better now!

I thought it was all pretty GOOD. Easy to get sucked into, and almost seductive in its unexpected romantic splendor. There's death, yes, but only as encountered in a worthy clash, one far in the future and up away from our Earth, one of spruced-up icons, on a plane of imagination and nostalgia for comics and movies, maybe the only place its writer can indulge in such dreams, so as to spark a measured reflection upon waking.

Jog seems much more himself on 7/17: Yes. Quite.

Omega: The Unknown #10 (of 10)

This is as good a superhero comic as any I've read this year. It's an EXCELLENT ending to a VERY GOOD series, throwing all of its might behind Farel Dalrymple's drawings and Paul Hornschemeier's colors, with a few callbacks to the (still-uncredited) guest art of Gary Panter. There's exactly eight words of dialogue in this whole issue, but every story beat is clear as a bell. Each page seems dipped in some distilled essence of all the melancholy, eccentricity and droll humor dealt heretofore by writer Jonathan Lethem ("with" Karl Rusnak, as always); little is concluded (yep, it's one of those endings, True Believer), but all is evoked, climactically.

Still, I'd strongly recommend you read the whole series again, front-to-back. That was my own first impulse upon finishing this issue, and it proved to be more rewarding than a reread typically is. Simply put, I was impressed with how straightforward the story really is, when taken all together. Mysteries may build upon mysteries in the serial format, but there's some very keen A-to-B plotting at work here -- and often nuanced plotting -- that I don't think registers quite so well unless the whole thing is right in front of you. It's certainly not oddness for its own sake - hell, it's even got one of those bits where a character helpfully explains the work's theme while talking about something else (that'd be Alex's speech to the class at the top of issue #3).

Or, let me put it this way - I've seen a fascinating reading of the series as a metaphor for Asperger's Syndrome. I'd never picked up on that aspect while following the series monthly. But then, going through the work again, right there in issue #3 we've got a doctor suggesting that the young protagonist might, in fact, have Asperger's Syndrome ("Not that I'd want to make a snap diagnosis based merely on affect."). In the new Comic Foundry (No. 3, Summer 2008), there's an interview with Lethem in which he goes into how the idea of 'franchising' got to him, and how his teenaged reading of the original Steve Gerber/Mary Skrenes/Jim Mooney series left him with the impression that it was "scarred" and "impure" from Marvel U concessions, driving it away from the ideal of issue #1 - the same issue #1 that this new series all but remade for its own debut issue, "A version of an unfinished dream" by its original creators.

And sure enough, there's this very consistent narrative throughline about franchises - not just the obvious stuff, the corporate hot dog stuff, but superhero franchises, dehumanization and the notion of 'individuality' in a universe more prone to creating fungi.

Allow me to ruin the comic for you.

Truth be told, a surface reading of the series' themes doesn't benefit it much. Oh dear, individuality (Alex and his band of rebels and oddballs) vs. hideous conformity (the Mink's branding, the nanobots' army of slaves) in a superhero milieu - how banal can you get? Marvel has typically sought access to atypical audiences through hybridization -- melding superheroes to whatever other genre seems interesting or fitting -- and this project may prove to be a success with the bookstore-leaning 'literary' comics audience, in that Mighty Marvel Manner. I wonder what they'll take from their reading - jokes about crummy fast food and cultural homogenization hardly seem genius grant stuff.

I expect they'll be more receptive to Lethem's interplay between the homeliness of Omega's urban neighborhoods & grassy campuses and the various eruptions of superhero fury and camp. Dalrymple & Hornschemeier were always the perfect visual team for such content, the former's lines matching scratchy streets/faces with disarmingly lithe action scenes, craggy faces growling in bendy containers until their robot bodies pop into splinters or their fleshy forms singe to the bone, their remains returned to the scrap of the city and the cut of the grass. Hornschemeier, meanwhile, casts nearly all the outdoors in earthy tones, as if to reinforce how natural humans can seem among buildings as much as hills. At home, where Lethem (with Rusnak) can have them speak frankly. Even a born performer like the Mink has unusual candor, in the way Stan Lee always plays Stan Lee.

Me, I find the work's themes simply fascinating from their accumulated context. Lethem may be one of many, many successful prose writers taking a crack at the funnies these days, but he's also unique in that he's stated, quite directly, that he doesn't want to nurture any alternate career; he has no follow-up comic planned, no sequel intended. This is 'his comic' -- one written in evident homage to a comic he read as a younger man -- and that's perfectly enough. Likewise, all of the artists involved surely have retained some lingering reader's connection to the superhero genre -- Panter's admiration of Jack Kirby is obvious, and I do believe Hornschmeier may have been a child of the Image revolution, if the bedroom pinups from The Three Paradoxes were adequately autobiographical -- but none of them have actually worked on a big-time superhero comic, until now.

As such, it's not hard to see this Omega revamp as a genre summary, particularly as it deals in so many typical superhero concerns. In that aforementioned Comics Foundry interview (conducted by Andrew Avery, for the record), Lethem notes that he always took the Gerber/Skrenes/Mooney Omega as sort of a Superman parody - accordingly, his Mink is a 'bad' version of Batman, one I see as totally melting Bruce Wayne into his superhero persona by combining Bat-labels with Wayne Enterprises for big profits. Both of them are also grittier 'Marvel' versions, with the Mink tucking city politicians into his pocket and Omega drifting from job to job in total alienation, an adult invader with no kindly couple to raise him right.

As the series moves forward, we learn some of the history of the Omegas - the Mink only understands them in terms of franchising, and they indeed are essentially a Green Lantern Corps. of space police dedicated to defeating a singular robot threat. But just as the robots operate by transforming people into zombies through nanotech-infested fast food and cool toys -- there's an awesome bit in this issue where a superhero called the Hurler gets an action figure of himself, which then sticks to his hand so he can't hurl it away (oh the commentary!) -- the Omegas are, in the interests of cosmic balance, individual to a fault.

The first Omega assigned to Earth, bearded Sil Renfrew, found himself totally vulnerable to the aimless rebellion common to terrestrial young folk. He wound up a tool of the Mink's, a Boy Wonder in a crazy adult's fantasy of superhero power, then dead from real-life warfare. The nameless adult Omega of the story finds it impossible to relate to anything in the world, refusing to so much as eat anything he doesn't cook himself (also a good precaution, given the nature of his foes!). And Alex, the young future Omega, chafes under the demands of his born task while also failing to grasp much of a world he was raised apart from, so as not to repeat the mistakes of Sil.

Knowing all this, and knowing the ultimate plan of the Omegas to counteract the nanobot menace with subtle additives to the food supply, a broad vision of superhero comics reveals itself, tethered to Lethem's view of the original Omega as tainted - as if by imperceptible robots! This new series might start the same way as the old one, but it exists as Lethem's ideal, and maybe holds within it the conflict that marked his initial reading. After all, this does take place in the (or 'a') Marvel Universe, threatened by subversion and homogenization - invaders making the story into stupid shit! They're all corporate interests, and -- by Lethem's own estimation of the old Omega -- Marvel's interests.

Really! The Mink stands as an old, storied superhero property (I loved how what we see of his own comics are a horrible, totally queasy wedding of ham-fisted adult themes and nonstop licensing opportunities), happy with his bureaucracy and long-ago gone amoral. The beauty of Lethem's characterization (with Rusnak) is that he's still a damned funny, charismatic presence, the most purely entertaining character in the series - you can completely see how he got so popular, even if he's gone real shitty. But in the end, the robots create a terrible spinoff of the main property, and neither survive the conflict that follows.

Only the Omegas and their few human friends stand as forces for vitality -- individual voices! -- in this harsh superhero landscape. Heroes like Steve Gerber, beaten down; the greatest irony of this story is that they're all poised as classic hard-luck Marvel heroes, flawed people and monsters each, hated and feared and misunderstood by the people and genre they've come to protect. This seriously may be the most self-depreciating thing Marvel has ever published, as perhaps could only come from an acclaimed outsider given carte blanche to act on his old superhero feelings - who says autobiography is all boring?

That's not to say that everything Lethem happens upon is entirely fresh -- one of the dangers of this sort of book is that the necessarily detached writer might happen upon smashing insights that more immersed genre specialists figured out years ago -- but even such Genre Interrogation 101 moments as the main characters encountering a whimsical 'silly' magic character the Mink has hidden away in a labyrinth are bolstered by the story's powerful focus on character - it's not that Alex and company need to free the Nowhere Man, but that the encounter frees Alex to reconcile the delicacy of human friendships he'll never fully understand with his human/inhuman nature as a Marvel Superhero.

And so, with this issue, we reach the end. It's hardly a song and a dance, though it pulses with formal assurance. Omega (the unknown) blows the robots to bits, and is left with no tangible foes - lost as Sil Renfrew, before the robots arrived, yet still sickly aware of his purpose. Every panel in which Dalrymple draws Omega writhing against Panter's backgrounds (Gary Panter, as: the soul of superhero comics) is like a kick to the face; it's agony.

Meanwhile, the battle against the unseen aspects of the invasion goes totally underground - if you squint, you can see the heroic salt shining white against the pale world above, as the infestation slowly continues. Alex rejects all labels, throwing away his Omega costume and the book of Omega secrets. The last we see of him, he's holed up alone, rebuilding his robot parents, seemingly resigned to never having any real friends - he'll just build some. Everyone drifts apart - some seem hopeful, but there's such melancholy. No more costumes; no more adventures.

The greatest ambiguity though, is saved for the book's final pages, in which a ruined, alcoholic Omega descends into the underworld to sit in a jury-rigged approximation of the Mink's old television show, taped together with garbage and broadcast to nobody outside of direct eyeshot. The last superheroes we see.

Is that Lethem's estimation of the genre? Barely holding itself together, playing for a tiny audience, populated by weird doppelgängers of once-handsome corporate properties. Honestly, I pick up a hint of... defiance to it. A transformation of the mainstream into something bizarre and personal-in-its-way. Off-putting, but joyful. Everyone in the crowd seems truly happy.

Not the unknown, though - not on the stage. Surely he'd like his time to be done. And while he'll have to live forever, so long as his Marvel Universe endures, the limited confines of this project grants him a personal mercy, a bottle transmission of our reader's eye out of his world and back into our own. Never to return, until the next time.

The Shops Got It On 7/10: Jog's late post

The Goddess of War Vol. 1 (of 4?)

This is an impressive new project from Lauren R. Weinstein and PictureBox, the 32-page debut of a continuing series (or possibly a four-issue miniseries, if you believe Diamond); you'll know pretty quickly if your local shop happened to stock it this week, since I can't imagine a 14.5" x 10" comic is that easy to miss, even if someone tries to hide it. And at $12.95 you'll be paying for that extra room, though I can assure you that content is packed right in - if anything, I occasionally felt overwhelmed.

Weinstein should be pretty well known to constant alternative comics readers; she's had two strip collections out, 2003's Inside Vineyland (from Alternative Comics) and 2006's Girl Stories (from Henry Holt), both of which picked up some acclaim. Like many artists publishing with PictureBox, she's also active in music - actually, the title character of this series is one she also 'plays' as lead singer of Flaming Fire. But anyone who's familiar with Weinstein's comics could probably guess that this won't be any glossy, celebratory fantasy vision. Oh no.

Briefly, The Goddess of War is the saga of Valerie, a bold valkyrie who kept her post while more noteworthy mythological figues like Brunhilde and Gudrun fucked around, thus assuring her rise to prominence as head administrator of mortal warfare. Ah, but Our Heroine has since become overworked, unmotivated and deeply irritable, and one day decides to blow off work and get trashed on the blood of Mayan virgins. Sadly, this is also the day a terrorist attack strikes Times Square, creating a massive backlog of prayers for violence, and prompting several cosmic entities to go checking on Valerie, not all of which have her best interests in mind.

(er, that's the most recent art I can find online - the grammar error is corrected in the book itself)

But nearly half the issue is powered by Valerie's internal troubles, as she recalls egging on a struggle between an Apache tribe and white settlers, all for jealous love of the chief, Cochise. And the rest of it's presented in a deliberately low-key, day-in-the-life style, which makes plenty of sense coming from a publisher that specializes in fantasy/sci-fi/'genre' stories related with a particular emphasis on the personal touch, regardless of whether that touch has been declared 'appropriate' for said genre in comics. That goes for the storytelling in a visual capacity, especially.

So, just as Marvel's early adventures of Thor were heavily informed by the cadence of romance comics, Weinstein's own brand of Norse myth often walks and talks like a diary comic, following its very annoyed heroine as she groans about her life and her job, drinking too much, confiding in a hapless friend and tumbling onto the floor from romantic angst. It's just the hapless friend is Nebulon: Universe Eater, a cosmic Cnidarian that gobbles down stars while wondering "Why does she always need a cheerleader?"

All of it, intergalactic phenomena included, is rendered in small panels with delicate, wobbly character art - everyone, appropriately, looks very soft, which works even better once the narrative leaps into its prolonged flashback, and the work's tone suddenly seems more a stripped-down Jack Jacksonish Western history, except after seven (rather dense) pages of period distrust and misunderstanding there's a flashback-in-a-flashback psychedelic sex scene, characters looping around a moment Valerie freezes in time. Weinstein herself freezes certain dramatic moments and establishing images via etching, but most often her alter ego is pliable enough (emotionally!) that her face changes to that of a monster when she's mad.

It's an interesting mix of narrative styles, juxtaposing the moment-by-moment banality of life-lived-now against both a world of star-crossed fantasy and a detailed vision of vast human history. I do think the lattermost of those gets maybe a bit too much attention; it's effective to follow Valerie's banal godliness with a more emphatic look at human warfare (the stuff she facilitates in between complaining), although the amount of observational detail at work slows the work as a whole. Which maybe was the point, since we humans have to live through these wars. Still, a VERY GOOD start.

Abhay is Reviewing Secret Invasion #4, Learning about Cuba, and Having Some Food

1: WHERIN RECENT EVENTS ARE NOTED. When I was a kid, a big company crossover came out called Secret Wars. There was a lot of fighting and Colossus cheated on his pre-teen girlfriend. It was fun. But then it was followed by a crossover called Secret Wars 2, which wasn’t so good. Bummer. But you know: big world kept on turning.

Jump ahead 23 years: DC puts out the first issue of a crossover called Final Crisis. And it’s not a very entertaining comic book.

The result? Heads will roll! Jobs will be lost! Say hello to the unemployment line! Say goodbye to your daughter’s virginity! Light the torches! Frankenstein must die! Blow pot-smoke at your parrot! Maybe it’ll get the munchies and want a cracker! Parrot will make us laugh!

Dude losing his job was fait accompli for about a solid week. Psuedo-journalists were reporting on rumors. The comic-convention rumor mill was literally trans-atlantic.

What the fuck happened in those 23 years? But: I think it’s great, personally; it’s exciting to write about crossovers right now. How great would it be if people really did start losing their jobs? How great that would be! Because: what other comics have any stakes to them besides crossovers? You could make an argument for Lost Girls since there were some obvious issues, and that was an expensive book to print. But… it’s hard for me to think of much else.

All-Star Batman celebrates its 3rd anniversary this month: 9 issues in 3 years. Who gives a shit? I don’t; they don’t; it doesn’t matter. No one’s losing their jobs over All-Star Batman, ala Bill Mechanic & Fight Club. But Crossovers! Crossovers: maybe there could be something at stake. Maybe there could be an element of real risk to them for the creators involved, for a change. How much fun would that be to read? To write about? What could be more fun to write about right now than multi-title crossovers? Answer: Victorian-era group sex parties. Proper lords and ladies, rutting desperately until they die of consumption-- like a Jane Austen novel with meat-flutes. It’s just crazy enough to work.

2: WHEREIN THIS REVIEW IS DELAYED TWO DAYS WHILE THE AUTHOR SPENDS TIME ON GOOGLE IMAGES.

I really feel sad for these crossovers, having to top each other constantly. The 2nd issue of Final Crisis had to end 12 realities, blow up 9 supporting casts, and have 10 pages of screaming Japanese superheros. The 1st issue of Secret Invasion was a 1/2 page of talking and then the rest of it was just exploding interrupted by screaming and bedwetting, and urine-soaked beds exploding, and the fire ripping backwards up the urine trail and...

What are they going to do next time? This is all fun now, but 8 months from now: it’s go-time again. 6 months? 3 months? People say they want a longer refractory period between crossovers, but the incentives in place right now don’t seem to favor that, so…

How do they keep topping this? Eventually, we’re all just going to have to put our phone numbers into a database, and Marvel comic creators will randomly call us up at 3 am shrieking that our grandmothers have gotten stabbed to death. We’ll be too drowsy to understand what’s happened, and, you know, that’s when they get our credit card information. That’s when the identity theft happens. A year after that, they’re actually going to have to murder one of us, like in the Shirley Jackson stories.

So what I think I’m really waiting for is a crossover like The Anniversary Party.

Remember that movie? It was all digital video. Alan Cumming is married to Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the entire movie is about an anniversary party they throw where they invite their most pretentious douche-bag friends. That movie kind-of was a crossover. “Hey, look, Kevin Kline just made a reference to Wind-Up Bird Chronicles so we’ll think he’s smart because he reads Haruki Murakami. Hey, look: it’s the girl from Flashdance, only not flashdancing so who cares. Holy shit, did Phoebe Cates just blow the doors off this movie?!?”

Why can’t there just be a big Marvel crossover about an anniversary party? Why can’t there be a movie about flowers? So yeah: what I’m saying is—whatever they’re trying to do with this Secret Invasion, I really think where they went wrong?

Not enough Phoebe Cates.

3: WHEREIN ISSUE THREE, AND THE AUTHOR’S DISAGREEABLE REACTION THERETO, IS LAMENTED.

So: I wasn’t happy with my reaction to issue #3. It was a smidgen too piss-y, I thought. I’ve been thinking about why that was the case besides the fact the issue stunk. What did Secret Invasion #3 do to deserve that?

I think a lot of it has to do with creator summits.

I really love anything involving creator summits, hearing about those. Oh man-- anytime I hear about creator summits, my ears perk up! Love it! Check out this old quote from Matt Fraction, on how he pitched his new Iron Man comic at one of the creator summits: “Y'know, the ideas kind of found me. It was on a list of stuff to talk about and” and I’m just going to stop there.

It was on a list…?

There was a list in the world with “Talk about Iron Man” on it. Someone wrote that down, maybe on letterhead, with a bullet-point next to it. That’s like me having a list on my fridge saying “To Do: Have Anal Sex with Severed Unicorn Horn.” Except I would never hurt a unicorn that way. That’s something I wouldn’t do. But those people actually talked about Iron Man. They crossed “Talk about Iron Man” off their list!

I think that’s genuinely wonderful. Shit, I love hearing about those summits, man. And for 22 pages a month, readers get invited to go to that summit, and hear what the creators think about these characters. What a treat that is! You get to go to the summit without smelling the farts. A bunch of comic creators in some conference room with stale coffee, maybe a spread from Café Bonjour or wherever, maybe some stinky dry erase board markers? I got $5 that says that room smells like a fart that’s shitting a burp. When you read these crossovers: everything on those lists, all the conversations that resulted from that, this is a 22-page highlight reel.

And after all that… it’s got Hulkamaniac and Bob’s Big Boy getting slapped by a skrull who imitates the powers of the Night Thrasher??? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Anyways: I think I was a little lopsided last time. Let’s hope I try better this time!

******************************************

Hmm: I think the scariest thing about this issue is anyone would admit to liking both Indiana Jones 4 and the new Weezer album on the same page. Oh whoops, switched to talking about the new Powers. Nevermind. Right, right: Secret Invasion… ******************************************

4: WHEREIN THE REVIEW IS FINALLY GODDAMN COMMENCED, ALREADY. I didn’t enjoy the early parts of the issue because I didn’t think the Osama-Bin-Laden-video monologue that opens the issue was particularly necessary. The point that the monologue makes, that the fight will be difficult because it’ll be hard to know who to trust? I think that’s a point that’s been made many, many times before, and it’s a point that especially didn’t need re-stating. 4 issues in, why is this comic still re-explaining its very simple premise? Are readers this stupid?

Also: Nick Fury and his WildCATs? Underwhelming. They arrive on the scene and win the fight for... well, no apparent reason. Why did they succeed where the lame Initiative characters failed? No explanation. They’re only featured on 4 pages of the issue, which, given the emphasis placed on their arrival last issue, I found surprising and disappointing. The focus is moreso on Ms. Marvel, which-- do people really care about that character? Really? Wow.

One of them’s named Stonewall. Chris Claremont (of course) had a character named Stonewall in the 1980’s, but that character was a large man with a moustache (of course) whose power was really quite brilliant: it was difficult to push him over. So he would go into various fights and, like, stand there, I guess...? That’s how I remember him anyways, sort of a moustachioed metaphor for the resilience of the gay rights movement.

(He was a sidekick of one of my favorite Marvel characters, the Crimson Commando. The last time I read about him was the 1980’s though; according to his Wikipedia entry, that’s not a character that’s been treated well by writers since then. But: which has?)

Anyways: the new Stonewall is just a bald guy with his shirt off who says “Hoofah”. So: as superheros named after a pivotal moment for the gay rights movement go, they went from the bear to the shirtless bald guy. I don’t really know what that means; is that social commentary? This comic features two men with red hoods in it. I’m square; is that, like, a thing? One of the characters is named Yo Yo—is that because she’s bi?

Wouldn’t it be great if the real secret invasion is the Marvel Universe being invaded by the lesbian and gay community? The Skrull invasion isn’t so secret; Skrulls are running around exploding things. But maybe at the end, when all the superheros are celebrating their victory, the Mighty Thor take off his shirt and starts dancing to Kool ‘n the Gang. Maybe that happens; why not? Why can’t there be a crossover about superheros coming out of the closet finally? Come on, Mighty Thor-- you don’t have to pretend to be uptight Donald Blake anymore. Mike Myers isn’t pretending to be Austin Powers anymore, you know? I got $5 says Black Panther is an MSM.

Anyways: once that monologue wrapped up, personally, I started to enjoy the issue. I didn’t understand the two panel cameo by Yellowjacket; what did that mean? But the Iron Man scene worked. I thought that was a more effective scene than the scene in #3. Since so much of this series have been characters reacting to a chaotic situation forced upon them, I especially liked the fact that the Iron Man scene ended with a character I have some investment in finally taking action and announcing that he intended to DO something. I’m fine that hasn’t happened before (or it hasn’t happened as much to my liking before) because of the nature of the story they’re telling, but I think I needed some sense with this issue that the story was going to start being about the characters and who they are, rather than a thing that was happening onto them. That’s why I like my porn with a little bit of a story to it. Same reason.

I particularly enjoyed the three pages of Die Hard involving the Agent Brand character who... You know: people say crossovers should explain every single conceivable thing in case the book is being read by any new readers. I don't always agree. I have no clue who Agent Brand is. Was I upset that the comic didn’t spend a half-hour explaining her to me? Not really. First off, I have access to Wikipedia, and superhero entries on wikipedia are more thorough than entries about U.S. Presidents, famines, several small wars. Second: I don’t need to know who she is to enjoy Die Hard. I’ve enjoyed Die Hard in a Nakatomi building, on an aircraft carrier, in Hong Kong, with a vengeance, without a vengeance; I never required annotations to enjoy Die Hard. People making that argument might have a stronger position with the scene concerning the Hood, but one would imagine a later issue will explain the significance of that for newer readers.

But: this ending doesn’t work at all. The big rousing “now, this fight turns around and it starts in New York” ending? Huh? They did the exact same thing last issue! Nick Fury showed up. And wasn’t the whole point of this issue that Nick Fury cleans up New York of Skrulls? But then at the end, the comic ends with… Skrulls in New York and characters showing up in a big rousing “now, this fight turns around and it starts in New York” moment. This comic just keeps repeating itself.

So far, the secret invasion of Earth has gone all the way from Brooklyn to Central Park West to Times Square. Oh no: if the superheros don’t win in the Bronx, Queens will be next! I hope an entire issue gets set in Kim’s Video; the Skrulls can menace the cash register, while Nick Fury opens up a second front in the Drama section.

What was wrong with attacking the Pentagon or the White House?

Did the Skrulls not watch Independence Day? Maybe that’s how this series ends! The Skrulls won’t even see The Goldblum coming!

Nick Fury says “Let’s Roll” at one point. I don’t know if that was intentionally intended as a Flight 93 reference, but I certainly hope not. If it was, I think that’s pretty fucking sad and pathetic, and everyone involved in this comic is an unmitigated douchebag, and I can explain why on a napkin, using a single sentence from the Let’s Roll entry on Wikipedia: “Country music duo The Bellamy Brothers recorded a song called ‘Let's Roll, America’ on their 2002 album Redneck Girls Forever.” So, you know: let’s hope that was unintentional.

And, ahm.... crap. This review hasn’t gone so well either. I was hoping I’d rally after #3, but that hasn’t happened. Something’s just missing, some important ingredient of…

“Hi, Brad. You always knew how cute I thought you were.”

Needs more Cates!

DER DERRR DER-DER DERRRR DER. DEW DEW-DEW DEW.

You know: my second-favorite part about that scene is Judge Reinhold imagines he’s in a business suit. It’s one of those things you might only pick up on your 15th or 20th watching the scene that... my little tip for you of something else to watch for.

DER DERRR DER-DER DERRRR DER. DEW DEW-DEW DEW.

Oh now, I’m happy with this review, and only sad about my life.

DER DERRR DER-DER DERRRR DER. DEW DEW-DEW DEW.

It's Not All About Cash (Hell No): Diana Aborts-Retries-Fails, 11/7

Every now and then, I go back to books I've dropped and re-evaluate them. It's my way of trying to keep an open mind, because as a critic (especially a comics critic) it's way too easy to go from this: To this:

So with that in mind, I found myself picking up the latest issue of a series I'd stopped reading over a year ago. The nice thing about Marvel comics in general is the handy recap page that kicks off every issue of practically every series. Case in point: I hadn't even been remotely interested in the events of NEW EXILES since I dropped the book, but even though we're eight issues into the reboot, the plot was totally accessible. Well, insofar as it pertains to the series itself, anyway. I'll get to that in a bit.

NEW EXILES #8 is part two of a story where the French and British Empires are at war, and and the Exiles intervene because this particular reality is crucial to a whole section of the multiverse. Meanwhile, Psylocke is having dreams of Slaymaster killing about two dozen alternates of herself. And then she meets OGUN (emphasis Claremont's).

Yes. Ogun. The magical spirit guy that likes to possess women's bodies. Last seen in 2001, but, of course, it's really Ogun from the 1985 KITTY PRYDE AND WOLVERINE, written by... well, I'm sure you can guess.

Strike one: obscure characters busting out of the Claremont Historical Archive to remind us all why we were happy to see them leave the first time around.

We abruptly jump into a five-page monologue by an Atlantean Gambit who sounds like a preteen Aquaman on speed. It's absolutely painful to read: dense, overly verobse, obvious, using a hundred words to beat into the ground a concept that could be communicated in ten. So much of comics is about "showing", but Claremont seems to think he's getting paid by the word here, because all he does - all he does - is "tell". Atlantean Gambit just goes on and on about how lovely the water is, and how weird New York technology is, and how he's lucky his body is super-strong so he can survive cannon fire... ugh.

Strike two: Blah, blah, blah. Yes, Psylocke, I can see Ogun got the drop on you, Tom Grummett's art is helpfully depicting him whooshing behind you and grabbing your arm - I don't need a mid-chokehold thought bubble telling me "He moved so fast, I never even saw him coming!"

Now, I'll give Claremont credit where it's due, since that happens so rarely: it's nice to see an alternate reality scenario that takes its cue from "real" history as opposed to Marvel history - the high concept here is that the French won the Napoleonic Wars. Oddly enough, such a huge change in the history of the world has nevertheless produced Storm, Ka-Zar, Emma Frost and "Force-X" (eww).

Strike three: to quote Maxwell Smart, missed it by thaaaat much. Claremont can occasionally come up with seeds of interesting concepts, but they never, ever turn out to be everything they could've been.

So... yeah, the reasons I dropped the book are still pretty much in effect here, and there aren't any visible signs of improvement on the horizon. CRAP, and I guess I'll just wait for the next guy to come along.