On the last 50 pages or so of Marvel's Original Sin hardcover collection

Last week I discussed Original Sin, the eight(-ish) part miniseries by writer Jason Aaron, artist Mike Deodato and colorist Frank Martin that dominated the 390-page Original Sin hardcover collection. Tonight I wanted to look at all the supplementary material included in the collection, almost all of it from the pages of the five-issue tie-in anthology entitled Original Sins...which is only one letter's difference from the main series, because comics are weird and dumb and evil. There are also two issues of Original Sin: Secret Avengers Infinite Comic, which I believe was a digital-first comic, which might offer an explanation for why it has two people (?) named "Mast" and "Geoffo" credited as "storyboard artists" rather than with more typical "layouts."

Almost all of these stories, which range in length from Ryan North, Ramon Villalobos and company's 40-page Young Avengers story to a handful of two-page gag strips, deal with the fall-out of a single event early on in Original Sin, The Orb's use of one of the Watcher's gouged-out eyes as a secret-disseminating "truth bomb" to disorient the heroes gathered to apprehend him and his accomplices.

The scene is actually a very small, not terribly important part of Original Sin, but it is the part that allows for other comics to tie-in to the "Original Sin" brand and try to stretch Aaron's story into something that could—at least theoretically—sustain a line-wide crossover. Original Sins—with an "s"—allowed Marvel the chance to check-in with a bunch of other, mostly book-less heroes and, in the process, give a bunch of other creators a chance to play in Marvel's sandbox.

I can't imagine Original Sins was a very satisfying read if read as it was serially published. Each $4, 20-page issue contained a trio of stories—a 10-page lead feature, 8-pages of the five-part Young Avengers story and a 2-page gag comic. If you wanted to just read that Young Avengers story, you were stuck paying $20 for it, and getting little else that would interest you. If you wanted to see favorite, unlikely creators like, say, Richard Geary or Chip Zdarsky drawing Marvel characters, you'd be paying $4 for 2 pages of comics, and getting a lot of stuff that likely wouldn't appeal to you in the process.

The way they're packaged in this collection, the Young Avengers story kicks off this section, and then the rest seem to follow as they were published.

Let's take them one at a time.

"Young Avengers: Hidden In Plain Sight" by Ryan North, Ramon Villalobos and Jordan Gibson

By far the highlight of the book, I don't want to say too much about this here at the moment (As I talk about it here). The Ryan North who wrote it is the same Ryan North who writes Dinosaur Comics and Boom's Adventure Time comics, and, as with the latter, he includes little alt text like gags along the bottom of most of the pages. It is a very funny comic, but funny within the bounds of the Marvel Universe (that is, no one breaks character or the fourth wall in the way some of the other, shorter, comedic pieces in Original Sins-with-an-"s" do).

Hulkling sees, via social media, that all the superheroes seem to be fighting Noh-Varr's ex-girlfriend in Manhattan, so he texts Prodigy, they go to space to pick up Noh-Varr, and head to Manhattan to see what they can do. The fight is over, but they stumble upon a post eyeball zap adventure that pits the three Young Avengers against The Hood (The rest of the team is present, but they literally text in their appearances).

It's seriously great stuff, and made me wish Marvel hadn't ended the last volume of Young Avengers when its creative team of Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie and Mike Norton departed, but rather kept it going under North and Villalobos.

"Terminus" by Nathan Edmondson, Mike Perkins and Andy Troy

This one is a bit of an odd story out in that rather than checking in with a book-less character, it's a 10-pager starring the new Deathlok, who has a new series, and it therefore seems to be here to remind readers of Original Sin that there's a new Deathlok comic they might want to read.

Henry Hayes, a former soldier who now works for Doctors Without Borders, is accosted by an off-duty SHIELD agent who explains he was there when "The Watcher's eye exploded downtown," and now he knows Hayes' secret. That secret being that he's secret Deathlok, a cyborg assassin who doesn't seem to be half-zombie in this iteration, and who now more closely resembles the one from the TV, I guess. Oddly, Hayes himself doesn't seem to know the secret, so I guess that's the premise of the new take on the character.

Mike Perkins draws this sort of realistic, espionage-style action comic very well, as he's proved in the past, and while there's not much here, and nothing that really piqued my interest in the series, it's a pretty effective pitch for that series.

"Lockjaw: Buried Memory" by Stuart Moore, Rick Geary and Ive Svorcina

At just 16 silent panels over two pages, this is a very fleet read. There's only a single joke to it—Lockjaw suddenly has a memory, and seeks the aid of a Marvel superhero—and it's not that funny a joke, really, but if you ever wanted to see Rick Geary draw not only Lockjaw, but the current versions of Luke Cage, Iron Man, Emma Frost and others, then this comic certainly fulfills that desire.

Kamala "Ms. Marvel" Khan appears in one-panel of this story, as one of the several heroes to deny Lockjaw help, and it constitutes her only appearance in Original Sin, despite being depicted, along with a bunch of other heroes who weren't drawn there by Deodato, at ground zero of the eyeball bomb in Manhattan on the cover of Original Sins #1.

"Black Legacy" by Frank Tieri, Raffaele Ienco and Brad Anderson

Is Marvel Studios developing a Black Knight film, or is he going to appear in the third Avengers movie or on Agents of SHIELD or something...? For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why this story existed at all.

The Black Knight, who I was fairly certain was based in England (I only read the first half of the Revolutionary War trade; am I misremembering his presence in it?), is holed up in his apartment, which he hasn't left in what appears to be a long time, wearing only his briefs and clutching his ebony blade (Should I rewrite that last bit to make it sound less suggestinve? Nah). A writer and expert on the Black Knight legacy and the ebony blade is knocking at his door, saying she knows his secret, which is that the blade is addictive and makes folks who wield it crazy, eventually killing him.

I'm not sure why The Black Knight, who seemed to be in a pretty good place last time I remember seeing him (If not in Revolutionary War, then definitely in Captain Britain and MI:13) is made all Howard Hughes for the sake of a ten-page story which, incidentally, has nothing at all to do with Original Sin except, perhaps, thematically. During my first read-through, I thought the Knight was caught in the blast—which would have mandated his presence in Manhattan, not England—but on rereading, I see that not only was he not in the blast, it's not clear which city he's in during this story. Also, the writer, who knows his secret, knows it from research and inference, not because she was caught in the blast.

So either Tieri's got a Black Knight series on the horizon, or Marvel's got a Black Knight media adaptation on the horizon, or man, this is one out-of-left field page-filler.

"Before Your Eyes" by Ty Templeton and Paul Mounts

Templeton writes and draws this Howard The Duck two-pager, in which Howard finds himself ejected from his car by a faulty—and apparently very powerful—air bag, and his mind races through what he recently learned from "the eye of a dead Watcher".

Howard The Duck's troubled history, and his existence as a sort of flashpoint regarding a big comics company and a creator in conflict over who owns what and who gets and deserves credit and money for what, makes Howard The Duck comics incredibly difficult to read, something that will never change now, given the fact that Howard's creator Steve Gerber has passed away.

I'm a big fan of Templeton's work, and while this isn't really a great example of it—consisting as it does of only 14 panels of Howard in a suit—it ends with a pretty charged, I-can't-believe-Marvel-published-that statement: "You are Howard The Duck. The greatest example of wasted potential in the known galaxy."

I suppose there are a couple of different ways to read that, but there's only one way I could read it.


"Whispers of War" by Charles Soule, Ryan Browne and Edgar Delgado

This is the only story in this book I couldn't read all the way through...I made it onto the fourth page of the ten-page story before giving up. It opens with a spiky headed guy who I at first took to be Iceman, with a goblet in a penthouse hot tub, talking to a trio of faces that are merging from his body, one of which is that of a frog.

I guess this is what The Purple Man looks like now, which was a bit of a surprise, given that the last time I saw him (Alias, maybe?) he just looked like a man. Only purple. On page four, The Inhumans appear, so I then assumed he might have gone through some Terrigenisis mutation or whatever and then I got so bored I had to stop reading.

The cover for the particular issue of Original Sins appeared in has Blackbolt and The Purple Man on the cover, and says there's an "Inhuman" story within, so I suppose this has something to do with the ongoing u series. Lockjaw's in four panels of it, but that's just not enough Lockjaw to get me to give a shit about The Inhumans. Sorry.

"Bury The Lead" by Dan Slott, Mark Bagley, Joe Rubenstein and Paul Mounts

This two-pager is teased as a J. Jonah Jameson story on the cover, and it is. There's only one joke in it, and it's a fairly strong one if you know the character at all from any medium, but that also means I can't really say anything about it here without ruining it. Suffice it to say that it's a fun little piece by a writer and penciler strongly associated with Spider-Man and his supporting cast and, I suppose, that this is another Original Sin tie-in that has nothing at all to do with Original Sin—it involves someone discovering a deep dark secret about JJJ, but not through a Watcher eye-blast or anything like that.

"Checkmate" by James Robinson, Alex Maleev and Cris Peter

This is a Dr. Doom story written by current Fantastic Four writer and drawn by Alex Maleev in his signature realistic, but grittier style. The actual protagonist is a scummy, investment advisor Wall Street type—someone you won't mind knowing gets killed by Dr. Doom, essentially—who learned some of Doom's secrets from the Watcher eye-bomb, and makes elaborate plans to blackmail Doom.

It goes about as well for him as you might expect.

Maleev's Doom is very cool-looking, despite only appearing in the splash pages that book-end the short story. He gives Doom red eyes, which is a small but effective tweak of the design. His protagonist is much less well-drawn, however, and I found myself being repeatedly distracted by trying to place the Hollywood actor he seemed to patterned after in any given panel: Here he looks like Ben Affleck, there Chris Evans, ooh in this sequence he looks like Eric Balfour...interesting choice.

The backgrounds and establishing shots, on the other hand, appear to just be traced or mildly manipulated photographs, which is pretty disappointing. But it's only ten-pages long, so it's hard to get too disappointed in the artwork either way.

"Catharsis" by David Abadta, Pablo Dura and Erica Henderson

This is another two-pager, which thus far has meant a funny story, but there isn't really a joke here, just a premise so unusual that it would only really fit in a gag format strip. Well, I think there's an attempt at a joke in the final panel, but I didn't think it really worked.

This does give a nice preview of what upcoming Unbeatable Squirrel Girl artist Erica Henderson's Marvel work could look like though. Verdict? Pretty nice!

"How The World Works" by Al Ewing, Butch Guice, Scott Hanna and Matthew Wilson

Billed as a Nick Fury story, this is as much a Dum Dum Dugan story as it is a Fury one, and the revelation that occurs in it seems to me to be at least as big a one as any of those regarding Fury in the main Original Sin series (i.e. that he's really old now for real, that he has a small army of super-LMDs of himself as a strapping young man, that he assassinates space monsters in his down time, that he almost blew a hole in Spider-Man's head, etc).

It's also the story that most directly ties in to the events of Original Sin, in terms of content and visuals, with Guice's pencil art, inked by Hanna and colored by Matthew Wilson, most closely resembling that of Deodato. It takes place during the time in which The Orb is in custody, and involves Dugan confronting Old Man Fury about all the shitty things Fury's been doing, only to discover a super-shitty thing Fury's been doing, a sin that seems a lot worse than some of his other sins.

"The No-Sin Situation" by Chip Zdarsky

Probably the best two-pages in the whole book, regardless of how much I might have talked up that Young Avengers story, this Zdarksy strip is billed as starring "Everybody Else." It's only two-pages long, but it has 28 panels in it! It opens with Nick Fury sitting down Gambit in an interview room and telling him that there's a situation where everyone's secrets are being revealed and that "I just want to get aheaed of it and see what we should prepare for." Fury assures the ragin' Cajun that "Everyhing you say here will be off the record and not in continuity."

The rest of the strip then consists of single-panels featuring a different Marvel character, introduced in a narration box naming them and defining them in a manner similar to Original Sin, revealing a deep, dark secret about themselves (The Black Panther and Namor, The Sub-Mariner are exceptions...they get two panels).

They are mostly very, very funny. For example:

I found two elements of the strip striking in that they paralleled Andrew Wheeler's "Original Spin" coverage of Original Sin for Comics Alliance. The first was that Zdarsky introduces The Watcher as "Moon Creep;" the first headline in the first installment of "Original Spin"...? "Moon Creep Murdered! Sex Games Gone Wrong?"

Also, Dr. Strange reveals that he changed his surname to Strange because he wanted to be in a metal band, which also explains his hand gestures. One of Wheeler's running gags for the Dr. Strange/Punisher team-up plotline of Original Sin was that the pair were a "retro psychedelic prog rock" band called Strangecastle.

"Original Sin: Secret Avengers" by Ales Kot, Mast, Geoffo, Ryan Kelly and Lee Loughridge

This is the apparent digital-first comic, referred to in the table-of-contents, where it is misplaced as coming before the issues of Original Sins rather than after them, as "Original Sin: Secret Avengers Infinite Comic #1-2." As I said, I'm not entirely sure what it's doing here; I suspect Marvel wasn't sure where else to put it, but then, the back of a Secret Avengers trade seems like the more obvious place, doesn't it?

It's only tangentially related to the goings-on of Original Sin—odd, since it stars two of SHIELD's "name" characters, one of whom is Nick Fury's namesake—as "The Event" (as the eyeball attack in Manhattan is here referred to) reveals the fact that this scientist guy that this Nick Fury—the young, black one who looks more like Sam Jackson then the old, white one does—and Agent Clark Gregg thought was dead is actually still alive, and he needs to be captured and stopped. Preferably before this guy with a weird face wearing a SHIELD uniform but commanding Hydra, a guy who no one ever names, gets his hands on him. As for the scientist, he developed a way to manipulate the universe through code, which he plans to have go open source. It is all apparently following up on plot points from comics I have never read, so I never really understood the exact nature of the conflict or the impetus for it, but I did manage to read all 32 pages of it, so it wasn't as boring and confusing as that Inhumans/Purple Man story was...

Review: Infinity

This is, however, a terrible cover, saying nothing about the book other than that Thanos is in it, and that he takes excellent care of his teeth for someone obsessed with death.

I really rather enjoyed Infinity, the Jonathan Hickman masterminded and written Marvel crossover/event series.

At least in the form in which I read it, the form of a gigantic, 630-page hardcover collection with the size and scope to truly deserve being called "a graphic novel." Even though it is a collection of serially-published comics: A half-dozen issues each of New Avengers and Infinity and 10 issues of Avengers.

The thing about the modern Marvel event series—DC has temporarily abandoned the field after The New 52, only offering one true big event in favor of smaller, franchise-sized crossovers and line-wide theme months—is that while the publisher does lay out a buffet of comics under the umbrella title of the event, it's up to the reader to basically curate their own experience. If you want to read it monthly, then you can choose to just read Infinity. Or just Infinity and its more important tie-ins (Here, Hickman's two Avengers books). Or everything with the word "Infinity" in the title. Or just the books featuring characters, creators or premises you like with the word "Infinity" in the title. Or some other configuration.

You could also wait for the collection, in which Marvel more-or-less pre-curates your Infinity experience for you. That's what I did with this book; I waited long enough for the dust to settle and the important parts of the story to emerge and get put together between a single set of covers (Yes, it costs a $75 fucking dollars, but that's what public libraries are for, if you feel no particular compulsion to own the book, and you probably shouldn't).

(One could also follow along by simply reading Andrew Wheeler's amusing summaries at Comics Alliance.)

I mention that merely because I suspect my experience of reading it in this particular form—one big, continuous narrative only occasionally broken up by the need to eat or sleep or go to work—made it a much more enjoyable one than it would have been were I reading it in 20-80-page installments once a week or once a month, over the course of half a year or so, likely picking up all sorts of puzzle pieces that I would only later find didn't really have anything to do with the final story (I ran across the Guardians of the Galaxy tie-in issue in the collection Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Angela, for example; that had almost nothing to do with the story of Infinity, it turns out, and was so insignificant to the story that it merits a two or three-panel dramatization within this collection).

Also, the not paying for it has got to help a lot. I know from reading Secret Invasion and Civil War how frustrating it is to pay too much money for a branded tie-in that has no real import or no real pay-off in the story itself. I suspect that if I had attempted to read Infinity the good old-fashioned, Wednesday Crowd reading way, I would have hated what little I made it through before giving up entirely.

But 600 pages of curated comics, for the free? Yeah, that's a good way to read the story.

The presentation here is pretty unique too, I think. There are two byzantine credits pages at the beginning, saying who did what in which comic book collected—Hickman wrote almost all of it, with Nick Spencer-co-writing a handful of Avengers issues; artists included Mike Deodato, Stefano Caselli, Jim Cheung, Jerome Opena, Dustin Weaver, Leinil Francis Yu and others—but unless you're very diligent, and, for some reason, decide to keep referring back to those credits pages while reading, it's difficult to tell which comic book the section you're reading originated in.

That is, there are no individual covers and story titles and credits demarcating the end of one issue and the beginning of the next. Rather, it's presented like a novel. There will be an all-white page with a chapter title on it—"Orbital," "The Last Lesson," "Plans and Intentions"—and then a few pages of comics before the next chapter. It's all rather seamless.

The artwork, if you're familiar with the names of the above artists, changes noticeably, but also changes so often that a sort of baseline aesthetic is established, and even an experienced reader will likely go a few pages before noticing a different artist is drawing, and generally only, say, when you see the way Yu draws an eyeball, or the way Deodato abuses his computer to drop blurry photos into the backgrounds in the most unnecessary of ways (For example, one panel had a photo of the moon in the back. Just draw a fucking circle! Use a compass if it's too hard! If we see a large, luminous circle in a black sky, we'll figure out it's the moon; we don't need to see all the craters).

The surprisingly seamless (or seam-lite) feel of the artwork may have something to do with the fact that the cast is largely an unfamiliar one. Well, it's large for one thing, and while most of the names are familiar, there are a lot characters in here who aren't exactly Spider-Man and Wolverine (both of whom appear briefly in the opening, and then disappear); there are a lot of Inhumans and space guys and new Hickman creations and Thanos' "The Black Order/Cull Obsidian" (almost none of whom are dark in color or where much black, oddly enough) that I didn't know if they were new or not, because the extremities of the Marvel Universe isn't my bag.

It may also have something to do with the fact that while I named some of the artists who contribute the most work, there are quite a few more, and those weren't counting the inkers and colorists. The book has the look of a studio work; not in the sort of uniform, page-to-page look that a manga studio might be able to produce, sure, but neither in the sort of "All hands on deck! Deadline's in six hours, guys!" look of some of the rougher DC Comics with more than three artists involved.

As for the story, it is appropriately big for a book called Infinity, but also, once it gets going, rather simple.

It involves a convergence of the two plot-lines in Hickman's two ongoing Avengers books, both of which I like quite a bit, from what I've read to them previous to this.

The simpler of the two would seem to be New Avengers, which should really be called The Illuminati, as it features the Brian Michael Bendis-created concept of a cabal of the smartest and most influential Marvel Universe leaders secretly meeting and pulling strings behind the scenes. The current incarnation—Doctor Strange, Namor, The Black Panther, Mister Fantastic, Black Bolt, Iron Man and the X-Men's Beast, the latter of whom is in for the temporarily dead Charles Xavier—are currently trying to secretly deal with a fantastic problem with mind-boggling moral implications.

Apparently, alternate Earths from neighboring dimensions keep appearing close to their own Earth (the one we call 616) and, with no Spectre to push the world's apart, Gardner Fox-style, they have to come up with a solution to save their world. The best they've been able to come up with is to destroy the alternate Earths, before they collide into their own Earth, destroying both.

Namor, who is, remember, a dick, and Black Panther, whose little sister now rules Wakanda as queen and is advised by a bunch of dicks, find their countries at war on account of the events of Avengers Vs. X-Men, which makes playing nicely on the same team somewhat difficult for the pair.

In Hickman's Avengers book, he's introduced the biggest and most powerful Avengers line-up I've seen, in a book that is probably the closest thing to Grant Morrison's '90s run on JLA with Howard Porter, John Dell and occasional fill-in creators that I've yet found. Iron Man invents a sort of Avengers machine to recruit members, and the huge line-up has swelled to include Captain America, Captain Marvel, Thor, Hyperion, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Black Widow, The Falcon, Shang-Chi, Hawkeye, Wolverine, former X-Men Sunspot and Cannonball (who have taken the Wally West/Kyle Rayner comic relief/POV character role from JLA), Manifold, a new Smasher, a weird new take on Captain Universe and new characters—or new versions of old characters, in perhaps one case—Abyss, Nightmask, Ex Nihilo and Starbrand. Whew!

Those last four were later additions, and the earlier books of the series have dealt with the already pretty huge Avengers line-up dealing with them, as they showered Earth with "origin bombs" and pulled all kinds of crazy cosmic bullshit.

As for that simple plot that powers Infinity, it goes like this. An ancient race known as The Builders, whom Abyss and Ex Nihilo were kinda sorta in the employ of at one time, are destroying the galaxy, wheat thresher style, on their way to Earth, which they would also like to destroy. "The Galactic Council" (i.e. The Illuminati...but in space!) rally all kinds of Marvel alien races and band together to try to stop The Builders in Star Wars-dwarfing space battle after Star Wars dwarfing space battle, and The Avengers recruit their most powerful recent antagonists (Ex Nihilo, et al) and head into space to join the fight.

Meanwhile, learning that Earth is currently Avengers-free, Thanos decides to attack, with a somewhat ambiguous goal (looking for an Infinity Gem, and/or collecting bags of heads) masking his true goal—to find and kill his son, who is hidden on Earth among the Inhumans.

So it's a war on two fronts, with the away team pretty outmatched, despite entire space empires worth of cosmic help, and the home team dealing with Thanos' armies, lead by the five super-powerful members of the Black Order (this bit actually reminded me a bit of the also decidedly simple, and better than most stories in its class, Fear Itself, at least in the way Thanos' Obsidian generals mirrored the hammer-wielding Worthy).

The remaining Earth heroes and The Illuminati have to deal with the Thanos mess, and hope to hold him off long enough for the space war to wrap up and the other Avengers come back to help beat-up Thanos. Meanwhile, Blackbolt is up to something. And of course, an alternate Earth could materialize at any moment and obliterate the world...or compel the Illuminati to commit planetary genocide.

So lot of big ideas thrown about at machine gun pacing, with clever uses for powers and comic book science being employed as tactics in the course of the wars.

I do hate to keep bringing up Grant Morrison—or at least, Grant Morrison circa the turn of the century—as I get the feeling Hickman gets unfairly compared to him far too often already, but Hickman's take on the various super-characters reminded me quite a bit of Morrison's take on the JLA, in which the characters are very remote and, a few jokes or a single character trait apiece aside, don't have all that much in the form of personalities, but rather are interchangeable soldiers, functionaries who are so caught up in the escalating scales of the threats they face that there's no real need to concern ourselves with any personal conflicts they might be facing.

Are Captains Marvel and America confident, or do they feel out of place fighting among god-like aliens in battles in which worlds live and die? Who cares? They're kinda wrapped up in the fighting of those battles at the moment.

This isn't the case with the Thano/Illuinati side of the plot. Many of the characters have semi-silly magnetic poetry names, and speak in florid pronouncements, but there is a much (relatively) smaller scale to plots like the invasion of a single planet by a single invasion force, for example, or Thanos wanting to kill his son, or Black Bolt not wanting to let Thanos kill a bunch of his people, and so forth. The motivations and conflicts among m any of these characters are still quite grand, but things like wars between nations and geo-political rivals are at least human in scale.

For all of the talk one hears about the unlimited special effects budget of the comics page, I found the art somewhat ill-suited for depicted space battles between armadas of huge space ship. At their best, we get a sense of scale in large drawings of huge numbers of ships, but they don't move, and the artists rarely give us more than establishing shots—there are no dogfights or anything akin to that. The scale here dwarf that of your biggest Star Wars battle, but it doesn't move or sing and thus doesn't thrill like even the most dryly staged and unimaginative Star Wars battle scene.

At best, the space ship fights work in extreme long shot, as we see chunks of gray and white metal in the background, laser beams like Christmas tree lights between them.

The supehero battles are a lot more successful, of course, and Hickman and his collaborators do some weird and strange things with the space team of Avengers. They are outnumbered by their many alien allies—Gladiator, Ronan The Accuser, etc—but appear in the fray with odd bits of armor and masks, occasionally astride weird little vehicles. My favorite out-of-place character in this is probably The Falcon, who gets a big, bizarre, vaguely prehistoric bird-shaped helmet that allows him to participate in space fights.

Also note Spider-Woman on a speeder-bike thingee with Hawkweye behind her, fighting alien spaceships with a bow and arrow in space.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the good guys ultimately win, not even losing any token, temporary casualties as is so often the case in these sorts of crossovers (Well, I'm pretty sure thousands died, but no Avengers). What is surprising is all the stuff that Hickman has his good guys try in the course of winning, some things failing horribly (like a last resort to release a new "Annihilation Wave" from the Negative Zone, a threat so dire it once powered it's own galactic-spanning crossover event series) and some things succeeding remarkably well (like Thor having Mjolnir punch a hole in a seemingly unstoppable villain to inspire a planet full of guys who carry big, blunt weapons).

Again, like Morrison's JLA, the story ends with a sort of exciting, sort of depressing note—as bad as all this might have seemed for our heroes, it was nothing compared to what it could have been, and what it will be next time. The end of the world (or galaxy or universe) doesn't just appear and win or lose once, but it's something that's always coming, more persistently and more insistently each time, and requires constant fighting. Entropy is an inevitability, and superhero fights, like life itself, is basically just a stalling tactic.

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

A cheery thought, I know.

So let's end on a fun note. A Lockjaw note.

Lockjaw is, of course, the giant bulldog with a tuning fork on his head and a handsome mustache that serves as the Inhumans' modes of transportation, given his ability to teleport himself and others. He is awesome.

He appears throughout the book, generally in a seemingly small role, as he helps Black Bolt and Black Bolt's brother Maximus The Mad in their bizarre machinations.

Lockjaw: The only reason an Inhumans movie might be a good idea.

He also gets maybe the single most bad-ass scene in the entire series. Here is Lockjaw taking out one of Thanos' generals, Supergiant, all by his bad-ass bulldog self:

Fuck yeah, Lockjaw!

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

Hey, is it weird that in a hand-to-hand fight against one of Thanos' generals, the orange guy in gray armor called Blackdwarf, that Black Widow's costume gets torn up a lot more than Shang Chi's?

Ha ha ha ha! No, of course not! He wears spandex and she wears crepe paper. It's a simple matter of the materials they make their costumes out of, and has nothing to do with artists preferring to draw women with their clothes torn off then men with their clothes torn off. Obviously.

Review: Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers Unleashed

The original, 2009 Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers series was an extremely Marvel Universe-dependent affair. The cast, of course, was comprised of various animal heroes associated with various Marvel characters—The Inhumans’ teleporting bulldog Lockjaw, X-Man Kitty Pryde’s dragon Lockheed, The Falcon’s falcon Redwing, Ka-Zar’s sabre tooth cat Zabu, Speedball’s cat Hairball, a frog with Thor’s powers and costumes called Throg and Ms. Lion from Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends—and the plot involved them going on a quest to assemble the Infinity Gems before cosmic villain Thanos could put them in his gauntlet and rule the universe or whatever.

The 2010 sequel series, Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers Unleashed (Get it? Because two of them are dogs, and dogs wear leashes?), is much less dependent on Marvel continuity, and perhaps ironically, seems a lot more reader friendly—at least up to a point.

The conflict in this outing is that half-frog, half-god-like superhero Throg feels out of place, neither true frog nor true god, but finally finds acceptance among his fellow mythological creatures, like the Yeti. In doing so, he stumbles into a world where such fantasy creatures have all been sent, a world where they’re under threat by a mysterious, unseen foe.

When Throg leaves Earth, his old teammates must reunite and try to find him, and, along the way, earth gets invaded by fantasy animals and, later, the things from their world that were harming them in the first place.

Writer Chris Eliopoulos’s plotting is fairly strong, though the twist at the end seemed a little tired and overused to me, as well as coming a bit out of left field (Of course, if this is a kids comic, I don’t suppose it matters so much if many other stories have similar elements, since this may be the first time in their younger lives they’ve encountered it). The characterization of some of the principals helps sell it all quite well, and I think the story is actually at its best when we’re just sort of hanging around Ms. Lion and Hairball as they attempt to be animal superheroes in New York City.

That pair has, by far, the most defined personalities among the cast members, even if their personalities are sorta simple—Hairball, the cat, hates the dog; Ms. Lion, the dog, is dimwitted and enthusiastic—and they get the most panel-time.

In fact, one of the weaknesses of the scripting is how unnecessary much of the cast seems. If Redwing, Lockjaw and Zabu weren’t in this comic at all, it wouldn’t change a thing—their few lines would just be spoken by someone else. That’s a challenge of writing team comics—especially super-team comics, as teams as stacked with powers as, say The Justice League and The Avengers really shouldn’t need to have folks like Superman or Sentry standing around constantly—and I guess it holds true for team comics featuring superhero animals.

Ig Guara’s art is, again, superior. He draws perfectly realistic animals, but without sacrificing their ability to emote in ways that seem both animal-like but easily readable. And Big Two super-comic artists who can do very realistic while still maintaining the vibrancy of a living, breathing, done-by-human-hand drawing are increasingly rare.

Much like the first volume then, this is pretty fun all-ages adventure; a not-great comic with an awesome premise and extremely polished execution that make a few flaws seem particularly forgivable.

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

I read this story not as it was originally published, in serial comic book form, but in a trade. I read the original series in comic book form, and regretted it when I saw all of the nice variant covers that were being produced for it, variants that I assumed were included in the trade.

So this time I waited for the trade, so as not to miss out on Robert Langridge’s totem poll variant or this neat dogs-playing poker riff. I know the incentive for doing variant covers at all is that it helps the publishers sell more books to their retailers, but it has the opposite effect on me, and I wonder if it incentivizes trade-waiting among more readers than it manages to sell issues to readers? (It’s such a weird business model really, with publishers selling to retailers, not readers, and retailers selling to readers, so the publisher/reader relationship isn’t as important as it might be otherwise).

The advantage of my waiting for the trade is that I did indeed get all the covers without having to buy two copies of some of the issues, and I also got two other, shorter stories.

The downside? Marvel published the trade at a smaller, not-quite-digest size, which didn’t serve the art and thus the comics all that well, since they were created for the larger dimensions (which I’ve already discussed a bit here).

So I’m afraid I still can’t quite figure out the best way to read these things.

The serials come out more frequently and are at a size more complimentary to the content, but they’re also full of ads, missing some content (variant covers, at the least) and, in most Marvel cases, are more expensive.

The trade is generally cheaper, has more content (here, variants and back-ups) and can be purchased without a trip to a comic shop (45 minutes, for me), but (again, in this particular case) the artwork is ill-served by the size.

So, those back-ups?

The first is by Eliopoulos, writing and drawing, and was originally published as part of the $4 Tails of the Pet Avengers: The Dog Days of Summer one-shot, from last July. It’s actually a Franklin Richards, Son of a Genius story, drawn in Eliopoulus’ Bill Watterson-inspired style, and starring Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman’s young son, and his robot nanny HERBIE.

The inadvertently create a giant garbage monster, and the Pet Avengers show up to help.

It’s a pretty fun, funny little story, and it was a pleasure to see Eliopoulos drawing the Pet Avengers. Check it out:He also does an excellent job with Puppy, a puppy with similar powers to Lockheed (and a similar tuning fork on his head), really capturing the not-giving-a-fuck of certain dogs.Finally, there’s a four-page short entitled “Hulk-Pet Avengers,” which gives us an opportunity to see another artist’s take on the characters—that of Dario Brizuela.This one’s written by an Audrey Loeb, whom I believe may be related to that other comic book writer named Loeb (it would certainly explain why this not at all funny or even very good story got published), and, like so many comics written by people named Loeb, it’s sort of a nonsensical mess.

A little kid Hulk who is blue—Blue Hulk apparently only exists in these shorts, where he tends to hang out with Red Hulk and (Green) Hulk, neither of whom are present here—is hanging out and watching TV with the Pet Avengers. Here, they can talk to non-animals, like Blue Hulk.

Actually, all of them can talk, even Lockjaw, who can’t talk, even to other animals. It’s…it’s just weird, really. Like someone in old time Hollywood writing a script for a short film featuring the Marx Brothers, and including plenty of lines for Harpo.

Anyway, the TV watchers see an ad for some place called Ice Cream Mountain, which is apparently a literal mountain of ice cream, and then they try to go there, but talking Lockheed’s teleportation powers get scrambled by lightning, so they teleport to a few other places first, on the way encountering the Red Ghost’s Super-Apes, which is kind of cool, I guess.

(Disclaimer: If Audrey Loeb is Jeph Loeb’s young daughter and only, like, a grade schooler or something, I apologize for being mean. If she’s over 18, then never mind—it’s just the story I’m judging, not the person, obviously. And the story is no good.)

Two things.

1.) Is Ms. Lion transexual? He's male, but dresses as a female, with pink bows on his ears, and uses a feminine modifier on his name. Of course, if he was a physically male dog that identifies himself as female, he would he be so quick to answer "yup" when asked if he's male? (Can the other animals, all being of different species, with the possible exception of Lockjaw, who's kind of a special case anyway, tell what gender he is?) Or is Ms. Lion perhaps a transvestite, a male dog who enjoys dressing as a female dog, and has adopted a more colorful female name, for the fun of it? Whatever the case, Ms. Lion is a ground-breaking character, the first transgendered or cross-dressing one in Marvel's character catalog (That I know of, anyway).*


2.) How is it that Ms. Lion knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man? Did Mephisto's mind-wipe mojo somehow not affect him?



(Image from Marvel's Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #1, drawn by Ig Guara)



*Or, more likely, writer Chris Eliopoulos is just using the scene to humorously point out that Ms. Lion is so stupid that he doesn't even realize that "Ms." is an article used by females, and that pink bows are associated with female characters rather than male ones, especially in the cartoon character business. Each of the "Pet Avengers" is given a single character trait, and Ms. Lion's is stupidity.

Some random thoughts on some NYCC announcements

(Above: J.H. Williams sure can draw, can’t he? From his upcoming run on Detective Comics, starring the lady with the custom-made bat-boots)

—This is probably the news of the Con. Er, for me at least.


—I don’t understand this concept at all. Robert Kirkman and Todd McFarlane are doing a book about a scary Spider-Man who wears a mask that looks like Spawn’s face, and he shoots…webs? Slime? Ectoplasm? Seriously, what’s that stuff he’s flinging around in that image? It’s pretty gross-looking.


—I read this write-up of the Superman panel, and I’m afraid I still can’t figure out what exactly is up with the Super-books going forward. I have both Action and Superman on my pull-list at the local comics shop at the moment, but I guess I’ll drop ‘em and proceed on an issue by issue basis going forward. I definitely want to avoid any issues of Action with Eddy Barrows’ art, as he’s in the Ed Benes/Tony Daniel neighborhood in my own personal aesthetic estimation.

And what’s with Superman leaving Earth for about a year…again? The first Superman story I read was the one that followed his death, the yearlong “Funeral for a Friend” and “Reign of the Supermen” sequence, which was all about defining Superman by his absence. That was about 15 years ago now, I suppose. About two years ago, Superman left Metropolis for a year of story time (but just a few months of our time) as part of 52, and stories were told defining him by his absence. The ongoing Trinity is all about what the world would be like without Superman (and Wonder Woman and Batman in it) and thus defining him by his absence. I get it, I get it—Superman is very important to Metropolis and to the whole world in general.

This particular storyline, which I guess takes place in a third Superman series, will have a different reason for him leaving, and some different creators involved, but it’s hard to get very excited about a world without Superman story again.


—I’m still not at all interested in the X-Men. Although this image is pretty awesome, in a stupid-awesome kind of way:



—Ditto Star Wars comics. I don’t know what it is exactly; I loved Star Wars growing up, and I love comics now, but I just can’t seem to get into any of the Star Wars comics. I did dig the Star Wars Tales trades and the Tag and Bink trade, but that’s as far as I’ve been able to wade into ‘em.



—What I find most interesting about the existence of a book called Dark Wolverine starring Wolverine’s son Dokken (did I spell that right?), who has two claws on each hand instead of three, is that it’s being co-written by prose writer Marjorie Liu, who is currently writing a low-selling NYX miniseries. Not that her co-writing a Wolverine book with Daniel Way is a negative thing or anything, it’s just not the next place I expected to see her name pop up at Marvel.


—Vaneta Rogers covered the Batman panel, which was full of mysterious and exciting news.

For example, I’m kind of excited about the Greg Rucka/J.H. Williams III Batwoman arc on Detective, which will definitely get me picking up that title again. I am curious why it took DC so long to publish an actual Batwoman story after her high-profile debut in, when was that, 2006?

Also in June, DC will be relaunching Batman(hopefully with the original numbering still in place!) and launchng new books entitled Batman and Robin, Red Robin (A Jason Todd book? I’ll pass, but jeez, they sure did take their time getting around to telling a real Jason Todd story too, didn’t they?), Outsiders (New direction #16), Batgirl (which is pretty damn silly considering they cancelled a semi-successful Batgirl ongoing, then spent a few years doing their level best to wreck the character, and her just-ended miniseries sold pretty awfully), Batman: The Streets of Gotham and Gotham City Sirens.

They didn’t announce creative teams for any of those though, so who knows if any of those will be any good.

If Batwoman is taking over TEC due to Batman’s continued absence, than I suppose Jason Todd is in Red Robin, Dick Grayson reluctantly becomes Batman and stars in Batman and Robin and beyond that…I can’t make any guesses. Streets sounds like it could be a Gotham Central type book, and Sirens sounds like it could be the rumored girl book, which would be a natural place for Paul Dini.

I do hope Batman will be Grant Morrison’s story of Batman fighting his way through time from caveman days to the present.


—Okay, the plans for the Ultimate Universe post-Ultimatum just sound insane. Here’s a few paragraphs from Albert Ching’s coverage of the Cup O’ Joe panel:

Turning to Ultimatum, Quesada showed slides of "Ultimate Requiems." "We're kind of saying goodbye to those books," said McCann. "We're canceling Ultimate Spider-Man," said Quesada to a startled crowd. "We are done professionally!" yelled Bendis to Quesada, emulating the now-infamous Christian Bale rant.

"We are introducing Ultimate Comics," said Quesada. Bendis talked about Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, starting with a new #1, with David LaFuente as the new artist. "You can tell it's going to be good because it has the New Avengers lightning bolt on the cover," said Bendis.

Of LaFuente, Bendis said "This is his first ongoing series. He's awesome." Bendis said it's a fresh start, but not a reboot, though some time will have passed between the series. "Some new characters, maybe someone new in the costume," he continued.

I really like LaFuente’s art—he did the Peter/MJ sex life annual, and the Hellcat miniseries—and I’m sure I’ll continue reading Bendis’ new version of Ultimate Spider-Man, but I’m pretty surprised that they’re relaunching it, as doing so is kind of anathema to the whole line’s original concept. And Stuart Immonen didn’t end up sticking around all that long after all, did he? (Of course, New Avengers, which he’s taking over, sells better, so I can’t exactly blame the guy).

I love the way LaFuente draws Spidey's head, by the way.

They also announced Ultimate Comics Avengers—these kinda sound like Japanese titles using English words, don’t they?—by Mark Millar and too-slow-for-a-monthly Carlos Pacheco, continuing the proud tradition of ridiculously late Millar Ultimate Avengers books, I guess.


—This kinda sorta excited me. From Albert Ching’s DC panel coverage:

DiDio asked Giffen what his post-Reign in Hell comic will be. "Two words: Doom Patrol," said the veteran creator. Giffen then asked how many of the crowd were fans of the Grant Morrison Doom Patrol. Many cheered. "You're going to be really disappointed," said Giffen. "How about the original Doom Patrol?" Slightly less cheers, but still positive. "You guys are going to be really disappointed," said Giffen, playing the audience. He said that they were going to make the Doom Patrol accessible to people.

"So what's your problem with Justice League International?" asked Giffen in DiDio's direction. "Does anyone really think I have a problem with JLI?" DiDio snapped back. (Apparently, much of the crowd did.) This led to an announcement that the classic JLI team — Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire — will be doing Metal Men back-ups in Doom Patrol.


—I don’t know what to make of any of the Final Crisis Aftermath books without hearing the names of any creators attached, but only the Super Young Team seem to naturally extend from FC and show any glimmer of the possibility of maybe being a minor hit. It also scares me to hear Ian Sattler say of Final Crisis Aftermath: Escape, "Dan described this book as a combination between The Prisoner and Saw.” I thought all DC books were now a combination of something and Saw.


—Fellow Blog@ contributor David Pepose covered the Radical Publishing panel, of which the most interesting news to me was this:

In addition, Levine said, after this Comic Con, Radical would no longer publish 22-page single issues, instead collecting six-issue arcs into three 48-page books. “It's just so much easier for readers to invest themselves in 48 pages rather than 22,” he said. “We'll keep it at $4.99 so it’s cheaper than two issues.”

Hey, yeah, that is great news. A five-dollar bill gets you 48 pages, whereas Marvel and DC charge you six bucks for 44 pages.

Assuming that there are prices associated with the production of individual books that would be involved with the production of a bigger book with two books’ worth of pages inside (i.e., making two covers, laying out the ads twice, etc.), that would be a way to save money, right?

If industry leaders DC and Marvel are really thinking they need to move to a higher price point, as Marvel’s already in the process of doing, the Radical model sure sounds promising. Currently, Marvel’s charging $3.99 for 22 pages of New Avengers; a pretty rotten value when put up against $4.99 for 48 pages, isn’t it?

The downside for the Big Two transitioning to double-length books would be publishing each one less frequently, which means potentially getting those customers into the shop less frequently, but smart publishing schedule planning could alleviate that.

For example, if Marvel’s publishing 20 X-Men books a month, they could simply schedule five a week. People! This could work! Try this before you go charging $3.99 per chapter of New Avengers!


—Hey, look at this!

Lockjaw and The Pet Avengers, apparently.

DC, your pets are like more numerous and much cooler; I can’t believe you let Marvel beat you to the punch on an all super-pet team book.


—Kevin Maguire will also be drawing Spider-Man: The Short Halloween, which is being written by some guys from that Saturday Night Live show I used to watch in high school. That’s still on, huh? Anyway, a lot of upcoming Maguire comics is good news

So I understand the Obamas are looking for a new dog...

Provided they don't have their hearts set on one that's both three-dimensional and, what's the word, real, then I might have a few suggestions...


Krypto The Superdog

Breed: Kryptonian

Current owner: Superman

Positives: Has all of Superman's many powers, only scaled to dog proportions, making him an ideal guard dog, watch dog, bloodhound and, should the need arise, attack dog.

Negatives: Would be difficult for human owners or handlers to take him for flies into outer space for exercise, or throw trees for him to fetch; could render the president's secret service detail superfluous, costing hundreds of them their jobs



Ace, The Bat-Hound

Breed: German shepherd

Current owner: Batman (estranged)

Positives: Batman would likely be willing to give Ace up, given how the Dark Knight tends to be ashamed of his occasional canine sidekick and is constantly trying to distance himself; an experienced tracker, Ace could help find people when the president can't (Look out, bin Laden!)

Negatives: Previous owner was kind of insane, so Ace might have a difficult time adjusting to living with a normal family that never wears capes or assaults anyone; background check could compromise Ace's secret identity, and thus that of Batman



Rex, The Wonder Dog

Breed: German Shepherd

Current owner: A national treasure, Rex is owned by us all

Posiitves: A superb polymath and jack-of-all-trades, Rex's skill set and resume are unparalleled by any dog in history (and, come to think of it, few humans); in addition to being an excellent guard dog, he could easily fill in as a nanny for the girls, a secret service agent, White House chief of staff, Secretary of State, Vice President, or whatever Obama needs, really

Negatives: It might not do to have the First Dog showing up the president of the United States, and the fact that Rex would likely crush the back of al Qaeda, capture bin Laden, turn the economy around, solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and invent a new source of cheap green energy within his first 100 days pretty much guarantees he'll be making Obama seem incompetent in comparison.



G'Nort Esplanade G'neesmacher

Breed: G'Newtian

Current owners: The Guardians of the Galaxy

Positives: As a biped that can speak English and has opposable thumbs, G'Nort needs little in the way of care, and could be more useful than most first pets tend to be(he could feed himself, reach things on high shelves for the girls, etc.); his magic wishing ring is sometimes referred to as the "most powerful weapon in the universe" and can create any form of energy and matter in any amount, so long as he has the necessary willpower and imagination

Negatives: Past unsavory personal connections include Guy Gardner, The Scarlet Skier and Justice League Antarctica; allegiance to an immortal race of remote, controlling aliens may present the appearance of a conflict of interest; less intelligent than most species of earth dogs; a little of him goes a long way



Lockjaw

Breed: Attilanian giant bulldog

Current owner: The Inhuman Royal Family, or possibly Ben "The Thing" Grimm

Positives: An exceptionally good dog for watching after the daugthers of the powerful; has experience working with ruling families; in addition to his great strength, his ability to teleport would be a useful form of transportation for the president; would be the first First Pet with a tuning fork in its head

Negatives: His great size may be problematic, potentially causing damage to the White House; the United States and the Inhumans have had several recent conflicts, and it may be impolitic to invite one of them to live in the White House; drools



Scooby-Doo

Breed: Great Dane

Current owner: Some beatnik

Positives: Master of disguise (for a dog); will do absolutely anything for a scooby snack; can talk (albeit with a speech impediment); friends with ghost-breakers Mystery Inc., who could prove useful in solving the mystery of the White House ghosts

Negatives: Extremely cowardly and somewhat paranoid (Get ready to hear “Sp-Sp-Spirit?!” every time you mention “The spirit of bipartisanship," Mr. President-Elect); needs held a lot; enormous appetite could put an unusual strain on the White House's pet food budget



Dynomutt, Dog Wonder

Breed: Android

Current owner: The Blue Falcon/Radley Crown

Positives: As his dog hair is synthetic, he's hypoallergenic; miraculous system of transistors allows him to telescope his limbs to great lengths and pull a gadget for almost any emergency out of his chest; worked for the first black mayor in a Saturday morning cartoon; former All-Star Laff-a-Lympic athlete; his partner Blue Falcon says he’s “as strong as a train…fearless, scare-less” and “a go-go dog person” (that’s a compliment, right?)

Negatives: An inveterate bumbler; kind of an idiot (for a talking android dog); has an extremely annoying laugh; has amassed a long list of goofy but potentially dangerous villains like Madame Apeface, Queen Hornet, The Red Vulture, The Glob, Fishface, Lowbrow, The Blimp and so on; according to his partner Blue Flacon he has “a so-so brain” and is “a little too careless”



Goofy

Breed: Human canine hybrid

Current owner: The Walt Disney corporation

Positives: Has opposable thumbs and walks bipedally, so he can manipulate most basic tools; can dress, feed and walk himself; can speak (although mostly just says “Gorsh!” and “A-hyuck hyuck”)

Negatives: Severely mentally retarded (or possibly brain-damaged); unsavory associations include a gigantic rodent and a duck with severe anger management issues



Snoopy

Breed: Beagle

Current owner: A depressed, round-headed grade school student

Positives: Good with kids; extremely affectionate toward little girls; quite a dancer; his Easter Beagle schtick would be a hit at White House lawn Easter egg rolls and hunts

Negatives: Prone to hallucination and elaborate delusions, has trouble separating his imagination from reality; ties to MetLife may present conflict of interest when the new president tackles health insurance reform