Review: Jessica Jones Vol. 1: Uncaged!

Writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos return to their Jessica Jones character for the first comic to star the super-powered Private Investigator since 2014, a move no doubt inspired by the well-received 2015 Netflix series (and, one imagines, a boost to trade paperback collection sales of the original 28-issue Alias series). The new ongoing monthly isn't titled Alias, after all, but Jessica Jones.

In truth, Bendis didn't stop writing the character when he moved on from her solo title, as he took her with him into the pages of the short-lived series The Pulse and his long run on the Avengers franchise, where she continued to play a role, albeit a small, supporting one. Doing so meant moving her significantly far away from the character who was able to power the iconoclastic Max imprint series, however, as she married Luke Cage, devoted herself to being a mother to their child and lived with the Avengers in Avengers Tower (and their other bases).

So to relaunch a title with Jessica as the star, and to make it much of anything at all like the TV show and the original comics run that inspired it, Bendis and Gaydos had to return the character to where she was over a decade ago. Surprisingly, Bendis accomplishes this rather easily, although granted the mechanics of how she became estranged from Luke, where their child is and why she is once again a pariah in the superhero community, taking shady cases just to make rent, is all left as a mystery. And it's a mystery, I should say, that was almost certainly terrible frustrating to anyone who attempted to read the first six issues of the series serially, as it was published, rather than waiting for the trade paperback collection (If I have learned anything at all about Brian Michael Bendis during the sixteen years or so I have been reading his work, it is this--always wait for the trade).

I suppose it would constitute a story-ruining spoiler to reveal what exactly is going on, which isn't made apparent until the final of these issues, so suffice it to say that when the new series begins, Jessica has just been released from a prison for superheroes, and is trying to get her life back together. Her daughter Danielle is not with her, and Luke wants to know where she is, as Misty, Jessica Drew and, finally, Luke himself all confront her about Danielle, with Jessica either telling them off or jumping away in a super-leap.

Meanwhile, she takes an unusual case and is just about simultaneously approached by a mysterious woman using Spider-Man villain Spot for muscle.

I was somewhat surprised how heavily this initial story arc revolved around the events of Secret Wars and Civil War II, and there's even a strange, hallucinatory appearance by a young black woman dressed like Captain America that Jessica addresses with, "Dani?" Danielle Cage is Captain America in a possible future, but you likely wouldn't know that if you hadn't read any of Al Ewing's various Avengers comics. I don't know that one necessarily needs to have read these comics to be able to read and enjoy Jessica Jones, of course, and I suppose it's worth noting that, at least in terms of the Secret Wars plotline, it is very much in keeping with what Alias originally did, looking at the fantastic events of the Marvel Universe from a street-level, more real-world point-of-view, and dramatizing how the world of superhero adventure affects those on the edges like Jessica Jones and her clientele.

The Secret Wars business, by the way, is that a woman hires Jessica to prove that her husband isn't crazy, because he believes he is a refugee from another universe, and that he was suddenly plopped into this universe when his own was destroyed, replacing the version of himself that existed in this universe. That, of course, sounds insane to everyone he explains it to, but he's basically like a civilian version of Spider-Man Miles Morales and, I don't know, I think Ultimate Thor and maybe Ultimate Captain America made it into the post-Secret Wars Universe too.

The Civil War II tie-in is a little weirder, in that here Bendis is tying into his own big event comic, which is a slightly more uncomfortable thing, and it's so much harder to do convincingly now that Bendis himself isn't writing from the edges of the Marvel publishing line, but is driving it himself with events comics like Civil War II. That element is that Alison Green, the innocent banking lady that Captain Marvel had extraordinarily renditioned and was illegally holding without charge based on a prediction from Ulysses that didn't pan out in Civil War II #4 (the final dumb and/or bad thing she did before Iron Man brought his team to the Triskelion to free Green and fight Captain Marvel) was radicalized by Captain Marvel, and become part of an organization intent on killing superheroes. (This is also somewhat awkward in that it makes the case, sort of, that she wasn't completely innocent, and that Ulysses was right to suspect her...after a fashion.)

If you didn't read any of those comics though, I don't know how you read this one. I asked my friend, who recently devoured and loved Alias and liked the Jessica Jones TV show, what she thought of this new series, which she has been buying and reading serially, and she said she has no idea what is going on. That may be a function of Bendis building it on event comics, and/or it may be a function of his writing for the trade as per usual, so that it takes about a half of year to demystify the mystery.

But read in trade, and being familiar with what it references? I liked it pretty okay. I did not care for the art much, however. Gaydos' style is, well, Gaydos' style and this is his character and a new version of his book. I don't know if he's gotten lazier since the early aughts, or if I've just become more aware of it, but there are quite a few irritatingly obvious shortcuts in the art here. It's not just the usage of photos for most of the backgrounds, although that too is annoying, but Gaydos recycles images repeatedly, so in the course of a single conversation between Alison and Jessica, Alison will continually make the same face and gesture. It's a very 1960s Hana-Barbera kind of thing to be seeing in a comic book collection published in 2017.

All in all, this trade is a pretty good reminder that you cannot, in fact, go home again, but Bendis and Gaydos have done a pretty good approximation of home here.

Some recent Marvel trades I read, um, recently:

Daredevil: Back In Black Vol.3--Dark Art

After a really rather rough second volume (discussed in this post), the current, Charles Soule-written volume of Daredevil is back to the level of quality of the first volume. This likely has a lot to do with the fact that pencil artist Ron Garney is back, drawing all five of the issues collected herein. It may also have a lot to do with the fact that, like the first volume and unlike the second volume, Soule apparently wrote these issues as a single arc. It's not quite complete enough to read like a distinct graphic novel, as it does pick up on at least one event from volume two (Elektra having broken Blindspot's arm), and there's a pretty dramatic cliffhanger ending regarding the fate of Daredevil's new sidekick, but otherwise this is a pretty self-contained comics story.

Our heroes are doing their thing, lawyering and/or law assistancing by day, fighting crime by night, and they are forced to face a sinister new villain. The papers have dubbed him "Vincent Van Gore," which is pretty good, but he personally prefers "Muse," which isn't quite as good. He's a serial killer/artist, and his first major piece being a gigantic Guernica-esque mural painted with the blood of dozens of different victims. He's also got some weird and, frankly, ill-defined powers that make him a match for Daredevil in a scrap, particularly since Daredevil can't "see" him.

And that's pretty much that: Hero vs. villain, with the latter being a brand-new villain. There's something you don't see much anymore!

Complicating matters is that Muse's second piece involves killing of several Inhumans*, and so Daredevil and Matt Murdock try to work with Medusa and New Attilan. There's another new character introduced here--a former New York City Police Department detective who got Inhuman-ized, given a neat but subtle power and who now works as a liaison between the country and the city's police--who spends the most time with DD and/or MM, but the climax of the Inhumans' involvement seems to be to have Medusa be kind of a jerk and let Karnak and Daredevil fight. As I was reading one scene, in which neighborhood toughs attempt to murder an Inhuman, it occurred to me that this story arc may seem quite dated in a few years' time, as the scene is written almost exactly as if Soule had simply replaced the word "mutant" with "Inhuman."

I'm not crazy about Muse's mask, which appears to include a tight-fitting knit cap like the kind of a cartoon burglar might wear, and his tiny little backpack, but otherwise his design is visually striking, and of the sort that fits into the book's unusual coloring scheme (which color artist Matt Milla manages).

I can't say I'm terribly excited about what I imagine may dominate the fourth volume, based on the last, climactic pages of this arc, in which Blindspot is forced to take on Muse solo in order to save many lives, but it's quite possible that Soule will end up zagging instead of zigging.

Again, after a choppy second volume, Daredevil is again pretty tightly written super-comics, with great art and a somewhat unique visual hook to its telling that separates it from the scores of other superhero comics on the shelves at the moment (the vast majority of which are also published by Marvel).

Deadpool: Too Soon?

If Deadpool's current state of popularity is such that his presence can not only goose interest and sales in books he appears in, than this four-issue miniseries operated on almost reverse logic. This is a Deadpool comic filled with a large cast of guest-stars, most of them relatively minor characters, but ones with strong fan bases.

Writer Joshua Corin (whom I have never heard of**) sends The Forbush Man, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, The Astonishing Ant-Man, Rocket and Groot, Howard The Duck, The Punisher and Peter Porker, The Amazing Spider-Ham and, um, The Punisher to a mansion, each following a similar mysterious letter. There they are greeted by Deadpool and his apparent wife, a demon named Shiklah (I had heard he was married, although this is the first time in my extremely sporadic reading of Deadpool comics that I learned to who).

Deadpool has invited them all there to pose for his Christmas card photo with him, and has dug up enough blackmail material on each of them to force them to comply. Why this particular assortment of characters? Because, he explains, they are the funniest characters in the Marvel Universe. If The Punisher seems particularly out-of-place among this group, I suspect that is the joke regarding his presence.

This set-up leads to a locked-door sort of mystery, as when the lights briefly go out and come back on, Forbush Man is found decapitated! Is this the end of the Forbush Man, the most expendable of the guests, in that he's not currently starring or co-starring in a comic book? Looks like! At his funeral, attended by all (dig Tippy-Toe's little black ribbon), Deadpool vows to find the killer, criss-crossing the country to investigate the other suspects in the room that night (he naturally dismisses himself and his wife).

Joined against his will by Squirrel Girl, he travels to California, to Miami and then back to New York City, pursued by "Squirrelpool," a hideous clone monster created accidentally when he and Squirrel Girl share an old teleporter (I was pretty disappointed in this design by artist Todd Nauck; it suits the purposes of the story fine, although I'm not sure why it's a hulking monster-sized creature instead of being Deadpool-sized, or even just Deadpool-plus-Squirrel Girl-sized, but man, it would be so easy to amalgamate those two characters into a cool design).

When the beheadings start to pile-up, and include clearly-not-going-to-get-killed-off-for-long characters like Rocket and Groot (and, a little more shockingly, Squirrel Girl's besties Nancy Whitehead*** and Tippy-Toe), the stakes are lowered and, when the murderer is revealed and defeated with some help of Marvel's latest movie star Dr. Strange, it should come as no surprise that everyone is restored to life in some particularly random deus ex machina. (To be fair to Brad Meltzer, whose Identity Crisis is pretty much the worst murder "mystery" in comic book history, I should note that the killer is not a suspect introduced at any point in the comic, and so as a mystery, this doesn't work...not that the mystery set-up was ever meant to be anything more than a premise, of course).

Nauck is an artist I sometimes have some trouble evaluating entirely impartially, given the amount of affection I have for his work on account of his years on Young Justice. His ability--and tons of experience--balancing light-hearted supehero comedy with concinving superhero action serves him well in this particular series, though, and it's certainly interesting to see so many diverse characters translated though his particular visual style, even if they don't all seem to work (Squirrel Girl, for example, is a character that some artist seem to nail a particular take on, while others flounder a bit, sometimes for reasons I have a hard time pinning down. Nauck's version just looks like a typical super-girl character with a few Squirrel Girly features, rather than looking like Squirrel Girl.)

I was a little surprised to find a back-up, the story "Deadpooloween" taken from the Gwenpool Holiday Special: Merry Mix-Up #1, and I was more surprised still to find that it was both written and drawn by Chynna Clugston Flores. I guess it was included because it prominently features Squirrel Girl, as does the Too Soon?. It's been a good long time since I've read a Chynna comic, although I can hardly overstate how much I loved her Blue Monday in Action Girl and then from Oni (Image is currently reprinting it, and you should buy it and read it). While I'm sure she's done something for Marvel since, the last Marvel comic she drew that I read was that issue of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up from the earliest years of the Ultimate line, when Brian Michael Bendis had Peter Parker and pals run into the X-Men at the mall.

In her story, Deadpool belatedly realizes it Halloween, and suits up to cruise the town near Empire State University. There he finds that Squirrel Girl is hosting a Deadpool costume contest, which he angrily enters, irritated that the success of his movie has spawned so many college bros dressing up like him this Halloween.

Remember what I said about certain artists seeming to do a better, truer Squirrel Girl than others? Chynna nails hers. Her style is so different than that of Erica Henderson, but Chynna is just an all-around expert when it comes to drawing geeky young people, I guess. I would love to see more Chynna Clugston Flores Squirrel Girl somewhere in the future.

Doctor Strange Vol. 3: Blood in the Aether

With Doctor Strange's magical powers and resources utterly exhausted by his two-volume battle against the magic-destroying interdimensional entity The Empirikul, he is at one of his lowest, weakest points in Doctor Strange #11, by writer Jason Aaron and guest-artists Kevin Nowlan (who draws the scenes set during Strange's origin) and Leonardo Romero (who draws the scenes set in the present). That means there's blood in the water and the sharks are starting to circle.

And by "the water" I guess we mean "the aether," and by "the sharks" I guess we mean an assortment of villains, including Doctor Strange's arch-enemies and a few newer or more random threats.

So after the prelude chapter that the 11th issue serves as, the rest of the collection is a sort of week-in-the-life story, in which Doctor Strange runs a gauntlet of foes new and old, all the time being forced to rely on his wits, his allies and what new sorcery he can invent on the fly to save himself...and everyone else.

So in rapid succession Strange faces Mister Misery (the name the thing from his basement assigned itself), Baron Mordo, Nightmare, Satana and Master Pandemonium**** (and Pandemonium's hands), the post-Original Sin version of The Orb and, of course, the dread Dormammu. Their motives range from the dire to the petty to the idiosyncratic, and if you're at all familiar with any of these characters you can probably assign each of them to those categories without any help from me, but it all adds up to a pretty dramatic, almost arcade-like fight, with a few lighter moments to stop and exhale.

Regular pencil artist Chris Bachalo manages the bulk of the five issues that make up the actual "Blood in the Aether" story arc (with a pair of pencilers getting "with" credits on the last two issues, and eight different inkers credited on these issues...speaking of credit, it's to Bachalo and company's credit that the story actually looks pretty great, and all those different artists work together well enough that their collaboration is, if not seamless, than relatively seam-light).

It's really difficult to overstate how well-suited Bachalo is to the material, and not just to the Steve Ditko-conceived world of Doctor Strange in general, but to writer Jason Aaron's world-weary, joke-heavy conception of the character and his story specifically. As I've said before, Bachalo handles weird well, and he manages to make old characters like Dormammu, Mordo and Nightmare his own, while the characters that are his own, like Mister Misery, are hard to imagine under anyone else's pens.

Probably the best example of his work is the issue devoted to Satana, however. She plans to open up her own hell, one in which the damned can spend time with "cool" dead people, like dead rockstars and superheroes, like Doctor Strange. She pitches him over a bizarre meal in a bizarre diner (Pandemonium is both her short order cook and her muscle), filled with elaborately, cartoonishly designed creatures. To save himself, Strange must use his astral projection form in a pretty unusual way, which I'm not sure if he's ever done before, in order to achieve a particular goal I'm quite positive he never has.

I'm not sure if Bachalo has completely redesigned Satana here, or if his and colorist Antonio Fabela's version is just strikingly rendered, but this is maybe the coolest I can remember her looking. I think Bachalo draws Pandemonium's hand demons a little too gitancially, but, like Swarm, there's really no way to screw up the drawing of this crazy-ass Marvel villain.

Bachalo's Orb is another pretty great character. I don't believe I've seen him since Original Sin, nor do I quite understand how either he or Nick Fury Sr. "work" in the Marvel Universe anymore, but Aaron's conception of The Orb works well here for the purposes of a Doctor Strange comic, and Bachalo seems to have a lot of fun selling this new life of the character's menace as well as inherent humor.

This volume is really strong enough to stand on its own, independent of the two preceding it, as the only things one really needs to know from the previous ten issues get summarized in the three sentences following the Doctor Strange logo on the title page.

Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 2: Civil War II

Here's another in the too-long line of pretty good books that got derailed and/or destroyed by Civil War II. In the case of the David Walker-written Heroes For Hire revival, I say "and/or destroyed" because the book is no longer around. That may have simply been Marvel trying to more closely tie their comics to the various Netflix series, as after this book's cancellation Walker went on to write a Luke Cage solo title sharing the name of his TV show, and a new Iron Fist series launched. Or it could have been because of this dumb-ass story arc, that takes over issues #6-9 of the then-new book, almost the entirety of this second collected volume of the series (there's also a fun, holiday annual included in this collection).

For trade-waiters like me, the other unfortunate aspect of Civil War II? Because that book was so delayed, and expanded after solicitation, it meant I couldn't read any of the tie-in trades like this until I read the main series, but so many of the tie-ins were published prior to the Civil War II collection, that basically meant holding off on reading any (or at least many) Marvel collections for a few months longer than I might have otherwise. (As it turns out though, one really only needs to have read the first few issues of Civil War II to understand what's going on here; War Machine's dead, She-Hulk is in a coma and Carol Danvers is a big, stupid immoral idiot and...that's it, really).

Now, this arc is bad, but it's still fun, and maybe as good as a tie-in to such a dumb event series could be if it really did try to honestly engage with the event instead of simply side-stepping it as fast as possible. Walker writes these characters extremely well, and has a lot of fun with Luke's refusal to swear and in recovering the often very goofy characters from Cage's deep past, and other failed or half-forgotten street-level characters from Marvel's past, and reintroducing them, often portraying their past portrayals as youthful indiscretions, or perhaps trying to be something they weren't...or, in at least one case, trying to hang on to something they never were in the first place.

The artwork by Flavianao and Sanford Green is great, and I could look at those two guys' drawings of the two guys in the title all damn day; I particularly like, as I believe I mentioned when discussing the first volume, how huge this Luke Cage is drawn, in relation to Danny, Jessica, Danielle and the whole world around him. He's a literally bigger-than-life character.

Walker's way of dealing with the Civil War II plot is interesting, and I find myself wondering whether the plot for this arc, which isn't quite concluded in this volume, is one he would have written anyway, and he was just forced to fold Carol Danvers in, or if his non-Civil War II plot was an intentional echo of Civil War II, inspired by its plot.

So the first issue opens with Luke Cage, Danny Rand, Jessica Jones and a clueless Danielle watching news footage of the battle with Thanos that took place in Free Comic Book Day 2016, which the Civil War II collection puts between Civil War II #0 and Civil War II #1 (That event series, by the way, makes an excellent case for trade-waiting, as it's really hard to tell where and when it actually starts; there are basically three different starting points, one of which isn't terribly relevant. Better to let a collections editor curate it, I think). This is the battle that ends with War Machine James Rhodes dead and She-Hulk in a coma, and the two heroes are pretty shaken for obvious reasons, with flashbacks giving less-obvious, more personal details: Cage and Rhodey's last conversation was an intense argument, and Danny thinks about the time he kissed She-Hulk. Four more pages are devoted to Civil War II: They attempt to visit Shulkie at the Tri-Skelion but are turned away, and they are warmly greeted by Carol, who then asks if they can give her a minute of their time so she can explain what's going on.

Jump to the two of them walking to their car, reiterating that Civil War II is dumb and they hope they can avoid being in it (they can't!).

"What was all that 'predictive justice' stuff Carol was talking about?" Danny yells. "Sounded like a bunch of fiddle-faddle to me," Luke says, and they agree to sit this one out, as they are also sick of hero vs. hero fights. On a two-page spread, between two tiers of them talking about it, there's a nice big spread of the Luke Cage-lead Avengers (from the second volume of the Bendis-written New Avengers, I want to say) fighting the Carol Danvers and Iron Man-lead Avengers (from the pages of the Bendis-written Mighty Avengers). Cage, who sided with Captain America in the pages of the first Civil War, was basically in a kinda cold war with the government-sanctioned Avengers between the end of Civil War and the post-Secret Invasion "Heroic Age," I think.

Walker then returns to matters related to his book, as a bunch of reformed criminals and their family members attempt to hire the Heroes For Hire to find a bunch of ex-cons who have since gone straight but disappeared shortly after encountering a group of mysterious vigilantes. And then those vigilantes attack! Followed by the police!

This ends with Danny Rand in jail for assaulting some officers, where he tries to figure out the disappearances. Many of those who have disappeared are also in jail there, and they ended up there without officially being charged or getting trials. Outside prison, Luke calls in favors from many friends to try to figure out the one clue they have, a mysterious device that mixes facial recognition software with the ability to manipulate and falsify criminal records. This is what the vigilantes were doing to bust their victims.

So you can see how this thematically kinda sorta ties in to Civil War II, as innocent--or at least innocent-until-proven-guilty--people are being attacked, arrested and punished for crimes they didn't actually commit. Civil War II comes back to the fore when Ulysses--the prophesying Inhuman that Carol Danvers is using to predict possible future crimes to prevent before they happen--has a vision of Luke Cage leading a break-in at Ryker's to free the incarcerated Danny.

In fact, a confused and frustrated Cage calls Songbird and Centurius to join him as he looks at Ryker's, in the hopes that they can talk him out of doing something stupid and figure out this whole mess, and then "Sweet Christmas, Easter and Hanukkah," in swoop Danvers, Mockingbird, Puck, Spectrum, Storm, Deathlok and a whole bunch of SHIELD troops. They are there to stop Ulysses' vision from coming to pass by arresting Luke first and, just as in All-New Wolverine Vol. 2: Civil War II, Carol's intervention is exactly what causes the vision to come to pass (slow learner, I guess).

Luke's not having it, of course, he tells off Carol in such a way to piss her off, and everyone fights, with the fight eventually spreading inside the prison after Carol punches Luke through its walls and a couple of errant energy blasts and explosions continue to escalate the situation.

There's a lot of fighting between all parties. I particularly liked the fight-then-team-up sequences involving Mockingbird, who Walker writes close enough to Chelsea Cain that she sounds like the same character, and Songbird, because they have similar names. And I'm always calling Songbird Mockingbird by accident.

It ends with Cage making a couple of speeches in Carol's direction, and then Danny making another one, and she's eventually shamed into dropping it and they help round up the prisoners and clean up the jail. (I'm not sure this all lines up perfectly well with Civil War II, by the way. In that book's third issue, Luke and Danny appear to be working with Carol and SHIELD, at least according to one big panel of a series of three images that run across a two-page spread while New York City Assistant District Attorney examines Carol Danvers, but in issue #4, Luke is allied with Iron Man on the "cool" team that shows up at the Triskelion to fight Carol's lame team.)

But just as in the pages of Civil War II, the tie-ins seem mostly designed to demonstrate that Carol is dumb and keeps making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

As for the A-plot, which becomes the B-plot, Luke's team is just about to crack where the doohickey being used to find and incarcerate people came from, when a very powerful person in a hoodie teleports to his safehouse and steals it from the hands of his allies.

As I mentioned earlier, the rest of the collection is devoted to an annual, or, to be specific, Sweet Christmas Annual #1. Walker writes this as well, but Scott Hepburn provides the art. It's Christmas Eve, and Luke, Danny and Danielle visit a toy store to find the Pokemon-like hot toy of the season. Also there is Spider-Woman Jessica Drew and her baby. And Daimon Hellstrom, Son of Satan, in an open-coat Santa suit. And The Krampus. And the real Santa Claus. It is every bit as awesome as it sounds, and Hepburn draws a hell of a Krampus, as well as a pretty sweet warrior version of Santa that isn't as over-the-top as the one in the Grant Morrison-written Santa vs. Krampus comic, Klaus.

I'm really glad it was collected here, even though the storyline preceding it didn't really reach its conclusion, because it at least means the book ends on a high note, rather than being another example of the Civil War II storlyine stumbling into an already perfectly strong title, upsetting all the furniture and then stumbling back out.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 5: Like I'm The Only Squirrel In The World

This volume takes for its cover that of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #13, i.e. the one where Squirrel Girl is hauling back to throw Tippy-Toe, who is herself hauling back to throw Ant-Man, who is all curled up like a ball in her tiny squirrel fist. Is this modified Fuzzball Special just something for the cover, or does it actually occur within the pages of the comic itself?

It does!

The Squirrel Girl/Ant-Man team-up takes place during a story arc that dominates this trade, occupying the first three of the five issues collected herein. Doreen, Nancy and Tippy-Toe join Doreen's mom at a cabin in Canada for a rather boring vacation, which is interrupted by a bid to conquer the world by a character who can split himself into many different versions of himself. His name is Enigmo, and he is apparently a pre-existing Marvel villain (The Internet said he debuted in 1994 issue of Avengers). Brain Drain, the disembodied brain in a jar atop a powerful robot body that has been hanging around with Doreen and friends for a while, teleports to Canada to help her, and he does so with the only hero he could find who was small enough to fit in the teleporter at the same time as him: The Astonishing Ant-Man, Scott Lang.

As per usual, Squirrel Girl is able to save the day, with the help of her many friends and the help of science knowledge, which writer Ryan North applies to the comic book world of the Marvel Universe as charmingly as ever. For example, there is a flashback to physics class, where in Doreen and Nancy remember their teacher's lecture on "Galileo's Square-Cube law," which explains why giant mice are impossible.

"And yes, you can get around this restriction with certain cosmic rays or other exotic particles. I am aware of Pym's work, thank you," the professor continues. "It's hard not to be when he published journal articles like 'Ha Ha, I'm Giant-Man Now: Screw You, All Other Physicists.'"

That sounds like a fantastic journal article! Should I be reading scientific journals, for laughs?

This very full arc, which actually feels a lot longer than three issues, contains not only a team-up with a very grumpy Ant-Man--who was kidnapped into participating--but lots of jokes based on Brain Drain's nihilistic view of the universe and the humor inherent in Canada, and how it is different than America.

I mention that the arc felt longer than it actually was, not as a criticism, but as a compliment. Not only does artist Erica Henderson draw lots of panels per page when called on to do so, but North clearly spends a great deal of his writing-time think of how to pack as many jokes into each page as possible. Not just the bonus jokes that come in the alt-text like sentences below most of the pages, but, for example, this panel, in which Doreen surveys her choices for magazines to read in the cabin:

North easily could have stopped at the titles of the magazines themselves, but he went above and beyond, to include several jokes on each cover, detailing the contents of those magazines.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl has got to have set some kind of record for the most jokes per square centimeter of page-space.

The remaining two issues of the collections are done-in-ones. The first of these is a comic told entirely from the perspective of Nancy's cat Mew, which I believe the solicitation for blamed on Matt Fraction and David Aja doing that Pizza Dog issue of Hawkeye a few years back (In fact, there's a dog that appears in this that I'm fairly confident is supposed to be Pizza Dog, although he's not named, and I didn't see either of the Hawkeyes among the many super-heroes running around). In the background, The Taskmaster is using his awesome skills to take on a whole mess of superheroes--Iron Man! A The Hulk!***** Captain America! Spider-Man! Ms. Marvel! Ms. America! Hellcat!--in addition to Squirrel Girl, but she ultimately proves unbeatable, thanks to the fact that she has something Taskmaster can't master. This issue contains several pages by Zac Gorman, in which he draws comic strips that replicate Mew's dreams. Apparently cats dream in comic strips? Who knew?

The final issue is devoted to celebrating the 25th anniversary of Squirrel Girl's introduction by creators Will Murray and Steve Ditko in 1991's Marvel Super-Heroes Winter Special #8. It's a kinda sorta origin of the character, although not in the "how she got her powers and became a super-hero" kind of way as much as a "where, specifically, she came from" kind of story (That is, it opens with her parents meeting, and the title page is her mom holding her just after giving birth). From there it jumps around in five year increments, and we meet the late Monkey Joe, watch 15-year-old Squirrel Girl help The Hulk take down The Abomination and, finally, enjoy a birthday party with her pals and some Avengers, a party which The Red Skull foolishly attempts to crash.

While the issue is mostly another North and Henderson joint, Murray writes the 15-year-old Doreen sequence, and a piece of Ditko art is repurposed to get something from the great artist into the issue.



*Oh hey, in all those recent discussions of the source of Marvel's current sales woes--you know, whether it was diversity of characters or event exhaustion or them renumbering their books twice a year or whatever--did anyone theorize that maybe it was just that everyone hates the Inhumans, yet Marvel seemed to go ahead and keep publishing Inhumans books constantly, while shoehorning them into pretty much everything they publish? Could that have been a factor? Did Marvel comics readers so hate the Inhumans that they stopped buying Marvel comics to avoid reading about the Inhumans?

**At least not until googling him. He's a prose writer and playwright, and this was his first comics work, which would explain why I had never heard of him. It should be noted that he writes like a comic book writer here, and doesn't display any of the typical flaws one sees when writers fluent in another medium tackle comics-scripting for the first time.

***I was a little surprised that Corin didn't include a joke of any kind referring to Nancy Whitehead as Nancy Whiteheadless. He is a stronger man than I am, I guess.

****I just went to check the table-of-contents of Jon Morris' The Legion of Regrettable Super Villains, the companion book to his earlier League of Regrettable Super Heroes and, to my surprise, Master Pandemonium was not included. Nor was The Orb. Swarm was however, and there's actually a pretty good showing from Marvel villains overall: Stilt-Man, MODOK, Angar the Screamer, Black Talon, The Headmen and others.

*****Not a typo! I'm just not sure which The Hulk it is, Amadeus Cho or Bruce Banner, the latter of whom I'm fairly certain wasn't temporarily dead-ish at the time that issue of Squirrel Girl was pubished.

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.

Super-Endorsements 2012:

Poor Luke Cage.

They took his codename. They took his hair. They took his tiara. They took his bracelets. They took his yellow silk shirt, and forced him to start wearing off-the-rack street clothes to Avengers meetings and superhero battles.

Now they've taken those shirts, and, apparently, his nipples.

No wonder he's scowling. At this rate, he'll be fighting crime in the nude and hoping to hang on to the rest of his anatomy by this time next year.

Speaking of plastic ring incentives...

Instead of that goofy We'll take returns on certain DC comics in exchange for some ultra-rare Deadpool variant to reward bad retailing practices and encourage speculation scheme/PR stunt Marvel embarked on in reaction to the success of DC's Blackest Night ring scheme, why didn't Marvel simply produce a plastic four-finger "Cage" ring/set brass knuckles?

I can't speak for the whole direct market or anything, but I know I'd buy four issues of Siege if I had to do so in order to get a plastic version of the above.

Man-Thing:

“…And if you see my ex-girlfriend, please kick her in the vagina for me."

Hey Internet, what’s up?

Okay, I’m not sure if I’m reading this right or not, so I wanted to post it here and get some second opinions.

This is a passage from New Avengers #27, written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Leinil Yu.

If you haven't read it yet, I'll set the scene. The woman on the left is the world’s greatest assassin (and former Daredevil flame) Elektra. The man on the right is super-strong, nigh invulnerable Luke Cage, nee Power Man. His superhero team just invaded her ninja team's base, and they're in the middle of a fight.







Sooo, did Cage really just kick Elektra in the crotch?

And the sound Bendis decided best represents the sound of a super-strong man kicking a woman in the vagina is “FOOM?”

And are we to believe Matt Murdock really told Cage, “Oh, hey, you guys are going to Japan to fight The Hand ninjas? Cool. Hey, if you see Elektra there, can you kick her in the vagina for me?”