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.

I’m going to talk at length about Doomwar, a Marvel comic most of you probably didn’t even read.

In 2010, Marvel published a six-issue series by writer Jonathan Maberry, a prose writer turned comics-writer, and pencil artist Scott Eaton entitled Doomwar, dealing with the Black Panther characters’ international conflict with Doctor Doom. The premise was laid out in the title and cover images, and the hook apparent and appealing—the supervillain king of a fictional Marvel kingdom versus the superhero king of another fictional Marvel kingdom.

At the time, Marvel was switching tack after a great deal of sales frustration in keeping the 2005-launched, Reginald Hudlin-written volume of Black Panther going. The previous year, Marvel tried relaunching the book with a new #1 issue and a new, female character in the title role (T’Challa’s little sister Shuri), but that lasted twelve issues, ending with an arc entitled “Prelude to Doomwar.” Doomwar was essentially just the next arc of the now-canceled Black Panther, but given it’s own title and lots of guest-stars to position it as an event. (Marvel, incidentially, is still casting about for a way to make a Black Panther comic stick; Doomwar was then followed by another miniseries, Klaws of The Panther, and then T’Challa took over the numbering, sub-title and setting of Daredevil in a perplexing publishing move).

I’m probably part of the reason Black Panther’s sales flagged so. T’challa The Black Panther is a great comics character, and one I always want to like. In 2005, Marvel made it easy to do so by assigning the book to a famous-outside-of-comics writer (when that wasn’t quite as commonplace as it was today) able to generate mainstream interest and by assigning John Romita Jr., the publisher’s very best artist, to the book.

Sadly Romita only stuck around for the first story arc, so although Hudlin proved to be a much stronger writer than many form outside of comics (and much more dedicated to the character, title and a schedule than most of his peers with similar entries into comics), the book’s visuals were inconsistent. I stuck with it through the first thirtysome issues, and dropped it around the time Secret Invasion began. Doomwar was the first thing to really pique my interest again, due to its premise and the Romita art on the cool-looking covers, but by that time Marvel had chased me away from reading their line in a serial format with their price increases (I’m not currently reading any Marvel ongoing series, although I think I’m going to try the upcoming Daredevil and Captain America and Bucky comics as serials).

So I picked up the trade of Doomwar. I found at least one aspect of Maberry’s plot and scripting to be rather weak, enough so that it distracted me from the story, but otherwise fine for what it was—a big, huge fight comic with a whole bunch of power-players. Eaton’s art was decent, with only a few really poor sequences, although it was all over-colored in the way the vast majority of Marvel’s comics are these days.

None of the images inside are as powerful as the one’s on the covers though.

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When I got to the climax of the story, I remembered reading a post on 4thletter.net that was pretty critical of that climax, so shortly after finishing the story I went to look for it and reread it now that I knew the context.

It was written by David Brothers, and entitled “Superhero Comics Still For Children, Also Unbelievably Stupid”. You can (and should) read the text in full here.

In essence, Brothers’ complaint is that the two Black Panthers, T’Challa and Shuri, the rules or Wakanda, don’t kill Doctor Doom at the end of the story when they have him at their mercy, Shuri lets him off with a warning/threat, that if he ever does anything like this again, she will kill him.

Brothers:

Doctor Doom invaded Wakanda (a sovereign nation), held its queen hostage, murdered a whole gang of its inhabitants whenever he liked, staged a coup, and generally acted exactly like a James Bond villain, complete with a plan with poorly defined goals and acts of villainy for the evil of it.

If someone breaks into your house and starts murdering your family while cackling about how you are lazy and terrible and threatening your wife like he’s Snidely Whiplash? You don’t let him off with a warning. You leave his brains on the wall and sleep the sleep of the just. That is the only appropriate response. You kill him, and you kill him because he needs to be dead. Some things are beyond the pale, and what Doom did? That’s worthy of death. Past a certain level, your position on the death penalty and violence become irrelevant. And I know, blah blah blah, protect trademarks, blah blah can’t kill Doom, blah blah comic books, blah blah diplomatic immunity, but to that I say “blah blah crap.”

While Brothers clearly understands (and underlines his understanding) that Doctor Doom can never really be killed off because he’s a corporate owned intellectual property, a money making machine than can be massaged and calibrated to be more or less successful in different media and circumstances, but always needs to be around, he also has problems suspending his disbelief that a character—even a superhero character—wouldn’t kill a foe under these circumstances.

“If you’re going to wear Big Boy Pants and write comics with Big Boy Stakes, maybe you should be willing to make some Big Boy Decisions and not completely neuter your heroes at the end of the story,” Brothers notes, writing that every time he sees some variation of the hero sparing a villain who horribly wronged him or society and making a speech about why he or she isn’t going to pull the trigger, it reminds him “that superhero comics used to be aimed at children and still haven’t grown up yet.”

I disagree.

Personally—and this is all just purely personal at this level—I’m uncomfortable reading about superheroes who kill. Particularly heroes who have always shown an unwillingness to do so (like Wonder Woman, for example). I don’t like seeing heroes torture, hurt animals or perform lobotomies on their foes either.

Not only is there not necessarily anything heroic about any of the above, but it also creates creative dead ends for many characters whose main appeal is the serial, endless nature of their adventures and the never-completely exhausted potential those IPs have; and it also leads to bleak, unappealing stories that ask the reader to consider troubling questions that the texts suggests immoral, wrong-headed answers to; and it also leads to a lot of bad stories; and, most importantly, it also put the reader in the same corner that Doomwar apparently put Brothers in—suggesting a character has to die for the sake of the story, and that not killing him due to artificial reasons not evident in the text (More on this last reason in a bit).

I suppose a lot of my personal preference for whether heroes should ever kill or not comes from my own personal beliefs—I’m against the death penalty, I don’t think violence is a good answer to most problems and although I understand there are circumstances and reasons under which human beings sometimes end up having to kill one another, I feel in an ideal world they never would. Certainly, a paragon of human virtue, someone better than me, like, say, a superhero, shouldn’t ever have to take a life.

I think the fact that Batman never kills anyone, not even a mass-murderer and terrorist like The Joker with thousands of deaths to his name, is more admirable than a The Punisher, who always kills his villains…and always a hell of a lot more believable. (Which isn’t to say there are no good Punisher comics; it’s just that the Punisher is the villain in them all).

The thing about ends-justifying-the-means superhero comics, of course, is that the ends are always a foregone conclusion. Is it realistic that a hero like Batman wouldn’t kill The Joker? (Which may be a bad example, if you go with the reading that Batman’s too insane to ever actually kill anyone; him killing would be like someone with a certain type of obsessive compulsive disorder not touching a certain door knob so many times a day). Maybe, maybe not. But why would a writer put him in that position anyway, without a good answer? And a good writer should have a good answer. If a writer can’t think their way around something like why Batman doesn’t just kill all his foes all the time, and sell it to their readers, then they probably shouldn’t be writing Batman comics.

I suspect that is, in large part, what bugged Brothers so much about that scene. Maberry didn’t do a good enough job of explaining why Shuri and T’Challa didn’t kill Doom there. Or, as Brothers put it, Maberry was writing a story about the deadly consequences of war, but at the resolution just walked away from the natural ending to the story he had written.

To review, if you haven’t read it, here’s what Doctor Doom did to The Panthers and their nation Wakanda. Off-panel (or perhaps in previous issues of Black Panther, like those with the words “Prelude to Doomwar” printed across the top) Doom funded an opposition movement within Wakanda, one that eventually grew so large and influential that it deposed the royal family, banished hero/rulers T’Challa and Suki, and arrested Queen Storm for witchcraft, with the intent of executing her for the crime (This is a trifling point, but I find it amusing that anywhere in the civilized world would still believe in witchcraft and think it some sort of evil at this point in time in the Marvel Universe; clearly Storm flies and controls the weather, a relatively minor set of powers compared to many in the world, and yet their assumption is she’s also a witch, and not just a mutant…?).

From the outside—i.e. to everyone except T’Challa, Shuri and the reader—this looks like a natural turn of events in Wakandan politics, and not the work of a single supervillain who, remember, is also the ruler of a sovereign nation of his own (So maybe this would be like Kim Jong Il funding a Third Party in the U.S., and that party banishing Barack Obama and putting Michelle Obama on trial for witchcraft…?). Doom does this because he’s trying to steal Wakanda’s natural resource Maguffinanium—I mean, vibranium—which is kept in a particular vault.

It’s a valuable metal with practically magical properties, which Doom has discovered had actual magical properties. (So, Kim Jong Il is breaking into the secret super-uranium vault below the White House, because he and he alone knows how to turn super-uranium into super-duper-uranium).

He’s trying to coerce Storm into opening the vault for him, but shooting citizens in the head to motivate her. At one point, he tries to murder T’Challa and Shuri’s mother, but their uncle takes the bullet instead.

To rescue Storm, the Panthers and their allies must wage war against the faction of Doom-funded Wakandans; soldiers on both sides die.

When Doom acquires the vibranium, the Panthers begin waging war on his many hidden, international factories, many more of their Wakandan allies dying in the conflict (Doom uses robots, so no soldiers on his side really “die”). At that point, Wakdanda and Latveria are essentially at undeclared war, although it’s basically just the rulers of the two countries fighting—plus the handful of soldiers in the Panther’s inner circle.

At the book’s climax, Doom has built a new suit of invincible armor out of the magically-enhanced vibranium; he’s also gained the ability to control every particle of vibranium on earth, and thus he controls all the metal in the entire world, making him one of the most powerful beings that ever lived. The Panthers challenge him to fight on his own border, and T’Challa has to play the only card he has to stop Doom and save the world—he can eradicate all of the vibranium at once with the push of a button on some device he and Reed Richards built.

He does so. The world is saved. Doom’s armor shuts down, and he falls immobile to his knees. That’s when Shuri makes her speech about not killing Doom, the one that Brothers posted in his post on the issue.

As I said, I don’t object to the characters not killing Doom, which I would have found a dramatically unsatisfying ending, given the fluidity of death in the Marvel Universe (Doom has died and gone to hell repeatedly only to return to life later; in fact, the last issue of a Marvel comic I saw Doom appear in featured scenes of Doom waltzing in and out of hell).

Maybe Maberry didn’t sell the Panthers’ decision not to kill him very well though.

Shuri especially shows no compunctions about killing throughout the story. Her first act of war in retaking Wakanda is to have Nightcrawler teleport her to the room with the leader of the usurpers, where she promptly snaps the guy’s neck (he is, of course, a Wakandan citizen; is this good or bad? It is war…) During the fight, Shuri and her allies kill a lot of Wakandans, and at one point both Nightcrawler and Wolverine warn her about killing too wantonly or getting too used to it.

Later, she spends the lives of her soldiers at such a rate that T’Challa and others are concerned that she’s throwing too many lives away.

Her decision not to kill Doom could then be seen as her learning a lesson, about ultimately deciding not to become a cold-hearted killing machine. I suspect that was what Maberry was going for, but it’s a sudden U-turn, and not foreshadowed or explained clearly at all.

T’Challa’s not the one who talks her out of it, either. In fact, his decision to not kill Doom seems even stranger. He doesn’t seem as willing or eager to kill or spend lives as his sister, but he does hire a mercenary assassin (Deadpool) and send an elite squad of assassins to infiltrate Doom’s capital city and kill him. They fail obviously, but it does seem strange for T’Challa to attempt to kill Doom in one issue, and not kill him in the next when the opportunity presents itself.

Again, this may have been T’Challa having a change of heart—or maybe he knew Deadpool would fail and was only using him to distract Doom–but Maberry doesn’t include anything in the text to justify these readings. I’m just making guesses.

There were, of course, two very easy solutions for having The Panthers sparing Doom, even if they wanted to kill him.

First, they had Doom at their mercy in the presence of the Fantastic Four, none of whom would have allowed them to execute a defenseless Doom (A panel or two of Invisible Woman putting a shield around Doom and saying she can’t allow them to kill Doom like this would have sufficed.)

Second, this entire war was off the books. It wasn’t between Wakanda and Latveria, but between The Panthers and Doom. Both of them broke a mess of international law, and if they summarily executed Doom on the spot, it would have looked bad for Wakanda in the long run. It’s easy to imagine that, from the perspective of someone watching all this on the news, that it looked like the Wakandan royal family attacked Doom without provocation and killed him in or next to his own country.

Maberry didn’t choose either route though, so it does look like a more or less random decision by the Panthers.

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I suppose one could compare Black Panther versus Doctor Doom to Barack Obama versus Osama bin Laden in light of recent events. I’m not gonna get into that.

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The aspect of the story that I found more distracting, that I had trouble suspending my disbelief over, was how generally unconcerned the rest of the superheroes of the Marvel Universe seemed to be in the threat of Storm’s execution and the prospect of an invincible Doctor Doom.

Now, reading universe superhero comics often requires the reader to accept a certain amount of illogic in the proceedings. There’s no real reason why Superman and The Flash couldn’t stop all of the super-crime, maybe even all the normal crime too, in the DC Universe all by themselves, but if the a villain in an issue of, say, Green Arrow or Batman is threatening a city or a country or the world with destruction, we don’t generally expect to see Superman fly in to save the day, even though a practically omniscient, practically omnipresent and practically omnipotent guy wholly devoted the preservation of human life should probably show up for any and all such events.

Maberry opens the door for the whole Marvel Universe to get involved, however, by showing Black Panther seeking allies and getting some assistance from some characters, raising questions for why so-and-so showed up, but not so-and-so.

Storm’s trial and death penalty verdict are announced on national television before the Bad Wakandans shut down the media. The X-Men make no move to rescue their friend and ally though. Even when T’Challa flies to their island and asks them for help, Cyclops says he can’t officially involve his team—which, at this point in Marvel history, is kinda sorta their own sovereign nation on an island off the West Coast of the United States—but that he can’t stop X-Men from volunteering either.

That explains why Cyclops and Emma Frost, and perhaps why all 150 X-people, don’t storm Wakanda, but it doesn’t explain why, of all the X-Men, Wolverine, Nightcrawler and Colossus are the only ones who volunteer. (From Maberry’s perspective, it’s clear Wolverine is there because he’s popular and his image on the cover might sell some books; Nightcrawler is there to provide transportation; Colossus is there for…no real reason, which makes it strange that more X-Men don’t come along to pose in backgrounds).

With those three in tow, T’Challa races back to try and overthrow his own country. He doesn’t approach his long-time allies in The Avengers or the Fantastic Four? He doesn’t call up Luke Cage or Monica Rambeau or any of those guys who were like, “Man, you should totally start a Black Avengers” heroes? The X-Men don’t loan him Namor, Doctor Doom’s greatest frenemy?

Once they’ve rescued Storm and retake Wakanda, The Fantastic Four do get involved (at which point, the three X-Men go home). During this phase of the conflict, Shuri, the FF and the Wakandan forces raid some dozen or so Doombot factories and fight a war of attrition, trying to find the right factory containing Doom and the stolen vibranium before he’s able to magically super-weaponize it. Again, no Avengers or anyone get involved.

I think that this may have been during the “Dark Reign” period, in which Norman Osborn controlled SHIELD, the Avengers initiative and his own team of Avengers, and its possible he was deliberately keeping all his forces out of it (that, or politics, since all of the above are U.S. sanctioned at that point), but it doesn’t explain the absence of the “New” Avengers, Thor, Iron Man and the like.

When Reed Richards thinks things are getting out of hand and he and T’Challa will need more help, he makes a call to…War Machine. Not Iron Man (the Bush to Reed’s Cheney in Civil War) or Luke Cage or a Captain America or Cyclops or Namor, someone with their own force of heroes or soldiers to turn the tide of a war-like conflict, but just this one guy in an Iron Man suit. This one guy who’s not Iron Man! (I don’t know if Iron Man is more powerful than War Machine or not, but the former has a bigger leadership role in the Marvel Universe, and is a super scientist along the lines of Reed, T’Challa and Doom, and thus would presumably be of more use than War Machine).

At the end of the story, when Doom controls all metal on Earth, T’Challa does reach out to The Avengers and X-Men and so on, but at that point they’re too busy fighting metal shenangigans in their own backyards.

Again, it wouldn’t have taken more than a few panels or lines of dialogue here and there to explain why so few X-Men give a damn about Storm, or where FF was at one point, or why no one else is trying to prevent Doctor Doom from gaining omnipotence, but Maberry didn’t use those panels or lines at the right times, at least not to my reading.

That bugged me more than Shuri not killing Doom, although I can see why it bugged Brothers (I’m not sure if I would have seen that scene as a real weakness if I hadn’t seen someone else raise the point, though).

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

I did enjoy Doomwar for the most part though, and would recommend it to fans of Marvel superhero punch-‘em-ups.

I still owe you guys a Friday night post, huh?

Sorry about that. Here's um...

Let's see...

What have I got laying around here...

Ah,here.

Here are some dumb pages from my sketchbook.

At one point in the distant past, around the time Marvel announced Mighty Avengers I think, I thought it would be ever so amusing to think up additional Avengers teams and post a different one each day for a week or so.

I was going to do a Diabolic Avengers, which would have had Daredevil, Devil Dinosaur, Son of Satan and so on, and a Sean McKeever-written Characters Avengers that would have had the kid and robot from Sentinel, Gravity, Mary Jane and so on.

At some point I must have realized that it would be way too much work to be worthwhile, and/or I got distracted by a shiny object in the next room, and that's about as far as I got with that idea.

Well, I did start messing around with some sketches of a Feline Avengers team. Here, let me show you!

Here's the second and third pages full of Black Panther...
(and there's Captain Americat in the corner).

Here's Tigra, who was going to be off to the side in the group shot, talking to Tony Stark on her cell phone a la Civil War...
(That's part of a picture of El Gato, the villainous sorcerer form a single issue of Omega The Unknown, in the corner).

And this is about as far as I got with Sabretooth. I was going to go with the look he had in Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, which is much less dumb than his original Marvel Universe look...

Black Cat and Patsy Walker, Hellcat were going to make up the rest of the team.

Who is the new Black Panther? And who cares who she is?

If you read any Marvel comics in the singles format, you've probably seen ads like this:


There's at least one other one as well, asking, "Is Echo The New Black Panther?" and featuring the head of the minor Daredevil character who was in a few issues of New Avengers cut and pasted on top of the female BP figure there.

See, when Black Panther gets relaunched next month—during Black History month, naturally—he will be a she. At least for a while. There's nothing really all that unusual, or even noteworthy, about a superhero being temporarily replaced by another secret identity.

In fact, it happens to just about every hero at one point or another. In some cases, like Batman or Captain America, it seems to happen on some sort of cycle. Heck, this isn't even the first time someone other than T'Challa took up the Black Panther mantle.

What I find interesting about this particular ad campaign, however, is just how random it is.

"Is Echo the new Black Panther?"

Who? Oh, the woman who wore a padded man-suit to be Ronin for a while. No, of course not. Why would she be.

"Is Sue Storm the new Black Panther?"

Sue? No, of course not. Why would she be? She's not even in Marvel continuity until Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch finish their Fantastic Four run, is she?

"Is Monica Rambeau the new Black Panther?"

No. Jesus; are you pulling these names out of a hat?

It's probably unfair of me to say that no one cares simply because I don't care, but I honestly haven't heard anyone outside of these ads discussing who the new lady Black Panther could possibly be. Perhaps I just don't know anyone who reads Black Panther anymore, or read any bloggers who are excited about the next volume of the title, or don't hang around the right message boards anymore (although I do spend significant amounts of each day at Newsarama).

I haven't read Black Panther in a while, although I thought writer Reginald Hudlin turned out some really great scripts during the time I was reading it—the first story arc with John Romita Jr. art, the surprisingly readable "House of M" tie-in, the whole "Black Avengers" arc—but lost interest somewhere around the FF tie-ins, thanks to a combination of ever changing artists and the casual approach to continuity (i.e. the refusal to acknowledge its existence).

But as far back as then—last summer, according to the Grand Comic Book Database—Hudlin was writing scenes in which T'Challa's little sister was questioning her big brother's leadership ability, and her friends were urging her to usurp his throne/position. So every time I see one of these ads, after my first confusion as to why they exist at all or why they're choosing the names and heads they're choosing, I think of T'Challa's sister.

I suppose Marvel could throw a real curve ball and have it be B.P.'s wife Storm, but it strikes me as a really odd and ineffective campaign to drum up interest for a title and a storyline where that no one's much interested.

But of course I don't actually know anything about marketing. For all I know, each of these ads will end up being a different variant cover for Black Panther #1 and it will sell 115,000 units in the direct market.