The last half-dozen Marvel trades I've read:

Elektra: Always Bet on Red

Like the Ghost Rider miniseries discussed below, this collection has no volume number on the spine, and appears to be the trade paperback collection of the miniseries. I could have sworn that when Marvel launched Elektra earlier this year, along with new solo series featuring other Daredevil adversaries Bullseye and Kingpin, it was mean to be an ongoing series. I went back and checked the solicitations and, sure enough, at no point did any of the five solicits for the five issues of Elektra refer to it as a miniseries; the fifth solicit mentioned the the climax of "Always Bet on Red," but that could have easily have been read as simply referring to the first story arc, not the entire series (After all, generally miniseries featuring such long established characters have a colon and a subtitle in them, identifying them as miniseries in the first place).

Perhaps shop-owners received more information than consumers, but it certainly appears that this was either a "stealth" miniseries, sold as an ongoing but only planned to run for a very limited time (because miniseries sell so much worse than regular series), or it was always intended to be an ongoing, but Marvel saw how poorly the first issue was ordered and realized immediately the market couldn't support an Elektra ongoing at the moment (I don't know why anyone at Marvel would think it would. If Daredevil was only selling just-okay as a monthly, ongoing series, common sense would dictate that there was much of a market for three Daredevil spin-offs, no matter how good the Netflix show is).

The only other place I can look for clues is in the book itself, and writer Matt Owens certainly seemed to structure the storyline as if he was going somewhere with it. The first arc is kind of a generic, almost random feeling one, in which Elektra stumbles upon Arcade's new version of Murderworld, set up in Las Vegas, where he has reinvented himself as a sort of celebrity crime lord. The plot and the script are fine, but it's the sort of story almost any Marvel character could have been plugged into with only minor variations in the specifics. The ending reveals that Arcade is kinda sorta working for Wilson Fisk, and that he had arranged to engage Elektra at Fisk's wishes, which sends her back to New York City...where the story ends.

I realize those last three paragraphs don't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement of the book, but it actually is a rather good, extremely well-made (if generic-feeling) genre story. Whatever shenanigans might have went into Marvel's decision to publish and promote it, that hardly affects the quality of the comic. All in all, this appears to be yet another example of Marvel knowing how to find, recruit and nurture comics talent to produce great Marvel comics, despite all the bumbling that apparently goes on when it comes to selling those comics to the public these days.

Owens is working with artist Juan Cabal, although, in another curious aspect of the comic's promotion, the solicit for the first issue said it would be drawn by Alec Morgan. Cabal's work is pretty incredible. It is highly detailed in a way that allows for maximum "acting" from the characters and clues or gags in the text in the backgrounds, but it is still clean, with a smooth, airy quality that helps ones eyes glide through the story. It reminded me quite a bit of the artwork of Jamie McKelvie or, to a slightly lesser extent, Kevin Maguire. In a rather rare example of this, cover artist Elizabeth Torque's style even lines up quite well with that of Cabal; were Torque not specifically credited, I could honestly be fooled into thinking the same artist handled both the covers and the interiors, only with the cover artist working with a different colorist.

The story, as I said, is fairly simple...to the point of simplistic. Elektra is in Las Vegas, running away from something or other (The last I saw of her, she was taking over Coulson's SHIELD team in Agents of Shield Vol. 2...or was it fighting an undead Hulk in Uncanny Avengers...? Both collections had Civil War II as their sub-titles.) Her bartender chats her up, and Elektra's keen eyes catch a mostly-hidden bruise on the woman's body. Later she finds her pretty badly beaten up by her boyfriend, a lieutenant for "The King of Las Vegas'" crime empire, and, so she puts on her new costume and kills a bunch of dudes. Then come some robots and, with an issue or so, she's being hunted through Arcade's Murderworld for the entertainment--and gambling opportunity--of his ultra-wealthy, low-morale clientele.

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that Elektra wins, and that she abstains from killing Arcade, for reasons never made quite explicit.

As I said, this could just have easily featured Wolverine--the original, or any of the three versions running around the Marvel Universe at the moment--or The Punisher or a Spider-Man or a Captain America or Deadpool or Daredevil or Gambit or just about anyone who doesn't boast absurdly high power levels. Owens and Cabal make it specific to Elektra at a few points, including once near the beginning where Arcade talks about them as professional rivals, and how maybe he should have had the job/s Fisk had previously hired her for, and a few nicely structured scenes that refer back to her history in the pages of Daredevil.

This short sequence is pretty elegantly done--

--and there's a later once in which the narrative moves in and out of a flashback paralleling the current cation, with Cabal's artwork overlapping, to show here in two different costumes in two different settings, but basically facing similar decisions about how to fight against evil (Hint: She chooses not to knock its perpetrators out, tie them up and leave them for the police).

I'm kind of fascinated by Arcade--in fact, I probably wouldn't have even borrowed this trade if he weren't the villain--as he's such an absurd character, an assassin who spends millions, even billions on robots and so on in order to collect what must be the relatively paltry bounties from the heads of his victims. (Here at least Owens given him an elaborate enough scheme that he seems to be making enough to afford all that nonsense). Though he and Elektra are technically both assassins, I have to assume any semi-sane person in the market for a high-end killer would go for the lady who can quickly and quietly kill a mark with a pair of bladed ninja weapons than the guy who has to build a high-tech amusment park to use as a murder weapon.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the trade will ultimately be what Elektra's wearing, however. As even the cover image reveals, she's now wearing a sleek, modern, sensible black outfit, with only the red of her mask and the flowing red sash serving as visual echoes of her original design, which has only really barely changed in decades past. You'll notice this get-up looks a lot like the one Elodie Yung wore in Daredevil and The Defenders, which is another point in Netflix's favor over them 2003 Daredevil movie: Better costuming for Elektra.

Ghost Rider: Four on the Floor

There are a few curious aspects about this third collection of Ghost Rider Robbie Reyes comics by writer Felipe Smith.

First, it doesn't have a "Vol. 3" in the title, nor does it sport a "3" on the spine. This is likely because it was a miniseries, and not a continuation of the too-quickly-canceled, really-quite-good Ghost Rider ongoing...but, for the purposes of a trade reader, it's not exactly helpful, especially if the plan is to continue Ghost Rider as a series of mini-series, which the ending of this collection seems to indicate.

Second, the miniseries didn't have a sub-title; it was just called "Ghost Rider". "Four on the Floor" was apparently added later in the marketing of the trade.

I was also a little surprised that the book existed at all, as it isn't often that Marvel cancels a series and then brings it back for an abbreviated engagement like this, although I suspect it had something to do with the fact that Ghost Rider was appearing on the Agents of SHIELD TV show this year. There are a couple of variant covers that are specific to Agents of SHIELD, and that would also explain why Agent Coulson and May are among the guest-stars who show up in the course of these five issues.

And there are a lot of guest-stars, to the point that for much of the book, it seems like Smith is dividing his attention between Robbie and the hero team-up plot, the two mostly parallel plots intersecting only occasionally and, of course, for the climax. That other plot starts with Amadeus Cho investigating a bizarre alien entity of some kind that can take on the characteristics and powers of whatever it comes into contact with. So it moves from the appearance of a stone to a lab rat to a beetle in short order, and once it takes a bite out of a (Totally Awesome) Hulked out Cho's tongue, it gets a major upgrade.

Next on its list is All-New Wolverine Laura Kinney, and, before the series is over, Silk, at which point Cho calls in a couple of superpower-less SHIELD Agents to assist in the hunt. Smith did a pretty great job on this plotline, and he writes a really great--if slang-heavy, rather irritating--Amadeus Cho, and the character's interactions with the completely blase Wolverine were pretty priceless. By the time they run across the very scary, very weird new Ghost Rider for the first time, I found myself wishing that Marvel would have Smith write this version of Ghost Rider, Wolverine and The Hulk into a new, temporary, fill-in version of The Fantastic Four with a Spider-Man somehow (I mean, it's not like they are doing much else with the FF at the moment! Plus, Gabe and Laura's little clone sister Gabby don't get to spend any panel-time together, which seems like a tragic oversight; Gabby would be the world's best babysitter/bodyguard for Ghost Rider's little brother!).

The Robbie Reyes plot mostly picks up where it left off. He is trying to stay on the straight and narrow and raise his brother Gabe, while defending his neighborhood from evil in his other identity, the new Ghost Rider (who is empowered by the evil spirit of his late uncle, and rides not a motorcycle but a haunted, flaming muscle car).

I continue to really dig the specifics of this new Ghost Rider, including his metallic skull that makes him look more like a piece of infernal machinery than a, you know, ghost, and the way he roars with the sound of a revving engine. Additionally, his powers seem to be increasing, and he seems bonded with and able to move through his car in a way not unlike The Silver Surfer with his surfboard.

Robbie's major concern is the ex-con that gets hired on at his garage, a former gang member renowned throughout the neighborhood for his brutal killings of rivals. He says he's turned over a new leaf, but Robbie's not so sure, and Uncle Eli is even less sure, but then, Uncle Eli is always out for blood.

The plots intersect for the first time when Ghost Rider interrupts a Hulk and Wolverine fight against a local gang, and, after Robbie refuses to join them, they accidentally meet up again when Laura brings her monster-damaged car into Robbie's shop for repairs. At the climax, it takes the combined might of all the heroes, and Ghost Rider's magically-derived abilities, to finally shut the creature down.

Smith is mostly absent the artist he launched the series and character with, Tradd Moore (there is a short story entitled "Pyston Nitro Strikes!" in the back of the collection which reunites Smith and Moore), nor does he work with previous Ghost Rider artist Damion Scott, nor does he get to draw it himself. Instead, the art team is Danilo S. Beyruth and suspiciously large number of colorists involved (five). The artwork is fine, but can't help but feel a little lacking given how dynamic, exaggerated and elaborate Moore's art was, which can still bee seen on many of the non-variant covers.

Beyruth handles the storytelling and action quite well though, and there is a pretty great scene with a variation on the old "Fastball Special," where the monster picks up Wolverine by the ankles and uses her as a sword to attack Hulk, something Hulk repeats at the climax. The monster's transformations are also pretty fantastic, and at the climax, when it changes shape to reflect different DNA-derived powers and abilities and starts puking up Coulson-headed, Hulk-bodied extensions of itself to fight its foes well, damn, comic books are just pretty awesome, you know? And this book is a great argument of that fact.

Heroes For Hire By Abnett & Lanning: The Complete Collection

Given the timing of this 400+-page collection's release--in August of this year--it was almost certainly prompted by Netflix's Defenders series, which, despite its name, featured characters more closely associated with Marvel's Heroes For Hire team than any Defenders line-up. It's almost surprising that the image chosen for the cover features Ghost Rider so prominently, rather than Misty Knight, the closest the ensemble book has to a star, although I guess three out of the five characters on the cover have been prominently featured in Netflix's corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The bulk of the book is filled by the short-lived, 12-issue Heroes For Hire series by writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning and four different pencil artist, plus the five-issue Villains For Hire (which was basically just a continuation of the ongoing under a different title) and a "Spider-Island" tie-in one-shot.

On the face of it, this particular iteration of the concept is rather different from past ones, and actually seems to have a lot in common with the Distinguished Competition's Birds of Prey. The series' constants are Misty Knight and Paladin. Misty is supposed to be taking time off from active superheroing as she recovers from a very weird, very comic book-y trauma, and so she takes on the codename "Control," raiding her Rolodex to contact various specialist heroes for particular parts in various missions, doing so through a secure earpiece and asking the question, "Hello hero, are you for hire?" (She pays them not always in cash, but also in information or favors). Feeding them intel, she walks them through their parts of the missions; meanwhile, Paladin is Black Canary to her Oracle, her constant companion and the one mainstay among the rotating cast.

The heroes called upon vary very dramatically, but include the likes of The Falcon, Black Widow, Moon Knight, Silver Sable, Spider-Man, Ghost Rider, Elektra, Iron Fist, The Shroud and, um, Gargoyle, a character minor enough that I had never actually heard of him before this. Other heroes pass through in less official capacities, like The Punisher and Satanna. Part of the fun is that variety, and the spontaneous, almost random nature of who shows up when.

Despite spanning two different titles and enduring two crossovers of of differing scales--the smaller "Spider-Island" and the line-wide Fear Itself--Abnett and Lanning actually craft a particularly cohesive story that reads more or less like a single, epic, superhero novel...albeit with some sub-plots that don't seem to go anywhere (particularly that weird "Spider-Island" issue, which begins in medias res and ends with a cliffhanger that is never resolved in the pages of the book, just straight up ignored).

Misty is essentially battling a single villain with designs on New York City throughout, and several plots of the mystery villain surface and resurface, including human and exotic animal trafficking from the Savage Land and the sale of Atlantean drugs. "Control" proves to be a lot more than just a codename, as it is the modus operandi of the villain of the first issue, and the villain behind that villain, and, it's also the metaphorical subject of the whole thing; not only is Misty and the villain struggling for control of the city's underworld, but she is struggling for control over her own personal world.

After Heroes For Hire apparently shipped its last issue, Misty changes the operation to Villains for Hire, as she and the final boss villain use similar strategies that include teams of mercenary villains to make war on each other.

As might be expected for so many pages of comics produced in so little time, there are a lot of artists involved. Pencil artist Bra Walker handles most of the Heroes For Hire art, with six issues (mostly inked by Andrew Hennessy). Kyle Hotz pencils three and the Spider-Island: Heroes For Hire one-shot, Robert Atkins draws two issues and Tim Seeley draws one. Renato Arlem draws the five issues of Villains.

I liked Hotz's art by far the best. It's the loosest, most energetic and most dynamic, and his characters are all distinct-looking and have a cartoony edge that makes it clear he's not even trying to mimic reality, but rather create his own. Arlem's work is the polar opposite, and it's both remarkable and depressing how completely different Arlem's version of the main villain is compared to Hotz's version; they look like two completely different characters, the only thing they have in common is the peculiar shade of their skin.

The art's far from perfect, and there are a lot of panels of Misty's hair that look...off, but that's not as weird as the way she is so often posed. Not only does she suit up in red spandex to basically just work a microphone and keyboard in the comfort of her own workplace, she has a weird tendency to put her hands on tables, arch her back and bend over, thrusting her butt out. The tone of the art isn't generally going for this sort of over-the-top sexulization though, it just slips in here and there...enough to draw attention to itself.

The writing's not perfect, either. I imagine Abnett and Lanning inherited Misty's weird Iron Fist-chi-sparked phantom pregnancy from whoever wrote her last, and they try to move past it as quickly as possible, but given that it's the foundation to her current endeavor, it somewhat taints everything that follows. Also, there's repeated talk of the concept as a business, often just in joking terms between Paladin and Misty, but she does spend a lot of money on the likes of Elektra and Silver Sable, but it's not really clear how they make money. Like, I don't need to see a business plan in the comic or anything, but there isn't really any money in what Misty is doing, so she has zero income but crazy high expenses...? Is she independently wealthy, like her ex-boyfriend was...?

That said, the majority of the writing is quite strong, not only in the overall arc of the story and that the writers somehow managed to tell one big story despite the difficulties in doing so across multiple titles, but in the characterization. The characters that appear, from the likes of Spider-Man on down to the D-list villains in the final chapters, all feel and sound like themselves, and, for the most part, the narrative manages to exist within the shared universe setting of the Marvel Universe and use that to its benefit rather than its detriment.

I'm not sure where it originated, but there's a six-page "Heroes For Hire Saga" that basically explains the entire history of the concept in the Marvel Universe, like a Wikipedia article written in character. I confess to really digging it, particularly as I was trying to plug the Netflix versions of the characters into it. Like, I really want Carrie-Ann Moss' Jeri Hogarth to open "Heroes For Hire" with Luke, Danny, bionic-armed Misty Knight and Colleen Wing. That sounds like more compelling TV to me than a Defenders Season 2. They can have Jessica do PI work for them, and Matt Murdock can be their lawyer.

Poking around comics.org as I was writing this, I grow more and more confused by their choice of cover, as it leaves off the book's protagonist, and there are certainly some decent Misty-centric images they coulda went with instead:

Ms. Marvel Vol. 7: Damage Per Second

The title story refers to a three-parter in the middle of this particular collection. It involves a pretty insidious villain, a literal and figurative online troll that knows all of Kamala Khan's secrets, like the fact that she is Ms. Marvel, and is prepared to wreak havoc on her life and those of her friends, threatening to dox their most closely-guarded secrets. It's actually a pretty good story, managing to be relevant without preachy and moving several character arcs forward.

The true nature of the troll--that it's a sentient computer virus, instead of being attached to an actual person--is perhaps a little convenient, as is the way in which Kamala and her friends and allies defeat it. It turns out that, because the troll is learning its behavior and morality by observing human interactions online, to defeat it they merely have to turn the Internet purely good and benevolent for a while.

That they actually succeed is perhaps the most unbelievable aspect of this comic, which stars a young woman who can grow and stretch like plastic because of genes she inherited from an alien race, and part of which is set in a sci-fi African kingdom whose king dresses in a black bodystocking and cat mask.

Takeshi Miyazawa handles the art on "Damage Per Second." That arc is book-ended by two done-in-one stories, the first of which fails where the longer story arc suceeded. Drawn by Mirka Andolfo, it's a cute story about Ms. Marvel battling gerrymandering and encouraging civic engagement, as the same Hydra villains who previously served to give villainous form to urban gentrification reappear, this time with one of them running for Jersey City mayor.

Their nefarious plot is to unseat the current mayor--apparently they aren't reading Captain America: Steve Rogers, or they would know there's no reason to fight over Jersey City when they're about to control the whole country, if not the world--but thanks to Ms. Marvel's involvement, the city elects a noble, third-party candidate who wouldn't have had a chance in hell of winning otherwise.

While writer G. Willow Wilson has Ms. Marvel slap down a lot of the traditional rationale people give for not voting, I found the overall story kind of eye-rolling. It ends with the third-party candidate getting sworn in, and a few narration boxes from Ms. Marvel:

Revolutions don't happen overnight. They're long and complicated and messy and sometimes disappointing. But sometimes, if you hold out long enough, they work.

Of course, a revolution happening overnight is exactly what this issue was all about.

Like I said, the issue's heart is in the right place, and it is pretty effective in some places, but it undermines its own message with how pat it is.

The final issue of the collection is drawn by Francesco Gaston, and it is a Ms. Marvel-less issue of Ms. Marvel. A kind of check-in with Bruno and how he's doing over in Wakanda, where he's enrolled at Golden City Polytechnic Prep, it features Bruno being reluctantly talked into a dangerous caper by his new roommate, who is not at all who he seems. It features a few pages of The Black Panther.

All in all, it's a pretty strong showing from one of Marvel's most reliable titles.

(If I've done my math right, which is only necessary because Marvel randomly renumbered the book despite keeping the same writer and many of the same artists in the rotating roster, there have been 37 issues of the series so far, all written by Wilson. The original 1977 volume of Ms. Marvel only lasted 23 issues, but the reigning champ is still the 50-issue, 2006-2010 series starring Carol Danvers and written by Brian Reed. Fingers crossed Wilson can hang in there at least another year and a half to beat the record...)

Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat Vol. 3: Careless Whisker(s)

This is the third and final collection of writer Kate Leth and Brittney L. Williams' very idiosyncratic take on Hellcat, and I've gotta admit that this book being canceled? That actually kinda hurts. This was probably tied with The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl for my favorite Marvel comic, although I guess I should be thankful it lasted as long as it did at 17 issues; the similarly silly and similarly high-quality Mockingbird only made it to eight issues. (What else to the two books have in common? Female writers who are leaving comics to focus on other stuff, to the detriment of comics in general and Marvel comics in particular).

This volume finishes up the Hellcat vs. Black Cat story arc that was rather awkwardly cut off in the middle at the end of the previous collection, then moves into a weird but fun two-parter wherein Pats catches a bizarre cold (every time she sneezes, reality is altered in a strange but amusing fashion) and her rivalry with Hedy Wolfe is resolved in unexpected and, in the final issue, Jubilee takes Patsy and pals to the mall which, well, it's kind of crazy they went this long using Jubilee as a supporting character and somehow avoided the mall, isn't it?

The last splash page is pretty great, featuring almost every single character who appeared in the previous 17 issues in almost any capacity, all doing something or other at the mall (There's Doctor Strange and Wong, trying on hats at a kiosk, for example, and hey, it's the Cage-Jones family walking by a demon down on one knee, proposing to Hedy).

Farewell, Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat; I fear you were just too good for this fallen world of ours.

I don't hold out a whole lot of hope that we will see a return of the series by Leth and Williams the way, say, Smith's Ghost Rider came back for a miniseries (above), but maybe, just maybe, someday Leth and Williams will reunite for a Jubilee series of some kind. After all, they are so far the only creative team to make teenage mutant mall-crawling vampire single mother Jubilee really work, without ignoring or somehow downplaying one of those aspects, you know?

Spider-Woman: Shifting Gears Vol. 1--Baby Talk

Alright, let's run through this again real quick. Despite the "Vol. 1," this is actually the third volume of writer Dennis Hopeless' Spider-Woman ongoing monthly, and the second one featuring the presence of pencil artist Javier Rodriquez, Jessica Drew's new costume and new direction (So I'd advise skipping Spider-Woman Vol. 1: Spider-Verse, which is a crossover tie-in in addition to being drawn by Greg Land, and instead start your reading with Spider-Woman Vol. 2: New Duds and then picking this one up...Remember what I said a few reviews ago about Marvel getting in the way of selling their own generally high-quality comic books to fans? The Hopeless/Rodriguez/Fish run on Spider-Woman is Exhibit Fucking A).

Spider-Woman isn't my favorite character, or even one I'm particularly fond of, so this series hasn't really been a particular favorite of mine (particularly since I've had such a goddam hard time reading it in order), but it really is a rather incredible book, and as well-made as anything either of the Big Two publishers have produced in the last few years...hell, it's better-made than about 90% of their books.

A lot of that credit has to go to Rodriguez, whose art isn't just perfectly conceived, designed and rendered, but it is always, always, always perfectly arranged upon the page (this is a good example of not judging a book by its cover because yes, that is a godawful cover). It's not just that the story-telling is perfect, it's that Rodriguez is almost relentless in finding inventive and unexpected ways of handling that perfect story-telling. There are so many splashes and or two-page spreads in this book that are somewhere between beautiful and insane.

This trade collects the first five issues of the latest volume of Spider-Woman, and what appears to be a short, five-page story from the pages of Amazing Spider-Man that brings readers up to speed with what Jessica Drew is up to now: She has stepped away from Avenging on a professional basis in order to open a private investigator business with the Marvel Universe's greatest investigative journalist Ben Urich and reformed Spider-Man D-List villain The Porcupine. Oh, and she's also pretty damn pregnant all of a sudden (the identity of the biological father isn't revealed until the final pages of this collection, although it's not either of the two most obvious suspects; one of them seems like he will be taking on the role of the child's father though, based on the last collection of the series, which, um, I've already read, because of how Marvel numbers this damn thing).

My favorite part of this sequence is Spider-Man's spider-sense  going off as Tony approaches. Although the fact that Tony wears his suit of super-armor to a party when he doesn't even have a secret identity to protect is kinda funny too.

The short serves as a sort of preview or introduction, after which we get a very, very full first issue detailing how the team is handling Jessica's delicate condition (Porcupine is doing all the fighting, which here includes taking on The Griffin and Ruby Tuesday...at the same time! I thought they were heavier hitters than this...?), Jessica, her BFF Carol Danvers and company throw a big "Maternity Leave Party" in which we get tons of guest-stars, we see how Jessica is adjusting to pregnant life and, finally, she visits some kind of crazy super sci-fi hospital that Carol keeps insisting she visit and then Skrulls invade. That's one issue! (Rodriguez's Skrulls look a lot more like the original Kirby ones than the ones that we all got so goddam sick of seeing back during Secret Invasion too, which is cool.)

The next three issues consist of, well, it's Die Hard in a super sci-fi hospital, only Bruce Willis is an extremely pregnant super hero, and instead of Hans Gruber and some terrorists with funny accents, the bad guys are Skrulls who are there to abduct a sullen teenage prince from the cancer ward.

It's pretty far away from what one might consider a "Spider-Woman" story, but given how flexible the character has proven over the years, and what Marvel has done with former Ms. Marvel, current Captain Marvel and Jessica Drew over the last decade or so, it kinda actually is. Rodriguez gets to draw all kinds of wild aliens--the maternity ward waiting room is just a delight to look at--and there are several amazing sequences in which Jessica must sneak through the fantastic settings of the hospital in order to reach one objective or another...when she has to backtrack (while carrying a head in a jar), he even finds a new way to present these settings in new and interesting ways.

The climax includes the most amazing two-page spread, which is basically a post-delivery Jessica Drew in a hospital gown with a pair of laser guns in a huge, deadly brawl against a small army of heavily armed Skrulls for the life of her child. It's...it's something to see.

The final issue is just as full as the one that begins the collection, as Jessica tries to adjust to motherhood and talks through her various insecurities and anxieties with friends who are almost all completely ill-equipped to understand what the hell she's going through...only The Porcupine, who has a daughter, really understands. Well, he and fellow father Ben Urich, who helps convince a reluctant Jessica to get back in the game by the end of the issue.

Some recent Marvel collections I read recently

All-New Wolverine Vol. 3: Enemy of The State II

Well, this was interesting move. Writer Tom Taylor follows a Civil War II tie-in, which was collected in the trade paperback All-New Wolverine Vol. 2: Civil War II, with a story arc entitled "Enemy of The State II." The original "Enemy of The State" was a 2004-2005 Wolverine story arc by writer Mark Millar, artist John Romita Jr and others in which Hydra, The Hand and a new group "killed" Wolverine, resurrected him as a brain-washed Hand super-assassin, and then sicced him upon SHIELD and a large swathe of the Marvel Universe, and he fought and almost-but-didn't-kill pretty much everyone...well, I think Northstar might have "died" for a while. It was pretty cool; Wolvie fought a shark, and JRJR drew it, so, you know, it had that going for it.

For this "Enemy of The State," Taylor puts this Wolverine in a situation that...isn't really like that at all. Just enough that they could get away with using the title, I guess. JRJR is not involved; it's drawn by Nic Virella, Djibril Morissette-Phan and Scott Hanna. There is no shark.

I'm not sure if Taylor used that title simply as an attention-grabbing call-back, or if he was making a sarcastic meta-point, since "Enemy of The State II" has hardly anything in common with "Enemy of The State," in the same way that Civil War II had hardly anything in common with Civil War (which was also written by Millar!). Probably the former.

So when we last saw All-New Wolverine Laura Kinney and her clone/little sister Gabby, the pair had just survived a Civil War II tie-in, and took the opportunity to tell everyone off, express their dissatisfaction with the very premise of Civil War II and announce their intention to stay out of it.

That entailed Laura putting cosplaying as Netflix's Jessica Jones--well, she put on a scarf and leather jacket--and packing up Gabby and their pet wolverine Jonathan for a cross-country trip to a stinky old cabin of Logan's, where they can sit out the civil war and also stay off the radar of Laura's old handler, who just mailed her a scary package tying into her origin as X-23. But trouble follows Team Wolverine!

Doused with her "trigger scent," which turns her into an unstoppable, mindless killing machine, Laura blacks out and kills the entire population of a nearby small town! (Spoiler: Not really, but she thinks she did). She's promptly arrested by SHIELD, escapes and then she tries to get to Madripoor, but along the way she's abducted by bad guys lead by Kimura, who wants to use her trigger scent to have her assassinate Tyger Tiger so they can...take over Madripoor? (I believe the original "Enemy of The State" took its name from the fact that the bad guys wanted to use Wolvie to kill the president of the United States, after his various fight scenes; I guess "The State" Laura is the enemy of is Madripoor...? Huh; I think the worst part of this arc may actually be its title...)

It takes the combined efforts of Gabby, time-travelling teenage Angel (Laura's boyfriend, remember), Teen Grey, the rather randomly here Gambit and some unlikely allies to not only straighten out what happened and why, but to also cure the trigger scent's hold on Laura once and for all, essentially purging her of the sorts of berserker rages that plagued her predecessor for so long and bringing to a close the grown-and-programmed-to-be-an-assassin part of her backstory.

It may have taken two consecutive trade paperbacks specifically labeled as sequels to comics from over a decade or so ago, but it looks like Laura, Taylor and All-New Wolverine are all ready to move on once and for all and into a less Old Wolverine sort of series. In essence, this storyline seems to complete the X-23 part of Laura once and for all.

The artwork is pretty rough, and the changes in personnel don't do any of it any favors. The trade collects issues #13-18; Virella draws the first two issues (with Hanna inking), and then Morissete-Phan comes on for an issue, and then Virella returns for an issue, and than Morissette-Phan returns for an issue, and then it's back to Virella again. I couldn't guess what was happening behind the scenes, but the results don't look so hot; the two artists draw one character, Roughhouse, completely differently, and thanks to a change in colorists, he even has different color hair, depending on the issue.

There are some minor things--Gambit's staff looks more like a huge pipe in a panel, Laura dons an Iron Man costume but leaves off the helmet for some reason--but it's mostly the aesthetic whiplash that hurts the visual aspect of the book...which, this being comics, is kind of an important aspect.

The comic has its moments--I liked the bit where Gabby responds to the smuggler who says she sees things differently, for example--but it's probably the worst of the three volumes collecting the series to date.

Avengers: Unleashed Vol. 1--Kang War One

Here's a good example of how challenging Marvel makes following their comics in trade paperback. Despite the "Vol. 1" on the spine, this continues writer Mark Waid's run on the flagship Avengers title, All-New, All-Different Avengers. That produced 15 serially-published issues of a comic book series and three trade paperback collections, which was apparently enough that Marvel decided they needed to relaunch the series with a new title and a new #1 issue, despite the fact that it had the same core cast (with Civil War II and Champions prompted a few defections) and that the same writer would be continuing the same storyline from his All-New, All-Different Avengers series.

To make matters more confusing still, the relaunched, renumbered and retitled comic book series is called simply Avengers, but it is being collected as Avengers: Unleashed for, um, reasons...?

As always, this is hardly an insurmountable barrier that is keeping larger numbers of people from buying and reading Avengers trade paperbacks, but it's still a barrier, and I can't quite make sense of why Marvel continues to keep throwing up such barriers at all. It seems pretty abundantly clear to everyone now, even Marvel, that whatever positive effects a continuous cycle of relaunches-in-numbers-only might have had in the past are disappearing, and I'm not convinced those positive effects of a temporary bump in periodical sales to comic shops were ever really more valuable than the potential loss of audience for the trade paperbacks which can, of course, last and sell indefinitely.

The copy I read, for what it's worth, came from the nearest book store to me, a Barnes and Noble. This store has the bulk of their graphic novels in two aisles; one devoted to manga, the other to everything else. Titles are shelved more-or-less alphabetically, but in this case Avengers: Unleashed Vol. 1 came before All-New, All-Different Avengers Vols. 1-3, probably because they decided to start the shelf devoted to Avengers comics with the adjective-less title. (If you want to catch up on Mark Waid's Avengers run, and haven't yet started, the actual reading order is All-New, All-Different Avengers Vols. 1-3, and then Avengers: Unleashed Vol. 1. Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers: Unleashed, while pretty good in its own right, has nothing to do with any of this).

After Iron Man Tony Stark got kinda sorta semi-killed at the end of Civil War II, and the kids Ms. Marvel, Nova and Spider-Man Miles Morales all decided to bounce and start their own team, what's left of this line-up quickly recruits a pair of old Avengers: Hercules and Spider-Man Peter Parker, the latter of whom basically buys his way on the team by offering them funding and a new headquarters on the top five floors of the Parker Industries, which used to be the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building. This seems to be one more point of comparison between the current Spider-Man and the old Iron Man, the main difference here being that none of Parker's teammates know he is both the rich guy funding them and letting them live in his Manhattan tower and a member of their superhero line-up.

Picking up on plot points from All-New, All-Different--particularly from The Vision issue of the Civil War II trade (reviewed in this long-ass post), Kang the Conqueror attacks the team pretty much as soon as Waid fleetly and efficiently sets up the new status quo. Waid, as I've said plenty of times previously, knows how to write comic books, and this one is very much an old-school superhero team book, right down to the pacing.

The plot, as almost all involving time travel are, is kind of complicated. Essentially, The Vision was facing a Baby Hitler situation with the infant Kang, and decided that rather than killing him, he would just abduct him and hide him. That resulted in adult versions of Kang attacking first The Vision and then the rest of The Avengers, and so the Kangs killed all of them when they were babies. They got that sorted out by the end of the third issue, but Waid then went in an unexpected direction, and had Captain America Sam Wilson decide that they should really quit playing defense and finish Kang off once and for all. All of that leads to recruiting a team of teams of Avengers from four eras, including the founders, attacking various parts of Kang's temporal empire.

The artist is now Michael Del Mundo, and as he's the only notable personnel change, he's probably the only real reason to bother relaunching, but given how often artists change on Marvel comics, it's not a terribly convincing reason. He is a great artist though, and his artwork, which he mostly colors himself, gives the interiors a painterly aesthetic that quite closely echoes that of cover artist Alex Ross (also retained from All-New, All-Different). He's really great with the trippy visuals, of which there are many. Some of these involve all the time travel and general super-hero craziness--as when Kang calls alternate version of himself in as reinforcements, and these resemble a MODOK-esque Kang with a giant head and little limbs, as well as a vaguely ape-like Kang. There are also just a few throwaway instances of Del Mundo going nuts with the visuals, as when he draws a Kang head that is itself made up of different versions of Kang.

Del Mundo is also great with lay-outs though, and there is some really effective "acting" bits, some of which call on the placement of characters, panels or lettering to have one character cut-off or silence another character visually as well as in the dialogue. He really gets to shine in the penultimate issue, in which Kang narrates his entire history on the way to a surprise ending, as the book consists almost entirely of double-page spreads, although rather busy ones with lots of visual information embedded in them. Overall, his presence really elevates Waid's Avengers run by his mere presence. Adam Kubert and those other guys were fine, but Del Mundo? Del Mundo is really, really good.

I'm no fan of The Vision, and I have been sick of Kang and his time shenanigans for almost as long as I've known who Kang is (I believe I audibly groaned when he first appeared within the pages of All-New, All-Different), but despite my personal distaste for some elements in the story arc, I still enjoyed the hell out of this comic book. If you like super-comics, this one is a good one--provided you can figure out when to read it!

Doctor Strange and The Sorcerers Supreme Vol. 1: Out of Time

Doctor Strange and The Sorcerers Supreme is a comic book series that simply shouldn't exist. Marvel has struggled with the character since 1996, which ended about 20 years worth of Doctor Strange ongoing comics in a pair of monthly series. His particular role in the Marvel Universe has meant he's never really been completely MIA for long, regularly racking up guest-appearances, memberships in various team books and rather regularly produced miniseries, but that the publisher has been able to keep the 2015-launched, Jason Aaron-written and (mostly) Chris Bachalo-drawn series going as long as they have is something of an achievement for a character some 20 years removed from his last ongoing series.

So of course Marvel, seeing some somewhat surprising success, immediately tried to strike while the iron is warmer than usual, launching a second Doctor Strange ongoing monthly series. (Similarly, when the latest volume of Black Panther proved a success with its first few issues, Marvel launched two additional Black Panther series, both of which were almost immediately canceled. Marvel seems so intent to find their next Deadpool-style cash chow that they seem to be treating everything that doesn't flop immediately as if they've found it.)

This context sets before Doctor Strange and The Sorcerers Supreme a rather unfortunately high bar: It doesn't just have to be pretty good, which it is, but it also must justify its very existence, and I'm afraid that as well-crafted as it is, as enjoyable as it was to read, it wasn't so great an achievement of comics story-telling that it had to be. The world would have continued to turn just fine were this a miniseries, or an original graphic novel, or a fill-in story arc of the monthly, or was simply never told at all.

Writer Robbie Thompson works mainly with the art team of pencil artist Javier Rodriguez and inker Alvaro Lopez, who contribute five of the six issues in this collection, while Nathan Stockman provides art for one of the issues. The premise is a rather simple one. When an incredibly powerful foe threatens Camelot, Merlin magically travels through time to assemble a super-group of various Sorcerers Supreme. In addition to Strange, these include familiar-ish characters Wiccan Billy Kaplan, from a future where he has inherited Strange's role; Strange's mentor The Ancient One, from a time when he was still a very young man and Sir Isaac Newton, who I am fairly certain has appeared in a Marvel comic of not too ancient vintage which I never read (I want to guess "SHIELD" was in the title, somewhere?), and his more intelligent-than-usual Mindless One, whom he calls "Mindful One."

Rounding out the team are two characters I thinkride anything, though).

Why Merlin plucked these particular characters from these particular points in time isn't ever explained, but it seems curious that he would recruit Strange at this particularly low-point in his magical powers, as well as The Ancient One before he was a little more, well, Ancient.

The issues are pretty formulaic. After the first, each begins with an origin story of sorts featuring one of the characters who will play a bigger than usual role in that particular issue, and then the narrative will plunge into the next step of their adventure. It takes some unexpected twists, as the threat Merlin calls them to face isn't what it first appears, Merlin himself doesn't stick around too long, and one of the Sorcerers betrays the others.

Rodirguez's art is uniformly excellent. The designs of all of the new and/or altered characters are all pretty great, from Rodriguez's version of an adult Billy to The Demon Rider and Conjuror, and, as should be the case with a 1960s-born, Steve Ditko-created character and milieu, there are plenty of opportunities for show-stoppingly intricate and imaginative imagery, like Strange and Merlin's walk-and-talk through time in the first issue, or a visit to (and battle within) Merlin's Escher-like library (which seems to owe quite a bit to the Distinguished Competition's Doctor Fate's tower).

The guest-art is strategically employed, coming during the fifth issue, a sort of pause to the action in which we learn the origin of the Marvel Universe's Sir Isaac Newton, and see his first meeting with Doctor Strange (back when he was at the height of his powers, hanging out with Clea). The final issue, for which Rodriguez appears, is a cute, clever (but kind of irritating in practice) choose-your-own-adventure style comic.

All-in-all, it's a particularly creative comic book, but it doesn't really offer anything that one can't find in the other Doctor Strange ongoing (which has also seen Strange teaming up with various sorcerers and mages, including pre-existing Marvel characters and intriguing new ones). That makes it a somewhat idiotic publishing decision--unless Marvel really thought that the movie would create so many Doctor Strange fans that they could do like they did with Guardians of The Galaxy, and build a line around the doctor--even if it does have entertainment value and impressive execution.

In other words, it's a pretty good comic that probably shouldn't have ever been published...at least not as a $3.99/20-page ongoing monthly.

Ms. Marvel Vol. 6: Civil War II

This is the first trade paperback collection of Ms. Marvel that I did not purchase a copy of. (That's right, it's time for everyone's favorite aspect of EDILW--Caleb Talks About His Comics Buying Habits!). Ms. Marvel has been one of the handful of Marvel comics I have been not only reading in trade, but buying in trade as well (due to cancellations, I think Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is now the only one I'm still buying regularly in trade!). The week this one was released, I let it sit on the shelf at the comics shop because it was a Civil War II tie-in, and I wanted to wait until I actually read Civil War II before I read this tie-in to it, and Civil War II was still going on. And then it was expanded to last an extra issue or something. And I think it was also late...?

Anyway, by the time I had read Civil War II in its collected form, Ms. Marvel Vol. 6 was months old, and given that I had already read something close to 10,000 trade paperback collections sub-titled Civil War II that I had borrowed from the library, I didn't see any reason to not just borrow Ms. Marvel Vol. 6 too, rather than spending $17.99 on it (Well, aside from "voting with my dollars" so that Marvel keeps Ms. Marvel going, I guess, although I don't know if they make many decisions like that based on trade sales...Oh, and making sure some really great comics creators get some extra royalties...?).

So the lesson here, Marvel Entertainment Decision-Maker Who Is No Doubt Reading This Post And Hanging On Every Word,  is that tie-ins to event storylines can make excellent jumping-off points, particularly if said event is delayed. You have probably heard this before, but every jumping-on point is also a good jumping-off point, and pretty much anything at all that disturbs a comics reader's buying habits in anyway is perilous.

So this six-issue collection has a four-issue Civil War II-related story arc sandwiched in between two issues that serve as a good prelude and a good epilogue, respectively; taken as a single unit, writer. G. Willow Wilson's sixth volume of the series is a pretty well-constructed story with its own beginning, middle and end.

The first issue was drawn by the series' original artist, Adrian Alphona, and guest-stars Ms. Marvel's then-fellow teen Avengers, Spider-Man Miles Morales and Nova...although not in the capacity one might expect. There is a Tri-State Science Fair going on, and Kamala Khan, Bruno and other members of her supporting cast are there competing against the New York contingent, lead by Miles. When there's an issue that forces the superheroes to suit up, Nova is just kind of flying by.

That final issue is drawn by Mirka Andolfo, whose work frequently appears in DC Comics Bombshells, and follows Kamala to her ancestral home in Karachi, where she has gone to try and clear her head from the terrible things that happened to her during Civil War II and the tie-in arc. Ms. Marvel has already been pretty blessed with all-around great art, but Andolfo is a really good fit, maybe particularly for this particular story, which has Kamala out of costume for most of it--she purposely left her costume back in Jersey City. Andolfo is probably a good name for the editors to keep in mind when the regular artists need a break.

As for the tie-in arc, Wilson's got kind of a difficult job, as Kamala has particularly close bonds with the two opposing "generals" in the war, having taken her superhero name from her lifetime idol Captain Marvel Carol Danvers, and having served alongside Iron Man Tony Stark on The Avengers for a few years now (our time). Those bonds, and her relationship with Miles, meant Civil War II writer Brian Michael Bendis all but had to include her in the series itself, and the moment she decides Carol has gone too far is one of the more dramatic ones in the series, at least if you know/care about the character. Additionally, Ruth Fletcher Gage and Christos Gage used Kamala a bit in their tie-in arc, which was collected in Captain Marvel Vol. 2: Civil War II.

Wilson doesn't include any of those scenes, and her arc doesn't really quite line-up with the events of Bendis' main event series. They fit well enough though, as long as you don't think too much about the timeline between the various books (When I was a high schooler, this would have infuriated me, and I probably woulda wrote an angry letter to a letters column). Instead, she keeps Kamala busy in Jersey City, where Carol Danvers has assigned her to be the team leader of a group of four young (superpower-less) volunteers who are quite excited about this whole predictive justice thing.

Kamala is obviously a little torn on the matter, because it's so obviously illegal and dumb--these kids un-ironically dress like Hitler Youth, topping off their outfits with arm bands and Saddam-like berets, and keeping the victims they don't actually arrest in a makeshift Guantanamo in an abandoned Jersey City warehouse. On the other hand, it's Carol Danvers asking her to help. (The business with Miles doesn't come up in here at all; his appearance at the science fair was his only appearance in this volume.)

When a classmate gets citizen-arrested by the group, and Bruno gets badly injured, Kamala finally flips sides, trying to orchestrate a demonstration of how Ulysses' powers don't always work, one that gets Captain Marvel and Iron Man in the same place at the same time, for all the good that does.

Wilson's arc is actually pretty ambitious, as she tries, not terribly successfully, to tie Marvel's civil "war" with the geo-political events that created Pakistan. The four tie-in issues including flashback sequences drawn by Alphona that are set in the 1940s, the 1970s and in Kamala's childhood, as well as shortly into her career as Ms. Marvel. These reveal the origin of that thing she wears on her left arm, how she first met Bruno and some poetic suggestions about her Inhuman bloodline, as her grandmother and mother speak of something special inside them, something from beyond the stars.

The tone is a little all-over the place, though. Alphona's artwork in those four issues is his most stately and serious--well, there's a lot of silliness in Kamala's second-grade classroom--but the modern day business, all drawn by Takeshi Miyazawa, features a Canadian Ninja Syndicate who attack with, like, chickens and straight edges. The family history is meant to be taken quite seriously, while the Jersey City action is melodramatic in the mighty Marvel manner--all the Carol Vs. Tony stuff--while Kamala's difficulties with Bruno and her other friends are also supposed to be serious, but those scenes come between ones of over-the-top junior fascist nonsense. While not technically part of the arc, the very first issue is Alphona at his loosest, with most panels busting at the borders with little gags (Each long or medium shot is worth scrutinizing for visual gags, mostly centered around the science projects in the background, and callbacks aplenty can be found in the later classroom scene).

It's...a weird book. Well-written, extremely well drawn and with an ambitious amount of humor, drama and melodrama, it's nevertheless tonally unique, as if Wilson is deciding scene by scene what kind of modern Marvel book her Ms. Marvel is going to be, a serious one, a comedic one or a Nick Spencer-esque combination of the two.

Oh! I just noticed as I was writing this that, according to the back cover, this is rated "T+"; I found that a little surprising, if only because Ms. Marvel is one of the publisher's most consistently teen-friendly, genuinely all-ages comics I've encountered.


*Let me go check my bookshelf to be sure! Let's see... Ghost Rider canceled, Howard The Duck canceled, Patsy Walker canceled, lost interest in All-New, All-Different Avengers and Star Wars, didn't care for that first volume of the current Black Panther...Yeah, jeez, if I'm not going to keep reading Ms. Marvel in trade, I am currently down to just Squirrel Girl! At least for the time being. I am sure that will change in the near-ish future.

Review: A-Force Vol. 0: Warzones!

I read the first issue of writers G. Willow Wilson and Marguerite Bennett and pencil artist Jorge Molina's five-issue A-Force miniseries shortly after it was first released, and had summed it up thusly: "It's not very good, but it's not bad either; it's well-crafted, What If..?-style continuity gobbledygook." The series has since ended and been collected and published as A-Force Vol. 0, and I'm afraid reading the other four-fifths of the series didn't alter that assessment any.

If anything, I disliked the trade more than I disliked that first single issue, as with so much of the story yet-to-be-published, one could at least hope it would get better in the following four issues.

It did not.

Unlike the handful of Secret Wars-related collections I've read so far (Runaways, Weirdworld, 1872), A-Force is quite deeply rooted in the particulars of the main series' "Battleworld" setting, and completely lacking in any sort of premise, or even organizing principle, of its own. So on the one hand, it seems overly concerned with the specifics of Secret Wars and Battleworld, but, on the other hand, it seems completely random in its construction and narrative.

This particular region/domain of Battleworld is a tiny, Mediterranean-style island home to versions of just about every superhero in the Marvel Universe, plenty of civilians and zero supervillains. It's unclear what the super-people do all day, or why they even bother with costumes and codenames. She-Hulk is the domain's "Baroness," which is the local ruler who answers to Victor Von Doom, god-king of Battleworld. The borders of Battleworld are strictly patrolled and enforced by The Thors, which are various Marvel heroes who have been Thor-ized. There are a lot of rules and politics involved in administration and borders, which drive the plot of this mini in a way that is unusual among the few books I've read so far. In fact, the central conflict of A-Force involves a bad actor gaming the rules of Battleworld for political gain. So not the most exciting of plotlines, if you're not really, really into that aspect of Secret Wars.

As for the premise of the series, it seems like it was decided on some meta, macro level well ahead of the first draft of the script. The idea was apparently What If...All The Avengers Were Women?, loudly declared on the cover of the first issue (and the trade collection) in which Jim Cheung draws pretty much every Marvel heroine he can fit in a single image, even those who don't get so much as a cameo inside the book (Snowbird? Moondragon?). Marvel quickly adopted "A-Force" as a way to brand comics starring their female heroes, too, as they launched those A-Force Presents anthology collections of early issues of Thor, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel and so on.

But the story within never addresses the fact that Arcadia's completely unnecessary superhero team–again, no super-villains, no street crime and a population that seems to be about 75% superhero–consists only of female super-people (Luke Cage, Black Bolt and Namor cameo in the first issue; by the last issue, we'll also see that Black Panther, Commander Rogers, The Winter Soldier, Colossus, Gambit and other male heroes make their homes in Arcadia too). And the particular female characters who make up the team are pretty random: She-Hulk, Medusa, Dazzler, Captain Marvel, Loki, Nico Minoru and America "Miss America" Chavez (Spider-Woman and Pixie are among the characters who seem to be on the team too, but don't get much panel-time). Apparently these are just the characters Bennett and/or Wilson and/or Molina wanted to write about and/or draw for five issues (Molina's preferences might indicate why they chose to use the disco-era version of Dazzler, roller skates and all; I'm assuming he just really liked drawing her plunging neckline in that particular costume, given how often it's in the book; in terms of characterization, the characters are all completely interchangeable, and any handful of characters could fill the roles this handful play).

Adding to the shoulder-shrugging randomness of a core super-team consisting of a pair of Avengers, an Inhumans/Fantastic Four character, a member of the X-Men, one of The Runaways and the trans-feminated version of Thor's archenemy is the fact that everyone's powers seem weird and random. Miss America and Dazzler can fly now, for example, and Nico's magic powers don't work like they did in Runaways. Oh, and the relationships are all kinda weird. Like Loki is the mother figure of Nico and America, who are the best friends in the world here, despite the fact that I don't think they've ever even met prior to this comic...?

So, what have we got? A-Force is on a routine patrol when suddenly they are attacked by a Megaladon. America throws it so hard that it lands outside of Arcadia's domain, and so a Thor version of The Falcon shows up to arrest her, and exile her to somewhere. Everyone's mad that She-Hulk was unable to stop this from happening (Despite arguing with Dr. Strange, who is Dr. Doom's "sherrif"...?), but, when she investigates, she finds that the prehistoric monster shark was imported via a magical portal.

Later, a little girl who looks like a night sky falls to the Earth and befriends Nico. This is a new character named Singularity. And another portal opens, this one dropping a Sentinel on Arcadia, and when Shulkie and company follow it back to where it came from, more members of the Thor Coprs–Valkyrie, Gamorra and Sif–show up to make more arrests. It's quickly determined that the person opening the portals is using Asgardian magic, and thus the person causing all of the trouble turns out to be the one who is literally the only supervillain in the whole domain.

When she's busted, Loki plans to take Arcadia down with her, knocking down a wall separating their domain from the next one over, which is apparently that of the Marvel Zombies. That, at least, leads to a fifth issue that consists mostly of Marvel heroes fighting zombies, and cameos aplenty. This is actually a lot of fun, if only in a spot-the-character kind of way, as a reader can wait to see if their favorites show up in a panel, several of which aim for cute little pairings, like Spider-Gwen rescuing MJ, or Jessica Jones protecting Luke and Danielle or living light-show characters Dazzler, Jubilee and Karolina side by side. I liked seeing that Nico wasn't the only Runaway on Arcadia, at least; Gert shows up atop Old Lace, and Molly shares a panel with Colossus.

Like the Weirdworld collection, this one is labeled "Vol. 0" because it's leading to a new ongoing series, set in the "real" (and post-Secret Wars) Marvel Universe. Presumably that will have a clearly defined premise of some sort, beyond "The Creators Liked These Characters And Had 100 Pages To Kill On A Secret Wars Tie-In."

Review: Ms. Marvel Vol. 3: Crushed

The third collected volume of Ms. Marvel, sub-titled Crushed, is the last collection before Secret Wars rears its Secret Wars-y head in Jersey City, sweeping Kamala Khan up in the (completely temporary) end of the Marvel Universe. The collection has three complete and distinct stories, each with a different artist and, most surprising of all, one of those three is not written by Kamala's co-creator and writer G. Willow Wilson (I think marking the first non-Wilson scripted appearance of Ms. Marvel), and is from a book other than Ms. Marvel.

All three stories are very good, however, which, in the case of the third, is actually quite a relief.

The first story is a done-in-one from Ms. Marvel #12, and features a somewhat forced appearance by Loki, currently in his Agent of Asgard appearance (handsome young man with smaller-than-usual horns on a...tiara, I guess...?) and status quo. He's sent to Jersey City on a flimsy mission to investigate the recent dangers there. He immediately meets Bruno and tries to help Bruno win Kamala's heart, and then crashes their school's Valentine's Dance.

Ms. Marvel and Loki don't exactly fight and team up; they sort of argue and then go their separate ways.

Elmo Bondoc draws this issue, and while the art is in sharp contrast to that in the rest of the book, it's within the same aesthetic ballpark of original artist Adrian Alphona, and is actually really quite sharp.

Wilson's script is as fun and funny as usual, including the way that everyone but Kamala seems to know Bruno is pining for her, and everyone but Bruno knows he'll never win her heart. There's a running gang about how no one even flinches at the site of Loki either, assuming that "viking" is just a new, hipster style that will be catching on soon (I guess that works if Loki has the appearance of a twenty-something now).

Wilson did pass up a perfectly good opportunity for a Mean Girls allusion, however, when Ms. Marvel smashes through the skylight in her school's gymnasium, points at Loki, and shouts, "Everybody stop! This guy is not in high school!"

Surely "He doesn't even go here!" would work just as well, right?

The second story is the three-issue arc from which the collection takes its title, which ran from #13-#15, and is illustrated by the always excellent, always welcome Takeshi Miyazawa. It's an awfully Inhumans-y story, and I'm not crazy about Ms. Marvel's connections to The Inhumans–her name alone saddles the character with a little too much Marvel Universe baggage, making her one of the dozen or so Marvl Comics Marvel characters, so to also link her origin to the new conception of The Inhumans and to keep referencing it doesn't seem terribly smart to me.

It's a very fun story though, even if, by it's climax, I found myself wondering if I should know who this "Lineage" character is and what became of Queen Medusa and Lockjaw in New Attilan. Kamala's parents want to introduce her to their friends son, and while she dreads it, wouldn't you know he turns out to be super-cute and to have so much in common with her that it's practically love at first sight?

It turns out he may have too much in common with her, however, as he reveals that he too is an Inhuman, after Kamala fights a young, bad guy Inhuman about her own age by the name of "Kaboom."

It's a short, swift arc, and there's a lot of fun teen drama in there, including the continuation of the Bruno-love-Kamala plot, and some business with Kamala's older brother. Her almost-boyfriend showing his true colors happens pretty quickly, and I wonder if the arc might not have been more dramatically satisfying if Wilson kept us guessing about him longer, but then, chances are she didn't have time. Secret Wars was looming, after all.

This is pretty awesome:

Because her last name is actually Khan, get it?

The final story in this collection is an issue of SHIELD featuring Ms. Marvel, written by Mark Waid (who will be writing Ms. Marvel regularly in the post-Secret Wars Avengers title) and drawn by Humberto Ramos and VIctor Olazaba.

It seems somewhat unusual to include an issue of something other than Ms. Marvel in a trade collection of the Ms. Marvel series, but I think it's a testament to how popular a character she is (readers who read her will want to read all of her appearances), and how relatively young/new she is (there aren't that many appearances of her outside her own book yet; her Amazing Spider-Man appearances are solicited to appear in Ms. Marvel #4.

In this issue, two of the SHIELD agents from the TV show, Agents Coulson and Simmons, are trying to track down a high school student dealing in old super-villain gear. And wouldn't you know the high school he attends is Kamala Khan's? Despite Coulson's continual attempts to keep her from helping out, Simmons sees something of herself in Kamala, and Ms. Marvel naturally forces the issue, helping them whether they like it or not.

Waid handles Kamala particularly, even surprisingly well, but perhaps it shouldn't be too big a surprise. One of Kamala's more endearing character traits is the extreme fannish-ness she harbors towards the superheroes of the Marvel Universe. It's a trait Waid accentuates in this issue, and certainly an old-time, old-school fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel (and DC) superhero trivia like Waid can easily relate too. It bodes well for her time in the Waid-written Avengers book.

Pencil artist Ramos offers one of the more far afield depictions of the new Ms. Marvel to date, but he is and pretty much always has been a consummate artist of teenage super-people, and he naturally does a fine job on the art for this issue as well.

Review: A-Force #1

I've been quite curious about the Secret Wars premise as a whole, and I was made more curious about this title in particular thanks to Jill Lepore’s article in which she dismissed the characters as all resembling porn stars, and her son and her son’s friends mention of all the characters having “cleavages” (The only cleavage on the cover I note is Dazzler’s and, within the book itself, Loki’s, Namora’s (in just the one panel) and Nico Minoru’s (depending on the angle, in just a few of the panels she appears in). But then I guess I shouldn’t put too much stock in 10-year-old boys’ understandings of and usage of certain vocabulary. That's the part of the article that really stuck with me though, because I like the way they used "cleavages" as a plural and all).

As this was the first Serect Wars book I had access to (i.e. my friend bought it, so I didn’t have to blow $4 of my own money on a 21-page comic book.), I figured I should read and maybe write about it here, on the Internet, which I am now doing.

So, the Secret Wars tie-ins are apparently really beginning en medias res, huh? This book opens with a first page of six, small, tight, horizontal panels, and then a two-page splash page(s) filling up the second and third pages.

In the first, the narrator–presumably She-Hulk, as she's standing front and center and filling the most space on the crowded cover–talks in poetic language about an island, while we see see a half-dozen rapid fire images of seven female superheroes and some civilians (Is that Luke Cage in panel three? Or is it racist of me to assume every huge, super-cut bald black guy pushing a stroller with a baby in it and standing next to a white lady with dark hair is Luke Cage?). The narrationboxes are green instead of standard yellow or white; another good indication that it's She-Hulk (who is, remember, green).

On the splash, we see roller skate-era Dazzler, X-Person Pixie, Runaway Nico Minoru, Ms. America (America Chavez version) and Captain Marvel Carol Danvers flying over a big, beautiful, vaguely Mediterranean-looking island nation: "Welcome to Arcadia," a little green box says, followed immediately by another that add "It's pretty tight."

No sooner had I begun to question whether or not Miss America and Dazzler could fly and how Nico Minoru could without using The Staff of One (and why she'd waste a flight spell on patrolling) when the title page interrupts, explaining this much at least about Secret Wars:

More about the rules of this new "patchwork" world (their words, not mine!) become clear as one reads on, as apparently She-Hulk is "the baroness" of Arcadia, the Thors police the world and enforce its rules and Dr. Strange is apparently higher-up the pecking order than some (I got a bit of a House of M vibe from the page in which Shulkie and Dr. Strange talk Battleworld politics, to be honest).

As for the plot, there's not much to it for a first issue, and the bigger, more obvious questions go unanswered–Why is it called Arcadia? Why is the team called A-Force? Why is A-Force composed entirely of female characters, particularly if there are at least a few super-dudes in town?

During a routine, morning patrol, a gigantic monster shark with spikes on its face that we're told is a Megaladon attacks America, the patrolling super-people kicks its ass and, after it's down, Ms. America picks it up and throws it...out of the bowl...that the ocean is in...maybe?

I didn't follow this part, just in the visual mechanics of it.

And there's a ghost in the background...I think....?

As throwing monster sharks out of the borders of a place is against the laws of Doom, America is to be arrested by the Thor version of The Falcon (sadly not Accompanied by Redwing in a little viking helmet), and she's to suffer some terrible punishment that readers won't know enough about to guess the exact nature of.

Female Loki and Medusa are kind of catty about She-Hulk being unable to stop this from happening, and Nico, who is apparently super-tight with America in this new setting with what I assume must be a new, jumbled continuity (She doesn't need her staff ever for anything, apparently!). She-Hulk turns to help from Namorita, Namora and Namor, as apparently Megaladon don't naturally occur in the ocean bowl outside of Arcadia, and when the three sea-going superheroes investigate, they find something that we'll have to wait until next issue to find out about .

Namorita, I should note, has a seashell over one breast, not both breasts, as Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker. Man, it's weird Jill Lepore wrote about A-Force in The New Yorker and discussed Namorita's breasts. It's weirder still that she messed up that part, as it's not like she was dealing with very big or complicated numbers. Namorita only has two breasts; we're dealing with numbers between one and two here.

I still can't wrap my head around that article's existence. Why did Marvel give Lepore a copy of this book, instead of Secret Wars, or any of their billion Avengers titles? Why did Lepore decide to write about this in relation to Avengers: Age of Ultron, as if this book were somehow the most representative of Marvel comics? So weird.

The book is written by G. Willow Wilson and Marguerite Bennett, and drawn by Jorge Molina, who both pencils and inks (with Craig Yeung helping out on inks and two colorists needed for the 21 pages, for some reason).

It's not very good, but it's not bad either; it's well-crafted, What If..?-style continuity gobbledygook. Characters are introduced, characters that have the names and appearances of some fairly familiar if minor Marvel characters but are essentially brand-new, based on their characterization and their relationships. A few conflicts are introduced, ones that will likely be explored during the remainder of the series, with the way in which the book ties into Secret Wars proper becoming more clear as it goes on.

The artwork is fine, but unspectacular; Molina's work is almost perfectly clear and well-executed, in a style that doesn't distract form the story, with the only real confusing bit occurring during what was unfortunately a rather key moment (the bit with the border violation). I don't like the way he draws Megaladons, but I guess I've never seen one in person, so I really can't claim he's drawn it wrong.

All in all, it's a perfectly acceptable, laughably over-priced, mediocre comic book from Marvel. Thinking back on Lepore's attacks on it and Wilson's defense of the book, it's hard to understand what either of them got worked up about, as it reads like nothing more than paycheck comics-writing devoted to 1/75th of a line-wide event series of the sort Marvel publishes on the regular.

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I just went back and re-read Lepore's article, having now read the comic book she devoted so much New Yorker ink to. This is the second-to-last paragraph:

There’s an underwater superhero in the A-Force, but we couldn’t figure out her name. All I remember is: she wore a seashell on each breast.

Here's the panel in which "the underwater superhero" is introduced:

So not only did she mess up the math on the seashells-to-breasts ratio, she also miscounted the number of underwater superheroes (I see three; am I blind? There are three there, right?) and she couldn't figure out their names, which are written there?

I could understand Lepore not knowing which of the three characters belongs to which of the three names, but even without the benefit of knowing who any of them are or Googling 'em, she and her 10-year-old co-writers should at least be able to narrow the name down to one of three likely possibilities, right?

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

I just saw a link to this today, proving that The New Yorker isn't the only completely idiotic print media institution to publish bizarrely out-of-touch stories about superhero comics as if their staff and their audiences haven't heard anything about them since the Kennedy administration. George Gene Gustines' "Fashion & Style" page article "Sorry, Batman: Dick Grayson Outgrows the Robin Costume" lets NYT readers know that Dick Grayson is all grown-up and no longer Robin, thus catching them up to the year 1984 in the character's development.

Maybe in another five years, GGG and the NYT can write a story about how Jason Todd was murdered by The Joker ("Holy Murder, Batman! Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!") or that Batgirl was shot and paralyzed by The Joker.

Well, at least this argument passes this Bechdel test.

New Yorker porn.

I had every intention of writing a blog post tonight, but my friend and I got distracted by links to a recent discussion on Marvel's female superheroes prompted by a surprisingly poorly-conceived article in The New Yorker, which ended up eating an awfully big chunk of my evening.

If you haven't heard, as neither of us had until about three hours ago, very smart historian, Harvard professor and usually very good writer Jill Lepore, best known in comics circles as the author of last year's The Secret History of Wonder Woman, wrote an odd, disjointed article for The New Yorker in which she criticizes an advance review copy of A-Force by forming some sort of focus group with two ten-year-old boys.

It's a very bizarre article, of the sort that seems like it was written in 1998, and really should have the words "Biff," "Bam" and "Pow" in the headline. I don't expect everyone who engages in superhero comics to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the sort most fans boast (to be able to name all of the characters on the cover of A-Force #1, for example), but Lepore seems to wear her ignorance like a badge of honor in this discussion, getting the most basic of facts wrong when a simple Google search would provide answers to her questions. I'm not sure how it even got past fact-checkers; The New Yorker has fact checkers, right? (To pick one egregious example, she mentions the fact that the male Thor has turned into a woman; in actuality, a woman has proven worthy of wielding male Thor's magic hammer, thus gaining the powers of Thor...male Thor is still a man, and has appeared alongside the mysterious new woman with the powers of Thor in, like, every issue).

If I had to guess, I would assume a particularly out-of-touch New Yorker editor noticed that all the kids were talking about Marvel heroes because of the movie that was coming out, and thought that since Lepore wrote a book about a superhero, maybe they could commission her to write a piece for them, thus tapping into the cultural zeitgeist of the first few weeks of May. That, or Lepore herself pitched it to make a little extra scratch, persuading her editor that the kids are talking about Marvel superheroes right now, and she wrote a book about a superhero, so they should maybe pay her some New Yorker money for a piece of click-bait.

Either way, it's a very embarrassing piece; not simply for all of the moments in which Lepore reveals extreme ignorance, but the obstinance of that ignorance, the refusal to Google "She-Hulk" or "A-Force" or "female Thor" or "Thor + The View," as if lowering herself to do such "research" would somehow sully her discussion of the subject matter (Granted, the premise seems to be an attempt to view this comic book through the eyes of 10-year-old boys...she probably shoulda had them fact-check her article, though. Also, one of them probably should have brought up Secret Wars to her, as A-Force isn't really even meant to be considered outside the context of a Marvel Unvierse gone mad, with alternate realities colliding into a new, temporary, bizarre structure not meant to last longer than a few months).

Ms. Marvel and A-Force writer G. Willow Wilson responded at some length to Lepore's article here; Wilson, like Joss Whedon, is someone that Lepore actually calls out for what she perceives as the failings of the female superheroes in Marvel movies and comics. (I'm only on chapter three of Secret History of Wonder Woman, but if she thinks that, then I'm assuming the only superhero comics Lepore has ever read were those by William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter...?).

I'm not terribly worked up about Lepore's piece–these paragraphs being nothing more than a probably over-tedious wind-up to a lame joke–as it is such a strange throwback to a time when comics as a medium and industry was still fighting for respectability against the prejudices of the mainstream. The roles are so reversed now that comics (or at least comic book-generated intellectual properties) are devouring the rest of pop culture and assimilating other media. To see someone writing in a magazine criticizing the perceived failings of Marvel superheroes based on what one overhears from some children of her acquaintance seems utterly demented. I'm a little surprised Wilson engaged Lepore at all, let alone with as much patience, grace and intelligence as she did.

But what I found most interesting here is that we have Jill Lepore (a woman) and G. Willow Wilson (a woman) discussing the cast of characters starring in the upcoming coming book A-Force (all of whom, of course, are women). So here we have an Internet argument about comics that totally passes the Bechdel test, and if that's not progress, I don't know what is.

....

I wonder if Lepore knows what the Bechdel test is...?