Briefly on Stane Lee and Julie Schwartz's introductions to 2008's JLA/Aveengers trade

When I wrote about Kurt Busiek and George Perez's JLA/Avengers a few months ago, there was one interesting aspect of the trade collection I read that I couldn't quite find a way to fit into the post, so I've decided to return to it now in a separate post. The particular 2008 trade paperback collection I used for my re-read included a pair of introductions from comics veterans who were integral in the creation of both of the title teams (as well as so much else that went on at Marvel and DC over the course of decades), Stan Lee and Julie Schwartz.

Everyone, of course, knows Lee. Even if this is your first visit to a comics blog, and if you somehow arrived here and started reading this post by accident, you probably know who Stan Lee is, as he's perhaps the only true household name that the medium has ever produced. The legendary editor, writer and promoter of Marvel comics not only co-created the super-team The Avengers (along with his frequent collaborator Jack Kirby) and not only served as The Avengers' first writer, he also co-created all five of the team's founding members (again, along with Kirby, and a couple of others like Ernie Hart, Don Heck and Larry Lieber).

As for Schwartz, he spent over 40 years as an editor with DC Comics, and was pivotal in the publisher's recommitment to superheroes in the latter half of the 1950s, working with writers and artists to reintroduce new, second-generation versions of The Flash, The Green Lantern and others, helping usher in waht became known as the Silver Age of superhero comics (and, indirectly, as we'll see, inspiring Lee and company's creation of the Marvel Universe). It was Schwartz who decided to also update the Justice Society of America team, and thus the Justice League of America debuted in 1960.

In 2008, the year these introductions were published in this collection, Schwartz had already been dead for several years, having died in 2004 at the age of 88 (This may explain why his introduction says "By Julie Schwartz, As told to Robert Greenberger"). And as for Lee, he was 86, and about to start the last decade of his life (He would die in 2018, at the age of 95). 

The introductions are set side-by-side in two parallel columns, not unlike those that were printed on the inside front cover of the first DC/Marvel superhero crossover, 1976's Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1, although in that case they were penned by Lee and his then DC equivalent, Carmine Infantino. 

Amusingly, the Stan Lee introduction is much longer than the Schwartz one, continuing for another six paragraphs after Schwartz's had ended. More amusingly still, neither man gives much in the way of an indication that he's actually read the comic they are supposedly introducing (Not that I blame either man, given their age at the point they must have been writing these). 

Schwartz, at least, proves he's well aware of who the creative team is, the fact that there are a ton of characters involved, and that the story will involve the first fighting and then teaming up. His intro ends thusly:

It may seem like a tired old plot, but in the hands of true professionals they make it entertaining. Kurt and Georg have my admiration for taking the time and care to fit in so many heroes, villains and other familiar beings. I'm just glad I'm not the one who has to proofread it all!

As for Lee, he eventually gets around to saying "There are countless thrills and chills on the action-packed pages ahead," but then, that's the same thing he would say about any Marvel comic (or any comic he himself had anything to do with). 

So if not the comic collected within the trade, what do they talk about? 

The history of the two teams, or at least the origins of the team each man is involved with, although, in Lee's case, it takes a bit to get to it, and he also talks about himself (and, charmingly, Schwartz) quite a bit too.

Lee's introduction is perhaps predictably jokey and jocular, as well as somewhat self-deprecatingn and often about the very writing he's in the act of doing. It's very Stan Lee.

He talks about the legendary 1960s golf game between National/DC Comics publisher Jack Liebowitz and Atlas/Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, in which Liebowitz said his new comic Justice League of America "was selling like there's no tomorrow."  

Writes Lee:

Well, might Marty didn't need a house to fall on him. As soon as the golf game was over he raced to a phone and called yours truly.

"Stan," he bellowed, "National's Justice League is a hot seller. I want us to get on the bandwagon too. Cook me up a book which stars a whole team of heroes — and to it yesterday!"

This, Lee says, is "comicdom's worst-kept secret," and the call that inspired not the Avengers, but instead the Fantastic Four. (As Lee puts it, it was "the reason I dreamed up the good ol' Fantastic Four, which I modestly called 'The World's Greatest Comic.'" Oh, did Lee dream them up? Well, that's one way of putting it; at least he mentions Jack Kirby in the next sentence, with "Aided by the artwork of the titanically talented Jack Kirby"...).

In Stan's telling, DC's JLoA and Marvel's FF were in " a no-holds-barred, neck-and-neck race," and, while that was going on, "we" (by which he means, but doesn't say, he and Kirby, Steve Ditko, Bill Everett and a handful of other collaborators) created  "a brand-new batch of additional super-heroes," those of the first generation of what was becoming the Marvel Universe.

He names them all, of course, and it's only after a few such years that Marvel actually has enough of its own superheroes with their own books to band together into a Justice League-like team, which is how Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk, Ant-Man and The Wasp ended up facing off against Loki in 1963's The Avengers #1. 

He spends several paragraphs talking about writing a team like the Avengers, and then spends a paragraph on Schwartz:

But I cannot come to the end of this candid little confessional without saying a few words about my co-Introduction writer, Julius Schwartz. I'm both pleased and honored to have the opportunity to appear with this legendary comic-book great in a watershed collection such as this. In all the years that I've known and admired him, we've never actually worked together or appeared in the same magazine before. It's taken half a century for this to happen. But y'know something? Considering the respect and admiration I have for the countless accomplishments of Julie Schwartz, it was well worth the wait.

Well that was sweet, I thought. 

While Lee's introduction appeared in blue ink on the lefthand side of the first two pages, Schwartz's was in red ink, and on the righthand side of the pages. 

Schwartz jumps right in:

The revivals of super-heroes were going so well that my schedule was getting crowded. But when we came up with the next logical step — combining these heroes into a team — no one else would touch it but me! Obviously, we modeled the new team after the Justice Society of America, but as I've said for years, I've never liked the name Society. It sounded too upscale. I preferred something like League, since, after all, everyone followed the baseball leagues.

He goes on to explain that "Every super-hero who had a feature was going to be in the new team," which is why they numbered at seven, and why characters like Martian Manhunter and Aquaman ended up on the team, despite the fact that those two didn't, at that point, have the sorts of resumes  or track records of the other five (if we allow The Flash and Green Lantern to list their forebears' accomplishments as their own,, of course). 

And as for Green Arrow, Schwartz says he couldn't remember exactly why he wasn't there at the beginning, but he had enough heroes for 24 pages anyway (And it's not like GA would never join the team; he would sign up within a year of the League's Brave and The Bold debut, in the fourth issue of their own book).

Schwartz goes on to write a bit about the original creative team—Gardner Fox, who had also written the old JSA stories, and Mike Sekowsky, "the only artist I worked with who could uniquely fit all these characters on each page"—and how the early issues came together, how they were received, and how the team expanded ("Well, we relented and finally let Green Arrow in. I was then sticking to my guns, and waited for heroes to have their own title before they could join, like the Atom and Hawkman.")

And then, how he and Fox introduced the parallel world of Earth-2, and the JLoA met the JSoA, the sales of which were incredible enough to keep the two teams meeting regularly for decades.

"But I never imagined they would ever cross paths with the Avengers," Schwartz writes. "When DC and Marvel first tried to have the teams meet, I was just an innocent bystander, curious to see what would happen."

Nothing, as it turned out. But that was in the 1980s.

"But as the house ad said when we first gave the JLA their own title, Just Imagine!," he writes. "Just imagine seeing the best and brightest from two entirely different companies combatting one another and then working together."

Obviously, neither piece says all that much about the amazing story that follows, the ultimate DC/Marvel crossover, but it was interesting hearing about the origins of the two teams from men present at (and integral to) their creation and, particularly in Lee's case, I found it somewhat revealing of the men themselves to hear what they had to say and how they said it. 

DC Versus Marvel: JLA/Avengers

It's perfectly appropriate that the final DC/Marvel crossover was 2003's JLA/Avengers, as that makes it the ultimate DC/Marvel crossover in both senses of the words. Writer Kurt Busiek and artist George Perez, the latter of whom was attached to the project when it was first in development back in the early '80s, produced the biggest and best of the 20 such comics that were published previously. 

And it's big in every way. Originally published as a four-issue mini-series, with each issue numbering 48 pages, it was nearly 200 pages along. The page count is similar to that of 1996's DC Versus Marvel, but, thanks to Perez's panel-packed pages and intricate, detailed artwork, the full series reads much denser than its closest relation in the sub-genre, more like a graphic novel than a comic book miniseries. 

The stakes are, naturally, also big: The fate of both the DC and Marvel Universes...which, of course, were also imperiled in DC Versus Marvel, but here that threat feels more immediate and visceral, more akin to Crisis on Infinite Earths than DC Versus Marvel. Indeed, the epic opens with a four-page prologue in which two alternate universes are destroyed, that of Marvel's Arkon the Magnificent and DC's Qward, which was in the process of being visited by the Crime Syndicate of Amerika. 

And the cast? Mind-boggling big. Not only does it feature both of the then-current title teams, it also features their various reserves and former members called in to help out with the crisis...as well various past, dead members temporarily resurrected by the cosmic goings-on...and characters from throughout both teams' history when their universes are temporarily fused...but, by the final issue's climactic battle, the series will feature every single hero who has ever been a member of either the Justice League or the Avengers.

Oh, and there are also plenty of characters from both universes that play small roles or make cameos, from The Spectre, Lobo, The Phantom Stranger and various Titans to The Watcher, The Thing, Spider-Man and The Defenders. It's a massive cast of characters and one that, frankly, it's hard to imagine any artist other than George Perez even attempting, let alone drawing so well. 

So it's an incredibly satisfying read, one that I have to imagine was welcomed not just by the fans of either or both title teams, but by anyone who had ever been a fan of either team...maybe (hopefully!) even those who were looking forward to the originally proposed, 1980s crossover, fans who ended up having to wait over 20 years to see Perez drawing all those heroes (Because of various time travel elements, the '80s teams do meet—in fact, I'm pretty sure Perez's original art for the original, proposed meeting was repurposed in a big panel here—and versions of the characters that existed then, like Flash Barry Allen and Green Lantern Hal Jordan, end up playing substantial roles in the proceedings). 

How do the creators manage to get all this fan service in, and still tell a compelling, let alone coherent, story? 

Well, again, much of that is due to Perez's artwork, and his ability to fit so much in each panel and on each page, while Busiek comes up with an exceedingly clever, three-stage story, one that reads a bit like several different crossovers in one. And he leaves a lot of room to explore the universes, comparing and contrasting the ways they differ in terms of, say, geography, or the way they treat their heroes or even the way their various physics work.

The story opens with Krona, a cosmic villain introduced in Green Lantern in the 1960s, whose deal was that he was seeking to unlock the secrets of creation. Here, his inquests result in the destruction of universes. After the aforementioned destruction of two alternate universes, he arrives in the Marvel Universe and meets the Grandmaster, a Marvel Universe mainstay that was first introduced in an Avengers comic from the late '60s. 

The Grandmaster negotiates with Krona, and is in possession of some pretty valuable information, as he does actually know a being who witnessed the/a universe-creating Big Bang (that would be Galactus, of course). As is his wont, The Grandmaster proposes to Krona that the two of them play a game; if Krona wins, he will give him Galactus, while if Grandmaster wins, he won't. The specific rules of the game will be explained to our heroes a bit later in the story.

Meanwhile, Busiek and Perez introduce the then-current title teams, each in a spectacular two-page spread as they face a major threat from the opposite universe, followed by a several-page sequence where they triumph, introducing readers to each team's members, powers and dynamic in the process. 

The JLA comes first, and they are in a pitched battle against the giant Terminus (Never heard of 'em; not in 2003, and not 22 years later, either. This is the relatively rare comic that could actually use an annotated edition).

The League is that which existed when Mark Waid took over JLA after Grant Morrison's departure and excised the bigger roster Morrison had gradually built up to deal with his climactic "World War III" arc. That means we're looking at the Big Seven that founded this iteration of the team, plus Plastic Man (And if you need an even more specific marker of where we are in League history, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who Perez does a great job of drawing much younger than the other heroes, is wearing his unfortunate, Jim Lee-designed costume...although Perez will draw him in his original costume in one panel at the book's climax). 

And in the Marvel Universe, the Avengers are dealing with Starro, referred to as "The Star Conqueror." If the splash page is accurate, this team, which Busiek was actually writing for Marvel around that time, consisted of Iron Man, Jack of Hearts, Quicksilver, Warbird, She-Hulk, Yellowjacket, Thor, The Vision, Triathlon, The Wasp, Captain America and The Scarlet Witch. (I say seemingly because this book, when I originally read it in 2003, was my very first exposure to The Avengers, unless you count Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's version that existed in The Ultimates. I wouldn't buy my first Avengers comic until a few years later, when Brian Michael Bendis launched New Avengers).

As both teams begin to investigate the extradimensional visitors—with Flash Wally West using his powers to enter the Marvel Universe, where he discovers mutants, that world's hatred of mutants, and the fact that the Speed Force doesn't seem to exist there—each team gets a cosmic visitor, there to explain the basic parameters of the Krona/Grandmaster game to them.

The Grandmaster himself visits the JLA Watchtower, telling the League they must race against a team from the other world to assemble 12 items of great power from across the worlds, including the likes of The Spear of Destiny, The Cosmic Cube, Green Lantern's power battery, The Infinity Gems, The Orb of Ra, the Ultimate Nullifier, and so on. Joined by The Atom, who is there to replace The Flash, who is powerless there, they visit the Marvel Universe. After some exploration and giant monster fighting, they are repelled by The Avengers (who are joined by Hawkeye, who will play a pretty prominent role throughout the series).

The Avengers are then visited by Metron of the New Gods, who gives them a similar spiel, about a team of others and a dozen power objects, and gifts Iron Man with a Mother Box, capable of opening Boom Tubes to the DC Universe, which seven of the Avengers take there.

That's pretty much the first issue, which ends with the Avengers being confronted by the JLA, and Thor throwing his hammer at Superman.

The second issue thus opens with what one might expect as the first stage of a typical superhero crossover ritual: The fight. It's a good one, far better than any of the many fights in DC Versus Marvel, including a great splash in which the 15 heroes do battle with one another, before we get various passages of break out fights, like Flash vs. Hawkeye ("They're not so tough, Thor," Hawkeye says, "They're just Squadron Supreme Lite") and Captain America versus Batman (After an exploratory page or so of strikes and counterstrikes to test one another, the pair agree they are just pawns in a larger game, and leave the battle to work on the case together).

Much of the rest of the second issue/chapter are devoted to the teams, their rosters expanded and fortified by reserve members, playing the game. And so the JLA and Avengers break into smaller teams to pursue the items in various locales throughout the two universes, giving us scenes like Hawkman, Black Canary and Blue Beetle vs. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in The Flash Museum and Wonder Woman and Aquaman vs. Hercules and She-Hulk in Asgard.

This all culminates in a huge 30 hero battle in the Savage Land for the final item, the Cosmic Cube. There we get such conflicts as a Hawkeye vs. Green Arrow archer off and a fairly long Superman vs. Thor battle, which Superman eventually wins ("Sorry to...disappoint..." Superman struggles to say, holding off Mjolnir with his left hand, before delivering a knockout punch with his right, "But in...my world, it looks like...the dials... ...go up to eleven!").

When Quicksilver finally secures the cube, the game seems to end in a tie...until Captain America knocks the cube from the speedster's hands, and into those of his new ally Batman, the final score being 7-5 in the Justice League's favor. Thus Krona, who had chosen the Avengers as his champions, has lost. The Marvel Universe is saved! 

Or is it? 

Krona, being a sore loser, attacks The Grandmaster, pulls the name of Galactus from his mind, and then summons the giant planet-eater, who he then attacks. The heroes get involved, and the seemingly dying Grandmaster uses the various gathered objects of power to...do something. 

What exactly will remain mysterious for much of the third issue/chapter, which is devoted to an exploration of a new, weird, but rather neat status quo. Here, it seems that the Justice League of America and The Avengers are long-time allies, getting together for annual, cross-dimensional get-togethers in the same manner that the JLoA and the JSoA used to (Iron Man and Green Lantern Hal Jordan seem to have a friendly argument over which world is Earth-One and which is Earth-Two).

This leads to long-ish sequence that opens with what I am assuming are the Bronze Age versions of the team, with the Satellite Era Justice League meeting with an Avengers team that includes Beast, and then we get a series of cameo-filled get-togethers between various incarnations of the two teams, giving us such moments as Snapper Car and Rick Jones talking barbecuing with Jarvis, Moondragon psychically fending off Guy Gardner's would-be sexual harassment and a Wonder Woman and Wonder Man arm-wrestling match.

Throughout the sequence, both Captain America and Superman, both of whom have been acting off throughout the series, sense something is wrong with what they're experiencing, and eventually things break down, the scene shifting to snow-covered ruins of a pair of cities, New York and Metropolis, with various heroes trying to make sense of the apocalyptic cityscapes, where civilians seem to randomly shift between worlds and mind-controlled villains prowl.

Apparently, the two Earths have been smooshed together, but they are too different to be stable and are thus tearing themselves apart. Teams of Avengers and Leaguers eventually convene, and their members seem mostly composed of past versions of the characters, based on their costumes, like those worn by The Wasp, Scarlet Witch and Hank Pym, who is here a Giant Man, rather than Yellowjacket. 

Oh, and The Flash is now Barry Allen, while the Green Lantern is now Hal Jordan. 

After some intervention from The Phantom Stranger, who shows these 13 characters their futures, which involves a lot of bad for some of them, like Hal going mad and becoming Parallax and Scarlet Witch and Vision losing their children, the heroes nevertheless decide to work together to take on Krona and save their worlds and futures,. This will involve building a special ship and invading the villain's extra-dimensional base, which is built of the corpse of Galactus.

There they encounter various villains in Krona's thrall, who at first are just assorted goons from the two universes (AIM, Kobra, Moleoids, two different versions of Parademons, etc.), but will eventually include dozens of villains who have fought either team throughout their history.

After a weird bolt of black and red lightning splits a panel and Aquaman and Scarlet Witch disappear to be replaced by Quicksilver and Green Arrow (and Hank Pym switches from a Giant Man costume to a Yellowjacket one), Pym theorizes that "chronal instability" is responsible, and this will be the vehicle through which we get all of the Leaguers and Avengers (and, in some cases, many of their various costumes and designs over the decades) to show up in a huge, sprawling fight scene that sees the various heroes fight their way through a gauntlet of villains to get to Krona. 

And so we get panels featuring The Falcon in a sky full of DC's winged heroes (Zauriel, Black Condor and various Hawkpeople), of "Batroc, Ze Leapair!" challenging Batman, of Prometheus threatening Captain America, Aquaman vs. Attuma, Superman wielding Cap's shield and Thor's hammer, and an incredibly fun game of cameo-spotting.

(On my first, original read-through of the single-issues published in 2003 and then again during my re-read of a trade collection a few weeks ago, I was trying to figure out if Busiek and Perez actually managed to get everybody in, which meant lingering on each page, scanning panels for the likes of lesser Leaguers like The Yazz, L-Ron-in-Trigon's body, Justice League Antartica and Tomorrow Woman, that last of whom was only on the team for the space of a single issue, JLA #5...although she was later also featured in 1998's JLA: Tomorrow Woman one-shot. They are, indeed, all there. Hell, I saw that Moon Maiden is on the cover of issue #3, and her single appearance was in 2000's JLA 80-Page Giant #3, an excellent novel-length story in which she was a member of the League from a forgotten timeline.  I didn't have the knowledge to do the same with The Avengers, obviously. When I posted about this after my re-read on Bluesky, Busiek himself responded to confirm that they did indeed get everyone in, working from official lists provided by DC and Marvel, and they did so because Perez wanted to draw them all.)

Our heroes are, obviously, successful in the end, the two universes  are saved and Krona is defeated...but in such a particular way that he will get what he wants, to see the birth of a universe. Eventually. 

While I had originally bought and read all of these issues, for the purposes of rereading it and writing about it as part of the series on DC/Marvel crossovers I ended up doing on Every Day Is Like Wednesday, I turned to a copy of the trade collection that I was able to get from the library system I work at. 

I felt lucky to find a copy, and to find one in such good shape, considering that it was published in 2008 (There was a tear on one-page, but that was the only injury to the 17-year-old book).

And that was the last time the book was published, other than, of course, a special, limited-run edition that the Hero Initiative published in 2022 to help fundraise for the ailing Perez. 

It seems fairly insane that this particular book has not been in print since it was originally released, especially now that the Avengers brand is so much more valuable than it was then, and so much better and widely known than it was in those pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe days. 

One imagines the publishers could sell a lot of copies of it, were it to be reprinted today. With the relatively recent release of the two omnibus collections collecting the other 19 DC/Marvel crossovers, one hopes a new JLA/Avengers collection will be along before too long. 

Like I said, I have the original issues, but I'd happily buy a new collection. It would be worth it just to have the covers unencumbered by the logos and text, as are presented in the back of this collection. Not only is that of issue #3 worth spending long minutes studying, but issue #2, depicting almost 40 different heroes all actively engaged in battle with one another, is something of a masterpiece of superhero combat. 

Editors from DC and Marvel have quite recently teased a future collaboration, and, honestly, I don't envy whoever the creators who get that particular assignment might be. One imagines their work will be much smaller in scale than JLA/Avengers was (how could it not be?), but, even still, with this the last of the crossovers, it's also the one any future crossover will have to try and top and, honestly, I don't see how anyone can hope to top this comic.  

Three reviews of Marvel collections I found in my drafts:

Avengers: Unleashed Vol. 2--Secret Empire

Although the second collection of writer Mark Waid and primary artist Mike Del Mundo's Avengers ongoing, this is actually the fifth volume of Waid's run on the primary Avengers team; his All-New, All-Different Avengers was relaunched after about 15 issues, because...because Marvel, that's why.

The turning point presented at the end of this volume, then, in which particular elements of the status quo introduced just last volume shift, may seem somewhat violently sudden, but it is perhaps best read in the context of the writer reacting to the goings-on in the Marvel Universe beyond his control, and as simply the latest necessary course correction rather than Waid quite suddenly thinking better of decisions he just made. As with the events of Civil War II, which took Iron Man Tony Stark out of the cast and helped shunt the younger Avengers off into their own team and their own book, Secret Empire presents Avengers with a big change, and Amazing Spider-Man apparently deals it another.

The first two issues, co-written with Jeremy Whitley of the sadly canceled Unstoppable Wasp, feature Doctor Victor Von Doom, currently wearing Iron Man-like armor and calling himself "Iron Man," teaming up with the Avengers, who are pretty frosty to the alliance. Only Wasp Nadia Pym is really into the idea, in part because of her fan girl fervor for Doom's brilliance.

Both are done-in-ones, with the Nadia/Victor relationship the most notable throughline. In the first issue, Doom stops by for tea, and then recruits Nadia's help in infiltrating a Lumberjanes camp. In the second, the Avengers are on the ropes, thanks to a power-stealing villain, but the Nadia/Victor team are able to save the day, with their science.

Both of these issues are drawn by Phil Noto, whose painterly style is a good fit with Del Mundo's. It was refreshing to finally see this post-Secret Wars Doom drawn at some length by someone other than Mike Deodato, who just draws him as Vincent Cassel for some reason (Still not sure why that is allowed to go on; can't he sue Marvel? Shouldn't Marvel be worried he might sue them for using his likeness like that?). I got lost among the relaunches of writer Brian Michael Bendis' Iron Man books, so I haven't read any of Infamous Iron Man, which Alex Maleev is drawing.

After those, Waid scripts three more done-in-one stories, two of which are set during the events of Secret Empire, and one of which is an epilogue. Oddly enough, they barely refer to the events of the event series, and make sense as tie-ins only if you've read it. If not, well, they stand alone fine, but they likely seem to be extremely odd choices for the title.

First, there's a Thor solo issue, which apparently details where she went after she was zapped away at the beginning of Secret Empire. Narrated by a native being to the dimension she was sent to, it's a nice, solid story of the character's heroism, with a fair degree of humor derived from the clashing cultures thrown in.

Then, Doctor Octopus narrates an adventure featuring Bad Cap's Hydra Avengers line-up of reprogrammed Vision, (possessed by a demon) Scarlet Witch, former Thor Odinson and mercenaries Deadpool, Taskmaster and The Black Ant. It's a very short story, but one that sends them all on a mission they see through to completion, while highlighting the self-serving villainy of some of the members and the tensions inherent in a character like The Odinson working alongside former bad guys.

The final story takes place after Secret Empire and whatever has been going on in ASM, as Peter Parker has apparently lost Parker Industries and possession of The Baxter Building, which is where the team's HQ has been for all of, well, all of just 10 issues. The six Avengers split up into pairs to have conversations with one another. The Vision and Hercules go out for coffee, and the synthezoid expresses his concerns about learning that he is immortal, and gets some surprisingly sage life-coaching from Herc. Spidey tries to find some common ground with The Wasp by inviting her to a science fair, but they get side-tracked by superhero stuff. And Sam Wilson, who here has already surrendered the shield and title of Captain America back to Good Cap but hasn't yet put on his new Falcon costume, pulls Thor aside and tries to convince her to lead the team, since he's no longer Captain America. It's a nice between-arcs breather issue, but then, because so much of the title has been reactive to line-wide crossovers, Waid's Avengers series has, more often than not, been a whole series of these sorts of relaxed breather issues.

Black Panther: The Man Without Fear--The Complete Collection

I'm glad Marvel gave prose novelist David Liss' Black Panther comics "The Complete Collection" treatment, putting all 18 or so issues of the T'Challa-starring comics he wrote between a single pair of covers, because Liss' run on the character might be murder to try to assemble through single issues (The run was previously collected into a trio of trade paperbacks under two different titles). This is because of how weird Marvel is at selling their damn comic books.

After Daredevil event storyline "Shadowlands" and Black Panther-centric "Doomwar," both Matt Murdock and T'Challa need to rediscover themselves. And so Murdock goes away, but he asks T'Challa to become the new guardian of Hell's Kitchen, where the now de-powered Panther decides he will be able to prove to himself whether he's still a total bad-ass without his former magic Panther powers and all the resources of a sci-fi fantasy kingdom to call upon.

And, for whatever damn reason, Marvel decided to make Black Panther the new star of the Daredevil comic book series, changing the title of the series to Black Panther: The Man Without Fear, but keeping Daredevil's numbering, so that the first issue of the new series was Black Panther: The Man Without Fear #513. And then, after about 12 issues, they changed the title again but kept the numbering, so the book was then Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive for a while. Oh, and then there was one of those dumb decimal-point issues, Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive #523.1. (As for Daredevil, when Matt Murdock returned, he got a whole new title with a new #1; I honestly have no idea how any of this works.)

Anyway, none of that really matters for the purposes of this collection, which reads as a complete, 400+-page graphic novel. What little one might need to know about what happened in Daredevil and Black Panther and Doomwar before gets quickly and efficiently explained in a conversation between Murdock and T'Challa in the first issue, and then referred back to organically throughout the story. And, if you're reading the entire Black Panther saga in preparation for the movie (UPDATE: I guess that's a pretty  clue as to just how dang long ago I wrote this review, huh?), well just know that this falls between Black Panther: Doomwar and the beginning of Ta-Nehesi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze's Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet.

What will be most immediately evident about Liss' run is the way it looks. Artist Francesco Francavilla draws and colors the majority of it, and his art is highly, highly stylized. It is heavily "drawn" looking in a way that stands out from the bulk of Marvel's comics. His designs are realistic, but stripped down and abstracted in the rendering, with well-placed lines of shading and a lot of usage of darks and shadows. The artist whose work might most immediately jump to mind when reading Francavilla's Black Panther book is, fittingly, that of long-ago Daredevil artist David Mazzucchelli.

Even when Francavilla's not drawing, Liss' Black Panther was fortunate to have some pretty great artists involved. Jefte Palo does a lot of the non-Franacavilla art, and he draws big, bold, exaggerated, muscular figures perfect for all the skulking and brawling in the book's action scenes. As the book nears its conclusion and Man Without Fear turns to Most Dangerous Man Alive, the comic gets more and more Daredevil-y, and Michael Avon Oeming and Shawn Martinbrough do much of the art. Both are great, and neither are too far removed from Francavilla's style, although Oeming is the artist who most sticks out as different from the others; his highly cartoony take calling to mind that of that other famous Daredevil creator, Frank Miller.

So after Daredevil gives T'Challa permission to be the new vigilante in town and then bugs off to wherever, Foggy Nelson helps set T'Challa up with a new identity. Under a goatee and pair of glasses, he is now Mr. Okonkwo, a Congolese immigrant who quickly finds a new gig as the manager of The Devil's Kitchen diner and a not-so-great apartment, the better to keep an eye on the neighborhood. Because he lacks Vibranium and his fancy gadgets, he basically fights crime as a sort of cape-less Batman or color-swapped Daredevil; wearing a bullet-proof vest over his togs and punching and kicking people. He occasionally busts out a gadget he made himself with equipment from the hardware store. Storm of the X-Men, who was still T'Challa's wife at this point, is limited mostly to Skype-ing with him, as he wants to go it alone as part of his proving-himself thing, and he's afraid if his storm goddess/queen/mutant superhero hangs around too much, his cover might be blown.

The six-part "Urban Jungle" features an escalating war between the new vigilante in town, The Panther--oddly, hardly anyone ever recognizes The Black Panther as The Black Panther, superhero, Avenger and former King of Wakanda, but just call him "Panther"--and a new would-be Kingpin of Crime in town, Vlad "The Impaler". It's low-level and low-stakes for a Black Panther comic, but then, scaling his world down from the world to a New York City neighborhood is part of the entire remit of the series. It's all-around super-solid superhero crime comics, with Luke Cage and Spider-Man both briefly dropping by only to be rebuffed (Palo draws the issue with Spider-Man in it, and he draws Panther a few heads taller and a few torsos wider than Spidey, giving them a nice physical representation of their attitudes in relation to one another).

That's followed immediately by the two-part, Palo-drawn "Storm Hunter," that follows on a dangling plot point from the previous arc. This issue pits T'Challa up against Kraven The Hunter, and he gets an unwelcome assist from his wife Storm.

Next is the Francavilla-drawn "Fear and Loathing In Hell's Kitchen," a Fear Itself tie-in of sorts...although one need not know much of anything about Fear Itself to follow the story, which features the rise of a new Hatemonger and the debut of "American Panther," a star-spangled, Panther-themed version of Black Panther to provide an America First answer to the foreign-born, immigrant hero, whose "accent" is referred to repeatedly. This three-issue arc actually reads incredibly uncomfortably in 2018, as the sorts of things The Hatemonger's followers say about immigrants sound way too familiar and, well, real today. At the time Liss was writing this story in 2011 or so, he was basically taking real attitudes of bigoted and/or racist and/or nationalist assholes and turning their words and actions up from, like, an 8 to an 11. Now that exaggerated-for-superhero-comics 11 is, like, part of the national discourse. If a guy showed up in a purple Klan hood with a big "H" on the forehead for "Hate" and demanded that immigrants return America to Americans in real life today, well, the actual president of the United States might say there were fine people on both sides of the argument, or that there were violence on both sides of the torch-wielding mob marching through New York (I guess the geography of the story is dependent on mind-control and the influence of a supernatural fear god, as it's difficult to imagine the events of Charlottesville in 2017 occurring in New York City, but still...)

Then there are two done-in-ones, a "Spider-Island" tie-in drawn by Francavilla (In which Panther has six arms and fights Overdrive and Lady Bullseye...Panther's extra arms being the only thing really making this a "Spider-Island" story) and a Palo-drawn "Point One" issue in which T'Challa fights The White Wolf again, this time getting an important assist from his waitress-turned-confidante Sofija.

Finally, there's "The Kingpin of Wakanda," drawn by Martinbrough, Oeming and Palo. This story arc is the Daredevil-iest of them all, in its villains if not its tone. Kingpin Wilson Fisk has taken over The Hand, and he makes a play for Wakanda. Faced with these foes and Kingpin's two top assassins--Lady Bullseye and Typhoid Mary--T'Challa finally accepts help from his fellow super-heroes Luke Cage and The Falcon, and even reaches out to allies in Wakanda.

Star Wars: Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi--Captain Phasma

Yes, that is actually the actual title of this comic book, at least according to the fine print on the title page. As you can see from the cover, the actual title looks like it might actually be a little different, but, well, whichever is the case, I think we can all agree that it features all of those words in one arrangement or another, and that "Star Wars" is in there one time too many.

I recently listened to the audiobook version of Delilah S. Dawson's Phasma novel and, as a result, know way more about the new trilogy's fascinating and mysterious character than I need to, or even want to. One thing that was particularly striking about Dawson's Phasma, which is for all intents and purposes a novel-length secret origin story for the character, is that she is constantly presented as the ultimate, undefeatable badass in it, but her relatively little screen time in Force Awakens and Last Jedi hardly matches up with her reputation from the book (In Force Awakens, she rolls over for a septuagenarian Han Solo and friends then lets them toss her down a garbage chute; in Last Jedi she's quickly defeated--and maybe even killed!--by a former subordinate after a few seconds of hand-to-hand combat). Of course, I soon realized that is generally the case with Star Wars bad guys in the expanded universe stuff: Boba Fett, General Grievous, even Darth Vader himself, all of them are infinitely more skilled, powerful and dangerous in comics, cartoons and novels than they are in the actual films, where they are generally blundering boobs that are almost ridiculously easy to take down by our heroes (Vader's appearance in Rogue One notwithstanding; that Vader seemed a lot more like the comic book Vader than the one from the original trilogy).

As for Phasma's first comic book miniseries, it echoes Dawson's novel in several ways that I found somewhat disappointing. The majority of the series takes place on a planet that is so similar to her home planet of Parnassos that it's weird that her comic book is set there at all--she does make reference to the fact that this planet reminds her "too much" of one she used to know--and there's even a brief flashback to her time spent there, including the namedropping of a character from the novel, but I couldn't quite make sense of it.

The relatively short story--it's only 80-pages long--is written by Marvel rising star Kelly Thompson and drawn by artist Marco Checchetto, with colors by Andres Mossa. It follows immediately from the climax of Force Awakens, beginning with her exit from the trash compactor and detailing how she spent the rest of the film's run-time, at one point rather comically walking past Kylo Ren and Rey as they light saber-fight in the snowy woods. She has her own, desperate mission to complete ASAP: To cover up the fact that she's the one that gave Han Solo and company access to Super Death Star Starkiller Base's computer systems and thus pretty much doomed The Empire The First Order's battle against The Rebel--er, The Resistance (See, I'm getting the hang of it!).

As only one person in the First Order knows she was the one who did so, a rando officer who checked the logs, she gives chase to him, eventually commandeering a TIE fighter, its pilot and its BB-8-esque droid to chase him to the Parnassos-like planet. There she and her partner navigate a sort of civil war between the humans living there and a race of aquatic beings who have captured her prey. Because she has to make sure he's dead herself, that means she first has to rescue him.

As I said, it's a pretty short, even slight story, one that reiterates something that is made extremely clear in Dawson's novel: Above all else, Phasma is a survivor, and a ruthless one at that, willing to sacrifice and kill anyone that threatens her survival. It is, however, the very definition of nothing special, which was something of a disappointment to me, based on how much I've liked the last few Thompson-written comics I've read.

Chechetto's artwork is similarly just okay, about on par with the level of quality and general visual style of the bulk of Marvel's Star Wars comics. The pages are very photo reference-y, perhaps unsurprising given how many costume and vehicles are being visually cut and pasted from the film into a comic book spin-off, and so aside from a few different creatures--humanoid and monstrous--living on the planet Phasma hunts her prey on, he's not called on to come up with much that's new or different from what we've seen in Force Awakens anyway.

Phasma's shiny chrome armor doesn't really seem to pop in the over-colored artwork, either. Again, it looks to be consistent with the bulk of Marvel's Star Wars comics, but the result of all the different lights reflecting off of Phasma is that she sometimes just look transparent, or else just badly colored white, rather than shiny and polished, which loses her most striking visual identifier. I can't help but wonder how much better this comic might have looked--although perhaps I'm just speaking from my own personal aesthetic preferences here--were it drawn by Elsa Charretier, who was drawing Marvel's Unstoppable Wasp, and has been doing some truly superlative work on IDW's Star Wars comics. In general, I think Phasma's look would be better served by something that looks more drawn than photographic.

Some recent Marvel collections I read recently

All-New Wolverine Vol. 3: Enemy of The State II

Well, this was interesting move. Writer Tom Taylor follows a Civil War II tie-in, which was collected in the trade paperback All-New Wolverine Vol. 2: Civil War II, with a story arc entitled "Enemy of The State II." The original "Enemy of The State" was a 2004-2005 Wolverine story arc by writer Mark Millar, artist John Romita Jr and others in which Hydra, The Hand and a new group "killed" Wolverine, resurrected him as a brain-washed Hand super-assassin, and then sicced him upon SHIELD and a large swathe of the Marvel Universe, and he fought and almost-but-didn't-kill pretty much everyone...well, I think Northstar might have "died" for a while. It was pretty cool; Wolvie fought a shark, and JRJR drew it, so, you know, it had that going for it.

For this "Enemy of The State," Taylor puts this Wolverine in a situation that...isn't really like that at all. Just enough that they could get away with using the title, I guess. JRJR is not involved; it's drawn by Nic Virella, Djibril Morissette-Phan and Scott Hanna. There is no shark.

I'm not sure if Taylor used that title simply as an attention-grabbing call-back, or if he was making a sarcastic meta-point, since "Enemy of The State II" has hardly anything in common with "Enemy of The State," in the same way that Civil War II had hardly anything in common with Civil War (which was also written by Millar!). Probably the former.

So when we last saw All-New Wolverine Laura Kinney and her clone/little sister Gabby, the pair had just survived a Civil War II tie-in, and took the opportunity to tell everyone off, express their dissatisfaction with the very premise of Civil War II and announce their intention to stay out of it.

That entailed Laura putting cosplaying as Netflix's Jessica Jones--well, she put on a scarf and leather jacket--and packing up Gabby and their pet wolverine Jonathan for a cross-country trip to a stinky old cabin of Logan's, where they can sit out the civil war and also stay off the radar of Laura's old handler, who just mailed her a scary package tying into her origin as X-23. But trouble follows Team Wolverine!

Doused with her "trigger scent," which turns her into an unstoppable, mindless killing machine, Laura blacks out and kills the entire population of a nearby small town! (Spoiler: Not really, but she thinks she did). She's promptly arrested by SHIELD, escapes and then she tries to get to Madripoor, but along the way she's abducted by bad guys lead by Kimura, who wants to use her trigger scent to have her assassinate Tyger Tiger so they can...take over Madripoor? (I believe the original "Enemy of The State" took its name from the fact that the bad guys wanted to use Wolvie to kill the president of the United States, after his various fight scenes; I guess "The State" Laura is the enemy of is Madripoor...? Huh; I think the worst part of this arc may actually be its title...)

It takes the combined efforts of Gabby, time-travelling teenage Angel (Laura's boyfriend, remember), Teen Grey, the rather randomly here Gambit and some unlikely allies to not only straighten out what happened and why, but to also cure the trigger scent's hold on Laura once and for all, essentially purging her of the sorts of berserker rages that plagued her predecessor for so long and bringing to a close the grown-and-programmed-to-be-an-assassin part of her backstory.

It may have taken two consecutive trade paperbacks specifically labeled as sequels to comics from over a decade or so ago, but it looks like Laura, Taylor and All-New Wolverine are all ready to move on once and for all and into a less Old Wolverine sort of series. In essence, this storyline seems to complete the X-23 part of Laura once and for all.

The artwork is pretty rough, and the changes in personnel don't do any of it any favors. The trade collects issues #13-18; Virella draws the first two issues (with Hanna inking), and then Morissete-Phan comes on for an issue, and then Virella returns for an issue, and than Morissette-Phan returns for an issue, and then it's back to Virella again. I couldn't guess what was happening behind the scenes, but the results don't look so hot; the two artists draw one character, Roughhouse, completely differently, and thanks to a change in colorists, he even has different color hair, depending on the issue.

There are some minor things--Gambit's staff looks more like a huge pipe in a panel, Laura dons an Iron Man costume but leaves off the helmet for some reason--but it's mostly the aesthetic whiplash that hurts the visual aspect of the book...which, this being comics, is kind of an important aspect.

The comic has its moments--I liked the bit where Gabby responds to the smuggler who says she sees things differently, for example--but it's probably the worst of the three volumes collecting the series to date.

Avengers: Unleashed Vol. 1--Kang War One

Here's a good example of how challenging Marvel makes following their comics in trade paperback. Despite the "Vol. 1" on the spine, this continues writer Mark Waid's run on the flagship Avengers title, All-New, All-Different Avengers. That produced 15 serially-published issues of a comic book series and three trade paperback collections, which was apparently enough that Marvel decided they needed to relaunch the series with a new title and a new #1 issue, despite the fact that it had the same core cast (with Civil War II and Champions prompted a few defections) and that the same writer would be continuing the same storyline from his All-New, All-Different Avengers series.

To make matters more confusing still, the relaunched, renumbered and retitled comic book series is called simply Avengers, but it is being collected as Avengers: Unleashed for, um, reasons...?

As always, this is hardly an insurmountable barrier that is keeping larger numbers of people from buying and reading Avengers trade paperbacks, but it's still a barrier, and I can't quite make sense of why Marvel continues to keep throwing up such barriers at all. It seems pretty abundantly clear to everyone now, even Marvel, that whatever positive effects a continuous cycle of relaunches-in-numbers-only might have had in the past are disappearing, and I'm not convinced those positive effects of a temporary bump in periodical sales to comic shops were ever really more valuable than the potential loss of audience for the trade paperbacks which can, of course, last and sell indefinitely.

The copy I read, for what it's worth, came from the nearest book store to me, a Barnes and Noble. This store has the bulk of their graphic novels in two aisles; one devoted to manga, the other to everything else. Titles are shelved more-or-less alphabetically, but in this case Avengers: Unleashed Vol. 1 came before All-New, All-Different Avengers Vols. 1-3, probably because they decided to start the shelf devoted to Avengers comics with the adjective-less title. (If you want to catch up on Mark Waid's Avengers run, and haven't yet started, the actual reading order is All-New, All-Different Avengers Vols. 1-3, and then Avengers: Unleashed Vol. 1. Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers: Unleashed, while pretty good in its own right, has nothing to do with any of this).

After Iron Man Tony Stark got kinda sorta semi-killed at the end of Civil War II, and the kids Ms. Marvel, Nova and Spider-Man Miles Morales all decided to bounce and start their own team, what's left of this line-up quickly recruits a pair of old Avengers: Hercules and Spider-Man Peter Parker, the latter of whom basically buys his way on the team by offering them funding and a new headquarters on the top five floors of the Parker Industries, which used to be the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building. This seems to be one more point of comparison between the current Spider-Man and the old Iron Man, the main difference here being that none of Parker's teammates know he is both the rich guy funding them and letting them live in his Manhattan tower and a member of their superhero line-up.

Picking up on plot points from All-New, All-Different--particularly from The Vision issue of the Civil War II trade (reviewed in this long-ass post), Kang the Conqueror attacks the team pretty much as soon as Waid fleetly and efficiently sets up the new status quo. Waid, as I've said plenty of times previously, knows how to write comic books, and this one is very much an old-school superhero team book, right down to the pacing.

The plot, as almost all involving time travel are, is kind of complicated. Essentially, The Vision was facing a Baby Hitler situation with the infant Kang, and decided that rather than killing him, he would just abduct him and hide him. That resulted in adult versions of Kang attacking first The Vision and then the rest of The Avengers, and so the Kangs killed all of them when they were babies. They got that sorted out by the end of the third issue, but Waid then went in an unexpected direction, and had Captain America Sam Wilson decide that they should really quit playing defense and finish Kang off once and for all. All of that leads to recruiting a team of teams of Avengers from four eras, including the founders, attacking various parts of Kang's temporal empire.

The artist is now Michael Del Mundo, and as he's the only notable personnel change, he's probably the only real reason to bother relaunching, but given how often artists change on Marvel comics, it's not a terribly convincing reason. He is a great artist though, and his artwork, which he mostly colors himself, gives the interiors a painterly aesthetic that quite closely echoes that of cover artist Alex Ross (also retained from All-New, All-Different). He's really great with the trippy visuals, of which there are many. Some of these involve all the time travel and general super-hero craziness--as when Kang calls alternate version of himself in as reinforcements, and these resemble a MODOK-esque Kang with a giant head and little limbs, as well as a vaguely ape-like Kang. There are also just a few throwaway instances of Del Mundo going nuts with the visuals, as when he draws a Kang head that is itself made up of different versions of Kang.

Del Mundo is also great with lay-outs though, and there is some really effective "acting" bits, some of which call on the placement of characters, panels or lettering to have one character cut-off or silence another character visually as well as in the dialogue. He really gets to shine in the penultimate issue, in which Kang narrates his entire history on the way to a surprise ending, as the book consists almost entirely of double-page spreads, although rather busy ones with lots of visual information embedded in them. Overall, his presence really elevates Waid's Avengers run by his mere presence. Adam Kubert and those other guys were fine, but Del Mundo? Del Mundo is really, really good.

I'm no fan of The Vision, and I have been sick of Kang and his time shenanigans for almost as long as I've known who Kang is (I believe I audibly groaned when he first appeared within the pages of All-New, All-Different), but despite my personal distaste for some elements in the story arc, I still enjoyed the hell out of this comic book. If you like super-comics, this one is a good one--provided you can figure out when to read it!

Doctor Strange and The Sorcerers Supreme Vol. 1: Out of Time

Doctor Strange and The Sorcerers Supreme is a comic book series that simply shouldn't exist. Marvel has struggled with the character since 1996, which ended about 20 years worth of Doctor Strange ongoing comics in a pair of monthly series. His particular role in the Marvel Universe has meant he's never really been completely MIA for long, regularly racking up guest-appearances, memberships in various team books and rather regularly produced miniseries, but that the publisher has been able to keep the 2015-launched, Jason Aaron-written and (mostly) Chris Bachalo-drawn series going as long as they have is something of an achievement for a character some 20 years removed from his last ongoing series.

So of course Marvel, seeing some somewhat surprising success, immediately tried to strike while the iron is warmer than usual, launching a second Doctor Strange ongoing monthly series. (Similarly, when the latest volume of Black Panther proved a success with its first few issues, Marvel launched two additional Black Panther series, both of which were almost immediately canceled. Marvel seems so intent to find their next Deadpool-style cash chow that they seem to be treating everything that doesn't flop immediately as if they've found it.)

This context sets before Doctor Strange and The Sorcerers Supreme a rather unfortunately high bar: It doesn't just have to be pretty good, which it is, but it also must justify its very existence, and I'm afraid that as well-crafted as it is, as enjoyable as it was to read, it wasn't so great an achievement of comics story-telling that it had to be. The world would have continued to turn just fine were this a miniseries, or an original graphic novel, or a fill-in story arc of the monthly, or was simply never told at all.

Writer Robbie Thompson works mainly with the art team of pencil artist Javier Rodriguez and inker Alvaro Lopez, who contribute five of the six issues in this collection, while Nathan Stockman provides art for one of the issues. The premise is a rather simple one. When an incredibly powerful foe threatens Camelot, Merlin magically travels through time to assemble a super-group of various Sorcerers Supreme. In addition to Strange, these include familiar-ish characters Wiccan Billy Kaplan, from a future where he has inherited Strange's role; Strange's mentor The Ancient One, from a time when he was still a very young man and Sir Isaac Newton, who I am fairly certain has appeared in a Marvel comic of not too ancient vintage which I never read (I want to guess "SHIELD" was in the title, somewhere?), and his more intelligent-than-usual Mindless One, whom he calls "Mindful One."

Rounding out the team are two characters I thinkride anything, though).

Why Merlin plucked these particular characters from these particular points in time isn't ever explained, but it seems curious that he would recruit Strange at this particularly low-point in his magical powers, as well as The Ancient One before he was a little more, well, Ancient.

The issues are pretty formulaic. After the first, each begins with an origin story of sorts featuring one of the characters who will play a bigger than usual role in that particular issue, and then the narrative will plunge into the next step of their adventure. It takes some unexpected twists, as the threat Merlin calls them to face isn't what it first appears, Merlin himself doesn't stick around too long, and one of the Sorcerers betrays the others.

Rodirguez's art is uniformly excellent. The designs of all of the new and/or altered characters are all pretty great, from Rodriguez's version of an adult Billy to The Demon Rider and Conjuror, and, as should be the case with a 1960s-born, Steve Ditko-created character and milieu, there are plenty of opportunities for show-stoppingly intricate and imaginative imagery, like Strange and Merlin's walk-and-talk through time in the first issue, or a visit to (and battle within) Merlin's Escher-like library (which seems to owe quite a bit to the Distinguished Competition's Doctor Fate's tower).

The guest-art is strategically employed, coming during the fifth issue, a sort of pause to the action in which we learn the origin of the Marvel Universe's Sir Isaac Newton, and see his first meeting with Doctor Strange (back when he was at the height of his powers, hanging out with Clea). The final issue, for which Rodriguez appears, is a cute, clever (but kind of irritating in practice) choose-your-own-adventure style comic.

All-in-all, it's a particularly creative comic book, but it doesn't really offer anything that one can't find in the other Doctor Strange ongoing (which has also seen Strange teaming up with various sorcerers and mages, including pre-existing Marvel characters and intriguing new ones). That makes it a somewhat idiotic publishing decision--unless Marvel really thought that the movie would create so many Doctor Strange fans that they could do like they did with Guardians of The Galaxy, and build a line around the doctor--even if it does have entertainment value and impressive execution.

In other words, it's a pretty good comic that probably shouldn't have ever been published...at least not as a $3.99/20-page ongoing monthly.

Ms. Marvel Vol. 6: Civil War II

This is the first trade paperback collection of Ms. Marvel that I did not purchase a copy of. (That's right, it's time for everyone's favorite aspect of EDILW--Caleb Talks About His Comics Buying Habits!). Ms. Marvel has been one of the handful of Marvel comics I have been not only reading in trade, but buying in trade as well (due to cancellations, I think Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is now the only one I'm still buying regularly in trade!). The week this one was released, I let it sit on the shelf at the comics shop because it was a Civil War II tie-in, and I wanted to wait until I actually read Civil War II before I read this tie-in to it, and Civil War II was still going on. And then it was expanded to last an extra issue or something. And I think it was also late...?

Anyway, by the time I had read Civil War II in its collected form, Ms. Marvel Vol. 6 was months old, and given that I had already read something close to 10,000 trade paperback collections sub-titled Civil War II that I had borrowed from the library, I didn't see any reason to not just borrow Ms. Marvel Vol. 6 too, rather than spending $17.99 on it (Well, aside from "voting with my dollars" so that Marvel keeps Ms. Marvel going, I guess, although I don't know if they make many decisions like that based on trade sales...Oh, and making sure some really great comics creators get some extra royalties...?).

So the lesson here, Marvel Entertainment Decision-Maker Who Is No Doubt Reading This Post And Hanging On Every Word,  is that tie-ins to event storylines can make excellent jumping-off points, particularly if said event is delayed. You have probably heard this before, but every jumping-on point is also a good jumping-off point, and pretty much anything at all that disturbs a comics reader's buying habits in anyway is perilous.

So this six-issue collection has a four-issue Civil War II-related story arc sandwiched in between two issues that serve as a good prelude and a good epilogue, respectively; taken as a single unit, writer. G. Willow Wilson's sixth volume of the series is a pretty well-constructed story with its own beginning, middle and end.

The first issue was drawn by the series' original artist, Adrian Alphona, and guest-stars Ms. Marvel's then-fellow teen Avengers, Spider-Man Miles Morales and Nova...although not in the capacity one might expect. There is a Tri-State Science Fair going on, and Kamala Khan, Bruno and other members of her supporting cast are there competing against the New York contingent, lead by Miles. When there's an issue that forces the superheroes to suit up, Nova is just kind of flying by.

That final issue is drawn by Mirka Andolfo, whose work frequently appears in DC Comics Bombshells, and follows Kamala to her ancestral home in Karachi, where she has gone to try and clear her head from the terrible things that happened to her during Civil War II and the tie-in arc. Ms. Marvel has already been pretty blessed with all-around great art, but Andolfo is a really good fit, maybe particularly for this particular story, which has Kamala out of costume for most of it--she purposely left her costume back in Jersey City. Andolfo is probably a good name for the editors to keep in mind when the regular artists need a break.

As for the tie-in arc, Wilson's got kind of a difficult job, as Kamala has particularly close bonds with the two opposing "generals" in the war, having taken her superhero name from her lifetime idol Captain Marvel Carol Danvers, and having served alongside Iron Man Tony Stark on The Avengers for a few years now (our time). Those bonds, and her relationship with Miles, meant Civil War II writer Brian Michael Bendis all but had to include her in the series itself, and the moment she decides Carol has gone too far is one of the more dramatic ones in the series, at least if you know/care about the character. Additionally, Ruth Fletcher Gage and Christos Gage used Kamala a bit in their tie-in arc, which was collected in Captain Marvel Vol. 2: Civil War II.

Wilson doesn't include any of those scenes, and her arc doesn't really quite line-up with the events of Bendis' main event series. They fit well enough though, as long as you don't think too much about the timeline between the various books (When I was a high schooler, this would have infuriated me, and I probably woulda wrote an angry letter to a letters column). Instead, she keeps Kamala busy in Jersey City, where Carol Danvers has assigned her to be the team leader of a group of four young (superpower-less) volunteers who are quite excited about this whole predictive justice thing.

Kamala is obviously a little torn on the matter, because it's so obviously illegal and dumb--these kids un-ironically dress like Hitler Youth, topping off their outfits with arm bands and Saddam-like berets, and keeping the victims they don't actually arrest in a makeshift Guantanamo in an abandoned Jersey City warehouse. On the other hand, it's Carol Danvers asking her to help. (The business with Miles doesn't come up in here at all; his appearance at the science fair was his only appearance in this volume.)

When a classmate gets citizen-arrested by the group, and Bruno gets badly injured, Kamala finally flips sides, trying to orchestrate a demonstration of how Ulysses' powers don't always work, one that gets Captain Marvel and Iron Man in the same place at the same time, for all the good that does.

Wilson's arc is actually pretty ambitious, as she tries, not terribly successfully, to tie Marvel's civil "war" with the geo-political events that created Pakistan. The four tie-in issues including flashback sequences drawn by Alphona that are set in the 1940s, the 1970s and in Kamala's childhood, as well as shortly into her career as Ms. Marvel. These reveal the origin of that thing she wears on her left arm, how she first met Bruno and some poetic suggestions about her Inhuman bloodline, as her grandmother and mother speak of something special inside them, something from beyond the stars.

The tone is a little all-over the place, though. Alphona's artwork in those four issues is his most stately and serious--well, there's a lot of silliness in Kamala's second-grade classroom--but the modern day business, all drawn by Takeshi Miyazawa, features a Canadian Ninja Syndicate who attack with, like, chickens and straight edges. The family history is meant to be taken quite seriously, while the Jersey City action is melodramatic in the mighty Marvel manner--all the Carol Vs. Tony stuff--while Kamala's difficulties with Bruno and her other friends are also supposed to be serious, but those scenes come between ones of over-the-top junior fascist nonsense. While not technically part of the arc, the very first issue is Alphona at his loosest, with most panels busting at the borders with little gags (Each long or medium shot is worth scrutinizing for visual gags, mostly centered around the science projects in the background, and callbacks aplenty can be found in the later classroom scene).

It's...a weird book. Well-written, extremely well drawn and with an ambitious amount of humor, drama and melodrama, it's nevertheless tonally unique, as if Wilson is deciding scene by scene what kind of modern Marvel book her Ms. Marvel is going to be, a serious one, a comedic one or a Nick Spencer-esque combination of the two.

Oh! I just noticed as I was writing this that, according to the back cover, this is rated "T+"; I found that a little surprising, if only because Ms. Marvel is one of the publisher's most consistently teen-friendly, genuinely all-ages comics I've encountered.


*Let me go check my bookshelf to be sure! Let's see... Ghost Rider canceled, Howard The Duck canceled, Patsy Walker canceled, lost interest in All-New, All-Different Avengers and Star Wars, didn't care for that first volume of the current Black Panther...Yeah, jeez, if I'm not going to keep reading Ms. Marvel in trade, I am currently down to just Squirrel Girl! At least for the time being. I am sure that will change in the near-ish future.

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: Standoff

This massive, 400-page collection is a bunch of bound comic books, and thus meets at least one of the most generic definitions of the term "graphic novel," and, it certainly has the length and scope of an actual novel. It doesn't read much of anything like a novel though, and really, how could it, given its contents? It collects a trio of Standoff one-shots and then the various chapters that ran through all of Marvel's Avengers and SHIELD-related titled, some completely integral to the plot, some obviously awarded sub-plots so that they could participate in the cross-over (and hopefully earn a sales boost) and at least two that are just sort of there.

The results are therefore quite shaggy, with the protagonist of one chapter disappearing for a long period of time, or becoming the antagonist later. An exciting plot point will be raised, and then the reader might have to wait a few dozen or a hundred pages to return to it. Some scenes repeat verbatim in different chapters, scores of pages between them, because they are necessary to more than one of the ongoing comics they appear in, and Marvel had no guarantee that a reader would read both of those single issues. Some plot points are raised, but not resolved, because they are part of the individual titles' ongoing storylines, not the "Standoff" story arc those titles are temporarily tying in to.

That is perhaps the necessary nature of a big storyline like this, as it was published serially in 15 individual publications, not all of which any given Marvel reader would read all of, but all of which a reader of this particular collection is forced to.

Honestly, I'm not sure which method is the best; I like this method, obviously, as it allows a reader to read the whole she-bang for cheaper (the trade is $50) or free (from your local library, the best way to read corporate comic), and not worry about making sure they are self-curating the best possible reading experience, since it's not like Marvel is going to help the reader make that easy by, like, telling everyone that you don't really need to read th Howling Commandos of SHIELD or Illuminati issues if you weren't already following those titles, as they're connected but trivial.

Then there's the matter of tone–many of these writers write funny superhero comics, but they have different senses of humor and tell very different kind of jokes–and ever-shifting art-styles. If all of these writers weren't somewhere between good and great, and if the artists weren't of similar caliber, I would be tempted to call this collection a mess, but it's not. It's just a little too big, a little shaggy and a little weird as a reading experience, but it tells a pretty solid, pretty dramatic, pretty funny superhero crossover story with a compelling premise, and a minimum of narrative dead-ends (That is, things that you have to read some other book to see how they turn out) and pointless tie-ins (If Marvel really wanted to go big, they could have had an issue of all of the characters who appear herein with solo titles of their own have "Standoff" issues).

So there are 15 individual issues/chapters within this book. There are three Avengers Standoff one-shots that could probably have been published as a 3-issue miniseries, were it not for the publisher's fetishization of the digits 0-12. And so these are sub-titled Welcome To Pleasant Hill, Assault on Pleasant Hill Alpha and Assault on Pleasant Hill Omega. There are two issues apiece of Agents of SHIELD, All-New, All-Different Avengers, Captain America: Sam Wilson, New Avengers and Uncanny Avengers and the previously mentioned single issues of  Howling Commandos and Illuminati.

There are seven writers involved–Frank J. Barbiere, Gary Duggan, Al Ewing, Marc Guggenheim, Nick Spencer, Mark Waid and Joshua Williamson–although Spencer writes the lion's share (five issues, including the three entitled Avengers Standoff), with everyone else scripting one-to-two issues. There are ten different pencils or penciler/inkers, and more inkers than I have fingers to count.

Here is the perhaps overly-detailed synopsis section of this "review." SHIELD Director Maria Hill's plan to create and weaponize a reality-altering Cosmic Cube was leaked by mysterious computer hacker The Whisperer previously, and she had very publicly said SHIELD was abandoning the project. They did not, but rather than making it into a weapon-weapon, they decided to use it for an experiment in fool-proof super-criminal incarceration.

She essentially founded the small, Norman Rockwell painting of a town named Pleasant Hill, and the Cosmic Cube transformed the incarcerated villains so that their appearances completely changed, they had no memories of their previous lives and they now hadve happy, even idyllic lives in a happy, even idyllic community in Connecticut.

Not everyone agrees this plan is quite ethical, especially the villains getting the cube treatment, and one imagines that should they ever wake up, they would be understandably pretty upset with Hill and SHIELD...and in fairly close proximity to a Cosmic Cube. But what are the chances of that happening? Well, this being a superhero comic book, 100%.

Bucky "The Winter Soldier" Barnes returns from space to put a stop to this, tipping off Old Man Steve about it in the process. Hill takes Steve there to see it for himself and try to convince him she's doing the right thing. The Whisperer reveals his secret identity to Sam Wilson (Surprise! It's that guy!) and tells him of Pleasant Hill, so that's three guys who all wear stars and were at one time or another named Captain America on-site.

The villains regain their identities, and all hell breaks loose, as SHIELD has packed the place with villains, including Baron Zemo, our Big Bad for this story (although there's an even worse guy there too).

To give all the Avengers who are not and have never been Captain America something to do, well, The Unity Squad (from Uncanny Avengers) and The Avengers (from All-New, All-Different Avengers) are summoned there under mysterious circumstances, and end up getting cubed themselves. The SHIELD agents (from Agents of SHIELD) are charged with arresting the now outted Whisperer, who calls to Roberto Da Costa's new A.I.M. (which is Avengers Idea Mechanics, from the pages of New Avengers) to rescue him, putting them in conflict with SHIELD.

And the Howling Commandos show up to save one of their members who stuck there and then basically bug out, and The Hood and Titania show up to save Absorbing Man and also bug out, in the Howling Commandos and Illuminati chapters.

I thought the premise was a strong one, even if it felt familiar. I can't place where exactly it originated, but it reminded me of a handful of second- and third-hand, everything-you-know-is-wrong kind of narratives. It is certainly an interesting new twist as presented in the Marvel Universe here by Spencer, however, and is morally murky enough that it's conceivable to see both how it could be considered a good thing by some people and a bad thing by other people (this seems like a better thing for heroes to fight over than the catalyst of either of Marvel's two miniseries entitled Civil War, for example, and while there is some hero vs. hero fighting here, it is mostly of the misunderstanding variety).

This is basically Spencer's story, a three Captain America team-up involving SHIELD and The Avengers, and he does a couple of pretty impressive things, including a surprisingly effective fake-out in his introduction of Pleasant Hill to readers, his presentation of Hill's acknowledgment of just how sketchy all this is and how she plans to live with herself for doing it and the way he manages to keep the story funny while also life-and-death serious.

For example, near the end of the book, Zemo calls upon Kraven The Hunter to seek out the cube, which has become sentient and taken the form of a little girl, and it was at first strange to see Kraven here given the last two places I saw him (The first Unbeatable Squirrel Girl trade, and then the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl/Howard The Duck crossover "Animal House," at the end of which he has reinvented himself as "A Hunter of Hunters" and is last seen pouncing on a fisherman).

Rest assured, while he is presented as a ruthlessly efficient tracker here, he's also perfectly zany in his exact method of capturing this particular prey.

Taken altogether, I think this was a fun read that achieved at least two noteworthy accomplishments. First, it demonstrated that these sorts of big supehero crossover stories, whether line-wide or more franchise specific like this one, can be fun and positive, and need not revolve around mass death and destruction and the ritual sacrifice of characters to make it seem important–the storyline dramatically changes the status quo for Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, it sets up multiple new books that will spin directly out of this storyline and it introduces a new legacy character back into the Marvel Universe, essentially adding to rather than subtracting from the number of heroes.

Secondly, it will serve as a decent sampler story–and, in time, a time capsule–of just where Marvel's Captain America, Avengers and SHIELD-related comics were circa early 2016 or so.

A couple more-or-less random thoughts:

•Glad to see the character who was The Whisperer back in action. That person is a really great character, although that person is kind of difficult to use on a long-term basis, and it seems like it's been a very, very long time since Marvel has known precisely what to do with that character.

•Quicksilver's new costume is terrible, and I don't understand that speed effects artist Ryan Stegman gives him.

•The Unity Squad seems so random now. I haven't read Uncanny Avengers since the first volume, when Rick Remender was writing it, and it has since been relaunched under writer Duggan. The original concept was a team that was half mutant and half non-mutant, a team consisting of both Avengers and X-Men meant to demonstrate the two factions that were at war in Avengers Vs. X-Men were friends now.

They have since added an Inhuman character too in Synapse, and given how Inhumans are basically being presented as just mutants-with-a-different name, when the Unity Squad first appears, they look like just another X-Men team: Rogue, Cable, Quicksilver, Deadpool and Synapse. Later on they meet up with Doctor Voodoo and...The Human Torch Johnny Storm...? He's not mutant or Inhuman, and not an X-Men or an Avenger. So the line-ups only former Avenger is Doctor Voodoo, who is a relatively new character (Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the superhero formerly known as Brother Voodoo join an Avengers team near the end of Brian Michael Bendis' run on the franchise?) and Quicksilver, who was a mutant.

I can't speak to the quality of the book–although nothing says "X-Men Comic" and "Something Caleb Won't Like At All" to me quite as loudly as the presence of Cable–but it seems to have drifted awfully far from its original premise.

•How bright is Cable's fucking eye, by the way? Stegman draws it like there's a fire burning in the socket, and it's leaping out of it. It doesn't just glow or shine, but it gives off light like a powerful flashlight. How hard must it be to talk to that fucking guy, face to face?

•I like that Orrgo isn't turned into a person, like so many of the others who get imprisoned in Pleasant Hill, but a Pomeranian. Similarly, a shark-themed villain who is never named and never gets any dialogue was turned into an actual shark in the town aquarium.

•Because of their attack on a SHIELD battlecarrier in their rescue of The Whisperer, the U.S. government retaliates against AIM by siccing American Kaiju on them. I've mentioned how awesome this character sounds when the solicits for these issues first became public.

I like kaiju in general, but the pairing of that noun with that particular modifier? Brilliant. High five, writer Al Ewing! We see his origin, in which General Robert L. Maverick (described in a narration box thusly: "Thunderbolt Ross thinks he's kind of heavy-handed") bullies a scientist into shooting Corporate Ziller (GET IT?!) full of a new attempt at the super-soldier serum that contains gamma radiation and even "The Connors formula, for Pete's sake! Lizard serum!"

The result? A Godzilla with a big-ass flag tattoo on his forehead (like Nuke) and a star-spangled underbelly. His roar? "YUUUU! ESSSSS! AAYYY!" (The first word is red, the second white and the third blue).

I don't like his design quite as much as his concept (I think the coloring needs work, personally), but seriously, American Kaiju. I want that thing to have its own book, STAT.

•I didn't think that this was a very good way to return Steve Rogers to his original, more-or-less immortal look. He had previously been stripped of his super-soldier serum, which turned him into a very old man, and so he had returned to being Commander Rogers and working with SHIELD, whereas now he's got the serum back in him and is young and hunky and super-powered again.

It was accomplished via Cosmic Cube, of course, and it's a little awkward, as the transformation is hailed by everyone, Rogers included, as being a good thing, when this entire story is basically all about how using the cube is playing God and is a bad thing.