Review: Secret Avengers: Run the Mission, Don't Get Seen, Save the World

This book is one of the many books I fully intended to buy in trade form, that I saw when the component issues were being released serially and thought to myself, "I'm going to write that down on my To Buy list and get it when it's in trade," and then, as the months passed, my interest waned and I saw that I can read it for free from the library, and do I really need to own it? Wouldn't I be just as happy reading it once? And if it does turn out to be the sort of thing I want to read over and over again for the rest of my life, well, I suppose I can buy it at some point in the future (Or, actually, I guess I can keep borrowing it from the libraries).

I've found this happens an awful lot with Marvel trades, as so many of their comic books are so expensive I see little point in reading them serially, and it's always going to be easier to buy a new comic on a Wednesday afternoon when you see it there looking at you then six months later, when you have to remember and order it, you know?

Anyway, Run the Mission, Don't Get Seen, Save The World collects a nice, short, economical run on the title Secret Avengers—the espionage-oriented book of the ever-growing Avengers line, essentially taking the Ed Brubaker corner and established tone of the Marvel Universe and having Captain America Steve Rogers and hand-picked teams run missions, each of which is a done-in-one adventure, and each of which is drawn by a different artists, many of whom aren't artists one would expect to find on a monthly Avengers title.

The six issues are from 2011, and pair Ellis with Jamie McKelvie, Kev Walker, David Aja, Michael Lark and Stefano Gaudiano, Alex Maleev and Stuart Immonen and Wade Von Grawbadger. Each features the sort of high-concept, pseudo-science based on real science plotting that Ellis is known for, as well as generally clever plot construction and execution. Characterization is, for the most part, kept to a minimum, and most of the characters involved talk in brusque, professional and interchangeable dialogue, with notable exceptions being the X-Men's Beast, Hank McCoy, and the unstable, crazy Batman of the Marvel Universe, Moon Knight.

This was from a time in the ongoing Marvel Universe saga in which Steve Rogers had come back to life after his assassination via time bullets or whatever, and his former sidekick Bucky was still serving as the official Cap, while Rogers was wearing a mask-less costume, using an energy shield and going by either Commander Rogers or The Commander, having taken over the role of SHIELD Commander and Boss Of All Superheroes (this being from the period in which who held that role defined much of the Marvel Univere's ongoing story, as it changed hands from Maria Hill to Tony Stark to Norman Osborne to Rogers).

If there's an ongoing storyline here, it involves Rogers and his agents fighting The Shadow Council, I think it was, one of the many, basically interchangeable anti-SHIELDs of the Marvel Universe.

In the first issue, Rogers, Black Widow, Moon Knight and Beast infiltrate an abandoned secret city hidden underneath Cincinnati, only to find that it's been reoccupied and put to an awesomely ambitious and bizarre usage. This is probably the strongest of the issues, in part because of McKelvie's clean, smooth, expressive artwork (although his Beast is kind of lame, looking a little too much like a dude wearing a cat-mask; I don't think model sheets for Beast have existed at all in the 21st Century, given the fact that every artists draws him differently; in this volume alone, he looks like at least three different characters entirely), but in larger part because of the scale and stakes of the plot, and the amount of characterization and interaction Ellis manages to pack into this one. Only Rogers comes out as a basically blank slate.

McKelvie draws Commander Rogers' flechette gun, which shoots three little shields.

It also features some really goofy "flechette" guns that shoot non-lethal icon-shaped projectiles. Rogers' shoots out little Captain America badges, while Moon Knight's shoots out little crescent moons.

Next up, Rogers, Sharon Carter, War Machine and Valkyrie seek to solve the mystery of a villager-abducting ghost truck, featuring nice expressive art by Walker; then Rogers, Carter and Shang-Chi attempt to stop a version of Captain America's most visually-interesting foes from importing and weaponizing transmatter from a bad continuity (explained by Beast in flashback), as drawn by Aja, who does some rather magnificent, Escher-like lay-outs, in which the characters savagely battle in panels with no gravity or sense of up and down.

Lark and Gaudiano's Moon Knight, in his formal wear.

As for the second half of the book, Rogers, Carter, Black Widow and Moon Knight (wearing his mask with a white suit, for a nice formal variation of his costume) infiltrate a hotel where a drug dealer is selling powdered Lovecraft creature bones as a power-up drug (this is the Lark/Gaudiano ish; sadly, Lark only does breakdowns); there's an incredibly complicated story in which Black Widow must jump back in time to save her dead teammates without letting anyone know (drawn by Maleev, whose Beast looks like the Kelsey Grammer one from the third X-Men movie),

Maleev

and, finally, a pretty cool story in which Rogers, Carter, Widow, Valkyrie, War Machine, Moon Knight and Beast infiltrate and ultimately destroy a building with some terrible, world-ending secret creatures in the basement, the day being saved with some inspired uses of Marvel Universe techonology (including War Machine flying an elevator car with his rocket boots and Beast creating a fake, building-engulfing inferno to empty the building).

Immonen

That's the Immonen-penciled story, making this issue something of a Nextwave reunion and a perfect note for Ellis' short run to end on. I'd rather highly recommend this as a continuity-light introduction to Ellis at his work-for-hire best and/or a handful of some of Marvel's less-prominent super-characters and/or the work of a half-dozen creators or so who have bodies of work well worth tracking down if you like what you see of them here.

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In their annual re-examination of the year that was in Big Two super-comics and media tie-ins, Robot 6's DC Comics expert Tom Bondurant and Marvel Comics expert Carla Hoffman touched on Tom Brevoort's arguments that numbers don't matter when it comes to comics.

I beg to differ with Brevoort, personally. So I just read this book, right? Say I liked the whole Secret Avengers concept, and wanted to read more Secret Avengers comics. Where would I go from here? I plugged this title into Amazon, and found it listed both as Secret Avengers: Run the Mission... and as Secret Avengers Vol. 3: Run the Mission... (the "Premiere Edition" hardcover I got from the library didn't have a volume number attached, for whatever that's worth).

So then I just typed "Secret Avengers" in, and found three different Secret Avengers Vol. 1s, listed thusly:

Secret Avengers Vol. 1: Reverie (Marvel NOW)

Secret Avengers by Rick Remender Vol. 1

Secret Avengers Vol. 1: Mission to Mars

There seem to be three different Secret Avengers comic book series released in the course of the last few years—oh, and there's an unnumbered Fear Itself: Secret Avengers in there too, just to make things more confusing—each with their own volumes 1, 2 and/or 3. A comic shop with a knowledgeable seller of comics could no doubt help walk a curious reader through, but if I were looking to buy these online or borrow them from the library (and thus looking at an online library catalog), it would be fucking murder making sure I read them in the proper order, which is apparently something like Volumes 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, with Run The Mission... and Fear Itself somewhere amid all those repeating volume numbers.

Surely numbering the damn things 1-10 would be a lot easier.

Worse still is when they change the titles along with the numbers. Like, I'm enjoying Mark Waid's Indestructible Hulk, having just finished Indestructible Hulk Vol. 2. But I understand they're relaunching the Waid-written Hulk title with a new title, just plain Hulk, which means Waid's run will like include something like three or four numerically consecutive volumes of Indestructible Hulk, followed by Hulk Vol. 1...?

I still haven't finished the Hercules run by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente, because I started reading it in singles and wanted to switch to trades, but got lost as they kept changing the titles of the book they were writing and their Hercules was appearing in...

I suppose I might as well read Astonishing X-Men Vol. 5: Ghost Box

Having previously read the rest of Warren Ellis’ run on Astonishing X-Men (Astonishing X-Men Vol. 6: Exogenetic and Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis), I figured I might as well track down Astonishing X-Men Vol. 5: Ghost Box as well.

This was Ellis’ first arc on the series, following the four arcs/volumes by writer Joss Whedon and artist John Cassaday. For it, Ellis was teamed by Simone Bianchi.

Now, reading the series more or less backwards through the collections isn’t the way I’d recommend doing it, although each story arc is self-contained enough that it doesn’t matter overmuch. Reading them all now, and putting them in order in my memory, it’s clear Ellis was working through a series of big action plots stemming from the events of some of the mutant-centric events (House of M’s decimation of the homo superior species, the “Manifest Destiny”-branded move to the West Coast, first from San Francisco and then onto a little island apparently un-ironically called Utopia, etc). But, more importantly, while he was doing that, he had some broad characterizations of the main cast—the cast of Whedon and Cassaday’s run, minus Kitty Pryde and Colossus, plus Storm—and some ongoing conflicts that several of them would really wrestle with, including Cyclops’ struggle to be a Professor X-like leader during a time when a Magneto-like leader might be more successful, and Beast’s struggles to scientifically un-do what the Scarlet Witch magically did to mutants way back in House of M.

The plot in this storyline was a lot more complicated than those in some of the later volumes Ellis wrote, perhaps not necessarily in terms of a summary, but rather in terms of presentations.

That plot basically boils down to this: the mutant super-team stumbles upon a secret war between two factions of super-mutants that can’t possibly be of this universe (given what the smart mutant knows about science) and they must save the world from an overwhelming invasion force, discovering along the way that someone from their past is heavily involved.

But Ellis introduces it in a rather twisty and turny way, which makes the read surprising and engaging, at least when read in a trade collection. I imagine it just read boring when a reader had to way 30 day to 30 months between late installments.

When the San Francisco Police Department find an exceptionally exotic corpse, apparently killed in an exceptionally exotic manner, they call in the X-Men to consult, and they start following the clues, which takes them all around the world and fighting some mad-science monsters and invaders and encountering tons of Ellis-style super-science, while trading withering remarks with one another.

It’s essentially a perfect script for an X-comic.

I was exceptionally—or should I say X-ceptionally? Ha ha ha (NO. No I should not say that)—surprised by Bianchis’ artwork, which was, in terms of rendering, better-planned, better-thought-out and overall better drawn than much of what you might find on the super-comics shelves, more closely resembling a European album comic than Big Two artwork. Bianchi and Andrea Silvestri provide ink washes over the pencils, which no doubt adds to its painterly-like look, and Simone Peruzzi, Bianchi and three others all provide colors, although the three involved seem to be among Marvel’s better colorists.

Now, while Bianchi’s design and rendering skills are pretty incredible, I’m not sure I’ve completely made up my mind about the overall quality of his work after reading this one story. It’s not always clear what’s going on, and he makes extremely interesting choices, particularly in laying out his panels and depicting action (Near the climax, for example, the team splits into three sub-teams, and each fights a different threat; only the Wolverine/Armor fight scene is terrible legible, and that’s mostly because it simply involves a guy kneeing and stabbing another guy using his knife-fist, rather than gymnastics or lasers or super-powers).

But even if the flow of a page gets all-tangled up here or there, or if it’s impossible to understand why Bianchi chose to draw a page’s worth of action in the format he did, they are always interesting-looking pages to take in, consider and figure out.

I loved the way the characters looked, and I loved reading the art—even when I was trying to read it as much I was actually reading it, if that makes sense.

Let’s look at the images, shall we?

First, I wanted to draw special attention to Storm’s costuming:Bianchi does redesigns for all of the characters, some major and some extremely minor, and his Storm is perhaps the more radical one. As I mentioned of Phil Jimenez’s version of Storm in a letter volume of the series, it’s a combination of her original costume with her ‘90s embrace of the color white, but Bianchi adds a great deal of filigree, suggesting a sci-fi super-goddess and the Queen of a sort of African above-ground Atlantis like Wakanda.

The back of the book includes some design sketches, and I’ve just included The Storm one, as it offers the best view of the whole shebang. I should note that Bianchi’s drawing of it is the first time I ever understood what exactly that weird shape in Storm’s hair was really supposed to be.

I always thought it was some sort of huge goofy pick or headband, but now I see the strange shape is merely suspended around a ring that encircles the head, which makes more sense.

I was kind of alarmed by the first page of the book, which opened with a three-panel grid, the top one of which featured a panel approximating Armor’s Twitter account, and I worried that it would be a device that runs through the entire story. Luckily it didn’t, but those first few pages are awfully off-putting, no so much grids, as panels of various shapes stacked Tetrisly, even Dr. Mario-like on the white pages, with elements bleeding out of certain borders, and some black matting effects below certain panels.

The craziest thing about the page, however, in which we’re first introduced to Armor, Wolverine and Beast, is the Wolvie intro:I guess maybe I’m just not familiar enough with San Francisco to recognize what the hell is going on, but is Wolverine in the San Francisco Zoo or something? Or is there a place somewhere in which there’s a pagoda and some bison? And what’s up with that one laying on the ground? Is it dead? Do Buffalo sleep like that? Or did Wolverine kill it? Or just tip it, like rural teenagers might do to a cow?

(Help me, San Francisco-based comics retailer and writer-about-comics Brian Hibbs!)

As cool as it would be if Wolverine’s actual superhero costume was just a pair of black briefs, Bianchi’s redesign is actually a version of the yellow and blue scuba-diving suit with a cowl shaped like Wolverine’s hair-style.

The most noticeable modification is the holes for Wolverine’s ears, but what really struck me was the eyes:Sometimes Bianchi depicts them like Alex Ross draws Batman’s mask, as a sort of perfectly-fitted affair in which just enough material has been cut away to allow only the hero’s eye-balls and nothing else around them to be revealed.

Other times, it looks like maybe Wolvie has really wide eye-holes, and has simply painted the area around his eyes, although I can’t see any borders to suggest eye-holes.

So I don’t know exactly what’s up with Wolverine’s mask but, again, I like it despite being unclear about it. It’s a very expressive sort of depiction, in which the character is both wearing a mask and not wearing a mask at the same time, and Logan the person and Wolverine the superhero, the skin and the costume, the representation and the emotional content overlap.

One of the funnier parts of the book was probably unintentional. When the team gets the call to go consult on a crime scene, Cyclops announces “Street tactical gear,” and then we see them all dress like…this:Cyclops explains to Storm that the idea is to not have on superhero costumes, as cops associate costumes with vigilantes and, given the state of the Marvel Universe the last few years, people associate them with “government flunky or illegal combatant, which is one step away from being a flying terrorist.”

I don’t quite understand why their “street” clothes look so goddam garishly insane though. Only Wolverine seems to be dressed “normal.” Couldn’t they just wear, like, suits, or dress business casual? Why all the cargo pockets and vests and boots? Why does Emma Frost look like she’s wearing a white version of a Operation: Desert Storm uniform, with a choker, for some reason?

Let’s look at some of Bianchi’s interesting panel lay-outs, from two non-consecutive pages:Note the jumbled nature of the first page, and the apparently randomly shaped panels that it consists of.

I chose the bottom example because it's one of the many instances in the story where Bianchi embeds a panel within a figure. Here, there's a panel with Cyclops' face in it, within the borders of Cyclops hip. (If it weren't so late at night as I type this, I would pause for a few minutes to think how to set-up a "Cyclops is literally talking out of his own ass" joke at this point).

And here’s one of the previously mentioned unintelligible action scenes: It's probably even harder to make sense of out-of-context like this. It's Beast fighting a "chameleonic" mutant (And saying "RRAAAAHHRRR"). The bad guy is the thing that has the green netting all-over it, like an unfinished special effect from a few years ago. Beast apparently jumps into it and makes it explode somehow. Note all the little Beasts all over the page though. Generally, less-solid figures would show where the character was in the recent past, so the one saying "RRAAAAHHRRR" is the second most recent Beast, while the one kicking is the final or "present" Beast. The others are all older Beasts. I can't really follow the actions they are meant to depict though, not in any chronological, linear fashion. The lack of background sure doesn't help any, either.

I’d highly recommend the book if you like superhero comics, particularly ones featuring Marvel’s mutants. (Or if you have any curiosity about them; Ellis’ entire run seems to have a particularly low-threshold of X-knowledge and -appreciation necessary to enjoy, and to boast some fairly great artwork, the ugly coloring on Exogenetic aside).

After writing a few more paragraphs, doing a heck of a lot of scanning and looking more closely at all those pages, I’m still not sure how good Bianchi’s art is, but its definitely great, and fun to read and to look at.

Oh, it should also be noted that the collection features a few vignettes from a two-part miniseries Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Boxes that Marvel published, apparently to keep some AXM content on shelves during delays. They are written by Ellis, and are kinda sorta related to the main story, but I had trouble making heads-or-tails of them, as they move in and out of different alternate realities. Clayton Crain, Kaare Andrews, Adi Granov and Alan Davis and Mark Farmer draw the various scenes, and those are about as different as any four art teams assembled can be. They’re each good in their own ways, the Andrews and Davis/Farmer ones especially so, but they all clash violently off one another, and I found the story-like sequence they form confusing to the point that trying to read it was practically upsetting.

I guess it is fun to see what Davis does with Bianchi’s redesigned Storm costume though…

Recent Marvel Trades I Waited For (Pt. 3): Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis

Regular readers will know that I was really excited about this particular miniseries, as it paired the reliably good writer of pretty smart superhero comics Warren Ellis with the amazingly talented (but rather infrequent) drawer of comics Kaare Andrews, and Marvel’s solicitations of the cover images included a cover in which Andrews rather radically redesigns the characters (in relation to one another, at least; they still look like “themselves,” just exaggeratedly so) and another which is one of my favorite superhero images of all time(Like the image of Arsenal clutching a dead cat from Rise of Arsenal, Emma Frost eating pancakes on top of a crawling Scott Summers is something that I don’t seem to ever stop finidng amusing) and others that include a baby vomiting down the cut-away cleavage-revealing part of Emma’s costume and the X-Men apparently about to fight a bunch of babies.

I was not disappointed by the series itself, although I should again note that my enjoyment of it likely had a lot to do with being able to read it in a single sitting and for free, rather than paying for $4 for 20 pages of it every month or four (The schedule was rather erratic, with some severe delays, if I'm remembering correctly).

I imagine it must have sucked reading it serially. Ellis and Andrews pace it a little like a slightly more staid than usual shonen manga, with a lot of splash pages, characters posed atop stacks of panels, breaking out of the borders, and hardly any pages containing more than three or four panels.

The individual issues must therefore have read blindingly quick. The second issue, for example, opens with a one-page splash featuring a close-up of Cyclops’ face, as he says something tough. That’s followed immediately by a two-page splash of Cyclops eye-beaming a bunch of soldiers (the image reveals Cyclops in the middle-distance from behind, while a bunch of silhouettes fall down like bowling pins and the background turns red), and that’s followed immediately by another two-page splash, this one featuring all six of the X-Men rushing at the viewer in various about-to-fight poses, and then that is followed immediately by a one-page splash of four of them engaging in fisticuffs with the nameless soldiers, Storm and Armor delivering curt fight-chatter quips.

All together, that’s almost a 1/4 of the issue devoted to just four panels, and each of those moments is diminished by the poor pacing; if everything is a splash, nothing seems worthy of a splash.

Andrews’ art is great, but he does nothing with those four panels that he couldn’t have done better if each page had four of it’s own panels.

I liked Ellis’ plot for this one better than his plot for Exogenetic, as there seems to be a bit more going on, and a lot more of it more interesting than the series of fights in that storyline. Additionally, all of the six leads in the ensemble—Cyclops, Emma Frost, Wolverine, Armor, Beast and Storm—have something particular to do in the story and justify their presence in it (I mention this mainly as a contrast to Bendis’ Avengers arc that I wrote about earlier in this series of reviews, wherein the characters featured seemed to be there moreso because Bendis liked them then because they had anything to do with the story they were presumably starring in).

The mutant race remains on the ropes, on the brink of extinction after the weird-ass events of Houes of M, so the X-folks get pretty excited when they hear about a town in an African country where a bunch of mutant babies with strange and dangerous new powers have been born. Even though they can’t possibly be the same sort of homo superior mutants that make up the ranks of the X-gene mutants (as they are born with their powers, rather than developing them at puberty), they decide to check it out.

There they discover Joshua “Doctor Crocodile” N’Dingi, the leader of the country with the baby problem, who intends to execute all the babies. The source of their mutations is quite exotic, and one I’ve never seen in comics before (N’Dingi and origin story he tells may have occurred in previous Marvel mutant comics; I don’t know). Essentially it is a symptom of an act that brings about an even greater threat, and the X-Men have to thread the needle between various threats—one of which is potentially apocalyptic–in order to save the most people.

I was again quite impressed with both Ellis’ plotting and his dialogue and characterization. It was a smart, fun, funny, action-packed superhero comic, an a spefically X-Men one, in which the mutant heroes deal with the sorts of issues that are endemic to being mutant superheroes.

(And, once again, I was struck by how Ellis’ X-Men bear so much in common with Morrison’s, this time including shedding their superhero fight-suits in order to wear relief worker-like uniforms, so they look more like they are there to help and less like they are there to kick-ass. Well, everyone but Emma changes clothes; she gets to wear another version of her tight, white and revealing wardrobe of costumes, explaining, “Darling, if you were sleeping with the leader of the pack, you too could wear what you liked.”)

(Here’s a terrible scan of them disembarking, which also gets a two-page spread).As good as the writing is, however, what separates this from the pack (Actually, is “pack” even a big enough metaphor for X-Men comics in 2011? Should I have said “what separates this from the herd” instead….?) is Andrews’ incredible design work.

His Cyclops isn’t just tall, but built like an action star to boot. Storm is built like his female equivalent, only she’s even taller. Wolverine is short and squat. Emma tiny in comparison to her lover Cyclops, and even Wolvie, and she’s all curves and round shapes (not he forehead whenever she’s in profile). Armor is similarly small, and slim to the point of being gamine (Andrews draws her armor in extremely exaggerated fashion, so it looks like a red, glowing fetal mecha battle-suit). Beast is giant, and usually crouched so as to give him a sort of dome-like shape. Andrews has given Storm her mohawk back, presumably just because it looks cool, although her her hair remains long, somewhere between that of George Perez’s Starfire and that of Rapunzel’s; Emma also has head of hair that follows her like a comet trail.

Andrews’ art is colored by Frank D’Armata, just as Phil Jimenez’s was, and it bears many of the same weakness, including blurred backgrounds to simulate a movie camera focusing on the foreground, but D’Armata’s special effects are less oppressive here. He eschews attempts to blur characters to imply action, for example, perhaps because Andrews does so much with whipping hair and nearly horizontally positioning characters when they’re running or fighting that to blur them would be superfluous.

I suspect it has a lot to do with the lighter, brighter setting—most of the book takes place outside in bright, sunny daytime Africa—and Andrews’ characters taking up so much space and containing so many fewer lines than Jimenez’s more tightly-packed pages full of more realistic renderings. Just a guess though; maybe the editor was like, “Jesus man, tone it down next time, huh?” after seeing how “Exogenetic” turned out, or maybe he used up his allowance of special effects there.

Now let’s look at some of that awesome Andrews art, shall we?

Here's a panel from rather early in the first issue, in which the X-People hang out in the kitchen and discuss what Storm's husband The Black Panther told her about the mutant births, and whether or not it's X-Men business: Note how much Andrews is able to characterize the various characters and their roles in the ensemble by their postures in this panel. It's a pretty great scene and, though it's essentially an all-talk scene, it's really livened up by the nice touches like Beast perching like a gargoyle on the counter, or Armor and Emma's expressions.

There's another talky scene later in the same issue, wherein Wolverine and Emma talk about Africa on the jet plane ride over. Note the...well, you'll note immediately what's noteworthy about this page:I like how Andrews is able to not only design the panels around her boobs, but to do so with every single panel on the page, including the one where one of her breasts just sort of juts into a panel containing Wolverine's head.

I particularly like how Andrews is able to draw a page of repeated panels ogling Emma Frost, and to do so in such an extreme way that he seems to be simultaneously making fun of comic book artists ogling their female superheroine stars while engaging in it himself. And, of course, he gets away with it here because it's Emma Frost, who is often written as something of an outgoing, sensual, sexually-aggressive character constantly displaying herself (It's not just the costumes, of course; in this story she psychically gifts various medical personnel the ability to all speak the same language by making out with them. Later, when Scott asks her to do something with her psychic powers, he asks her to try doing it without licking anyone).

Finally, there's Armor's reaction to Emma presenting her breasts to Wolverine in that final panel.

The collection includes the script for the first issue, which allows us to consult it to see what Ellis specifically noted and what Andrews added to the scenes. This scene? The worlds are all Ellis, but everything else is all Andrews.

Here are a few images of Wolverine, who was dealt a bunch of mortal blows by the invincible enemies the X-Men must face in this story, but he doesn't die (obviously) due to his amazing healing factor. I love just how physically destroyed Andrews makes Wolverine look in these panels:In the top image he is literally holding his own spilled guts, while an enemy points a giant laser gun point blank at his head. In the bottom one, he's got big cartoon character-sized holes in him, as if someone took a hole-puncher to Daffy Duck or something. Only with, you know, more gore. How could he even use his right arm to stab someone's head (as he does in the inset panel) when his shoulder muscle is just plain...missing?

Oh, and before I end this fawning little "Kaare Andrews is awesome" gush, I suppose I should address the question of what on Earth happens in the issue containing this cover.Are you ready for this? Emma uses her powers to commandeer the brains of the enemy soldiers, Doctor Crocodile explains exactly what's up with the babies and how he gained the appearance that lead to his nickname, there's an argument over whether the babies should all be executed or not, and then an incredible threat appears.

And that's it. No pancakes. No playing horsey. Why does this image even exist?

Because Kaare Andrews is awesome. That is the only answer I can come up with.


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Hey, wait a minute...

Wait, make that two minutes...

Recent Marvel Trades I Waited For (Pt. 2): Astonishing X-Men Vol. 6: Exogenetic

After Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and a passel of talented artists reinvented Marvel’s moribund and morbidly obese X-Men franchise into something new and cool and fresh for the 21st century in 2001-2004's New X-Men, Marvel characteristically decided to order a full retreat from the new.

So the title "New X-Men" was repurposed for a book showcasing the youngest, newest teenage mutants (since New New Mutants just sounds silly), and the flagship book became the newly launched Astonishing X-Men. In the first issue of the new series, leader Cyclops formally announced to character and readers alike the game plan—The X-Men were going back to being superheroes.

To help keep complaints to a minimum, Marvel turned to fan-turned-Hollywood script-writer-turned-television superstar-turned-nerd celebrity-turned-budding comic book writer Joss Whedon (that was, in industry parlance, a major “get”) and Planetary artist John Cassaday.

The book was pretty good when it came out, but it never came out. I read and liked the first two story arcs, and then quit paying attention during one of the many-months stretches between issues.

To follow the Whedon/Cassaday team’s 24–issue run, Marvel tried hard to assemble another creative team who would keep the book off the shelves for long stretches of time, writer Warren Ellis (an ideal X-Men comics writer, and probably the writer Marvel should have tapped to follow Morrison, had they truly wanted to follow Morrison instead of pull a 180 of course correction) and Simone Bianchi, an extremely gifted designer and cover artist who was slow enough to match Cassaday’s pace.

I didn’t read their story arc—collected as Vol. 5: Ghost Box—either, as by that point I had sort of forgotten about the X-Men again, and all I had ever heard about that story was how evil Marvel was being in their pricing of it (Rather than charging $4 for 22 or 20 pages of story, I think there was an issue of “Ghost Boxes” with less than 20 pages, and a bunch of sketches or whatever to fill up the back...? Am I remembering correctly...?).

And what followed that?

Well, like I said, I had pretty much tuned the title and the characters out, and hadn’t given it a thought until Marvel started releasing images like these to promote the miniseries spin-off that Kaare Andrews would be illustrating:(These are among some of the best Marvel covers of the last 10 years, by the way).

And then the other day in the library I saw this, and realized what I had missed:Apparently they followed Bianchi up with Phil Jimenez, one of my own personal favorite artists (and, it’s worth noting, an artist who drew chunks of Morrison’s New X-Men run, and whose style meshed incredibly well with the then-mandate for a more realistic science fiction take on the concept).

Naturally, I brought it home from the library with me, read it, re-read it, and then decided to blog about it. Which brings us all up to speed, right?

This volume includes the story arc “Exogenetic,” which reads just like a lot of Ellis’ comics scripts do—like surprisingly finished storyboards for a blockbuster action movie. That is either a virtue or an extreme irritant, depending on how you encounter the story.

Read all at once in a single sitting, it’s a virtue, and the comic seems fast-paced, action packed, and built around set-pieces and one-liners, with just enough clever character work, funny jokes and a few interesting moral and/or scientific ideas that you feel smarter having experienced it, rather than dumber (as in the case of experiencing an actual Hollywood blockbuster action movie).

Read 20-pages at a time, with 30-to-90 days in between installments, and being charged $20 in a $4 per-installment payment plan, it’s an extreme irritant, and it continues to baffle me that there are enough people who enjoy that sort of experience that it makes sense for a big publisher to continue to make stories like that.

The opening set-piece involves Agent Brand of S.W.O.R.D. (the acronym-ed agency that works the alien beat in the Marvel Universe) on a fairly routine mission exterminating some old X-Men alien enemies, a mission that goes really wrong, and it’s up to the X-Men to save her and the city of San Francisco, which she is plummeting towards. And then a Sentinel (giant mutant-hunting robot, for the X-nostics in the reading audience) made entirely out of meat, which can shoot Brood aliens out of its finger tips (the Brood are basically just the Aliens from the Alien/s movies, but with eyes) attacks.

Increasingly gigantic threats of a similar nature continue to attack the Astonishing team, each a heavily modified and/or creepy and weird riff on a classic X-Men antagonist. The team follow the trail of apocalyptic threats back to their source, which is an unusual villain with a great M.O.

(And part of the reason I found it so great was that it was something I used to think and worry about when I was a teenager. My first exposure to Marvel’s merry mutants came about through that awesomely, hilariously shitty cartoon on Fox in the ‘90s, and it always bugged me that the mutants were so angsty about basically being normal people, only better-looking and with super-powers and they lived in a mansion with a holographic play room and jet planes and a bunch of other super-powered hotties; they seemed dealt an infinitely better hand than the only other mutant heroes I had much experience with, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who were so deformed they had to hide their very existence from the entire world, and lived in a fucking sewer.)

It might be selling it short to describe it as a series of action set-pieces climaxing with a classic to kill or not to kill superhero moral dilemma, but that’s what it is. It’s too Ellis’ credit that he writes the characters, their dialogue and their relationships so well that it’s difficult to notice that’s all the story really is; or, if not notice, than at least care.

Yes, I found myself thinking, okay, sure, this is just The Astonishing X-Men and Storm and Agent Brand getting in a bunch of big fights until Scott gets to think long and hard about maybe laser-blasting a bad guy to death instead of arresting him, but I don’t care, because I like hanging out with Ellis and Jimenez’s versions of these characters so much.We’ve seen Jimenez draw the X-Men before, but he’s an extremely good fit with Ellis’ version of them. Like Morrison, Ellis is a “realistic” writer of super-comics; while the latter started from the premise of mutants as a mainstreaming genetic minority treated as an ethnic and/or cultural minority, Ellis compromises Whedon’s mutants-as-superheroes and Morrison’s rescue/emergency forces and humanitarian (mutantarian?) concern takes, and he writes their dialogue with the sort of withering sarcasm born of lifelong friendships and explains the nutty super-science in a way that at least seems vaguely plausible, if not exactly something on the cusp of being reproduced in laboratories in the next 50 years (There’s a gigantic Sauron in this comics, which means not only does the reader have to accept a were-pterodactyl energy vampire, but a Godzilla-sized clone of a were-pterodactyl energy vampire).

Jimenez is incredibly gifted at rendering people, and his superheroes all have the benefit of looking like actual people in good shape and with generally cool costumes, rather than any sort of exaggerated cartoon (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course). He gets to draw a generous swathe of X-Men antagonists in the course of the story, generally altered in some way, so that Jimenez is both, say, drawing a Sentinel and drawing a new take on a Sentinel. Because of the realistic nature of his drawing style, even these horribly ridiculous villains and dangers borrow the feel of the main characters. Simply put, Jimenez draws a perfectly little super-comic world, in which all of the elements seem to belong and they all flow together rather than clashing against one another.

He does a pretty great job designing the characters and costumes, too. I really liked his Storm. Not only does she look like “herself” (regal, imposing and at least half-a-head taller than everyone else), but he gives her a new costume that is essentially just her original black costume, only in white, the color that she became more associated with post-‘90s.Jimenez does a swell job with Armor too. She looks like a teenager, she looks like a real person, and, when she’s wearing her energy armor, it has one look and she has another, and both are present at once; that is, even though she’s wearing an abstracted cartoon character made of red energy, she’s still herself inside it.I could imagine myself still reading X-Men comics regularly if Jimenez was drawing them instead of Greg Land or whoever.

That said, however, I suppose I should note that Jimenez’s pencils, finished and inked by his frequent collaborator Andy Lanning, are here colored by Frank D’Armata, who seems to be doing his level best to overpower the art with effects so as to make it look as awful as most of Marvel’s modern “house style” comics.

Between the blurring of lines to replicate the focusing of movie cameras or to simulate motion (a weakness of film being replicated in a medium that is itself immune to that weakness) and the glowing lights and flares, far too many of the panels are far too hard to read.

Do you need to wear glasses to read? If so, then a lot of these panels look like they would if you tried reading them without your glasses.

Do you not need to wear glasses to read? Hmm. Then I don’t really have a good metaphor. I guess they just look out of focus. And apparently Marvel wanted them to look out of focus. Because it looks more like a movie that way? I don’t know. Personally, I’d rather see speed lines in good old-fashioned ink, and lightning bolts and laser beams drawn by Jimenez and Lanning’s hands, rather than dropped in later from some computer program so that it looks like Storm bought her super-powers at Spencer Gifts at the mall and that Cyclops' eye-beams have the power to obliterate images.

But I am an old man of 34. I don’t know what the kids like today. Based on my reading of this and too much Marvel output, I would have to assume what the kids like today are murky, sickly shadows, lens flares and blurry backgrounds.

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

Next up: Ellis and Kaare Andrews’ Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis! Yes, Ellis wrote one story called “Exogenetic” and then later wrote one called “Xenogenesis.” He apparently made a bet with his editor that he would use only the first 12 Scrabble tiles he pulled out of the bag to title all his stories.

That is the trade that contains the comic with this cover:So we’ll finally learn what the hell happened inside that issue to justify that cover. I can’t wait! Can you? Well, you have to!

Review: Batman: Monsters

I puzzled over seeing Batman: Monsters (DC Comics) on a recent Diamond shipping list a lot longer than I should have.

It’s a collection of three short story arcs from the Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight title, consisting of seven issues all together. They’re by three different writers, two of them at least being “name” ones able to move some paperbacks by their bylines alone.

I wasn’t quite sure why these stories, though, and why these stories now. Even the binding theme of “monsters”—how is it that that’s never been used fort he subtitle of a Batman trade paperback before?—was a little shaky. One story involves a pretend werewolf, another genetically engineered soldiers, the third supervillain Clayface.

It seemed if one wanted to put together a bunch of Batman fights monsters stories—even if one were limited to issues of LDK—one could find ones that fit better into a “monster” theme. And if one wanted to simply put together short Batman stories written by James Robinson or Warren Ellis, well, there’s certainly enough material floating around that a Batman by Warren Ellis or Batman by James Robinson would be do-able.

But, like I said, I was over-puzzling over the matter. Monsters is essentially just another serviceable, evergreen Batman trade, something of a random sampling of short arcs from LDK, almost the entirety of which could be plundered to put together loosely thematic trades like this.

The first story is “Werewolf,” a three-issue arc by James Robinson and John Watkiss. The title is something of a red herring (Sorry if I’m spoiling the story at all; it is 14 years old though), although it pretty directly frames the leading suspect in a group of vicious murders in both Gotham City and London—a werewolf.

The truth is insanely complicated—animatronics and hallucinogenic gas are involved—and the mystery elements are even more convoluted, but for the most part it’s a rather fun read, and Robinson does a decent job with it (And compared to his more recent superhero work, “Werewolf” might as well be Watchmen).

The appealing elements of LDK included the fact that its Batman was more realistic, that he was divorced from the greater DC Universe and much of his own continuity, and that he was younger, weaker, more fallible and more human. All of that is in evidence here, as Batman journeys to London to get to the bottom of the werewolf killings, and finds himself contending with the cops and robbers of that country.

Watkiss’ art is dynamite, featuring big, thick lines that look like brush strokes, and a tall, slim Batman with highly expressive eyes (despite their lack of pupils). Watkiss’ werewolf design in particular is a great one; it’s gigantic, almost twice as tall as Batman, and bearing paws that could wrap around our hero’s waist. The face isn’t even all that lupine—it’s basically just a huge smile full of teeth.

One year and ten issues later came “Infected,” a two-part story written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Hitman artist John McCrea.

The results of a top secret military experiment to breed perfect soldiers have escaped into Gotham City, and since they’re pre-programmed with war games that make them bug-fuck insane, they essentially go on a killing spree. Batman stops them.

It’s a rather Warren Ellis-y story. There’s some neat super-science ideas in it regarding the specifics of the super-soldiers—gross-looking, organs-on-the-outside, H.R.Giger-y guys who can fire bullets made out of their own bones from guns built right into their wrists—and the exploration of those ideas seem to dominate Ellis’ attention.

The climax contains two events that should have been pretty big deals for Batman—he uses a gun on his opponent, and he takes his opponents life—but neither gets much more than a passing acknowledgement in the narration that Batman would rather not have to use a gun, and that the dude he ices was essentially dead already (For a guy who hates guns and only reluctantly picks this one up, Batman sure is a crack shot).

McCrea’s one of my favorite superhero comics artists, although I’m not sure he’s the best fit for Ellis. Even when operating in a more serious vein as he does here—McCrea tends to modulate the cartooniness of his art from story to story and sometimes even character to character—there’s a fun sense of exaggerated reality to his designs that make his Batman, with his Simon Bisley profile and long cape with curling scallops, if not quite out of place in the story, then not perfectly at home either. (Sorry, that’s a really long, shitty sentence. But what are you gonna do? It’s free, right?).

The final story is the one that sticks closest to LDK’s original mandate of telling untold tales of Batman’s past (or re-telling previously told ones for post-Crisis continuity). This is the story of Batman’s first encounter with Clayface II, the shape-shifting Matthew Hagen Clayface rather than the Golden Age Clayface, and it happens awfully early in Batman’s career.

In fact, Batman says it’s only the third week of his mission, but he’s already tangling with his second Clayface? That struck me odd mainly because the story is written by Alan Grant, who wrote the “Mud Pack” storyline (which really oughta be in trade, DC) and pretty much every Clayface appearance up until the end of the nineties (after which point DC and its writers wouldn’t even bother distinguishing between the various Clayfaces, but just assume the only one was the one from the cartoon).

Grant probably wrote more Batman stories than anyone else in the ‘90s, although I was still sort of surprised to see him here, as his name isn’t quite the draw that Ellis’ or even Robinson’s is at the moment. His story is probably the best one in the book however, as it’s the only one that pretends to be concerned about anything other than the Batman + Badguys = Conflict formula that drives the earlier stories.

This 1997 two-parter was called “Clay,” and while Hagen is the villain, Batman’s main conflict is his reaction to his first encounter with this Clayface.

Batman takes a severe beating, and witnesses Clayface smashing a man’s head between his powerful hands. The image shocked the young Batman, and he can’t get it out of his mind. He spends the rest of the story in a mild state of shock over the gruesome image, and struggles with thoughts of his own mortality throughout.

Okay it’s still not Shakespeare, but Grant’s focused on telling a story about Batman’s inner life as well as his running around getting in fights, so there’s something to that. It’s nice to see shocking violence treated as shocking violence—that’s mature, sophisticated storytelling, rather than violence for violence’s sake (Reading the two-panel sequence, in which we see an image of Clayface’s hands squeezing his victims head in one panel, and the next cuts away to Batman reacting as he’s splattered with bits of gore from off-panel, and a big red “SPLORCH!” tells us what happened, I realized that today we almost certainly would have seen the head being popped on-panel).

Grant is working with Quique Alcatena, an artist whose extremely detailed artwork was so often the very best part of the Batman stories he was drawing in and around that time. His Batman is “first appearance” style Batman, with big, thick bat ears pointed at angles away from the cowl, rather than sticking straight up.

Alcatena is a perfect horror artist, and he draws the story like a horror story. We see every drop of clay on the oozing, undulating surface of the villain, who has a thick, stocky build and ponderous way of moving that suggest a man in an elaborate costume from an old black and white horror movies.

Alcatena gives Batman’s face a shell-shocked, worried look, and Hagen’s a slightly crazed one. He draws every brick in the walls of the underground settings, and every hair on the bats that fly through the Batcave. And when Grant gives him a fever dream of Batman’s about death and violence to cut loose on? Well, I wish I had a scanner to show you.

That’s three stories ranging from pretty good to pretty great scripts, with art that ranges from great to Holy shit, look at how awesome this panel is!, so I guess this collection’s existence isn’t really all that puzzling after all.

August 2nd's Meanwhile in Las Vegas...

This week's Las Vegas Weekly comics column features reviews of





and