Some Batman-related trades I've recently read:

Batgirl: Stephanie Brown Vol.1

It's unclear if DC is going to continue collecting the 73-issue, 2000-2006 volume of Batgirl after the third collection of Batgirl: Cassandra Cain (which ended the run by the original creators, and would be a fairly natural stopping point). The release of Batgirl: Stephanie Brown Vol. 1 at this point would seem to argue against it, though.

This collection includes the first 12 issues of the 24-issue, 2009-20011 Batgirl series, the one starring former Spoiler, former Robin Stephanie Brown as the new, third Batgirl. So yeah, with this collection released, the entire series is already half-collected; smart money says DC will definitely get around to collecting all of the issues of this particular volume of Batgirl.

This was actually kind of a fun read for me, as I skipped them the first time around, so it was all new to me.

As to the why, well DC basically "broke" Batgirl in a series of poorly considered moves starting with the "One Year Later" arc of Robin, and subsequent attempts to fix the damage they did there in comics like Teen Titans and a Batgirl miniseries. That Batgirl, Cassandra Cain, had essentially become so narratively toxic that she barely appears in this series; the moment in which she hands over her costume and her codename to her friend Stephanie Brown consists of her basically just stripping off her costume and then peacing out, disappearing into the Gotham night (in her underwear, I guess).

I additionally kind of hated the new costume, a purple, black and gold affair that had an Utlimate Marvel-like quality of "realism" to it, looking like something that might appear in a live-action movie starring Batgirl, rather than a tolerable costume design (the even gave her a utility garter belt, to echo the one she had in earlier Spoiler costumes). Of course, on the other side of The New 52, wherein everybody had terrible new costumes, this one doesn't look so bad at all.

Finally, the book just kind of looked poorly-drawn. That's one of the detrimental factors that repelled me from the monthly, serially published that time has not healed. Just looking at the credit page of this collection, there are 15 credited artists. That is a lot of artists for a 12-issue series. Lee Garbett and Trevor Scott are the "regular" penciler and inker, respectively, but by my count Garbett pencils seven issues solo, with four other of the other issues involving him splitting pencilling duties with another artist. Scott inks just four issues solo, two others with another inker, one with two other inkers, and then others ink the rest. While the book looks mediocre at best for these first 12 issues, the constant fluctuations of style and ability that comes with so many artists trying to draw a single book over the course of just one year certainly don't help matters at all.

It's really a shame, because writer Bryan Q. Miller seems to be on fairly solid footing here, once old Batgirl Cassandra Cain is waved off the stage. Stephanie Brown is about to start her freshman year in college, and just about everything has changed for her and the rest of the Bat-family of late. Batman dying will do that.

It took me a bit to orient myself exactly, but at this point in Bat-history Bruce Wayne was temporarily dead, Tim Drake had taken the name Red Robin and left Gotham City, Dick Grayson had assumed the role of Batman and was fighting alongside the new Robin Damian Wayne, Alfred apparently left town to lead The Outsiders (???) and, as previously noted, Batgirl randomly decides to quit being Batgirl, handing Steph her costume with a series of short, cryptic declarative sentences: "I fought for him. But no more. Now, the fight is yours..."

So Steph continues to scratch her vigilante crime-fighting itch as the new Batgirl, until original Batgirl Barbara Gordon busts her. Like everyone else, Babs doesn't really think Stephanie has the chops for this, and wants her to stop immediately. That's one charming difference between this Batgirl and the previous ones. She's not a genius like Barbara, and she's not an invincible, natural-born fighting machine like Cassandra: She's basically just got a good heart, a lot of pluck and the experience that comes with years of trying to run with the bats, screwing up and falling short, but getting back up again. In Batman comics, Stephanie Brown is the epitome of dusting yourself off and trying again.

Miller gets that, accentuates it and makes it integral to her characterization and the premise of the series. Like Kelley Puckett and Scott Peterson did on the previous Batgirl series, he pairs Stephanie with Barbara Gordon as a mother/mentor figure, giving Babs co-star status, but Miller's series takes it a step further. While the previous Batgirl starred a teenage vigilante who was torn between to "parents" with different ideas about who she should be in Barbara Gordon and Batman, this series essentially posits Batgirl as a collaboration between Stephanie Brown and Barbara Gordon, who supplies her with a new suit, Batman-level tech and weapons and constant Oracle-ing.

Within a matter of issues, it's Barbara Gordon and Stephanie Brown against the world. Meanwhile, Babs takes a job teaching at Stephanie's school, she develops a crush on a cute classmate whose father is tied to organized crime, and new Gotham City police detective Nick Gage is posited as the center of a potential love triangle involving the ladies of Team Batgirl. Gradually, Wendy Harris is introduced to the book and becomes a greater and greater part of the cast, eventually becoming another protegee of Oracle's; Wendy, if you have forgotten, blocked it out of your mind or were lucky enough to never read it, was the DCU version of the Superfriends character, who was paralyzed by a monster version of Wonder Dog, who killed and ate her brother Marvin. It was a stupid, stupid time at DC Comics; this follows not only the events of that series, but I'm assuming something that must have happened in Birds of Prey too, as Barbara apparently has history with Wendy and The Calculator, Wendy and Marvin's father.

Because of the particular make-up of the Batman line at the time, we get to see Oracle and the new Batgirl working with (and/or against) the Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne version of the Dynamic Duo. Damian and Stephanie play off one another delightfully, as Damian is 1000-times more forceful in his condemnation of Steph than Tim or even Batman ever were, and it was actually kind of fun to see the restoration of the old Batgirl/Robin dynamic, where in Robin looked down on Batgirl and she resented the fact that he and Batman didn't accept her as a full partner. It's also fun to see Dick-as-Batman having disagreements about how to train and manage kids in capes with Barbara instead of Bruce-as-Batman, given Dick and Babs' long, occasionally romantic history, and, of course, the fact that they themselves used to be Robin and Batgirl.

Despite the relatively poor and rather inconsistent art (particularly when compared to that of the Batgirl: Cassandra Cain collections), I rather enjoyed this, and especially appreciated how these first 12 issues of the series all read like single graphic novel in one sitting. There are multiple story arcs within, but they read like chapters in one big story arc. It is also particularly effective as the culmination of Stephanie Brown's life story, whereas after years of trying to work as Robin's partner, or Batgirl's sidekick, or as Robin, or solo, she's finally found where she truly belongs.

So of course DC would cancel the book 12 issues later and reboot the whole universe, so that Stephanie Browns' years-long mega-story arc never actually happened, and we would eventually get a weird, bowdlerized version of the character that lacked the history, relationships and personality traits that made the pre-Flashpoint version of the character appealing in the first place.

DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Batman Vs. Predator

The official title is a bit of a mouthful, but this $35*, 370-page trade paperback is a pretty great collection, including all three Batman/Predator miniseries: 1991's Batman Vs. Predator, 1995's Batman Vs. Predator II: Bloodmatch and 1997's Batman Vs. Predator III: Blood Ties. As is so often the case with sequels, each consecutive miniseries was less good than the one that preceded it, but all three are head-and-shoulders above the comics featuring Batman's last two encounters with the Predator species of alien hunters, 2001's JLA Vs. Predator and 2007's Superman and Batman Vs. Alien and Predator.

I read the first of these in single issues as they were released, but this time was my first time re-reading that story in a very long time. Bloodmatch I only read for the first time rather recently and I am fairly certain this was the first time I read the third series (or, if I had read it before, I had somehow managed to completely forget ever having done so).

That first was written by Davie Gibbons and featured art by the Kubert brothers, with Andy penciling, Adam inking (and lettering) and Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh coloring. I recall it having been a rather big deal at the time, being one of the relatively early inter-company crossovers of its kind. I liked it a lot back then, and it holds up remarkably well.

Gibbons wrote what was basically a Batman story featuring a Predator alien, as the Dark Knight uses his detective skills, fighting prowess and technological achievement to solve a series of spectacularly brutal murders that are eventually attributed to a so-called "See Through Slasher."

The Predator, this one bearing the one from Predator II's massive arsenal of sci-fi weaponry, arrives in Gotham City, finds a hiding spot, and then proceeds to watch the news to look for the city's best fighters and all-around tough guys, starting with a pair of championship boxers, and then their gangster patrons, ultimately going after crime-fighters like Commissioner Gordon and, of course, the Batman himself. The final fight involved Batman suiting up in a special costume of the sort a Batman action figure line might include, and ultimately beating on his foe with a baseball bat.

It's very much the work of a writer-writer, rather than a fan writer, as Gibbons is pretty intent on telling a complete standalone story--albeit it one set within Batman continuity--instead of what one might expect from a more modern writer who grew up on such comics. Like, I'd certainly want to see Predator take on Batman's rogues gallery, although that would necessarily have to be an Elseworlds kinda comic. Gotham City is, after all, something of a game preserve stocked with the worst killers in the world.

I remembered really liking the Kubert's art back then--when this would have been among the first comics I had read--and I'm genuinely surprised at how well that holds up. There's a touch of the '90s about it, aesthetically, but it more closely resembles, say, Jim Lee inked by Joe Kubert than the art of either Kubert brother today, one of whom has since drawn a fairly healthy number of comics featuring Batman since his collaboration with Grant Morrison on "Batman and Son."

The coloring of their art is pretty stylized, with an almost Vertigo-esque palate. It looks more like a Dark Horse Predator comic of that era, rather than a Batman comic of that era, alternating between dim and dark, with the most colorful pages being somewhat washed out in their look. The brightest color in the whole comic is the red of the blood.

Bloodmatch was written by Doug Moench and featured pencil art by Paul Gulacy and inks by Terry Austin. In that one, a rogue Predator makes a surprise comeback to Gotham--the end of the first crossover implied that Batman had hoped by proving how dangerous he was to hunt, he would have scared future visits from more of that particular kind of alien--and The Huntress, who was at that point a very unwelcome presence in Gotham City, trying to fight crime there using more violent methods that Batman was willing to condone.

Moench's plot is a lot more busy than Gibbons', but it still works as both a Predator narrative and a Batman one, and Gulacy's art is always a treat. There's a real weirdness to his character designs and acting that I find enormously appealing.

Finally, there's Blood Ties. This one feels so much like a regular Batman comic that it actually could have run in the pages of Batman or Detective Comics. Maybe that has something to do with the presence of writer Chuck Dixon, who was writing like at least half of all Batman comics during any given month back then. Batman and Robin Tim Drake are dealing with Mister Freeze and his gang, when two visitors appear to join the hunt (There's a neat moment where Mister Freeze's lack of discernable body temperature renders him invisible to the Predators, who can only seen heat-signatures).

Batman tries to keep Robin completely out of the loop, as he thinks the Predators are far too dangerous for his teenage sidekick, but that ultimately proves impossible, as it turns out these two Predators are a father and son pair, and each has chosen one of the Dynamic Duo as their quarry. Batman sets a trap for them, in which he wears another special Preadtor-fighting costume--this one with a Robocop-like visor that echoes the one worn by the special alien-hunters in Bloodmatch, while Robin and Alfred face off against the younger one in the Batcave.

Among the innovations of Dixon's script, drawn by pencil artist Rodolfo Damaggio and inker Robert Campanella, is a fleshing out of something implied in the Predator II film, that these Predators have been visiting Earth for a very, very long time, and we see flashback-like scenes where they encounter human foes in centuries past and acquire trophies for them (which suggests another DC Comics/Predator story, in which Predators visit various historical heroes like Jonah Hex and Enemy Ace and the Crimson Avenger and Sgt. Rock and The Sandman Wesley Dodds, although perhaps there aren't any such heroes with enough name recognition to justify ever publishing such a series. It would be more interesting than anything like Superman and Batman Versus Aliens and Predator, though!).

There are plenty of goodies beyond the comics themselves in here too. There's what appears to be a Dave Gibbons foreword to the original collection of the original series, and afterwords from co-editors Diana Schutz and Denny O'Neil. That last one is particularly interesting, as in it O'Neil admits he had next to nothing to do with the actual editing of the series, and his main contribution was deciding whether or not Predator and Batman belonged in the same comic, given their diverse milieus, and the justification he came up with (While there's an aura of the sci-fi about the Predator aliens, the way they are always presented, in film as well as in the comics, is so mysterious that they are essentially just strange, monstrous killers whose origins are secondary, and thus there's little difference between Batman fighting one of them and Batman fighting, say, a vampire or werewolf or suchlike).

That justification was even needed and considered shows how unusual the crossover was in 1991 and 1992, and how much more vigilantly Batman was policed for internal, aesthetic consistencies back then.

That's followed by what's called a "Pinup and Cover Gallery," although I could swear most of those pin-ups come from what Schutz refers to as the "fershlugginer trading cards." So in addition to covers by Christopher Warner, Arthur Suydam, Simon Bisley (artist for Batman Vs. Judge Dredd, another very early inter-company crossover), DaMaggio and Gibbons, there's a fairly fantastic gallery of images of Batman fighting Predator, many of them from artists who would go on to do some pretty damn notable Batman work in the future: Arthur Adams, John Byrne, Jackson Guice, John Higgins, Adam Hughes, Michael W. Kaluta, Sam Kieth, Joe Kubert, Mike Mignola (that's a re-colored version of his image that graces the cover of this collection), Steve Rude, Tim Sale, Walt Simonson (Damn, look at those Batman ears! We often talk about Batman ear-length, but Batman ear-width gets considerably less attention), Matt Wagner and Tom Yeats.

The Wagner image is a particular favorite, and one I quite clearly remember from first seeing it some 25 years ago. It featured Batman stalking through the sewers, a black blade in each hand, one of which is shaped like a bat, while what must be a 12-foot Predator looms behind him, the dripping water short-circuiting its light-bending camouflage technology, and its face hidden in shadow save for pupil-less red eyes and white teeth.

I'm in no hurry to read another, modern Batman/Predator comic, although I can think of at least two reasons why I'd love to see one. First, I'd like to see more of Matt Wagner's version of the Predator (and Wagner's a hell of a Batman writer as well, handling a memorable Legends of the Dark Knight arc entitled "Faces," a pretty great Batman crossover with his Grendel character and, more recently, a suite of "Year One" era miniseries) and, second, I haven't seen Kelley Jones draw a Predator yet.

So maybe if DC and Dark Horse hired Wagner to write and draw a Long Halloween/Dark Victory-style and -sized series, with Kelley Jones on covers, that would be pretty alright with me.

Robin Vol. 4: Turning Point

This latest collection of the early-nineties launched, Chuck Dixon-scripted Robin ongoing series contains eight issues of Robin, plus the lead stories from two issues of Showcase '94. The interesting thing about the collection, which isn't a very good read, is that every single issue in it is part of a crossover of one kind or another, and, with the exception of the Robin/Showcase '94 crossover, none of those crossover stories can be collected here in their entirety, given their size. They have been collected elsewhere, but after the first sixty pages or so, the rest of the book is devoted to the Robin chapters of "KnightQuest," "KnightsEnd," "Prodigal" (chapters 4, 8 and the conclusion) and Zero Hour (the tie-in as well as Robin #0, both of which I just recently re-read in the Batman: Zero Hour collection).

Given the apparent remit of the series of collections, there's no other way around this, really, but it makes for a particularly off-putting reading experience. I mean, I managed just fine, but then I read almost all of these comics once before, and I also read the missing chapters of stories like "KnightsEnd" and "Prodigal" and so on. Picking this up today and reading these stories for the first time might be difficult, although I guess most readers would be able to figure out what else they need to read to make sense of what's going on.

The one complete story in the volume is entitled "Benedictions," and it features pencil art by Phil Jimenez (who actually draws a fair amount of this collection) and inks from three different inkers, one per issue. A sequel of sorts to Dixon's third pre-monthly miniseries, Robin III: Cry of The Huntress (which had some downright goofy special covers), it re-teams Robin with the mafia-hunting black sheep of Gotham City vigilantes.

Like so many of Dixon's scripts, the basic plot was somewhat generic, and could have been used for just about any superhero character: An unlikely mob boss moves to seize control of organized crime in the city, and an even more unlikely deadly vigilante attempts to stop her, with Robin and Huntress caught in the middle. That said, I always dug--and still dig--the chemistry between Dixon's version of Tim Drake and The Huntress.

Whenever Batman and Huntress teamed up (like in Batman Vs. Predator II: Bloodmatch, above), there was a predictable, even tedious dynamic between the two, with the stern Batman lecturing her on her use of force, her lack of training and the fact that Gotham was his city and he was therefore boss of everyone wearing a cape in it (His objections to her brutality always felt a little off too, as it's not like she ever actually killed anyone, or hurt her criminal prey any worse than he did, you know? If you're arguing whether shooting someone in the leg with a crossbow bolt is crueler than beating them into unconsciousness with your bare hands or giving them concussions with pointy metal projectiles well, at that point it's getting pretty academic).

Robin, being a teenager, was more of an irritating little brother to her. Judging her and always rubbing in the fact that he had Batman's sanction and knew everything about her, while she knew next to nothing about the Dynamic Duo.

That's followed by the Tom Grummett-drawn conclusion to "KnightQuest," in which Jack Drake and Bruce Wayne both return to Gotham City and Bruce sees what Jean-Paul Valley has been up to in his absence. Then there are two issues of "KnightsEnd" tie-ins, in which Grummett and inker Ray Kryssing get to draw Nightwing, Lady Shiva and both Batmen. Then there are the two Zero Hour-related issues, also by Grumett, and three chapters of "Prodigal," two-and-a-half of which are penciled by Jimenez (the final issue is divided between a tense talk between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson in the Batcave, as the former is ready to reclaim his mantle from the latter's stewardship, which is drawn by Jimenez, and Tim's battle against Steeljacket, penciled by a John Cleary).

It was nice to see such relatively early Jimenez art, which proved what a really great artist he was. His work is super-detailed, resulting in figures that were as close to photo-realistic as you were likely to get in those days (something achieved by hand, rather than with a computer), and his characters all had a George Perez-like range in their acting.

He draws a handful of great cityscapes that look like he must have labored over them forever, and I really liked the detail work he brought to the characters, the way his Tim looks like a 15-year-old kid, or his Azrael Batman's intricate costume looked realistic rather than the work of an overly fussy Jim Lee clone and, especially, the way he drew Dick Grayson Batman's  "shoulder spikes," so that they are a part of the costume, and not merely an artistic flourish.

That last issue is actually pretty great, because it contrasts the work of Jimenez with Cleary, whose work I am not familiar with, but draws here like a mix between a then-popular Todd MacFarlane/Rob Liefeld style artist and a Batman Adventures contributor, resulting in images that are ridiculously overblown but also kind of cartoony. (As I was writing this paragraph, I paused to send cellphone photos of his Renee Montoya to my friend Meredith, who likes Gotham Central's Montoya a lot; Cleary poses her in various crazy ways, my favorite panel probably being the one where she's posed at the bottom of a flight of stairs, her left foot on the floor, her right foot on the sixth step up. She looks like a giantess climbing the stairs sideways, like a crab.)

I also quite clearly remembered the end of the Grayson/Wayne conversation, which actually brought a tear to my eye.

The cliffhanger ending has Robin returning to the Batcave to find Dick back in his Nightwing costume, as Bruce Wayne was ready to go back to being Batman. Jimenez's final splash, shows Tim and Dick reacting to Batman's new costume, which is drawn so that all we can see is the whites of his eyes and the yellow of his bat-symbol and utility belt.

If you were reading back then, this was teasing the debut of his new all-black costume, which would be prominently featured on the covers for the next issues of Batman, Detective, Shadow of The Bat and Robin, including on embossed black covers.

I liked the Kelley Jones covers best. Here's the regular cover, which was awesome...

And here's the embossed one, which, um, obviously didn't photograph well, being all-black and all...

*Considerably less on Amazon, but you shouldn't buy comics from Amazon. You should totally support your local comic shop.

Review: Monsters Unleashed: Monster-Size Hard Cover

Marvel was not kidding around when they named this collection of the five-issue Monsters Unleashed "Monster-Size." It's 14 by 21.6-inches, which might be hard to picture exactly, but, for context, your average trade paperback or comic book is just 6.6-by-10.1. This massive hardcover dwarfs those Street Angel one-shots Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca have been publishing with Image, which are 8.8-by-12.2, or those Alex Ross/Paul Dini one-shots like Superman: Peace on Earth and Batman: War on Crime, which were 9.8-by-13.2.

It is a big comic book. I'm fairly certain it is the biggest comic I've ever read, with Lauren Weinstein's Goddess of War coming the closest (and that was only 10-by-14.9 inches, and remains the most annoying comic I own, as I have no idea where to properly store it). It's a coffee table book, but only in the sense that it is big enough to be a coffee table. As I am typing this, it is sitting on my kitchen table next to me, and it takes up almost half of the table.

Does that massive size matter? Yes, in this particular case, I believe it does. That's because it made the act of reading Monsters Unleashed, a between-events event series that seemed mainly an exercise in maintaining the publisher's ownership of the title of their early 1970s horror anthology, into an experience in and of itself. I may forget plot particulars and which characters or artists participated in the future, but I likely won't forget lugging the huge, heavy tome home from the library, dropping it with a room-shaking thud on my living room floor and reading its poster-sized pages, with some panels the size of some other comics' splash pages.

The story is written by Cullen Bunn, and he works with a different artists on each of the five issues: Steve McNiven and Jay Leisten, Greg Land, Leinil Francis Yu with Gerry Alanguilan and Michael Jason Paz, Salvador Larroca and Adam Kubert. None of these are artists that I would have necessarily picked as an ideal artist for a story involving Marvel's heroes fighting the old Jack Kirby and Stan Lee-created monsters from the pre-Fantastic Four Marvel comics (I probably would have tried to get Nick Bradshaw, whose hyper-detailed style is so similar to that of Art Adams, one of comics' finest monster artists). In fact, there are at least two artists on that list whose work I actively dislike.

Regardless, these huge pages are an incredible showcase for an artist's work; these pages are slightly larger than the size in which most Marvel comics artists used to draw, before the art was reduced to fit into a comic book. That gives a reader an unusually close look at their work, when suddenly no detail is too small that it can't be pored over, and its component shapes and lines scrutinized. I must confess that Land and Larroca, two reference-heavy artists whose work I dislike and, in the case of the former, actively keeps me from reading books he draws, look better-than-ever here. Even if they are drawing over photo reference (and I don't know that's what they do, I just know that's what it looks like), it's difficult to notice on such a big canvas as that offered here.

Additionally, the format infuses all of the pages with import, as almost no panel is smaller than a splash page. And when Bunn does script a splash page, or, heaven forfend, a two-page splash, well it's like one is reading posters rather than comics.

It is therefore a little unfortunate how little there is to Bunn's story. The premise I described above, suggesting Spider-Man and the Marvel heroes battling Fin Fang Foom and the Atlas/Marvel monsters, sounds a simple one, and that simplicity was actually a selling point, particularly since the series was immediately following Civil War II and the crossover series before that was the complex, DC "crisis" style Secret Wars. Despite the covers and the the virtual promise of that premise as seen in the Monsters Unleashed Prelude collection, that wasn't quite the idea of Monsters Unleashed.

Rather, there are three groups of monsters, and the Kirby/Lee creations are but one of them and, honestly, they play a very small part in the proceedings. Giant monsters that we will eventually be told are called "Leviathons" begin raining down on Earth in the form of huge, blazing meteors. Immediately upon landfall, they arise and attack the nearest city, keeping all of Marvel's participating heroes fairly busy. The Atlas/Marvel monsters eventually ally themselves with the superheroes to fight off the alien Leviathons, the idea being that if any giant monster is going to conquer Earth, it's going to be one of them. And, finally, the day is saved by a half-dozen brand new giant monsters, who aren't introduced until the fifth and final issue (and who would go on to star in the ongoing Monsters Unleashed monthly series, which was announced before this event series even wrapped up and, I believe, demonstrating Marvel's willingness to greenlight just about anything, regardless of what the market might be interested in and/or able to support).

Bunn perhaps wisely introduces Marvel's many heroes by the team, with each assembling to battle a Leviathon, and having their names announced in little text boxes next to them: The Avengers (the ones from the Mark Waid/Michael del Mundo series; the Unity Squad and the U.S.Avengers are MIA), The Champions, The X-Men and The Guardians of The Galaxy are introduced as monster-fighting squads in the first issue, with Captain Marvel and Alpha Flight appearing at the beginning of the second. A few solo players are also involved, including Black Panther and, relevant to the story, Elsa Bloodstone and Moon Girl from Moon Girl and Devi Dinosaur.

Also introduced is a mysterious little boy obsessed with monsters, who has some sort of connection to the Marvel monsters like Fin Fang Foom, Gorgilla and company. As the Leviathon shower gets stronger and stronger, Foom and his forces eventually join the fray--Vandoom tries to earlier, but gets mistaken for a "bad" monster and slapped away--and hold the line, while the heroes figure out what's what.

What's what is this: The boy, Kei Kawade, is an Inhuman with the ability to summon, transport and apparently command (to a degree) any monster he draws. Medusa and Karnak show up at Parker Industries to explain some legend of an Inhuman with similar powers who fought off the Leviathon hordes in the ancient past. So, like Civil War II, the very next Marvel crossover event series to follow it was centered on a new Inhuman (I couldn't help but think of former Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada's explanation as to why he wanted to do the whole "No More Mutant" thing; that he felt "because they're a mutant" had become too easy a catch-all origin for any emerging super-character in the Marvel Universe. Here, then, is a pretty concrete example of how Inhumans are the new mutants).

With the help of Moon Girl, who has created a machine to translate the Leviathons' roars, Kei eventually decides to create his own monsters, but, again, these don't appear until the very last issue. When they do, they fight the leader of the Leviathons, they lose for a while and then they win. And...that's the whole story.

There are some fun moments to it all--how could there not be?--but it was really rather surprising what little story there is. What surprised me most was how little the Marvel monsters had to do, to the point that few of them are even named, and only a handful get any lines at all, with those that speak generally only getting a token line or two (FFF gets the most dialogue, but even then his total number of lines could probably be counted on a single hand). Also weird was the fact that the Marvel heroes all acted like they couldn't tell the Marvel monsters from the invaders; granted, many of these characters are relatively new faces, but I'm pretty sure everyone fights Fin Fang Foom eventually (I know both The All-New Wolverine and The Totally Awesome Hulk already have, within the first few issues of their solo titles) and hell, Orrgo was just on the SHIELD payroll as recently as The Howling Commandos of SHIELD and played a part in the "Standoff" storyline.

Some of the new monsters look potentially interesting, but then their weak entrance and similarly small roles in the story mean they are really nothing more than names and designs at this point, so it's actually kind of weird that Marvel green-lit an ongoing in which they star along Kid Kaiju, the superhero name that Spider-Man Miles Morales gives to Kei.

Were this not the biggest comic book I had ever read, and not filled with gigantic, immersive splash pages, it would be a more-or-less completely forgettable story. While I have no idea who it was at Marvel that suggested collecting it in a $50, raft-sized format, it was a pretty good suggestion.

Review: All-New, All-Different Avengers Vol. 2: Family Business

This second collection of the Mark Waid-written A-title of the Avengers franchise contains six issues and an out-of-order interruption from a Free Comic Book Day giveaway, and it takes a while to get going, as the first two issues are tie-ins to the "Standoff" crossover storyline. These first two issues, both drawn by Adam Kubert, don't quite work on their own, particularly as the second of these ends with Winter Solider and the Captain Americas Captains America rallying all of the various Avengers teams for a big battle that...happens elsewhere.

If you're a trade-reader and have already read Avengers: Standoff, then you can skip these two issues here. If you haven't yet read Avengers: Standoff and want to know the specifics of what's going on and how it gets revolved, you'll want to read Standoff.

That's followed immediately by a short story drawn by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer in which the All-New, All-Different Wasp narrates her infiltration of The Vision's body and her planting of bombs within it, which blows him up; it originally appeared in Free Comic Book Day 2016 [Civil War II] #1.

And then the volume starts for real and, yeah, 50 pages or so into a 140-ish page collection isn't the ideal place for a story to start for real. Mahmud Asrar takes over the art chores for the rest of the book.

The Vision starts malfunctioning very strangely, attacking the other Avengers in their hangar base, and then a new Wasp shows up, helping them deal with The Vision problem...which we already read about, as that what was happening in the Alan Davis-drawn short (an asterisk in the bottom of a panel of the issue refers readers to the FCBD special). This new Wasp is Nadia Pym, daughter of the currently dead Hank Pym and his late first wife, who was being raised by bad Russians and used her knowledge of Pym particles to escape, break into her late father's lab and build herself a Wasp suit.

Given that there are now two Captains America, Spider-Men, Hawkeyes, Hulks, Thors and Iron Men, it's not so unusual that Marvel would introduce a second Wasp, although it is somewhat unusual that a) The original Wasp is still around, in full possession of her powers and still actively super heroing, and b) As the daughter of Pym and his Silver Age wife, Nadia is a white-skinned woman of European descent, just as Janet Van Dyne is; in every other case of Marvel introducing a second version of a character it was to bring some diversity to their universe, either in terms of race or gender or both.

Because of that, I have to assume Waid (or someone else) has longer-term plot reasons for introducing a new, second Wasp...unless Marvel Comics just wanted to have a daughter of Hank Pym be their current Wasp, in order to more closely reflect the status quo of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but if that's the case Nadia is pretty different than Ant-Man's Hope Van Dyne in a couple ways. Starting with her name.

Jarvis, who is particularly sensitive about Janet Van Dyne's legacy, decides to take Nadia to meet her namesake and kinda sorta but not really step-mom Janet, and the pair hang out together. Meanwhile, the rest of these Avengers all go out into outer space in order to help Nova look for his father. They don't find him, but they do find a curious space trap that embroils them in a battle with a particularly formidable classic Marvel villain. Waid uses a pair of items from Marvel lore in a rather inventive way to have our heroes triumph over him.

All in all, it's a pretty messy package, and not one that is particularly well-suited to casual, trade-only readers. Of course, if you missed the single issues, there isn't really any other way to read it.

Review: Avengers & X-Men: Axis

Well, I really liked the logo.

Perfectly designed so that the "A" can be read as an "S" and an "I" when upside down, whoever designed the Axis logo has transformed the word into one that looks the same upside down or right side up. It was rather well used for the covers of the nine-issue event miniseries, most of which featured two characters on either side of the word "Axis," so it could be difficult to tell at a glance which way was up and down at a glance (On the cover of this collection, only the tiny little Marvel logo and "Bonus Digital Edition Included" tag let you know whether it's the heroes or the villains who belong ton the top).

It also fits with the overall premise of the book. The word does not refer to the Axis Powers of World War II, as one might reasonably believe, given the fact that The Red Skull is the major villain of the series, but rather a fixed line of reference around which something could rotate (Note the line through logo, completing the "A"). Here, the axis is that of morality or alignment, to use the role-playing game word for it.

Unfortunately, the rest of comic isn't nearly as inspired or well-executed as the logo and cover designs. This is both a shame and somewhat surprising, because the basic premise is so simple: The heroes have become villains, and the villains have become the heroes.

Now a large part of the problem with writer Rick Remender's Axis plot is that as simple as the above premise sounds, its set-up, fall-out and resolution are extremely complicated, in terms of incident. There's that, and then there's the fact that the demands of a nine-issue limited series meant to act as the spine of a line-wide cross-over event don't really make for the ideal exploitation of that premise.

The two pages of synopsis marked "Previously..." at the opening of the first issue, which include six large panels taken from other books and paragraphs of text accompanying each, start during the climax of Avengers Vs. X-Men and the killing of Professor Xavier by a Phoenix-possessed Cyclops, and the rest of the events are from Rick Remender's own Uncanny Avengers series (Aspects of the story of Axis actually go back even further, to incorporate the events of House of M...and some bullshit X-Men comics from the nadir of Marvel Comics in the '90s, but the big stuff is all from Uncanny Avengers).

To summarize that summary, just as Captain America had put together his half-Avengers, half-X-Men "Avengers Unity Squad," The Red Skull had stolen Xavier's corpse and somehow stuck Xavier's brain into his own head, giving him super-psychic powers.

Most of Uncanny Avengers dealt with the fall-out of that–with a diversion into the Apocalypse business Remender seems to always be writing–and, when the series ended, Magneto had killed Red Skull on Genosha, where the Nazi super-villain was in the process of building a concentration camp for mutants. Somehow smashing the Skull's skull in released "Red Onslaught," the Red Skull version of Onslaught, who, um, I don't know, Wikipedia that shit, I guess.

Axis proper opens in Los Angeles, where The Avengers Unity Squad and some other random-ish Avengers are fighting Plantman and trading tedious quips like they're all Spider-Man all of a sudden ("Assume anything green is your enemey, Avengers." "Even kale?" "Especially kale." I guess The Kale Growers of America should have bought that ad space in Marvel comics when they had the chance!).

The Avengers start to bicker, and then start arguing pretty savagely with one another, and then outright fighting. This is mostly due to the influence of Red Onslaught, who is sending psychic hate waves all over the world, but it starts gradually, and the make-up of these Avengers are so new and foreign to any other Avengers books I had read that I don't really know how they all get along anyway (The Vision is there all of a sudden; The Hulk is there and he has seemingly gone through his bi-annual personality re-vamps; Thor is here, and he's lost Mjolnir but hasn't yet lost his arm, so I guess the Thor in this entire series is taken from somewhere in the middle of Thor #1; Sam Wilson is now Captain America).

Iron Man continually uses "raincheck" as a verb, something he does throughout the series, so I'm assuming it's just a weird writing tick of Remenders, and none of the editors decided to say, "Hey Rick, I think this eighth instance of Iron Man saying 'raincheck' is a bit much. You're starting to sound like Claremont here, with your constant repetition of the same slang."

The Avengers eventually get their shit together, thanks to a psychic-blocking doodad of Iron Man's invention, and while the entire world breaks into random rioting, they eventually trace the hate-waves back to Red Onslaught on Genosha, where Magneto and a handful of X-people are already fighting him.

Once the Avengers, a random calvary of X-Men and other assorted character (Sue Storm, Nova, Medusa) start dog-piling on Red Onslaught, he unleashes his secret weapons: A pair of Stark-built Super-Sentinel robots, specifically designed with Civil War-related counter-measures pulled from Stark's sub-conscious brain via Skull's super-telepathy and built as the ultimate superhero-fighting and capturing countermeasure.

It works beautifully for a while, until Magneto comes up with a brilliant plan: If the robots are designed specifically to take down superheroes, they won't be able to deal with supervillains, and so he brings a completely random assemblage of villains to the party (Mystique, Sabertooth, Enchantress, Loki, Doctor Doom, Deadpool and, most randomly of all, Carnage, Hobgoblin, The Absorbing Man and Jack O' Lantern, whose new design I liked a lot...I really like characters with pumpkins for heads in general, though).

If this strategy sounds familiar, you may remember when Grant Morrison used it in 1998's JLA #17; that's the one where Prometheus takes down the Justice League using special, anti-superhero stratagems programmed into his brain, but is helpless to defeat Catwoman, as she's a villain. It worked fine as a few panels of a one-issue story, even if it does fall apart if you pick at it. It shouldn't matter if you classify the person swinging a bullwhip at your genitals, as Catwoman did to take down Prometheus, a "hero" or a "villain"...the defense against bullwhips would still be to either block them or dodge them, whoever's swinging them).

It's really just a reason to get some villains in the scene for the big switcheroo, of course, (And that at least explains why Magneto didn't just pick up some old allies from his Brotherood of Evil Mutants, but also picked out random Spider-Man villains who someone else somewhere in Marvel editorial had plans to put in Axis tie-in miniseries).

The plan is to have a couple of magic people cast a spell reversing the tiny bit of Xavier that's in Red Onslaught with the dominant Red Skull personality, giving the heroic bit control and reducing the evil bit.

It doesn't go according to plan, exactly. It works, dismissing Onslaught and rendering Skull unconscious (and presumably with Xavier in the driver's seat and Skull now tied-up in the trunk), but it also affects everyone on the island. As I said, good guys are now bad guys, and bad guys are now good guys.

And here we come to a problem.

What exactly does that mean? The idea seems to be that every hero has a little piece of evil in them, and every villain a little bit of noble, altruistic goodness, and that the spell simply reversed the proportions, bringing the evil out of all the heroes and making them bad, while bringing the good out of the villains and making them good.

This is really much more of a DC Comics concept though, as most DC villains are just evil-with-a-capital E. Over the years, layers of psychology have been given to the likes of Black Adam, Lex Luthor and Sinestro, but whatever their motivations, they're essentially rotten apples, characters who either want to rule the world or rob banks. They may have more justification than, say, The Joker, but they're just no damn good, in the same way that despite paranoia or overzealousness, DC's heroes are all good, upstanding, saintly citizens (something Geoff Johns and other writers have been rebelling against as much as possible of late, but no matter how many Parademons and monsters you have Aquaman and Wonder Woman kill in battle, they're never going to be anti-heroes like Wolverine, The Punisher and Ghost Rider).

For some of the affected, it is as literally true for them as it is for Red Skull. Genesis, the clone child of Apokolips that Remender introduced in Uncanny X-Force and has been part of the cast of Wolverine and The X-Men, apparently does have a literal seed of villainy in his inner-workings, and this spell "inverts" his Genesis and Apokolips identities (and appearances).

But it doesn't work so well with, like, anyone else. Magneto and Dr. Doom, for example, haven't really ever been evil-for-evil's sake, at least not since the mid-60s, and while both often commit despicable acts, they have always been justified in the minds of the characters, and able to be rationalized to others (Magneto especially of late, as he has literally been on the X-Men team for the last few years). No one's a villain in their own minds, and all that.

Neither of these two villians seem affected at all by the spell, really...except during one scene later in the book where Doom addresses his people in Latveria and apologizes for being such an evil tyrant to them; in personality and relationships with other characters, though, he remains unchanged.

Deadpool is also unaffected; he's there because he sells books, but his "inversion" affects his fashion more than his personality, and so he continues to talk utter nonsense and behave as usual, he just now talks with hippy slang.

Why this is such a problem is that the inversion happens in issue three, which means Remender still has six issues to fill with good guys-gone-bad and bad guys-gone-good.

Now, if this were an old-school, summer annual style event, with two oversized bookends, the story might work much better. Imagine issues #1-3 of Axis compressed into a 48-page Avengers & X-Men: Axis #1, and then every title's annual telling a story about the individual characters now that they've had their alignment's switched around, concluding with Avengers & X-Men: Axis #2, where the problem is resolved and almost everything goes back to normal, save a plot thread or three to explore in future issues of ongoing series.

But Remender doesn't have that option, and so he has to keep going. And that means he has to essentially keep the Avengers and X-Men operating as teams, which doesn't really work if they are all suddenly evil (well, he didn't have to, I suppose, but the book would have been particularly disjointed if it spent the next four or five issues spending a few pages on 40 different characters one at a time).

The now evil core group of Avengers (plus Medusa, because Marvel's trying to push The Inhumans) stay together, but wipe a bunch of the characters off the board by capturing almost all of the non-mutant characters. They repeatedly say they'll stick together because it serves their interests, but it's not clear how.

A few do go their own way, at least temporarily: These include Tony Stark, who rather than just being randomly evil like most of his peers, has his selfishness and arrogance amplified. He's basically the character he was at the start of the first Iron Man movie. It's weird that Remender picks and chooses which characters have motivations for their actions, specific aspects of their character that change, while others are just bad guys for no reason.

Then there's the Hulk, who develops a Hulk's Hulk (not unlike the Null that appeared in Matt Fraction's short-lived Defenders revival), unimaginatively named "Kluh," who has black skin, a white mohawk and glowing red lines around his torso, looking vaguely like one of The Worthy from Fear Itself.

Meanwhile, The X-Men decide to overthrow humanity for, um, some reason, wiping them all out. Apparently, the inversion of all of the X-Men's heroic natures is...that they are genocideal maniacs? (This doesn't work too well, considering that almost none of the evil mutants have ever wanted to go quite that far).

The wild cards in this new round of Avengers vs. X-Men fighting are Spider-Man, Nova, Old Man Steve Rogers, the latest Nomad (Rogers' son, apparently? I've never heard of him) and, of course, all of the villains-turned-good.

After much fighting, including one–just one–character being able to reverse his own alignment-reversal to go back to being good again by pure force of will, the remaining good guys and bad guys-gone-good are able to cast another inversion spell, this one putting everyone back to normal.

The only exceptions are Iron Man, who is able to use his technology to shield himself, and the two guys standing next to him: Havoc and Sabertooth. Iron Man would go on to star in Superior Iron Man (and presumably be restored to good again before or during Secret Wars), and the other two characters will presumably be dealt with in Remender's relaunched Uncanny Avengers, which prominently featured Sabertooth on the cover.

So in the end, it was a very simple, rather fun idea, but a very small one, and it didn't really work in the complicated, serious Marvel Universe, nor to support an event book of this scale.

I suppose some of the tie-ins might have been good, though, particularly if they offered their writers the opportunity to do more with the inverted moral alignments than Remender does here. That is, if there are tie-ins that explore how an inverted Sam Wilson or Nightcrawler differs from the regular version, aside from just being a psychotic maniac...you know, if other writers do with other characters what Remender does with Iron Man and pretty much no other character in this series.

The artwork is unfortunately all over the place, and isn't even divided by acts or arcs within the series as a whole. Adam Kubert, Leinil Francis Yu, Terry Dodson and Jim Cheung all pencil the book, but come and go randomly. Kubert's there for the first, second, seventh and parts of the ninth issue, for example. Yu for the third, fourth, eighth and part of the ninth. There are nine different inkers (no, not one per issue; don't be silly) and five different colorists. It's all pretty okay artwork, and the book makes visual sense, but hoo-boy does it read like a deadline-dodging, last-minute jam book thrown together at the last minute. It's a sharp contrast to the story, which Remender was building to for years.

The opening sequence, drawn by Kubert, is particularly weird, as all of the pages have extremely wide borders filled with the Axis logo repeating over and over like the comics panels were being framed by Axis wrapping paper.

It is a nice logo, though.


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

So anyone have any recommendations for Axis tie-ins to pursue in trade? Were any of them any good? I remember thinking the Hobgoblin mini looked intriguing when I saw it in the shop, and I'm curious about the new Jack O' Lantern.

"In a perfect world, this was how it was always meant to be": Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #1

While many of Marvel's Secret Wars tie-ins have taken their titles and parts of their plots from past stories set in different realities or alternate futures and timelines, Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows is one of the few that is based on a previous status quo. And, it's worth mentioning, a pretty popular status quo that many fans were unhappy that Marvel changed on what amounted to an editorial whim.

Without getting too deep into the death of the Spider-Marriage, here's the short-ish version. Previous Marvel Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada didn't like the fact that Spider-Man Peter Parker was happily married to Mary Jane Watson, as he felt it unnecessarily aged the character, but un-marrying him didn't really solve the problem, as making Peter Parker a widower or a divorcee wouldn't exactly make him younger. This was one of three "genies" in the Marvel Universe that Quesada wanted to find a way to re-bottle.

He found a way, but it was a terrible, terrible way: A soft reboot that only affected Spider-Man continuity. When perpetually dying old lady Aunt May was on her deathbed yet again, Mephisto–i.e. Satan himself, essentially–appeared to Peter Parker and told him he would restore his beloved aunt to health in exchange for his soul. No, not his soul! Don't be silly! Why would you think the devil would want to render services to someone willing to sell their soul to him? No, Mephisto wanted Spider-Man's marriage. As in, he wanted to manipulate the time-stream to make it so that Peter and Mary Jane were never married.

This was really cool of the devil, and worked out pretty great for all involved. Because while he claimed that he wanted Spider-Man's marriage because it represented Spider-Man's happiness, the devil was also going to strip away all memory of the marriage from Peter Parker, so he won't have any reason to be sad about losing the marriage. What a nice guy, that devil is!

Now, this was problematic for a lot of reasons, the fact that Spider-Man did a deal with the devil to supernaturally extend the life of his elderly aunt being just one of them. (Why would the devil do that, anyway? Why would the devil want that? Would Spider-Man really want that? Would Aunt May have wanted Peter to make that decision? Isn't death a natural part of life? Is Spider-Man going to put together the Infinity Gauntlet and challenge the entire Marvel Universe the next time Aunt May gets cancer? Why does having an unmarried 30-something Peter Parker matter, anyway–issn't that why Marvel created the Ultimate line?).

In addition to undoing the marriage, the devil basically just did a random reboot of Spider-Man continuity, rebuilding Aunt May's house, seemingly brining Peter Parker's dead best friend back to life, that sort of thing–it was bad enough a story that J. Michael Straczynski (who has, remember, wrote some real stinkers in his career), argued with Quesada about the scripting of the One More Day miniseries in which this nonsense occurred, ultimately asking to have his name removed from the issues and publicly disavowing it as it was being released).

I guess people got over it pretty quickly, though. I quit reading Amazing Spider-Man at that point, but I would have quit not long after, when they jacked the price up. Marvel started publishing ASM about three times a month, and they hired a slew of great writers and artists to work on it. One of them was Dan Slott, pretty much the idea Spider-Man writer, and that guy is still writing Spider-Man. Hell, he's writing this very comic.

I'm not a fan of reboots, myself, and I hate these sort of soft reboots the most, as they don't work well in a shared universe; they essentially punish fans for knowing too much about the setting and history. DC's increasingly frequent re-settings of their continuity are annoying too, but at least those have been across the board, and generally done in-story in a way that makes a modicum of sense. The devil didn't cosmically annul Superman's marriage at any point; rather time itself was disrupted so badly by The Flash and Reverse Flash's attempts to alter it in Flashpoint (and Pandora's still un-explained attempt to strengthen the universe by blending it with two different alternate realities) that it completely changed all of history, not just a marriage (DC has done its share of dumb soft reboots too, including a John Byrne-lead one of The Doom Patrol and a Jeph Loeb/Michael Turner-lead one of Supergirl, but both were made irrelevant quickly by people either not reading/caring or later, universe-wide reboots.

Anyway, let's read Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #1, the first issue in a comic book set in an alternate reality where Joe Quesada never managed to convince anyone to reboot the Spider-Man franchise, an alternate reality that is now part of "Battleworld: A massive, patchwork planet composed of the fragments of worlds that no longer exist, maintained by the iron will of its god and master, Victor Von Doom!"

THE COVER

There's a lot of verbal information on this cover, but if you take a quick glance around it, you'll note how important Marvel apparently thinks the Spider-Man and marriage parts are compared to the Secret Wars-iness of it.

The ASM logo is at the top, the same size as it usually would be, long with the sub-ttile and an oversized "#1." The Secret Wars logo, in contrast, is tiny, about the size of the creator credits or the tag letting us know that this is a Marvle comic book and that we get a "bonus" digital edition because we are over-paying for this $3.99, 21-page comic.

The image is by Adam Kubert, as the large pink "Adam Kubert" signature next to it makes clear. It features an unmasked Spider-Man standing next to Mary Jane, a little girl that looks more like MJ than Peter sitting on his shoulders. Is this the long-lost Parker baby, grown up? Yes, yes it is.

Behind them is an oddly elongated version of the Spider-Heart that appeared on the wedding issue. I'm not sure why Kubert would have drawn it in that particular shape, as drawing it out like that obscures it so much behind the logo. I have to assume it was simply because there was some miscommunication between artist and publisher regarding the final lay-out of the cover, or because Kubert screwed it up but didn't want to or have time to go back and change it.

I like Adam Kubert's art okay, but like his brother, he's not really the sort who handles deadline pressure well. Or at all.

TITLE PAGE

The spiel about Secret Wars is repeated here: "The Multiverse Was Destroyed! The Heroes of Earth-616 and Earth-1610 were powerless to save it!" and so on. The page ends with a big "The Amazing Spider-Man" logo (sans the "Renew Your Vows" subtitle), and some of the credits, starting with the letterer and ending with the executive producer.

PAGES 1-3

The first page opens with a narration box designated by a Spider-symbol as Peter Parker's: IN a perfect world, this was how it was always meant to be." Oh, snap!

Behind it are framed photos hanging on the wall, including one of the Parkers on their wedding day and another in the hospital, MJ and Peter posing with what looks like a tiny Wilson Fisk swaddled in a pink blanket.

"Renew Your Vows Part 1: Why We Can't Have Nice Things" fills the over-sized gutter between the page's two panels, along with the missing credits from the first page: Writer Dan Slott, pencil artist Adam Kubert, inker John Dell and colorist Justin Ponsor.

At a cramped table in a cramped-looking kitchen, a shirtless Peter Parker tinkers with his web-shooters, while MJ feeds their poorly drawn daughter, whose age seems to change from panel to panel. Kubert may draw great superheroes, but toddlers are not his strong suit.

It appears to be sometime in the late 1980s, maybe early '90s. The Parkers trade jokes a bit, and Peter mentions that he seems to be picking up the slack of other New York City costumed vigilantes, as it seems he's been fighting his villains and there's lately.

PAGE 4

Peter rushes into the Daily Bugle office to sell some photos, where he learns that some superheroes have been showing up dead ("Punisher, Moon Knight, a boy going by the name Night Thrasher") and others with powers have gone missing ("Daredevil, Iron Fist").

Is it weird that any time a creative team gets the opportunity to do an alternate reality story of any kind, they almost always resort to killing everyone off? I mean, it makes some degree of sense, given the fact that killing everyone off is something they can't normally do, so maybe they just have some pent-up bloodlust for superheroes they need to release somewhere, but you never read an alternate reality story where some of the good guys just retire or something...

SPECIAL PULL-OUT ADS SECTION

This being a modern Marvel comic book, there have already been two ads, but here we get the first pull-out section of house ads. There are four ads for four different Secret Wars tie-in comics, all printed on a glossy, heavier paper stock, and which a reader can unfold as if they were going to be a poster or something cool.

Nope, just ads. One for Secret Wars #5, one for Spider-Island #1, one for Age of Apocalypse #1 and one for Hail HYDRA #1.

PAGES 5-7

Spidey makes all haste to Avengers mansion, where Jarvis lets him in and lets him know they've been expecting him–"and anoyne else left standing."

Inside, he finds "The Avengers, New Warriors, Hulk and Namor." We can tell this is an alternate timeline because Captain America has a star on his forehead and an A on his chest. Totally different. Also, I think The Vision is wearing an all-white costume with just a yellow diamond shape on his chest, and thus look 98% less stupid than usual.

Cap is in the middle of a debrief, explaining that many superheroes have gone missing lately, including all of the X-Men. Iron Man and Spider-Man gossip in the corner, ignoring Captain America, while Shellhead offers to move Spidey and his family into the Mansion for safety's sake. Peter calls home on a very, very large phone to ask MJ about this, while in the background Cap reveals their best lead, the CEO of a company researching "super-human abilities and bio-technologies" with the perfectly villainous-sounding name of Augusts Roman Then Hawkeye reports in from the field, noting that there's a full-scale prison break at Ryker's and that "Everyone's broken out!"

Cap's just all like whatever.

"Sorry Clint," he says. "But I'm calling it. Roman's an omega-level threat. We need all hands!"

MJ told Spidey to hold on, as someone was at the door, and then she didn't answer again. Could the two things have something to do with one another?

Yes!

PAGE 8

Master tactician Captain America is in the process of loading every single superhero left into a single Quinjet with which to launch an assault on Roman, when Spidey bugs out of there, jumping through his own apartment window with a KSHHHH.

"Well, look at this..." says someone off-panel in a white on black dialogue balloon that either represents a slightly drunk Morpheus or...

PAGE 9

...Venom! He's sitting comfortably on Peter's busted love seat, holding the baby in one hand (and one tentacle, his other arm (and several tentacles) around MJ.

Now I believe this is a reference to an earlier story in which something, for lack of a better term, rapey either happened, or at least was strongly implied as having happened. (I actually tried reading that part of Todd McFarlane run in a library-borrowed trade in the very early '00s, and I just couldn't do it; like the Chris Claremont/Jim Lee X-Men, they were just too bad for me to force myself to read them; spending a few minutes online researching, the official line is apparently that Venom "terrorized" Mary Jane. Those of you who lived through Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man run can feel free to set the record straight in the comments section.)

Scanning the full-page splash for clues, there's no real strong implication of that here. MJ's no more naked than she was previously, the rips in her jeans all in the same places they were during the dinner scene. Aside from Venom's long, dripping tongue curling in her direction, there's nothing terribly suggestive going on here.

I do like the fact taht Kubert drew a stuffed Hulk doll with its arms ripped off. Venom clearly smashed the door in, tore up a pillow and part of the couch and ripped the arms off of Annie's toy.

What a jerk!

PAGE 10

Venom starts talking to Spidey, but he doesn't listen, punching him so hard in the face that he breaks bones in his hand while Venom's in mid-sentence. Why Venom didn't bite his own tongue off, I don't know. Just like I don't know why Venom's voice is so clear, despite talking with his tongue out of his mouth all the time. Shouldn't he sound more like Daffy Duck...?

Peter tells MJ to get the baby out of there, while he punches the hell out of Venom.

PAGES 11-12

MJ runs out to the street, and see the Avengers fly over head, attempting to hail them, but they're busy, flying straight at Roman's headquarters, Empire Unlimited. He has been expecting them, as he has "telepathy, like Professor X," and introduces himself. He's a big, robotic-looking Darkseid type, with his company logo as a chest emblem, pink energy emanating from his flying form.

"From this day on, call me REGENT," says Augustus Roman, CEO of Empire Unlimited. See, he did indeed capture all the missing superheroes, and he's managed to extract their powers and put them into his own body, and now he's ready to fuck up The Avengers.

PAGES 13-14

MJ thinks about Venom's powers and weaknesses out loud, and then she jumps on to the back of a speeding fires engine, hanging on with one hand while holding her baby in teh other.

Venom jumps out the window, in pursuit, followed by Spidey.

Spider-Man looks briefly in the direction of the glowing pink explosions around the Empire Unlimited skyscraper, but heads off to save his family.

"The Avengers..." he rationalizes "...will be just fine."

Will they?

Regent is boasting, telling Cap that this is "literally a show of force" and that he can evade and counter anything they can throw at them. And then The Hulk jumps at him.

PAGE 15

I'm not 100% sure what happens here. The art's a bit murky. Regent grabs Hulk's arm, shoots Cyclops' energy beam and then BAMFs away, clutching The Hulk's severed arm.

It's unclear if he cut it off with eyebeam and then teleported away with the severed arm, or if he severed it via teleportation.

Either way, I don't think Hulk's, Cyclops' or Nightcrawler's powers should work like that, but whatever, this isn't a Hulk or X-Men comic, it's a Spider-Man one.

...

...Oh! Hey! Remember a few pages ago, when Kubert drew a stuffed Hulk doll with its arms torn off? Maybe that wasn't a little clue that Vemon was a big mean bully and jerk; maybe it was foreshadowing this very moment.

PAGE 16

The firemen notice MJ on teh back of their truck with a baby as they pull up to a burning building. They start to give her grief, but are soon distracted by the giant black tongue monster rushing them. MJ lifts a line from what has to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 different comic books and movies (Venom: There's nowhere left to go! And notheing left to do... ...except scream!" MJ: Yeah? You first.")

MORE PULL-OUT ADS

A turn of the page brings us a half-page ad for Secret Wars: Civil War and a half of a page explaining how to redeem your code for a free digital copy of the paper comic you over-paid for. Next to it is a second pull-out section of house ads, including one for the third issue of this series, showing Spider-Man in his black costume and the tag "The Most COntroversial Spider-Man Story of The Year Continues!", plus ads for Old Man Logan #3, The Infinity Gauntlet #3 and Star Wars: Lando #1, which is not a Secret Wars tie-in, but man, if they were collapsing the whole Multiverse into Battleworld, there really should be a Star Wars tie-in. Maybe ones featuring the characters from Castle, Once Upon a Tim, those Oz comics and the Jane Austen adaptations as well.

PAGES 17-20

The sirens do indeed cause Venom to scream–"AAARGHHH!"–as sound is one of his weaknesses. Then Spider-Man arrives and starts wailing on Venom, each blow pushing him back further and further until they're within the burning building.

MJ asks a fireman if there's anyone left in the building aside from the two spider-themed super-people, and when she learns that it is, MJ shouts that the building is empty, "You're the only ones in there! Do you understand?!"

He does. God help him, he does. He pulls down a support column and brings the whole burning building down on top of them. OMG! Spider-Man just killed one of his villains!

As you can see, Spider-Man emerges from the burning rubble, but Venom? Not so much. He is apparently dead. Or maybe just "dead." I guess we'll find out.


PAGE 21

It's sometime later, and Peter Parker is helping his now much older-looking daughter–she has long red hair as she does on the cover–cross the street. Off-panel, someone shouts, "Help! My purse! That man's flying away with my purse!" And, behind an oblivious Peter Parker, we see The Vulture successfully flying away with a purse.

"It's not a perfect world," Peter narrates over the last panel, where billboards and bus signs indicate that REgent has taken over the city/Battleworld domain, "But, I look after me and mine. And that's...good enough."

This makes for a nice, parallel to Spider-Man's origin story. You'll recall that he decided to use his super-powers to fight for good after choosing not to help stop a criminal, a criminal who then went on to murder his beloved uncle shortly afterwards. In the course of this story, he finds that by using his super-powers to fight for good, he was actively endangering his family members, and must now make the opposite choice–to selfishly not fight crime to keep his family members alive.

This story, then, shows the Spider-Man story coming full-circle. Now, we already know Spidey probably isn't going to not be Spider-Man for too long–that ad for ASM: RYV #3 in this very issue appeared to show Spider-Man in a Spider-Man costume, Spider-Manning, but it's interesting to see Slott doing something interesting with the opportunity to do an out-of-continuity Spider-Man story.

I made much of the first line of the book, the bit about in a perfect world, Spider-Man and Mary Jane would have been married, but I suppose that could be read as an ironic statement, rather than Slott meta-endorsing the previous, pre-devil deal continuity. After all, how "perfect" is this world...? Every superhero except Spider-Man is apparently dead, Spider-Man is retired, a super-villain rules the city/world/Battleworld domain and animal-themed super-villains are free to snatch purses with impunity (Although, there are flying cars and hover buses in Regent's New York City, so it's not all bad).

I've only read four Secret Wars tie-in books yet–I haven't written about the fourth one, X-Men '92 yet–but this was certainly the best of those four.

Review: Uncanny Avengers Vol. 2: The Apocalypse Twins

Despite being the second collection of the Rick Remender-written title starring a half-Avengers, half-X-Men "Unity" faction of Avengers, and despite starring the same characters with no additions or subtractions, and despite its reference to the events in the previous volume and the continuing tensions between the characters from that volume, in several respects this read like an entirely different book.

Much of that is visual, given that the "regular" artist for the series, John Cassaday, only lasted four issues, and the artist who drew the remaining, non-Cassaday chapter of Vol. 1 (Olivier Coipel) isn't around either. Art duties have been assumed, at least for six of the seven issues collected here, by Daniel Acuna.

And much more of that seeming like a different book is due to the fact that this volume—much more so than the previous one, which was devoted to premise establishing, character introduction and dealing with the aftermath of a single previous Marvel comic, Avengers Vs. X-Men—is permeated by the at times confusing and slightly unpleasant feeling that can occasionally characterize Big Two super-comics: The sense that one has walked in during the middle of a movie, or, more accurately, started watching a soap opera already a decade or so in progress.

The sub-title characters are descendants of the apparently deceased X-Men villain Apocalypse, and there is apparently a whole culture built up around Apocalyse, including an extended family with feuds over the rights of ascendency, a cult, a connection to the Celestials...probably all stuff devoted Marvel readers are already pretty familiar with. Additionally, characters discuss minor plot points in an off-handed fashion, like Rogue and Sunfire's history with each other and with Apocalypse, while fairly major plot points are culled from many other Marvel stories, some of which I've read (this deals with the fallout from the first story arc of the Remender-written Uncanny X-Force, for example, the death of The Sentry from Siege, and so on) and some of which I haven't (Wasp and Captain America both being lost in time and space for a while, whatever Wonder Man's been up to, like, is whole life, something from another Remender-written Uncanny X-Force story arc in which Wolverine maybe killed Archangel or something, and something from somewhere about Wolverine killing Daken by drowning him in a mud puddle, I guess...?). And there are multiple versions of Kang involved, and thus time-travel and...Oh man. I could follow the plot okay, but I felt pretty left out of the specifics, the texture and the emotional beats of the story, and generally had no idea what was going on regarding the various motivations for the characters' actions, or the finer points of their conflicts and histories.

As near as I can figure out, at some point, Kang kidnapped the titular twins and trained them in time travel or something, leading them to a critical point in history in which seven time lines diverge. They rebel against Kang, and are setting about some incredibly complicated plan involving a mutant rapture that will take all of the mutants from earth to a new planet, Planet X, forever enforcing a sort of segregation between mutants and humans (Or temporarily, I guess; since humans should continue to mutate, right? Again I find myself at the point where I'm not entirely clear as to what distinguishes a mutant from a human being; if the formers are evolutionary jumps of the latter, or if they are a distinct sub-species or a distinct species).

The Avengers Unity Division wants to stop this mad plan, but, to do so, they must first stop fighting themselves, and Remender has them breaking into pretty clear Avengers vs. X-Men factions, with Havoc siding with Cap and The Avengers (in an attempt to keep them team meant to realize Xavier's dream together) and Thor siding with the X-Men, who seem eager to kill the hell out of the Apocalypse Twins, which is something he can get behind, being a warrior and all.

I was lost enough on the core points regarding what the fuck a mutant actually is that the conflict didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me, as in the argument between Rogue and Scarlet Witch regarding Alex's dumb speech in the first volume, nor did the circumstances of the schism really register with me (Cap seems pissed at Wolverine for leading the squad that killed the child version of Apocalypse in X-Force, but I'm pretty sure Fantomex pulled the trigger, and, anyway, isn't that kid alive and well in Wolverine and The X-Men, or is that yet another of Apocalypse kids?).

Also somewhat confounding was the fact that the team seemed to be facing an extinction level event, and yet the rest of the Avengers—those in Avengers and Avengers Assemble, for example—don't answer the all-hands-on-deck distress signal. It's just these half-dozen goofballs, because they happen to be the ones in this title (On the very last pages, though, Remender just check in with the various Avengers and X-Men squads, as they all listen to the Twins' call for a mass mutant exodus from the planet).

All in all though, it's a bigger, richer narrative than the one seen in the first volume, albeit one I found overly-complicated. Part of that's on me, sure, as I'm not well-versed enough in Marvel minutae to "get" much of this, but then, I think it points to a certain degree of failure on the part of the creators and the publisher as well, given that this is a book that is, by the point collected here, less than a year old, and part of a line-wide effort to attract new readers to the Marvel Universe.

Regarding attracting new readers, I thought it was pretty weird that this book collects Uncanny Avengers #8AU, a designation meant to indicate that it ties into Age of Ultron. That issue is drawn by Adam Kubert, and barely mentions Ultron, but instead chronicles Kang's time with the Twins. It's presented out-of-order here too, not appearing on either side of Uncanny Avengers #8, but between issues #6 and #7.

I was quite surprised how much I ended up liking the art, as Acuna is an artist I had started to actively avoid after the few, pretty poor examples of his artwork I've seen in the past. The Acuna who shows up here, however, is head and shoulders above the one I had seen working on DC books in the past, though, the artwork having a much more drawn look to it, and the character acting leaps and bound above what it once was.

I particularly liked his rendering of Alex "Havoc" Summers, which features a leaner, more elongated figure with a slightly angular face; it's a build not unlike that of his brother Scott Summers, and one that distinguishes him from the other big muscular short-haired blond guy on the team, Steve "Captain America" Rogers.

One aspect of his work here I didn't care for? Wolverine's bushy sideburns are still visible when he's wearing his cowl, which makes me think either his sideburns are too big or his mask is too small.

There are some pretty cool designs in this book, although I'm not entirely sure who came up with what—in addition to Acuna and Kubert, Cassaday is still around enough to provide the cover art, and it's possible he did design work on the series before the reality of a monthly (or, knowing Marvel, more-than-monthly) series caught up with him. The Twins are pretty cool-looking, resembling god-like, mythological figures more than Apocalypse himself ever did, and the Four Hourseman that show up during Kubert's section, during medieval times, when Thor carried an axe rather than a hammer, are pretty awesome.

Check them out:

They only last about two pages, but I was pretty sad to see them go, based on how weird and cool-looking they are.

Four new Horsemen appear near the climax, a Horseman unity division including black and blue versions of recently deceased mutants (Banshee and Daken) and recently deceased humans (The Grim Reaper and The Sentry). They also called themselves The Four Horsemen of Death, rather than Apocalypse. They're obviously not as cool-looking as the medieval four above, and they lack horses, robot or otherwise, which makes them pretty poor horsemen in my book. If you're going to be a horseman of any kind, I think it absolutely necessary that you at least have a horse.

And now I leave you with an image of The Sentry peeling apart his face to shoot energy beams at Thor:

Review: Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine

This fairly nutty 2010 six-issue miniseries came out during the rather brief period during which Marvel seemed to be trying to establish something of an "Astonishing" line of books or, at the very least, to have the adjective's appearances in titles suggest a certain level of quality.

The word has a long history at Marvel, from the 1950s Astonishing comic to the Marvel Age Tales to Astonish, but it gained a new, more prestigious meaning in 2004, when Marvel launched a new X-Men book entitled Astonishing X-Men to house the stories of the Joss Whedon/John Cassaday creative team (The title was itself taken from the mid-90's, when one of the "Age of Apocalypse" X-teams used the moniker).

After Whedon, Astonishing X-Men became first a showcase title for continuity-lite stories by Warren Ellis and various A-List artists, but has since become just another X-Men ongoing, and had rather long ago relinquished its flagship status (I'm no X-expert, but Uncanny and All-New seem to be the X-Men A-titles at the moment, yes...?).

Nevertheless, in 2010, Marvel attached the adjective to this Jason Aaron-written, Adam Kubert-drawn miniseries teaming their two most popular characters (and, not long after, launched Rob Rodi and Mike Choi Astonishing Thor five-part miniseries, before seemingly retiring the adjective for use anywhere outside of one of the half-dozen X-team books).

Aaron's plot for his Spider-Man & Wolverine story is a tough one to describe without spoiling much of anything, as it features Aaron at his most excessive, with a Morrisonian technique of throwing big, huge, imaginative ideas at the reader and barely developing them before moving on. It also features Aaron working in what I've heard some refer to as a Silver Age-like method, where insane comic book things happen, often seemingly at random, and the characters, who are written as their modern-age "selves" rather than 1960s pastiches, essentially play straight-men to the plot.

The plot here is, in one way, a bunch of crazy, random things happening, so it' shard to discuss without simply pointing at scenes and sequences and saying, "And then this awesome thing happened! And then this awesome thing happened!"

Suffice it to say that Spider-Man and Wolverine, two characters who don't generally share a lot in common within the Marvel Universe save for their recent time on multiple Avengers line-ups together (a fact dictated by what they do share in the real world: Popularity), find themselves being literally knocked around time together, landing in the prehistoric past, one another's adolescent years and a post-apocalyptic future.

There's a scene set in the future where Doctor Doom has transformed himself into Doom, The Living Planet and is set to devour earth until Wolverine shoots him with a Phoenix Gun, which, like it sounds, is a gun that shoots the Phoenix Force in bullet-form (Wolvie approaching the planet packing that particular heat is revealed in a three-page fold-out splash).

And as big and crazy and cosmic as that sounds, it's only issue #2, not a climactic moment.

The villain of the piece is a drug-dealer named Czar who has gotten his hands on "time diamonds," with which he has studded his teeth and encrusted a baseball bat he calls his "timestick" (when he whacks Wolverine with it, for example, he literally knocks him into a different time period). He is aided and assisted by Big Murder, a dwarf. The pair are black dudes, and while Aaron depicts what, exactly, they use their fantastic powers for in his typically clever, witty, funny way, the portrayals veer so close to stereotype and parody (Big M, for example, functions as a sort of hip hop hypeman to Czar, and wears Flava Flav like accessories).

When a character refers to Czar as a "buck," it sure made me flinch—even if the context was "young buck" and the person saying it was an old man version of Czar himself from the future.

They are actually working at the behest of another villain, a familiar face that certainly makes sense within this context (and explains why Spider-Man and Wolvie are together in this), but he's also such a lazy, predictable stand-in for comic book writers that Aaron might as well have written himself into the story as the Big Bad; that, at least, would have been a more original twist.

It's not Logan's big brother Dog, who appears in this and, apparently, in issues of Wolverine and The X-Men that are the stands now, making this book a bit more relevant to readers of the ongoing X-Men saga, I suppose. Nor is it The Orb, one of my favorite of Marvel's oddball villains (I still have a very distinct memory of picking up a copy of Ghost Rider as a child from a drugstore rack and being fairly bewildered by the site of a guy on a motorcycle with a giant eyball for a head), although he's in this too.

It's a hell of a showcase for Kubert (inked here by first Mark Morales and Dexter Vines, and then by Mark Roslan), and the ideal sort of project for an artist of his talent and particular relationship with deadlines—a continuity-lite miniseries in which no other books depend on the narrative's timely completion, full of wildly different settings, characters, opportunities for designs and style-switching (In one section, for example, Wolverine finds himself in Spidey's teen years, during the brief period between the spider bite and the Uncle murder that he tried being a professional wrestler, while Spidey finds himself in Wolvie's teen years, which Kubert renders in the style of Origin).

It's not a perfect comic, and it's not all that astonishing a comic either, but a few uncomfortable bits aside, it easily was one of the most fun superhero comics I've read in a while (Probably since the last Jason Aaron-written Wolverine story I read, actually, and Aaron writes Spidey just as well as he does Wolvie).

But I can see while they called it Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine; Most Fun Spider-Man & Wolverine just doesn't sound quite as marketable.

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

Writer Matt Fraction had the Fantastic Four travel back in time "2.66 million years ago" in in the first issue of his rebooted Marvel NOW! Fantastic Four, where they were attacked by a dinosaur...despite the fact that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago (and it wasn't just a typo, as it was repeated again the very next issue).

In the opening issue of this series, our heroes are marooned in the prehistoric past, where multiple species of homindis (The homosapien-looking "Small Folk," and the more bestial, ape-like "Kill Folk") live side by side with dinosaurs, some of which they've managed to domesticate. We can probably date this pretty closely to 65 million years, as Peter Parker sees the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs as it comes speeding out of the night sky.

So that's two Marvel comics I've read lately that has humans and dinosaurs co-existing; is the modern Marvel bullpen full of creationists, or is it just a function of the Earth-616 having a very different natural history than us, what with the Savage Land and that meteor that killed the dinosaurs off being encrusted with time diamonds...?