A little more on the first couple of new Marvel Star Wars collections.

I reviewed the first two collections of Marvel's new ongoing Star Wars series, Star Wars and Star Wars: Darth Vader, for School Library Journal's Good Comics For Kids blog. You can read the reviews here and here, respectively.

In general, I was quite impressed with both. Dark Horse Comics had done such an incredible job with the license to the Star Wars franchise for so many years, and Marvel's licensed comics of late have been so lackluster and just kind of weird (think the Dark Tower comics, Halo, the Castle-related books, the Once Upon A Time comic, etc) that I remember actually being a little scared when it was first announced that Marvel would be reclaiming the license.

In fact, I think my first reaction was a snarky tweet along the lines of "I wonder which artist Marvel will be pairing with Brian Michael Bendis for their new STAR WARS comics." I was pleasantly surprised, then, that the comics I read–just these two, so far–were actually quite good.

While those GC4K reviews are as thorough as I'd want to get with either book, and accurate reflect my feelings about both collections, there were a few random observations I had while reading them. Which I will now share with you here. Because what am I going to do, have a thought about a comic book and not commit it to writing on the Internet...?

•I can't tell you how excited I was to to find that Jason Aaron was not starting his Star Wars ongoing with the rebels looking for a new secret base from which to hide after the Battle of Yavin IV (i.e. when they blew up The Death Star at the end of the first movie; I never understood why they don't refer to that as "The Battle of the Death Star," as everyone knows what the Death Star was, and only fans know what Yavin IV is. I imagine it's the same in the the Star Wars universe, right? Surely every sentient being would have heard of the giant, moon-sized, planet-destroying, orb-shaped laser gun, or at least be more likely to have heard of that then some random celestial body chosen by the rebels for its relative obscurity, right?).

That was at least part of the premise of the Brian Wood-written Star Wars series at Dark Horse, the one that used the same cast and time period as this book, and it feels like it was the driving plot behind the first one million issues of the original Marvel Star Wars series (I'm still on Dark Horse's Star Wars Omnibus A Long Time Ago... Vol. 4, but it seems like the original Marvel series was dedicated to the rebels trying to find a new base for a few years...right up until The Empire Strikes Back came out, and then it was all about Luke, Leia, Lando and Chewbacca trying to "find" Han, even though it always seemed pretty clear that Boba Fett was going to take him straight to Jabba The Hutt).

•Leia seemed to be the more bad-ass of the two Skywalker twins. The first issue features Han posing as an emissary for Jabba, and Luke and Leia are disguised as his bodyguards, wearing the same disguise Lando would wear in Return of The Jedi. They're attempting to infiltrate an Imperial weapons factory, and at one point they turn on the nearby Stormtroopers.

It's Leia who gets the tough-guy moment punctuating the scene, as she punches out the Imperial and says "Thanks" after he's given them the information they need. (That information was scared out of him by R2-D2, who is basically the Batman of the Star Wars gang).

•I suppose I shouldn't have been, but I was pretty surprised by the inclusion of prequel trilogy races in this series, which is set in the original trilogy. It seemed slightly wrong and off, but then, I guess I'm just not used to the later films informing the setting of the earlier films; it's basically been the reverse forever, with all the comics and books and cartoons being pumped out stuck foreshadowing the "future"e vents of the original trilogy.

There are more subtle allusions too, as when Darth Vader prepares to lop off Luke's head using two light sabers, the same way Anakin finished off Count Dooku in Revenge of The Sith, an far more obvious ones, as when Darth Vader flashes back to various scenes of his life as Anakin with Padme at the climax of Darth Vader Vol. 1, an unfortunate scene if only because it forced Salvador Larroca to try his hand at celebrity likeness.

•I really like AT-ATs/Imperial Walkers. And one figures pretty prominently in this first Star Wars collection. Han and Leia try to escape the facility in one, they try stepping on Vader with it, and Vader fights it hand-to-hand.

When I first heard they were going to do Star Wars spin-off movies featuring certain characters, my initial hope was that there would be a Star Wars: AT-AT, and it would just be 90 minutes of an AT-AT walking around and stepping on stuff.

That, or maybe The Haunted AT-AT, which sould be like DC's old The Haunted Tank concept, only with the Force ghost of a fallen Jedi general from the Clone Wars filling in for General Stuart. Or maybe The Fast and The Furious, but with AT-ATs.

AT-ATs–They're wear it's AT! (...AT!)

•I don't think there's anyway around it: Star Wars: Darth Vader Vol. 1–Vader is a terrible name for a trade paperback. Whenever you have a colon in the title of your comic book, you're going to get in trouble when it comes time for the collections, as if you want to include a sub-title you have to either use a double colon or a dash, as they do here; neither of which looks good. If you have a colon in your title, you're better off forgetting sub-title and just using volume numbers, as in manga collection. But If you were going to use a sub-title, why on Earth use have it be half of the same name that is your title?

Jessica Jones Vol. 1: Jones, Luke Cage Vol. 1: Cage, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen Vol. 1: Jimmy Olsen...it just doesn't work.

•I'm not a particular fan of either Cassaday or Larroca's style, although they're both good at what they do, and reading the entire run of Invincible Iron Man kind of turned me around on Larroca a bit. The latter is at his best when not drawing humans, so he's in pretty good shape here, as there are hardly any human beings at all; just a lot of droids, aliens and guys in masks that make them look like robots. Although so much of the book is devoted to not drawing humans that, when a few finally get introduced, they look super-off.

•Seeing Darth Vader on Tatooine seemed pretty wrong to me; partly because I was assured in one of the old Expanded Universe novels that Vader would never set foot there, and partly because it makes him seem a bit more like a chump that he returned to his home planet and never, like, felt Luke's or Obi-Wan's presence, never put two-and-two together at all.

•I did like his reaction to Salacious Crumb, though.

•The cover for Darth Vader #3 was pretty awful; I'm not sure why Doctor Aphra is striking a sexy, Bond girl-on-a-movie poster pose, like she's a model showing off the latest in finger-less gloves and blaster-holster belts.

It's not at all reflective of her character within the story.

•Kieron Gillen's story doesn't really deviate far at all from Dark Horse's several Darth Vader minis-series, most of which were actually pretty excellent. He's scheming against The Emperor, The Emperor is testing him and treating him like crap and the pair have two completely different agendas.

•By far the best part of Vader is the creation of two dark, evil versions of C-3PO and R2-D2. We've previously seen an astromech serving Vader in a few panels of one of the previous miniseries, and I was kind of fascinated then by the concept of an "evil" R2, who was to R2 as Vader was to Luke.

This one is BT-1, not an astromech, but a "blastomech" droid. Aphra explains that it "does enough to pass as an astro, but it's primarily a cove. It's a specialized assassin droid." He doesn't really look as cool as Vader's old black astromech, and Larroca's art and Edgar Delgado's colors make him look more gun-metal with lots of color than shiny black. The square-shaped head further distances him from R2. He certainly packs a lot of weaponry though:

I was much more impressed by 0-0-0, or Triple-0, the evil version of 3-PO. "I'm a protocol droid, specialized in etiquette, customs, translation and torture, ma'am," he says, introducing himself to Aphra.

He looks identical to 3PO, save instead of gold he's a shiny dark gray, and his eyes glow red. He walks and talks just like 3P0 too, which makes his dialogue about torture and killing seem all the funnier, as I hear it in Anthony Daniels' voice.

•As much as I liked Vader's new running crew, I didn't care for the ending of the series, and the direction it's taking. I'm not sure if I'd buy the second volume...but then, I'm not sure what's happening with future issues of Marvel's Star Wars comics anyway, as they seem set to do a crossover already, and who knows how that will end up being collected. Hopefully a lot better than Black Vortex was...

Review: Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1: The Red Shadow

Unity is a laudable concept, but it's maybe not the sexiest word to have in the title of a Marvel fight comic, which is why the Rick Remender-written Avengers comic that spun out of the events of Avengers Vs. X-Men borrowed the traditional X-Men adjective "Uncanny" and added that the popular proper noun "Avengers" for Uncanny Avengers. Rather than being called something like, you know, The Avengers Unity Division, which is technically the name of the particular faction of heroes starring in this book (See the Olivier Coipel-drawn panel above).

The premise is pretty solid. Following the world-wide war between The Avengers and the X-Men of that particular event series, Captain America thought long and hard about what his enemy Cyclops said about he and the other non-mutant heroes steering clear of mutant issues for years (which probably had more to do with Marvel editorial and the fact that Captain America had his own titles and the X-Men had theirs than with Captain America's own personal beliefs in mutant civil rights).

To help do his part to fulfill the dreams of the late Charles Xavier (who, you remember, was killed by the Phoenix force-empowered Cyclops at the climax of Avengers Vs. X-Men), Cap decides to form a superhero team that is half Avengers and half X-Men, with human and mutant heroes fighting side-by-side for the good of all.

And Remender chooses a pretty perfect villain for the first story arc, given that premise. The Red Skull (Or a Red Skull; if I read this correctly, this is a resurrected clone of the original Red Skull...?), who has decided to use mutants in America as the Nazis once used Jews, gypsies and other scapegoats in Germany, a sort of shared minority punching bag to unite the populace against and make them more easily ruled by a fascist strong man like, say, The Red Skull.

While the premise is strong and flows perfectly and naturally out of Avengers Vs. X-Men there is, of course, a problem with it: The Avengers have always included mutants in their ranks, at least since their first major line-up shake-up in the, uh, 1960s. That's when Captain America reformed the team as 50% mutant, with The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver joining him (and becoming among the longest serving Avengers in the team's history). Original X-Men Beast had a pretty good run as an Avenger, and Wolverine's been on the team for almost a decade now. Namor served a stint, and Storm was an Avenger for at least five minutes.

While Remender does a fine job writing the mutants in his roster, they seem more like the characters he was assigned, ones that no one else was using too prominently on their X-Men or Avengers teams, and, for the most part, they're therefore not really the X-Men or the mutants who seem like they are most ready to graduate into the sort of superhero one typically might associate with Marvel's A-List superhero team, or ones particularly well suited to a PR effort or sincere mission to live Xavier's ideals.

Of the four in the first story arc, which comprises four-fifths of this collection then, we get long-time Avengers The Scarlet Witch (who has never really had much to do with the X-Men formally) and Wolverine (who is on most Avengers and X-Men teams already anyway).

The more interesting choices are Rogue, who has some pretty serious issues with Scarlet Witch, given that whole "No more mutants" thing that decimated the mutant population and, in a roundabout way, set the stage for Avengers Vs. X-Men and the death of Xavier, and Havoc, the horribly-costumed brother of Cyclops, who is a fairly minor character in the Marvel Universe as a whole, and thus an interesting inclusion on an Avengers team, especially as its leader, which is what Captain America has made him (Although immediately has trouble taking orders from someone else, since he's always the leader of all his teams).

The non-mutants on the team, at least in that first arc, are, of course, Cap and, um, Thor, who is either a god or an alien, depending on whether you're an ancient norseman or not, and therefore doesn't really fit with the mission statement so well.

With the fifth issue, more characters are added: Japanese mutant Sunfire, a nice addition in how random and previously un-affiliated he is with the Avengers, and human heroes Wonder Man and The Wasp.

Backseat driving the line-up aside, Remender does a nice job of selling the premise and justifying the inclusion of most of the members, giving them interpersonal conflicts and alliances right out of the gate (Thor being maybe the only exception; he's merely written as the cartoon character he usually is).

The plot of the first arc includes a pretty shocking splash page ending to the first issue, and an extremely silly point that has a nice gross-out component and goes a bit further in making the Red Skull someone the X-Men might want to fight (Actually, I'm not sure why all the X-Men teams didn't go after the Skull...beyond, you know, different titles and Marvel editorial).

DC's not the only publisher who can play the gross-out grand guignol game.

He and his new super-hero team, which is filled with characters with Peter Milligan/Grant Morrison sounding names like The Goat-Faced Girl, Dangerous Djinn and so on, rob Xavier's grave, remove his brain and, somehow, fuse it with Red Skull's brain to give him Xavier's mental powers (it's sorta glossed over how exactly that works, given that the Red Skull's skull is the same size as everyone else's skull; that is, big enough for about one brain).

This first story arc is drawn by John Cassaday, a talented artist with a few collections of pretty high-quality X-Men comics on his bibliography, but probably not someone you want on a monthly comic book, as evidenced by the fact he draws only the first four issues of this collection. The fifth issue is drawn by Olivier Coipel and Mark Morales, and is an all-around stronger piece of work, although I suppose I should take into account my preference for Coipel's more fluid, energetic style over Cassaday's, but it's a well-drawn book, from start to finish.

I love the way Cassaday draws the Skull's smile.

The previously-mentioned grating occurring between Avengers history and the expressed goals of this Avengers team aside, and some over-narration aside, Remender does a pretty fine job on the book...save for that one, now-infamous scene in #5, in which Alex "Havoc" Summers makes his "M-word" speech.

Shut up, Alex.

Those who care about the issue have all already had their say long ago, when #5 was originally released as a single issue, so I don't want to get too deep into it here, but it doesn't really work in context any better than is sounded out of context.

Remender has Havoc state during a press-conference that he doesn't like being identified as a mutant, and thinks that the world "mutant" itself is, in fact, a divisive term, meant to separate mutants from the rest of humanity, and he would prefer to be thought of as human rather than mutant. Putting aside whether or not that's a thing the leader of a The Avengers Unity Division showcasing human and mutant hero working shoulder-to-shoulder would or should say, and putting aside (Hey, I've done a lot of putting aside with this book!) how that works if you extrapolate the mutant metaphor the way it's generally extrapolated (replace the word "mutant" with "black" or "Jewish" or "gay" or "Mormon" or "teenager" whatever, and there's no way that speech doesn't sound pretty weird, and potentially offensive to a lot of folks), Havoc and/or Remender sort of fuck up two important points in that little speech.

First, Alex refers to mutant as "the M-word," which in the traditional reading of the X-Men metaphor would make it equivalent to "the N-Word," and "black" and "N-word" sure as hell aren't the same thing, nor is "Jewish"/"K-word" or "gay"/"F-word" or "Mormon"...I actually don't know any offensive terms for Mormons. If you know any, please, don't tell them to me. If there is an "M-word" in the Marvel Universe, it's "mutie," as in "you stinkin' mutie," not "mutant.

Second, mutants literally are a separate species than human beings in the Marvel Universe...aren't they? I am not the most well-read Marvel reader (I've "only" been reading Marvel comics for about 15 years now), and X-Men continuity is an especially confounding area of comic book knowledge for me. Also, I'm not a biologist, and know even less real-world science than I know comic book science. But that said, it was my understanding that the mutants in the Marvel universe had their own scientific classification—Homo sapiens superior—which would make them a distinct organism separated by species from Homo sapiens (i.e. human beings), no? Don't Marvel's mutants share a genus with human beings (Homo), but have their own species (superior, or sapiens superior).

Like, look at Neanderthals. They share a genus with humanity, but are generally considered a different species, Homo neanderthalenis...although Wikipedia says that's not exactly settled science, and that some believe them to be not a distinct and separate species than Homo sapiens, but a sub-species, classified as Homo sapiens neanderthalenis. At any rate, whether Marvel's mutants are their own species or a sub-species of humanity, what Alex says sounds pretty contrary to what Marvel history I know. (And man, when you factor in the Celestials in mutant evolution and all that ancient aliens shit, it's reeeaaaaallllly hard to make equivalences between the real world and the Marvel universe).

Anyway, that speech was a super-dumb part of an otherwise pretty good comic book.

Now look at this crazy looking Neal Adams variant cover:

Wow. I don't know exactly what it feels like to have a cloned Nazi monster with chunks of Charles Xavier's brain grafted on to his own trying to mentally dominated you with psychic powers, but that Adams image at least gives me a few clues to go on.