"Will He Save The Galaxy--Or Destroy It?"

 Somebody better take Marvel Comics’ collective temperature—are they feeling okay? Deadpool didn’t appear in a single comic this week! For that matter, there weren’t any major releases at all in the X-Men franchise (except for Giant-Size X-Men Forever #1…are those crickets I hear?), or Spider-Man (there was a Spider-Girl, and a $1.00 reprint of Amazing Spider-Man #546), or Batman (well, Batman Confidential, and Joker’s Asylum: Riddler), or Superman (a Superman/Batman Annual featuring Batman Beyond doesn’t really count, does it?). It was just one of those weeks that comes along every once in awhile, where the biggest release is a Serenity one-shot. There were only a few things that really excited me this week, but we’ll get to them in a minute; in the meantime, have some random observations on the new comics for the week of June 2, won’t you?

 -The house ads for Marvel’s Shadowland event would seem to indicate that this whole Franken-Castle experiment is coming to an end sooner rather than later—they depict a bearded, but non-monsterized, Punisher blasting Spider-Man with a shotgun. I remain a big fan of the sheer insanity of making the Punisher into a Frankenstein, but I’ll be just as happy to see it end within the next few months. I really enjoyed that first arc, but extending it beyond those six issues might be a mistake (although not as big a mistake as re-titling the book Franken-Castle! That’s just asking for trouble).

 -Is it me, or do Mouse Guard and Mice Templar seem to come out on the same week more often than not?  When they do come out, I mean—both are pretty infrequent.

 -Avengers: The Origin by Joe Casey and Phil Noto is a miniseries that is taking five issues to re-tell a story—Avengers #1 by Lee and Kirby—that took 22 pages to tell in 1963. The same week that the third issue of this re-telling drops, Marvel releases the first issue of Avengers Prime, which reprints a Walt Simonson story from 1989's Avengers #300 that recaps the same events…in seven pages.  It’s the new math, folks. Just go with it.

 -I’m the last LBW contributor to get on board with this, but I have finally gotten caught up with Jeff Lemire’s excellent Vertigo series Sweet Tooth. I opened each new issue with a mixture of excitement and dread, wondering what the hell is going to happen to poor, antler-headed Gus and his hulking protector (maybe?), Jepperd. This week’s issue ten continues to unravel the mystery of Gus’s unnatural existence in another beautifully hand-crafted, heartbreaking issue. A great book, and unlike anything Vertigo’s ever done before.

 

All right, enough of all that. The two things I was most excited about this week had a lot to do with my own personal nostalgia. One was Dark Horse’s brand-spanking new Omnibus reprinting the Marvel Star Wars series. I was kind of embarrassed at how much I was looking forward to this one. The original Star Wars comics were among some of the first comics I owned, and in the days before DVD or VHS, they were how I used to get my required fix of the Force and all that jazz. They were pretty goofy, but I read them until they basically fell apart, and I was pretty excited to revisit them in this new volume. It didn’t hurt that I’ve been on a bit of a kick lately, having just read J.W. Rinzler’s extremely in-depth chronicling of the making of the original movie (this led to me buying the DVD set again—something I swore I would never do!—when I found a copy of the boxed set that contains, as mere second disc extras, mind you, the original, unaltered theatrical releases of the original trilogy). The Omnibus edition of the original Marvel run contains the first 27 issues for 25 bucks, so it’s not much of a financial risk. So far, I’ve only read the first six issues—which adapt the first film—and, surprisingly, they hold up pretty well! I mean, they’re totally ridiculous, of course, as you would expect a mash-up of old-timey Star Wars and Seventies Marvel comics to be. But on the other hand, I love both of those things, so why wouldn’t I love this? I can’t get enough of how scripter Roy Thomas imposed the Marvel style onto George Lucas’s vision; for example, issue five is titled Lo, The Moons of Yavin! The covers are a study in foolishness as well;

 

Seriously, Luke, if you can see the Death Star in the sky above you, you’re done, son! Listen to Han, he knows what he’s talking about. As if to hammer home the Marvelness of these proceedings, Luke even calls Uncle Owen Uncle Ben at one point. Seriously! But still, the art by Howard Chaykin and Steve Leialoha is cool, eschewing the photo-reference overload made popular in most comics adaptations since, and it’s interesting to see how the finer details of the larger Star Wars universe hadn’t been nailed down yet—Jabba the Hutt appears on Tattoine as a yellow, whiskered humanoid (suck it, Special Editions!). I don’t know how much I would recommend this collection for anyone who wasn’t already a Star Wars fan or didn’t grow up reading these comics, but I’m certainly getting a kick out of them; I may have to do a series of posts about the subsequent issues in this collection, if it turns out there’s anything interesting to say about them. They’re a nice historical reminder of a time when the Star Wars universe was still pretty uncharted territory, when pint-sized fans like me were hungry for any new information about all those crazy planets and aliens. Of course, a lot of the characters and ideas that were introduced by writers like Thomas and later, Archie Goodwin and David Michelinie, were eventually paved over to make way for more “official” novels, videogames, cartoons, Special Editions, sequels, and, heaven help us, prequels, but unlike a lot of the revising of history that Lucasfilm has indulged in over the decades, this stuff is still readily available. One final note—was Marvel trying to equate Luke Skywalker with Bat Lash on the cover caption to issue #1?

 

The other big release for me this week was Hawkeye & Mockingbird #1 by Jim McCann and David Lopez (the team who reunited Clint & Bobbi in New Avengers: The Reunion). This new ongoing has the on-again/off-again couple, well, on again, teaming up romantically and superheroically to fight superterrorists and other assorted baddies. I had high hopes for this one, as Hawkeye is one of my all-time favourite characters (and he’s had a rough couple of years, to say the least), and I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. This is a fun, fast-paced issue with lots of action, humour, and intriguing subplots involving Mockingbird’s family history and a potential team-up of two of the pair’s classic nemeses (well, one is a cool new take on a classic one, but still). There are lots of fun shout-outs to stuff like the original 1982 Hawkeye miniseries and the duo’s tenure in the West Coast Avengers, but none of it is impenetrable to new readers—in fact, this double-sized first issue comes with a handy backup feature where the heroes playfully narrate each other’s complex together-and-separate histories. This is good to have on hand, when both of your leads have been dead at least once (twice this decade for Hawkeye!). Unlike the similar Green Arrow/Black Canary series from a few years back, this book doesn’t collapse instantly under the weight of tons of ongoing continuity--McCann’s script hits the ground running in its own direction and has a sense of fun, romantic adventure about it. And I seriously hope someone at Marvel has David Lopez chained down, because this guy has some chops. This is one gorgeous-looking book, all smooth lines and easy-to-follow action.

This is probably my favourite thing to come out of all this Heroic Age jazz right now, and I hope it sticks around for awhile (especially with this particular creative team on board). I do have one small complaint--I'm really tired of seeing the word rape in mainstream superhero comics--Bobbi drops it in reference to her ordeal at the hands of the Phantom Rider back in West Coast Avengers. If you must, it's possible to allude to this stuff without typing what has become the most overused "r" word in comics since "retcon"; Young Avengers Special #1 was a perfect example of this, where we know that something awful happened to Kate BIshop in the past, but it's never explicitly stated or shown. This is a pretty minor complaint, though. It was a pretty great comic otherwise.

Sorry Power Girl: I Just Can't Do It.

In honour of the end of what will surely be remembered as the best run of Power Girl appearances (that's right, not just in her own comic: anywhere) I was going to put together a timeline of PG appearances that would necessarily showcase the changes to her costume and *ahem* carriage over the years. The longer that I worked on it though, the more it became evident that I was going to end up with a thirty-year history of one character's boobs. Which was kind of the point, I admit, but it was far to creepy for me to go on. Instead, here's an abridged form of the same. From her very first appearance in All-Star Comics No. 58:

 

And from last year's astonishingly good Power Girl No. 1:

Everything in between was either a variation on the same theme or an aberration best forgotten.

Man, Am I Ever Getting Sick Of That Damn Green Arrow Preview: New Comics For May 26th

 It’s felt like the last few weeks have been particularly bleak and dreary in the world of comics, with lots of pain and death and suffering. However, this week’s new releases had a lot more fun stuff going on, and generally made me feel a whole lot better about the industry in general and superhero comics in particular. That’s not to say that some things weren’t depressing (shame on you, Amazing Spider-Man) or horribly violent (can at least one issue of Green Lantern pass without somebody being skeletonized or skinned alive?), but overall, things were looking up.

 

Dazzler #1: A few weeks back, I was pretty hard on 1984’s Dazzler: The Movie graphic novel. I’ll stand by that, but this Women of Marvel one-shot was a much better vehicle for everybody’s favourite disco-themed superheroine. The story involves Arcade (I love that guy!) using a bunch of killer robots, who correspond with a lot of the villains from Dazzler’s solo series, to try and kill the mutant songstress at the behest of her evil sister. There are some fun callbacks to the most ridiculous moments of Dazzler’s book—she once again has to face Dr. Doom and Galactus, albeit robot versions—but most ridiculous of all, she is forced to fight for her life in her original roller-skated, KISS-makeup’d costume. This was written by Jim McCann, who is also going to be scripting the upcoming Hawkeye and Mockingbird ongoing (I got my fingers crossed for that one, and this comic gave me a lot of hope), and drawn with great style by Toronto guys Ramon Perez and Kalman Androsofszky. There’s a short back-up that makes this into a Necrosha tie-in, but the main feature is the reason to check this out.

 

Hey, that's enough outta you!

 Thunderbolts #144: Steve Rogers puts Luke Cage (himself a reformed criminal) in charge of a new team of T-bolts, mostly villains out to redeem themselves in this Heroic Age crossover. The team, made up of old school ‘Bolts like Songbird and Moonstone, as well as newbies like Crossbones and Juggernaut, is an odd mix that might make for some good readin’—strangest of all, Man-Thing is on board, using his connection to the Nexus of All Realities to provide the team’s transportation abilities. Jeff Parker continues his streak of writing great team books for Marvel (once again, if you missed Atlas last week, you need to get on that ASAP), also proving himself to be either a big fan of Aziz Ansari’s stand-up routine or the MTV reality dating show Next, or both—a female prisoner declares of Luke Cage, “If he’s got a neck tattoo, I’m gonna lick it!”. There’s also a great last-page villain reveal that is extra cool for longtime Thunderbolts readers. If Moonstone can just get herself a less slutty outfit, this book will be in great shape.

 

See? That is one trampy getup. 

The Thanos Imperative: Ignition #1: This was maybe not the most new-reader-friendly one-shot, as it builds out of several Annihilation and War/Realm of Kings miniseries, not to mention the ongoing (but maybe now cancelled?) Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy books, but it did make me want to check out the next installment. Apparently, in some of those books, it was revealed that there’s a parallel universe that is slowly bleeding into the Marvel-verse, one where life has triumphed over death I guess? Even so, this happy-sounding place has been dubbed the Cancerverse, so it can’t be that great. Anyway, the denizens of this ‘verse want to invade the Marvel universe and eliminate death, starting with the avatar of death himself, the recently-resurrected Thanos. This was a confusing but intriguing first issue—it practically requires a flow chart to keep track of all its dozens of characters. But once again, the last-page reveal of the avatar of life from the Cancerverse—in other words, the big villain of the upcoming Thanos Imperative miniseries—is a cool shocker that, in retrospect, makes perfect sense.

 

G.I. Joe: Hearts and Minds #1: I haven’t read anything by Max Brooks prior to this, but the author of such bestsellers as World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide manages to keep the living dead out of this miniseries (so far, anyway), telling two short stories focusing on a Cobra operative and a Joe soldier, respectively. First up, in the better of the two stories, we get a look at what makes cold-blooded mercenary (and lousy poet, if I remember his action figure’s file card correctly) Major Bludd tick, and the second story gives us some background on Joe tracking expert Spirit. Bludd's story contrasts his cold-bloodedness with his surprisingly tragic and decidedly mundane family history, while the Spirit story focuses on how the character hates that everyone just assumes, because of his Native American heritage, that he is an expert tracker...but, of course, he is an expert tracker anyway, hence his surly disposition. I have no idea where this fits in terms of continuity, if there even is such a thing where a bunch of action figures are concerned, but I was able to enjoy it purely based on my nostalgia for the G.I. Joe universe. Next up is Tripwire and Firefly! Man, I hope they get to Beach-Head at some point.

 

Seven Psychopaths #1: This is really getting to be the year of “guys on a mission” stories, what with The Losers, The A-Team, and The Expendables, isn’t it? This new book from Boom! Studios stars a disgraced British Army Colonel in London during the Blitz, who gets a letter from an old guy named Goldschmidt in an insane asylum, advocating the use of a team of certified lunatics to drop into Berlin and assassinate Hitler. That’s so crazy, it just might work! The Colonel springs Goldschmidt and they begin assembling their team, on the premise that these guys (and gals) will be so nutty and unpredictable that the Nazis won’t be able to catch them or stop them—also, that the mystical significance of the number 7, as in there will be seven of them, will give power to their cause. I don’t know where Sean Phillips found time to draw this, between his stints on Criminal and the new Dark Tower series, but I’m glad he did. Fabien Vehlmann's script is tight, and funny too—my favourite part is when Goldschmidt notices that the Colonel’s file on the project is labeled “Seven Psychos”, and he gets all offended by it. I have not idea where this story could be going, but I hope the creators go all Tarantino with it and create their own batshit crazy ending for WWII.

Secret Avengers #1: Not that it took much, but this book really blew the doors off last week’s Avengers relaunch. Like Thunderbolts, this is a totally strange assortment of Marvel characters from different eras and genres (War Machine, Nova, and Moon Knight, together at last?!?), but Ed Brubaker sells it. This shadow-ops team deals with all sorts of crazy threats before they can even become threats, and their varied specialties come in mighty handy. The result is a cool mix of real world (well, Marvel real world) action and cosmic intrigue that has lots of callbacks to old-school House of Ideas. The Serpent Crown? That dastardly Roxxon corporation? Now you’re talking my language, Brubaker! There’s a predictably cheesecakey opening scene where Valkyrie and Black Widow have to go undercover as call girls—the superheroine glass ceiling at work—but otherwise, artist Mike Deodato, who I’m not normally a big fan of, turns in some surprisingly good work here. His shadowy visuals work the conspiracy angle nicely, and he shifts gears ably from “realistic” scenes, like the opening gambit in Dubai, to the trip to Mars in the final pages. Also, Marvel pulls the hat trick for final page bad guy reveals this week, with this issue’s mastermind being the most surprising of the three. Also, I cannot overstate how awesome it is to have the Beast on an Avengers team again. We gotta get Wonder Man in on this so they can be all rowdy ‘til dawn like they used to.

Who wouldn't want to party with those guys?

John Buys Comics: Why Doesn't John Remember Last Week's Reviews?

Brevity is once again the order of the day! Uh, not because I’m drunk again, though. No, this time it’s simple procrastination - if I don’t curtail my wordcount I won’t write anything at all.

Captain Long Ears, by Diana Thung

In common with Calvin and Hobbes: a young boy has crazy imagination-fueled adventures with a stuffed 

animal. Crazy space hijinks.

Unique to this book: a compelling and more-accurate-than-usual look at the emotional life of a child, a very cool combination of imagination-adventures and reality. An obsession with poop, including one of my favourite poop jokes of all time (on the last page). An ending that manages to be happy without being sappy. Just terrific on all fronts.

Justice League: Generation Lost No. 2

It’s only the second issue, so I may be completely wrong, but at this point [Generation Lost] looks like it has a far better chance of hauling the DCU out of the rape-and-murder hole that it’s had one foot stuck in for the last few years than its biweekly sibling Brightest Day, if only due to the fact that the latter’s narrative arc (at 10% completion, natch) looks like it’s going to involve things getting bad and then better. All of the returned characters are going to have some terrible trials and tribulations and then emerge triumphant and the mass happy ending is going to change things FO-EVAH.

In contrast, what has happened in Generation Lost so far has been incredibly encouraging. I may just be reading what I want to here, but it looks like Giffen and Winick are actually going to be examining some of the reasons/events behind the darker storytelling trends that have been the norm for a while now. If Max Lord is alive and nobody on Earth including Wonder Woman remembers that she killed him, is she still a murderer? Hell, how does that change the perception of how events played out afterward?

Anyway, nobody was killed with a knife.

Mystery Society No. 1  

You know I love stories of paranormal investigation, and it’s actually kind of awesome that the main character is a smug asshole - it’s an underused heroic archetype! I think that I need to call a SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT on it, though - right now this is essentially a pile of interesting ideas. It’s going to be how they’re deployed that swings the Like-o-meter one way or the other - you can cram your comic full of as many psychic 1950s teenage girls and skull-masked undead… teenage girls as you want, but by god you’d better come through on some tasty plot or I will... not read no more.

So watch out.

The Brave and the Bold No. 34 - The Legion of Super-Heroes and the Doom Patrol are two of my favourite things of all time. How does mixing them together produce such a tepid and uninteresting comic? Maybe the second part of this story will retroactively make this one better somehow? I command you to wait for my analysis! Bite your nails with tension!

Green Lantern No. 54/ Green Lantern Corps No. 48 - See now, this is what I was talking about. Have most of this portentous stuff in two reasonably self-contained books and I’m kind of okay with it. Also: the triumphant return of Dex-Star, rage-fueled kitty!

War of the Supermen No. 4 - Superman is home! No more military/industrial conspiracies! Whoopee!

Detective Comics No. 865 - Hey, wait. So Vandal Savage is the Biblical Cain, and Cain from Sandman is kind of Cain, and Rage-Entity the Butcher is strongly implied to be Cain… that’s a lot of Cains. But Vandal Savage is also still a caveman? I don’t know how smoothly the two origins jibe.

"I Want You To Stop Me."

It’s not every day you can say that you survived a run-in with a murderous android, yet here I am, alive and well. Yesterday, at Park Lane cinema here in Halifax, I ducked out of work early to attend a special screening of the 1986 thriller The Hitcher, followed up by a Q and A session with star Rutger Hauer. The actor was here in town filming the feature-length adaptation of local director Jason Eisener’s award-winning Grindhouse movie trailer, Hobo With A Shotgun. The screening, part of Jason’s superfun Thrillema series, which screens cult movies with a pre-show reel of crazy genre trailers, raised money for David Brunt, the star of the original Hobo trailer; if you haven’t watched this energetically gory mini-revenge flick yet, check it out here, but be warned—it’s most definitely not safe for work!

 

Hauer, who takes over the role from Brunt for the big-screen adaptation (Brunt has a cameo in the feature version, and was reportedly on set for the bulk of shooting), is probably best known as lead replicant Roy Batty in the 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner, but has done about 180 films, including Batman Begins, Sin City, Ladyhawke, Blind Fury, and Wanted Dead or Alive. His role as the enigmatic, homicidal John Ryder in The Hitcher might be his second most famous role behind Roy Batty—the character, a seemingly unstoppable, strangely tormented, almost supernaturally destructive figure really comes alive thanks to Hauer's darkly humourous interpretation, not to mention those piercing blue eyes. Hauer ‘s Q and A afterwards was a real treat; the 66-year old actor clearly loves talking about cinema, slyly dropping F-bombs among praise for his collaborators and insights into his process. He even hung around to sign stuff for the fans afterwards—I got my Blade Runner Limited Edition Gift Set signed by Roy Batty himself! How cool is that?

 

Incidentally, the first thing I saw Hauer in—when I was far too young to be watching it, probably—was a 1981 cop thriller called Nighthawks, which pitted the actor, playing a terrorist named Wulfgar, against a New York cop played by a fully-bearded Sylvester Stallone. Hauer is absolutely ruthless and terrifying in this movie, but it’s also worth watching for the geek-friendly supporting cast of Billy Dee Williams, Lindsay Wagner, and Persis Khambatta. In other words, it not only has Rocky/Rambo fighting Roy Batty, but it also stars Lando Calrissian, the Bionic Woman, and Ilia from Star Trek: The Motion Picture!  A bit obscure, but worth keeping your eyes peeled for (check out the trailer here).

 

Unprecedented Carnage

Lois Lane No. 27. 1961. "The Last Days of Lois Lane." There are three interesting things about this story, and one of them pretty remarkable.

The first of these things is the setup: Clark Kent and Lois Lane are on location covering a story.

Now, I'm not saying that there is no place in this world for atomic energy, and we definitely need to do research to ensure that what technology we do have is as safe as possible, but the experiment that Clark and Lois just observed was a nuclear explosion. A nuclear explosion has very few peacetime applications, and I can't imagine that any of them require a rigorous series of experiments. Wait a second, I've just worked up a little questionnaire that should render further research unnecessary:

1. Can the problem at hand conceivably be solved by a massive explosion?

2. Is the problem worse than a heavily-irradiated landscape?

If you've answered yes to both questions, then call the Atoms for Peacetime Project today! 

The second interesting thing about this story is fact that Superman has nothing to do with Lois' dilemma. Unlike the bulk of the "something bad is happening to Lois" stories that I've read, this isn't a prank or a lesson or a scheme to keep his secret identity a secret, it's just a plain old mistake - Lois believes that she is dying of radiation poisoning. She believes it so hard, in fact, that when she asks the doctor about it, well,

He tells her that she is fine and she takes that as proof that she is so bad off that he's lying to her. Frankly, I didn't realize that doctors were allowed to do that.

The third interesting thing, and this is the remarkable one, is not that she immediately starts taking crazy risks in order to become an even more renowned reporter whose memory will live on forever,

And it's not quite the fact that a lot of the stunts that she tries seem... unlikely to result in good stories, seeing as they'll probably cause her grisly death before she can get her byline.

Not that that's not odd - heroically writing a story only to have it consumed by flame or the ever-hungry sea seems less like the sort of thing that people will remember one fondly for and more like a Darwin Award in the offing.

No, the strangest thing about this story is its fairly high body count. This is a time in which almost nothing - man, monster, animal, whatever - died in the DCU. Stories would go out of the way to mention that Superman had only hit a rabid bear hard enough to knock it out, say.

First, you have Lois in an experimental moon rocket, one doomed never to return to Earth:

Note the brave animals. Even though Superman went and got this particular rocket, I'm certain that they were eventually jammed into another. Not far from the old JLA Watchtower lies a tiny skeleton in a miniature spacesuit. You can still see the look of betrayal on the wizened face.

More tiny martyrs, though as the former owner of an ungodly number of guinea pigs, I have to admit that I can sympathize with someone who might want to blast the occasional screaming poop-factory with radiation, if only to teach them a lesson.

This, however, was the biggie:

After all, the sacrifice of animals in the name of science was much less controversial back in the day than it is now, but this is a Superman comic and people have just fallen off of a mountain, and Superman doesn't show up for a couple of hours. A couple of hours! Not one second later! This might, in fact, be the only instance of a death by falling in any Superman comic, ever. I'm still flabbergasted.