Some recent Marvel trades I read, um, recently:

Daredevil: Back In Black Vol.3--Dark Art

After a really rather rough second volume (discussed in this post), the current, Charles Soule-written volume of Daredevil is back to the level of quality of the first volume. This likely has a lot to do with the fact that pencil artist Ron Garney is back, drawing all five of the issues collected herein. It may also have a lot to do with the fact that, like the first volume and unlike the second volume, Soule apparently wrote these issues as a single arc. It's not quite complete enough to read like a distinct graphic novel, as it does pick up on at least one event from volume two (Elektra having broken Blindspot's arm), and there's a pretty dramatic cliffhanger ending regarding the fate of Daredevil's new sidekick, but otherwise this is a pretty self-contained comics story.

Our heroes are doing their thing, lawyering and/or law assistancing by day, fighting crime by night, and they are forced to face a sinister new villain. The papers have dubbed him "Vincent Van Gore," which is pretty good, but he personally prefers "Muse," which isn't quite as good. He's a serial killer/artist, and his first major piece being a gigantic Guernica-esque mural painted with the blood of dozens of different victims. He's also got some weird and, frankly, ill-defined powers that make him a match for Daredevil in a scrap, particularly since Daredevil can't "see" him.

And that's pretty much that: Hero vs. villain, with the latter being a brand-new villain. There's something you don't see much anymore!

Complicating matters is that Muse's second piece involves killing of several Inhumans*, and so Daredevil and Matt Murdock try to work with Medusa and New Attilan. There's another new character introduced here--a former New York City Police Department detective who got Inhuman-ized, given a neat but subtle power and who now works as a liaison between the country and the city's police--who spends the most time with DD and/or MM, but the climax of the Inhumans' involvement seems to be to have Medusa be kind of a jerk and let Karnak and Daredevil fight. As I was reading one scene, in which neighborhood toughs attempt to murder an Inhuman, it occurred to me that this story arc may seem quite dated in a few years' time, as the scene is written almost exactly as if Soule had simply replaced the word "mutant" with "Inhuman."

I'm not crazy about Muse's mask, which appears to include a tight-fitting knit cap like the kind of a cartoon burglar might wear, and his tiny little backpack, but otherwise his design is visually striking, and of the sort that fits into the book's unusual coloring scheme (which color artist Matt Milla manages).

I can't say I'm terribly excited about what I imagine may dominate the fourth volume, based on the last, climactic pages of this arc, in which Blindspot is forced to take on Muse solo in order to save many lives, but it's quite possible that Soule will end up zagging instead of zigging.

Again, after a choppy second volume, Daredevil is again pretty tightly written super-comics, with great art and a somewhat unique visual hook to its telling that separates it from the scores of other superhero comics on the shelves at the moment (the vast majority of which are also published by Marvel).

Deadpool: Too Soon?

If Deadpool's current state of popularity is such that his presence can not only goose interest and sales in books he appears in, than this four-issue miniseries operated on almost reverse logic. This is a Deadpool comic filled with a large cast of guest-stars, most of them relatively minor characters, but ones with strong fan bases.

Writer Joshua Corin (whom I have never heard of**) sends The Forbush Man, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, The Astonishing Ant-Man, Rocket and Groot, Howard The Duck, The Punisher and Peter Porker, The Amazing Spider-Ham and, um, The Punisher to a mansion, each following a similar mysterious letter. There they are greeted by Deadpool and his apparent wife, a demon named Shiklah (I had heard he was married, although this is the first time in my extremely sporadic reading of Deadpool comics that I learned to who).

Deadpool has invited them all there to pose for his Christmas card photo with him, and has dug up enough blackmail material on each of them to force them to comply. Why this particular assortment of characters? Because, he explains, they are the funniest characters in the Marvel Universe. If The Punisher seems particularly out-of-place among this group, I suspect that is the joke regarding his presence.

This set-up leads to a locked-door sort of mystery, as when the lights briefly go out and come back on, Forbush Man is found decapitated! Is this the end of the Forbush Man, the most expendable of the guests, in that he's not currently starring or co-starring in a comic book? Looks like! At his funeral, attended by all (dig Tippy-Toe's little black ribbon), Deadpool vows to find the killer, criss-crossing the country to investigate the other suspects in the room that night (he naturally dismisses himself and his wife).

Joined against his will by Squirrel Girl, he travels to California, to Miami and then back to New York City, pursued by "Squirrelpool," a hideous clone monster created accidentally when he and Squirrel Girl share an old teleporter (I was pretty disappointed in this design by artist Todd Nauck; it suits the purposes of the story fine, although I'm not sure why it's a hulking monster-sized creature instead of being Deadpool-sized, or even just Deadpool-plus-Squirrel Girl-sized, but man, it would be so easy to amalgamate those two characters into a cool design).

When the beheadings start to pile-up, and include clearly-not-going-to-get-killed-off-for-long characters like Rocket and Groot (and, a little more shockingly, Squirrel Girl's besties Nancy Whitehead*** and Tippy-Toe), the stakes are lowered and, when the murderer is revealed and defeated with some help of Marvel's latest movie star Dr. Strange, it should come as no surprise that everyone is restored to life in some particularly random deus ex machina. (To be fair to Brad Meltzer, whose Identity Crisis is pretty much the worst murder "mystery" in comic book history, I should note that the killer is not a suspect introduced at any point in the comic, and so as a mystery, this doesn't work...not that the mystery set-up was ever meant to be anything more than a premise, of course).

Nauck is an artist I sometimes have some trouble evaluating entirely impartially, given the amount of affection I have for his work on account of his years on Young Justice. His ability--and tons of experience--balancing light-hearted supehero comedy with concinving superhero action serves him well in this particular series, though, and it's certainly interesting to see so many diverse characters translated though his particular visual style, even if they don't all seem to work (Squirrel Girl, for example, is a character that some artist seem to nail a particular take on, while others flounder a bit, sometimes for reasons I have a hard time pinning down. Nauck's version just looks like a typical super-girl character with a few Squirrel Girly features, rather than looking like Squirrel Girl.)

I was a little surprised to find a back-up, the story "Deadpooloween" taken from the Gwenpool Holiday Special: Merry Mix-Up #1, and I was more surprised still to find that it was both written and drawn by Chynna Clugston Flores. I guess it was included because it prominently features Squirrel Girl, as does the Too Soon?. It's been a good long time since I've read a Chynna comic, although I can hardly overstate how much I loved her Blue Monday in Action Girl and then from Oni (Image is currently reprinting it, and you should buy it and read it). While I'm sure she's done something for Marvel since, the last Marvel comic she drew that I read was that issue of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up from the earliest years of the Ultimate line, when Brian Michael Bendis had Peter Parker and pals run into the X-Men at the mall.

In her story, Deadpool belatedly realizes it Halloween, and suits up to cruise the town near Empire State University. There he finds that Squirrel Girl is hosting a Deadpool costume contest, which he angrily enters, irritated that the success of his movie has spawned so many college bros dressing up like him this Halloween.

Remember what I said about certain artists seeming to do a better, truer Squirrel Girl than others? Chynna nails hers. Her style is so different than that of Erica Henderson, but Chynna is just an all-around expert when it comes to drawing geeky young people, I guess. I would love to see more Chynna Clugston Flores Squirrel Girl somewhere in the future.

Doctor Strange Vol. 3: Blood in the Aether

With Doctor Strange's magical powers and resources utterly exhausted by his two-volume battle against the magic-destroying interdimensional entity The Empirikul, he is at one of his lowest, weakest points in Doctor Strange #11, by writer Jason Aaron and guest-artists Kevin Nowlan (who draws the scenes set during Strange's origin) and Leonardo Romero (who draws the scenes set in the present). That means there's blood in the water and the sharks are starting to circle.

And by "the water" I guess we mean "the aether," and by "the sharks" I guess we mean an assortment of villains, including Doctor Strange's arch-enemies and a few newer or more random threats.

So after the prelude chapter that the 11th issue serves as, the rest of the collection is a sort of week-in-the-life story, in which Doctor Strange runs a gauntlet of foes new and old, all the time being forced to rely on his wits, his allies and what new sorcery he can invent on the fly to save himself...and everyone else.

So in rapid succession Strange faces Mister Misery (the name the thing from his basement assigned itself), Baron Mordo, Nightmare, Satana and Master Pandemonium**** (and Pandemonium's hands), the post-Original Sin version of The Orb and, of course, the dread Dormammu. Their motives range from the dire to the petty to the idiosyncratic, and if you're at all familiar with any of these characters you can probably assign each of them to those categories without any help from me, but it all adds up to a pretty dramatic, almost arcade-like fight, with a few lighter moments to stop and exhale.

Regular pencil artist Chris Bachalo manages the bulk of the five issues that make up the actual "Blood in the Aether" story arc (with a pair of pencilers getting "with" credits on the last two issues, and eight different inkers credited on these issues...speaking of credit, it's to Bachalo and company's credit that the story actually looks pretty great, and all those different artists work together well enough that their collaboration is, if not seamless, than relatively seam-light).

It's really difficult to overstate how well-suited Bachalo is to the material, and not just to the Steve Ditko-conceived world of Doctor Strange in general, but to writer Jason Aaron's world-weary, joke-heavy conception of the character and his story specifically. As I've said before, Bachalo handles weird well, and he manages to make old characters like Dormammu, Mordo and Nightmare his own, while the characters that are his own, like Mister Misery, are hard to imagine under anyone else's pens.

Probably the best example of his work is the issue devoted to Satana, however. She plans to open up her own hell, one in which the damned can spend time with "cool" dead people, like dead rockstars and superheroes, like Doctor Strange. She pitches him over a bizarre meal in a bizarre diner (Pandemonium is both her short order cook and her muscle), filled with elaborately, cartoonishly designed creatures. To save himself, Strange must use his astral projection form in a pretty unusual way, which I'm not sure if he's ever done before, in order to achieve a particular goal I'm quite positive he never has.

I'm not sure if Bachalo has completely redesigned Satana here, or if his and colorist Antonio Fabela's version is just strikingly rendered, but this is maybe the coolest I can remember her looking. I think Bachalo draws Pandemonium's hand demons a little too gitancially, but, like Swarm, there's really no way to screw up the drawing of this crazy-ass Marvel villain.

Bachalo's Orb is another pretty great character. I don't believe I've seen him since Original Sin, nor do I quite understand how either he or Nick Fury Sr. "work" in the Marvel Universe anymore, but Aaron's conception of The Orb works well here for the purposes of a Doctor Strange comic, and Bachalo seems to have a lot of fun selling this new life of the character's menace as well as inherent humor.

This volume is really strong enough to stand on its own, independent of the two preceding it, as the only things one really needs to know from the previous ten issues get summarized in the three sentences following the Doctor Strange logo on the title page.

Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 2: Civil War II

Here's another in the too-long line of pretty good books that got derailed and/or destroyed by Civil War II. In the case of the David Walker-written Heroes For Hire revival, I say "and/or destroyed" because the book is no longer around. That may have simply been Marvel trying to more closely tie their comics to the various Netflix series, as after this book's cancellation Walker went on to write a Luke Cage solo title sharing the name of his TV show, and a new Iron Fist series launched. Or it could have been because of this dumb-ass story arc, that takes over issues #6-9 of the then-new book, almost the entirety of this second collected volume of the series (there's also a fun, holiday annual included in this collection).

For trade-waiters like me, the other unfortunate aspect of Civil War II? Because that book was so delayed, and expanded after solicitation, it meant I couldn't read any of the tie-in trades like this until I read the main series, but so many of the tie-ins were published prior to the Civil War II collection, that basically meant holding off on reading any (or at least many) Marvel collections for a few months longer than I might have otherwise. (As it turns out though, one really only needs to have read the first few issues of Civil War II to understand what's going on here; War Machine's dead, She-Hulk is in a coma and Carol Danvers is a big, stupid immoral idiot and...that's it, really).

Now, this arc is bad, but it's still fun, and maybe as good as a tie-in to such a dumb event series could be if it really did try to honestly engage with the event instead of simply side-stepping it as fast as possible. Walker writes these characters extremely well, and has a lot of fun with Luke's refusal to swear and in recovering the often very goofy characters from Cage's deep past, and other failed or half-forgotten street-level characters from Marvel's past, and reintroducing them, often portraying their past portrayals as youthful indiscretions, or perhaps trying to be something they weren't...or, in at least one case, trying to hang on to something they never were in the first place.

The artwork by Flavianao and Sanford Green is great, and I could look at those two guys' drawings of the two guys in the title all damn day; I particularly like, as I believe I mentioned when discussing the first volume, how huge this Luke Cage is drawn, in relation to Danny, Jessica, Danielle and the whole world around him. He's a literally bigger-than-life character.

Walker's way of dealing with the Civil War II plot is interesting, and I find myself wondering whether the plot for this arc, which isn't quite concluded in this volume, is one he would have written anyway, and he was just forced to fold Carol Danvers in, or if his non-Civil War II plot was an intentional echo of Civil War II, inspired by its plot.

So the first issue opens with Luke Cage, Danny Rand, Jessica Jones and a clueless Danielle watching news footage of the battle with Thanos that took place in Free Comic Book Day 2016, which the Civil War II collection puts between Civil War II #0 and Civil War II #1 (That event series, by the way, makes an excellent case for trade-waiting, as it's really hard to tell where and when it actually starts; there are basically three different starting points, one of which isn't terribly relevant. Better to let a collections editor curate it, I think). This is the battle that ends with War Machine James Rhodes dead and She-Hulk in a coma, and the two heroes are pretty shaken for obvious reasons, with flashbacks giving less-obvious, more personal details: Cage and Rhodey's last conversation was an intense argument, and Danny thinks about the time he kissed She-Hulk. Four more pages are devoted to Civil War II: They attempt to visit Shulkie at the Tri-Skelion but are turned away, and they are warmly greeted by Carol, who then asks if they can give her a minute of their time so she can explain what's going on.

Jump to the two of them walking to their car, reiterating that Civil War II is dumb and they hope they can avoid being in it (they can't!).

"What was all that 'predictive justice' stuff Carol was talking about?" Danny yells. "Sounded like a bunch of fiddle-faddle to me," Luke says, and they agree to sit this one out, as they are also sick of hero vs. hero fights. On a two-page spread, between two tiers of them talking about it, there's a nice big spread of the Luke Cage-lead Avengers (from the second volume of the Bendis-written New Avengers, I want to say) fighting the Carol Danvers and Iron Man-lead Avengers (from the pages of the Bendis-written Mighty Avengers). Cage, who sided with Captain America in the pages of the first Civil War, was basically in a kinda cold war with the government-sanctioned Avengers between the end of Civil War and the post-Secret Invasion "Heroic Age," I think.

Walker then returns to matters related to his book, as a bunch of reformed criminals and their family members attempt to hire the Heroes For Hire to find a bunch of ex-cons who have since gone straight but disappeared shortly after encountering a group of mysterious vigilantes. And then those vigilantes attack! Followed by the police!

This ends with Danny Rand in jail for assaulting some officers, where he tries to figure out the disappearances. Many of those who have disappeared are also in jail there, and they ended up there without officially being charged or getting trials. Outside prison, Luke calls in favors from many friends to try to figure out the one clue they have, a mysterious device that mixes facial recognition software with the ability to manipulate and falsify criminal records. This is what the vigilantes were doing to bust their victims.

So you can see how this thematically kinda sorta ties in to Civil War II, as innocent--or at least innocent-until-proven-guilty--people are being attacked, arrested and punished for crimes they didn't actually commit. Civil War II comes back to the fore when Ulysses--the prophesying Inhuman that Carol Danvers is using to predict possible future crimes to prevent before they happen--has a vision of Luke Cage leading a break-in at Ryker's to free the incarcerated Danny.

In fact, a confused and frustrated Cage calls Songbird and Centurius to join him as he looks at Ryker's, in the hopes that they can talk him out of doing something stupid and figure out this whole mess, and then "Sweet Christmas, Easter and Hanukkah," in swoop Danvers, Mockingbird, Puck, Spectrum, Storm, Deathlok and a whole bunch of SHIELD troops. They are there to stop Ulysses' vision from coming to pass by arresting Luke first and, just as in All-New Wolverine Vol. 2: Civil War II, Carol's intervention is exactly what causes the vision to come to pass (slow learner, I guess).

Luke's not having it, of course, he tells off Carol in such a way to piss her off, and everyone fights, with the fight eventually spreading inside the prison after Carol punches Luke through its walls and a couple of errant energy blasts and explosions continue to escalate the situation.

There's a lot of fighting between all parties. I particularly liked the fight-then-team-up sequences involving Mockingbird, who Walker writes close enough to Chelsea Cain that she sounds like the same character, and Songbird, because they have similar names. And I'm always calling Songbird Mockingbird by accident.

It ends with Cage making a couple of speeches in Carol's direction, and then Danny making another one, and she's eventually shamed into dropping it and they help round up the prisoners and clean up the jail. (I'm not sure this all lines up perfectly well with Civil War II, by the way. In that book's third issue, Luke and Danny appear to be working with Carol and SHIELD, at least according to one big panel of a series of three images that run across a two-page spread while New York City Assistant District Attorney examines Carol Danvers, but in issue #4, Luke is allied with Iron Man on the "cool" team that shows up at the Triskelion to fight Carol's lame team.)

But just as in the pages of Civil War II, the tie-ins seem mostly designed to demonstrate that Carol is dumb and keeps making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

As for the A-plot, which becomes the B-plot, Luke's team is just about to crack where the doohickey being used to find and incarcerate people came from, when a very powerful person in a hoodie teleports to his safehouse and steals it from the hands of his allies.

As I mentioned earlier, the rest of the collection is devoted to an annual, or, to be specific, Sweet Christmas Annual #1. Walker writes this as well, but Scott Hepburn provides the art. It's Christmas Eve, and Luke, Danny and Danielle visit a toy store to find the Pokemon-like hot toy of the season. Also there is Spider-Woman Jessica Drew and her baby. And Daimon Hellstrom, Son of Satan, in an open-coat Santa suit. And The Krampus. And the real Santa Claus. It is every bit as awesome as it sounds, and Hepburn draws a hell of a Krampus, as well as a pretty sweet warrior version of Santa that isn't as over-the-top as the one in the Grant Morrison-written Santa vs. Krampus comic, Klaus.

I'm really glad it was collected here, even though the storyline preceding it didn't really reach its conclusion, because it at least means the book ends on a high note, rather than being another example of the Civil War II storlyine stumbling into an already perfectly strong title, upsetting all the furniture and then stumbling back out.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 5: Like I'm The Only Squirrel In The World

This volume takes for its cover that of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #13, i.e. the one where Squirrel Girl is hauling back to throw Tippy-Toe, who is herself hauling back to throw Ant-Man, who is all curled up like a ball in her tiny squirrel fist. Is this modified Fuzzball Special just something for the cover, or does it actually occur within the pages of the comic itself?

It does!

The Squirrel Girl/Ant-Man team-up takes place during a story arc that dominates this trade, occupying the first three of the five issues collected herein. Doreen, Nancy and Tippy-Toe join Doreen's mom at a cabin in Canada for a rather boring vacation, which is interrupted by a bid to conquer the world by a character who can split himself into many different versions of himself. His name is Enigmo, and he is apparently a pre-existing Marvel villain (The Internet said he debuted in 1994 issue of Avengers). Brain Drain, the disembodied brain in a jar atop a powerful robot body that has been hanging around with Doreen and friends for a while, teleports to Canada to help her, and he does so with the only hero he could find who was small enough to fit in the teleporter at the same time as him: The Astonishing Ant-Man, Scott Lang.

As per usual, Squirrel Girl is able to save the day, with the help of her many friends and the help of science knowledge, which writer Ryan North applies to the comic book world of the Marvel Universe as charmingly as ever. For example, there is a flashback to physics class, where in Doreen and Nancy remember their teacher's lecture on "Galileo's Square-Cube law," which explains why giant mice are impossible.

"And yes, you can get around this restriction with certain cosmic rays or other exotic particles. I am aware of Pym's work, thank you," the professor continues. "It's hard not to be when he published journal articles like 'Ha Ha, I'm Giant-Man Now: Screw You, All Other Physicists.'"

That sounds like a fantastic journal article! Should I be reading scientific journals, for laughs?

This very full arc, which actually feels a lot longer than three issues, contains not only a team-up with a very grumpy Ant-Man--who was kidnapped into participating--but lots of jokes based on Brain Drain's nihilistic view of the universe and the humor inherent in Canada, and how it is different than America.

I mention that the arc felt longer than it actually was, not as a criticism, but as a compliment. Not only does artist Erica Henderson draw lots of panels per page when called on to do so, but North clearly spends a great deal of his writing-time think of how to pack as many jokes into each page as possible. Not just the bonus jokes that come in the alt-text like sentences below most of the pages, but, for example, this panel, in which Doreen surveys her choices for magazines to read in the cabin:

North easily could have stopped at the titles of the magazines themselves, but he went above and beyond, to include several jokes on each cover, detailing the contents of those magazines.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl has got to have set some kind of record for the most jokes per square centimeter of page-space.

The remaining two issues of the collections are done-in-ones. The first of these is a comic told entirely from the perspective of Nancy's cat Mew, which I believe the solicitation for blamed on Matt Fraction and David Aja doing that Pizza Dog issue of Hawkeye a few years back (In fact, there's a dog that appears in this that I'm fairly confident is supposed to be Pizza Dog, although he's not named, and I didn't see either of the Hawkeyes among the many super-heroes running around). In the background, The Taskmaster is using his awesome skills to take on a whole mess of superheroes--Iron Man! A The Hulk!***** Captain America! Spider-Man! Ms. Marvel! Ms. America! Hellcat!--in addition to Squirrel Girl, but she ultimately proves unbeatable, thanks to the fact that she has something Taskmaster can't master. This issue contains several pages by Zac Gorman, in which he draws comic strips that replicate Mew's dreams. Apparently cats dream in comic strips? Who knew?

The final issue is devoted to celebrating the 25th anniversary of Squirrel Girl's introduction by creators Will Murray and Steve Ditko in 1991's Marvel Super-Heroes Winter Special #8. It's a kinda sorta origin of the character, although not in the "how she got her powers and became a super-hero" kind of way as much as a "where, specifically, she came from" kind of story (That is, it opens with her parents meeting, and the title page is her mom holding her just after giving birth). From there it jumps around in five year increments, and we meet the late Monkey Joe, watch 15-year-old Squirrel Girl help The Hulk take down The Abomination and, finally, enjoy a birthday party with her pals and some Avengers, a party which The Red Skull foolishly attempts to crash.

While the issue is mostly another North and Henderson joint, Murray writes the 15-year-old Doreen sequence, and a piece of Ditko art is repurposed to get something from the great artist into the issue.



*Oh hey, in all those recent discussions of the source of Marvel's current sales woes--you know, whether it was diversity of characters or event exhaustion or them renumbering their books twice a year or whatever--did anyone theorize that maybe it was just that everyone hates the Inhumans, yet Marvel seemed to go ahead and keep publishing Inhumans books constantly, while shoehorning them into pretty much everything they publish? Could that have been a factor? Did Marvel comics readers so hate the Inhumans that they stopped buying Marvel comics to avoid reading about the Inhumans?

**At least not until googling him. He's a prose writer and playwright, and this was his first comics work, which would explain why I had never heard of him. It should be noted that he writes like a comic book writer here, and doesn't display any of the typical flaws one sees when writers fluent in another medium tackle comics-scripting for the first time.

***I was a little surprised that Corin didn't include a joke of any kind referring to Nancy Whitehead as Nancy Whiteheadless. He is a stronger man than I am, I guess.

****I just went to check the table-of-contents of Jon Morris' The Legion of Regrettable Super Villains, the companion book to his earlier League of Regrettable Super Heroes and, to my surprise, Master Pandemonium was not included. Nor was The Orb. Swarm was however, and there's actually a pretty good showing from Marvel villains overall: Stilt-Man, MODOK, Angar the Screamer, Black Talon, The Headmen and others.

*****Not a typo! I'm just not sure which The Hulk it is, Amadeus Cho or Bruce Banner, the latter of whom I'm fairly certain wasn't temporarily dead-ish at the time that issue of Squirrel Girl was pubished.

Some recent Marvel collections I've read:

All-New Wolverine Vol. 2: Civil War

I haven't been reading Civil War II, so I'm not sure how well the story of various Marvel heroes fighting one another over whether using an Inhuman with the ability to see the future to help them pre-emptively fight crime is the best idea or not is working within the confines of that particular miniseries.

From what I can tell from the tie-ins I've read so far, however, that narrative seems to be sort of stumbling around Marvel's publishing line like a drunk, unwelcome house guest--barging in with little warning, upsetting all the furniture and then staggering away just as suddenly, leaving everything feeling a little awkward.

Though the second volume of All-New Wolverine takes "Civil War II" as its subtitle, it's actually only the second half of the collection that has anything at all to do with Civil War II and, as was the case with Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat Vol. 2, there's a pretty clear, even glaring line between the events and tone of the collection before and after the tie-in.

The first issue herein is a rather unlikely team-up with Squirrel Girl, who shows up on the All-New Wolverine's doorstep in the middle of the night, holding an actual wolverine. His name is Jonathan, and Squirrel Girl thought he would be needed because she mistakenly thought that Wolverine could communicate with wolverines the way she communicates with squirrels. It was an honest mistake, and one that gives Laura and her little clone sister Gabby a pet wolverine.

Why is Squirrel Girl there at all? Well, it seems that Laura has "wronged the squirrel world," and S.G. wants her to make amends, so the two go off on an adventure to rescue a squirrel together. Though there's obviously a lot of silliness to it, writer Tom Taylor uses this issue to resolve the issue of whether Laura and Gabby are going to remain together or not, which ultimately allows him to demonstrate a way in which the all-new Wolverine is superior to the previous model...or at least trying to behave in the way she wished he had when he was still alive.

That's followed by two issues of Laura and Gabby going up against one of the greatest antagonists in the Marvel Universe: Mr. Fin Fang Foom*. It seems things go wrong during the sale of a very mysterious, very deadly weapon of mass destruction, which turns out to be what Gabby repeatedly, alliteratively refers to as "Fin Fang Pheromone," a liquid capable of drawing FFF to a target.

Laura is recruited by SHIELD (and Gabby tags along) because the first Wolverine they sent in ended up in the belly of the best. So Laura goes inside the giant dragon to rescue the older, futuristic, alternate dimensional version of the man she was cloned from, Logan from Old Man Logan.

Artist Marcio Takara has a really great panel set inside Fin Fang Foom, in which Laura, up to her knees in his stomach acid, strikes the same, somewhat iconic pose that the original Wolverine struck in that old issue of Uncanny X-Men, where he emerges from the sewer water and looks up, talking out loud to the not-present The Hellfire Club about how they've taken their best shot and now he's gonna take his.

Captain Marvel Carol Danvers and Iron Man Tony Stark, both playing remarkably nice for two pals about to engage in a civil war in a month or so's time after the events of this story arc, arrive to help out, but ultimately the only way to save SHIELD's helicarrier and New York from the Fin Fang Pheromone-crazed Fin Fang Foom involves off-panel nudity and a jetpack. (Speaking of nudity, I notice Fin Fang Foom is going commando throughout this entire adventure. It may be more realistic for a giant, humanoid dragon monster to not wear giant tiny purple shorts, but it still looks off to me.)

Takara draws all three of these issues. That's followed by the Civil War II tie-in arc, drawn by pencil artist Ig Guara and three inkers. Old Man Logan has now joined the cast, having been dragged back to Laura and Gabby's apartment to recover from having his lower half skeletonized by his time being semi-digested in Fin Fang Foom's stomach acid (Miraculously, not only does his flesh grow back, but apparently his healing factor also regrew his jeans, boots and belt!).

Ulysses, the future-predicting Inhuman who serves as a catalyst for Civil War II, has a vision in his office or cell or dark room at the Triskelion. Here's how he words it:

Wolverine. And an old man. A young girl. Flying through the air. And...I saw an angel? And screaming. And blood. A whole lot of blood.

Seriously? Those little cryptic snippets are the basis upon which Captain Marvel and the other heroes siding with her take violent action, occasionally against their peers? That's kind of crazy, like playing the stock market or formulating national foreign policy based on Nostradamus, or a few random verses of the Book of Revelation.

It's apparently enough for Maria Hill to mobilize a Captain America Steve Rogers-lead strike force to storm Laura's apartment and ask to detain The Notorious OML, on the belief that he's going to kill Gabby. Complicating matters further is the fact that he does kill Gabby in his own timeline, although as has been repeatedly established in his own book and the the X-books, his future is an alternate one, and things happen/happened/will happen quite differently in that world than they do/have/will in this one.

So the logistics of this story are really kind of a mess, with Captain America and SHIELD and OML all operating on visions and/or memories of the future, and fighting each other, with Laura and Gabby caught in the middle of what has turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (It turns out that if you expect Logan might commit a violent act upon those around him, sending a SHIELD SWAT team to fill him full of drug-tipped darts and a Captain America to smack him around and speechify might actually provoke him into violence, rather than deescalate the situation).

The arc ends with Laura telling Cap and SHIELD off, by essentially calling the entire premise of Civil War II idiotic, and forcefully saying she and Gabby would prefer to be left out of the rest of the crossover, thank you very much. Based on the logic of SHIELD here, it's hard to disagree; as with the original Civil War, one side is clearly being set-up as the wrong side, and there seems to be even fewer pains taken to articulate an argument for the Captain Marvel-lead side for acting in anyway that could conceivably be seen as "right," no matter how much one squints or tilts one's head (Interestingly, the original Civil War made Iron Man look like an evil and/or ignorant villain just prior to his big screen debut in his first film, while Civil War II is doing the same to Captain Marvel just prior to her big screen debut in her first film).

Which isn't to say there aren't moments in the arc. Burglars breaking into Laura's apartment, only to find Gabby, two Wolverines and an actual wolverine waiting for them was kind of funny, and Gabby calling Old Man Logan "her interdimensional dystopian future grandpa" was kind of cute. Taylor and his artistic collaborators continue to find the perfect balance between silly normal girl and usually hidden killer with Gabby, who is a fun character...except when that darkness slips out for a panel or two.

Next up is an arc entitled "Enemy of the State II"; the first "Enemy of the State" was the Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. arc of Wolverine in which Logan was brainwashed to assassinate the entire Marvel Universe, so, um, it looks like the next volume of All-New Wolverine might end up being a bit darker and a lot less fun than these first two. Damn you, Civil War II!

Black Widow Vol. 1: SHIELD's Most Wanted

Black Widow is the current book by the former Daredevil creative team of Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, and demands attention for that fact alone. I remember a few years back that Comics Alliance ran apiece crediting Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye for essentially reinventing Marvel's strategy for dealing with solo series starring second-tier characters, as Hawkeye was followed by a bunch of comics that seemed to feature Hawkeye-ized versions. While that's true, I think Waid and his original Daredevil artistic partners Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin deserve the credit, as their new Daredevil pre-dated Hawkeye. They established the simple formula of Good Writer + Good Artists = Good Comics, along with the idea of a simple tweak to the status quo might be all you need to make it those Good Comics interesting (Here, it seemed to simply be to stop trying to do Frank Miller's Daredevil over and over forever).

While Samnee came later, he drew a very healthy portion of Waid's run, and was key to the books continued success. He was certainly there long enough, and did great enough work, that whatever the pair did next was worth a read if for no other reason than it was what they were doing next.

And they chose Black Widow.

I found that a bit surprising, given that the character is in kind of a weird place. Outside of comics, Black Widow is by far Marvel's most popular and recognizable female heroine, thanks to her appearances in the Avengers and Captain America movies, but within the Marvel Universe, she's traditionally been a B- or C-lister, a character other characters team up with or who appears on a superhero team for a while, rather than a lady with her own book (although Waid and Samnee were giving her a second ongoing, following a short-lived, 20-issue, 2014 series by Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto). I don't know exactly why that is, but I suspect it's simply a function of her realistic nature: She's a spy, maybe even a super-spy, but not a superhero. For a long time, that was probably a liability, but in the post Ed Brubaker Marvel universe, the more realistic Marvel Universe in which so many different titles and stories were focused on espionage and intrigue rather than heroes vs. villains and cosmic happenings, it became an advantage--it's the reason she works in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so well where few of her fellow female heroes would, and the reason she can appear not only in Avengers movies, but also in Captain America and Iron Man ones.

I think that Waid and Samnee are doing Black Widow at all is a vote in favor of the character, and an argument for promoting her to the studio people, more-or-less advocating a solo movie (I was resistant to that idea a half-dozen movies ago, as the fact that she was just a super-spy made the prospect of a Black Widow movie seem no more exciting or interesting than a gender-flipped James Bond movie, but at this point the Marvel Cinematic Universe is so big and populated that a super-spy movie set in it would bear the advantage of further the world-building meta-narrative and the ability to choose from a prefabricated supporting cast and neat villains that might not ever make it into the boys' movies, lie, I don't know, Taskmaster or MODOK and AIM or fucking Fin Fang Foom even*).

I note all of this because the approach that Waid and Samnee, who gets a co-writer credit as well as the expected artist credit, seems like they might have just been doing a comics adaptation of a Black Widow movie they would like to see. It is very action-oriented, opening with an issue-length action scene in which the Widow takes on and takes down a huge swathe of SHIELD agents as she escapes from a SHIELD helicarrier. She has two words of dialogue in it. She battles her way through a helicarrier, she jumps off it and fights flying cars and jetpacks while plummeting to earth, and then there are chase scenes involving a jetpack, a flying car and a motorcycle.

The second issue/second chapter of the collection shows how she became an enemy of SHIELD, as she's kidnapped by a mysterious operative named The Weeping Lion and blackmailed into returning to The Red Room where she was trained to steal a file for him. This involves secret meets in foreign countries, a European car chase, lots of fighting and looks back to her mysterious origins--as I said, it's all very action movie-like, albeit a very good action movie, one with a smart script and a highly competent director. It's a prestige action movie.

Aside from the SHIELD tech in the opening scenes, things don't get too terribly Marvel-ous until the last chapter, which more-or-less completes this story arc. That's when Iron Man Tony Stark shows up to kick her ass, she appropriates some Stark tech, and goes after the super-powered power behind The Weeping Lion. Although so clearly set in the Marvel Universe, this is a Black Widow story, not a Marvel Universe story, and it benefits from the distinction.

It also benefits by the remove at which Waid and Samnee hold the character--she has surprisingly little dialogue in several issues, especially for the title character--as she plays pretty much everything as close to the vest as possible. "No one gets into my head unless I let them," she tells the big bad on the last page, and that would seem to go for the readers as well. That's not a criticism; it's a fair portrayal of a character born and bred as one of the world's greatest spies.

This fast-moving six-issue collection, which constitutes a complete story with a beginning, middle and ending of its own--with the necessary promise of more to come--is a great example of the showing vs. telling argument of good comics-making. Waid and Samnee's presence on the book all that demands that it be read, certainly, but the quality of the quality of the work here makes it so a reader won't be sorry for meeting that demand.

Doctor Strange Vol. 2: The Last Days of Magic

In his 2015 introduction to The Demon Vol. 1: Hell's Hitman, writer Garth Ennis reflected back on both the things he still liked and the things he doesn't like about the 1993-1994 comics collected within:

There's also the inevitable scene that everyone was doing at the time, where some malevolent influence affects numerous characters in the vicinity and they start committing acts of unspeakable evil--why didn't it occur to me, I wonder, to reverse this hoary old cliche and have people suddenly become unnaturally pleasant to one another?

I thought about Ennis' reference to what was, in the early '90s, "a hoary old cliche" while reading the first issue/chapter of The Last Days of Magic, the second collection of Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo's Doctor Strange ongoing, as it opens with Aaron doing something pretty similar. And then doing it again later. And again later.

Here the malevolent influence is the arrival of The Empirikul at Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum. These are an army of eye-ball headed robo-clones lead by an all-powerful character who has been traveling the Multiverse, killing any and all magicians and their magic in each dimension in the name of science. And so the examples in Aaron's scene aren't of normal people doing terrible things, but of magic stuff around the world suddenly stopping working.

The specifics are different, but it reads the same. Aaron returns to this technique again and again, as a sort of shorthand to show the worldwide, apocalyptic nature of the threat as succinctly as possible. A few scenes are dramatized, but more often than not Aaron has Strange simply telling us what's happening here or there, and there are often significant time jumps between scenes or issues.

It has it's moments, sure--Aaron at his worst is still a lot more fun and engaging than many super-comics writers at their best--but this collection felt a lot less satisfying than the one that preceded it, and was assembled in a particularly annoying and ad hoc way, as too many Marvel graphic novels apparently are these days.

The Empirikul's leader is given an origin, and it is basically just yet another riff on Superman (at least his heat vision is green instead of red!). Raised on a planet that worshiped an ancient god-monster an was ruled by magic, his parents devoted their lives to science and, when the magic police came for them, they rocketed their infant son off to space where he used science to become super kick-ass.

On Earth, he takes down Strange and a rag-tag group of magical allies, but one of their number sacrifices himself allowing Strange and the others to escape. About 30 pages after I started wondering, Scarlet Witch finally asks Strange why they don't just call The Avengers--if the Empirikul are science-based, then why not leave it to all the science-based super-armies to take them on?--but Strange has a readymade excuse about the costs of magic and so on.

After he and his allies--Scarlet Witch, Doctor Voodoo, Son of Satan, Talisman, Magik, some cool new characters that aren't introduced until after the conclusion of the arc they appear in--scrounge the world seeking out the very last remnants of magical items, they return to face The Empirikul. Meanwhile, Wong and Strange's new librarian Zelma hatch a new variation on an old cost-of-magic-workaround revealed in the previous volume, and the Empirikul find a thing in Doctor Strange's cellar.

Ultimatley, the good guys win and the bad guys lose. Retroactive spoiler alert. Bachalo's artwork is, as always, a ton of fun, and he's particularly well-suited the naturally trippy visuals of a character and milieu created by Steve Ditko in the 1960s. The Empirikul's footsoldiers, the Ibots, are really fun characters, and Bachalo, who inks and colors his own work through most of this, draws the all-white, mechanical creatures with huge spheroid heads in sharp, sharp contrast to the darker, grittier magical characters, especially the black thing in the cellar that appears to be a sentient tidal wave of tar full of eyeballs and toothy mouths.

The first issue/chapter has an eight-page sequence showing the sudden death of magic, wherein several examples are dramatized (rather than just rattled-off in list-like fashion). These are drawn by a rag-tag group of artists including Mike Deodato, Jorge Fornes, Kev Walker and Kevin Nowlan.

And then, after the conclusion of the story arc, appears Doctor Strange: The Last Days of Magic #1 which, some parenthetical fine print helpfully tells us, "takes place between issues #6 and #7." You know where a good place to collect it might have been, then? Maybe between issues #6 and #7.

This 45-page special features a framing sequence by Aaron and drawn by Leonardo Romero (whose clean, cool artwork is a bit of a revelation, and should appeal to fans of Evan Shaner and Chris Samnee; I hope Big Two editors are throwing offers Romero's way as we speak). In it, Zelma learns about some of the magicians of the world while trying to organize Strange's library "then," and in the "now" we see those magicians fighting their own battles against various Ibots. These include El Medico Mistico/Doctor Mystical, a Santo/Dr. Strange hybrid who is the Sorcerer Supreme south of the border (and whose spells are awesome; he summons rain...full of great white sharks); Mahatma Doom, whose name kinda says it all, and his ally Xandra Xian Xu; and, finally, "The Siberan Seer, the manliest mage in all the land," Count Kaoz, who killed and ate a magic bear as a nine-year-old boy, and "his guts have been infested with sorcery ever since. Also Trichinosis."

It...might have been nice to meet these guys before they started appearing in the story arc a reader of this collection will have already completed before hitting this story.

Between the framing sequence are two longer stories by different creative teams, one featuring a pre-existing character (and member of The Unity Squad, if that's still what they are calling the Avengers team in Uncanny Avengers), and the other a seemingly new character. Gerry Duggan and Daniel Beyruth tell a story about Doctor Voodoo, while James Robinson and Mike Perkins introduce The Wu, a Hong Kong policewoman who uses magic on the sly--think a pink-haired, Honk Kong action star who jumps around shooting magic handguns and you get the idea.

International Iron Man

This book collects the seven-issue series, which I believe was announced as an ongoing, by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev. It tells of an element of Tony Stark's origin, specifically of his relationship with a young woman when they were both students in England back in the 1990s, and his current search for his true birth parents.

It is rather neatly divided into two threads (with a weird, Iron Man-less chapter near the end), set in the present and "20 Years Ago." The present is, of course, 2016. So "20 Years Ago" would be 1996, right? Okay.

So on page 10 the young, pre-facial hair Tony Stark of 1996 is talking to his fellow student Cassandra Gillespie, who seems surprised that Tony doesn't know who she is, given how famous she apparently is. "You Googled me by now," she tells him upon their second meeting, and he replies, "I did."

Aha! He googled her? In 1996? I don't think so! Google might have been founded in 1996, but its search engine wasn't built until 1997 and it didn't incorporate until 1998, and it wasn't exactly popular right out of the gate. It certainly didn't become a verb until much later than that (Bendis, it has been pointed out several million times on the Internet, isn't known for writing convincingly distinct dialogue; there's a scene set in the 1970s or so in which a woman asks a SHIELD agent, "You do see how this all sounds crazytown?").

So Tony couldn't have Googled Cassandra back then! Ha ha ha ha! Bendis made a mistake! And I noticed it! I win! I am a winner! He must somehow try to console himself with his piles of money and the prestige of his peers within his chosen medium and his status to be able to write and do pretty much whatever he wants to do with the direct market's number one publisher, while I sit here alone in a cold, dark apartment lit only by the light of my laptop, secure in the knowledge that I saw his mistake!

...

Although since I suppose the Marvel Universe is its own distinct fictional shared-setting, completely separate from our own no matter how many similarities may exist between the two, it's possible Google was founded and popularized much more quickly in that universe than it was in ours, and tech-savvy people of Tony and Cassandra's caliber may have been aware of it as soon as it was created and been futurist enough to coin the word "Google" as a verb meaning "to look something up on Google" immediately. So why don't I just award myself a no-prize and get on with my life?

That aside, this reads like a well-plotted original graphic novel. In the past, a young Tony with a rocky, almost non-existent relationship with his father Howard Stark (gray-haired and severe like John Slattery's portrayal, not young and charming like Dominic Cooper's) is in college in London, where he meets Cassandra, the daughter of Stark's weapons-dealing rivals.

Tony meets her parents for dinner and they are attacked by Hydra, which seems awfully fishy to the elder Stark, who tries his best to keep his son away from Cassandra, who he believes is a "honey pot." Tony doesn't agree, however, and uses his genius to reunite with Cassandra until things climax in a Hydra/SHIELD battle.

Bendis continually cuts back and forth between that storyline and one set in the present, in which Tony-as-Iron Man is facing off against the grown-up, eye-patch rocking Cassandra and her squadron of upgraded Mandroids. Tony is now trying to figure out who his real father is and, for some reason, thinks she knows (In retrospect, I suppose this is all meant to be a red herring of some sort, as it heavily implies that the pair share a father, but it basically just gives readers some supeheroic stuff to soak in between visits to Tony's pre-Iron Man past).

Eventually Tony finds the name of his mother, and in an extended, Iron Man-free flashback, we meet his birth parents, discover how they met and how they separated, and just how exactly Howard and Maria Stark got their hands on baby Tony and raised him to believe they were his birth parents.

It's overall pretty good stuff, although Bendis is still Bendis, so the ticks about his writing that bug a lot of Marvel readers can still be found within. Alex Maeelv's art is incredibly effective, as it should be, given how often and how long he's worked with Bendis on various Marvel projects.

I'm not so sure about Marvel's publishing decisions, though. I can see that perhaps there wasn't time to squeeze this whole story into the pages of Invincible Iron Man, the other Iron Man book that Bendis is currently writing, especially since the events of the unfolding Civil War II (which is also being written by Bendis) promise a big status quo shake up for the character that will see him ceding his role as Iron Man to a new apprentice-type character, codenamed Ironheart.

But as someone who works in a library, reads Marvel comics in trades and often find myself asked which books to read in which order, I often find myself trying to figure out which books to read in which order, and Bendis' Iron Man is a bit of a mess. As far as I can make sense of it, Bendis' run on the character is collected in Invincible Iron Man Vol. 1: Reboot (not to be confused with Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man Vol. 1: The Five Nightmares), Invincible Iron Man Vol. 2: The War Machines (not to be confused with Fraction's Invincible Iron Man Vol. 2: World's Most Wanted Book One) and International Iron Man Vol. 1. There's an Invincible Iron Man Vol. 3: Civil War II yet to come, but, in the meantime, Bendis has launched Infamous Iron Man (starring Victor Von Doom) and re-relaunched Invincible Iron Man (now starring Ironheart Riri Williams) with a brand-new #1 issue. Hopefully when that gets collected it will be as Invincible Iron Man Vol. 4, but who knows.

And that's not counting the just completed Civil War II, of course, the change in status quo of which was revealed in the latest Invincible Iron Man #1 months earlier.

Like they used to say in the 1970s, it's crazytown. Don't believe me? Google it. Or maybe Ask Jeeves.

Mockingbird Vol. 1: I Can Explain

With no prior experience with or affection for either the creative team of Chelsea Cain (a successful prose fiction writer making her comics debut) and pencil artist Kate Niemcyzk or the character of Mockingbird Bobbi Morse (She was married to Hawkeye back when he used to wear that dumb cowl and loincloth? And had something to do with the Skrulls as per the dumb-ass Secret Invasion series?), I was in no particular hurry to read this. That is despite the fact that it was clearly very well-drawn and featured what looked to be highly-comedic content, and the fact that my friend and occasional co-writer Meredith insisted it was like the best thing ever (But did not ever go quite as far as she did with any issues of All-New Wolverine, and actually forced me to read it).

Well it turns out that Meredith was right; this is very much like the best thing ever. It's as funny as any of my favorite Marvel comics of the moment--Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat, Howard The Duck--but also slightly more serious in terms of conflict and interconnectivity with the Marvel Universe as a whole. In tone, it's closer to All-New Wolverine or maybe Ms. Marvel than the outright comedy series, but it definitely has a lot of gags and a lot of silliness in its DNA.

The first story arc, consisting of the first five issues of the (sadly already canceled) ongoing series, is pretty brilliantly constructed. Cain is not only remarkably good at writing comics for someone who has made her career as a writer in entirely different writing medium (A lot of novelists and screenwriters tend to struggle with a pretty dramatic learning curve before really figuring out their groove with comics), but she's actually pretty damn brilliant at it.

The first issue/chapter is a fairly weird, almost daffy one. It opens with Bobbi stalking into her weekly medical check-up, throwing a chair through a glass wall and facing a horde of zombies after a ping pong ball bounces towards her. "Let me back up," she narrates, and then she takes us through a series of check-ups, each opening in a waiting room full of super-people apparently on SHIELD's medical plan (There's Tony Stark reading a pamphlet on STDs, there's Hercules with a bag of ice on his head), where she appears after various adventures, often wearing whatever she was during said adventure/secret mission (a SCUBA suit, a BDSM fetish suit, etc). The next four issues show those particular adventures/secret missions, and also explain what exactly is going on with the ping pong balls and zombies, the final one finishing the conflict, with Mockingbird teaming up with Howard The Duck and (the formerly Ultimate) Spider-Man, both of whom were kept waiting in waiting rooms while the zombie horde was wreaking havoc in the medical center.

For the most part, these issues are like done-in-ones, but relate to various events and clues laid out in that first issue, and the conflict resolved in the fifth.

So Bobbi infiltrates a London chapter of Hellfire Club, which is much heavier on the leather, latex and whipping than previous incarnations, all in order to rescue Lance Hunter, her boyfriend (and a character from the Marvel TV show I don't watch). It guest-stars the Queen of England, which is why there are so many corgis on the cover. Then she must rescue a 12-year-old girl who has taken her clique hostage using her early onset super-powers, a feat that involves some kicking, some tech, some science and some talking. And then she infiltrates an underwater sea base run by AIM spin-off TIM (Total Idea Mechanics) where she must rescue her ex Hawkeye, who is a lot like Lance (and, like Lance, spends the entire issue in just his boxer briefs). Then we circle back to the beginning of the book, and all the details and clues fall into place, everything is explained, and Mockingbird, Howard The Duck and Spider-Man save the day. It is awesome.

Niemczyk draws the first four issues, and her style is perfect for the tone of this comic, looking just serious enough for the dangers to all be taken seriously, but with a light enough touch that the jokes all land, whether it's something somewhat silly, or the contrast between the dialogue or situation and the renderings of the characters. She's an all-around great artist, skilled with design, rendering, lay-outs and character acting. Given this book's too-short run, I hope Marvel finds a plum assignment for Niemczyk to handle next.

The fifth issue is by Ibrahim Moustafa, another talented artist who is not quite the revelation Niemczyk is, but that's only because I've heard of him and read his work before.

After the conclusion of that opening arc, another Cain-written Mockingbird story runs: That's Mockingbird: SHIELD 50th Anniversary #1 by Cain and artist Joelle Jones, which was published prior to the comics that precede it in this collection, and was apparently so well-received upon release that Cain was asked to write a Mockingbird monthly. As the events of that one-shot are set before the first story arc of Mockingbird, and inform it somewhat, it probably would have made more sense to place it before the other issues as a prologue, but then it's tonally pretty different (more serious, less funny), and would sort of spoil how well Cain constructed that arc. So I'm of two minds about its placement, really.

As soon as I finished the volume, I became deeply depressed, because I knew Marvel had already canceled the book. Having not yet read it, I had no reason to miss it, but now I do. If you missed the monthly, serially-published issues and haven't yet read the trade, I'd highly recommend it. Of all the trades reviewed in this post, it's certainly the best, and one of the better Marvel trades I've read in a while.




*This 1961 Jack Kirby/Stan Lee creation is long overdue for both his own series and an appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I imagine him being the perfect antagonist for an opening action sequence in Avengers 5, after Thor and Hulk are back on the team. And, hopefully Namor. They've gotta get Namor in these things eventually!

**I can dream, can't I?

Review: Doctor Strange Vol. 1: The Way of the Weird

I'm not sure if writer Jason Aaron has gained a reputation for reinvigorating often difficult superhero characters and giving them exciting new directions, almost like a Marvel answer to Geoff Johns' pre-Flashopint character rehabilitation programs at the Distinguished Competition. I mean, that's the way I see Aaron, after his work on Ghost Rider, a series of different Wolverine titles, his work on the previous, Odinson version of Thor and, most especially, his run on Wolverine and The X-Men, which was by far the best X-Men run since Grant Morrison and company's millennial run, and the introduction and continuing adventures of the new, female Thor in the pages of Thor/Mighty Thor. I'm not sure if everyone else sees him that way too, though.

But given the fact that not only has just about everything I've read of his been good*, he's also found ways to make even the most tired characters and concepts exciting, fun and even funny, I was pretty pleased to hear that Marvel had tapped him to write the first new Doctor Strange ongoing book in...well, since I've been reading Marvel comics, I think? The character has always been around, getting a few miniseries and playing roles big and small in most of the post-Civil War event series. Brian Michael Bendis used him regularly in his Avengers-centric stories, as a member of "The Illuminati," and he always showed up when a magic guy is needed in any book. The post-Secret Wars book would be his first attempt at a star turn in pretty much forever though.

And one imagines that the book had to be a good one, as Marvel Studios has a Doctor Strange film up next on their slate, and are going to want as many Doctor Strange-related collections on shelves as possible the last quarter of this year.

So they paired Aaron with Chris Bachalo, and the results are about as I expected: Fresh, exciting, fun and funny.

One of the problems, or at least the perceived problems, with the Doctor Strange character is just how damn powerful he is. If your superpower is "magic," then writing simple fight comics gets a lot harder than it is for someone whose power is, say, "webs and the proportional strength of a spider" or "sharp claws" and so on. Aaron and Bachalo address Strange's comics creator-frigthenng powers of omnipotence head on in a couple of ways. First and most obviously, there's the matter of escalating the threats, so that if the hero seems omnipotent, then for an external, physical conflict you need to imagine antagonists that are even more powerful (the route in recent years has been to impose limits on Strange instead, essentially de-powering him to fight lower-level threats...um, Jonathan Hickman's New Avengers/Avengers/Secret Wars epic excluded, of course).

Secondly, they show that just because Strange has the power to take on various magical threats doesn't mean his life is easy, in the same way that a medical doctor may be able to prevent or cure most diseases, but they're still over-worked, stressed out and engaged in a never-ending battle.

And thirdly, and most imaginatively, they depict the cost of Strange's magical powers. Taking the "doctor" of the character's name (and origin) as literally as possible, Aaron and Bachalo's Doctor Strange treats the Earth and its people as his patient, and various magical threats as infections that need repelled or subdued (either by spells or magical weapons like that big-ass battle axe seen on the cover). Along the way, of course, Strange picks ups all sorts of mystical maladies himself, and the toll its left on his body is most graphically displayed during a scene late in the volume where we see Wong preparing a meal for him, which new point of view character Zelma refers to as "culinary afterbirth."

"Exposure to magical energy changes a mortal body over time," Wong explains to her in dialogue bubbles over a panel of Strange forcing a pink, viscous soup with eyeballs, snails and tentacles into his mouth using chopsticks. "After years of casting spells to save the world...this is literally the only food that the Doctor's stomach can accept... ....Food that would kill a normal man. And someday, will kill him as well."

It's played for laughs ("Ugh," Strange says, "Tastes like leprosy"), but demonstrates the danger of magic swiftly in the space of a few panels, and, incidentally, helps further remove Wong from his stereotypical, 1960s, Asian manservant roots. Yeah, the Asian guy may be Strange's cook, but did you see the stuff he has to cook for Strange? You have to be a kung fu expert with great magical knowledge and incomparable courage for that; only a superhero could run run this Doctor Strange's kitchen (not that all Wong does is cook and occasionally karate chop here, of course. Aaron also has a big, high-concept idea regarding the magic's deleterious effect on Strange's mortal body that Wong is involved in that is only partially explained by volume's end).

We meet Aaron and Bachalo's version of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Doctor Strange in a bravura 12-page sequence that includes a pithy, one-page recap of his origin (delivered via Strange's own narration over a mosaic-like background of old panels of comics featuring the character), a sprawling battle scene against bizarre magical foes of Bachalo's wildest imagination, and then the reveal that the character was making a house call, floating next to the bed of a sleeping little boy while his astral projection was fighting his foes on "the ectoplasmic ...within the boy's very soulscape.

From there, his cape unwinds from his shoulders and forms a stairway he strolls casually down, from the boy's second-floor bedroom window to the streets, where it ties itself into a rather ordinary-looking scarf, and we see Strange in "street clothes" rather than his regular work clothes/costume.

There's a few pages of him strolling around New York, in one of several instances in which Bachalo, who colors his own art in this book, shows us the world through Strange's eyes...or at least a big third eye in his forehead. The streets of modern day New York are rendered in black and white, while all sorts of strange creatures flit through in full-color, some attached to passersby that don't even notice them, and most of these ignored by Strange himself, sine they're just a part of daily life (as he sees it), not threats.

He visits a bar where Marvel's other mystical characters occasionally convene, and when he returns home, there is a young woman there seeking his help with a scalp infection of sorts: She's grown mouths atop her head. Meanwhile, in a different dimension, some strange force called The Empirikul (get it?!) are hunting and exterminating the Sorcerers Supreme in various different dimensions. That last bit is drawn by Kevin Nowlan. It's a five-page sequence which accounts for the only bit of the book not drawn by Bachalo himself.

How did the artist handle penciling and coloring five consecutive issues himself? The seven inkers probably helped.

You can extrapolate much of what follows there that first issue. Zelda, a librarian, tales a part-time position helping organizing Strange's library, since the ability to not find the right book at the right time could be a matter of life and death. There are more visits to the magicians' bar (Look! Son of Satan! Man, I hate what Bachalo did with his hair), more attacks on alternate Sorcerer's Supreme, more of Strange's weird-ass life and, ultimately, the arrival of the Empirikul on Earth, providing a point from a cliffhanger ending to the volume.

There are plenty of familiar elements, even familiar scenes–a visitor lost in Strange's house, for example, seems like something I've read a handful of times in the past few years–but to my casual Doctor Strange reader's eye, it certainly seemed like Aaron and Bachalo did a fine job of refreshing without reinventing the character. Nothing terribly important seems to have been reinvented, no dramatic change to the status quo was delivered. Rather, this seems to pretty simply follow the formula of the Mark Waid and company relaunch of Daredevil a few line-wide relaunches ago: Good Writer + Good Artist + Interesting Character = Good Super-Comics.

Regarding that art, there's little difference between what Bachalo is providing here and what he was doing with Brian MIchael Bendis in Uncanny X-Men. He even mostly sticks with the borderless panels set in a white field (forming implied panel borders) he used throughout his last X-Men run, and in a few instances drops photos into the backgrounds for the backgrounds, for some dumb reason.

Rather, this subject matter just allows him to cut even looser and go even wilder with designs. I've mentioned the coloring tricks (Bachalo seems particularly enamored of a Tim Burton-esque, horizontal striped pattern for the supernatural). His mild re-designs of Doctor Strange is cool too. Whether he gets dressed magically or simply casts a spell to change his appearance, I liked the way he blends in within this book.

Bachalo also did a rather fine job of redesigning Strange, with a less-is-more approach that one might not even notice at first. He still wears his classic tunic and cape (clasped with the Eye of Agamotto), but he's ditched the yellow gloves with the spots, so now his shirt doesn't puff up on the sleeves above them, looking blouse-like. The cape's bizarre collar that looked so cool in Ditko's drawings but rarely if ever works when a modern artist, more intent on rendering their figures in three-dimensional, realistic portrayals, attempts to draw it (the fact that we see the cape used as a scarf and ramp in here indicates that it is magic enough to change shape and appearance to, so purists can rest easy that Bachalo didn't change the cape, but simply changed whether or not Strange decides to rock a crazy collar with it or not).

His pants are no longer so tight, and just look like a regular pair of nice pants, and he has boots with treads on them, furthering the idea that his superhero costume amounts to his work clothes. He wears a dagger on his belt, like a Dungeons & Dragons magic-user now, and summons magical medieval weaponry to cut and bash tentacles as necessary.

Least noticeable of all, unless you look super-close at those Ditko panels upcycled into an origin recap on page one, Strange no longer has any gray or white in his hair, but looks very young...even younger than the guy who will be playing hi in the upcoming movie, actually. It is perhaps a little weird that Strange, one of the most visibly middle-aged superheroes, no longer looks quite so middle-aged at a time when the readers of Marvel comics books are far, far older than they were in the 1960s, but I suppose the idea is to have him remain a contemporary of Tony Stark and that generation of heroes, and those guys are never getting any older, are they?

That, or maybe Strange just cast some sort of spell of de-graying. I mean, if I were a Sorcerer Supreme, I'd probably cast a spell to re-grow hair on my bald head.

Now that I've discussed the book at length, here's a short review: Aaron and Bachalo's Doctor Strange book is very good, and there's a good chance that you will enjoy reading it, so you should probably check it out. It will definitely go on any list of books I recommend to any friends who want to know a good place to start with Doctor Strange comics as the movie approaches (Right up there with Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin's 2006's The Oath, which introduces the Night Nurse costume I wish Rosario Dawson would don in a Netflix series eventually).

Now here's hoping after Aaron and Bachalo finish their run on this series, they follow it up with a new Defenders series, because my favorite Doctor Strange is a Doctor Strange who bickers with Namor, The Hulk and Silver Surfer...



*Abhay Khosla's "The Case Against Dan DiDio" is still pretty fresh in my head, so as I was thinking about Jason Aaron and all the great comics he's written for Marvel in the past decade or so, I couldn't help but remember where Aaron came from. Before going on to write Ghost Rider, Thor, Wolverine, The X-Men, Star Wars, Original Sin, and parts of Avengers Vs. X-Men, Aaron wrote Scalped for DC Comics' Vertigo imprint. And...that's about it. Looking at Wikipedia, because I honestly can't remember ever reading any Aaron-written DC comics other than Scalped, it appears that he has a few more Vertigo credits to his name, but the only DC Universe title he wrote was the Penguin issue of Joker's Asylum. I don't know that Aaron writing all of these great comics, many of which were also big commercial hits, for Marvel, and not writing for DC Comics instead, despite obviously having contacts at DC is necessarily Dan DiDio's fault, but it certainly fits the pattern that Khosla suggests (and, really, anyone who follows mainstream comics will have noticed–I mean, even Scott Snyder took his Wytches to Image instead of having Vertigo publish it) that DC under DiDio has had a problem keeping top-tier talent. Aaron was writing Scalped for Vertigo at the same time he was writing some of his Marvel superhero comic work, but the number of different titles he wrote for Marvel vs. DC in the last ten years is pretty damn striking.

Review: Uncanny X-Men Vol. 5: The Omega Mutant

This volume collects Uncanny X-Men #26-31, and if it's not the climax of Brian Michael Bendis' run on the title and the X-Men franchise in general, it's at least a major turning point, as by the time the volume ends the two warring schools status quo has been altered into a more traditional one.

It picks up right where the previous volume ended: During the hologaphic delivery of Professor Charles Xavier's last will and testament, the late mutant leader revealed that he's been keeping the most powerful mutant of all-time secret from everyone, including that mutant himself, by regularly mind-wiping him so that he doesn't realize his vast, destructive powers over time and space. Of course, if Xavier's dead, then it falls to his former students to deal once and for all with one Matthew Malloy, the omega level mutant who just disintegrated several city blocks by freaking out a little.

After some more quibbling amongst themselves, eventually Storm, Wolverine, Rachel and Cyclops get on a plane to meet with Malloy, with Beast consulting ("And--And he's more than an omega level mutant. He's more powerful than any mutant signature we've ever seen before.") Malloy turns out to be more powerful than expected, having telepathic and telekinetic powers as well. When a SHIELD helicarrier carrying the X-Men get near him, he brings it down and teleports the X-Men back to their respective schools.

Meanwhile, the junior X-Men at the New Xavier School (i.e. Cyclops' team) start to question what on Earth they're training for exactly, and Tempus decides on her own radical course of action for dealing with Malloy.

So too does Cyclops. With Magik and, later, Magneto, he attempts to talk Malloy down, essentially trying to recruit him to his cause (looked at one way), although, to be fair, looked at Cyclops' way, Cyke does have a lot of experience dealing with out-of-control, reality-warping mutants who can barely control their own powers.

As for Tempus, she just goes back in time to tell the still-alive Professor X that he needs to come up with a better plan for dealing with Malloy.

It ultimately goes sideways in the present, with Scott, Magik, Emma Frost and, a few pages later, what looks like the rest of the X-Men all being killed by either SHIELD's attack on Malloy or Malloy's powers reacting to threats against him.

Luckily, Tempus and Professor X did find a work around, with Xavier preventing Malloy's parents from ever meeting, which thus prevented him from ever being born. Meditate on the ethics of that cosmic, retroactive pre-abortion!

With the timeline re-set–an awfully weird device for Bendis to employ, really, considering how much the idea that "time is broken" has played into his recent writing, from Age of Ultron to All-New X-Men–so that Malloy never existed, the reading of the will goes quite differently, and essentially a few issues of Uncanny never happened, so far as any of the characters involved save Tempus know. She lets Cyclops know what happened though, in the midst of telling him off and dropping out of his school. Which he then dissolves anyway, without consulting even his fellow teachers.

His last words (this trade) to the assembled X-Men kind of choked me up a little, to be honest, although otherwise Bendis' strongest writing in this particular volume has been in the jokes and clever exchanges department.

So where are we now? The Jean Grey School is the only X-Men school, meaning Cyclops' students and, presumably, his fellow teachers will be absorbed into Storm's school. Cyclops isn't exactly sure what he's going to do next, but he's had a lot to think about. Iceman is extremely angry with Cyclops, up to the point that he seems to be considering killing him. And Beast is in complete despair in terms of the X-Men's place in the world, as no one responded to his plea for help–although his plea was erased form the timeline by Tempus' actions, so maybe he's cool now.

Secret Wars has already started, and Bendis' X-Men run is coming to a close, so there's not much space left in the writer's story. If this wasn't the climax, then the next volume should be, and if it was, then the next volume will either be the conclusion or the denouement.

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Look at these panels:

Kris Anka

I've talked at length about the lame way that Bendis uses swearing in his Marvel comics before, essentially writing in swear words just to censor them with grawlixes, so that anyone who has heard a swear word before (meaning anyone who can read) will be able to fill in the blanks, while Bendis and Marvel look juvenile, over-sensitive and just plain weird by swearing without swearing.

I've also noted that the symbols in the grawlixes he uses don't generally match up, so that instead of using four symbols in a phrase like "Fuck you!" he'll use five or six, so it will look like "@#$%^ you!," leaving one wondering if there's a one symbol-to-one letter correlation and, if so, what weird-ass swearing his haracters are employing. If it's spelled "@#$%^ you!" is it not, in fact, "Fuck you!" but, let's see..."Bitch you!" or "Shits you!" or "Cocks you!" or...I don't know.

Anyway, the swear words that Wolverine and Cyclops use in the above passage would, most logically, be "shit." As in, "All our shit aside, Logan." But there aren't four symbols; there are seven. What swear word has seven letters?

"Asshole," of course. But it doesn't really fit, does it? "All our asshole aside, Logan. He lied to us." "Our asshole not aside."

No, it doesn't work. So I'm assuming the word they're using is "fuckery."

"Xavier lied to all of us. All our fuckery aside, Logan. He lied to us."

"Our fuckery not aside."

Yeah, that's perfect. That actually describes what occurs between the characters in X-Men comics pretty well: Fuckery.

Also, I really enjoyed Iceman's dig in that third panel.

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Speaking of Iceman, he also gets my second favorite line in this book:

Chris Bachalo

Review: Uncanny X-Men Vol. 4: Vs. SHIELD

With the issues collected in this volume–Uncanny X-Men #19-25–writer Brian Michael Bendis seems to be winding down his run on the X-Men franchise, or at least this track of his run on the franchise, as this is the book that features Cyclops Scott Summers and his allies and students at the New Xavier School (The other, of course, is All-New X-Men, the one featuring the original, teenage X-Men from the past, transported to the future). The first half of the collection features the conclusion of a few of the plotlines that Bendis has kept simmering throughout his time on Uncanny, occasionally bringing them to the fore, sometimes moving them to the background.

The first, as the the subtitle so obviously alludes to, is SHIELD's conflict with Cyclops' X-Men, which, for all intents and purposes, are the "bad" X-Men of the post-Avengers Vs. X-Men status quo, with Wolverine, Storm, Beast and the others at the Jean Grey School being the "good" X-Men, the ones that the public fear and hate less, the ones that work with the Avengers, the ones that SHIELD isn't at war with.

The other is the resolution of the plotline involving Mystique and Dazzler, Agent of SHIELD. Maria Hill had appointed Dazzler her official mutant liaison, but unbeknowest to her, the real Dazzler has been kept in a coma-like state in Madripoor, being regularly harvested of fluids to produce the drug Mutant Growth Hormone, while Mystique impersonates her, helping to stoke tensions between SHIELD and Cyclops' X-Men.

Almost every time Cyclops, Emma Frost, Magik and the others find a new mutant and seek to recruit them, they are attacked by highly-advanced versions of the Sentinel robots, and all of the clues as to who has been siccing the new killer robots on the X-Men have always pointed to it being SHIELD. Hill denied it, but Cyclops didn't exactly trust her, as she was highly devoted to hunting him down.

All this time, since nearly the beginning of the title, we've seen that the mastermind behind the Sentinel attacks was someone located within a SHIELD helicarrier, someone wearing a completely impenetrable disguise with a mirrored helmet.

He, she or it was always alone, of course; the disguise was simply for this antagonist's identity to be kept from the reader (I'm not entirely sure they played fair, either, as the body shape should have been...different in all those other glimpses, but I'm not going to cry foul or anything; unlike Batman Eternal, Uncanny X-Men wasn't presented as a mystery, although, like that Batman series, this reveal comes out of left field, being a practically random X-Men villain who hasn't shown up in the series previously).

After the latest attack by SHIED Sentinels, Cyclops, Emma and the others get serious about trying to figure out who is doing this and why, and they eventually realize it must be someone who knows how to work a cerebro, which limits the suspect list pretty dramatically; so Cyke and Magik go to confront Hank McCoy (grown-up version) at the Jean Grey school (Hey, have you figured out the mystery villain yet, just from reading my review?). It's not him, of course, but it gets Cyclops and Magik to the Jean Grey School, just in time for SHIELD to show up to arrest him, with Mystique-as-Dazzler in tow, as well as actual Dazzler (who Magneto just got done rescuing), and so everyone's in the same place at the same time for a series of dramatic confrontations and reveals, including another attack by the SHIELD Sentinels and the threat of nuclear attack from the helicarriers parked right above the school.

I hope it's not spoiling anything to say that the good guys win and the bad guy loses?

Despite all of the distractions and side-trips that he's induged in over the course of the first year and a half or so worth of issues, the four-issue climax of these plots is actually really well done.

The last three issues of the collection kick off a storyline that will continue into the next volume, this one partially drawn by Kris Anka (Chris Bachalo, who draws the four-issues constituting the climax of the SHIELD conflict, also draws the final issue contained herein; they both do their regular excellent job).

She-Hulk Jennifer Walters, in her capacity as the late Charles Xavier's lawyer (well, it had to be either her or Daredevil), bounds to the Jean Grey school and has the original X-Men go get Cyclops (turns out Beast knew where their secret base was all along) for the reading of Xavier's last will and testament.

This is, naturally, a rather intense moment, since a large part of the reason there's so much animosity between Cyclops and his former teammates is the fact that Cyclops killed Xavier (while possessed by The Phoenix Force, probably, although there's some disagreement among the X-Men about all of that). Also, everyone's pretty sure that Xavier left the school grounds and all of his assets to his once prize pupil Cyclops, and Xavier didn't have time to change his will between the time Cylcops started killing him and the time he finished killing him at the climax of Avengers Vs. X-Men.

But before the will can be read, She-Hulk has to play a recorded hologram message from Chuck, and in it he says he's about to reveal his darkest secret! And man, that guy has had some dark secrets. We are then introduced to an incredibly powerful mutant as a little boy, one so powerful that he can basically do anything, with "doing anything" mostly consisting of inadvertently killing anyone around him and, as he grew older, anything around him for miles, simply by being stressed out.

He's one of, if not the, most powerful mutants who ever lived and, unable to find a way to help him, Charles Xavier basically wiped his mind, and kept tabs on him, regularly showing up to do mind-maintenance on the guy. And now that Xavier's dead, the poor schmuck's staggeringly destructive powers will return, and Xavier won't be there to stop them from being unleashed. His last wish is for the X-Men to find the young mutant, now a grown man, and help him as Xavier himself could never figure out how to do.

Meanwhile, he's evaporating city blocks, and SHIELD is trying to get through to him, while the X-Men bicker.

This is an interesting premise, even if it is a bit eye-rolling that writers are constantly finding new deep dark secrets from Xavier's past to wring stories out of. In these issues at least, it gives Bendis a good excuse to get the leaders of the two X-Men factions in the same place at the same time (Wolverine shows up in this section as well), and to have them trade barbs and explore one another's hurt feelings in various ways. It's all very soap opera, but in a good way–The X-Men really excel at superhero soap opera that is melodramatic without being unreadable in a way that no other super-team does.

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One thing I didn't like? Dazzler, who has just gone through a pretty terrible trauma, taking to the bathroom, looking at herself in the mirror, then noticing a pair of scissors.

What's the best way to get over a trauma?

A trauma make-over!

She actually looks an awful lot like her Ultimate counterpart, here. The entire scene is a little cliche, and I feel uncomfortable with the implication that people who wear certain kinds of clothes or make certain kinds of fashion choices do so out of a desire to hurt themselves or to process incredibly painful memories and events. Why can't Dazzler just get a new hairstyle? Why did she have to spend weeks or months in a coma having her hormones harvested by addict mutants while a shape-shifting villain stole her identity to decide she'd rather be more emo than disco in 2014?

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Actually, there are two things I didn't like. This collection includes all the many variant covers, including an "animal variant" from the month when Marvel had various variants on all their books, depicting their heroes as animals. Giuseppe Camuncoli decided to draw them as...well, hell, sexy Furry fantasy characters, I guess...?

Man, comics are so fucking weird.