Review: Marvel Zombies 5

You know, I think Marvel may have published too many Marvel Zombies comics. I say this for two reasons. First, looking at this page on Wikipedia, I realize that they published about three times as many of the damn things than I would have guessed they did. Second, they published so many of them that I actually lost track of which ones I read.

Last week I was at Half Price Books, and found hardcovers of both Marvel Zombies 4 and Marvel Zombies 5 for less than $5 apiece. Those were both written by Fred Van Lente, a favorite writer of mine, and both had solid artists attached (4 was drawn by Kev Walker, while 5 had a different artist attached to each issue, including the likes of Kano Michael Kaluta). I snapped them both up, took 'em home and read them both.

The first, a direct sequel to Marvel Zombies 3, features Morbius, The Living Vampire's new A.R.M.O.R.-sponsored Midnight Sons strikeforce of Werewolf By Night's Jack Russell, Son of Satan's Daimon Hellstrom, Man-Thing's Jennifer Kale and Man-Thing himself trying to foil the zombified head of Deadpool and his leg-man Simon Garth (from Tales of The Zombie) from spreading the zombie virus further...or letting it fall into the hands of The Hood or the dread Dormammamu. So basically, the stars of all my favorite Marvel Essentials editions (minus Godzilla) teaming up to fight zombies. Sold.

The second, rather randomly, features Howard The Duck and Machine Man, the latter the hero of Marvel Zombies 3, here being written along the lines of Warren Ellis' winning Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. characterization, traveling the Marvel multiverse in search of blood samples from various zombie incursions.

It wasn't until about five minutes ago, when I prepared to write a review of Marvel Zombies 4, that I realized I had actually already done so, having previously bought and read it in trade paperback! That was in 2010, but apparently I had no memory of ever having read it. While I was in the act of reading it, the only thing that struck me as particularly familiar were the godawful Greg Land covers, which I was positive I had seen and written about before, but I just assumed I did so during the regular looks at Marvel solicitations, where my eyes would have first been assaulted by them, and my belief in a just world would have been insulted by the fact that the biggest comic book publisher in North America had paid Greg Land actual money in exchange for a drawing of a woman whose breasts were each as wide as her thighs.

So either it was a terriblly unmemorable story, I have a shitty memory or Marvel has published way too many Marvel Zombies comics. I'm going to go with the latter.

Anyway, Marvel Zombies 5. This is the third and final of the Van Lente-written Marvel Zombies books dealing with A.R.M.O.R., a S.H.I.E.L.D.-like military organization whose acronym stands for Altered-Reality Monitoring and Operational Response); they are at least conveniently numbered 3, 4 and 5, since Marvel also apparently published some other Marvel Zombies material between 4 and 5. (Seriously, the franchise is getting X-Men complicated here).

Due to a "Planestorm," A.R.M.O.R. has banned its agents from traveling between realities, for fear of spreading zombie infections, but our protagonists Machine Man and Howard The Duck are breaking regulations to travel into different zombie-afflicted areas to collect samples from each form of ghoul, each of which is given the designation of a particular director of a zombie movie (a Romero, a Boyle, a Raimi, etc). The reason for their mission is that Morbisu, The Living Vampire hopes to discover a cure for the virus by comparing alternate strains. As to what brought these two together, Machine Man is immune (being a robot) and Howard...maybe it was just time for Marvel to put Howard The Duck in another comic, before people forgot they owned him...? He says in-story that he needed a new job after his Avengers Initiative team was shuttered; Howard, a Clevelander, was part of the Ohio Avengers, a team I sorely wanted to know the roster of ever since Marvel first introduced the Fifty State Initiative plan, one of the few good ideas to come out of Mark Millar's Civil War.

The format of the five-issue series finds the characters traveling to a different reality in each issue, interacting with the inhabitants there as they fend off a different form of zombie, and then moving on to another world.

The first reality is the Kano/Tom Palmer-drawn Earth-483, "designated The Territory,'" where all of Marvel's Western heroes apparently live. Or lived. A mysterious green meteorite passing over Boot Hill in Rango causes the dead—all of 'em Marvel Western heroes—to rise from the grave to seek the flesh of the living. A "Romero" infestation, some of the zombies have enough muscle memory from their years among the living that they can still work their guns, and it's up for the old, bitter, besotted Hurricane and his super-speed to re-kill them all.

Before he dies, he passes his powers on to his daughter, Jackie Kane, who takes the superhero name "Swift Cloud." She's rescued by Machine Man and Howard, who arrive only on the 22nd page of the 23-page first issue. Van Lente's entrance line for Howard falls pretty flat, as it doesn't really make any sense, but he recovers immediately with this in the very next panel:

The premise of this series is a pretty good one, even if the execution varies widely from issue to issue. As far as Multiverses go, Marvel just doesn't have a very big or very interesting one...or, at least, many of the more exciting and familiar locales aren't visited during this particular jaunt. This first Earth benefits from some great art and from being chock-full of Marvel heroes, albeit some of the most rarely scene ones.

In the next chapter, still drawn by Kano and Palmer, but with Alvaro Lopez joining Palmer in inking, our threesome visits the near-future world of Kilraven, Earth-691. There they fight against, with and then against again Kilraven and his crew and their Martian-sponsored foes. The zombies here aren't actually undead zombies, but "Infected;" that's right, this type as known as a "Boyle." (The grandest, grand guignoil scene involves zombie fetuses exploding out of pregnant zombie ladies' bellies, which strikes me as more of a "Jackson" kind of thing, but why split hairs?).

From there it's off to somewhere medieval, where Kaluta presents a four-page story of Marvel's Black Knight character which involves an evil book that makes evil dead, and here our heroes naturally faced the loud-mouthed, giggling, wise-cracking type of zombie known as a "Raimi." Van Lente does a pretty good Army of Darkness pastiche here, although by this point, the artwork is getting a little unfocused—after Kaluta's contribution, we get 10 pages of Kano/Palmer and six by Felix Ruiz, whose work looks nothing like theirs—and it's becoming clear that the book is all premise and not plot.

Kano and Fowler disappear for the rest of the book. The fifth issue is drawn by Fernando Blanco and Felix Ruiz, and sees our heroes in a cyberpunk future where zombie infection spreads via data (and a grown-up Amadeus Cho and his gorgon girlfriend Delphyne from Incredible Hercules meet a gruesome end (and Swift Cloud wears Matrix drag). This issue deals most heavily with Machine Man's heartbreak over losing Jocasta, who is a bad guy in this future world, but that was really only interesting in that it generated this image earlier in the series:

And, finally, the series just sort of peters out in the last issue/chapter, drawn almost entirely by Blanco (save for one page by Frank Brunner), which is apparently set in "our" world, and allows Marvel to make fun of two of its favorite targets: DC Comics and Marvel Comics readers.

The jab at DC Comics is just this, which appears at the top of the top of the first page of the story:

That's...interesting...? It's also how the zombie infection is spread in this particular reality, as a fanboy stereotype character who reads superhero comics just so he can constantly complain about how terrible they are ("If I don't keep following 'em," he tells his local comic shop owner, "How will I know when they stop sucking?"). We spend the majority of this final section with this character Wendel, who is thoroughly annoying and unlikeable, and yet still not as annoying and ulikeable as Van Lente, Blanco and company spending so many pages erecting this particular straw man to beat on.

There's a sort of neat twist near the end, where this zombie, occurring as he does in the "real" world, suffers from rigor mortis, and Howard rattles off a whole list of reasonable questions about zombies that are perfectly logical reasons why they wouldn't really work in the real world, but rarely if ever get raised in zombie narratives, as the point of such stories is to have zombies in them, rather than be realistic.

Does Morbius come up with his zombie cure? The story leaves us hanging, but then it turns out to not have ever really been a story at all. Sure, it had all the component parts, and there are plenty of interesting ideas in there, but ultimately Marvel Zombies 5 read like an illustrated and published version of a story meeting between writer and editor, a first or second draft that somehow went to press instead of a final script.

Or does saying so make me sound too much like Wendel, who, you won't be surprised to learn, also reviews the comics he reads on the Internet!

...

I just hope I remember reading this one, so I don't accidentally buy it again in a few years...

Van Lente and Dunlavey on the heirs of Siegel, Shuster and Kirby pursuing legal rights

On Sunday, Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood reprinted the full text of a letter the late Joanne Siegel, who passed away at the age of 93 last month, sent to Warner Brothers CEO Jeffrey Bewkes. Siegel is, most of you probably know, the wife of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and was, in fact the inspiration and model for Lois Lane. Along with her family and the estate of Superman's other creator, Joe Shuster, Siegel was involved in a tough, complicated series of legal battles with Warner Bros. over elements of the Superman franchise, and after a rather emotional build-up ("So I ask you to please consider—do these mean spirited tactics meet with your approval? Do you really think the families of Superman’s creators should be treated this way?"), she sums up the point of her letter thusly:

To protest harassment of us that will gain you nothing but bad blood and a continued fight.

To protest harassment of our attorney by falsely accusing him of improper conduct in an attempt to deprive us of legal counsel.

To make you aware that in reality this is a business matter and that continuing with litigation for many more years will only benefit your attorneys.

Heidi MacDonald's The Beat and Comic Book Resource's Robot 6 reprinted the contents of the letter, and when linking to it in the course of my own linkblogging at Blog@Newsarama, I referred tot he letter as "the saddest thing you'll read all day."

Well, I was wrong. I read much, much sadder things yesterday, without even having to venture into the "real" media's discussion of tragic international events. No, I simply read the comments threads on those Beat and Robot 6 posts.

If you've ever read a comment thread on any blog post dealing with the heirs of a comics creator dealing with the current owners of the intellectual properties their husbands or fathers made, then you know how miserable the sorts of things anonymous comics fans tend to spew in such arenas.

Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey's latest issue of Comic Book Comics, a history of comics presented as a comic book series, dealt with the history of Siegel and Shuster's dealings with DC over the ownership of Superman—as well as the similar difficulties that Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson and Jack Kirby had with DC/National and Marvel—and the Siegel and Shuster "story" hasn't really been completed in real life, so it doesn't really have a satisfying conclusion in their comic strip about it either (In 2008, judge Stephen G. larson ruled that the contents of Action Comics #1 revert to Siegel's heirs, and, Van Lente wrote, "The full implications of that decision are still being worked out, but it seems to be in the heirs' interest to work with the company," since, "many of the elements considered crucial to the mythos have appeared since Action #1 and are incontrovertibly owned by DC").

Van Lente and Dunlavey therefore ended their story with panel below, addressing the sorts of fan arguments against the creators and their families, reversing a creator-as-sheep, publisher-as-shepherd visual metaphor they employed throughout the story: Well said, guys.

Review: Marvel Zombies 4

Trying to break the Wednesday habit in favor of reading super-comics in trade format can be pretty difficult, particularly if you’ve been reading new comics every Wednesday for along time.

Marvel Zombies 4 was a particularly difficult series to resist, as it was written by one of my favorite writers, Fred Van Lente (Action Philosophers, Incredible Hercules), drawn by the very talented Kev Walker who ably demonstrated his skills in Marvel Zombies 3, and was about a team of monster heroes comprised entirely of characters found on my shelf of Marvel Essential collections.

Thankfully, Marvel made the task of not buying Marvel Zombies 4 #1 when it was first released as a comic book easy, by charging $3.99 for the 22-page comic book (33% more than your average 22-page comic book from Marvel or DC*), and then using this as the cover:
Who on earth would pay $4 for anything wrapped in that? I really want to know, so that I can look down on them from afar.

(That familiar-looking professional wrestler whose chest is caving in, by the way, is supposed to be The Son of Satan, and the lady in the underpants who looks like every lady Greg Land has cut-and-pasted onto a cover is suppose d to be one-time Man-Thing supporting character Jennifer Kale).

The cover of the trade paperback collection isn’t all that great, it’s one of Arthur Suydam’s increasingly tired zombie covers, which here doesn’t really work because formless muck-monsters and skeletons are kind of hard to zombify, but it’s not as depressingly awful as that Greg Land piece (What is, really?).

Unfortunately, the Greg Land covers are included in the trade collection as well, but at least it’s not the first thing you see. In fact, you can probably even Xacto-knife them out of the trade if you’re so inclined.

But enough of judging the book by its covers, let’s talk about the book itself. It’s entitled Marvel Zombies 4, but is more like Marvel Zombies 3 II, since it has the same creative team as Marvel Zombies 3, and follows directly up on that plot line.

If you’ve read the previous series, you know Zombie Deadpool lead a Marvel Zombiverse invasion of “our” Marvel Universe, with the HQ of super-secret organization Alternate Reality Monitoring and Operational Response in Florida. It was successfully stopped, but part of Zombie Deadpool—specifically, his head—managed to escape, meaning the threat of a zombipocalypse spreading throughout the Marvel Universe still existed.

As this series opens, ARMOR doctor and Marvel Zombie victim Morbius, The Living Vampire has joined with Kale, Jack Russell (Of Werewolf By Night) and Damion Hellstorm, The Son of Satan to track down and destroy the head (and any zombies it may have created).

Van Lente’s plot was surprisingly complex, as it involved not only those two “sides” of the conflict, but also voodoo-style zombie maker The Black Talon and the Marvel universes kingpin of villains, The Hood (Seen most often in New Avengers and “Dark Reign” branded titles) and Dormammu, plus some Roxxon Corporation-hired supervillains serving as Blackwater-like security contractors. There are therefore a lot of players here, and while it never exactly gets convoluted, it’s hardly as straightforward as Marvel Zombies 3 was, and a lot less new reader friendly (Ididn’t have much problem personally, but it definitely lacks the instantaneous “Marvel heroes as zombies, got it” hooky premise that the original series had, and I probably would have been lost if I didn’t have a decent working knowledge of the Marvel Universe…I still felt I would have liked it more if I had greater knowledge too. Like, should I have been more excited to see The Night Shift? Maybe, if I knew who they were).

Of course, that same complexity, and the near-chaos of cameos it created is also a large part of the appeal of the book, seeing various Marvel characters bounce off of one another. It’s violent, it’s gory, it’s full of Marvel’s monsters, someone says “And whatsoever knows fear-- --BURNS AT THE TOUCH OF THE MAN-THING!” so sure, it’s a lot of fun. Even Deadpool wasn’t all that annoying, and Van Lente and Walker have a fun “action” scene of the zombified head of Deadpool eating a man Pac-Man-style.

Walker’s art is still pretty great. The action moves and flows clearly from panel to panel, the designs meld the radically different characters into the same narrative quite successfully and there’s a slightly sketchy aspect of his work that makes it look vaguely John Romita Jr-ish, only darker and less-distinct. A pretty perfect look for a book about Marvel zombies and monsters, really. (I’m not crazy about his Man-Thng though…he looks too little in many panels, as well as too much man and not enough thing.)

It ends pretty much where it began, with Morbius saying that his monster team worked well together and should maybe stick around, and Deadpool’s head escaping, but then this is the fourth Marvel Zombies series (not counting Marvel Zombies Return, which immediately follows it, and the Army of Darkness crossover business), so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the story doesn’t end without preparing to start again.

After the conclusion of the title story, there’s a trio of black-and-white reprints of stories from 1973’s Tales of The Zombie, featuring Simon Garth, Marvel’s Zombie-with-a-capital-Z (who is featured in the main story, primarily as Deadpool’s head’s source of transportation). These are by Steve Gerber, Sal Buscema, Stan Lee, Bill Everett and Tom Palmer and Roy Thomas, and they’re full of gorgeous art.

The first story, for which Buscema provided layouts and Palmer finishes, was noteworthy in that it was full of female nudity—well, with strands of long hair or shadow obscuring nipples—and it is just beautiful, beautiful artwork. Those guys could really draw, so when they wanted to draw a sexy woman being sexy, the result was a recognizably human beautiful woman. And, um, obviously “recognizably human” should be the bare minimum of what a professional artist should be able to accomplish, not something worth singling out for special praise, but it was so obvious how good Buscema and Palmer were at drawing since their chessecake-filled story came so soon after this hideous image by Greg Land.




*I was dismayed to read this quick note from John Jackson Miller noting that in March, for the first time ever, there were more $3.99 books than $2.99 books in Diamond’s top 300 (Although it’s worth noting that Miller didn’t stipulate how many of those $3.99 books were only 22-pages vs. how many were 30-pages or more…as a consumer, it’s important to take into account whether or not a publisher is giving you more content for a higher price or not). I was somewhat cheered up by Tom Spurgeon’s “slightly horrified” reaction to the fact, and this comparison in discussing the price hike: “The justifications for it feel like a teenager deciding to drive an increasing number of her errands at 90 mph and admitting this is crazy but pointing out they've managed to do this so far without totaling the car.”

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By the way, I read this trade just a few days after reading Terror Titans, and thinking about that very violent Sean McKeever-written comic book with the word “titans” in the title naturally got me thinking about those other very violent Sean McKeever-written comic book with the word “titans” titles.

This book is just as violent and gory as any of those book, although a lot less shockingly so, because one expects to see violence and gore in a comic book about monsters destroying the cannibalistic undead more than one expects to see Wonder Dog stalk and maul Marvin and Wendy from Super Friends.

But this has a baby being eaten on page three, a head getting smashed like a water balloon on page five, exploding fish monsters that bathe Morbius in gore, Deadpool’s aforementioned Pac-Man impression, a giant amoeboid thing impaling characters, a red blood rain that melts human flesh and bone on contact. Plus, some squicky sex talk (“Let’s…find somewhere you can slip into something more comfortable. Like me.")

And you know, it’s perfectly fine here. The book says “Parental Advisory” in small font on the back of the book near the UPC symbol, so there’s none of that Trojan horse bullshit and, again, this is a horror comic book about monsters destroying each other made for grown-ups and marketed to grown-ups, instead of an all-ages superhero comic. (And sorry if it sounds like I’m picking on Teen Titans here; it’s just the most egregious example, and the one freshest in my memory from having just read it).

I guess it’s just one of those things I don’t understand about superhero comics. Why put all that violent, gory, mature audiences content in all-ages super-books when there are already so many alternatives for violent, gory, mature audiences content, in many cases in books published by the same two publishers who do all the superhero stuff and, at least in this particular case, even set in their superhero world?

If DC thinks their readers want ultraviolent, gore-filled horror comics set in the DCU, why don’t they just publish such comics and market ‘em, instead of trying to turn Teen Titans or Justice League or whatever into those sorts of comics?

Okay, I promise I’m going to shut up about that run of Teen Titans forever now.

Ryan Dunlavey's Golden Age Daredevil

Among the many cameos in this week's Comic Book Comics #4 is our old friend the Golden Age Daredevil.

The above panel is how writer Fred Van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey introduce and depict him (He appears in only one other panel, standing shoulder to shoulder with, I believe, Lenin and Stalin. God, I love this book).

What did the aborigines who raised him get him for his birthday? I'm betting it's a boomerang.

The secret origin of Hal Jordan (and The Guardians):

In Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey's Comic Book Comics #3, they cover the dawning of the Silver Age of superheroes, and devote a panel to the source of Gil Kane's designs for Hal Jordan and the little blue aliens the GL worked for.

Check it out:

I did not know that. Comics really are educational!

To learn more about Julius Schwartz's DC hero revival, the fall of EC and the rise of Mad, Dr. Wertham and 1960s pop art's relationship with comics while enjoying sight gags, Dunlavey's Stan Lee and Jack Kirby caricatures and even a few dick jokes, be sure to check out the latest issue of Comic Book Comics. It's 100% Every Day Is Like Wednesday approve!