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: Wolverine Vol. 1: Hunting Season

This trade collects the first six issues of the latest volume of the Marvel's Wolverine comic book, recently relaunched as part of the publisher's successful "Marvel NOW!" campaign. It's written by Paul Cornell, an inventive writer known for highly imaginative plots and delivering extremely "comic book-y" stories that teeter on the edge of crazy with a completely straight face. It's mostly drawn by pencil artist Alan Davis, an old hand who has been regularly producing slick superhero art since long before I had ever read my first comic book (He's working here with his frequent partner, inker Mark Farmer).

It's a good example of what has made the post-Marvel Now line of comics so successful, from a creative standpoint (although, as far as I can tell, they're doing just fine in sales as well, and still regularly beating DC in their ages-old war for direct market market share).

Good Writer + Good Artist + Popular Comic Book Character = Good, Popular Comics.

The formula here is tweaked somewhat slightly, as so many of the Marvel Now relaunches were, by the fact that the good writer and good artist just so happen to be ones that the average comics reader might not have thought would be a good fit for the character, and the fact that they're leaning hard in a direction that is far from the predominant one for the character and book.

This is Wolverine as superhero, the character somewhat divested from his large supporting cast/s, his unwieldy history/continuity and the emphasis taken off of his personal demons and his bloodthirsty stabbiness. Cornell isn't writing an "Ultimate" Wolverine, of course, and there are explanations given as to why Wolverine doesn't call the Avengers or X-Men for help with this particular conflict, and he makes references to his past, his long life and some of the significant events and people in it, but they are just mentions, organic and natural: If you get them, you get them and, if you don't, the panel or scene, let alone the whole story, hardly demands that you do.

One way of stating just how pure a superhero story this is might be to say that you could take Wolverine out of it and plug in another hero, but while that's true in the broadest sense—Wolverine is fighting some kind of mind-controlling, hive-mind alien life-form that have a connection to a mysterious high-tech weapon—Cornell builds the story around this more-or-less generic superhero threat specific reactions to Wolverine's powers and behavior.

Long story short, this is a Wolverine comic book for people who don't necessarily know, like or even care all that much about Wolverine...while at the same time being an extremely polished comic book for fans of the character as well. It's a Wolverine comic book about Wolverine, not a Wolverine comic book about other Wolverine comic books, if that makes sense.

While it was surprisingly good, two words in that particular order I keep returning to with the Marvel Now books I sample, it was far from perfect, but I like to think that in a perfect world, this would be the base-line for a mainstream superhero comic: Smartly made by highly-skilled professionals trying something new with old, familiar toys in an attempt to reach new readers without sacrificing old ones.

What keeps it from being perfect? Well, it's still a Wolverine comic book, and at the risk of sounding snobby, I think it's safe to say that the most a Wolverine comic book can aspire to being is a perfect Wolverine comic book, not a perfect comic book in general.

Beyond that, some of the individual chapters seemed a little too fleet; they're constructed with beginnings, middles and cliffhanger endings, but sometimes those endings seemed awfully close to the middles, and I imagine that could have made the serially-published books a bit of a disappointment to read (This wasn't a $3.99 comic, was it? Oh God it was).

The bigger problem was that two-thirds of the way through this trade, and this story, Davis disappeared, and was replaced by a Mirco Pierfederici, with a trio of inkers finishing his art (Karl Kesel and Zach Fischer on #5, Tom Palmer on #6). Marvel tried to cover for the fact that there's fill-in art here, by labeling the first four issues as part of a four-part "Hunting Season" arc and the last two issues as a two-part "Drowning Logan" arc, but its an unconvincing attempt; this is all one story, with nothing differentiating the two arcs from one another aside from the fact that the art changes and Marvel labeled them as different stories (a distinction made all the more clear when read in a single collection like this).

Pierfederici and company's art isn't bad or incompetent or anything, but it is quite obviously not that of Davis, which was a good one-third to one-half of the book's selling point (see the Marvel Now formula stated above), and since Davis is around for the first two-thirds of the story, he's there more than long enough to establish a distinct look and tone for the book, which Marvel then blows by having a clearly rushed fill-in artist swoop in (I do hope this wasn't published at the accelerated, more-than-monthly schedule of so many of Marvel's current comics, because, if so, then they reeeaaallly screwed this one up pretty thoroughly, and there aren't any convincing excuses as to why they might have done so).

I did note while reading that Pierfederici's character design was a bit off—he's missing a stripe that Davis has on Wolvie's costume in his chapters—but then, the colorist made a postal uniform red and yellow instead of blue in an earlier chapter too, so maybe they're just sort of rushed all-around in the production of this comic?

The disappointing fumbling of the ending aside—looking at the credits for the serial issues that follow those contained here, it looks like Pierfederici draws #7 as well and then Davis returns after a three-issue break—this was a nice, clean break from the Wolverine comic/s that preceded it (and I really liked those Jason Aaron ones), and appears to be an interesting take on the character with several promising narrative paths to explore.

It's just too bad Marvel can't manage their scheduling better (And that they insist on charging so much for their damn comic books; this is a perfect example of a comic book I'd happily have on my pull-list and buy and read monthly at $2.99, but at $4-a-pop will happily wait to read in borrowed-from-the-library trade).

Some of my Favorite Scarecrows #5: Alan Davis'

One Batman creative team I’d love to see more of is the one made up of Mike Barr, Alan Davis and Paul Neary. I’ve only ever actually read two stories these guys have done, both collected in greatest hits style trades (Stacked Deck: The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told, Batman in the Eighties), and in both cases they were among the very best stories in the collections (Confidential to DC Comics’ trade program: I would totally buy a trade collecting all Barr/Davis/Neary Bat-stories in one volume).

One of those two stories was 1987’s Detective Comics #571, which featured Batman and Robin vs. The Scarecrow. I won’t go into much detail here, because Dave Campbell has already written a better, funnier summary than I could, but it involves a new twist on The Scarecrow’s traditional fear toxin, and one of the greatest Batman panels of all time.

Let’s take a closer look at Davis and Neary’s Scarecrow:


Man, I love their Scarecrow (Actually, I love all their Bat-character designs…specifically their Robin, who seems like a real little kid).

Davis doesn’t do anything terribly radical with the design, and it’s pretty much your generic Scarecrow, just as Breyfogle’s and Jones’ were. Like them, he also has the face more or less blank, save for a bit of stitching for the mouth, except when some degree of expression is desired, and, also like them, he really draws attention to the hands, which become huge and clawlike—here the fingers moving seemingly at random, as if they have minds of their owns. I can see this Scarecrow’s digits kind of wiggling themselves in between panels, and it’s a pretty creepy image.

Davis seems to have been thinking Wizard of Oz when it comes to his Scarecrow’s posture, because he really seems to be devoid of a human skeleton, and just stuffed with straw, based on the weird angles at which his body bends. Just look at that panel where he shoots Batman (Phoot phoot phoot phoot!). His neck is diagonal between his head and shoulders, and the top half of his torso seems to have hinges right below the ribcages.

This bendy, boneless Scarecrow makes for a great punching bag too: