Review: Secret Avengers Vol. 1: Mission To Mars

Here's a pretty good example of how needlessly difficult Marvel makes it to read and/or buy their comics in trade, due to the publisher's laser-beam focus on short-term sales success over long-term sales success (i.e. constantly rebooting and renumbering their books).

It's easy enough to stay on top of the Marvel comics line if you're reading the books serially–that is, Wednesday in, Wednesday out, as they're published–or even in trade, so long as you're reading the trades as those are released. But wait a few years and then try to get into, say, The Avengers, or X-Force, or Thunderbolts or–God help you–the X-Men, and it can get tricky.

So say you want to read Secret Avengers, a book devoted to, as the title implies, an off-the-books, covert superhero team independent of the various other public Avengers. The concept is only five years old, so it shouldn't really be that hard to figure out where to start, right?

So, where to begin? With Secret Avengers Vol. 1, Secret Avengers Vol. 1, Secret Avengers Vol. 1, Secret Avengers by Rick Remender Vol. 1 or Secret Avengers: Run the Mission, Save the World, Don't Get Seen. Yes, Marvel has relaunched the book three times in the last five years resulting in three books entitled Secret Avengers Vol. 1, one of which is also published as Secret Avengers by Rick Remender Vol. 1, and the Run The Mission collection, which doesn't have a number attached, is actually a collection of issues from halfway through the first run of the comic, before it gets relaunched.

So once you figure out which Secret Avengers Vol. 1 to start with, which can be difficult if you're trying to buy the damn things online or order them from your local library online (the correct answer, by the way, is Secret Avengers Vol. 1: Mission To Mars by Ed Brubaker, Mike Deodato and company), you then have to choose between Secret Avengers Vol. 2 and Secret Avengers Vol. 2 (a third Secret Avengers Vol. 2 hasn't been published yet, but should be shortly) and Secret Avengers by Rick Remender Vol. 2. It gets easier as it goes on, with only two volumes of Secret Avengers Vol. 3 so far extant.

But instead of reading, say, Secret Avengers Vols. 1-8, the actual reading order is something like this (I think):

Secret Avengers Vol. 1

Secret Avengers Vol. 2

Secret Avengers Vol. 3

Secret Avengers Vol. 1

Secret Avengers Vol. 2

Secret Avengers Vol. 1

Secret Avengers Vol. 2 (not yet published)

Secret Avengers Vol. 3 (not yet published)

Numbers! Fuck 'em!

So having previously read Secret Avengers: Run the Mission, Don't Get Seen, Save the World (also published as Secret Avengers Vol. 3: Run thee Mission, Don't Get Seen, Save the World and the third Secret Avengers Vol. 1 (Secret Avengers: Let's Have a Problem), I finally ran across a Secret Avengers Vol. that seemed to be the first Secret Avengers Vol.1, volume one of the first volume of Secret Avengers. That's the one sub-titled Mission To Mars; Reverie is actually the fourth collection, and Let's Have a Problem the sixth, in terms of reading order, even though those two are also labeled volume one.

If it turns out that this post about this particular volume spent far more time on describing the insanity of Marvel's trade-publishing program, well, that's probably fitting. I spent more time figuring out which volume to start with and where to order it from then I did actually reading the book.

Launched in 2010 as part of the publisher's "Heroic Age" branding initiative, longtime Captain America writer Ed Brubaker begins very much en media res, assuming a little not-terribly-vital familiarity with the goings-on of the Marvel Universe. Convicted serial killer and former supervillain Norman Osborn had just vacated his Obama-appointed position as The Boss of All Superheroes (as head of the SHIELD-replacement organization HAMMER, which doesn't actually stand for anything; they just liked the sound of it). The new Boss of All Superheroes is former Captain America Steve Rogers (whose title and shield were both being used by Bucky Barnes at the time), and in addition to running SHIELD he has assembled a secret team of super-heroes whose skill-sets lend themselves to subterfuge, espionage and ass-kicking, depending on the character.

That team, revealed mostly on the cover, consists of Rogers himself, Black Widow, Valkyrie, Beast, War Machine, Nova and Moon Knight, plus Sharon Carter and Ant-Man III (Irredeemable Eric O'Grady).

Brubaker's plotting is very reminiscent of what he had done on Captain America for so long, balancing more tactile, real-world espionage and military adventure with the more fantastic elements inherent in the superhero genre, especially a shared-setting superhero comic taking place as fantastical as the Marvel Universe. The dials and knobs are merely turned and tuned differently here, as he includes a whole team of heroes, and goes bigger and crazier with the plots. I mean, you saw the sub-title, right? A large portion of this collection (of the first iteration of Secret Avengers first five issues) is set on the planet Mars, and cosmic hero Nova plays a significant role.

The very full, very fast-paced first issue introduces the entire team, in action in the present and being recruited by Rogers during flashbacks, as they recover an artifact from Roxxon that isn't The Serpent Crown, but seems to be very much like it. Rogers had space-hero Nova investigating Roxxon's mining operation on the planet Mars, where he came into contact with another crown artifact, and so the team needs to go save him. Meanwhile, a shadowy group of espionage-types in matching black uniforms with Eastern dragons on them are also after the artifacts. And they are lead by...Nick Fury?!

The first four issues are a single story arc, in which Brubaker proves particularly adept at juggling a superhero team. Despite the more real-world focus of the first issue, things get big and crazy fast. The Avengers take a spaceship to Mars, they get cool space-suits with their symbols on them, they encounter a robot from an ancient alien civilization, Nova is possessed and evil, Steve Rogers puts on Nova's power ring helmet and temporarily becomes a Captain America-ized member of the Green Lantern Corps Nova Corps, every member of the team gets to show off their powers and/or worth in some spotlight scene or another...it's big, dumb superhero comics written very smart and very sincerely, without a trace of irony or cynicism (O'Grady is the closest thing we get to a point-of-view character, as he's the only one really impressed by things like "going to Mars" and so on).

It's all drawn by Mike Deodato (with Will Conrad on one issue), who has a very particular style that he never deviates from, sometimes to the detriment of the story. His muscular figures swelling out of their spandex works well enough here, as does his attempts at hyper-realistic backgrounds and civilian scenes. This isn't a terribly subtle book, and thus Deodato's action-figure style is a good fit.

The fifth and final issue explains how and why there is apparently an evil version of Nick Fury working with the bad guys on The Shadow Council, which is kinda long and unimportant to get into here, but it's based on a bit of old Marvel trivia that one not need know to understand and/or enjoy how it unfolds. Same goes for all of the Marvel stuff, really; Brubaker name-checks Roxxon, The Serpent Crown, Celestials, Zodiac and stuff like that, but it's all thoroughly contextualized to the point that if you've read stuff about them before, it's fine, and if you haven't, the way in which they operate within the comic is apparent.

That last issue is drawn by David Aja, Michael Lark and Stefano Gaudiano, and has a different colorist than the previous four (Jose Villarrubia, rather than Rain Beredo), and it's an aesthetic 180. It's a smartly planned one, though, as the Avengers battle on Mars is over, and Brubaker turns his attention to a secret history of a Fury lookalike and his place in the world.

It's pretty good stuff, really...if you can find it.

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My favorite part of the comic came during the first issue/chapter, during which Black Widow and Valkyrie, pretending to be escorts (ugh) break cover and beat up a bunch of guys, and a super-jet hovers outside the building they are in, with Steve Rogers bounding in wearing his navy blue spandex with a giant star on the chest to evacuate them and steal a chest with the super-artifact in it.

"We won and we're getting away with no one knowing who we are," the unmasked Rogers in the colorful costume who happens to be the most well-known superhero in the world, tells his unmasked colleagues. I know the comic wouldn't e as much fun to look at if all the heroes wore black clothes and matching ski-masks all the time, but they're hardly the most inconspicuous group. I guess it's a good job Valkyrie didn't bring her pegasus with her...

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Speaking of costumes, I really liked the team's (mostly) red and blue space suits with their own icons on them (a star for Cap, a circle for Ant-Man, an hourglass symbol for Black Widow; Moon Knight gets his own all-white space suit), and I even liked Beast's Avengers romper.

Remember, this team is a secret team, and Beast does most of his work behind the scenes. In this panel, for example, he's in a lab looking at computers or whatever and explaining science shit. He still thought he should wear a big Avengers-logo while doing so, though.

I guess if you have that in your closet, you take whatever opportunities you have to wear it...

Young Avengers Catch-up: Young Avengers Presents (2008)

Marvel's Young Avengers characters have been an interesting group of characters to keep one's eyes on over the past half-decade or so. That's because of how the company's publishing decisions regarding them have illustrated the tensions between respecting a particular creator's vision and wishes for creations generated but not owned by the creator and the company's ever-present desire to sell more comics to people who want to buy them.

For years, Marvel has been remarkably cool (as in admirable, not cold) in its deference to Young Avengers co-creator Allen Heinberg, essentially leaving the half-dozen or so teenage superheroes he created (and, in some cases, re-created) with artist Jim Cheung alone, waiting for the TV writer who dabbles in comics to find time to return to them.

To recap: Way back in 2005 Heinberg and Cheung created an "ongoing" series entitled Young Avengers that introduced a half-dozen super-characters, each a teenaged version of an Avengers character, that lasted 12 issues, comprised of three story-arcs.

Then Heinberg got busy with other stuff, and, despite demand for the characters, then-Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada always answered questions about them with something along the lines of "They'll be seen in This-or-That-Series, but we want to make sure we get the characters right, so we'll be waiting for Allen to come back and finish the awesome story he started." Heinberg eventually did, but not until 2010, when the nine-issue Avengers: The Children's Crusade launched. It finally wrapped up just last year, in 2012 (No, it shouldn't take two years to publish nine issues).

In the years between those two series, Marvel essentially found a happy medium between letting someone else write a Young Avengers comic and not publishing any Young Avengers comics until Heinberg could get around to writing them, publishing various miniseries checking in with the characters in relation to various line-wide crossover event stories: 2006's Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways, 2008's Secret Invasion: Runaways/Young Avengers, 2009's Dark Reign: Young Avengers and a 2010 special Siege: Young Avengers. Plus a 2008 Young Avengers Presents miniseries, a six-issue anthology issue in which different creative teams checked in on each of the members of the Young Avengers for their post-Civil War/"The Initiative" status.

That no doubt sounds like an awful lot of comics, but it's far fewer comics than Marvel would have produced (and sold!) if they just kept Young Avengers going monthly for the four or five years the franchise was left fallow-ish, and it's probably worth noting how Marvel treated Heinberg's Young Avengers vs. writer Brian K. Vaughan's similar Runaways, which were also new, young heroes that were either new creations or derivative of pre-existing Marvel characters. Runaways passed into other writers' hands almost as soon as Vaughan left, and didn't cease publication until sales sunk too low.

Either because Heinberg finished the story he wanted to tell at the conclusion of Children's Crusade or because Marvel decided Heinberg-less Young Avengers is better than only publishing annual miniseries, Marvel just last week launched a new Young Avengers ongoing by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie and Mike Norton (which I wrote about at some length here).

I liked it an awful lot, and it reminded me that I haven't followed the characters at all since the early half of Heinberg and Cheung's first run on the characters (I lost interest when about the time Heinberg did, but didn't regain it when he did). The new Young Avengers only features three of the original cast-members—Wiccan, Hulkling and Hawkeye, who is also appearing with the other Hawkeye in Hawkeye—and adds three other young Marvel characters—Marvel Boy (The Grant Morrison/J.G. Jones version), Loki (last seen in the Gillen-written Journey Into Mystery, which I wasn't interested in, being adverse to Asgardian stuff) and a new Miss America that I'm not sure has ever appeared anywhere else or not.

I got online and started seeing what other Young Avengers material was out there, and will be reviewing it in a series here, as I did with Marvel's Fear Itself tie-in collections, although not as frequently. I'm going to start with Young Avengers Presents.

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As stated above, this is a six-issue anthology series, with each issue featuring a different member of the Young Avengers team (although most guest-star other members in some capacity or other), each by a different creative team, each featuring a pretty neat cover by Jim Cheung showing the Young Avenger before a collage of head-shots of the "old" Avenger that inspired them and almost all of them featuring the Young Avenger meeting up with a grown-up Avenger one way or another.

The series is set after the events of Civil War, during which the Young Avengers sided with Captain America's anti-registration faction, and the war's aftermath, including Cap's apparent assassination. Un-registered superheroics were outlawed, so the team was in semi-retirement, with only Stature legally allowed to superhero (She was appearing in the since-canceled Avengers: The Initiative series at the time).

The art can get a big dodgy in terms of consistency (Hawkeye's costume is constantly changing, for example), and I liked some styles much better than others, but overall it's a very competently-produced series, and not a bad introduction to the characters, even if their exact circumstances requires a bit of other reading (or at least asking a friend or Wikipedia what the hell happened during Civil War, I guess). Given the nature of the book, it's probably best to take it issue by issue.

"Patriot" by Ed Brubaker, Paco Medina and Juan Vlasco

After a rough day at school, in which Eli Bradley gets in a fight with a fellow student after he's heckled for writing about the Tuskegee experiments ("If it's so bad here, why don't you move to Russia-- or Iraq?"), Eli returns home to find James "Bucky" Barnes, the former Winter Soldier who is about to take over being Captain America during the original Cap's temporary death, leaving his house. Eli is the grandson of Isaiah Bradley, the kinda sorta first Captain America, the black one (As seen in the excellent, Kyle Baker-illustrated Truth).

Wanting to track Bucky down for...whaetever, Eli suits up as Patriot and teams with Hawkeye and Wiccan to find Bucky and ultimately have an off-panel heart-to-heart regarding the death of Captain America and the original Patriot (I didn't even know there was an original Patriot). A bigger deal probably could have been made regarding the Young Avengers meeting Bucky—in Young Avengers #1, it was explained the reason why there are no real sidekicks in the Marvel Universe was the apparent death of Cap's sidekick Bucky, but dude apparently didn't die after all.

I liked the art in this one pretty well, and it reminded me how much I liked Patriot's costume (one he lost the full-face mask) and overall design. It kinda made me wish he was in the new Young Avengers series, although I suppose they don't want more than one patriotic, star-spangled hero on the line-up. I assume he'll at least guest-star at some point though.

"Hulkling" by Brian Reed and Harvey Tolibao

I was somewhat surprised to see the floating heads behind Hulkling belonged to Marvel's original, dead-from-cancer Captain Marvel, and not the Hulk. I mean, half-Kree, half-Skrull shape-changer Teddy Altman took his name and look from founding Avenger the Hulk, not Captain Marvel, right?

Well, apparently Teddy is that Captain Marvel's son...? And this story is set during the time between when this Captain Marvel randomly came back to life in a panel of Civil War and whatever happened to him during Secret Invasion happened to him (I didn't read any of those Wait, what's up with Captain Marvel being back? comics because, being under 50, I didn't much give a shit about Captain Marvel...at least, not that Captain Marvel. The Fawcett/DC one is a different story, because that Captain Marvel rules). So it is essentially just a heart-to-heart between the two characters.

It did make me wonder why Hulkling didn't go by Marvel Boy or...something with the word Marvel in it, in large part because I hate his look, which is essentially short Hulk with bleached blond hair, crustacean arm action in the shoulder region and veiny pterodactyl wings. I also don't like Teddy's "civilian" look, with all those dumb earrings. Feh.

Tolibao's art is fine, and looks an awful lot like Steve McNiven's, and I really enjoyed how muscley and vein-y he made Cap and Teddy look, the former through his clothes. I imagine it was meant to look cool, but I imagine Tolibao drawing them sarcastically, and it made me giggle.

(This is my favorite panel; check out Marvel's posture)

(By the way, here's Tolibao's Hawkeye; her costume has two sleeves in his version rather than one, but he and this art team is one of the few which draws human breasts with nipples on them)

"Wiccan & Speed" by Roberto Aguirre-Sacas and Alina Urusov

I don't really get these two, although the story of Young Avengers and "Avengers Disassembled" and House of M and Brian Michael Bendis' New Avengers run and about a decade of X-Men comics and much of the events of the Marvel universe over that same time have kinda sorta involved them. They were the magically imaginary children that Scarlet Witch thought she had, but didn't really, but I guess maybe did, since now they are teenagers?

I don't know. One is magic character designed to originally make YA readers think he had something to do with Thor, rather than Scarlet Witch.

The other has the lamest speedster name this side of The Whizzer, and looks almost exactly like Impulse villain Inertia,

who looks exactly like Impulse/Quicksilver amalgam Mercury,

who of course looked a bit like Scarlet Witch's speedster brother Quicksilver.

(sheesh).

His personality is also essentially that of a slightly more edgy Impulse.

In this story, they go looking for the Scarlet Witch and don't find her. It has some of the nicest art in the book, and that which is stylistically furthest from the media on the book. There's a abstracted nature to the design, and the images are smooth, clean and clutter free—it's quite suggestive of cels of animation.

Urusov even makes the Hulkling character, who I just stated I didn't like the look of, look kind of cool, giving him a truly hulking size and physique and fewer nooks and crannies. His hair also looks bleached to the point of being whitish, a more exotic look for a huge green space alien dude.

"Vision" by Paul Cornell, Mark Brooks and Jaime Mendoza

Though this is The Vision's story, it's just as much Stature's. This Vision, by the way, isn't The Vision that was torn vertically in half in "Avengers Disassembled," but the brainwaves of "Iron Lad", whose real identity was a secret in the first YA story arc, housed in a rebuilt android Vision body or...I don't know. Some of these characters sure are complicated for ones who have only starred in like 25 comics altogether, huh?

Anyway, it's not The Vision, but a new, younger Vision with the old Vision's powers but another Young Avenger's mind or whatever.

He has a crush on Stature, the size-changing heroine daughter of Ant-Man II Scott Lang. He goes to visit her at Avengers Initiative HQ, where she's in training to be part of Civil War victor Iron Man's well-regulated, federal army of superhero draftees, and talk about their relationship, which is weird (She was into the guy whose mind is in Vision's body).

Some AIM guys attack. There's a fight.

While I like teen angst and melodrama, this is more of the Crying Robot flavor than the true teen flavor, and I'm not really into Crying Robots (One nice thing about The New 52? No Red Tornado. Or at least not anywhere that I've noticed).

My favorite part was a panel of the AIM guys—those are the standard issue Marvel villains who dress a bit like beekeepers—on some sort of stake-out, in which Brooks draws four dudes in big, yellow beekeeper suits just sitting in a parked car by the curb.

"Stature" by Kevin Grevioux and Mitch Breitweiser

The next issue sticks with Stature, whose powers are apparently reflective of her emotional state (a very Marvel touch) and, at story's opening, she's feeling so "small" she's in danger of shrinking out of existence. Hawkeye has her placed, in the fetal position, on a microscope slide, and Wiccan and Patriot get called to talk her back to size.

She's apparently feeling small because she accidentally fell on her mom's cop boyfriend, whom she doesn't like, and might have killed him.

It's a nicely done done-in-one, with a predictable, cheesy—but not too cheesy—ending. Breitweiser's art is the most realistic in the book, but it doesn't enter into that weird wax dummy, photorealism realm that a few Marvel artists like to work (Greg Land, Salvador Larocca, etc). Bretiweiser probably has the best costuming in the book too, with people generally wearing clothing that looks like clothing one might see on the street. I was kind of surprised at how "in-style" Cassie Lang looked when not dressed as Stature.

"Hawkeye" by Matt Fraction, Alan Davis and Mark Farmer

Hey, it's Matt Fraction! Writing Hawkeye Kate Bishop and Hawkeye Clint Barton, the two Hawkeyes who star in his critically acclaimed Hawkeye series! I wonder if this particular comic doesn't merit a more thorough look-see from Hawkeye fans in light of that?

It also features probably the biggest and best art team in the collection, the veteran Davis/Farmer team.

This story features Kate on a date with Patriot, when they are suddenly attacked by their horse-drawn carriage driver—Ronin in a top hat!

Does that bring back memories? Ronin? Remember Ronin? "He" was a mysterious ninja in a vest character from the beginning of Bendis' New Avengers run that was either supposed to be A) Daredevil or back-from-the-dead Hawkeye (one of the first violations of then-EIC Quesada's vow that dead would mean dead while he was in charge) in a disguise who was later changed to Echo-in-a-padded man suit because too many people too easily guessed the surprise or B) was meant to be Echo all along, but artist David Finch either didn't know it and thus drew Ronin as a big hulking man or just sort of sucked at drawing.

Anyway, Ronin was at this point Clint Barton, and he challenged Hawkeye to visit the New Avengers' secret base to have an archery contest over possession of her bow, which was his bow, but Captain America gave it to her while Clint was temporarily dead, but now Clint was alive and Captain America was temporarily dead, so he wanted his bow back (Jesus, I guess these stories are all a lot more complicated than I thought while reading; I guess a good way to tell just how Byzantine continuity is in a particular super-comic is to try summarizing it in a few paragraphs).

Davis and Farmer's art is really nice, as smooth and dynamic as always, although they dress the boys like they're grown-up stock brokers on dates: Patriot wears a suit and tie, Speed a blazer.

I liked Kate's second dress though, which featured the same pattern as one of Hawkeye's goofier costumes.

Fraction's script is pretty clever, and the Hawkeyes sound like they would a few years later in Hawkeye; the comic is much more straightforward in construction and lay-out though, and offers a nice indication of exactly what it is that David Aja is bringing to the table in Hawkeye (that, and/or it's an indication of the difference in Fraction's writing the just sixth-issue of an anthology series versus scripting his own series).

It made me kind of which Fraction was writing the new Young Avengers, or at least got to write these characters at some length somewhere between then and now.

It also made me wish that instead of titling Hawkeye Hawkguy, Marvel instead changed the name to either Hawkeyes or Hawkguys.

It also also made me dread the possibility that the two Hawkeyes might hook up at some point. The first issue of Young Avengers has Kate musing on how hot Bucky is and Patriot admonishing her that "he is way too old for you", and this final issue certainly demonstrates how teenage the Young Avengers are versus how middle-aged the New Avengers are (even if Hawkeye and his peers are drawn more like twenty-somethings than the thirty- or forty-somethings they probably actually are...I'm 35, but was in junior high during the Gulf War, which I think has replaced Vietnam as a time-marker in the Marvel Universe sliding timeline...or has it slid to Afghanistan already? Because that seems too drastic a slide...)

Anyway, she's only 18 now right? That would be legal but gross Fraction—don't do it!

And that's Young Avengers presents: Some really good stories, some pretty good stories, some decent-but-no-worse-than-that stories. It's kind of a weird tour of the Marvel universe too, and read a few years later, it's remarkable how things have changed and how drastically. Even if you just look at who is dead and who is alive at what point (Since then, the then-dead Captain America, adult Vision and Ant-Man II came back to life, "Captain Marvel" died again and Bucky died and came back to life.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

I did not make a New Year's resolution to contribute to Robot 6's weekly What Are You Reading? column on a more regular basis or anything, but I guess it kind of worked out that way, as this is the third week in a row I've managed it (My current plan is to keep doing that, and have links to it account for my Sunday night post, as I've quite doing links round-ups on Sunday afternoons, due to how much time it ate up doing so and due to the fact that I'm trying to constrain my link-blogging to Twitter...Oh, but hey, here's a good link).

The above image is from Criminal Vol. 6: The Last of the Innocents, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' "What If...Archie Andrews Basically Killed Everyone?" story that is fairly nutty, but a nice example of superhero decadence applied to a non-superhero franchise, using such thinly veiled analogue versions of the folks from Riverdale that I think "veiled" may actually be too strong a term for it (That's the Archie analogue, who is differentiated from the genuine all-American teen by his hair color and lack of freckles, apparently fingering the Veronica analogue, who is differentiated from Archie's gal pal by, um, having a different name...and a dad who has a gray beard, instead of just a gray mustache).

Phillips also drew a panel in which the Betty analogue used the word "finger-bang," but I didn't scan that because it didn't make sense when divorced from the rest of the page, where as the "gag" in the sequence above translates well enough.

It's one of the comics I discussed there in addition to a few others not previously reviewed here, so click on this to see what Gambit and End Times of Bram and Ben writer James Asmus and Robot Sixers Michael May, Tom Bondurant and I read this week.

As far as battle cries go...

...I think I like the sound of "Imperius Rex!" better.



(Panel from The Marvels Project by Steve Epting and Ed Brubaker)

Another trade I waited for: The Marvels Project

I rather enjoyed reading through the trade collection of Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting’s eight-part series The Marvels Project, although the farther I got into it, the less and less it seemed like a story so much as a summary of other stories.

I suppose there was a degree of inevitably to that aspect of the series, as it is a summary of other stories, with Brubaker and Epting retelling scenes from various Golden Age classics, checking in on various Golden Age characters big and small and contextualizing some historical events within the Marvel Universe. It’s more an exercise in connecting various dots and giving a consistent viewpoint to those connections than a proper story. As such, it’s very interesting, if never quite compelling.

The framing sequence is kind of oblique, with Marvel Western hero The Two-Gun Kid, who was shunted from his own era into the modern Marvel Universe, dying back in the period between the World Wars—apparently, when he got old, he was sent back to die close to the time he would actually die? Brubaker sort of assumes some basic knowledge on the part of his readers regarding this complicated nonsense—lucky for me I read Dan Slott’s She-Hulk or I woulda been lost right out of the gate (If you click on that link, don’t look the horse in the eye, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life).

Conceptually, the idea is showing the passing of the torch from one sort of hero—the cowboys of the Wild West—to a new kind of hero, guys in capes and masks like The Angel, our point-of-view character for the story of how the Marvel Universe first became populated with Marvels.

The Angel is a vigilante hero of the normal-guy-who-dresses-weird-and-punches-bad-guys-really-hard and, as a New Yorker, he’s around to witness the birth and evolution of the android Human Torch (Marvel’s first “Marvel”), the emergence of Namor (there’s a pretty weirdly affective scene early on, wherein Nazis are shown depth charging the sea and collecting the Atlantean corpses that float to the service) and his conflicts with the Torch and the surface world, the emerging crop of heroes like those who starred in The Twelve and those awesome 70th anniversary specials Marvel was publishing in 2009 (Did they ever trade-collect those? I bought ‘em all, but they were among the comics stolen when my last apartment was burgularized), and, eventually, the appearance of Captain America.

Brubaker imagines a sort of superhero-arms race between America and the Nazis, which ties a lot of the various plot-points together, and eventually unites heroes as diverse as Namor, The Torch and Captain America against the Nazis. It also allows The Angel and some smaller characters (The Ferret, The Phantom Bullet, etc.) to get involved in a more direct way.

The plot works, and it all hangs together quite well, but because of the huge span of time being covered—it opens in 1938 and ends in 1941, with an epilogue set in the present—and because of the fact that The Angel is telling the story (often resorting to saying things like, “I didn’t know this at the time, of course, but…”), far too much of it feels like being told a story about a story, instead of a story.

Epting is a hell of an artist, and he pencils and inks here, with Dave Stewart handling the colors. I don’t care for this style of art at all, as the coloring (or perhaps the way Epting produced the art) gives it the comic book equivalent of soft, soap opera-like lighting. The blacks and lines just don’t look like they were drawn with ink pens or brushes, so it all looks several degrees removed from drawing.

Within this style, which is pretty much Marvel’s house style at this point, and obviously more popular with more folks, it’s nice art, but my eyes slid over it without ever really appreciating it—the photos-as-reference, computers-used-somehow approach is a lot less lifeless and annoying in a historical setting, however. Like, having New York skylines plopped in as background isn’t quite as lazy-looking when it’s the New York of the late-30s and early-40s than that of the early 21st century.

You know what’s really weird, though? The climax of the book features the big heroes of the period splitting up to deal with a two-pronged Axis attack on the allies—Cap, Bucky and Namor intervene to protect President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill from Nazi super-soldier U-Man and an evil Atlantean assassination squad, while The Human Torch and Toro head off the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. I was kind of confused by the latter, as it implies foreknowledge of the attack within the U.S. government—if Roosevelt and Captain America knew the attack was coming, why didn’t they warn the folks at Pearl Harobor, who could have at least defended themselves better? And why did they just send The Human Torch and Toro, instead of rallying a conventional military counterattack?

It implies a complicity among the Roosevelt administration, a realization of the conspiracy theory that he let Pearl Harbor happen in order to provide political cover to the U.S. entry into the war. Which, I don’t know, is that what happened? I haven’t read much about it in a long, long time, and assume Brubaker’s more up on this stuff than I am.

Or did it go down differently in the Marvel Universe? (Well, even more different than two flying, flaming dudes throwing fireballs at Japanese Zeros?) Did Roosevelt, Cap, Torch and others know ahead of time that the Japanese were about to attack Peak Harbor in past Marvel stories about the era, or is that an original idea of Brubaker’s?

I don’t know.

The narrator, The Angel, implies that the Japanese force was much, much larger than the one we know about, and that the Torches greatly reduced the damage that would have been done, but, I don't know, it seems like getting the word out and responding militarily might have staved off the attack complete.

"They saved many lives, stopped many of the Japanese bombs and blew up many more of their fighters... But they couldn't hold back the storm no matter how hard they tried."

It's made clear that the Cap and company vs. U-Man fight was kept secret, although I'm not sure if the Torches activities were or not: "That fight would remain secret," Angel says of that battle, "because Captain America didn't want to diminish the sacrifice of the men at Pearl Harbor, he told me later. They were the real heroes...the soldiers who bled and died. The ones who didn't have science on their side like he did."

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

Speaking of things I don't know about, there's a character wandering around Europe that the Nazi scientists kept in some sort of stasis named Private John Steele. He's apparently invulnerable, super-strong and was caught during the first World War. He awakens and starts wandering around killing Nazis in Europe, hooking up with Nick Fury for a while.

I have no idea who he is or where he came from, but he's presented as someone I should know.

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

I haven’t played a Marvel-related video game since…a Street Fighter vs. Marvel heroes arcade came before turn of the century, maybe? But I’d play the hell out of a game that was basically 1942 where you played The Human Torch instead of a plane…

In which I review two Uncanny X-Men collections, one of which I liked and one of which I did not.

The image above is one I took on my cell phone the other day. It’s of the graphic novel section at the library in the next town over from me.

The library serves a pretty small community—at the time of the last census, the town it’s in had a population of about 12,500—so it’s not really much of a surprise that their graphic novel section is pretty small. All of their sections are small. But jeepers creepers, three shelves isn’t very many shelves.

The last time I visited there, I noticed that the X-Men seemed to be pretty well represented on the shelf, including an awful lot of Wolverine comics and just about a full run of Ultimate X-Men trades.

There were at least five Uncanny X-Men trades checked in, and I grabbed all of them that I figured I’d be able to stand reading, which, after you eliminated the House of M tie-in trade, the one featuring the grotesque photo collage stylings of Greg Land, and two from the ‘90s, left two trades—both by pretty exciting writers.

Now I’m going to write long, meandering reviews of them.

Uncanny X-Men: The Extremists contains an arc from Ed Brubaker’s run on the title, specifically issues #487-#491, all of which were drawn by Salvador Larroca.

Brubaker was, I think, a very interesting choice for the X-Men franchise, give that he’s primarily known for his work in the crime genre and, at Marvel, for his reinvention of the Captain America title, moving it away from straight-ahead superheroics and towards a much greater emphasis on past war-fighting and modern espionage.

I know from working with Newsarama.com that Brubaker’s X-Men comics resulted in a lot of conversation among fans, and I know I was curious enough to check out a few trades from the Columbus libraries before, but I didn’t care for any of the trades of his X-work I’d read before at all. In fact, I’m having a hard time remembering much about them at this point.

I read one about Charles Xavier being a slightly more manipulative jerk than usual, in which it was revealed he had an extra X-Men team between his first two famous ones. I think I read something about Banshee getting run over by an airplane.

And then were was a whole bunch of space stuff, which always seemed like a weird aspect of the X-Men comics to me—like, I’ve always just assumed that those stories only existed because Chris Claremont and whoever wanted to do some space opera stuff one month, but they were stuck on the X-Men comic so just did it there instead of a more appropriate book. If the creators had been working on The Avengers or Man-Thing at the time, Tony Stark would have been dating the lady with the hair pyramid from the Shi’ar Empire and Rory Regan’s dad would have ended up being a space pirate. (Reminder: I know very, very little about the X-Men, and never read the “good” stuff by Claremont and Byrne, so keep in mind if it sounds like I have no idea what I’m talking about when I talk about the X-Men, it is because I have no idea what I’m talking about).

As with the other Brubaker X-Men stories I had previously read and forgotten, this one didn’t impress me much at all.

The antagonists are the Morlocks, the sub-set of mutants that live in the sewers, and I have to assume they are an extremely tired group of X-Men antagonists, because I hardly ever read any books with the letter X in the title, and I’ve seen variations of this Morlocks story—complete with Storm freaking out due to claustrophobia—a good 40 times or so, across various media.

What’s fresh(er) about Brubaker’s approach is that he uses them as a vehicle to tell a story that is kind of sort of about religious extremism and terrorism, but I found the whole endeavor sort of tasteless and overly obvious, with a moral amounting to nothing more specific or relevant than stating that terrorism is bad, that violence is bad, that it’s possible to take religion too far, that religion is no excuse to commit violence and so on.

Maybe it’s just me. Perhaps another reader would find the fact that Brubaker has taken an extremely basic, almost generic plot that could quite easily have been about any of many real-world conflicts and just X-Men-ed it up to make it X-Men-specific for the X-Men comic inspired. Certainly that sort of ham-handed obviousness in attempts at relevance is part and parcel to the X-Men franchise, historically. At least from what I know of it.

Me, I kept wondering what the point of it was—why can’t the religious terrorists be jihadists or Zionists or a Christian militia, instead of some weird made-up mutant religion ?

But no, it’s sort of a Mad Libs thing.

The blank space marked “good guys” is filled in by the X-Men (Well, Storm, a Morlock, a Native American mutant who is actually named Warpath, and Cyclops’ space-pirate father’s ex-girlfriend who is an alien cat lady left over from a preceding space opera story arc).

The “bad guys” space is filled by a splinter group of Morlocks who take their crazy new mutant religion too far. The religion is a prophecy-based one more or less invented by a mutant Morlock named after a type of keyboard.

The religious-inspired terrorism isn’t bomb or even death-based, but instead involves making innocent subway commuters look like mutants (one of the bad guys has the mutant ability to fuck up people’s faces by touching them).

It’s quite competently plotted, and it certainly supplies the necessary amounts of melodrama and action to be mediocre, but it was really hard for me to get over just how stupid the whole thing seemed.

Larocca’s art didn’t help at all, either. I’ve grown used to his work on Invincible Iron Man, where the copious amounts of photo reference and computer usage is somewhat more tolerable given the high-tech settings and amount of images that involve Iron Man armor, but most of this book takes place in darkened tunnels, so the characters themselves almost constantly in super-sharp relief against their settings, forcing the eye to consider them in great detail.

And most of them look like photos of people run through filters, with superhero costumes layered on top of them.

I know this sort of superhero comics art has its fans—and presumably a lot of them, given how popular it is at Marvel these days—but I just can’t stand the style, and generally find myself reading the story in spite of it, not because of it.

It’s really hard to give one over to the drama of a pissed off, claustrophobic Storm lightning-ing her way out of a coffin and telling the bad guys she’s going to kick their asses now when you can’t help noticing the artist is using a different model for her face on this page then he did on the last page, you know?

I wouldn’t recommend this comic.

Leaps and bounds better was Uncanny X-Men: Lovelorn, which consists mostly of Uncanny X-Men #504-#507 by Matt Fraction, Terry Dodson and Rachel Dodson, with the Fraction-written, Mitch Breitweiser and Daniel Acuna-illustrated Uncanny X-Men #2 awkwardly grafted on to the back of the book.

Like Brubaker, Fraction is another unlikely choice for an X-Men writer, which, of course, makes him a great choice for an X-Men writer. I’ve liked an awful lot of the Matt Fraction comics I’ve read over the years, and probably would have added this book to my regular single-issue reading diet when he took over the title, were it not for the fact that one of the artists he’s been working with is Greg Land, whose art I can barely bring myself to look at anymore, let alone read or pay money for.

In fact, I had to scan the credits on this book before even checking out to make sure it was Land-free.

To be fair to Brubaker, I suppose it’s worth noting that Fraction is working with a much better art team here, one that constructs images and page layouts as if they were drawing comics (which they are) and not trying to trick the eye into thinking it’s looking at something other than comic art.

And also that Fraction’s stories are further removed from the House of M/M-Day/“No More Mutants” bullshit than Brubaker’s were, so he doesn’t have to waste as much time jumping through the hoops involved with it (During Brubaker’s arc, the Xavier School is a sort of prison camp guarded by Sentinels and the X-people aren’t allowed to leave it, but they do all the time anyway, so space must be devoted to them fighting with Sentinels and arguing with government administrators throughout their adventures).

The status quo Fraction’s working with here is after all of that nonsense, and finds the X-Men now living in San Francisco, with Cyclops in the leadership position instead of Charles Xavier. It seemed a lot fresher to me, in large part because I have never experienced X-Men stories in this setting or with this particular status quo.

The title story arc follows a few different X-Men through a few different engaging sub-plots, which eventually crisscross at various points.

Colossus is feeling pretty pouty, a mood demonstrated by the fact that he keeps trying to get a tattoo to remember his dead-again girlfriend by on his skin, but he keeps turning into a giant metal dude during the process and breaking the tattoo artists’ needles. Cyclops and Emma Frost tell him to get his head on straight, so he goes out and gets involved in some solo superhero stuff in the local Russian community, which just so happens to involve a bad guy from his own past.

Cyclops is feeling pretty stressed out and having a hard time explaining things to Emma, so she psychically visits his head, presented as a hotel populated entirely by, as she tells him, “your memory of every woman you’ve ever cast a furtive glance upon,” giving the Dodsons and excuse to draw all the sexy X-ladies they want, wearing whatever costumes strike their fancy (Here’s the cover to #504, for an idea of what the inside of Scott’s head looks like here).

Meanwhile Beast and Angel are trying to put together a team of super-scientists to help them crack the mutant population problem that resulted from the House of M/M-Day/“No More Mutants” bullshit I referenced earlier.

(An aside: That particular plot point, that the Scarlet Witch used her magical powers, or mutant powers that mimic magic I guess, to suck the X-gene out of all the mutants on Earth that weren’t popular X-Men never made a whole lot of sense to me. If Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada simply wanted to make mutants seem more unusual and thus “special” in the Marvel Universe, he could have simply had editors, writers and artists quietly quit introducing new ones—and stop using the more obscure ones—without having to do a sort of cosmic “fix.” He’s referred to this as one of the genies he wanted to put back in the bottle, but, much like the Spider-marriage, you can’t really put genies back in bottles, and doing so has only created storytelling hurdles and barriers. Tim O’Neil had an interesting essay about the “No More Mutants” problem, essentially arguing that it’s turned the X-Men into their own villains; from my perspective as a casual reader, the main thing it did was create a bunch of new problems I had to wrestle with whenever I think about Marvel’s mutants in an attempt to fix a problem I hadn’t even realized existed).

However here that fall-out is being used as a source of storytelling potential (the X-Men’s science guy is going to put together a Justice League of scientists to solve a big science problem), rather than a storytelling roadblock that needs to be hopped over or tunneled under (a scene of a tense stand-off between a government employee in piloting a Sentinel and an X-person added into every issue).

It no doubt helps that not only is Fraction approaching the mutant de-population as storytelling opportunity rather than an anchor dragging him down, but that he’s having so much fun with it. Beast and Angel track down three mad science types, of various levels of madness.

The first is someone named Dr. Nemesis, whom I liked so much I had to Wikipedia, and I guess he’s a public domain hero who appeared in some Invaders stories in the second half of the last century…? Fraction basically writes him like an arrogant, mad scientist version of Warren Ellis’ online persona though, so, you know, that’s fun. The final one is a Japanese dude who built some crab monsters and a Godzilla to protect himself, so the story arc’s climax can juxtapose two battles of various levels of seriousness and silliness.

In one, Emma Frost and an unarmored Colossus battle Russian gangsters who were attempting to sell immigrants as sex slaves, while in the other Angel turns blue and gets metal wings to fight Godzilla.

That right there is good superhero comics. By all means, use real world crime, even X-Men it up a little bit (The Russian gangster has super-mutant tattoos that swirl around and reveal secrets or some such), but don’t forget to include the occasional mad scientist, giant monster and some jokes.

It also helps if the comic book is drawn and looks like part of the wonderful tradition of cartooning that makes the medium so special, instead of something that looks like it was put together inside a computer by someone who finds lines on paper shaped like amazing people doing amazing things to be irrelevant and joyless compared to making Storm look like a photo of a real woman.

I would recommend this comic.

Oh yeah, and then there’s the Annual, which was decently written and interestingly drawn (Breitweiser drew the modern scenes in the sketchy, gritty style you see from the likes of Gabriel Hardman, while Acuna draws the flashbacks in his sorta slick, plastic-y, overly textured style, although it’s modulated to be more cartoony than some of his past work). It’s a Dark Reign tie-in, and is basically the history of Namor and Emma Frost’s relationship, which naturally includes them fucking, because Emma Frost has did it with everyone in the Marvel Universe…or at least she eventually will have, once they do enough stories retconning more and more Marvel heroes into her sex life.

It wasn’t as fun or interesting as the lead story, the colors were darker and less bright, and the artwork less clean and bold in style than that of “Lovelorn.” And it reads like a weird detour, as it has next to nothing to do with the story that preceded it, aside from having Emma Frost in it. Also, Namor didn’t commit enough acts of incredible violence or act as massively prickishness as I would have liked him too. But then, this is my favorite Namor story, and I know they can’t all have Namor slapping mayors and throwing the Empire State building at babies.

Review: Batman: The Man Who Laughs

What a strange book this is. If one squints and tilts one’s head just right, it’s easy to see the rationale behind 2008 hardcover Batman: The Man Who Laughs.

The contents deal, in part, with the first time The Joker met the Batman; it’s a tale that’s been told and retold in DCU comics, even post-Crisis, but with The Dark Knight telling it to a very, very wide audience, it makes sense to get as many Joker vs. Batman stories on the shelves as possible (And this one has the benefit of sharing some of the same bits of inspiration as the blockbuster film).

It’s also written by Ed Brubaker, who did quite a bit of work in and around Gotham City at the beginning of the decade, and who’s star has continued to rise at Marvel, thanks in large part to his success with killing off Captain America and sustaining the quality of Captain America without its deceased star.

Why DC chose to collect the stories they did under this cover and this title, however, is pretty perplexing. More than half of the contents of Batman: The Man Who Laughs consist of something other than Batman: The Man Who Laughs, and the Joker only appears in one of the two stories. Even the artists and settings differ (The Joker story is set in the Batman: Year One era, the later story is set in the modern “Year Now” era).

In fact, the only things they have in common is that Brubaker wrote both of ‘em, and that Batman’s in them.

The title story originally appeared as a 64-page prestige format one-shot in 2005. It was bound with a bit of a spine, and would therefore definitely fit most people’s perceptions of a “graphic novel” if it were simply reprinted in 2008 to take advantage of Joker-vs.-Batmania. That is, it would stand up on a bookstore or library shelf on it’s own, even if the name on the spine would be a little hard to make out.

The desire to reprint it as a slightly larger hardcover was certainly to make it more appealing to the library and book store audience, but that left the problem of what to fill up the rest of the book with—64 pages is far too slim for a hardcover.

There are certainly no shortage of Batman/Joker stories out there; they could have even used different versions of this story, like Legend of the Dark Knight #50, featuring a story by Denny O’Neil and Bret Blevins, with a pretty creepy cover by definitive Joker artist Brian Bolland, or perhaps the first Joker story from Batman #1 or 1978’s “The Sign of the Joker” by Steve Englehart and Marshall Robers, the last two of which inspired certain aspects of Brubaker’s story (and Nolan’s movie).

Instead they chose “Made of Wood,” a three-part Detective Comics story in which Batman teams up with the original Green Lantern and the retired Commissioner Gordon to solve a decades old mystery.

Both are fairly strong stories; “Made of Wood” moreso than Man That Laughs, in large part because Brubaker was telling a story that hasn’t been told dozens of times before.

But they don’t really seem to go together. “Made of Wood” seems like filler, but since it’s actually longer than the title story—66 pages—it makes the title story seem like the real filler. A new reader reaching it would likely be surprised to find it there. Surprised, and perhaps disappointed.

Grafting it onto The Man That Laughs also makes it more difficult for DC to do some sort of complete-ish collection of Brubaker’s work, which would fit quite nicely into a several volume series.

As a writer equally adept at superhero adventure, crime and police procedurals and even martial arts fantasy (as Brubaker’s gone on to prove himself in recent years), he’s pretty much an ideal Batman writer. He got to help redefine Catwoman (a book that was just re-cancelled this week), worked with Greg Rucka on brilliant but cancelled Gotham Central, and contributed chapters to a few of the last Batman crossovers before the last DCU reboot (“Bruce Wayne: Fugitive,” “War Games”).

He also got his chance on the two flagship Bat-titles, and he excelled at them, but editorial rejiggerings seemed to have kept him from ever getting too comfortable.

He wrote Batman for a stint between 2001 and 2002, from Batman #591-#598, plus #604 and #606 and #607 (those last two issues with some guy named Geoff Johns, who’s kinda marketable these days). All of these were drawn by Scott McDaneil, who’s somewhat abstracted, highly energetic style wasn’t the best of fits with Brubaker’s particular skill set, but still, that’s about a dozen issues of Brubaker on Batman just sitting around, not being in a grapic novel.

And in addition to “Made of Wood,” Brubaker wrote a six-part arc for TEC #777-#783 entitled “Dead Reckoning.” This was penciled by Tommy Castillo, and would probably make for a decent trade by itself; it features name villains Penguin, The Riddler, Catwoman, Joker and Two-Face.

If you count 64-page Man Who Laughs like three 22-page comic books, that all adds up to about 24 issues of Rather Popular Writer Brubaker on Perpetually Popular Batman, or two or three good-sized trades featuring almost all of Brubaker’s Batman that doesn’t already appear elsewhere.

As to the contents, they’re both pretty solid efforts. Man Who Laughs, named for the silent movie version of Dumas’ novel that inspired The Joker’s look, is presented like a continuation of Year One, right down to the Batman and Gordon tag-team narration and fonts.

Some new villain calling himself The Joker predicts killings ahead of time, his victims dramatically dropping dead at the designated time, despite the best efforts of Batman and the police. His ultimate plan to is to poison Gotham City’s water supply with his Joker venom; Batman stops him.

The main strength of the story is just how straightforward it is; Brubaker really writes the encounter as if The Joker really were a new character, with no heavy-handed foreshadowing that this more colorful than usual crook is going to go on to someday star in “A Death in the Family” or The Killing Joke.

The art is by Doug Mahnke, penciling and inking, and while Mahnke is a master compared to some of the guys DC has drawing Batman these days, his muscular, dynamic Batman and highly idiosyncratic character visages seem somewhat contrary to the by-now well established look and aesthetic to “Year One” Gotham. There’s a great difference between the art of David Mazzucchelli, Tim Sale and Matt Wagner, but the differences between those three aren’t anywhere as near the difference between Mahnke and the three of them. (That’s quite a cover image though; my face hurts jut looking at Joker’s smile).

“Made of Wood” is penciled by Patrick Zircher and inked by Aaron Sowd. Their art shares a level of detail with Mahnkes—particularly for backgrounds and settings—but the characters are more realistic; Batman looks more like a costumed man than a he-man superhero, and the bit players look more like people you might pass on the street, rather than caricatured characters. (I like both artists a great deal; Zircher and Sowd just seem better suited to Brubaker’s Batman stories).

This story more than any other Brubaker one I’ve read demonstrates how perfectly suited he is for the character. The two superheroes are more or less incidental to large parts of the story, in which retired James Gordon stumbles upon a mystery and tries to solve it. It’s your typical murder mystery novel, but with extremely colorful protagonists.

Gordon is out for a morning walk when he finds a dead man with the words “Made of Wood” carved into his chest and dumped at the foot of a statue of Green Lantern Alan Scott, who operated in Gotham during the Golden Age (Wood, by the way, is Scott’s only weakness). Back during that Golden Age, we learn there was a serial killer with the same MO, but the crimes just stopped and their perpetrator was never brought to justice.

Gordon and Batman each try to crack the case, with Scott eventually visiting and lending a hand, the narrative flashing back to period stories featuring Scott, his villain Sportsmaster and his sidekick Doiby Dickles (sadly, no Streak). It’s a great little superhero mystery story, somewhat evocative of James Robinson’s Starman in the way it jumps between the decades, but it sure doesn’t have much of anything to do with the story that precedes it.

The Internet is Right Again: The Immortal Iron Fist really is really good

Man, I am terrible at this “wait for the trade” business—I honestly don’t know how people do it.

I enjoy the monthly soap opera of super-comics, and the unique way universe comics like those of Marvel and DC relate to one another, and the ritualistic aspects of going to the shop and reading new comics every Wednesday way too much to ever drop all monthlies in favor of trades. Despite the fact that I realize trades are often cheaper, don’t contain ads and usually make for a more enjoyable reading experience.

The only ongoing super-books I have been successfully able to resist in monthly installments, opting to “wait for the trade” on have been those I started reading in trade (Daredevil, Captain America, Manhunter) or those that are so obviously paced for a trade that there’s little point in reading them monthly (Astonishing X-Men, most of Garth Ennis’ work, just about all of Warren Ellis’) or are so rock-steady in quality that I know ahead of time I’ll want the trade (Angry Youth Comix, Conan, The Punisher, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy stuff).

Marvel makes it particularly hard because they release their collection in a succession of formats, so even when I decide to wait for a trade collection, there’s an intermediary temptation when they release the more-expensive hardcover collection, and I often succumb to that, rather than waiting a few more months for the cheaper trade (Beyond! and Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. got me this way).

I’ve tried waiting for the trade on a couple other more recent series—The Immortal Iron Fist and X-Men First Class—and damn, it’s hard to resist picking up new issues.

Especially when all you read about the title online is a bunch of gushing from fans and critics who simply cannot shut up about how totally awesome the comics are.

Like The Immortal Iron Fist. Does anyone who read this book just kind of think it’s okay? I’ve never heard a single “meh” or seen a single shrug about it; it’s always a bunch of exclamation points. Even those relatively far afield from the core audience of people who enjoy seeing Danny Rand kick dudes in the face really seem to dig it.

Well, in an act of iron will that I’m completely shocked I was able to accomplish, I managed to hold off on Immortal Iron Fist after reading the first few, ad-crammed issues until the trade paperback came out.

And I just wanted to say, yeah Internet, you’re right again. This is a really good comic book.

The legacy aspects, the phenomenal guest artists who illustrate the flashbacks (including John Severin and Russ Heath in this volume), the acknowledgement of the Marvel Universe and character history without enslaving the book to it, the practically imperceptible drift from straight street-level heroics into martial arts fantasy, the Bendis/Maleev Daredevil meets Akira Toriyama Dragonball aesthetic—this is pretty much an ideal Marvel monthly.

As much as I loved the art on this book (and that’s why I originally dropped the monthly; all those ads featuring the Green Goblin riding brand new cars and Spider-Man bedding really broke the flow of Aja’s obviously carefully constructed layouts), I find myself idly wondering what it would be like if rather than the grittier, photorealistic style it were told in something more abstracted, cartoonier and Eastern looking. Say, if instead of Aja it was drawn by Kaare Andrews, and instead of their standard trade format, Marvel was putting this into digest-sized trades.

Would that ruin Brubaker and Fraction’s story? Would it fly off shelves and into kids’ hearts? As a reader, I don’t think that would necessarily make for a better comic (I do love Andrews’ work, though), but as someone who wonders a lot about the comic book industry, I’m curious about how this might sell as a Western manga. Mainly because it seems clear form this first arc that the book is moving into what I understand is a story arc that is as much fight manga as it American superhero (if not more so).

And as a final aside, I think this book is pretty much a perfect argument for why Marvel and DC should be a lot less cavalier when it comes to killing off their characters. Ten years ago, five years ago, two years ago, who would have thought a freaking Iron Fist ongoing series would a) exist, b) be any good at all, and c) be relatively popular and critically acclaimed?

It took the stars aligning just right—the right creators with a particular vision and the cachet to convince the publisher to greenlight a rather unlikely project, the availability of the character from other writers or editors trying to do something particular with him—for this book to come about.

And if it were Danny Rand who caught a chest full of Clor lightning in Civil War, we wouldn’t have an Iron Fist series right now. It makes me wonder if the future Fractions and Brubakers with these really neat ideas for a new series starring Goliath or Elongated Man or The Question will miss a future star aligning because the character got killed off to make a Civil War “matter” more or because Judd Winick needed to do something to see that first issue.

Now I wonder how I’ll be able to keep resisting the urge to pick up the monthly issues, now that I’ve read the first story arc and no first-hand just how good the series is…

Friday Night Fights: Shadow of the 'Cat

It's Friday night in Blogsville, and you know what that means, right?

Exactly.









You did click on the above images to make them Bahlactus-sized, right?

And because it seems unjust to scan from a Cameron Stewart drawn comic book featuring Ted Grant and not also scan an image of him in his cat suit, here are a few panels of Wildcat and Catwoman beating up some swarthy, scimitar-wielding bad guys:





(Both above squences are from 2003's Catwoman #20 by Ed Brubaker and Cameron Stewart, published by DC Comics. Check it out for plenty more pages of a cute girl in sportswear boxing and people dressed like cats kicking the crap out of theives, or, better yet, buy the trade, Catwoman: Wild Ride. The Stargirl image is from the same place as the the last Stargirl image.)

May 31st's Meanwhile in Las Vegas...

This week’s Las Vegas Weekly column features reviews of David Petersen’s tale of daring (and darling) swordsmice Mouse Guard Volume One: Fall 1152 and Scott Morse and company’s AdHouse art book The Ancient Book of Myth and War.

(Confidential to Chris Pitzer and Nate Wragg: I’d totally buy a floppy comic book starring Pathetos and/or one chronicling he war between Yeti and Sasquatch.)


And while I’m posting links…



—Attention Ed Brubaker fans: This movie isn’t a biopic about the comic book writer. Unfortunately.




—Hey, I know! Let’s talk more about that Heroes For Hire cover, huh?

In this week’s belated Lying in the Gutters column, Rich Johnston dipped deep into his nerd knowledge to point out something I don’t think I’ve heard anyone mention…not the dumb-ass Marvel fans who don’t see what the problem is or Quesada himself, who was sure to promise that no actual rape occurred in the book or was being alluded to in the cover image:


Joe Quesada, on Friday, amply justified it by saying "First, I think people are reading way too much into that cover than was ever intended. I heard terms such as 'tentacle rape' being thrown around when that in no way is what's happening, nor does it happen in the book. Those tentacles are the arms of the Brood who appears in the issue and is a major story point, the Brood have tentacles, sorry about that."

You can read the rest in the interview, but as I recall, the tentacles of the Brood, along with their stingers, are used to implant other races with their eggs, their stolen-from-Alien method of reproduction. The eggs then hatch and take over the host organism. Needless to say without the host's consent.

So, quite literally, the Brood do indeed rape their victims with their tentacles.



(Above: The Brood, apparently attempting to rape the X-Men)

Johnston also interviews C.B. Cebulksi, who was apparently the go-between who hooked artist Sana Takeda and Marvel up for the cover. It’s interesting to hear his reaction, but isn’t anyone going to ask Quesada, the book’s editors or Takeda herself about it? (And by “ask about it,” I mean do more than say “Hey, how about that controversy over the cover, huh?” and leave it at that*).

Cebulski seems to take the position that the comics blogosphere it beating up on Takeda, which, honestly, I haven’t seen any of (Of course, maybe I’m just not reading the same blogs that Cebulski is). Everything I’ve read has been directed at Marvel editorial; the few negative things directed toward Takeda that I’ve seen have been along the lines of “I’m not a fan of manga art” or “That’s not how black women’s hair works” or “Way to contribute to the Western-only comics audience’s stereotypes that manga is nothing but scantily clad women with big eyes being groped by tentacles.”

And for the last word on “Heroes For Hentai” (at least for today), let’s go to Steven Grant:

Marvel hasn't responded that I know of to the groundswell of criticism, but the litany is by this time familiar: the complainers don't know the characters, don't get the context, they're not the intended audience, and they're reading too much into the cover.

This may be true. As Freud once said, sometimes a long, stiff flesh tube threateningly approaching helplessly bound, abused and goo-spattered women as sinister hordes of eager eyes watch excitedly in the background is just a long, stiff flesh tube threateningly approaching helplessly bound, abused and goo-spattered women as sinister hordes of eager eyes watch excitedly in the background.





—As someone who’s spent time making fun of how terrible everything about DC’s current Supergirl is, I think I’m actually going to feel a little guilty if I don’t buy the book when the new writer and new artist take it in a new direction, a direction that includes an art style and skill level that seems to be devoted to portraying a real girl wearing real clothes. Renato Guedes’ “concept art” is remarkable (to me) in that he does nothing to alter this Supergirl’s costume (short of lengthening the skirt a bit); he simply draws it like it’s composed out of cloth and fits the girl wearing it. And it’s a vast, vast improvement.

I’m probably still not going to buy Supergirl (Mainly because I try to avoid pointless reboots whenever possible so as not to encourage DC to keep up their bad habit, and this particular one was one of the worst, as it occurred before the universe-wide continuity reboot).

But I will definitely make fun of Supergirl less.

Probably.





—It occurs to me that it has been days since I’ve said anything derisive about Michael Turner. So I guess it’s a good thing that Marvel gave Newsarama.com a look at Turner’s cover for World War Hulk #1.

Click on over if you’re dying to see a not very good drawing of much of the Marvel Universe’s biggest characters, and, if you do click there, do note that the entire image seems to be composed around the principle of not drawing feet.

In that respect, this may be the greatest Turner cover ever.

We get a big shot of the Hulk from the shins up or so, with small, background renditions of over twenty different Marvels positioned behind the Hulk’s body, fanning out with their feet hidden behind Hulk.

There’s almost 25 characters there, which amounts to almost 50 individual feet, and I applaud Turner’s ability to solve the problem. He gets away with having to draw but one, partial foot—Spider-Man’s left one (It’s hard to tell due to her size in the photo, but I think Wasp’s feet are hidden behind Punisher’s bicep).

Any way you look at it, it takes a lot of skill, imagination and guts to draw that many characters in a single image and find a way to avoid drawing so many feet.



—Note: I suck at drawing feet too, and find superhero boots and/or leotard-ed feet much more challenging than drawing bare feet or feet wearing shoes. (I intentional cut these guys off at the shins so as not to have to deal with their weird superhero footwear in this picture, and did a piss-poor job of Dinah and Diana’s feet in this one.

So don’t feel bad, Michael Turner. You’re in good company in your dislike of drawing feet. Well, you’re not alone, anyway. (I believe Gary Trudeau and Rob Liefeld also have an aversion to foot-drawing).




*Not that I blame Matt Brady for not busting Quesada’s balls about it in “New Joe Fridays.” Newsarama.com is not a site for that sort of reporting in general, and that particular column is simply a place for Quesada to hype Marvel and for Newsaramites to enjoy mediated interaction with Quesada. I’m sure Brady can only push so hard on these sorts of issues for fear of jeopardizing the site’s relationship with Marvel. Which, if ended, would reduce the content the site puts up that visitors are interested in by, oh, 50% or so.

Given all that though, I still don’t understand why Quesada took the question at all. I imagine if he was like, “Look Matt, I can’t really talk about that right now, can we just skip that question?” Brady would have complied and just not posted the exchange at all. It’s not like Quesada’s doing live, televised interviews with the comics press corps in these things.

Nor do I understand why Quesada gave such a poor answer to the question; he really sounds a little clueless about manga, Marvel alien species, comics audiences, geek culture, online comics culture and Marvel’s self-imposed ratings system. And I don’t mean to imply that he is clueless; just that he sounds clueless, and that was therefore a terrible answer. Not only did he whiff on a softball, he seems to have taken the ball right in the groin.