Meanwhile...

I wonder why publishers don't pursue married writer/artist teams with the same last name more aggressively? Just look at the space on the spine it saves! Since writer Kathryn Immonen and artist Stuart Immonen have the same last name, AdHouse only had to put one name on the spine of the book!

That book is, of course, Russian Olive To Red King, which probably features the best writing or drawing from either of the pair, and is their least commercial and most challenging work to date. I find even the name challenging, as I keep referring to it alternately as Black Olive to Russian King, Red Olive to Russian King, Black Olive to Red King and its proper title.

I reviewed it for Las Vegas Weekly this past week, and you can read my short review of the book here.

I also reviewed Lion Forge Comics/IDW Publishing's collection of Joelle Sellner, Chynna Clugston Flores and Tim Fish's Saved By The Bell collection for Robot 6 this week. I found the finished work pretty disappointing, but do keep in mind that the disappointment was of the purest sort: I was really looking forward to a comic book based on one of my favorite live-action TV shows of all time, by one of my favorite artists of all time (Clugston Flores).

One of the many mind-boggling things about it, for me personally anyway, was just how un-sexy it was. There's the bikini car wash scene above.

Here's a few panels featuring Kelly and Lisa in their underwear:

I know it's a kids comic and based on a TV show for kids (even if all the kids who watched it are now in their thirties and forties), but I remember that show being rather sexually charged (although I watched it from about ages 14-17, when everything was rather sexually charged), and while I can't speak for Fish, who drew the above panels of the oddly flat and trapezoidal butts, I know Clugston Flores is a great drawer of sexy teenage girls.

Well, here's hoping that Lion Forge does a Saved By The Bell: Remix miniseries at some point, giving talented, wildly-imaginative creators the chance to produce a Saved By The Bell comic that is as bonkers and stylized as their Miami Vice: Remix comic...

You can read my review of Saved By The Bell Vol. 1 here.

Finally, I reviewed Cyborg #1 for Good Comics For Kids. It was alright, but it was just alright, which isn't really much better than being bad in today's super-crowded field. Cyborg is a character that, like a lot of those created to be–or primarily thought of as–team players, was rendered uncrecognizable by the New 52-boot, which divorced him (and characters like him) from everything noteworthy, likable (or just plain him) about him. Sure, Cyborg got "promoted" to the Justice League from the Titans, but that would have meant more if he had worked his way up there after years with the Titans, you know? (Actually, James Robinson similarly promoted Cyborg to the League during his short, troubled run...but Cyborg and a handful of other new recruits disappeared from the line-up after only an issue or three).

I'm not crazy about the new, new, new, new redesign, either. I liked the previous one, with the C/gear emblem on the chest, better than this one. Please note that the above image does not feature the current Cyborg design, but I went ahead and used it here anyway, because that's my favorite image of Cyborg that has appeared on a DC Comic since the New 52-boot. Or maybe ever; I don't know.

You can read my review of Cyborg #1 here.

Review: Amazing X-Men Vol. 2: World War Wendigo

I can't help but wonder what Amazing X-Men might have been like had Jason Aaron remained onboard as its writer, instead of jumping ship for greener pastures (Star Wars, Thor). And if Marvel's X-Men plans didn't end up being so closely tied to Brian Michael Bendis' work. And if the board re-setting Secret Wars wasn't looming, building an expiration date into so many of the books in Marvel's line as it existed prior to their decision to rejigger their fictional universe.

That's a lot of ifs, I know; this second volume is just so very different from the first volume, and it certainly seems like Marvel's plans for the title changed pretty drastically at some point during Aaron's work on the initial story arc.

Aaron had, of course, been writing Wolverine for years by the time Amazing X-Men launched. For a while he wrote Wolverine: Weapon X, which was the "good" Wolverine title when there were multiple Wolverine titles. Then he wrote Wolverine. Then he wrote the excellent Wolverine and The X-Men. And, at that book's conclusion, this seemed to be the next step in Aaron's exploration of the X-Men through the prism of Wolverine, having gone from writing the character's solo adventures to writing about the X-Men's school, faculty and student body, to now focusing on the X-Men as an old-school, traditional superhero-team.

With the two A books in the franchise, the Bendis-written ones, focusing on two upstart squads of X-Men–Cyclops' outlaw, rebel faction and their New Xavier School and the time-lost original X-Men, who eventually transferred from Wolverine's school to Cyclops–Amazing X-Men really should have been the "real" X-Men book. Maybe it was techincally the (or a) B book in the franchise, but it would star the characters who both readers of the comics and the characters of the Marvel Universe would regard as the X-Men: Wolverine, Storm, Iceman and Beast...plus Northstar, Firestar (in for Kitty Pryde, who Bendis appropriated for All-New) and, at the end of the first story arc, "The Quest for Nightcrawler," Nightcrawler.

How odd, then, to open up the second collection of the relatively newly-launched title to find a fill-in story by a fill-in creative team, featuring Spider-Man teaming-up with just two of the Amazing X-Men for what reads a hell of a lot like an inventory story that could have run pretty much anywhere, but ended up in the pages of Amazing X-Men to...give Marvel an extra 30 days to find a new creative team, I guess.

That story is the one originally published in Amazing X-Men #7 and entitled "No Goats, No Glory," by writer Kathryn Immonen and the art team of Paco Medina and Juan Vlasco. It feels a little under-cooked, as if it's missing an element or two that might have improved it, but its major problem is that it just doesn't feel anything like an X-Men story at all, and doesn't seem to have anything to do with the storyline that preceded it or the one that will follow it (It's the sort of done-in-one that Marvel probably should have just not collected at all; I often wish the Big Two publishers would better curate their collections, and not just collect every single issue chronologically by default. Not doing so might actually encourage the purchasing and reading of the serially-published books–either in their comic book form or their digital form).

It's a Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends reunion story. Iceman and Firestar, in their civilian clothing, are at a Pik N Pay gorcery store right before closing (in the middle of the day, apparently), doing the shopping for a "game day" party. In the parking lot, they encounter a weird baby of unknown origin, and then Spider-Man, who is chasing the baby.

The baby has mutations and powers, and was left with Spider-Man as some sort of alien changeling when its owners/parents stole the goat Spider-Man was watching, the goat being the mascot of one of the teams playing the sport that is occurring on this particular day (Details are vague. Wait, Spidey mentions "kick off," so it's a football game of some kind). Why Spider-Man is watching a goat, why aliens might have stolen it and replaced it with their baby even though they want their baby back and why there is 21st century comic book plot about someone stealing the goat mascot of a sports teams is all left up to the reader to imagine possible explanations.

Immonen's scripting is often pretty funny, and as someone who used to watched the cartoon show that inspired this as a child, I enjoyed the reunion of these particular characters for purely nostalgic reasons, but what might work on the micro-level certainly doesn't work on the macro-level. This comic is just weird, not in its content, but in its existence, and not-finished quality.

The artwork, on the other hand, is fine, although there were details that bugged me (Like the position of the sun at closing time, or the fact that it took a raccoon two hands to hold an off-brand Oreo. Little stuff, really.)

That "intermission" of sorts between "The Quest For Nightcrawler" and the "World War Wendigo" storylines over, we have the return of artist Ed McGuinness inked by Mark Farmer for the first 1/5th of the title story, and the arrival of the new writers: Craig Kyle and Christ Yost. McGuniness and Farmer depart after that first issue, and Carlo Barberi and Iban Coello draw the rest of the storyline, with six additional inkers joining them (Barberi and Coello do some inking themselves, so there are eight inkers on the five-issue story altogether; maybe Marvel needed more than a one-issue fill-in inventory story to stall for the necessary time to put together an Amazing X-Men creative team).

Now, as many of you who have been reading EDILW for long know, I am not exactly expert in the Marvel Universe, having "only" read Marvel Comics for about 15 years now, and among my many, many, many blindspots is pre-Morrison X-Men history. So I don't have much in the way of background for a story in which The X-Men team up with Alpha Flight to fight Wendigos. And there were a couple of twists in this story arc where I was completely surprised by what occurred; it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, just surprising because I could tell that when certain new characters entered the narrative, I was meant to recognize them and perhaps have some sort of attachment to them. I didn't, and thus it just seemed like a random introduction of bizarrely random characters, but that actually contributed to my enjoyment to those twists.

Now, as far as I knew, Marvel's Wendigo was a big, cool, white furry monster that The Hulk fought in a comic that is probably worth a lot of money, as it was Wolverine's first appearance. I also know it's based on a legend of pre-European cultures in the North Americas. And I thought Marvel's Wendigo was a character, not a whole class of monsters, although I think Jeph Loeb is to blame for turning the Wendigo into Wendigos, in the pages of his Hulk run.

The rules of the Wendigo, as Kyle and Yost present them, is that any human being that consumes the flesh of another human being on Canadian soil turns into a Wendigo...rules so specific that it's actually kind of fun, as when the rampaging monsters cross over the U.S. border and immediately revert to human form. There seems to be some tinkering going on here though. An outbreak of Wendigo-ism is caused when a guy at a meat processing plant accidentally kills a co-worker, and attempts to hide his body by grinding it up with all the other meat.

And now Wendigos have the ability to infect others, turning them into Wendigos, by wounding them. So the threat is basically a zombie apocalypse sort of story, only without the zombies. Actually, maybe it's more of a werewolf or vampire apocalypse sort of story? The essential difference, beyond the visuals, is that Wendigo-ism, unlike zombie-ism, is reversible, so the X-Men and Alpha Fight (and The Avengers, guarding the U.S./Canada border) can face a potentially world-ending threat (more on how this is more than a Canadian problem in a bit) without having to kill scores or hundreds of civilians; even characters like Wolverine can become Wendigos but go back to normal at the end of the story, as superheroes inevitably must.

So Wolverine happens to visit an Alpha Flight lady (Vindicator) the day after her significant other with a matching outfit (Guardian), has gone missing. They investigate, and find a town overrun with Wendigos. Their teams come to attempt to bail them out. This X-Men squad includes Storm, Iceman, Northstar, Firestar and Nighcrawler from the previous story arc, and the newly added Colossus and Rachel Grey, apparently there because a few scenes call for a telepath to be there. Oh, and Rockslide, who stowed away in the locked bathroom of the Blackbird. His presence is also pretty random...until the climax. Alpha Flight includes Puck, Talisman, Aurora, Snowbird and Sasquatch, a character I've always liked the look of.

A few issues into the conflict, it's revealed that events are being manipulated by Tanarq, one of several god-like "Great Beasts," and apparently the bad one. These are the characters I was completely unfamiliar with. He's defeated the other spirit creatures in his realm and is growing stronger by Wendigo-izing Canadians; the more Wendigos that are made, the stronger the curse becomes, until they're capable of existing outside of the Canadian border, and thus threatening the rest of the world and, more importantly, the United States of America.

Some characters go to the spirit realm, free the Great Beasts, get temporarily turned into elemental gods (Rockslide was needed to be an Earth god, I guess) and fight a giant Tanaraq, who is ultimately killed (or "killed"...?) in a way that I swear I see some giant monster or other get killed in comics on at least a bi-monthly basis.

On a purely surface level, I enjoyed the storyline. I liked Kyle and Yost's dialogue, for the most part, and the way the various characters play off each other...at least among the X-Men. Aside from Aurora, none of the Alpha Flight characters have much of a personality (and even hers is a one-note mean girl characterization; like a cattier, Canadian Namor). The art is for the most part very strong, especially if you can forgive the hiccups in style (the one weird thing was the behavior of Storm's mohawk, which at one point gets flattened when she's plunged underwater, but when the next penciller takes over, it's standing straight up again; I guess she can probably control humidity, static electricity and heat enough to fix her own hair though, huh?).

That said, the story's not really about anything, despite gliding over various angles that could have been explored and exploited so that this storyline was something more than a superhero fight comic: The nature of the cannibal curse in the era of factory farming, the line between eating meat and eating human meat, anxiety regarding immigration, the xenophobia that X-Men comics have always looked to for dramatic tension given the new form of Canadians, conflict between the religious and secular world. There's a lot of stuff in here, but Kyle and Yost don't do anything with it. Even the denouement seems wasted, as we get a few pages assuring us that none of the mutants who were on the ropes died, and that Wolverine was successfully de-Wendigo-ized.

I suppose a cynical reader, or just a reader not terribly invested in the fictional lives of these Marvel characters, could level the same criticism at most super-comics: Hey, this isn't about anything, it's just a bunch of sexy people with superpowers fighting and exchanging snappy dialogue! But here it seems more obvious than it should.

Review: Avengers: Mythos

Despite the title, this collection is only partially composed of the Mythos origin one-shots by Paul Jenkins and Paolo Rivera, with the remainder of the stories filling it being five Avengers Origins one-shots, each by a different creative team. Regardless of which publishing initiative the comics originally came from, the main throughline is that each of the seven stories deals with the origin story of an Avenger, from founders like Thor and Ant-Man to relative newcomer Luke Cage, and as a whole the book functions as a sort of Avengers 101, a helpful guide to some of the characters you'll likely encounter when reading any of Marvel's many Avengers books or big crossover/event stories.

In most cases, better versions of the stories can be found elsewhere, but not packaged altogether so conveniently.

Let's break them down story by story, and of the whole simply say that it is of professional if unremarkably quality, a good, solid bit of escapism that points to other, better comics and readies the curious for immersion into bigger, wilder stories featuring the same characters.

Mythos: Captain America
By Paul Jenkins and Paolo Rivera

Marvel's Mythos line was one of several attempts to package their most popular characters in a way that would be new-reader friendly, with "most popular" meaning those that were or were most likely to be adapted into films. Jenkins wrote them all, condensing the characters' origins and careers in general into single one shots, while the incredibly talented Rivera drew them, working in a painted style that suggested a certain amount of prestige, but tended to lack the virtues and vitality of his drawn work.

The motley crew that earned the treatment, which repeated some of the goals of the Ultimate line (only in-continuity, and in a one-off instance instead of an ongoing one) and pre-figured the goals of the Season One original graphic novels), included not only Cap and The Hulk, but also Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, the X-Men and Ghost Rider (These are all collected together in the Marvel: Mythos, which may or may not be in print any longer because, you know, Marvel).

This one's from 2008, and the premise features a still-young Steve Rogers in the year 2008, strolling across a street to a VFW and, on his way, remembering his life story, which he narrates to readers along the way. This is the story you're probably already pretty familiar with, whether from the comics from the 2011 movie.

Skinny, 4-F kid willing to be a lab rat, successful experiment granting him super-soldier status, spy plot making sure he'd be the last such super-soldier, PR effort and real soldier, ally Bucky, the last adventure which (seemingly) ended both of their lives, re-discovery by the nascent Avengers team, finding his place as the leader of the current generation of superheroes, calling on the experience and knowledge gained during World War II.

He's at a veterans dinner at the VFW, talking to a fellow veteran during all this time. It's a very talky story, with a lot of telling (or reminding, really) rather than showing, but it gets it's job done pretty quickly and efficiently. The main innovations Jenkins adds are to spend a considerable amount of time on Cap's incredibly depressing childhood (they didn't call it The Depression for nothing!) and on his interaction with the other veterans at the dinner.

I'm curious about the Captain America stories of the future, in, say, another ten years or so, when almost all of those who fought in the war aren't around anymore. There will come a time pretty soon when Captain America is the last surviving soldier of World War II (with the exception of some other Marvel characters, of course), and stories like these will be impossible to tell in quite the same way.

Mythos: Hulk
By Paul Jenkins and Paolo Rivera

The 2006 Hulk issue was an all-around stronger piece of comics, with Jenkins focusing on a single incident of the Hulk's life—his birth in the Gamma Bomb test, and what went on just before and just after—and mostly ignored narration for letting the already modern mythic events tell the story all by themselves.

Jenkins pays special attention to the relationship between the angry, acid-tongued scientist Bruce Banner, the imperious General "Thunderbolt" Ross and his daughter Betty Ross, who the two men fight bitterly over. General Ross clearly goes out of his way and takes things rather far to make life miserable for Banner and to keep him from Betty, but the way Jenkins writes Banner, it makes Ross' actions understandable, if not relatable. Banner is pretty insufferable, and its Betty who deserves the readers' sympathy—she's the one who has to put up with these two.

Again, you know exactly how things go down here, with Banner impulsively but heroically rushing out on the testing site to save Rick Jones (here an intern doing some painting, listening to "It's Not Easy Being Green" on his walkman, and thus oblivious to what's going on around him), and being turned into the monstrous Hulk.

Rivera's Hulk takes many cues from Jack Kirby's, and while that character's depiction has changed quite a bit over the years—rather remarkably so, given the fat that his basic design is simply "big, green, muscular guy in torn purple pants—Rivera's retains the broad, thick body and large, square-like head that gave Kirby's Hulk his distinct look, the look most artists to follow him deviated rather dramatically from.

Avengers Origins: Ant-Man and The Wasp 
By Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Stephanie Hans

I really rather enjoyed writer Fred Van Lente's take on Ant-Man's origin way back in Marvel Adventures Superheroes #6 and Roger Langridge's portrayal of the character and The Wasp during his short run on Thor: The Might Avenger with Chris Samnee. It was hard not to contrast this with those other stories of the early Ant-Man, and thus find this one a little wanting.

Aguirre-Sacasa's script has some lighter, funnier moments to it—as in an instance where a shrunken-for-the-first-time Henry Pym wonders what to do next while a gigantic mouse looms behind him, or when he has a flustered conversation with Janet Van Dyne through a cracked doorway, trying to hide the giant ant tugging at his pant-leg—but the story is told with a more-or-less straight face, which isn't the easiest face to keep while discussing the origins of the character called "Ant-Man."

The funniest parts may not have been intentional. The writer repeatedly asks rhetorical questions about insects before answering them in the narration and the story: "Do insects dream?" and "Do insects have a destiny?" and so on. It ends with "Do insects love? Yes...these two do."

The story seems to take place within and around the early Ant-Man stories, which I've yet to read, despite having my eye on an Essentials volume containing them for literally years now, detailing Pym's early scientific successes in the fields of shrinking and ant-controlling and his romance with Jane Van Dyne, who, here at least, borders on stalking him. (If they ever finish and release an Ant-Man movie, it's easy to imagine her in a magic pixie girl role in it or its sequel).

I didn't really care for Hans' realistic, painterly work; it matches that done by Rivera in the previous story, but while those dealt with elements of the fantastic occasionally intersecting with the real world, this story is set in fantastic locales, and is chock-full of giant ants, a giant monster, a shrinking man, a shrinking woman, and it has more than one super-costume in it.  Hans likewise has a hard time selling some of the comic moments, which play in one's imagination more than on the page, as the art and words combine to suggest them, not detail them.

Avengers Origins: Vision
By Kyle Higgins & Alec Siegel and Stephane Perger

The origin of maybe my least favorite Avenger of all time! There are few things I hate to read about more than androids with the emotional lives of teenagers; I like The Vision even less than The Red Tornado, only in that The Vision has a more garish and ugly costume (I like Golden Age Vision's look okay though).

This story seems to be set almost entirely within an issue, or part of an issue, of The Avengers, of which I've never read. Ultron builds, grows and teaches The Vision, programming him with powers to take down a fairly weak squad of Avengers, and then sicks Vision on them.

Then it's The Vision vs. The Wasp, Pym as Goliath (Hoo boy, did their relationship change between these two stories!), Hawkeye and The Black Panther, and not only should the powerful android mop the floor with these guys, he does—the only reason he doesn't kill them is that he's introduced to the concept of love through much of the fight, and then turns on his creator Ultron.

As an all-fight action comic, there's little to complain about here, and, as a hater of emotional androids, I was relieved that at no point did The Vision shed any tears. Perger's art was pretty nice, maintaining the painted look, and while the backgrounds disappear almost constantly, much of the issue is set outside at night in the rainstorm, and or there are bright flashes of light, so that The Vision's sports-team color scheme is muted and, on the whole, he looks much more dramatic than usual, with Perger lengthening his cape when necessary and often blotting out the features of his face (or at least his eyes) in order to give him a mysterious, stoic, not-really-there look.

Avengers Origins: Luke Cage
By Adam Glass & Mike Benson and Dalibor Talajic

The major outlier among the other origin stories, Luke Cage's origin is of relatively recent vintage (he was created by Archie Goodwin, John Romita Sr. and George Tuska in 1972; the next most recent character included in this volume is The Vision, who was re-created in '68, but was based on a Golden Age Timely character from 1940). He's also the only one in the book to join the Avengers after the 1960s; in fact, he didn't join the team until 2005's New Avengers.

Glass and Benson's script follows Jenkins' Captain America script rather closely in form, telling Cage's origin story (which bears some parallels to Cap's) from prison to experiment to escape to flirtation with crime to Hero for Hire, ending in the modern day, with a sort of coda in which Cage continues to try and atone for a mistake he made during his life of crime and being forgiven by his victim.

Having never read the original stories this one is based on, once again I'm uncertain as to how faithful it's being, but given that Cage's archenemy on the outside is named Stryker-with-a-Y, it sure seems like it's a re-telling of something from the 1970s.

From here on in, the book loses its painted style, save for the covers, slivers of which are used as the cover for the collection. Talajic's art is perhaps the best in the book. It's certainly the most straightforward in terms of comic bookishness, and he does a pretty good job of updating the time period during the story (It seems like this Cage grew up in the '80s, rather than the '60s).

Avengers Origins: Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver
By Sean McKeever and Mirco Pierfederici 

Okay, they may technically be Avengers, but they're mutants, and they got their start with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, which makes these two X-Men characters, which makes them confusing and annoying.

McKeever tells their story from childhood until their debut as Avengers, with the bulk of attention spent on their relationship with Magneto, whose secret connection to them wasn't yet known to all parties at the time (although Quicksilver suspects). Their main conflict comes from not really having their heart in the whole "Evil" part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

As with the Cage story, the artwork in this oen is particularly comic-book-y, but perhaps in a more generic, less stylized way.

The story stands out as particularly complicated, but that's due more to the fact that their story is particularly complicated, coming out of the soap operatic X-Men franchise, and their inclusion in the Avengers by second-generation Marvel creators, while so many of the other Avengers getting the origin treatment here were originally created as stars of their own features, and thus had a pretty straightforward, simplicity to their powers and origins.

The question about Scarlet Witch that has always haunted me remains unanswered: What exactly is that thing she wears on her head and, like, what's it's deal, exactly...?

Avengers Origins: Thor 
By Kathryn Immonen, Al Barrionuevo and Michel Lacombe & Mark Pennington

The bulk of this story stars the young Thor and the young Loki, and it's set in Asgard. Odin commissions the creation of Mjolnir and a few other trinkets, and the hammer sits there, un-pick-up-able, while Thor and Loki have their various interpersonal conflicts and. When shit finally goes down, Thor finds the inner-strength he needs (and the right motivation) to pick up Mjolnir and start kicking ass. But he kicks so much ass, and does so in such an arrogant way, that he gets cast down to Midgard and, well, I'd suggest you pick up Thor: The Mighty Avenger for more of his adventures on Earth.

Immonen wisely starts and more-or-less completes her story before the story of the Marvel Thor really begins, with his time on Earth, and Barrionuevo's pencils are fine, evoking a bit of Brian Hitch, but are nothing remarkable, and his Asgard seems more like a Xena, Warrior Princess set than the sort of sci-fi fantasy realm of Kirby's creation.

On further reflection, the line-up of characters chosen for inclusion here is a rather odd one, isn't it? The Avengers Origins series is from 2012, the same year as the movie, but movie Avengers Iron Man, Hawkeye and Black Widow are absent, while the only movie Avenger who had an Avengers Origins issue produced was Thor. And The Hulk, who is in the movie, is included here, even though he's never really been a member of the team for any great length of time, and was merely present at their origin (As was Iron Man who, again, isn't represented).

And, again, Cage sticks out as being the odd Avenger out, although perhaps they decided to produce an origin issue focusing on him instead of, say, Hawkeye or Iron Man, simply because his origins is much more obscure than that of, say, Tony Stark.

All in all, it's a decent enough intro eight Marvel superheroes. None of the stories stand out as being particularly great ones, but then, none of them are at all poor ones either.

Review: Avenging Spider-Man: The Good, The Green and The Ugly

This trade collects five issues of what is essentially Marvel's current version of the old Marvel Team-Up, which paired Spider-Man with a different co-star each issue, now given a title that makes sense only in that it's meant to suggest an association with Marvel's most popular branding device at the moment, "Avengers."

After all, Spider-Man does nothing in the way of avenging in these issues, which are quite light-hearted adventures that play up the character's fun and funny side, and, of the three Marvel heroes he teams up with in the three stories within, one of them doesn't even have any association with The Avengers.

The first of the stories collected is an all-Immonen one-issue She-Hulk team-up, a Spidey/Shulkie comic from the creative team behind 2010 Top Shelf graphic novel Moving Pictures, which was about a pair of people making tough choices during World War II, while the Nazis were pillaging the art of the continent.

Oddly enough, this one is also set in and around a museum!

I find that one of the best ways to judge whether a Spider-Man comic is any good or not is whether it manages to make me laugh at all, and this made me laugh:

(The art really sells that joke; not sure if it's the speedlines or the figure work that do the heavy lifting, or simply the combination of the two, but that's a joke that would very easily not be very funny if drawn differently).

In this story, She-Hulk's team-up with Spidey lasts a lot longer than she would have liked, as the wall-crawler tags along to a museum function she has to attend for work. There some cultists attempt to steal some ancient Egytpian maguffin, and the cat goddess Bast arises.

It's full of the same sharp wit Kathryn Immonen's scripts usually are, and the super-short length (just 20 pages) keeps her sometimes overly wild plotting (see Hellcat, Herald, X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back for examples) in a nicely constructed, easily digestible package. It's great fun to see Stuart Immonen—a great, and greatly undervalued artist—drawing something light and fun like this, rather than the sorts of epic angst-fests we've seen him doing for Marvel lately (Fear Itself, Bendis-written Avengers comics).

That's followed by a slightly flabbier two-parter teaming Spidey with another super-strong superheroine, Marvel's current Captain Marvel Carol Danvers. This one's written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, penciled by Terry Dodson and inked by Rachel Dodson, making for another extraordinarily high-caliber art team for what is essentially something of a trifle of a comic.

In this one, Danvers offers Peter Parker a free flight to Boston to visit his aunt, in Danvers' own personal airplane, but the pair get pulled into superhero action against a spunky, jet-packing 99-percenter and an overzealous independent security contractor in a mechanized suit of super-armor. It's incredibly predictable—I've seen this almost exact same twist used in half the page-count by Grant Morrison in the late '90s—but DeConnick writes fun banter, and the art is super-slick.

I hadn't noticed previously, when I'd seen the cover image online before, but Danvers is actually wagging her index finger at whoever is shooting at her and Spidey on the cover. From a distance—the distance at which the image is visible as a little jpeg on a computer monitor, for example—it looked more like she was holding up her first two fingers.

The image makes a lot more sense now, although it's still kinda weird; it's such a frozen image, confined to a particular split-second—we can see where the bullets hit and are arcing away from her invulnerable skin—that allowing for motion in it like that seems pretty off.

The final story is another two-parter, featuring Deadpool, who must be "the Ugly" being referred to in the title). It's written by Kevin Schinick (whose name I'm not familiar with) and drawn by Aaron Kuder. It's a pretty Deadpool story, which means it's kind of in your face and annoying, but it has some pretty decent moments.

The first half features Deadpool in Spider-Man's subconsciousness, trying to guide him through his dreams in order to rescue him from a villain purportedly attacking him through his dreams. And then there's a reveal in the second issue, in which the incredibly unlikely (anywhere other than a story featuring Deadpool, anyway) villain: The Hypno-Hustler.

I really liked Kuder's style, which reminded me quite a bit of Frank Quitely's and Chris Burnham's in many panels (mostly in character design and in the way he draws his lines), and he has a pretty swell version of the Green Goblin (who appears in hallucinatory form only). Take away that guy's pupils, and he looks pretty damn horrifying, doesn't he?

So in The Good, The Green and The Ugly we get stories that are pretty great, pretty good and pretty decent, all of which adds up to not bad at all.

Review: X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back

I think this is a pretty good illustration of why those in the business of making and selling serially-published comic books shouldn’t go out of their way to encourage trade-waiting, so please indulge me while I write a long, drawn-out anecdote.

Earlier this year Marvel published a four-issue miniseries called X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back, featuring the new-ish, pixie-powered X-person who seems to function a bit like Kitty Pryde 2.0 in the current X-Men line-up. I don’t normally read X-Men comic books—too many moving parts, even for me—but the series was written by Kathryn Immonen, whose previous Marvel work I rather enjoyed, and it was drawn by Sara Pichelli, whose previous Marvel work I loved. It featured swell covers by Kathryn’s husband, and seemed to have a high school plot that is right up own my personal escapist alley.

Liking—or being curious about, or interested in—a creative team isn’t generally a good enough reason to start buying X-Men comics if your apartment is ankle-deep in superhero comics already, but it looked like the sort of thing that would be worth flipping through in the comic shop. Maybe it would be an impulse buy the week it came out, or something to pick up later in the month if there was a slow Wednesday.

Marvel, as is their way, priced the book about a minor X-person by up-and-coming creators at $3.99.

So I filed the title away in my own personal List of Trades I Will Probably Buy Someday. It’s a big list, full of series like this I’m perhaps only curious about, as well as thousands of dollars worth of manga (Seriously, do you know how many hundreds of dollars it would take to catch up on just, say, Rumiko Takahashi’s 50+ volume Inuyasha and Ken Akamatsu’s 28-volume Negima!) and thousands of more dollars worth of deluxe reprint collections of classic comic strips.

There are a lot of modern Marvel series I decide to trade-wait, but that generally simply translates into “not buying…but maybe someday.” Hell, I might go to Japan some day.

Well, the last time I was perusing the graphic novel section at a library that has a pretty sizable one, I noticed the trade paperback collection of X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back there. So now I had the option to read it immediately for free, the option I took.

Having been scared by Marvel’s scary price tag, I went from wanting to buy it to maybe thinking I’d perhaps buy it to someday, and then, having seen it at the library, I went to definitely never buying it ever.

I think Marvel charges too much for their comics, and it ends up costing them sales of serial comics from the customers most primed to buy their serial comics, basically. And that ends my anecdote.

So is anyone still reading, and curious of what I thought of the book? (Which, by the way, bears a price tag of $14.99…the permanent, ad-free way to read this story is actually 97-cents cheaper than the comics themselves would have been! And let’s just check the old Amazon for a moment and see…it’s currently $10.19 there, $5.77 cheaper than the comics would have been. Sometimes it really amazes me that anyone even buys Marvel comics serially anymore.)

It is extremely Kathryn Immonen-y: A lot of fun ideas, strong characterization, snappy dialogue and, unfortunately, the assumption that you already know who the hell all these Marvel characters are and enough of their histories that you’ll be able to keep up with new chapters in their conflicts and emotionally invested in the results.

So as with Immonen’s Heralds, I felt a little like I was watching a pretty good foreign film with rotten sub-titles in broken English (Maybe the film is a badly-dubbed anime film with the English written by a native Chinese speaker). It looked good, and I could appreciate a lot of it, but I was often aware of the fact that I wasn’t getting something.The book opens with a splash page of five school girls doing a walk-and-talk down a school hallway, each introduced via boxes and arrows containing their full names, favorite quotes, and a few terse sentences of characterization.

Over the next few pages, it becomes clear something’s not quite right around the edges of the school, and then we find out why—these five girls are Pixie and four other X-teens, including Armor from Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run, the teen girl version of Wolverine, and two others I’d never heard of.

The action is split from that inside the dream world Pixie and pals are trapped in, and the “real” world, where there first their fellow X-teens (I believe these are the characters from the post-Morrison version of New X-Men), and then Nightcrawler and Psylocke and finally Emma Frost all go looking for the missing girls.

Apparently, a big, bad bad, bad guy name Saturnine, whom seems to be a recurring X-villain but is also a demon, has captured them, and is using Pixie’s pixie-dust power to keep the girls in a dream state in order to draw out Pixie’s mom, who is actually the queen of fairy.

It succeeds, but first Pixie’s mom runs into the X-folks, so when she shows up to battle the army of demons for her daughters, the X-Men all do too.

Oh, and there are two dim-headed, scantily-clad, psychic power girls descended from Mastermind involved somehow, too. I think they’re Pixie’s half-sisters…?

As you can probably tell, I was pretty shaky on a lot of the background, but after an issue or two and I lost that “Damn, I need a program to read this thing” feeling, I rather enjoyed it.

The mix of fantasy stuff with mutant stuff seemed a little off the X-Men’s beaten path, similar to when they do stories about space pirates or Hell or whatever, but it was also kind of refreshing. And while a lot of the kids were more or less indistinguishable, Immonen gave the adult heroes pretty strong voices.

Here characters were charismatic, making them fun to spend time with, and thus read about.

Pichelli’s artwork seemed slightly weaker here than I’ve seen in the past, and I think it was something to do with Christina Strain’s colors over it. There’s a lot of varying textures to the different subjects, and some of those textures look a little forced.

For example, it’s clear that the guy made out of rock or the demon covered in scales have different textures than the smooth-skinned teens in spandex; the mottled, grainy wash of color given them is unnecessary. It’s like trying to communicate while shouting really loud, when talking does just fine. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Pichelli’s characters are abstracted, they are certainly simplified, and she leaves quite a bit for the reader’s mind to fill in, but, if the details aren’t always there in the linework, Strain seems to add it with shadows and shines.

It’s not bad work, of course, but it makes for a less appealing-looking work than it might have been with more reserved coloring, particularly during several scenes set in a dark club, at a school dance and in a mysterious, dark place where the kidnap-ees are being held.

So that’s X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back, a pretty good, fairly entertaining super-comic that Marvel Comics seems to be trying to prevent people from reading, for some reason.