Review: Vengeance of The Moon Knight Vol. 2: Killed, Not Dead

The second trade collection of the Gregg Hurwitz-written Moon Knight monthly, Vengeance of The Moon Knight is on much surer footing than the previous one, with shorter, sharper stories, each of which features at least one more-popular-than-The Moon Knight guest star, and each of which pull a little further back from the Moon Knight Is A Bloodthirsty Lunatic Trying Not To Kill plot line.

If the first six issues of the series made for a tradepaperback of Moon Knight comic books about other Moon Knight comics, than the next four issues, collected in this second volume, were Moon Knight comic books about action adventure in the Marvel Universe, a marked improvement (I think that’s one of the reasons the Bendis/Maleev Moon Knight comic was more palatable to me than the first Vengeance of...; it was a Moon Knight comic about the Marvel Universe setting as seen through one character’s experiences, and not a Moon Knight comic about old Moon Knight comics).

I think it also helps that here Hurwitz is paired with two different artists than his first partner, both with clearer, cleaner styles, and both markedly better about some of the basics of telling stories in comic book form. At least this time out, I’ve seen clear shots of some of the character’s faces, and could now identify Samuels and Frenchie on sight. Still not sure about Marc Spector/Jake Lockley, Moon Knight’s secret identity/-ies. There’s only two panels in this featuring his face, I think. (Which is better and more panel-time than his girlfriend, what’s-her-face, gets; she only appears in a single panel, as a pair of naked legs rising out of the soapy water of a bubble-bath, and a come-on line of dialogue, coming from a head somewhere off-panel.)

The first two issues, which tell the story from which the collection takes its sub-title, are drawn by Tan Eng Huat. His style has changed quite a bit since editor Andrew Helfer introduced him the North American direct market in one of the (many) doomed Doom Patrol launches way back in 2001, but even as he grows more experienced and comfortable drawing superheroes and tuning his style closer to the standard superhero wave-length, his artwork retains a sense of weird, awkward energy.

The guest-star in these Huat issues is Deadpool, and he’s taken a contract on a very old man dying of stage four colon cancer in a hospital; the lady who hired Deadpool wants the man killed violently, not dying peacefully, in revenge for his ordering the kidnapping and murder of her child (Thus the story and collection title, "Killed, Not Dead"). It is something this terrible very old man has done a lot of over the years and, in fact, he has a kidnapped child waiting to be ordered killed as the story takes place.

In traditional Marvel style, Moon Knight and Deadpool meet and fight. But instead of teaming up, they simply continue to fight. Oddly, neither character seems to know who the other is. Neither are at the top of the heap of Marvel’s character hierarchy obviously, but they’re not the most obscure characters either. I guess I just assumed every character had met every other character, by this point.

Huat

The art’s a little weird here, with some of the action not quite working right, and Deadpool somehow managing to beat blood out of The Moon Knight’s face without getting any on the face mask it must have come through, but it’s a better-looking couple of issues than those in the first volume, and one that manage to retain the same level of darkness and gritty, over-lined work.

The last two issues are drawn by Juan Jose Ryp, a better artist still. His is the smoothest, cleanest art we’ve seen on the series so far, and he has the strongest, clearest figurework and design of the three. His The Moon Knight gives readers the best look at The Moon Knight and his new, over-armored The Moon Knight costume we’ve seen (and really the ninth issue of an ongoing monthly series probably isn’t the ideal time to have a good artist start introducing the character visually).

Ryp

Ryp also uses a lot of lines, including that almost pointillist form of cross-hatching he does to imply texture and shadow. But his lines are careful, giving every panel a really remarkable amount of detail and breakground, without subsuming the figures into it. A Hurwitz/Ryp series would have really been something to see.

Ryp draws two done-in-one issues. The first of these is a Spider-Man team-up (where the cover comes from), and the second is a Secret Avengers team-up (Moon Knight joined the Secret Avengers, after all; this issue opens with former Captain America Commander Rogers, who had taken over Norman Osborn’s job as Boss Of All Superheroes after the events of Siege, and takes us along on a mission with them, as seen through The Moon Knight’s eyes and read through his narration.

The Spider-Man team-up has the pair trying to stop a robbery by The Sandman, who makes his escape in a gigantic form. I can’t think of an artist better suited to drawing the Sandman, a character literally made up of the little, grainy dots Ryp likes to dapple his work with, and there is just scene after scene of Sandman moving like a sandstorm and reforming. There’s a particularly cool scene set in a museum, where the heroes quietly stalk through taxidermied animals, seeking the hidden and disguised Sandman.

For the Secret Avengers issue, we see Rogers approach Moon Knight, then flashforward to a mission briefing and an attempt to rescue hostages from modern pirates, the leader of which is armed with a pair of super-weapons, one of which they were expecting and one of which they were not. Unlike the later Warren Ellis-written Secret Avengers stories, there’ s no science or espionage really needed on this mission, and nothing clever about its construction or what it asks of the heroes. They basically function as a superhero SWAT or SEAL team, dropping onto the boat and non-lethally but extremely violently dealing with the pirates.

This gives us an opportunity to see Ryp draw not only The Moon Knight and Commander Rogers, but also an Ant-Man, Beast, Valkyrie, War Machine and Black Widow.

Ryp

Ryp comes up with a nice solution to the zipped or unzipped question when it comes to Black Widow, first drawing her almost completely unzipped, but in the act of zipping up, as she will remain for the rest of the story. Cake and eating!

There’s not a whole lot to this aside from a big fight scene, of course, but it sure is a well-drawn fight scene, and The Moon Knight takes a weird shot with a bow and arrow that I didn’t think anyone in the Marvel Universe outside of Hawkeye would or should be able to make.

When speculating on possible reasons for the relative not-very-good-ness of Vengeance of The Moon Knight Vol. 1, I mentioned that it launched as part of the “Dark Reign” status quo, and thus had to tie itself into the overall Marvel Universe mega-story of the time. Here, “The Heroic Age” branding initiative started during the Deadpool team-up.

Like “Dark Reign,” “The Heroic Age” wasn’t a storyline so much as a branding initiative, a temporary dawn after the dark, stormy night of the previous cycle of crossover stories. During "The Heroic Age," Captain America Steve Rogers came back to life, helped the heroes defeat the villains that were running the world, and then became The Boss, replacing Osborn (who had replaced Iron Man, who had replaced Maria Hill, who had replaced Nick Fury I). The idea was to get back to basics, back to business-as-usual super-heroing, which is why I think we see a story as simple as Spider-Man and Moon Knight team-up to stop The Sandman from stealing a diamond, or even The Secret Avengers beat the shit out of some bad guys and that's the whole story kind of story.

Review: Annihilators: Earthfall

Last week I wondered about the packaging of the Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning-written Annihilators miniseries, which was serially published with the title feature drawn by Tan Eng Huat and a Rocket Raccoon/Groot back-up story drawn by Timothy Green II.

In that original format, perhaps the pairing of the stories made sense, as Annihilators followed Abnett and Lanning's canceled Guardians of the Galaxy series, and these two features each captured a component of that: The straight-faced cosmic superhero-flavored space opera, and the funny, off-beat characters appearing in an unlikely grouping.

For the trade paperback collection, they just put "Annihilators" on the trade and featured that team on the cover, with a little, diagonal strip of text in the lower right corner reading "Plus Rocket Raccoon and Groot!" The book was essentially a trade version of a flip-book, only without the flipping; the title story ended about half-way through, and then the unannounced back-up fills up the remainder of hte pages.

For the second Annihilators trade paperback collection, Marvel tried out a different, even worse strategy: Re-printing the comics exactly as they appeared when originally published. So you read one 20-page chapter of "Annihilators: Earthfall" by Abnett, Lanning, Huat and kinker Andrew Hennessy, then five-pages of Rocket and Groot in "Batteries Not Included" by Abnett, Lanning, Green and inker Victor Olazaba, and repeat until you hit page 100 and the back matter.

So if the first book seemed to contain a Trojan second half (for the casual reader like me who didn't already know the contents, anyway), this one features two unrelated stories constantly interrupting one another.

Me, I probably would have put the Annihilators stories together in a trade entitled Annihilators and the two Rocket Raccon and Groot stories together in a second trade entitled Rocket Raccoon and Groot, but what do I know? I just read the damn things. There's probably a reason Marvel is hiding the stories of the two most popular characters in these trades, the two that will be beating all of the Annihilators (save The Silver Surfer) to the big screen (Actually, I think I woulda called that second trade Guardians of the Galaxy: Rocket Raccoon and Groot).

The title story takes the team of outer space super-guys—Quasar, Gladiator, Beta Ray Bill, Ronan The Accuser and Ikon, Spaceknight—from their usual jurisdiction of outer space to Earth (hence the name of the comic), hot on the heels of an enemy force encountered in the canceled Guardians of the Galaxy series that Abnett and Lanning's Annihilators minis followed.

Because that enemy, The Universal Church of Truth, is collaborating with human beings in a planned, religious community, and because they can and do disguise themselves as human, it looks like a bunch of alien invaders (some of whom, it should be noted, have repeatedly come into conflict with Earth heroes) have landed and just started wrecking a city. The Avengers—Captain America, Iron Man, Ms. Marvel, Red Hulk, The Thing, Valkyrie (?) and, of course, Spider-Man and Wolverine—arrive and start fighting them before anyone gives anyone else a chance to explain themselves, because this is the Marvel Universe (In the 1960s, the fight and team-up formula resulted from first meetings of weird-looking super-powered beings meeting for the first time, now whole teams of people who know each other at least as well as players on rival sports teams do, regularly repeat the pattern because, um,  because Avengers Vs. X-Men sells better than The Only Difference Between Avengers And X-Men At This Point Is The Spelling Really probably would).

The main problem with this story is the same one that plagued the previous Annihilators story. There are too many characters to give them all enough to do, or even identify anything unique about themselves in contrast to their peers. The title team fares a bit better, as The Silver Surfer is gone and Gladiator, who had little to do in the previous series, has much more to do here. Of the title characters, Ikon seems to have the least to do, but that's fine; at least they're taking turns.

Okay, most of those guys can fly or survive a great fall (and are assuming appropriate action poses), but what, exactly, is Captain America doing? Is he floating down or what? 

The Avengers seem more-or-less randomly assembled, with Captain America the only one really necessary in terms of plot or conflict-driving. Most of them are merely there for a functional reason: Spider-Man to tell a joke or two, Iron Man to do science stuff, Wolverine to boost sales a tiny big. The rest are more-or-less wallpaper, offering characters for Huat to draw during fight scenes (The Avengers hold their own remarkably well, and that might be why some of these particular Avengers were chosen; otherwise, The Annihilators really should be able to, um, annihilate pretty much any Avengers assemblage, shouldn't they?).

As for the conflict, the one driving the plot is that the space bad guy has embedded his personality first into a group of children, where he feels safe from any heroes killing him to get rid of him, and then he spreads himself into some 30% of the American population, if I've got that number right (I may be mistaking it for the infection rate of the Senegal Flu in SST: Deathflight, which I watched between reading this comic and writing this review; anyway, it's a lot more than most of the characters feel comfortable killing).

Then the characters can bicker about how many Earthling's its acceptable to kill in order to save the many (which is also the conflict at the climax of SST: Deathflight!); Cap says none, Ronan says a ton, others fall in between, there's some argument for Quasar regarding the difference between collateral damage on alien worlds vs. on Earth (In Ronan's defense, the Avengers go kill-crazy against Skrulls occasionally, with little regard for collateral damage when that damage doesn't involve human life).

The conundrum that Abnett and Lanning have their villain cook up is a clever one, and the inter-character conflict regarding their ethical decisions is compelling (much more so than the fights, which all seem sorta rigged to keep The Avengers in the game). They do a fine job continuing to fine-tune the purpose of this team and what sets them apart from others in the Marvel Universe.

Although I can't help but wonder if they actually last. Marvel's doing some space stuff now in Infinity, and I imagine some of these characters show up—are the Annihilators still a team? They also relaunched Guardians of the Galaxy, which starred the team that the Annihilators were supposed to replace, did the Guardians thus replace their replacements? (I don't know; I read most of these things in trade now, so I'm quite a way's behind most of the Marvel Universe's goings-on).

The Rocket/Groot story again features the superior artwork, but is an all-around inferior story—both to this volume's title story, and to the Rocket/Groot story in the previous volume. It's a story I've read a few times already, with the protagonists swapped out for new ones. It's a Mojo story, which is basically all one needs to know to know almost everything about it.

I was pleasantly surprised by the return of the Timely Inc. Shipment Processing and Analysis Device from the previous storyline, though:

And the Build-A-Groot colelctor's figure, a piece of which is available with each of the various Rocket Raccoon variant figures like Camo-Attack Rocket Raccoon and Sea-Ops Rocket Raccoon, is a toy I actually wouldn't mind owning.

*********************
By the way, this story apparently takes place during the time the Fantastic Four characters were all wearing white instead of their regular blue, and, for Ben Grimm, that meant a pair of white shorts:

Is it just me, or does it look like he's adventuring in his underwear? I know he's often worn a costume consisting of just shorts, often ones that are much shorter than these shorts, but when they're white shorts, they just look so much more underwear-like than when they're blue or black.

Review: Annihilators

This trade paperback collects a 2011 miniseries by writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, the writing team that took the reigns from Keith Giffen to build-up, tend and generally cultivate Marvel's various space characters and concepts to the point that not only was that little corner of the Marvel Universe suddenly and surprisingly fresh and interesting again, but successful enough that Marvel Studios' first new, post-Avengers team movie was and is going to be a Guardians of The Galaxy movie, of all things.

This was the first of two Annihilators miniseries, which came after the conclusion and cancellation of Abnett and Lanning's 25-issue, 2008-2010 volume of Guaridans of The Galaxy (a super-team spun out of the 2007 Giffen-written Annihilation: Conquest—Starlord miniseries) but before Brian Michael Bendis assumed stewardship of the Hollywood-bound characters in Avengers Assemble and then his own volume of a Guardians of The Galaxy ongoing.

Interestingly, each issue of this initial Annhilators series was actually split into two sections, leading off with the title story featuring a new super-team of "Alpha-Plus" cosmic heroes, penciled by Tan Eng Huat and inked by Victor Olazaba, and a back-up story featuring Rocket Raccoon and Groot, the fan-favorite funny characters from Guardians. Aside from sharing writing teams and picking up after the events of past stories in which the Guardians team was disbanded following the "deaths" of several key players who have long since gotten better, the stories don't really have anythign to do with one another, and don't really seem to belong at all in the same trade.

In fact, their being married into the same trade like this seems to do a disservice to them both. By title and appearance, this looks like a collection of Annihilators, not of a Groot and Rocket Raccoon story (There is a little green diagonal strip across the lower corner of the book, reading "Plus Rocket Raccoon and Groot!", for whatever that's worth), and you'd only find them in here if you'd already picked up and started flipping through or reading a book that looks on its cover to be a pretty generic superhero book starring some pretty obscure Marvel characters (Silver Surfer is probably the best-known of that bunch, right?). I didn't know they were in here until I neared the end of what I assumed was the first of a handful of Annihilators story arcs only to be confronted with an awesome Mike Mignola image of the pair.

So this is basically a flip-book that doesn't actually flip, and features only one cover. I'm not sure what a better solution might have been, beyond publishing these as two, much slimmer trade collections of their own  (The Annihilators story, at least, could have been held to include in the second Annihilators trade...although maybe Rocket and Groot are in there, too? I don't know).

The Annihilators story is the weaker of the two, and I say that not simply because I am a fan of raccoons wielding firearms or weird Kirby monsters. Rather, there is not a whole lot of variation of characters in terms of power-levels, powers or even personalities, and the premise of their team's formation doesn't seem like one capable of maintaining it's own narrative momentum for long; rather, they seem like they would be the guest-stars in other people's comics. It reads very much like the first arc of a monthly series that would be canceled before it could have two or three more arcs.

Our narrator and main protagonist is Earthman Wendel Vaughan, who goes by the name Quantum, wears "the awesomely powerful quantum bands," dresses vaguely like a Marvel Captain Marvel of some sort, and whom I have never heard of nor do I know anything about. He's the character with the most personality and the strongest character arc, going from feeling gun-shy in the presence of his supremely powerful compatriots and over-humbled by his role as "Protector of the Universe."

As for his team, they consist of The Silver Surfer, Beta-Ray Bill, Gladiator and Ronan The Accuser. Into their circle comes Ikon, a female Spaceknight from the place that Rom Spaceknight came from, apparently having similar powers, weaponry and armor (she basically looks like a "sexy" Rom; that is, Rom with a wasp-waist, bib boobs and wide-hips—Yes, a sexy lady version of Rom is as weird-looking as it sounds).

The team is station in Knowhere, the former base of the Guardians, and hanging out with Cosmo, the telepathic talking Russian space dog in a cute little dog space suit (and whose breed seems to vary form panel to panel, under Huat's loose and expressive line-work). They are called "The Annihilators," because, it is explained that they are so powerful they comprise an existential threat to any enemies of the universe—try to hurt it, and you won't just get slapped on the wrist or beaten up or killed, you'll be annihilated (That's the in-story explanation, anyway; personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that all the previous space opera stuff featuring these characters that Giffen, Abnett and Lanning were spearheading were called Annihilation: Something-or-other).

After fighting her way onto the team Ikon, and an escaped villain with incredible powers allowing him to surgically cut space, draw the team into a big, crazy interplanetary conflict involving Spaceknights, Dire Wraiths and even some Skrulls. Planets and suns are moved around, fights are had. I thought it was pretty good escapism, as I know very little about any of these characters and care even less about them, but I remained more than engaged enough to real all the way through and even find myself curious about what happens next.

As I mentioned, the team seems to have a very limited shelf-life, as it read a little bit like a Justice League where everyone is Superman, and it was hard to suspend one's disbelief to regard the things being treated as threats as threats (In one scene, for example, the characters seem worried they'll be defeated by Immortus' "Army of the Ages," which meant they were fighting World War II vets, Native American warriors armed with bow and arrows, Roman Centurions, vikings and cavemen. Yeah, Huat threw in some menacing-looking robots and a Frost Giant, but, for the most part, it looked like a horde the U.S. Army could probably handle, and not something that should worry anyone capable of moving a planet.

It doesn't help that little of them have very little to do, aside from fight hordes of monsters and such, and use cosmic powers in vague, comic book science-y ways. I'm having trouble remembering if Gladiator, for example, even had any lines (He did, but nothing more substantial then things like "Quasar! Contain the giant while I pull the Surfer out of this mob! We must stand together!" and "Look out-- --NGHH!" and so on). 

Huat has tuned down the idiosyncratic weirdness that once brought him to this reader's attention in the first place (two, maybe three Doom Patrol reboots ago), that, or perhaps Olazaba's inks and June Chung's colors knocked it into more Marvel-ous shape. At any rate, while the forms, figures and motion are all more-or-less played perfectly straight now, there's still an accent of edginess, a touch of anxious energy to the proceedings.

And then we get to the really good part, "Rocket Raccoon and Groot: Root and Branch, Tooth and Claw," drawn by Timothy Green II, who drew the aforementioned Starlord miniseries.

I can't imagine the page counts vary all that much between the two stories, but the "back-up" feature reads much longer and more substantial, perhaps due to the simple fact that there is more dialogue and plotting going, on, and one doesn't need to use double-page spreads for the sorts of fighting and action (of which there is a significant amount) that goes on in this story versus the half-dozen cosmic superheroes versus hordes battles that went on in the Annihilators story.

After the Guardians were disbanded, Rocket got a job working in the mail room at space corporation Timely Inc (get it?), a job he earned in part due to the "workplace morale scheme," as his boss explains. "You helped meet our quote of cute sentient animals. You make the Timely Inc. office environment a more cheerful place so as to uplift the people who do actual work.

When someone sends a gun-wielding a killer clown puppet made of sentient wood after him, however, Raccoon leaves his job with a stolen, hand-held computer/package scanning device (which provides a great deal of exposition and becomes Rocket's side kick), trying to figure out who might try to kill him in such a manner. He seeks out experts in sentient wood, and finds his buddy Groot on Planet-X.

From there, they return to Half-World, Rocket's homeworld, although his memories of the place have been severely tampered with, for his own good and the good of all of Half-World. From what I've read of the recently released Rocket Raccoon: Tales From Half-World (repackaging the 1985 Bill Mantlo/Mike Mignola Rocket miniseries), there seems to be a rather significant retcon involved, although the general characters and their role in the universe—caring for the insane housed on their asylum planet—hasn't changed.

Reunited with old allies and temporarily resuming his old duty as warden and security chief for an asylum world, Rocket and Groot must save the day, in the process reminding themselves that the galaxy still needs guarding it, whether they're doing it while wearing matching uniforms and hanging out with Starlord or not.

Abnett and Lanning seem much more comfortable in this story, somewhat surprisingly, and they achieve a nice balance of action, superhero thrills and comedy, with that comedy coming organically form the characters and extrapolations of what the world surrounding such characters must be like.

Green's art remains pretty incredible. It's highly-detailed, but his sense of design veers far from what one might term realistic, with his Rocket veering pretty far from on-model raccoon to super-cute funny animal. He's particularly good at action scenes, during which Rocket jumps and spins around like a cartwheeling, furry shuriken, and he's excellent at drawing bullet-holes exploding into walls and heads (The heads of wooden clown puppets, not living, breathing, bleeding creatures).

I'm not sure who Bendis has drawing Guardians for him month-in and month-out now (I know it started with Steve McNiven and that Kevin Maguire has at least one issue coming up), but I'd love to see Green get to spend more time with these characters. As the artist of that Starlord miniseries, he deserves as much of the credit as Giffen, Abentt and Lanning into turning Guardians of The Galaxy into a thing, you know?