Review: A-Force Vol. 0: Warzones!

I read the first issue of writers G. Willow Wilson and Marguerite Bennett and pencil artist Jorge Molina's five-issue A-Force miniseries shortly after it was first released, and had summed it up thusly: "It's not very good, but it's not bad either; it's well-crafted, What If..?-style continuity gobbledygook." The series has since ended and been collected and published as A-Force Vol. 0, and I'm afraid reading the other four-fifths of the series didn't alter that assessment any.

If anything, I disliked the trade more than I disliked that first single issue, as with so much of the story yet-to-be-published, one could at least hope it would get better in the following four issues.

It did not.

Unlike the handful of Secret Wars-related collections I've read so far (Runaways, Weirdworld, 1872), A-Force is quite deeply rooted in the particulars of the main series' "Battleworld" setting, and completely lacking in any sort of premise, or even organizing principle, of its own. So on the one hand, it seems overly concerned with the specifics of Secret Wars and Battleworld, but, on the other hand, it seems completely random in its construction and narrative.

This particular region/domain of Battleworld is a tiny, Mediterranean-style island home to versions of just about every superhero in the Marvel Universe, plenty of civilians and zero supervillains. It's unclear what the super-people do all day, or why they even bother with costumes and codenames. She-Hulk is the domain's "Baroness," which is the local ruler who answers to Victor Von Doom, god-king of Battleworld. The borders of Battleworld are strictly patrolled and enforced by The Thors, which are various Marvel heroes who have been Thor-ized. There are a lot of rules and politics involved in administration and borders, which drive the plot of this mini in a way that is unusual among the few books I've read so far. In fact, the central conflict of A-Force involves a bad actor gaming the rules of Battleworld for political gain. So not the most exciting of plotlines, if you're not really, really into that aspect of Secret Wars.

As for the premise of the series, it seems like it was decided on some meta, macro level well ahead of the first draft of the script. The idea was apparently What If...All The Avengers Were Women?, loudly declared on the cover of the first issue (and the trade collection) in which Jim Cheung draws pretty much every Marvel heroine he can fit in a single image, even those who don't get so much as a cameo inside the book (Snowbird? Moondragon?). Marvel quickly adopted "A-Force" as a way to brand comics starring their female heroes, too, as they launched those A-Force Presents anthology collections of early issues of Thor, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel and so on.

But the story within never addresses the fact that Arcadia's completely unnecessary superhero team–again, no super-villains, no street crime and a population that seems to be about 75% superhero–consists only of female super-people (Luke Cage, Black Bolt and Namor cameo in the first issue; by the last issue, we'll also see that Black Panther, Commander Rogers, The Winter Soldier, Colossus, Gambit and other male heroes make their homes in Arcadia too). And the particular female characters who make up the team are pretty random: She-Hulk, Medusa, Dazzler, Captain Marvel, Loki, Nico Minoru and America "Miss America" Chavez (Spider-Woman and Pixie are among the characters who seem to be on the team too, but don't get much panel-time). Apparently these are just the characters Bennett and/or Wilson and/or Molina wanted to write about and/or draw for five issues (Molina's preferences might indicate why they chose to use the disco-era version of Dazzler, roller skates and all; I'm assuming he just really liked drawing her plunging neckline in that particular costume, given how often it's in the book; in terms of characterization, the characters are all completely interchangeable, and any handful of characters could fill the roles this handful play).

Adding to the shoulder-shrugging randomness of a core super-team consisting of a pair of Avengers, an Inhumans/Fantastic Four character, a member of the X-Men, one of The Runaways and the trans-feminated version of Thor's archenemy is the fact that everyone's powers seem weird and random. Miss America and Dazzler can fly now, for example, and Nico's magic powers don't work like they did in Runaways. Oh, and the relationships are all kinda weird. Like Loki is the mother figure of Nico and America, who are the best friends in the world here, despite the fact that I don't think they've ever even met prior to this comic...?

So, what have we got? A-Force is on a routine patrol when suddenly they are attacked by a Megaladon. America throws it so hard that it lands outside of Arcadia's domain, and so a Thor version of The Falcon shows up to arrest her, and exile her to somewhere. Everyone's mad that She-Hulk was unable to stop this from happening (Despite arguing with Dr. Strange, who is Dr. Doom's "sherrif"...?), but, when she investigates, she finds that the prehistoric monster shark was imported via a magical portal.

Later, a little girl who looks like a night sky falls to the Earth and befriends Nico. This is a new character named Singularity. And another portal opens, this one dropping a Sentinel on Arcadia, and when Shulkie and company follow it back to where it came from, more members of the Thor Coprs–Valkyrie, Gamorra and Sif–show up to make more arrests. It's quickly determined that the person opening the portals is using Asgardian magic, and thus the person causing all of the trouble turns out to be the one who is literally the only supervillain in the whole domain.

When she's busted, Loki plans to take Arcadia down with her, knocking down a wall separating their domain from the next one over, which is apparently that of the Marvel Zombies. That, at least, leads to a fifth issue that consists mostly of Marvel heroes fighting zombies, and cameos aplenty. This is actually a lot of fun, if only in a spot-the-character kind of way, as a reader can wait to see if their favorites show up in a panel, several of which aim for cute little pairings, like Spider-Gwen rescuing MJ, or Jessica Jones protecting Luke and Danielle or living light-show characters Dazzler, Jubilee and Karolina side by side. I liked seeing that Nico wasn't the only Runaway on Arcadia, at least; Gert shows up atop Old Lace, and Molly shares a panel with Colossus.

Like the Weirdworld collection, this one is labeled "Vol. 0" because it's leading to a new ongoing series, set in the "real" (and post-Secret Wars) Marvel Universe. Presumably that will have a clearly defined premise of some sort, beyond "The Creators Liked These Characters And Had 100 Pages To Kill On A Secret Wars Tie-In."

Review: Thor Vol. 1: The Goddess of Thunder

I liked this run of comic books an awful lot, and found it to be a very well-made, very fun story set in the traditional milieu of Marvel's Thor comics, but finding something new and exciting to do within that milieu.

That said, I'm fairly certain the fact that I enjoyed it as much as I did had to do with the fact that I'm reading it now (just last night, in fact), collected into a five-issue trade long after the individual issues were originally published. The true identity of the new Thor has already been revealed, so before even reading the first panel of this collection I knew the actually secret secret identity of the woman in the mask on the front cover. So I didn't concentrate on the mystery aspects of the comic while I was reading, an aspect that is a large part of what seems to have been driving the Jason Aaron-written, Russell Dauterman-drawn Thor series.

Had I been reading this series serially, I'd be pretty damn outraged that Marvel was selling the story as the shocking replacement of Thor by a female character (which was apparently garbled here and there, as I recall it being reported that Thor himself was actually being turned into a woman, rather than a woman was getting Thor's hammer and thus his powers and title), and then keeping that character's identity out of the first issue. And the second. And third, fourth and fifth. I haven't really been keeping up with it, but I believe it might have been a full eight issues until the identity of the new Thor was revealed (it's not done so in this collection), and by that point a reader has spent the better part of a year and over $30 on the story.

It is a good story, but it must have been frustrating as hell to show up month and after month to spend $3.99 on a "Who Is Thor?" story...and never get an answer, or even much of a clue.

See, as far as mysteries go, there are actually two of them in Thor, one of which leads to the other. At the climax of Marvel's Original Sin event story (also written by Aaron), Nick Fury whispers something in Thor's ear, which causes the Odinson to drop his hammer and from then on be unable to lift it. Whatever Fury whispered to Thor, the hearing of it somehow rendered Thor unworthy.

How would that work, exactly? What kind of secret knowledge instantly nullifies one's worth, upon being made aware of it? I don't know. That mystery doesn't get solved here either. Thor spends the majority of the first issues on the moon (where the hammer fell) trying in vain to lift it, and talking to it while ignoring his parents and the other Asgardians trying to talk to him. Later, upon getting very drunk in a tavern, he talks about the whisper, but is too drunk or too unwilling to elaborate on it when his friends ask.

So that's why there's a new Thor. Unable to lift Mjolnir, Thor's still Thor, but he's not as Thor as he is with it, you know? At the end of that issue, a woman off-panel walks up to the hammer, says "There must always be a Thor," and then reaches for the handle. An "S" appears before the "he" part of "Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of...Thor," and we gt a splash page revealing the new, female Thor.

I won't even pretend to know how Thor's powers "work." Originally (like, in the '60s), it was a lame doctor named Donald Blake who, upon lifting the hammer, became the Asgardian god Thor in a classic superhero transformation, but that was decades ago. I didn't understand that exactly, in terms of whether Thor and Blake were two completely different people, and what happened to the other when one was on-panel, so I certainly haven't been keeping up with the rules of Thor's transformations over the years.

With Blake, he changed appearances fairly completely, but in the other examples I've seen of people being able to lift Mjolnir, they can simply lift it, they don't transform into Thor, or buffer, blonder versions of themselves. So I won't get into whether this woman should become a man when lifting the hammer or anything.

I do wonder why she has a mask; she says she needs it, but there's no evidence of why she might within this volume. If Mjolnir changes the person holding it so completely–and she does get rather radically physically altered when she transforms–she really shouldn't need a mask. It's just there to give He-Thor something to wonder about, I guess; Dauterman is a fine artist, but all of his female's faces look enough alike that if She-Thor weren't wearing a mask, it's not like one would recognize her anyway

(Additionally, the lady who is really Thor doesn't have, like, an eye-patch or jagged scar or anything that would distinguish her from Generic Looking Comic Book Lady; every Marvel artist draws every Marvel woman their own way, and most of them seem to draw them all alike, so there's nothing by which to distinguish, say, Sue Storm from Emma Frost from Magik save their costumes.)

He-Thor doesn't seem to get too serious about sussing out the identity of She-Thor until the fifth issue, when he pulls an adorable scroll full of suspects out of his belt and crosses off a name with a quill pen.

As a mystery, Aaron's Thor is a bum one. There's only one woman (i.e. suspect) in the first issue, prior to She-Thor becoming She-Thor, and that's He-Thor's mom, Freyja. Later, She-Thor kisses He-Thor in a very un-motherly way, thus convincng the Odinson that it wasn't his mom who took his hammer.

The only other suspect in these five issues is Sif, who denies having the hammer, but wouldn't be above kissing He-Thor like that, even if she does seem pretty unhappy with him during their scene together (the climax of which is in the above panels).

Now, mystery aspects aside, like I said, I enjoyed this a lot, and found it to be a very well-made comic.

The power struggle between the two Thors mirrors that of Odin and Freyja. The All-Father left Asgard, now a floating city called Asgardia, for, um, reasons, and he left Freyja in charge as The All-Mother. Upon his return, he wants to be the boss again, which doesn't sit too terribly well with Freyja. Aaron's Odin is a wonderfully one-note character, all anger and bluster and more anger; he's even made amends with his long-lost brother, the bad guy from Fear Itself (Aaron's Odin is, essentially, the J. Jonah Jameson of Thor now).

While the Asgardians bicker, an army of frost giants marches on an undersea facility belonging to Roxxon, and while He-Thor can't get his magic hammer up, he eventually gets his shit together enough to grab his magic axe, mount one of his giant flying goats, and go to the bottom of the ocean to kill giants.

They have an unexpected ally in dark elf Malekith, who chops off Thor's arm and leaves him for dead.

It is then up to the new Thor, She-Thor, to try and save the day. Malekith (who both looks and acts infinitely cooler than the completely generic, personality-free villain he was in Thor: The Dark World) and the giants march on a flying Roxxon base, intent on getting a maguffin from Roxxon CEO (and shape-changing magic minotaur) Dario Agger. They've taken out The Avengers off-panel, leaving it to the new Thor to save the day.

She's almost there when the old Thor shows up, now outfitted with a dwarven-forged Uru robot arm, to fight the new Thor for his hammer. In classic Marvel style, the pair fight and then team up to defeat their common foes.

That is, in essence, the events of the first four issues, a fine introduction to a fine new direction. Aaron and Dauterman both excel at not only depicting the super-gods of the Marvel Universe in a way that makes them seem alien (from one angle) or mythic (from another), but also matter-of-fact. The delivery is deadpan, but that doesn't make it seem any less funny, or any less natural; a war-like society of space-gods on a flying city orbiting the moon is just the way things are, you know? Just as a private school for mutants run by superheroes is just the way things were in Aaron's Wolverine and The X-Men.

I really liked the new Thor almost immediately. Aaron writes her as almost two people in one. She talks in Thor-font, and with a heroic certainty, but thought clouds generally appear between her dialogue bubbles, questioning how she knows something or other, or why she said what she just said, or if superheroes should act in a particular way or another. It fits in nicely with the character, but, again, if I didn't know who the new Thor was, I imagine this would just read as a little weird (It does seem to eliminate Freyja and Sif though, who are perfectly comfortable in the world of Thor, and signal that whoever the new Thor may be, she's a normal woman from Earth, and not another superhero like, I don't know, Valkyrie, or is Thor Girl from The Initiative still alive?).

I also liked her desgin, and the way Dauterman draws her. The costume is even more "realistic" than that of previous Mjolnir-wielders, with only the red cape looking particularly superheroic. The mask, as odd as it seems that Thor would wear a mask, actually looks pretty cool, and immediately distinguishes the character from other Thors–because it's part of a helmet, and one with the upswept wings of the original Thor helm, it looks functional rather than a disguise.

I also like how relatively slim and little Dauterman draws the new Thor. She's not musclebound like the male Thor (and why would she be? Her super-strength comes from magic, not her muscles), nor is she a buxom default superheroine. Rather, she has to tilt her head to look up at Thor, she's got toned but slim arms, small breasts and generally looks too small to be doing many of the things she's doing–which makes for a particularly good contrast for her foes, actual giants, and, for a few pages, the old Thor himself, and makes it all the more visually dramatic when she wins those fights

(The variant cover artists don't stick to Dauterman's design. Sara Pichelli, Fiona Staples, Esad Ribic, Phil Noto and Arthur Adams all draw a very big and very buxom female Thor. In Adams' case, it was certainly to be expected, but dam it looks weird that they're encased in metal but are so...breast-y. The worst of all is probably Andrew Robinson's. And by "worst" I simply mean "at keeping true to the design of the character in the book. See below.)

The fifth issue in the collection features a guest-artist (at least, I hope it's just a guest artist; I really like Dauterman's work here) in Jorge Molina (He drew the panels with Sif and the scroll earlier in the post). The issue reads like an epilogue to the arc that fills up most of the collection, by the end of which He-Thor tells She-Thor that not only is she worthy of the hammer, but she should also use the name "Thor," so now I will quit calling them He-Thor and She-Thor, and resigns to go by "Odinson" himself.

On Earth, er, Midgard, Thor fights The Absorbing Man and Titania in Times Square, while in Asgardia Odin and his evil bro plot to find out who this new Thor is, and the Odinson very clumsily plays detective, but man, I love his scroll of suspects.

If the lady who is now Thor is going to keep being Thor for a while (and the post-Secret Wars Avengers line-up seems to indicate that she is), then I hope The Odinson moves to Midgard, rents an office and starts working as a private investigator.

Review: A-Force #1

I've been quite curious about the Secret Wars premise as a whole, and I was made more curious about this title in particular thanks to Jill Lepore’s article in which she dismissed the characters as all resembling porn stars, and her son and her son’s friends mention of all the characters having “cleavages” (The only cleavage on the cover I note is Dazzler’s and, within the book itself, Loki’s, Namora’s (in just the one panel) and Nico Minoru’s (depending on the angle, in just a few of the panels she appears in). But then I guess I shouldn’t put too much stock in 10-year-old boys’ understandings of and usage of certain vocabulary. That's the part of the article that really stuck with me though, because I like the way they used "cleavages" as a plural and all).

As this was the first Serect Wars book I had access to (i.e. my friend bought it, so I didn’t have to blow $4 of my own money on a 21-page comic book.), I figured I should read and maybe write about it here, on the Internet, which I am now doing.

So, the Secret Wars tie-ins are apparently really beginning en medias res, huh? This book opens with a first page of six, small, tight, horizontal panels, and then a two-page splash page(s) filling up the second and third pages.

In the first, the narrator–presumably She-Hulk, as she's standing front and center and filling the most space on the crowded cover–talks in poetic language about an island, while we see see a half-dozen rapid fire images of seven female superheroes and some civilians (Is that Luke Cage in panel three? Or is it racist of me to assume every huge, super-cut bald black guy pushing a stroller with a baby in it and standing next to a white lady with dark hair is Luke Cage?). The narrationboxes are green instead of standard yellow or white; another good indication that it's She-Hulk (who is, remember, green).

On the splash, we see roller skate-era Dazzler, X-Person Pixie, Runaway Nico Minoru, Ms. America (America Chavez version) and Captain Marvel Carol Danvers flying over a big, beautiful, vaguely Mediterranean-looking island nation: "Welcome to Arcadia," a little green box says, followed immediately by another that add "It's pretty tight."

No sooner had I begun to question whether or not Miss America and Dazzler could fly and how Nico Minoru could without using The Staff of One (and why she'd waste a flight spell on patrolling) when the title page interrupts, explaining this much at least about Secret Wars:

More about the rules of this new "patchwork" world (their words, not mine!) become clear as one reads on, as apparently She-Hulk is "the baroness" of Arcadia, the Thors police the world and enforce its rules and Dr. Strange is apparently higher-up the pecking order than some (I got a bit of a House of M vibe from the page in which Shulkie and Dr. Strange talk Battleworld politics, to be honest).

As for the plot, there's not much to it for a first issue, and the bigger, more obvious questions go unanswered–Why is it called Arcadia? Why is the team called A-Force? Why is A-Force composed entirely of female characters, particularly if there are at least a few super-dudes in town?

During a routine, morning patrol, a gigantic monster shark with spikes on its face that we're told is a Megaladon attacks America, the patrolling super-people kicks its ass and, after it's down, Ms. America picks it up and throws it...out of the bowl...that the ocean is in...maybe?

I didn't follow this part, just in the visual mechanics of it.

And there's a ghost in the background...I think....?

As throwing monster sharks out of the borders of a place is against the laws of Doom, America is to be arrested by the Thor version of The Falcon (sadly not Accompanied by Redwing in a little viking helmet), and she's to suffer some terrible punishment that readers won't know enough about to guess the exact nature of.

Female Loki and Medusa are kind of catty about She-Hulk being unable to stop this from happening, and Nico, who is apparently super-tight with America in this new setting with what I assume must be a new, jumbled continuity (She doesn't need her staff ever for anything, apparently!). She-Hulk turns to help from Namorita, Namora and Namor, as apparently Megaladon don't naturally occur in the ocean bowl outside of Arcadia, and when the three sea-going superheroes investigate, they find something that we'll have to wait until next issue to find out about .

Namorita, I should note, has a seashell over one breast, not both breasts, as Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker. Man, it's weird Jill Lepore wrote about A-Force in The New Yorker and discussed Namorita's breasts. It's weirder still that she messed up that part, as it's not like she was dealing with very big or complicated numbers. Namorita only has two breasts; we're dealing with numbers between one and two here.

I still can't wrap my head around that article's existence. Why did Marvel give Lepore a copy of this book, instead of Secret Wars, or any of their billion Avengers titles? Why did Lepore decide to write about this in relation to Avengers: Age of Ultron, as if this book were somehow the most representative of Marvel comics? So weird.

The book is written by G. Willow Wilson and Marguerite Bennett, and drawn by Jorge Molina, who both pencils and inks (with Craig Yeung helping out on inks and two colorists needed for the 21 pages, for some reason).

It's not very good, but it's not bad either; it's well-crafted, What If..?-style continuity gobbledygook. Characters are introduced, characters that have the names and appearances of some fairly familiar if minor Marvel characters but are essentially brand-new, based on their characterization and their relationships. A few conflicts are introduced, ones that will likely be explored during the remainder of the series, with the way in which the book ties into Secret Wars proper becoming more clear as it goes on.

The artwork is fine, but unspectacular; Molina's work is almost perfectly clear and well-executed, in a style that doesn't distract form the story, with the only real confusing bit occurring during what was unfortunately a rather key moment (the bit with the border violation). I don't like the way he draws Megaladons, but I guess I've never seen one in person, so I really can't claim he's drawn it wrong.

All in all, it's a perfectly acceptable, laughably over-priced, mediocre comic book from Marvel. Thinking back on Lepore's attacks on it and Wilson's defense of the book, it's hard to understand what either of them got worked up about, as it reads like nothing more than paycheck comics-writing devoted to 1/75th of a line-wide event series of the sort Marvel publishes on the regular.

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I just went back and re-read Lepore's article, having now read the comic book she devoted so much New Yorker ink to. This is the second-to-last paragraph:

There’s an underwater superhero in the A-Force, but we couldn’t figure out her name. All I remember is: she wore a seashell on each breast.

Here's the panel in which "the underwater superhero" is introduced:

So not only did she mess up the math on the seashells-to-breasts ratio, she also miscounted the number of underwater superheroes (I see three; am I blind? There are three there, right?) and she couldn't figure out their names, which are written there?

I could understand Lepore not knowing which of the three characters belongs to which of the three names, but even without the benefit of knowing who any of them are or Googling 'em, she and her 10-year-old co-writers should at least be able to narrow the name down to one of three likely possibilities, right?

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I just saw a link to this today, proving that The New Yorker isn't the only completely idiotic print media institution to publish bizarrely out-of-touch stories about superhero comics as if their staff and their audiences haven't heard anything about them since the Kennedy administration. George Gene Gustines' "Fashion & Style" page article "Sorry, Batman: Dick Grayson Outgrows the Robin Costume" lets NYT readers know that Dick Grayson is all grown-up and no longer Robin, thus catching them up to the year 1984 in the character's development.

Maybe in another five years, GGG and the NYT can write a story about how Jason Todd was murdered by The Joker ("Holy Murder, Batman! Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!") or that Batgirl was shot and paralyzed by The Joker.

Review: Wolverine and The X-Men Vol. 4

Wow, I guess the 12-issue Avengers Vs. X-Men series must have lasted a lot longer than I expected, given that the this five-issue collection is the second straight collection of this title tying directly into the line-wide crossover story.

As with Vol. 3, the Avengers Vs. X-Men series plot more-or-less takes over the book, with the issues collected herein consisting mostly of done-in-one stories that take place in and around plot beats from AvX, with writer Jason Aaron striving valiantly to move his own sub-plots forward (and sometimes succeeding quite admirably). There are three art teams involved in these issues, with pencil artist Jorge Molina and inker Norman Lee handling three issues, pencil artist Chris Bachalo and a trio of inkers handling a single issue, and Michael Allred coming aboard for a single issue in order to draw the collection's highlight, a story featuring his co-creation Doop.

In the first issue, one of the Molina issue, the Phoenix-possessed Colossus arrives at the Jean Grey School in order to ask headmistress Kitty Pryde, who has been mostly sitting out the conflict in order to keep the school going and the kids safe, out on a date. She complies, in order to try and talk her old friend (and old boyfriend) out of the mad god/cosmic supervillain territory he and the rest of the "Phoenix Five" are quickly edging into (At this point in the main storyline, they've started imprisoning defeated Avengers in an infernal prison camp, and many of the other X-Men are starting to have serious doubts about siding with Cyclops over the Avengers, here dramatized by series regular Iceman walking out on on the crazy mutants). I like the way Molina draws Iceman...he's still a spiky, but not as spikey, and he's not wearing those cargo shorts.

The date doesn't go well, and Colossus is ready to destroy Kitty's school, when its few feeble defenders—Kitty, Deathlok, Lockheed, Husk, Toad, Doop and Krakoa—convince Colossus to leave them alone for now via their apparently willingness to die for the school. Colossus is sad.

Molina draws the second issue as well, a pause-before-the-storm one in which the remaining teens from Utopia enroll at the school, Avengers Iron Man and Iron Fist consult with Beast and Broo about how to deal with the Phoenix Force, Charles Xavier shows up to look over the grounds and briefly deal with Quentin Quire, and then Xavier, Angel, Beast, Wolverine, Rachel Grey and Iceman go off for their final battle with the be-Phoneixed Cyclops and company.

Bachalo then shows up to draw a Hellfire Kids issue, which basically shows what they've been up to now that mutants are ruling their world with their nearly omnipotent powers. While their leader Kade Kilgore tells the readers the story of how he took over the Hellfire Club and went into the business of building and selling Sentinels, Cyclops and company show up, have some words with Kilgore and throw the kids into an adult prison, where they wait out the current status quo, and actually fare much better than one might expect a handful of little kids to.

That's followed by the Allred issue. Entitled "Wolverine's Secret Weapon," it's the story of how Wolverine convinced Doop to join the teaching staff at the school—a three-page sequence in which Doop has Wolverine to try and keep up with him. When Wolvie complies with all of his requests, no matter how difficult and/or embarassing, Doop takes on the position of the Jean Grey shcool's fixer. Doop, it turns out, is the best there is and what he does, and what he doesn't not only isn't very pretty, it's incredibly weird.

So Doop violently deals with hate groups and monsters, seduces local city council officials—male and female—to change their votes, has scary-rough sex with Warbird, out-metals Satan in a "Devil to Georgia"-like guitar duel, competes on the Avengers roller derby team (on his hands, if you're wondering where he puts his skates), baseball bats the laptops of bloggers bad mouthing the school, time-travelling to safeguard Charles Xavier's ancestors, and so on.

It's the kind of craziness Aaron excels at—"We're trapped in a cave in Dimension ZZZ, surrounded by hordes of bloodthirsty robo-barbarians, with nothing between us but a broken sword, a rubber chicken with nails in it, and a gun that shoots bees"—without even the porous filter of a semi-serious X-Men comic tamping down on any of it. Allred is, of course, game for anything, and this issue, in which every panel or four switches to a different scene of madness, gives hima whole bunch of crazy shit to draw...and a pretty big chunk of the Marvel Universe, actually. In addition to the Wolverine and The X-Men cast, he also gets to draw such unexpected characters as Howard The Duck, Tigra, She-Hulk, Gambit, Man-Thing, Deadpool, Sabretooth and more.

It's pretty much the best thing ever. (And a welcome break from the increasingly serious events of Avengers Vs. X-Men.)

The final book returns to the AVX plot, and to Molina and Lee and artists. Aaron jumps back and forth between the final battle between the Cyclops and Pretty Much Everyone Else, the one that ultimately ends with (spoiler!) Cyclops killing Xavier and the Phoenix Force being diffused to restart the mutant race, just as Cyclops had hoped it would, and between the events at the school. These include Husk leaving the teaching staff, Idie acting strangely, and Broo trying to get to the bottom of Idie's strange behavior, which exposes a new and weird plot by those Hellfire kids. In a particularly affecting scene, the Stepford Cuckoos, monitoring the battle via Cerebra, see so many new lights appearing, as the Phoenix Force starts making new mutants again, that no one notices that one light goes out.

As with the previous collection of the series, I'm curious how this reads to someone not following Avengers Vs. X-Men, as so much of it is written as direct reactions (The Doop issue aside, which is the only issue that doesn't refer to AVX at all). Aaron does a pretty good job of writing a long string of tie-ins without completely surrendering his own plotting in service to what it's tie-ing in to, however. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Aaron co-plotted AVX and wrote portions of it, and thus knew it inside and outside well enough to intertwine it with the events of his own book.