Review: Howard The Duck #1

There are going to be inherent levels of wrongness involved in any Howard the Duck comic, perhaps even more so than in most other characters with creator vs. company legal issues and hard feelings in their past, on account of those conflicts involving the character being fresher than those of, say, the first generation of Marvel characters.

The level of that wrongness a reader feels will likely depend on the reader, of course. If you were around and reading comics in the 1970s, then you'll be familiar with writer Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik's introduction of the character, the character's meteoric rise to fame (there's a reason the character was the first one to make the jump from Marvel comic book to silver screen by a a dozen years) and the ensuing clashes over creative control between the late Gerber and Marvel. In fact, you probably lived through parts of it, seeing the results or reading the coverage of it. For you, Marvel Howard The Duck comics likely seem wrongest.

If you've just heard about all of that well after the fact, then new Howard The Duck comics are still going to feel somewhat wrong, but likely less so.

And, of course, if you've never heard of Gerber, Marvel and The Duck's contentious history, and are only familiar with the character for his rather random, weird-ass appearances in oddball Marvel Comics (Marvel Zombies 5, Marvel Zombies Destroy, Fear Itself: Fearsome Four) and his brief after-the-credits cameo in Guardians of The Galaxy, then perfect! Has Marvel got a comic for you! In fact, you may be able to enjoy Howard The Duck #1 completely guilt-free, and without wondering if you should off-set your purchase with a donation to the Hero Initiative or a comics charity of some sort (Sure, go ahead and do so! Never hurts to donate $3.99 to the Hero Initiative).

So Howard the Duck #1 is really a bad news, good news sort of comic book. Yes, it will feel weird and slightly wrong for a lot of readers and potential readers that such a book even exists (Asking if the world needed more Howard The Duck comics, by the way, is a sucker's game; The Big Two are kinda sorta built on continuing to publish comics that the world doesn't really need, but portions of it want).

On the other hand, if a Howard The Duck comic must exist—and given Marvel's business model, it must exist eventually—then you couldn't really ask for a stronger creative team, nor a better comic. And it's nice to see a "created by" credit and that the creators aren't doing anything even approaching a Gerber pastiche. This is, instead, a misanthropic, down-on-his-luck talking duck in an pure comedic version of the Marvel Universe. Like, up to his shoulders in the Marvel Universe. In this issue, the first 20-pages of the series, there are substantial appearances by Spider-Man, Black Cat, Rocket Raccoon, She-Hulk and the supporting cast of her just-canceled series (Shulkie and Howard have offices in the same building).

The comic is the work of writer Chip Zdarsky, probably currently best known as the artist of Image Comics' irreverent Sex Criminals, and artist Joe Quinones, a major talent well-deserving of a high-profile, monthly showcase like this (If not higher-profile, but hey, this is good for now).

Quinones' style is pretty straight, meaning his Spider-Man and She-Hulk look like the ones that would appear in their own comics, his "sets" and "extras" are those of the "real" Marvel Universe, not some warped version of it. That is, Quinones isn't trying to draw "funny." (Did I use too many quote marks in that paragraph? I think I did. Imagine how annoying it would be to actually be talking to me right now, instead of reading this post; I'd be air-quoting, like, constantly.)

That sets up the important clash between appearance and content that powers the book's comedy. The delivery is deadpan, so no matter how over-the-top the gag might be—the training montage, for example, or Howard's "receptionist"—they never feel forced, but just scroll by.

And there are a lot of gags in this book, which is actually a rather dense read—always welcome these days, when Marvel charges $3.99 for 20-pages of ad-filled comics. Character humor, fishduck-out-of-water humor, minor visual gags, snappy dialogue, making fun of Spider-Man*...few panels go by without a joke of some kind, and those that do are usually preceded and followed by one with a joke.

As for the plot, it involves Howard having set up a new business venture. In the past, oh, decade or so he's been a lawyer, a member of the Fifty-State Initiative an an agent of ARMOR (the Alternate Reality Monitoring and Operational Response, created for the Marvel Zombies franchise). Now he's a private investigator, and not a terribly successful one (This issue opens and closes with him in jail cells). He meets a pretty nice human lady who owns a tattoo parlor he makes his unofficial partner, he takes a case retrieving a stolen piece of jewelry from The Black Cat** and he gets collected by an agent of The Collector.

But as to the pressing question regarding a new Howard The Duck series, the answer is, I'm sad to say, yes, yes he still wears pants. You may recall—if you're one of those readers for whom there's a level of wrongness about the book—that Howard originally looked like Donald Duck, only in 1950s businessman's attire instead of a sailor suit.

That was, in fact, the joke from which the character sprung. He was another kind of comic book character wandering into an entirely different kind of a comic, from classic funny animal comics to mainstream horror comics. He looked so much like a Disney duck, however, that his appearance lead to the other controversy involving the character, the end result of which Howard had to wear pants and have his head rearranged, pupil to bill, until he looked less like a cartoon duck and more like a real duck...or at least the movie version of himself.

Those of us who thought that a positive aspect of Disney buying Marvel might be that Howard The Duck could finally take off his pants and assume a form closer to his original, well, those hopes are now rather thoroughly dashed.

This Howard still looks somewhat wrong then—to me, at least—but then I suppose that too has a benefit, further distancing the title from the previous, original run, and thus any aura of pastiche.

Like every other aspect of the book, then, it's wrong done right.



*Spider-Man's a good example of the variety of humor in this comic. When we first meet him, he's playing with an old gadget of his, the one that shoots a sort of Spider-Man's Face-signal from his belt, and cracking jokes, as is a thing that Spider-Man often does. When we see him later, he's breaking down and sobbing about Uncle Ben, when he thinks his own selfishness might have resulted in Howard's death. So, you know, you get normal, funny Spidey and you get Zdarksy taking the piss out of the character, by making fun of his emotional trauma regarding his dead uncle.

**She's first misidentified as "The Cat-Woman" and, oddly enough, her own status quo seems to mirror the recent status quo shift that DC's Catwoman has undergone. While Catwoman set herself up as the boss of Gotham City's organized criminal element, Felicia Hardy is apparently trying to be more of a Kingpin of Crime sort, Spider-Man says, then The Black Cat who flirts with the city's premier superhero and, while technically a thief and villain, still has a heart of gold.

Review: Marvel Zombies Destroy!

My initial reaction to this book was to make a joke about the fact that they have now made so many Marvel Zombies comics that they decided to quit numbering them, but looking at that Wikipedia page I mentioned in my recent review of Marvel Zombies 5, I see this is hardly the first Marvel Zombies-branded book to be published sans a number (That would be their third outing, Dead Days, and Destroy! was also preceded by the non-numbered Return, Evil Evolution and Supreme).

This five-issue, 2012 miniseries seems to follow Marvel Zombies 5 rather closely in that it features Howard The Duck fighting zombies in an alternate dimension, but it is not the work of Marvel Zombies 3-5 scribe Fred Van Lente; rather this miniseries rather unusually has two different writers, with a Frank Marraffino (Marvel Zombies Supreme) writing the first two issues, and veteran writer Peter David taking over for the final three issues. The unusual change seems to suggest a problem of some kind, or at least a story behind it, but perhaps it was a schedule thing as much as anything else; there's a little editorial in the back by editor Jake Thomas that mentions the difficulties the team went through in getting it out, and how the project was a dream come true for him, and how heavily involved he was.

The art team is more stable, but it still required a fill-in artist, which is, again, pretty unusual in a miniseries, and the fill-in falls on issue #3, which is right where the writers change. A Mirco Pierfederici draws all of the issues save for #3, which is penciled by Al Barrionuevo and inked by Rick Magyar. It's worth noting that the change isn't terribly disruptive; I wouldn't have noticed a change in either writer or artist while reading if I hadn't read the credits page first.

I think that says less about the styles and skills of the creators than the fact that they were working on a franchise with such specific sensibilities. Does it have zombies in it? Are there a lot of jokes, a dark sense of humor and a great deal of horror? Okay, fine, it's Marvel Zombies then. Like a few other offerings to date, this one doesn't really feature the "real" Marvel Zombies, the ones from that alternate dimension first introduced by Mark Millar which was basically just the Marvel Universe if all the superheroes had turned into zombies, but it does feature plenty of zombified Marvel superheroes (from another alternate dimension full of zombies), and cast is split between Golden Age characters and the most obscure Marvels this side of Woodgod. Howard the Duck gets top bill (Ha! Bill!), and Dum Dum Dugan is the next biggest star, if that tells you anything about the cast.

Howard, Agent of ARMOR, recruits Dum Dum, Agent of SHIELD, to be a part of his crack strike force nicknamed "Ducky's Dozen." It appears that ARMOR, the acronym for government agency Alternate Reality Monitoring and Operationl Response, has discovered a reality where the Nazis won World War II (like DC's pre-Crisis Earth-X, then), and they accomplished this by becoming zombies. Worse yet, the Nazi zombies are preparing to invade the Marvel Universe, unless Howard's team can journey there first and wreck their mode of conveyance. Dugan has been recruited specifically for his Nazi-fighting expertise, but he suspects there's some other reason Howard wants him along and isn't telling him...and he's right!

As for The Dozen, they're a huge group of totally awesome-weirdos, only a few of whom I had ever even heard of, or could tell you much of anything about: Battlestar, Blazing Skull, Breeze Barton, Red Raven, Dragoon, Dynaman, Eternal Brain, Flexo, Gur and Taxi Taylor. How many of these guys are super-old, super-obscure characters, and how many were invented specifically to be killed off in this series? There's only one way to find out, and it's a good 15 minutes of Wikipedia-ing fun!

Spoiler alert: 3/4th of them don't make it back home, but somehow I doubt some of these deaths will stick, given the tongue-in-cheek nature of the entire series.

The dozen heroes journey into Nazi zombie-controlled territory and attempt to fight their way up a Mount Rushmore-style Nazi base with the heads of Hate-Monger, Zola, Red Skull and Baron Von Stucker, and they immediately find unexpected heavy resistance in the form of the zombified, Nazi-fied Invaders. And then they get some unexpected assistance from some lady superheroes going by the name "The Sufragists," and lead by Miss America, who has picked up this world's fallen Captain America's shield and legacy.

As the story progresses, new unlikely allies and unlikely enemies join the fray, with Loki siding with Earth-616's good guys and a zombified Thor and the rest of a zombified Asgard siding with the Nazis whose ancestors used to worship them.

There's a nicely strange aura about the entire book, owing in large part to its big, odd-ball cast, almost all of whom are completely disposable on account of their being either created specifically for this book, so rarely seen it's hard to imagine they would be missed (I had no idea Red Raven was even still alive to be killed!) or alternate reality characters, in which case anything goes, as we've got our own perfectly good Thor or Zola or whoever back in the "real" Marvel Universe.

Some gags work a lot better than others. I thought the riffs on Namor's catch-phrase didn't really work, as they were coming from Namor—well, a Namor—himself, but I did sort of love the armband worn by Dum Dum's alternate dimension, Nazi zombie doppelganger:

Yes, that's a handlebar mustache where the swastika should be and, yes, they did think to rename him Dead Dead Dugan, which is the title of this particular issue's story.

Marvel Zombies Destroy! certainly has its moments and, I think, more moments than many of the other Marvel Zombies efforts. It appears that there's still some life in this franchise after all.

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One of my favorite parts was Thomas' editorial, as in it he shares some of the concept art he came up with for covers, which looked a lot different and a lot better once Michael Del Mundo got a hold of it:

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So have we all agreed to just ignore what Original Sins revealed about the true nature of Dum Dum Dugan, because it's stupid? Will Secret Wars/Battleworld un-retcon that away? Because I couldn't get it out of my mind while reading this, and it really made me wish I'd read Destroy before Original Sin or Original Sins.

Review: Fear Itself: Deadpool/Fearsome Four

This collection does not feature a Deadpool/Fearsome Four team-up, as the title might make one think. Rather, it collects two separate and unconnected Fear Itself tie-in series: the three-part Deadpool series and the four-part Fearsome Four series.

This is the way Marvel handled a bunch of the tie-in minis, which at three-to-four issues were generally too short to fill up a sizable trade collection of their own.

There doesn’t even seem to be a lot of logic to the pairings either, as evidenced from this particular collection. The two miniseries have nothing in common with one another beyond both being Fear Itself tie-ins.

They don’t share any characters, the characters don’t share a franchise or family, no creators are involved in both stories (Contrast this collection to FI: Avengers, which collected two Avengers titles by the same writer).

It was the second half of this book that interested me, and convinced me to pick it up. That name may be borrowed from some old Fantastic Four villains, but the make-up of the thrown-together team include some of my favorite Marvel characters, locked in conflict with another of my favorite Marvel characters (Howard the Duck, She-Hulk, The Defenders’ Nighthawk and Marvel’s fur vest rocking Frankenstein team-up to take on Man-Thing).

The involvement of artists Michael Kaluta and Simon Bisley certainly didn’t make that series any less attractive, either.

But let’s start at the beginning, with Deadpool. Despite what I consider a rather valiant attempt on my part, I still don’t quite “get” Deadpool. I can see why other folks like him a lot, but he doesn’t really work for me, and I rarely if ever find him amusing. (Personally, I think he works best as either a villain or as part of an ensemble in a straight story, as in Rick Remender and company’s Uncanny X-Force, for example).

Writer Christopher Hastings (never heard of him; Internet search reveals that the artist responsible for Dr. McNinja is also named Christopher Hastings though) and artist Bong Dazo construct a somewhat random plot involving the character.

As the book opens, Deadpool and two contractors are installing a supervillian security system for a civilian couple, and just as Deadpool is boasting that it can keep Juggernaut himself out, the Juggernaut—now powered-up by his evil Thor hammer—runs in through one wall and out through another wall.

When the contractors’ van is blown up by a mysterious, furry person and the explosion showers the neighborhood with their tools, their hammer strikes Deadpool in the head and he comes up with a weird, circuitous plan I don’t quite remember the details of, even though I just read it.

When he hears about the magic hammers on the news, he decides to decorate the hammer that hit him on the head to make it look special, and then put it in the hands of a lame-o supervillain (The Walrus, whom I had to look up on the Internet to see if he’s original to this series or not; I just assume any Marvel villain whose name is simply that of an animal probably appeared in an issue of a Spider-Man comic at some point).

Then a disguised Deadpool follows The Walrus around, egging him on to commit villainy that he will eventually put a stop to. But, quite randomly, it turns out that the hammer is actually also a magical hammer, just not one of The Serpent’s hammers—instead, it’s an enchanted hammer used for fighting off werewolves, and the contractors were apparently also werewolf-hunters who were going to use it to stave off a werewolf invasion of a small, Arizona town.

The book is packed with jokes, verbal and visual, and several of them are MC Hammer jokes, which is about the level the humor in the series rises too—1990s Saturday Night Live.

I didn’t like anything about it, although Dazo’s art is of a professional quality, and is just cartoony enough to function as both serious superhero comic art and comic comedy art simultaneously.

As for Fearsome Four, it’s written by Brandon Montclare (another writer whose name was unfamiliar to me, although I guess he wrote that not-that-great Halloween Eve one-shot that Amy Reeder drew for Image). And it's artwork? It's artwork is a complete fucking mess.

There are seven artists credited for the four issues, plus three additional artists given “with” credits. A lot of these artists are really great artists, the sorts of artists whose presence on a Marvel event tie-in is eyebrow-raising enough to get a casual reader to at least browse through the series and, incidentally, among some of my favorite artists and/or artists whose work I wish I could see on a monthly basis.

Check out this line up: Simon Bisley, Ryan Bodenheim, Henry Flint, Timothy Green, Tom Grummet, Ray-Anthony Height and Michael Kaluta.

What the fuck went on with this series, behind the scenes, that lead to the weird hodge-podge of artists? I have no idea, but it certainly doesn’t work at all. Bisley is employed strategically, illustrating a section where Man-Thing uses his connection to the Nexus of All Realities to transform the heroes opposing him into monsters (or, in the case of Frankenstein, a more monstrous monster). The other artists come and go seemingly at random, and none stick close to any sort of character design—She-Hulk’s size and shape is just as amorphous as the all-muck swamp monster’s.

Howard the Duck, a character whose real-world history involves legal battles over his very design, looks different on an almost page-by-page basis, with Bisley the only artist drawing him in his original, pre-Disney legal noise version (before he’s transformed into first a duck monster and then a lizard monster).

His height, the size and shape of his bill, his clothes change from panel to panel.

Montclare’s plot at least addresses a question that Man-Thing fans might have wondered about when reading Fear Itself: How would a worldwide outbreak of supernaturally-inspired fear affect the mindless, emotionally empathic Man-Thing, who is drawn to snuff out fear by his own bizarre chemical reaction that immolates its source upon contact with his own body (You know, the whole “whatever knows fear burns at the touch of the Man-Thing” thing).

Man-Thing is in New York City and running amok: He’s getting bigger, he’s attacking at random and fires are being set all around him (of non-sentient things, so I guess all the fear powers him up…?). Howard The Duck is on his trail, wanting to get his old friend to calm down before he ends up hurting himself and/or destroying the city.

On the way, Howard runs into She-Hulk, Frankenstein’s monster and Nighthawk (the latter of whom is portrayed as a complete nut, fighting criminals by clawing at them with his fingertips). Dubbing them the Fearsome Four, they track and try to stop Man-Thing, but are opposed by Fantastic Four villain Psycho-Man and the old, temporary Fantastic Four of (Gray) Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine and Ghost Rider…either because including those characters helps justify the appropriation of the name “Fearsome Four,” or because having Spidey and Wolvie in your comic never hurts sales any.

It’s a pretty terrible comic book, really, but is confounding in its bad-ness, given how much talent is involved (if you see this trade on a shop or library shelf, I’d still recommend picking it up, if only to see what a Kaluta Nighthawk looks like).

Much of that is due to the chaotic art, but the story is rather pointless, repetitive and meandering, and told surprisingly straight. It’s a very, very serious story, and how exactly one takes all those particular ingredients and comes up with an almost joke-free, deadly serious story is beyond me.