Review: Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2: Angela

In an attempt to convert interest in a major motion picture into comics sales, Marvel seems to be pretty aggressively reprinting anything even tangentially related to the characters starring in the upcoming Guardians of The Galaxy movie, and launching three new Guardians-related series this year, in addition to the ongoing monthly Guardians book.

I wish anyone who likes what they've seen of the movie Guardians thus far and decides to see what the comics offer the best of luck in trying to sort out what to read in which order,  and I hope they find the experience an enjoyable one. The current ongoing monthly series, the one written by Brian Michael Bendis, kinda sorta began in the pages of Avengers Assemble in a storyline that has since been released as a collection simply entitled Avengers Assemble (a title which is a pretty common one for books featuring the Avengers).

Three collections of Bendis' Guardians of The Galaxy series have been released thus far. The first, Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 1: Tomorrow's Avengers was kind of a mess. It featured five comics. A special "#0.1" prequel issue that told the origin of Peter "Star-Lord" Quill, the first three issues of the series and the one-shot Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers, which featured short, solo-ish stories featuring the various characters all drawn by different artists and joining/re-joining Quill's team. Read in book form, it's borderline incoherent, as it is essentially three different beginnings to a story that never gets going, and while there's a lot of talent involved in turning Bendis's scripts into good-looking comics, it's hard to imagine a more inconsistent-looking book.

Here's the credits page, for an idea of how many artists were involved in just those first five Bendis-written, Guardians of the Galaxy-entitled comics:

The narrative actually gets harder to follow in the second volume, as the events of the Bendis-written Age of Ultron line-wide crossover event series and the Jonathan Hickman-written Infinity line-wide crossover event series take place between some of the issues collected herein, and each pushes the book in a different direction than the one it seemed to be naturally flowing in (and which Bendis seems to be intending it to go in during the first three issues of the series, collected in the previous volume).

It's possible to read this volume in isolation, without having read Age or Infinity, but I'm unsure how much sense it will make.

This volume collects Guardians of the Galaxy #4-#10, once again by Bendis and a bevy of talented artists. There are some particularly weird credits here though, like a "consultant" one for Neil Gaiman, which comes above that of all the artists involved:

Sara Pichelli is the main artist for the first four of these issues, "with" other artists helping out on two of them. These begin with The Guardians enjoying some down-time in a space-bar, at least until a bar fight breaks out and a bounty-hunter tries to kill Gamora.

After that issue, the next three deal with the mysterious fallout form the "time is broken" climax of Bendis' Age of Ultron, which gave Star-Lord a strange vision and somehow landed Angela, the one-time supporting character from the pages of Image Comics' Spawn that her co-creators writer Neil Gaiman and artist Todd McFarlane have been fighting over in court for years, in the Marvel Universe.

The character is a pretty generic '90s bad girl character, of the sort one might expect Gaiman to be ashamed to have his name attached to. As originally conceived, she was an angel from Heaven (named Angela...Angel-a....GET IT?!) whose mission was to come to Earth and hunt Spawns with a big sword, wearing little more than a metal bra and long ribbons.

As a character, she is most interesting for her behind-the-scenes history, as it involves such important figures in the North American comics industry of the 1990s as Gaiman and MacFarlane, and her introduction into the Marvel Universe is most interesting in that it seems like it has more to do with Gaiman and Marvel getting together to say "Fuck you, Todd MacFarlane" in stereo.

Here the character, who the collection is named after, is largely divorced from her own  pre-existent history. After fighting the Guardians for about two issues, she eventually claims to come from a place called "Heven," where she was being trained to be a hunter, and to have never even been to Earth, although she's heard stories of it (I suppose there's something kind of interesting in the characters' parallel situations; Angela's from Heaven and only heard stories of Earth, while Quill and Tony Stark are from Earth and have only heard stories of Heaven, although Bendis does nothing other than point out that parallel in this volume).

After fighting, capturing, meeting and releasing Angela, the Guardians and their  book then jumps into an Infinity tie-in story, with Francesco Francavilla taking over art and coloring chores. The Guardians attempt to rescue SWORD's Abigail Brand, who Bendis writes exactly like he writes SHIELD's Maria Hill, from the alien-controlled SWORD HQ. Captain America calls on them to join him and The Avengers in...something that apparently happens in Infinity or a tie-in, as after the two Francavilla issues, the story jumps again to some sort of post-Infinity storyline, in which The Guardians, now missing Stark but with Angela apparently on their team, are searching for Thanos.

That last issue is drawn by Kevin Maguire, who is maybe the ideal collaborator for Bendis, given the former's skills with facial expressions and the latter's preference for filling his scripts with panel after panel of talking heads.

All three of the primary artists are incredibly skilled ones, but none of them draw anything at all like one another, and the book's visuals are as scattered as its narrative, which, because it is so dependent on the events of other books, where the plots in some of these individual chapters actually begin and end, scans a bit like a movie with every third twenty-minute chunk excised from the run-time.

It has its pleasures—Bendis' banter, Francavilla drawing the very best Groot ever, the chance to see Maguire drawing a bunch of action scenes—but it's not a terribly coherent work, and I can't imagine anyone new to the property, to Marvel or to comics in general (i.e. the audience that Marvel seem to be targeting with all theses Guardians books) being able to make heads or (raccoon) tails out of it.

It doesn't seem like the title's going to get any easier to follow in the near future either, as the next volume, The Trial of Jean Grey, is a crossover with the X-Men, in which the teenage X-Men from the Silver Age marooned in the present day see their Jean Grey put on trial for crimes she will commit as an adult in the distant past of Marvel continuity.

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

You know what part I liked the least about this collection?

When the Guardians have finally subdued Angela on the surface of Earth's moon and taken her aboard their ship for interrogation, Quill hears her name and responds with a leer, "From 'Who's The Boss?' Angela? All grown up?"

On Who's The Boss?, "Angela" was the name of the character played by Judith Light, who was 35 when the show debuted and is now 65. I'm assuming the character Quill (and Bendis) meant was Samantha, played by Alyssa Milano, who was 12 when the show started and 21 when it ended and, as anyone who has seen Alyssa Milano since then can attest, grew up to be a particularly lovely woman.

Please note that I did not necessarily know or like Who's The Boss?, which I did not watch on purpose at any point during my life (I was 7 when it debuted, and 16 when it ended, if I did the math right), but I do have access to the Internet, and could thus spend the 10-20 seconds necessary to visit IMDb.com and determine that Milano's character was indeed named Samantha, and it was the grown-up lady on the show who was named Angela.

So what's the no-prize explanation here? In the Marvel Universe's version of Who's The Boss?, the characters played by Milno and Light had one another's names...?

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

According to Comics.org, there have only been eighteen issues of this volume of Guardians published so far, but they have 67 covers between them. That is a lot of variant covers.

Here are my two favorite from those included in the gallery in the back of this trade, the first is by Milo Manara and the second is by Skottie Young:

Review: Spider-Man: The Short Halloween

In 2009 Marvel published a one-shot comic written by extra-media celebrity dabblers Bill Hadler and Seth Myers of Saturday Night Live, drawn by the experienced and talented comics pro Kevin Maguire.

It was called The Short Halloween, a joking reference to Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s popular Batman: The Long Halloween limited series, although the only thing it shares in common with its namesake is that it takes place in part on Halloween. So it’s not really a joke so much as a reminder of another comic book which also exists.

The Short Halloween was only 34-pages long. Nevertheless, Marvel later published a hardcover “collection” of it, which would seem an impossibility, as how can you publish a collection of a single comic book...?

The answer is simple: Filler, and lots of it!

In this case, the filler that accounts for the remaining 106 pages of The Short Halloween (That’s right it’s just called The Short Halloween and not, repeat not, The Short Halloween and Other Stories), aren’t Halloween-related Spider-Man stories, or humorous Spider-Man stories, like the title one. That might make some amount of sense.

Rather, Marvel just stuck three issues of the short-lived but contemporaneous Spider-Man Family anthology series behind Short Halloween and called it a day (The three are issues #4-#6, if you’re counting).

It’s a pretty damn weird way to go about putting together a collection, and not simply because it’s so poorly labeled. I imagine anyone looking for those issues of Spider-Man Family might expect them to turn up in a trade with a title like, oh I don’t know, Spider-Man Family, maybe. And I imagine anyone picking this up are doing so for the title story, and while the nine or so shorter ones that follow it all are somehow Spider-Man related, they don’t organically fit with the title story (that is, they’re by different creators, they’re not Halloween related, they’re not exclusively humorous Spider-Man stories, etc).

Some of them do fit the comedy tone of the title story, however.

There are two installments of the silly Abby Denson-written “The Amazing Spider-Ma’m” (the first of which is drawn by Colleen Coover, who has drawn one of my all-time favorite Spider-Man panels), in which Aunt May borrows her nephews costume to fight neighborhood crime.

(Above: A panel from 2008's King Size Spider-Man Special #1, drawn by Colleen Coover, which I include here because it is awesome)

Writer Tom DeFalco finds a new way to keep Spider-Girl going with a couple of “Swiney-Girl” strips, which basically retell the basic Spider-Girl story with the heroine as the daughter of Peter Porker, Spider-Ham.

Both are presented as comedy pieces, although readers’ mileage will most certainly very. There are a couple of stories that are at least somewhat in the vein of the title story, in that they are serious and seem “canonical,” but have a great deal of humor in them, mostly generated by the hero’s own sense of humor (A Screwball story by Tony Lee, Mark Robinson and Walden Wong and a Marc Sumerak/Todd Nauck story in which Peter trails Carly while trying out as a crime scene photographer).

And then there are a couple that don’t seem to fit at all, like a long one by J.M. DeMatteis and Val Semeiks which explores the long, tragic relationship between Peter Parker and Harry Osborn (on the occasion of the latter suddenly coming back to life because of “One More Day”/editorial fiat), or the one where the dead Jackpot reflects on her life. Not a lot of laughs in those, really, nor in the old-fashioned melodramatic “Between Flights” story by Paul Tobin, Ron Frenz and Sal Buscema.

They’re all pretty good stories—well, the Swiney-Girl ones were rough going for me, actually. Let me start that sentence over: None of them are bad stories, exactly, they just seem out of place all smooshed together like this, and under the umbrella of the title of the title story.

That story, by the way, is remarkably good, especially considering the fact that its writers are new to comics. I generally think of Kevin Smith when I think of a celebrity or writer-from-another-media trying their hand at comics, probably because Smith was one of the first to do so in a high-profile way, and, Hader and Myers don’t show any of the signs of being new at or confused by this whole writing thing that showed up in Smith’s first, oh, two dozen or so comics scripts.

Maybe it has something to do with TV script-writing being somewhat similar to comics script-writing, or the fact that their story plays to their strengths by being a humorous piece divided into several related sketches, or maybe they simply worked their asses off to do it right, or maybe they just (even more simply) got lucky, but whatever the reason, their story didn’t read like the work of two completely new to comics writers.

It’s Halloween, and Spider-Man is engaged in battle with Fumes, founding member of the Furious Five (Shh! Don’t tell Grandmaster Flash or Kung Fu Panda!). A freak accident results in Spidey getting knocked out cold…in the same alley that a guy dressed up like Spider-Man for Halloween passes out drunk.

The fake Spider-Man’s friends grab the unconscious original and drag him back to the fake one’s apartment, while the fake Spider-Man ends up in the clutches of Fumes and his friends: Badger Teeth, Think, Haymaker and Gossip Girl (Shh! No one tell Cecily von Ziegesar!).

A few other complications are layered on top of the mistaken identity, including two dudes dressed as Doc Ock and the Green Goblin for Halloween who have a beef with the fake Spider-Man.

While the writing is sharp, it’s hard to imagine this particular story working quite as well as it did with any artist other than Maguire, a master of facial expressions and their subtle and not-so-subtle shifts, drawing it. He does his usual incredible job of designing distinct, real-looking people who all look different from one another, and selling gags and drama with his pencil acting.

Spider-Man: The Short Halloween—come for the title story, maybe stick around for the 100+ pages of random stories behind it…or don’t…?

I like this drawing:

It is, of course, by Kevin Maguire, and it depicts a rather fondly remembered moment from early in his run on DC' Justice League comics, the moment when Green Lantern Guy Gardner gets in Batman's face and wants to go mano-a-bate with him, and Batman casually knocks him cold with, as Blue Beetle excitedly repeats over and over, "One punch!"

Remember?

I like everything about the drawing up top, which would work just fine within the context of that story, if it were somehow magically inserted into it as a splash page (of course, back then Justice League artists used to draw as many as nine panels per page, and splash pages were rare, generally reserved only for one page of each 22-page issue).

I like the look on Batman's face, I like the casual stance he's in, implying the above wallop was just a casual, tossed off punch-in-the-face, I like the way the scallops of his cape frame the lower part of his figure, I like the comic book-y explosion and stars, I like the arc of Guy's body as he flies backwards through the air, folded in half by punch and gravity.

I would just link to the source of the image, but I found it on Facebook, via a comment of a friend who is friends with Maguire, so I'm not sure if you'll be able to see it or not. If so, it's here, and you can see more fine Maguire art here.

Of that black and white Batman-belting-Guy piece, Maguire commented, "One of the few drawings that I am completely satisfied with."

I am completely satisfied with it as well.

Perry White never would have published a headline like this in the Silver Age

I suppose the dwindling fortunes of the newspaper industry have forced White to embrace a greater level of coarseness in The Daily Planet, in a desperate attempt to seem younger and edgier, and maybe sell a few more papers.

It works, mind you. I'd totally buy a newspaper with the words "Lame-ass robots" in an all-caps, "War declared!" banner headline like that.



(Panel drawn by Kevin Maguire and written by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis for "Enter: Douglas," the Metal Men back-up strip in September 16's Doom Patrol #2. Man, check out that guys hairy knuckles. That Maguire fellow sure can draw)