Some recent Marvel collections I've read:

All-New Wolverine Vol. 2: Civil War

I haven't been reading Civil War II, so I'm not sure how well the story of various Marvel heroes fighting one another over whether using an Inhuman with the ability to see the future to help them pre-emptively fight crime is the best idea or not is working within the confines of that particular miniseries.

From what I can tell from the tie-ins I've read so far, however, that narrative seems to be sort of stumbling around Marvel's publishing line like a drunk, unwelcome house guest--barging in with little warning, upsetting all the furniture and then staggering away just as suddenly, leaving everything feeling a little awkward.

Though the second volume of All-New Wolverine takes "Civil War II" as its subtitle, it's actually only the second half of the collection that has anything at all to do with Civil War II and, as was the case with Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat Vol. 2, there's a pretty clear, even glaring line between the events and tone of the collection before and after the tie-in.

The first issue herein is a rather unlikely team-up with Squirrel Girl, who shows up on the All-New Wolverine's doorstep in the middle of the night, holding an actual wolverine. His name is Jonathan, and Squirrel Girl thought he would be needed because she mistakenly thought that Wolverine could communicate with wolverines the way she communicates with squirrels. It was an honest mistake, and one that gives Laura and her little clone sister Gabby a pet wolverine.

Why is Squirrel Girl there at all? Well, it seems that Laura has "wronged the squirrel world," and S.G. wants her to make amends, so the two go off on an adventure to rescue a squirrel together. Though there's obviously a lot of silliness to it, writer Tom Taylor uses this issue to resolve the issue of whether Laura and Gabby are going to remain together or not, which ultimately allows him to demonstrate a way in which the all-new Wolverine is superior to the previous model...or at least trying to behave in the way she wished he had when he was still alive.

That's followed by two issues of Laura and Gabby going up against one of the greatest antagonists in the Marvel Universe: Mr. Fin Fang Foom*. It seems things go wrong during the sale of a very mysterious, very deadly weapon of mass destruction, which turns out to be what Gabby repeatedly, alliteratively refers to as "Fin Fang Pheromone," a liquid capable of drawing FFF to a target.

Laura is recruited by SHIELD (and Gabby tags along) because the first Wolverine they sent in ended up in the belly of the best. So Laura goes inside the giant dragon to rescue the older, futuristic, alternate dimensional version of the man she was cloned from, Logan from Old Man Logan.

Artist Marcio Takara has a really great panel set inside Fin Fang Foom, in which Laura, up to her knees in his stomach acid, strikes the same, somewhat iconic pose that the original Wolverine struck in that old issue of Uncanny X-Men, where he emerges from the sewer water and looks up, talking out loud to the not-present The Hellfire Club about how they've taken their best shot and now he's gonna take his.

Captain Marvel Carol Danvers and Iron Man Tony Stark, both playing remarkably nice for two pals about to engage in a civil war in a month or so's time after the events of this story arc, arrive to help out, but ultimately the only way to save SHIELD's helicarrier and New York from the Fin Fang Pheromone-crazed Fin Fang Foom involves off-panel nudity and a jetpack. (Speaking of nudity, I notice Fin Fang Foom is going commando throughout this entire adventure. It may be more realistic for a giant, humanoid dragon monster to not wear giant tiny purple shorts, but it still looks off to me.)

Takara draws all three of these issues. That's followed by the Civil War II tie-in arc, drawn by pencil artist Ig Guara and three inkers. Old Man Logan has now joined the cast, having been dragged back to Laura and Gabby's apartment to recover from having his lower half skeletonized by his time being semi-digested in Fin Fang Foom's stomach acid (Miraculously, not only does his flesh grow back, but apparently his healing factor also regrew his jeans, boots and belt!).

Ulysses, the future-predicting Inhuman who serves as a catalyst for Civil War II, has a vision in his office or cell or dark room at the Triskelion. Here's how he words it:

Wolverine. And an old man. A young girl. Flying through the air. And...I saw an angel? And screaming. And blood. A whole lot of blood.

Seriously? Those little cryptic snippets are the basis upon which Captain Marvel and the other heroes siding with her take violent action, occasionally against their peers? That's kind of crazy, like playing the stock market or formulating national foreign policy based on Nostradamus, or a few random verses of the Book of Revelation.

It's apparently enough for Maria Hill to mobilize a Captain America Steve Rogers-lead strike force to storm Laura's apartment and ask to detain The Notorious OML, on the belief that he's going to kill Gabby. Complicating matters further is the fact that he does kill Gabby in his own timeline, although as has been repeatedly established in his own book and the the X-books, his future is an alternate one, and things happen/happened/will happen quite differently in that world than they do/have/will in this one.

So the logistics of this story are really kind of a mess, with Captain America and SHIELD and OML all operating on visions and/or memories of the future, and fighting each other, with Laura and Gabby caught in the middle of what has turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (It turns out that if you expect Logan might commit a violent act upon those around him, sending a SHIELD SWAT team to fill him full of drug-tipped darts and a Captain America to smack him around and speechify might actually provoke him into violence, rather than deescalate the situation).

The arc ends with Laura telling Cap and SHIELD off, by essentially calling the entire premise of Civil War II idiotic, and forcefully saying she and Gabby would prefer to be left out of the rest of the crossover, thank you very much. Based on the logic of SHIELD here, it's hard to disagree; as with the original Civil War, one side is clearly being set-up as the wrong side, and there seems to be even fewer pains taken to articulate an argument for the Captain Marvel-lead side for acting in anyway that could conceivably be seen as "right," no matter how much one squints or tilts one's head (Interestingly, the original Civil War made Iron Man look like an evil and/or ignorant villain just prior to his big screen debut in his first film, while Civil War II is doing the same to Captain Marvel just prior to her big screen debut in her first film).

Which isn't to say there aren't moments in the arc. Burglars breaking into Laura's apartment, only to find Gabby, two Wolverines and an actual wolverine waiting for them was kind of funny, and Gabby calling Old Man Logan "her interdimensional dystopian future grandpa" was kind of cute. Taylor and his artistic collaborators continue to find the perfect balance between silly normal girl and usually hidden killer with Gabby, who is a fun character...except when that darkness slips out for a panel or two.

Next up is an arc entitled "Enemy of the State II"; the first "Enemy of the State" was the Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. arc of Wolverine in which Logan was brainwashed to assassinate the entire Marvel Universe, so, um, it looks like the next volume of All-New Wolverine might end up being a bit darker and a lot less fun than these first two. Damn you, Civil War II!

Black Widow Vol. 1: SHIELD's Most Wanted

Black Widow is the current book by the former Daredevil creative team of Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, and demands attention for that fact alone. I remember a few years back that Comics Alliance ran apiece crediting Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye for essentially reinventing Marvel's strategy for dealing with solo series starring second-tier characters, as Hawkeye was followed by a bunch of comics that seemed to feature Hawkeye-ized versions. While that's true, I think Waid and his original Daredevil artistic partners Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin deserve the credit, as their new Daredevil pre-dated Hawkeye. They established the simple formula of Good Writer + Good Artists = Good Comics, along with the idea of a simple tweak to the status quo might be all you need to make it those Good Comics interesting (Here, it seemed to simply be to stop trying to do Frank Miller's Daredevil over and over forever).

While Samnee came later, he drew a very healthy portion of Waid's run, and was key to the books continued success. He was certainly there long enough, and did great enough work, that whatever the pair did next was worth a read if for no other reason than it was what they were doing next.

And they chose Black Widow.

I found that a bit surprising, given that the character is in kind of a weird place. Outside of comics, Black Widow is by far Marvel's most popular and recognizable female heroine, thanks to her appearances in the Avengers and Captain America movies, but within the Marvel Universe, she's traditionally been a B- or C-lister, a character other characters team up with or who appears on a superhero team for a while, rather than a lady with her own book (although Waid and Samnee were giving her a second ongoing, following a short-lived, 20-issue, 2014 series by Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto). I don't know exactly why that is, but I suspect it's simply a function of her realistic nature: She's a spy, maybe even a super-spy, but not a superhero. For a long time, that was probably a liability, but in the post Ed Brubaker Marvel universe, the more realistic Marvel Universe in which so many different titles and stories were focused on espionage and intrigue rather than heroes vs. villains and cosmic happenings, it became an advantage--it's the reason she works in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so well where few of her fellow female heroes would, and the reason she can appear not only in Avengers movies, but also in Captain America and Iron Man ones.

I think that Waid and Samnee are doing Black Widow at all is a vote in favor of the character, and an argument for promoting her to the studio people, more-or-less advocating a solo movie (I was resistant to that idea a half-dozen movies ago, as the fact that she was just a super-spy made the prospect of a Black Widow movie seem no more exciting or interesting than a gender-flipped James Bond movie, but at this point the Marvel Cinematic Universe is so big and populated that a super-spy movie set in it would bear the advantage of further the world-building meta-narrative and the ability to choose from a prefabricated supporting cast and neat villains that might not ever make it into the boys' movies, lie, I don't know, Taskmaster or MODOK and AIM or fucking Fin Fang Foom even*).

I note all of this because the approach that Waid and Samnee, who gets a co-writer credit as well as the expected artist credit, seems like they might have just been doing a comics adaptation of a Black Widow movie they would like to see. It is very action-oriented, opening with an issue-length action scene in which the Widow takes on and takes down a huge swathe of SHIELD agents as she escapes from a SHIELD helicarrier. She has two words of dialogue in it. She battles her way through a helicarrier, she jumps off it and fights flying cars and jetpacks while plummeting to earth, and then there are chase scenes involving a jetpack, a flying car and a motorcycle.

The second issue/second chapter of the collection shows how she became an enemy of SHIELD, as she's kidnapped by a mysterious operative named The Weeping Lion and blackmailed into returning to The Red Room where she was trained to steal a file for him. This involves secret meets in foreign countries, a European car chase, lots of fighting and looks back to her mysterious origins--as I said, it's all very action movie-like, albeit a very good action movie, one with a smart script and a highly competent director. It's a prestige action movie.

Aside from the SHIELD tech in the opening scenes, things don't get too terribly Marvel-ous until the last chapter, which more-or-less completes this story arc. That's when Iron Man Tony Stark shows up to kick her ass, she appropriates some Stark tech, and goes after the super-powered power behind The Weeping Lion. Although so clearly set in the Marvel Universe, this is a Black Widow story, not a Marvel Universe story, and it benefits from the distinction.

It also benefits by the remove at which Waid and Samnee hold the character--she has surprisingly little dialogue in several issues, especially for the title character--as she plays pretty much everything as close to the vest as possible. "No one gets into my head unless I let them," she tells the big bad on the last page, and that would seem to go for the readers as well. That's not a criticism; it's a fair portrayal of a character born and bred as one of the world's greatest spies.

This fast-moving six-issue collection, which constitutes a complete story with a beginning, middle and ending of its own--with the necessary promise of more to come--is a great example of the showing vs. telling argument of good comics-making. Waid and Samnee's presence on the book all that demands that it be read, certainly, but the quality of the quality of the work here makes it so a reader won't be sorry for meeting that demand.

Doctor Strange Vol. 2: The Last Days of Magic

In his 2015 introduction to The Demon Vol. 1: Hell's Hitman, writer Garth Ennis reflected back on both the things he still liked and the things he doesn't like about the 1993-1994 comics collected within:

There's also the inevitable scene that everyone was doing at the time, where some malevolent influence affects numerous characters in the vicinity and they start committing acts of unspeakable evil--why didn't it occur to me, I wonder, to reverse this hoary old cliche and have people suddenly become unnaturally pleasant to one another?

I thought about Ennis' reference to what was, in the early '90s, "a hoary old cliche" while reading the first issue/chapter of The Last Days of Magic, the second collection of Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo's Doctor Strange ongoing, as it opens with Aaron doing something pretty similar. And then doing it again later. And again later.

Here the malevolent influence is the arrival of The Empirikul at Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum. These are an army of eye-ball headed robo-clones lead by an all-powerful character who has been traveling the Multiverse, killing any and all magicians and their magic in each dimension in the name of science. And so the examples in Aaron's scene aren't of normal people doing terrible things, but of magic stuff around the world suddenly stopping working.

The specifics are different, but it reads the same. Aaron returns to this technique again and again, as a sort of shorthand to show the worldwide, apocalyptic nature of the threat as succinctly as possible. A few scenes are dramatized, but more often than not Aaron has Strange simply telling us what's happening here or there, and there are often significant time jumps between scenes or issues.

It has it's moments, sure--Aaron at his worst is still a lot more fun and engaging than many super-comics writers at their best--but this collection felt a lot less satisfying than the one that preceded it, and was assembled in a particularly annoying and ad hoc way, as too many Marvel graphic novels apparently are these days.

The Empirikul's leader is given an origin, and it is basically just yet another riff on Superman (at least his heat vision is green instead of red!). Raised on a planet that worshiped an ancient god-monster an was ruled by magic, his parents devoted their lives to science and, when the magic police came for them, they rocketed their infant son off to space where he used science to become super kick-ass.

On Earth, he takes down Strange and a rag-tag group of magical allies, but one of their number sacrifices himself allowing Strange and the others to escape. About 30 pages after I started wondering, Scarlet Witch finally asks Strange why they don't just call The Avengers--if the Empirikul are science-based, then why not leave it to all the science-based super-armies to take them on?--but Strange has a readymade excuse about the costs of magic and so on.

After he and his allies--Scarlet Witch, Doctor Voodoo, Son of Satan, Talisman, Magik, some cool new characters that aren't introduced until after the conclusion of the arc they appear in--scrounge the world seeking out the very last remnants of magical items, they return to face The Empirikul. Meanwhile, Wong and Strange's new librarian Zelma hatch a new variation on an old cost-of-magic-workaround revealed in the previous volume, and the Empirikul find a thing in Doctor Strange's cellar.

Ultimatley, the good guys win and the bad guys lose. Retroactive spoiler alert. Bachalo's artwork is, as always, a ton of fun, and he's particularly well-suited the naturally trippy visuals of a character and milieu created by Steve Ditko in the 1960s. The Empirikul's footsoldiers, the Ibots, are really fun characters, and Bachalo, who inks and colors his own work through most of this, draws the all-white, mechanical creatures with huge spheroid heads in sharp, sharp contrast to the darker, grittier magical characters, especially the black thing in the cellar that appears to be a sentient tidal wave of tar full of eyeballs and toothy mouths.

The first issue/chapter has an eight-page sequence showing the sudden death of magic, wherein several examples are dramatized (rather than just rattled-off in list-like fashion). These are drawn by a rag-tag group of artists including Mike Deodato, Jorge Fornes, Kev Walker and Kevin Nowlan.

And then, after the conclusion of the story arc, appears Doctor Strange: The Last Days of Magic #1 which, some parenthetical fine print helpfully tells us, "takes place between issues #6 and #7." You know where a good place to collect it might have been, then? Maybe between issues #6 and #7.

This 45-page special features a framing sequence by Aaron and drawn by Leonardo Romero (whose clean, cool artwork is a bit of a revelation, and should appeal to fans of Evan Shaner and Chris Samnee; I hope Big Two editors are throwing offers Romero's way as we speak). In it, Zelma learns about some of the magicians of the world while trying to organize Strange's library "then," and in the "now" we see those magicians fighting their own battles against various Ibots. These include El Medico Mistico/Doctor Mystical, a Santo/Dr. Strange hybrid who is the Sorcerer Supreme south of the border (and whose spells are awesome; he summons rain...full of great white sharks); Mahatma Doom, whose name kinda says it all, and his ally Xandra Xian Xu; and, finally, "The Siberan Seer, the manliest mage in all the land," Count Kaoz, who killed and ate a magic bear as a nine-year-old boy, and "his guts have been infested with sorcery ever since. Also Trichinosis."

It...might have been nice to meet these guys before they started appearing in the story arc a reader of this collection will have already completed before hitting this story.

Between the framing sequence are two longer stories by different creative teams, one featuring a pre-existing character (and member of The Unity Squad, if that's still what they are calling the Avengers team in Uncanny Avengers), and the other a seemingly new character. Gerry Duggan and Daniel Beyruth tell a story about Doctor Voodoo, while James Robinson and Mike Perkins introduce The Wu, a Hong Kong policewoman who uses magic on the sly--think a pink-haired, Honk Kong action star who jumps around shooting magic handguns and you get the idea.

International Iron Man

This book collects the seven-issue series, which I believe was announced as an ongoing, by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev. It tells of an element of Tony Stark's origin, specifically of his relationship with a young woman when they were both students in England back in the 1990s, and his current search for his true birth parents.

It is rather neatly divided into two threads (with a weird, Iron Man-less chapter near the end), set in the present and "20 Years Ago." The present is, of course, 2016. So "20 Years Ago" would be 1996, right? Okay.

So on page 10 the young, pre-facial hair Tony Stark of 1996 is talking to his fellow student Cassandra Gillespie, who seems surprised that Tony doesn't know who she is, given how famous she apparently is. "You Googled me by now," she tells him upon their second meeting, and he replies, "I did."

Aha! He googled her? In 1996? I don't think so! Google might have been founded in 1996, but its search engine wasn't built until 1997 and it didn't incorporate until 1998, and it wasn't exactly popular right out of the gate. It certainly didn't become a verb until much later than that (Bendis, it has been pointed out several million times on the Internet, isn't known for writing convincingly distinct dialogue; there's a scene set in the 1970s or so in which a woman asks a SHIELD agent, "You do see how this all sounds crazytown?").

So Tony couldn't have Googled Cassandra back then! Ha ha ha ha! Bendis made a mistake! And I noticed it! I win! I am a winner! He must somehow try to console himself with his piles of money and the prestige of his peers within his chosen medium and his status to be able to write and do pretty much whatever he wants to do with the direct market's number one publisher, while I sit here alone in a cold, dark apartment lit only by the light of my laptop, secure in the knowledge that I saw his mistake!

...

Although since I suppose the Marvel Universe is its own distinct fictional shared-setting, completely separate from our own no matter how many similarities may exist between the two, it's possible Google was founded and popularized much more quickly in that universe than it was in ours, and tech-savvy people of Tony and Cassandra's caliber may have been aware of it as soon as it was created and been futurist enough to coin the word "Google" as a verb meaning "to look something up on Google" immediately. So why don't I just award myself a no-prize and get on with my life?

That aside, this reads like a well-plotted original graphic novel. In the past, a young Tony with a rocky, almost non-existent relationship with his father Howard Stark (gray-haired and severe like John Slattery's portrayal, not young and charming like Dominic Cooper's) is in college in London, where he meets Cassandra, the daughter of Stark's weapons-dealing rivals.

Tony meets her parents for dinner and they are attacked by Hydra, which seems awfully fishy to the elder Stark, who tries his best to keep his son away from Cassandra, who he believes is a "honey pot." Tony doesn't agree, however, and uses his genius to reunite with Cassandra until things climax in a Hydra/SHIELD battle.

Bendis continually cuts back and forth between that storyline and one set in the present, in which Tony-as-Iron Man is facing off against the grown-up, eye-patch rocking Cassandra and her squadron of upgraded Mandroids. Tony is now trying to figure out who his real father is and, for some reason, thinks she knows (In retrospect, I suppose this is all meant to be a red herring of some sort, as it heavily implies that the pair share a father, but it basically just gives readers some supeheroic stuff to soak in between visits to Tony's pre-Iron Man past).

Eventually Tony finds the name of his mother, and in an extended, Iron Man-free flashback, we meet his birth parents, discover how they met and how they separated, and just how exactly Howard and Maria Stark got their hands on baby Tony and raised him to believe they were his birth parents.

It's overall pretty good stuff, although Bendis is still Bendis, so the ticks about his writing that bug a lot of Marvel readers can still be found within. Alex Maeelv's art is incredibly effective, as it should be, given how often and how long he's worked with Bendis on various Marvel projects.

I'm not so sure about Marvel's publishing decisions, though. I can see that perhaps there wasn't time to squeeze this whole story into the pages of Invincible Iron Man, the other Iron Man book that Bendis is currently writing, especially since the events of the unfolding Civil War II (which is also being written by Bendis) promise a big status quo shake up for the character that will see him ceding his role as Iron Man to a new apprentice-type character, codenamed Ironheart.

But as someone who works in a library, reads Marvel comics in trades and often find myself asked which books to read in which order, I often find myself trying to figure out which books to read in which order, and Bendis' Iron Man is a bit of a mess. As far as I can make sense of it, Bendis' run on the character is collected in Invincible Iron Man Vol. 1: Reboot (not to be confused with Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man Vol. 1: The Five Nightmares), Invincible Iron Man Vol. 2: The War Machines (not to be confused with Fraction's Invincible Iron Man Vol. 2: World's Most Wanted Book One) and International Iron Man Vol. 1. There's an Invincible Iron Man Vol. 3: Civil War II yet to come, but, in the meantime, Bendis has launched Infamous Iron Man (starring Victor Von Doom) and re-relaunched Invincible Iron Man (now starring Ironheart Riri Williams) with a brand-new #1 issue. Hopefully when that gets collected it will be as Invincible Iron Man Vol. 4, but who knows.

And that's not counting the just completed Civil War II, of course, the change in status quo of which was revealed in the latest Invincible Iron Man #1 months earlier.

Like they used to say in the 1970s, it's crazytown. Don't believe me? Google it. Or maybe Ask Jeeves.

Mockingbird Vol. 1: I Can Explain

With no prior experience with or affection for either the creative team of Chelsea Cain (a successful prose fiction writer making her comics debut) and pencil artist Kate Niemcyzk or the character of Mockingbird Bobbi Morse (She was married to Hawkeye back when he used to wear that dumb cowl and loincloth? And had something to do with the Skrulls as per the dumb-ass Secret Invasion series?), I was in no particular hurry to read this. That is despite the fact that it was clearly very well-drawn and featured what looked to be highly-comedic content, and the fact that my friend and occasional co-writer Meredith insisted it was like the best thing ever (But did not ever go quite as far as she did with any issues of All-New Wolverine, and actually forced me to read it).

Well it turns out that Meredith was right; this is very much like the best thing ever. It's as funny as any of my favorite Marvel comics of the moment--Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat, Howard The Duck--but also slightly more serious in terms of conflict and interconnectivity with the Marvel Universe as a whole. In tone, it's closer to All-New Wolverine or maybe Ms. Marvel than the outright comedy series, but it definitely has a lot of gags and a lot of silliness in its DNA.

The first story arc, consisting of the first five issues of the (sadly already canceled) ongoing series, is pretty brilliantly constructed. Cain is not only remarkably good at writing comics for someone who has made her career as a writer in entirely different writing medium (A lot of novelists and screenwriters tend to struggle with a pretty dramatic learning curve before really figuring out their groove with comics), but she's actually pretty damn brilliant at it.

The first issue/chapter is a fairly weird, almost daffy one. It opens with Bobbi stalking into her weekly medical check-up, throwing a chair through a glass wall and facing a horde of zombies after a ping pong ball bounces towards her. "Let me back up," she narrates, and then she takes us through a series of check-ups, each opening in a waiting room full of super-people apparently on SHIELD's medical plan (There's Tony Stark reading a pamphlet on STDs, there's Hercules with a bag of ice on his head), where she appears after various adventures, often wearing whatever she was during said adventure/secret mission (a SCUBA suit, a BDSM fetish suit, etc). The next four issues show those particular adventures/secret missions, and also explain what exactly is going on with the ping pong balls and zombies, the final one finishing the conflict, with Mockingbird teaming up with Howard The Duck and (the formerly Ultimate) Spider-Man, both of whom were kept waiting in waiting rooms while the zombie horde was wreaking havoc in the medical center.

For the most part, these issues are like done-in-ones, but relate to various events and clues laid out in that first issue, and the conflict resolved in the fifth.

So Bobbi infiltrates a London chapter of Hellfire Club, which is much heavier on the leather, latex and whipping than previous incarnations, all in order to rescue Lance Hunter, her boyfriend (and a character from the Marvel TV show I don't watch). It guest-stars the Queen of England, which is why there are so many corgis on the cover. Then she must rescue a 12-year-old girl who has taken her clique hostage using her early onset super-powers, a feat that involves some kicking, some tech, some science and some talking. And then she infiltrates an underwater sea base run by AIM spin-off TIM (Total Idea Mechanics) where she must rescue her ex Hawkeye, who is a lot like Lance (and, like Lance, spends the entire issue in just his boxer briefs). Then we circle back to the beginning of the book, and all the details and clues fall into place, everything is explained, and Mockingbird, Howard The Duck and Spider-Man save the day. It is awesome.

Niemczyk draws the first four issues, and her style is perfect for the tone of this comic, looking just serious enough for the dangers to all be taken seriously, but with a light enough touch that the jokes all land, whether it's something somewhat silly, or the contrast between the dialogue or situation and the renderings of the characters. She's an all-around great artist, skilled with design, rendering, lay-outs and character acting. Given this book's too-short run, I hope Marvel finds a plum assignment for Niemczyk to handle next.

The fifth issue is by Ibrahim Moustafa, another talented artist who is not quite the revelation Niemczyk is, but that's only because I've heard of him and read his work before.

After the conclusion of that opening arc, another Cain-written Mockingbird story runs: That's Mockingbird: SHIELD 50th Anniversary #1 by Cain and artist Joelle Jones, which was published prior to the comics that precede it in this collection, and was apparently so well-received upon release that Cain was asked to write a Mockingbird monthly. As the events of that one-shot are set before the first story arc of Mockingbird, and inform it somewhat, it probably would have made more sense to place it before the other issues as a prologue, but then it's tonally pretty different (more serious, less funny), and would sort of spoil how well Cain constructed that arc. So I'm of two minds about its placement, really.

As soon as I finished the volume, I became deeply depressed, because I knew Marvel had already canceled the book. Having not yet read it, I had no reason to miss it, but now I do. If you missed the monthly, serially-published issues and haven't yet read the trade, I'd highly recommend it. Of all the trades reviewed in this post, it's certainly the best, and one of the better Marvel trades I've read in a while.




*This 1961 Jack Kirby/Stan Lee creation is long overdue for both his own series and an appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I imagine him being the perfect antagonist for an opening action sequence in Avengers 5, after Thor and Hulk are back on the team. And, hopefully Namor. They've gotta get Namor in these things eventually!

**I can dream, can't I?

On ESPN The Magazine's The Body Issue: Super Heroes Edition

If you're better-versed in sports and athletics than I am–and you would almost have to be–then you likely already know that ESPN The Magazine has been publishing an annual "The Body Issue" special since 2009. Meant as a kinda sorta rival to Sports Illustrated's annual "Swimsuit Issue," each issue of "The Body Issue" features dozens of carefully-posed, often quite arty photographs of athletes–men and women–in the nude, showing off the rather wide variety of bodies and body types produced by specialization in various sports.

There is certainly a prurient element to the imagery, despite the fact that genitals (and the women's nipples) are always covered, although the intent is clearly in generating celebratory admiration of athletes and their bodies, rather than masturbatory admiration. It's sort of the modern, glossy magazine equivalent of ancient Greek art.

I imagine these issues and images should be of interest to super-comics artists and aspiring super-comics artists, as each issue certainly shows what men and women in peak physical condition look like without their clothes on, while highlighting the fact that there are more than two types of bodies (male and female).

This year's issue should be of extra-interest to comics readers, however, as it apparently included a 13-page pull-out collaboration between ESPN and Marvel entitled The Body Issue: Super Heroes Edition. I didn't read the magazine (although I did see the images in this year's issue online), but my father saved the insert for me.

Under a cover featuring an apparently nude Hulk–Bruce Banner wasn't wearing his over-sized purple pants with the elastic waist-band at the time of this transformation–jumping out of an explosion, there's a completely unnecessary table of contents (it's only 13 pages!) and a one paragraph introduction. The rest of the pull-out is devoted to nine superhereos, all sans costume, drawn by different Marvel artists.

Each of these pages feature, in addition to the drawing and the name of the hero, a little circle showing the character in costume (complete with artist credit for that image) and a smaller circle listing the year of their debut (no one earlier than 1962, no one later than 1980), their power or powers in as few words as possible and the name of the artist responsible for the drawing filling most of the page. There is also a paragraph or so long quote from each of the artists, talking a little bit about drawing super-characters for Marvel.

It's an all-around fun little package.

The heroes included are Ant-Man, Captain Marvel, Daredevil, Hulk, Iron Fist, Iron Man, Luke Cage, Medusa and She-Hulk. All are drawn in the nude, but, in the case of most of the men, they fade into white just above where the bas of the penis might begin. Two of the three women are shown from behind, from the small of the back-up; I think this may be the first I've ever seen She-Hulk and Captain Marvel Carol Danvers drawn without their breasts appearing in any way shape or form; not even a glance of side-boob, as the Internet calls it (And Shulkie is drawn by Frank Cho!).

The exceptions are The Hulk, whose whole body is visible save the part obscured by his huge hand and arm reaching toward the viewer (it's the same Jim Cheung drawn image that's on the cover of the insert, only minus the explosion background), Medusa, whose entire body head to toes is visible (but is wrapped from clavicles to crotch in her "Superstrong, prehensile hair"), Iron Man (who is drawn from the knees up, but in the act of assembling his armor around himself) and Ant-Man, who is seen from the thighs down, for some reason.

None of the heroes have any body hair at all, and Tony Stark and The Hulk both lack nipples.

I was at first a little disappointed by the fact that all of the heroes essentially have identical body types: Big and musclely, like body builders. With the exception of The Hulk, whose body is naturally exaggerated to cartoonish proportions. Daredevil and Iron Fist look slightly smaller in certain muscle groups than Luke Cage, but that's about it in terms of variety. I don't know what Carol Danvers' work out routine, but I was a little surprised at how cut Pichelli draws her, as she and She-Hulk have the same build in this.

I was also a bit disappointed at the relative lack of diversity in the characters, as here the term "people of color" apparently refers to the color green. There are more green people than brown people (and I was a bit curious about the inclusion of Iron Fist over Shang-Chi, especially when artist Russell Dauterman talked specifically about Bruce Lee as inspiration for his drawing of Danny Rand's physique).

There are plenty of men and women of different builds throughout the Marvel Universe, and it might have been nice to see a curvy Squirrel Girl or Volstagg in there, or a short and stocky (and hairy!) Wolverine or Puck, or characters who are slimmer of build like Spider-Man or Cyclops, or some characters of color other than green, some teenage characters (Kamala Khan's parents would never allow her to pose, but surely Robbie Reyes or some of the Young Avengers or Jean Grey students could), or a silver fox character like Doctor Strange or Mr. Fantastic. Let's see Namor, whose one costume is so skimpy he might as well be nude, some characters with fantastical bodies, like Nightcrawler or Beast or The Thing or Howard The Duck, let's see The Vision or Machine Man with their "skin" off.

Of course, it occurred to me rather quickly that the nine characters chosen had nothing to do with showing off a variety of body types, and more to do with corporate synergy and cross-media promotion.

Daredevil, Luke Cage and, I believe, Iron Fist have appeared in/will appear in the Netflix corner of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" (K'un L'un gets mentioned in an episode of Daredevil, anyway). Ant-Man has a movie currently in theaters (Hell, it even says "See Ant-Man in theaters starting July 17" at the bottom of his page).

Hulk and Iron Man are both in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and while they probably could have filled this book or one two or three times as long just with Avengers that appeared in that movie, they decided against using Black Widow or The Falcon or Thor (curious, really, unless the idea was to promote heroes with upcoming film or TV projects, in addition to more current ones, achieving a sort of balance). Captain Marvel and Medusa have films announced, even if they are a long way off (Medusa will be appearing in Inhumans, not Medusa; her presence here is another indication of how hard Marvel is trying to promote the Inhumans as a brand these days). And as for She-Hulk...? Well, I don't know. Black Widow or The Wasp or The Scarlet Witch would have made more sense. Marvel doesn't exactly have many great female characters of the household name variety, particularly when you discount the X-Men franchise, so they may have just picked a woman with a more typical super hero physique.

Note that there are no X-Men, despite the wide variety of body-types that team has to offer, no Spider-Man and no Fantastic Four. The characters chosen had a lot to do with which ones Marvel Studios can exploit in other media, apparently.

Now, that disappointment on the same-ness waned after I actually started reading the quotes from the artists, as it quickly became evident that the point of this insert wasn't the same as that of "The Body Issue" proper; rather, this was simply a focused look at how artists draw superhero physiques, which is an equally valid (and, really, more interesting) way to go with it. After all, the characters aren't real, but the artists are.

The original pieces are drawn by Cheung, Cho, Dauterman, Mike Deodato, Greg Land, Emanuela Lupacchino, Alex Maleev, Sara Pichelli and Leinil Francis Yu. All are colored by either Jason Keith or Laura Martin, with the exception of Maleev's Daredevil, which he apparently colored himself. The other art that appears, the previously used images of the heroes in costume that appear in the little circles, are from Kaare Andrews (Iron Fist), Mark Brooks (Ant-Man), Cheung (She-Hulk), Cho (Hulk, Medusa), Greg Land (Luke Cage), Salvador Larocca (Iron Man), Ed McGunness (Captain Marvel) and Paolo Rivera (Daredevil).

It was, of course, dispiriting, if not depressing, to see Land included here. He draws Ant-Man, but he only draws a random pair of hairless human legs, posed between a few ant legs, framed by a magnifying glass. Ant-Man (apparently Scott Lang) is given huge quadraceps and calf muscles, as if he were a weight-lifter, which doesn't really track with Lang...or original Ant-Man Hank Pym, or Irredeemable Ant-Man Eric O'Grady. It does track with what Land says about his source material, which will sound like a wildly, laughable inaccurate statement to anyone who has read many–or any–Land comics and picked out the many celebrity likenesses of Hollywood actors and professional wrestlers, of catalog models and, as he's most often accused of using, porn stars, seemingly light-boxed onto the page (or whatever the computer age equivalent of a light box is).

"I always try to have the musculature of something that could possibly exist," Land is quoted as saying. "Even though everything looks extremely exaggerated, I still want him to look like he can move and be functional...If I need reference, I have old body-building magazines–guys like Frank Zane who have strong physiques but don't look exaggerated. I take their figures and translate them into something that can work in a comic book."

Huh. I admit I haven't read many Land comics of late, as I actively try to avoid his work, but I saw no evidence in his work from a few years ago. Maybe he just recently started drawing without reference–note the "if" in that sentence about reference–and, when he did, turning to old muscle magazines, instead of Google Image. I guess I could check Mighty Avengers to find out, but that would mean having to look at Land's art, and I've done more than enough of that in my life time, thank you.

Regardless, it was still a fun little package, one that perhaps gave some clues about how Marvel sees its characters at the moment, and how it would like the world to see them. I wouldn't mind Marvel Comics producing a similar package in the future, one that takes advantage of the whole Marvel Comics Universe, regardless of which studio owns the rights to which characters. It would be a fun way to highlight the diversity of body types within their increasingly diverse universe, and the importance of anatomy in comic work and could take the place of the old swimsuit specials.

Review: Moon Knight by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev Vol. 2

Reading that first collection of Gregg Hurwitz's attempt at a Moon Knight series reminded me that I never read the second (and final) volume of the Brian Michael Bendis/Alex Maleev attempt, a book so short-lived that it might as well have been planned as a limited series rather than an ongoing. In fact, the second volume of the series, which collects issues #8-12, so completely wrap up every thing, it sort of felt like the book was planned as a 12-issue series from the outset, with Bendis perhaps leaving a little flexibility for himself in the last few issues should the book prove popular enough to keep going; as it wasn't, he seems to have written those last few scripts to tie everything up.

For a Bendis-written book then, it's incredibly tightly plotted, with no real loose ends and actual conclusions to the various conflicts raised (That said, the final issue, published in early 2012, does end teasing Bendis' 2013 event series Age of Ultron, both in its plot, which involves a pair of Marvel villains trying to reanimate Ultron to get on his good side before he does what he's going to do, and in a big, fat text banner in the final panel, reading "Moon Knight Will Return In...The Age of Ultron.")

The bigger surprise than how well-constructed the narrative ultimately ended up being—long-term plotting and endings being two particular weaknesses of Bendis'—was the fate of Echo, which I hope it's cool to discuss here, since this book ended almost three years ago now.

To recap the plot of the first volume, Moon Knight Marc Spector has moved from New York to Las Angeles. By day, Spector is consulting on a cheesy TV show about his adventures as a soldier of fortune called Legends of the Khonshu. By night, he's fighting crime, with the help of former (New) Avenger Echo and former SHIELD Agent Buck Lime, the latter of whom builds tech for Moon Knight.

More specifically, the crime he fights is that organized by the new Kingpin of L.A., Avengers-class super-villain Count Nefaria, who I had never heard of until I looked him up on Wikipedia after reading the first volume. Apparently, he's got Superman's powers—super-speed, super-strength, invulnerability, red eyebeams—and started out as a Thor villain. He also dresses like Bela Lugosi's Dracula for mysterious but awesome reasons. Well, Bela Lugosi's Dracula, but with a monocle. So I guess he actually dresses more like The Count from Sesame Street. He was trying to buy an Ultron robot on the black market, so that's two Avengers level issues that Moon Knight really oughta call the Avengers in on, but he's sort of stubborn, perhaps because he is literally, clinically insane.

Bendis' rather inspired—at least from a marketing angle—take on Moon Knights lunacy was to have the character seeing things and hearing voices, but for those things to be Captain America, Spider-Man and Wolverine, and those voices to be their voices. So although this is a Moon Knight comic, it's also sort of an Avengers comic, with every issue co-starring the most popular of the Avengers characters (It obviously didn't work at convincing enough people to buy the book every month to keep it going past 12 issues, but it was a good idea and a nice try).

In the first volume, when Bendis and Maleev were being rather coy about just how crazy Moon Knight was, it seemed at times that he had developed split personalities that just so happened to be these three Avengers. By this issue, though, they sort of appear like the ghosts of dead Jedi, advising him as disembodied voices or see-through figures. And, as with the Jedi in the Star Wars movie, when a character dies, they join the other ghostly advisors. So when Count Nefaria totally kills Echo, she appears with the other three, and Moon Knight starts hearing her voice as well.

That was pretty surprising. To learn that not only were Bendis and Maleev using Echo in this series, but they actually went ahead and killed her off in a fight with Count Nefaria, essentially "fridging" her (Although arguments could be made regarding how pure a fridging this was).

It surprised me because a random issue of a Moon Knight comic seems an even weirder place for an Avenger to die than for her to appear at all, and because she was a David Mack (and Joe Quesada) creation, first appearing in a 1999 issue of Daredevil. Sure, Marvel owned her, and Bendis made a lot more comics with her in them than Mack ever did—she was in New Avengers as Ronin when Bendis launched at book—but it still seems somewhat uncouth to kill-off a fellow creator's character (Additionally, she was 1) A woman, 2) Native America and 3) deaf, so that's three different groups that don't exactly have a great deal of representation in superhero comics that she represented; also, I'm just not a real big fan of killing off characters, as there's always more to be done with a living character than a dead one).

It also surprised me because Bendis also killed off The Sentry, another new-ish Marvel character he didn't create, but wrote extensively.

But, more than anything, it surprised me because this was literally the first I heard of Echo dying at all. Usually the death of a superhero, or supporting character in a superhero comic, makes some waves, but if this was heavily reported on among the people who report upon such things, I completely missed it and/or forgot ever hearing about it when it happened.

Which I guess is an argument for why killing her off isn't really a bad thing, if no one missed her, even when she was gone. (She could also have been brought back to life since then. I have no idea).

Anyway, Nefaria eyebeams her through the torso during the first of two big fights between Moon Knight and Nefaria. In that one, the voices in his head advise Moon Knight to run and/or call in the Avengers, and he refuses. He tries keeping Echo out of the suicidal fight, but in the end he lives and she dies.

Perhaps because so much of the set-up was handled in the first volume, or because the book was winding down already, this volume read much more smoothly than the first, and with few if any of the tiresome, trademark Bendis monologues. It's actually quite action-packed, and it's sort of a shame that Nefaria is in many of those action scenes, as Maleev often draws his fighting in longshot, and it's not all that clear what's going on. He and Moon Knight are posed in the air, and there's red light and explosions. From his eyebeams, I guess...?

Maleev continues to make liquids look really, really weird (Also, airborne bullets, blood splatter, laser-shields and, most especially, Spider-Man's webbing), and the collection format draws attention to some shortcuts he took that one might not have noticed with a month between seeing this on the last page of one comic...

...and this on an early page from the next issue...

He recycles art repeatedly throughout, but its never so obvious as on the cliffhanger/opening splashes like the ones above and below, which are just a turn of the page away from each other in the collection.

Despite some relative weakness in the art, Maleev's Moon Knight work is head-and-shoulders above that of David Finch and Jerome Opena. If one were to ask me for a recommendation regarding a Moon Knight comic, I'd definitely recommend these two collections over the Hurwitz-written Vengeance of The Moon Knight series, in large part because of how much more accessible and new reader friendly the Bendis/Maleev take is. Whether it is a Moon Knight series in the same way that the Hurwitz one was (or if it was Bendis and Maleev re-creating the character into something they hoped would be more marketable), well, I'm not Moon Knight fan enough to say. I do plan on trying all the other Moon Knight volumes I can find in trade though...eventually.

Review: Moon Knight By Brian Michael Bendis & Alex Maleev Vol. 1 (No seriously, that's what they called it)

Last year Brian Michael Bendis began writing the newest volume of a Moon Knight series for Marvel, teaming with artist Alex Maleev, with whom he had enjoyed a long and popular run on the title of another of Marvel’s gritty, street-level urban crime-fighter characters.

The particular tack Bendis took was a somewhat familiar one he had honed over the years of his writing New Avengers; in order to help ensure the popularity of a character he liked, he made him an Avenger. Now the Moon Knight character has had some affiliation with the team before and, in fact, was currently on an Avengers team at the time the book launched—the black ops version of the team in Secret Avengers, one of the few Avengers books Bendis doesn’t write—but here Bendis gives his star an Avengers-developed and approved mission, and he puts the three most popular Avengers in every issue.

The twist, which is telegraphed on the cover, and which I’m about to spoil since this is a six-month-old storyline, is that all of this Avengers business is simply in Moon Knight’s head. The character began life as a Werewolf By Night villain who then transitioned to a clumsy Batman knock-off, but his defining trait over the last decade or so has been that he’s a literal crazy person, someone suffering from a variety of fairly severe mental illnesses. Yes, quite edgy.

Exactly how mentally ill Moon Knight is becomes part of the story, and something his non-hallucinatory allies like an ex-SHIELD agent-turned-Hollywood prop man and New Avengers cast-off Echo try to figure out while helping him. Is he, perhaps, mentally ill like a fox?

Bendis at least suggests this may be the case, when the character talks about some new techniques he’s been trying out, and it does provide some background tension…as well as at least one really weird set-piece, in which Moon Knight wears a Spider-Man costume over his Moon Knight costume and breaks into a brothel to fight hookers in his version of the Spider-Man persona (he also wears fake Wolverine claws, which he unsheathes when he goes into a fake Wolverine berserker rage during the same fight).

It’s a welcome bit of unpredictability in an otherwise somnambulistic Bendis plot. If you’ve read any half-dozen of his Marvel story arcs, you’ll recognize all of the familiar, grating tics: Everyone talks the same, as if they’re reading a spec script for a 10 p.m. hour-long cable drama, everyone has the same sense of humor, the plot is told primarily through explanatory dialogue, favorite Marvel characters and concepts get dropped in or just name-dropped, etc.

Moon Knight has moved from New York to L.A. because, as has been pointed out in a score of other Marvel comics, all the superheroes live in New York City. Moon Knight’s in town to try and stop a mysterious villain from setting himself up as the Kingpin of L.A. (It’s teased throughout that it’s someone familiar and powerful; when the final reveal is made, I must confess I have no idea who the character actually is, although he is on Wikipedia).

While there, he’s also producing a crappy television show based on the soldier-of-fortune adventures of his secret identity, Marc Spector. The star of a Bendis comic, written like a pitch for a TV series actually producing his own TV series within the comic seemed kind of clever, and in this case Bendis is definitely in on the joke, as he has a character in the show-within-the-comic melodramatically repeat one of Bendis’ most oft-mocked lines.

Maleev is particularly well-suited to drawing Bendis scripts. In a more perfect world, perhaps Maleev would be the only artist allowed to draw Bendis scripts (Well, aside from Bendis himself, although he seems to have given up professional cartooning since enlisting with Marvel).

He draws in a photorealistic style, but he does seem to be drawing in it, rather than dropping in photos. A lot of the characters look heavily photo-referenced, but expertly and organically so: I couldn’t, like, identify movie stills within the DNA of the panels, or recognize actors or models in the character designs.

The only real flourish of expressionstic, more superhero-like art is in Moon Knight’s occasionally moon-shaped, almost-luminescent white cloak, which is over long, and a nice, sharp, dramatic break with the more realistic settings and character designs.Maleev also handles typical Bendis scenes of Person Monologueing for 1-3 pages quite well…certainly quite a bit better than many of the other artists who have drawn Bendis scripts at Marvel over the last decade. I was curious about this book prior to finding this volume, which collects the first seven issues of the monthly series, and serves as a satisfying enough chunk, resolving one mystery (the identity of the villain planning on becoming the Kingpin of L.A.) and ramping up the other (seriously, how crazy is Moon Knight?) by the end of the seventh issue.

I had noticed from Paul O’Brien’s regular analysis of Marvel’s month-to-month figure at The Beat that Moon Knight was pretty far down the chart, and moving far, far fewer copies than most Bendis-written Marvel Universe books do (in December, for example, it was #78 on the chart, and moved 24,626 units, while Avengers and New Avengers were #17/57,000-ish and #25/53,000-ish respectively).

From the contents of the first seven issues, I can’t tell why the market is less interested in this Bendis books than it is in some of his others, but it’s worth noting that even his more popular books are falling down the charts, with the X-Men retaking their traditional spot of Marvel’s top franchise from the Avengers, and DC’s “New 52” experiment dominating the top ten.

Looking at the covers for the individual issues, however, I see that Marvel was charging $4 a pop for this book, which might explain it’s relatively poor placement on the charts. I imagine even fans willing to shell out 33% more for Avengers or Spider-Man than they might if DC were publishing those books becoming more reluctant to do so when it’s a Moon Knight book.

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Oh, but I hate, hate, hate, hate the way Maleev draws liquids:
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I thought this scene was really weird. It involves Marc "Moon Knight" Spector (that's him on the left) and super-martial arts expert Echo (on the right). He tries to kiss her, and does, I guess because she let him (her being a super-martial artists with wicked reflexes and what not). And then, instead of, like pushing him or slapping him, she decks him so hard that blood explodes out of his face.

And then she does it a few more times:Pretty weird, right? But maybe that's what Bendis and Maleev were going for: These two people are both totally insane.

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Finally, may favorite part of the whole book was the last chapter, in which the mystery villain is finally revealed (stop reading if you don't wanna know who it is, yo). Like I said, I didn't recognize him or his name, but he looks totally awesome: Oh ish, look! It's...it's...it's...a guy cosplaying Bela Lugosi's Dracula...?

Not pictured: He totally wears a monocle, too.

Do you recognize this dude? He's apparently a Thor villain named Count Nefaria.