Two not-really-reviews: The Punisher Vol. 1 and New Avengers Vol. 1: Everything Dies

I borrowed these two collections from my library a few months ago, and read them both, with the intention of sitting down to review them at some point. In both cases, I kept putting doing so off—not out of a reluctance to write about them or out of procrastination, but simply because it seemed like I always had something else more timely or more pressing to write about, and thus they kept getting pumped further down the old review pile.

In the case of the Punisher book, I did pick it up and sit before my laptop with plans to review here on my blog one weekend afternoon, but then realized that despite having read it only a month or so before that, I had completely forgotten just about everything in it it (The Punisher grew a beard, I think? And there was a lady in it?).

So instead of writing about it that afternoon, I re-read it instead. And then, a few weeks later, I had once again forgotten just about everything that occurred within the story.

At that point, I just gave up and returned the book to the library. I figured if I could read the same graphic novel twice in the course of a summer and remember so little about it's plot, characters or overall quality, well, that fact was a sort of review in and of itself, wasn't it?

Here's all I remember thinking about the book:

1.) I was conflicted about the beard. On the one hand, Frank Castle has that whole military thing going on, so he seems like he might be the kind of guy who shaves every single day, and he even still makes his bed really well.  On the other hand, as a guy who only cares about killing criminals, maybe a beard would be a nice visual signifier that he puts criminal-killing above all else in his life, even personal grooming. Maybe he should have a gigantic beard like one of those guys in that duck show, long, crazy hair with twigs in it, and maybe some flies buzzing around his head that he never takes time to bathe, because he's just too busy killing bad guys.

2.) I think he wore a goofy Punisher shirt that looks like he bought it from a comic shop's clothing rack; like, it had a white skull/Punisher logo with a sorta wash effect on it, rather than wearing, like his superhero costume (In that respect, it reminded me of the Punisher shirt worn in the second of the three terrible Punisher movies). This seemed like a misguided attempt to make the character slightly more realistic, which is just silly; a Vietnam Vet who has killed 45,000 gangsters or so in a city full of superheroes makes The Punisher maybe the least realistic Marvel character of all. Dude's far below Man-Thing and Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer on my list of Marvel characters that could maybe possibly exist in the real world somehow someday. (Looking at the cover above though, maybe it was the Rucka Woman who apprentices with The Punisher who wore the lame Punisher merch shirt? Hey, I said I could barely remember the book!)

3.) Writer Greg Rucka put that same character he writes into every comic he writes in the book: The extremely competent, extremely tough woman haunted by personal demons and blessed with model good looks. I guess it's cool that Rucka is single-handedly trying to introduce as many "strong female characters" into comics as possible, but it's weird he keeps introducing the same one over and over, only varying her hair color and name.

4.) The Punisher fights The Vulture at some point, and The Vulture is not the old bald guy in green, but a young man with a full head of hair who wears red. All I really remember about this encounter is that I really hate hate hated Brian Hitch's cover for the issue that had the Vulture/Punisher fight in it.

Look at Hitch's Vulture:

He's just, like, a guy. In a red track suit. With some streamers on his jacket. And these streamers allow him to fly, I guess...? Or maybe he has superpowers, and the streamers are just for show? What a dumb cover image.

But it was just Hitch's version of the Vulture. The one inside, the one drawn by artist Marco Checcetto (whom I remember nothing of, so he was neither spectacular nor terrible), had, like, scary eyes and claws and fuller wings and looked like a super-villain monster man.

Did any of you guys make it farther into Rucka's Punisher run than I did, and manage to maintain memory of it? Is it worth starting over again some day, and reading all of it? I kinda want to get to the War Zone conclusion, where I think he fights the Marvel Universe, but not sure it's worth reading too many boring comics to get to it.

As for the New Avengers book, I really rather liked that one, but I let so much time elapse between reading it and considering reviewing it that I felt I'd have to re-read it to do even a half-way decent job of reviewing it, and it wasn't the sort of book I felt like re-reading (Not when I have sooo many other books, comic and otherwise, to read at the moment).

It collected the first story arc or so from the re-relaunched New Avengers book by Jonathan Hickman, Steve Epting and company, part of Marvel's "Marvel NOW!" initiative. It's not really an Avengers book, and it doesn't support its title very well (The more recent Mighty Avengers seems better-suited to the New Avengers title, given that for the bulk of Brian Michael Bendis' eight-years or so on the previous two volumes of New Avengers, they were meant to be the "street-level" super-team...and to have Luke Cage in it).

It's really an Illuminati title, the unofficial name given to the cadre of Marvel smart-guys who Bendis retconned into having been secretly running the Marvel Universe (Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Namor, Dr. Strange, Professor X). But I guess The Illuminati or The New Illuminati or Marvel's Illuminati just don't sound like proper titles for Marvel comic book (I like the sound of the word Superlluminati, though)

Hickman introduces some interesting changes to the line-up, with The Black Panther joining (after flirting with previous incarnations), Captain America joining for a little while until the others realized Cap just isn't an amoral enough asshole to hang with them and, finally,  X-Man/Avenger Hank "Beast" McCoy replacing the temporarily dead Charles Xavier.

The storyline of Bendis' involving these guys that I remember most clearly was an instance that lead into Secret Invasion, which I remember pretty clearly only because it made The Skrulls look like the good guys: The Illuminati detonate one of the Skrull's giant Star Wars ships and kill, like, thousands of Skrulls.

And that's sort of the quite dark gray area Hickman positions the team in. He's come up with a terrible moral dillema for them to face. In order to save the Earth, they must continuously destroy other Earths (wiping out the population of each), given some kind of cosmic thing where parallel Earths keep being drawn toward collision with the Marvel Earth. If they do nothing, both their Earth and the other Earth will be destoryed; if they destroy the other Earth, at least their Earth will survive, but at the cost of another whole planet.

Throughout this volume, they have to wrestle with that decision over and over, but circumstances tend to keep sparing them from having to actually make it. It's an interesting, unique conflict, and one well-suited to these particular super-heroes, some of whom aren't the sort who always find a third way when faced with two bad options (Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic in particular, given their roles as the villains of Civil War).

Infinity Gems, Thanos and, I'm sure, the already in-progress Infinity crossover/event figure heavily in the title's future, but I liked that first volume just fine, and was sorta surprised that I did, having no real strong feelings about the creators involved or the characters as a group (They've generally only appeared in the most talky, least exciting issues of Bendis' books).

I was sorta surprised by Mr. Fantastic's presence though, as he and the rest of the FF are lost in time and space in Fantastic Four and FF, two books being published concurrently with New Avengers, although perhaps they're actually set before or after the events of this title. 

As far as battle cries go...

...I think I like the sound of "Imperius Rex!" better.



(Panel from The Marvels Project by Steve Epting and Ed Brubaker)

Another trade I waited for: The Marvels Project

I rather enjoyed reading through the trade collection of Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting’s eight-part series The Marvels Project, although the farther I got into it, the less and less it seemed like a story so much as a summary of other stories.

I suppose there was a degree of inevitably to that aspect of the series, as it is a summary of other stories, with Brubaker and Epting retelling scenes from various Golden Age classics, checking in on various Golden Age characters big and small and contextualizing some historical events within the Marvel Universe. It’s more an exercise in connecting various dots and giving a consistent viewpoint to those connections than a proper story. As such, it’s very interesting, if never quite compelling.

The framing sequence is kind of oblique, with Marvel Western hero The Two-Gun Kid, who was shunted from his own era into the modern Marvel Universe, dying back in the period between the World Wars—apparently, when he got old, he was sent back to die close to the time he would actually die? Brubaker sort of assumes some basic knowledge on the part of his readers regarding this complicated nonsense—lucky for me I read Dan Slott’s She-Hulk or I woulda been lost right out of the gate (If you click on that link, don’t look the horse in the eye, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life).

Conceptually, the idea is showing the passing of the torch from one sort of hero—the cowboys of the Wild West—to a new kind of hero, guys in capes and masks like The Angel, our point-of-view character for the story of how the Marvel Universe first became populated with Marvels.

The Angel is a vigilante hero of the normal-guy-who-dresses-weird-and-punches-bad-guys-really-hard and, as a New Yorker, he’s around to witness the birth and evolution of the android Human Torch (Marvel’s first “Marvel”), the emergence of Namor (there’s a pretty weirdly affective scene early on, wherein Nazis are shown depth charging the sea and collecting the Atlantean corpses that float to the service) and his conflicts with the Torch and the surface world, the emerging crop of heroes like those who starred in The Twelve and those awesome 70th anniversary specials Marvel was publishing in 2009 (Did they ever trade-collect those? I bought ‘em all, but they were among the comics stolen when my last apartment was burgularized), and, eventually, the appearance of Captain America.

Brubaker imagines a sort of superhero-arms race between America and the Nazis, which ties a lot of the various plot-points together, and eventually unites heroes as diverse as Namor, The Torch and Captain America against the Nazis. It also allows The Angel and some smaller characters (The Ferret, The Phantom Bullet, etc.) to get involved in a more direct way.

The plot works, and it all hangs together quite well, but because of the huge span of time being covered—it opens in 1938 and ends in 1941, with an epilogue set in the present—and because of the fact that The Angel is telling the story (often resorting to saying things like, “I didn’t know this at the time, of course, but…”), far too much of it feels like being told a story about a story, instead of a story.

Epting is a hell of an artist, and he pencils and inks here, with Dave Stewart handling the colors. I don’t care for this style of art at all, as the coloring (or perhaps the way Epting produced the art) gives it the comic book equivalent of soft, soap opera-like lighting. The blacks and lines just don’t look like they were drawn with ink pens or brushes, so it all looks several degrees removed from drawing.

Within this style, which is pretty much Marvel’s house style at this point, and obviously more popular with more folks, it’s nice art, but my eyes slid over it without ever really appreciating it—the photos-as-reference, computers-used-somehow approach is a lot less lifeless and annoying in a historical setting, however. Like, having New York skylines plopped in as background isn’t quite as lazy-looking when it’s the New York of the late-30s and early-40s than that of the early 21st century.

You know what’s really weird, though? The climax of the book features the big heroes of the period splitting up to deal with a two-pronged Axis attack on the allies—Cap, Bucky and Namor intervene to protect President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill from Nazi super-soldier U-Man and an evil Atlantean assassination squad, while The Human Torch and Toro head off the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. I was kind of confused by the latter, as it implies foreknowledge of the attack within the U.S. government—if Roosevelt and Captain America knew the attack was coming, why didn’t they warn the folks at Pearl Harobor, who could have at least defended themselves better? And why did they just send The Human Torch and Toro, instead of rallying a conventional military counterattack?

It implies a complicity among the Roosevelt administration, a realization of the conspiracy theory that he let Pearl Harbor happen in order to provide political cover to the U.S. entry into the war. Which, I don’t know, is that what happened? I haven’t read much about it in a long, long time, and assume Brubaker’s more up on this stuff than I am.

Or did it go down differently in the Marvel Universe? (Well, even more different than two flying, flaming dudes throwing fireballs at Japanese Zeros?) Did Roosevelt, Cap, Torch and others know ahead of time that the Japanese were about to attack Peak Harbor in past Marvel stories about the era, or is that an original idea of Brubaker’s?

I don’t know.

The narrator, The Angel, implies that the Japanese force was much, much larger than the one we know about, and that the Torches greatly reduced the damage that would have been done, but, I don't know, it seems like getting the word out and responding militarily might have staved off the attack complete.

"They saved many lives, stopped many of the Japanese bombs and blew up many more of their fighters... But they couldn't hold back the storm no matter how hard they tried."

It's made clear that the Cap and company vs. U-Man fight was kept secret, although I'm not sure if the Torches activities were or not: "That fight would remain secret," Angel says of that battle, "because Captain America didn't want to diminish the sacrifice of the men at Pearl Harbor, he told me later. They were the real heroes...the soldiers who bled and died. The ones who didn't have science on their side like he did."

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Speaking of things I don't know about, there's a character wandering around Europe that the Nazi scientists kept in some sort of stasis named Private John Steele. He's apparently invulnerable, super-strong and was caught during the first World War. He awakens and starts wandering around killing Nazis in Europe, hooking up with Nick Fury for a while.

I have no idea who he is or where he came from, but he's presented as someone I should know.

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I haven’t played a Marvel-related video game since…a Street Fighter vs. Marvel heroes arcade came before turn of the century, maybe? But I’d play the hell out of a game that was basically 1942 where you played The Human Torch instead of a plane…