These are some graphic novels I read recently:

All-New Captain America Vol. 1: Hydra Ascendant (Marvel Entertainment)

Not to be confused with All-New Captain America: Fear Him, which collects a four-issue miniseries by that name, this collects all six issues of the "ongoing" All-New Captain America series, which was abruptly canceled (like the rest of Marvel's line) last spring as part of the publisher's Secret Wars. So it ended up just being a mini-series, really. This was somewhat unfortunate, as it ended with a really rather dramatic revelation, which it seemed would be the focus of writer Rick Remender's second story arc on the book. Except there was no second story arc, as there were no more issues of All-New Captain America. The character did reappear in his own book after the conclusion of Secret Wars, but that book was entitled Captain America: Sam Wilson, and wasn't written by Rick Remender, but instead by Nick Spencer.

Marvel's always-frustrating publishing gymnastics aside, how is this book? It's pretty good. Stuart Immonen handles the artwork, so of course it's pretty good. Immonen is an interesting artist these days, because he has always been pretty good, but his work today is so much cleaner, crisper and kinetic than it was at the start of his now fairly lengthy career. I'd say he's currently at the top of his game, but then, I would have said that five years ago too, and his art only gets stronger and stronger.

As for the story, it seems to pick up where Remender left off in a previous Captain America title, the 25-issue 2013-2014 Captain America which introduced Steve Rogers' son, the new Nomad and apparently ended with Rogers becoming a very old man (with great abs, at least as Old Man Rogers was drawn in some of the Avengers books of the era) and passing his shield and codename on to his long-time ally Sam Wilson, The Falcon.

I say "seems" because this is very much in media res, and those all seem to be things it's assumed a reader will know (and I did know most of it, simply from what I had absorbed from other Marvel books; the new Nomad was a complete surprise to me, though).

I like Wilson as Captain America. His hybridized costume is pretty great, and probably the best of the many costumes he's worn over the years (I think the wings being completely withdrawn when he's not flying helps a lot). With some artists, the combination of the wings and the shield can look pretty awkward, but Immonen makes them work perfectly together, particularly in the action sequence of the opening issue.

The plot seems at least semi-inspired by Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as it involves a very wide-reaching Hydra plot involving sleeper agents, one on each superhero team, according to one agent. The high command is made up of all of Captain America's rogues gallery, or at least the current incarnations of them, including Batroc The Leaper, Baron Zemo, Red Skull, Crossbones, Taskmaster and Baron Blood, who is ideally suited to fighting the new, winged Cap.

The bad guys' plan is to release bombs at certain cities all over the world that will sterilize everyone who isn't Hydra, reducing the world's population to a more sustainable size (Ra's al Ghul style), and it's up to the All-New Cap, the All-New Nomad, Redwing and some ad hoc allies--particularly Misty Knight, Agent of SHIELD--to shut down the bombs and save the world. Spoiler alert: They do.

The super-villain team-up makes this a nice introduction to the world of Captain America, and I'm not sure to what extent Remender and Immonen are responsible for some of their current looks and portrayals, but while some look just like they did the last time I saw them, others have cool, new looks (like Batroc) and personalities (Batroc, again, who is presented as anti-American in an elitist, dismissive way, rather than as a comic book Nazi kind of way).

There's a panel in which Knight flips mercenary Taskmaster by simply promising to pay him more than Hydra is that seemed like more of a swipe than a borrow of a similar scene in the Grant Morrison-written "Rock of Ages" JLA story (where Batman pays mercenary Mirror Master than Lex Luthor promised to, fitting in with Morrison's Batman-lead League vs. Luthor-lead Injustice Gang as corporate warfare element of that epic clash). It's possible someone did it before Morrison too, of course, but if so I didn't read that story.

The best part of the entire book, however, may be when vampire villain Baron Blood "kills" Redwing, and, a few pages later, Redwing is alive again, and Cap says something to the effect of "But what's with those red eyes? Well, I guess we'll deal with that later!" Yes, that's kind of weird that Redwing was bitten by a vampire, died and then was up and moving around, but with glowing red eyes--what could that mean?

Hopefully Spencer picks up on the Vampire Redwing plotline in his Captain America: Sam Wilson book. While the cliffhanger at the end of the volume, and the idea that each Marvel super-team has a Hydra infiltrator on it, are fairly compelling plots, what I really want to know more about is how Sam will cope with having his animal sidekick transformed into a vampire...

ApocalyptiGirl: An Aria for the End Times (Dark Horse Books)

Andrew MacLean's original graphic novel about Aria and her sharp-faced white cat Jelly Beans as they navigate a mysterious, post-apocalyptic world on a somewhat mysterious mission. That mystery will eventually come into focus and be clarified, but a large part of what makes MacLean's story so satisfying is the gradual, casual pace at which it unfolds. His remarkably upbeat protagonist seems to just go about her business cheerfully, occasionally narrating and occasionally getting involved with a spectacular action scene, and her setting is one that is at once fresh and fantastic, while still feeling lived-in and well-worn.

On foot or on motorcycle, she travels from her  home in an abandoned subway train to the plant-encrusted mech leaning against an ancient gas station, searching for a signal, searching for apples and sometimes having to pull a sword on members of the two warring tribes in the area, both of whom speak only in intelligible alien languages, when they speak at all.

The book reminded me a bit of the work of Matt Howarth, a bit of the work of Brandon Graham, and a bit of the work of James Stokoe–three of my all-around favorite cartoonists, all of whom have produced highly imaginative and oragnic-feeling sci-fi and fantasy work–but his art doesn't really look like that of any of those three.

Many of the elements of this comic will seem extremely familiar, but it never feels derivative of anything in particular. Quite the opposite, in fact. I'd highly recommend it.

G.I. Joe Vs. The Transformers Vol. 3 (IDW Productions) The current license-holder of both G.I. Joe and the Transformers, IDW, has repackaged all of the previous crossovers into a series of three trade paperbacks, starting with the original 1986 Marvel crossover and concluding with Devil's Due Publishing's 2007 The Black Horizon story, one of the two in this volume.

These two comics arcs are, to put it bluntly and gracelessly, garbage. If one were to make a diagram of the quality of all of the crossovers contained in these three volumes, it would look like a hill; the Marvel ones weren't very good, the first Devil's Due of the early 00s which featured Transformers disguised as various Cobra vehicles the best, and these two just sort of sputtered out with unambitious stories and awful artwork.

Both are by writer Tim Seeley, and the script end of things is markedly better than the art end, which gets increasingly amateurish to the point that it's kind of surprising that some of these pages even saw print as is.

The first story, originally published by Devil's Due in 2006 as G.I. Joe vs. The Transformers Vol. III: The Art of War, introduces Serpentor into the peculiar mixed continuity of the series of miniseries, in which a handful of Joes have large robot-fighting mech suits of armor derived from Cybertronian technology.

This Serpentor is created by scientists in the U.S. government at the Area 52 facility, a few floors beneath the G.I. Joe/Autobot collaborations. He's a powerful android programmed with the tactics and leadership abilities of history's greatest strategists...including Megatron, whose giant severed head is also in the facility. They wanted to use him as U.S. super-soldier, but you could guess how well that worked for them.

After Cobra attacks, the arisen Serpentor heads to Cybertron where General Hawk and a handful of Joes (Snake-Eyes, Scarlet, Road Block) go to lend a tiny, tiny fleshy hand. Once there Serpentor, Son of Megatron rallies the various warring Decepticon factions and leads them against The Autobots, along the way discovering that he lacks a soul/spark like all the human and Transformer characters, and seeks to remedy it by acquiring The Matrix of Leadership from Optimus Prime.

Interestingly, it ends up in the hands of Hawk, who becomes one with it...sorta (It would have been funny to seem him try to shove the giant Matrix into his tiny little body, but that never happens).

Seeley and the too-many artists–pencillers Joe Ng, James Raiz and Alex Milne, inkers Rob Ross, Alan Tam and "M3th"–do a pretty poor job in terms of getting characters in (Cobra Commander, The Baronnes, Zarana and Zartan are the only Cobra chracters with speaking lines; in addition to those mentioned above, the only Joes with lines are Mainframe, Firewall, Lady Jaye and Flint). There are relatively few Autobots and Decepticons, too. It's a very small crossover, considering the massive casts Seeley had to pull from (the casts are similar to the small-sized ones live-action movies, which never seem capable of juggling even a half-dozen characters from each faction).

The secondary characters are mostly un-introduced. Like, I know who the Predacons are because I played with them as a little kid, but there were a few characters that never made it into the G1 cartoons that I didn't recognize at all. Presumably, who they are isn't all that important, but given the most recent franshice smash-up that IDW has been publishing–Tom Scioli and John Barber's superior Transformers Vs. G.I. Joe, both the small casts and complete lack of introductions seem even worse. Scioli has pages, hell, even panels with more characters than all of those that appear in all six of these issues, and the "filecard" intros, complete with two-to-six word intros, at least suggest a characterization. Here, many of the characters might as well be named Deception #2, G.I. Joe #7, and so on.

The settings are similarly ill-defined, with Cybertron not looking any different or more alien than what little we see of Earth (the insides of a couple of high-tech headquarters).

With Black Horizon, originally published as two over-sized issues, Seeley has a more interesting semi-high concept, pairing the villains of both 1986's The Transformers: The Movie (still the best Transformers film) and 1987's G.I. Joe: The Movie (ditto), Unicron and Cobra-La, in an alliance of sort. The metal-adverse Cobra-La, whose technology is all organic and bug-like, once held the Galactus-like planet-sized Transformer Unicron at bay, promising to summon him in a few millennia to cleanse the Earth of humanity.

That time has come in Black Horizon. The Matrix-eyed Hawk no leads a clandestine alliance of Autobots and former Joes (Firewall, Cosmos, Prowl and a few more Autobots I didn't recognize) in trying to rid the world of Cybertronian technology, like that which his former government used to build Serpentor. They stumble upon Cobra-La's plan, and with the help of Flint and Optimus try to advert the apocalypse.

In one of the neater twists in Seeley's story, he includes the original G.I. Joe characters, the Barbie-sized ones, with Joe Colton, the character G.I. Joe is named for, having been taken prisoner by Cobra-La decades ago. He too is integral in saving the day. (I'm fairly certain they even snuck some Battle Beasts in there, but I can't be sure, since Andrew Wildman's artwork was so poor; it was hard to be sure of much of anything, really.)

Seeley also adds some Yeti (?) into the Cobra-La society, which, um, kind of clashes with their overall arthropod aesthetic, and gives them a Pretender Transformer or six to play with. These are among the weirder Transformers, ones that even as a little kid I thought were super-dumb. The toys were regular Transformers encased in plastic, two-piece shells of huge, humanoid monsters. That didn't seem to fit the whole "robots in disguise" formulation of the toy line. Like, if you were a giant robot from space, disguising yourself as a giant undead samurai isn't exactly as good a camouflage as, say, being able to turn into a helicopter or truck. In fact, I'm fairly certain a giant undead samurai is more conspicuous and alarming than a simple giant robot.

Like the previous story, this one is very small in its cast–which is especially unfortunate that one would think every single Joe would be rallied to fight off a astronomically large robot intent on eating the planet Earth–and is even worse in its drawing. The settings should be even more fantastic, but there are no real establishing shots, and we see little of the fascinatingly weird culture of Cobra-La, which here consists of little more than three name characters (Golobulus, Pythona and Nemesis Enforcer), some poorly-drawn, off-model Cobra-La soldiers and random humanoids.

Last week, I thought Scioli and Barber's Transformers vs. G.I. Joe comic was one of the best genre comics I had ever read, and certainly the based based-on-a-licensed property comic I'ever ever read. After reading how poorly produced previous crossovers between those two particular properties, I like it even more.

Star Wars Adventures: Chewbacca and the Slavers of the Shadowlands (Dark Horse Books)

While contemplating Marvel's recent Chewbacca miniseries, I became curious about the inherent difficulties in a solo story starring a character who communicates only in funny howls and growls, and how other comics writers might have addressed the Wookie language barrier in previous Chewbacca comics.

I didn't find many in existence, perhaps because of that very issue, but this Chris Cerasi-written, Jennifer L. Meyer-drawn original graphic novel was one. Cerasi's approach? To simply translate Wookie-ese into English/"Basic", so that Chewie and the other Wookies in this story simply talk to one another in the same manner that, say, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo do in other comics.

While it's kind of disconcerting to hear Chewie say, for example, "What is it, Ralrra? I'm kind of busy here," instead of a more typical "HHHRRRHHH," what really makes the dialogue in this comic weird is that the story is a story-within-the-story, told by Chewbacca himself.

So in the framing sequence, Han, Leia and Chewie have just jumped to light speed and Chewie is scolding Han for being careless ("GRAAAARRRRHH!"), and when Leia, who can't understand a fucking thing the Wookie says, asks Han why he's so upset, Han explains that his hirsute friend once had a run-in with some slavers that cost him.

Leia puts a hand on Chewie's shoulder and says, "Tell me, Chewbacca. Please?"

This is two panels after Leia asked Han what Chewie was saying. The Wookie stares off into space, and an off-panel dialogue bubble belonging to Han starts the story. And then we cut to Wookie world, "185 years before The Battle of Yavin" (Wookie's live long, BTW).

I suppose that we're meant to ignore Leia's direct plea to Chewbacca to tell her, and assume Han tells the story. But I like to imagine Chewbacca sitting there and HHHHRRRR-ing to Leia for a half hour, while she does her best to look engaged and concerned, despite having know idea what he's yowling.

In that story, Chewbacca was a reckless, rebellious teen Wookie, and seems to be prickly about the fact that an older friend of his named Tarful just passed some warrior rite of passage. To prove himself, he goes off into "The Shadowlands," with Tarful, a female friend named Ralrra and two very young, Ewok-sized Wookies in tow.

There they encounter the titular slavers, a human woman, a big fuzzy alien I recognize from the cantina scene in A New Hope but can't name and a white humanoid weasel/rat. They fight, Chewie and Tarful eventually win through a combination of home turf advantage and timely intervention by the grown-up Wookies but one of the little ones dies.

It's a pretty simple story, with some pretty heavy subject matter, given its apparently all-ages address (You can tell by the word "Adventures" in the title; why does "Adventures" mean "targeted towards kids"...? I'll never know, but it holds true throughout comics from at least the last 25 years).

Meyer's art is pretty unusual for a Star Wars comic. Only five pages of it is set in "the present," and she does a fine job of filtering the characters through her own style, which has a slightly washed-out look that appears to be somewhere between air-brushed and watercolors. She doesn't mess around with trying to draw likenesses either; she's drawing Princess Leia and Han Solo, after all, not Carrie Fischer and Harrison Ford.

On Kashyyyk, things look less Star Wars still. The forest world is full of hazily, dreamily rendered foliage and mist, and the Wookies have big, expressive eyes and readable facial expressions that give them a cute, almost manga look, and seems far, far removed from the silver screen Chewbacca (all of the current Marvel Star Wars comics, no matter the artist, seems to feature art that strives to replicate the look of the films as much as possible, sometimes to their detriment).

I've definitely never read a Star Wars comic that looks like this one, which, in and of itself, kind of recommends it.

Star Wars: Vader Down (Marvel )

The first real crossover of the new, Marvel era of Star Wars-licensed comics, this collection includes a special one-shot by regular Star Wars writer Jason Aaron and artist Mike Deodato and a handful of issues of both Aaron's Star Wars ongoing (also drawn by Deodato) and a couple of issues of writer Kieron Gillen and artist Salvador Larocca's Darth Vader. The story is a lot of fun, although if one wanted to read it cynically, there's a whole lot of silly, "And then this guy shows up, and then this guy shows up, and then..." with some outright comical, cartoon-esque sequences. If one was already on board, however, then that stuff is a blast.

The basic story is pretty simple. Vader recently learned that the pilot who blew up the Death Star is named Luke Skywalker, and he is therefore scouring the galaxy to find his son. He's doing so on the sly, with the help of Doctor Aphra and her evil droid allies, Triple-Zero (a sadistic, evil opposite of C-3PO) and BT-1 (a ridiculously heavily-armed, square-headed version of R2-D2).

Vader finds Skywalker doing drills with a couple dozen rebel fighter pilots, and engages them in one of the many scenes demonstrating Vader's superhuman, superheroic levels of Force powers, but he's ultimately brought down by Luke straight-up ramming Vader's tie fighter (the first of several attempts by the Skywalker twins to take Vader out in suicide missions).

With Vader down and all alone on a mostly abandoned planet (along with a similarly downed Luke), Leia launches an all-out assault to take out Vader once and for all. Given that these comics all take place before the next two Star Wars movies, and we know exactly when and how Vader dies, there's not really much suspense as to how this all turns out, of course.

That lack of suspense doesn't make it any less interesting. The two main aspects of that interest are watching Vader tear apart whole Rebel legions (I've noted before that Comic Book Vader, in both the Dark Horse comics and now the Marvel comics, is depicted several hundred times stronger in the Force than he ever is in the original trilogy of films; if this Vader showed up on Hoth at the beginning of Empire, the series should have ended right then and there with the Empire triumphant), and Aaron and Gillen pairing the film's heroes with their comic book opposites here.

Han Solo vs. Dr. Aphra! C-3PO vs. Triple-Zero! R2-D2 vs. BT-1! Chewbacca vs. Black Krrsantan! And Leia's desire to avenge Alderann vs. her desire to not have her new friends all killed horribly!

Those last two character vs. character battles are probably the best bits, as the two little trashcan droids cuss each other out* before pulling their weapons, and R2 is severely out-gunned. As for Chewie vs. um, Blacky, our hero is on the ropes, still suffering the effects of a neurotoxin injected by Triple-Zero (who notes that the rebels have all seemed to develop a particular enmity against protocol droids for some reason). R2 administers an antidote, and things turn around instantly. It's practically a Popeye fight, with the syringe a sort of chemical space spinach.

The resolution is basically of the everyone returns to their respective corners sort that defined the original run of Marvel Star Wars comics (and all Star Wars comics starring the characters from the movies that are set between films), but there are developments in the Darth Vader book's plotline, as Vader faces against one of his major rivals (who looks like Admiral Ackbar's head on General Greivous' body).

I'm no fan of either Larocca or Deodato, the latter of whom has increasingly relied on photo reference and appropriation in his comics-making, and his images often feature an uncomfortably obvious use of dropped-in, repeated images when illustrating large numbers (dulling the impact of that first splash page, for example), and swipes of character poses and expressions straight from the films that are more than a little distracting (I found myself wondering which frame of which film a particular Han Solo face is from, for example, rather than concentrating on that particular scene of the comic).

Their styles are similar enough that there's no severe aesthetic whiplash in this collection when they hand the baton off to one another, although Deodato's Vader often looks more noticeably like a Marvel superhero than Larrocca's, and Deodato's Aphra's anatomy shifts unpredictably, depending on his photo reference, I guess.

Suicide Squad Vol. 3: Rogues (DC Comics)

With this latest 280-page collection of the John Ostrander-helmed Suicide Squad run, I realized one of the reasons that DC has had such a hard time with their recent revival attempts. A new Suicide Squad book was one of the 52 new books launched as part of The New 52. It was one of a handful of books that the market seemingly kept rejecting, but DC kept insisting on publishing anyway**, simply changing creative teams at a particularly high frequency and, at one point, cancelling it and relaunching it almost immediately (DC did the same with Teen Titans and Deathstroke).

Now, there are a couple of reasons why the book has had such a hard time taking off, including rejection of fans by some of the New 52 redesigns--like skinny, sexy Amanda Waller, or mustache-less Deadshot--and the fact that it has thus far featured either bad writing, bad art or both (2011's Suicide Squad #1 was among the worst of the 52 #1s, consisting of almost 20-pages of the protagonists being tortured and, um, that's it).

But while reading Rogues it hit me that a conceptual problem was the fact that the New 52 version of the DC Universe wasn't old enough to support the Squad. While the original one launched shortly after Crisis On Infinite Earth's hard reboot of DC history, COIE didn't hit the re-set button on everything all at once, and it affected some characters more than others; the DCU still had a history, and most of its characters were understood to have been around for a while (about ten years or so).

So when Amanda Waller's Task Force X starts recruiting the likes of Captain Boomerang, Deadshot Bronze Tiger, Nightshade and The Enchantress, these are all characters that were at least semi-familiar to readers as Flash and Batman villains, as supporting characters from older, canceled titles and curios of DC continuity. Black Orchid, Shade, The Changing Man, Vixen, The Penguin, Dr. Light--whether their roles were big or small, they were characters with history in the DC Universe and a presence in the back issue bins. If you wanted to learn more about them, you could read their old comics, because there were old comics featuring these versions of the characters.

That's not been the case with the New 52's Suicide Squads, one of which appears in a book called New Suicide Squad. Yes, the characters all have familiar names, but unfamiliar histories, especially at the outset. The first issue of 2011's Suicide Squad was the very first introduction to the new versions of Deadshot, Harley Quinn, King Shark and company, and while they shared the universe with all the other characters, that universe was brand-new across the board.

One of the most interesting aspects of Ostrander's Squad book, that it featured ever-changing, Dirty Dozen-like congregations of characters that really had no business sharing the same story space, wasn't something that could be replicated in the New 52 DCU. It can now of course; when New Suicide Squad added the likes of Reverse Flash, Black Manta and The Joker's Daughter, these were, at least, characters with story arcs in other books, and a modicum of history, and writers were able to flesh out backstories for the more regular characters like Deadshot and Harley, but even then, their universe was younger and smaller than that of the original, Ostrander-written Squad.

I don't think that element was the chief virtue of the original series, but it was certainly one of them, and one that can't be easily manufactured (So it should be interesting to see the upcoming film, which features a cast of characters who have never appeared in any films before, excepting a Joker; it's going to come down to characterization, concept and craftsmanship, and can't coast on fights with The Doom Patrol or Justice League or trips to settings like Shade's weird-ass homeworld or Apokolips).

This particular volume collects #17-25, and 1988's Suicide Squad Annual #1. Ostrander continues to do the bulk of the writing, sometimes in conjunction with Kim Yale, and Luke McDonnell handles the lion's share of the pencil art.

There's a lot going on in these stories in terms of plot, just like there's always a lot going on in the old Suicide Squad, including the team's cover being blown and being forced to go public, an "Invasion" tie-in, Rick Flag going rogue after committing what turned out to be an exceptionally unnecessary murder and, perhaps of the greatest historical importance, the very first appearances of Oracle–here as just a voice coming out of a computer and offering her/its help to the Squad.

McDonnell and company's artwork is serviceable but unspectacular, and can read strangely today. We're so used to seeing highly-stylized art, often with style taking the driver's seat and shoving story-telling fundamentals into the backseat, that it can bee downright unusual to see such perfectly readable, but also un-showy, artwork. Especially applied to DC characters.

I am increasingly struck by the fact that no matter how dark the subject matter gets in this series, the characters almost never get any kind of costume redesigns–the exception that proves the rule here is Nighshade, who had a transformative experience in the comics collected in volume 2. There's just some kind of special energy that emanates from the friction caused by the garish, colorful supervillain costumes grinding against the deadpan serious stories of international intrigue and violent geo-politics.



*"My, what language," Triple-Zero says of their BLEEP PBEEP WUURUU BIDDA DEEBA smack-talk. "He certainly s a foul-mouthed little astromech. I wonder if he's capable of backing up such talk?"

**Which might have had something to do with a big-budget, Will Smith-starring Suicide Squad movie having been in development, and set for release this summer.

On four Marvel collections

Apache Skies

This 2002 semi-sequel to the previously discussed Blaze of Glory reunited the creative team of John Ostrander and Leonardo Manco with The Rawhide Kid, who lead the ensemble in the previous miniseries. The title is a reference to the plotline: The Kid is seeking to avenge an old ally of his, The Apache Kid (another old, Marvel-owned character, unrelated to the real-world Apache Kid, who didn't appear in Blaze of Glory–perhaps this was because Red Wolf had fulfilled that story's Native American hero quota, but, more likely, because between Rawhide, Outlaw, Two-Gun and Colt, that story had all the Kids it could handle).

Unlike Blaze of Glory, Apache Skies appeared on Marvel's then-new Max imprint, supposedly the home of the publisher's adult content–with the logo itself reading "Parental Advisory, EXPLICIT Content" and an "MA" rating–but in practice these were almost always just regular Marvel books with regular Marvel characters, allowing for some actual swear words instead of grawlixes or black bars. They rarely if ever actually included nuded or a greater degree of violence than that seen in the regular Marvel line, and certainly never threatened anything approaching literary, the way that rival company DC's Vertigo imprint was so often prone to.

Here, the N-word and the S-word appear a few times, the only sex scene is a single panel in which the couple are naked but posed so as to cover their bathing suit areas, and the violence is no more extreme than in Blaze of Glory, or any old-school Western: When people get shot, they mostly just fall or sprawl. None of this is meant as a criticism of the comic, of course, just a note on the head-scratching nature of the Max imprint in general. Whatever Marvel's plans for it upon its creation, as the years passed and the publisher gave up on younger readers for their core, Marvel Universe line, there was no real distinction. All Marvel readers were adults, after all. (I should note that this has changed more in the past few years, as the publisher does release books now that are perfectly all-ages in content, with Ms. Marvel and Unbeatable Squirrel Girl leaping most immediately to mind.)

Aside from the change in imprint, this story has a much smaller cast and a smaller scale. This makes for a tighter, more focused and, yes, more realistic story, but it also loses some of the operatic grandeur of Blaze; the previous series might have been prone to purple prose and self-importance, but then, that was part of its charm, too.

Ostrander and Manco's Johnny Bart, looking more like a "real" cowboy than the Hollywood version of the original, 20th century Rawhide Kid comics, is going about gunning down the men who killed the Apache Kid, shooting him in the back. So too is another long-haired gunfighter, this one calling herself The Apache Kid–in actuality, the first A.K.'s widow. The pair join forces, with A.K. II being quit resistant to doing so, given how her husband's attempts to bridge the worlds of their people and that of the white men ended up for him.

Lots of gunfights and a spectacular train chase follow, including a final look at The Rawhide Kid that is far more dramatic, even superheroic, than the simple riding off into the sunset of the previous series.

It's a pretty great comic book Western, and Manco's artwork is just as incredible as it was in Blaze, perhaps more so. Like the preceding storyline, this collection has also gone out-of-print. It's kind of too bad, as they are such good comics, but then, that's Marvel's publishing strategy. Perhaps they'll reissue them both in an omnibus if Hollywood starts running out of Marvel superheroes to base films and TV shows on, and finally works its way down to their Western characters.

Captain America & The Mighty Avengers Vol. 1: Open For Business

Don't be fooled by the title or the numeral 1 on the spine; this is only technically the first collection of a new series, collecting the first seven of the nine-issue comic book series by that title. In actuality, it's merely a continuation of writer Al Ewing's Mighty Avengers series, which shipped all of 14 issues before getting technically relaunched with a slightly different (and more distinct) title, a new artist and a new #1 (So, if you want to read Ewing's Mighty Avengers in trade at this point, you'll want to consult Wikipedia, as the reading order is Mighty Avengers Vols. 1-3 and Captain America & The Mighty Avengers Vols. 1-2...careful you don't accidentally get any of the seven Brian Michael Bendis-written volumes of The Mighty Avengers, some numbered and some not).

Underscoring the complete arbitrariness of the relaunch and re-titling is the fact that the book begins apparently where the last one left off, meaning none of the characters are introduced (some, like Captain America Sam Wilson and Luke Cage, probably won't need any introduction to even casual Marvel readers; others, like Blue Marvel or Power Man II*, most definitely will), their new status quo isn't introduced (basically, this is a splinter-group of Avengers functioning as a community organization, a Heroes For Hire that don't actually need to be paid for their service) and plotlines still in-progress (Spider-Man's first appearance is apologizing for what he did to the team while Otto Octavius' mind was in his body and he was the "Superior" Spider-Man, a villain and his company from previous issues are still there, in mid-plot).

If those aren't enough hurdles to the casual reader, who might–quite understandably!–see the "1" on the spine and pick the damn thing up expecting a decent jumping-on point, the very first issue collected herein (that is, Captain America & The Might Avengers #1) is an Axis tie-in, meaning that it introduces the title character on the first pages as a thoughtless, violent vigilante, and his teammate Luke Cage as a self-centered, disrespectful, greedy asshole. The reason for this is that they have been "inverted" before the start of this issue (in the pages of Axis), in which good guys and bad guys had their moral alignments flip-flopped.

Much of the first half of the book is concerned with Axis business, as Wilson and Cage join a team of other inverted Avengers (and Medusa) to fight the non-inverted members of their own team. From there, it resumes storylines in-progress from Mighty Avengers, which is heavy on Blue Marvel, who is a Sentry-like Superman analogue created by Kevin Grevioux in 2008.

I spent most of the time in a state somewhere between bewildered and trying to mentally place this between other Marvel events and what I knew of Marvel's publishing moves the last few years, which is a shame, because I really like quite a few of the characters on the team, and, with a few exceptions, it seemed like Ewing was doing a riff on Brian Michael Bendis' franchise-rejuvenating "street-level" Avengers team that he launched as The New Avengers (Ironically, Bendis' Mighty Avengers title featured his more traditional, superhero action-focused team and adventures).

From what I've seen in this particular book, which is set after a few line-up changes, this is one of–if not the–most diverse superhero teams of the last few years, featuring black characters Cap, Cage, Blue Marvel, Power Man II and Spectrum, the Hispanic White Tiger V (I think this one is the fifth one; I lost count a long time ago) the exotically "oriental" Kaluu (he's a 500-year-old dude from a Himalayan village who hung out with The Ancient One, depicted as an, um, ancient old Asian man, but soon to be played in a feature film by Tilda Swinton, I think...?) and a pair of white people, one of whom spends all of her time with green skin (She-Hulk) and the other who dresses from head-to-toe in red-and-blue tights (Spider-Man, now Amazing rather than Superior).

This diversity appears to be anything but forced, by the way. For the most part, these are all native New Yorkers who seem perfectly suited to the book and some of the characters, like the new Power Man, for example, would likely seem out-of-place were they anywhere other than on this team and in this book at this particular moment in time. In other words, it's a diverse team, but a completely organically diverse team.

This really seems to be a case of Marvel's over-reliance on a strategy that favors short-term sales to the direct market (and, perhaps, their quixotic quest for constant market share dominance over DC, which seems of no real value aside from bragging rights) interfering with their ability to publish collections for the bookstore and library market...or just the folks who read collections instead of serially-published comics. Sure, that Captain America & The Mighty Avengers #1 probably sold quite a few more units to direct market retailers than Mighty Avengers #15 might have, but the collection would have at least been readable as Mighty Avengers Vol. 4.

But then, I don't run a comics company. Marvel certainly knows all this, and are selling the comics and collections to the people they want to, and not to the rest of us.

Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1: Counter-Evolutionary

This is yet another randomly rebooted Marvel comic book series that makes reading the books in trade somewhere between confusing and confounding. This Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1, featuring the first few issues a series entitled Uncanny Avengers written by Rick Remender, shouldn't be confused with Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1: The Red Shadow, which collects the first few issues of a series entitled Uncanny Avengers written by Rick Remender.

Rather randomly relaunched under the same title after the events of Axis, this particular Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1 at least seems to devote some effort towards starting a new storyline in a manner that a new reader could pick it up and not be hopelessly lost, as they might with Captain America & The Mighty Avengers Vol. 1. Yes, Remender is still writing a book with the same title, and a line-up consisting of a mixture of Avengers and X-Men (or at least mutants), but the line-up has changed, its composition a bit more ad hoc and they have a new adventure to embark on. It is, of course, heavily burdened by past events–including those of Remender's own Axis event/series and the fact that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver have just learned that they are not Magneto's children after all (Because Fox still has the rights to the X-Men, apparently, while Marvel Studios wants to make use of Scarlet Witch in future movies, I guess).

Seeking answers to their true origins and operating under the assumption that The High-Evolutionary is involved, the twins have traveled to Counter-Earth, which is basically The High Evolutionary's Planet of Doctor Moreau. Scarlet Witch aving been off the (seriously diminished) Avengers Unity Squad's radar for a while, Rogue gathers a new Unity Squad to go looking for her.

Rogue, Doctor Voodoo, The Vision, Captain America Sam Wilson and the newly-inverted Sabretooth travel to Counter-Earth via voodoo, but the spell is interrupted, and they end up scattered all over the planet. The remainder of the story arc finds the seven heroes each dealing with different conflicts or challenges, all of which are eventually revealed to be part of a whole, and in the climactic battle against The Counter-Evolutionary and his forces they all come together to win the day.

It's pretty classic (read negatively, basic) superhero team plotting, but Remender does it well. Sure, some of the characters have less to do than others (particularly Cap), but then, this is pretty obviously the story of the twins, and so their getting the most panel-time certainly makes sense.

Remender is still working with artist Daniel Acuna (who drew the previous volume, Uncanny Avengers Vol. 4, because, remember, this second Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1 comes after Vols. 2-4, because Marvel has a peculiar belief in the totemic power of the number 1), and while I've not always been a fan of his work, here he gets all kinds of cool stuff to draw, particularly given all the animal-headed humanoids that populate Counter-Earth. He additionally does a pretty great job rendering some of the super-powers, particularly Quicksilver's super-speed, which he and Remender collaborate on to depict in semi-inspired ways.

It's pretty good super-team comics...although it's also kind of curious, as the title was re-relaunched immediately after this story arc, with another new #1 late last year, so expect a third Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1 soon. That volume, at least, will have a new writer to help distinguish it from the last two Vols. 1.

Uncanny X-Men Vol. 6: Storyville

Brian Michael Bendis is a comic book writer, but, for the sake of saying the same thing that I and others so often say about him in a different way, let's imagine that he was a runner competing in track and field events. If his comic book writing were running, we could say that Bendis is a very experienced, very talented runner. He has pretty great form, and he clearly understands the mechanics of running and what it takes to do well in his chosen sport. He's quite versatile, able to run marathons and super-marathons, as well as shorter distances. It's been a long time since he even attempted a sprint, but one imagines he would do decently at such a short event as well.

The major flaw in his performance isn't the running of the race, but the ending of it. Sometimes he collapses before the finish line, sometimes he trips over it, sometimes he falls flat on his back, sometimes he misses the finish line completely, running off the track and colliding with a bystander.

Uncanny X-Men Vol. 6 collects the end of Bendis' run on the X-Men franchise, which has spanned three years and almost 80 issues of two titles, All-New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men. It is a very poor ending, which shouldn't come as any surprise, given how the ends of Bendis' runs on various other titles, characters, franchises and crossover/event series have gone, but it's not his worst ending. To return to the race-running metaphor, this is more of an ugly, clumsy, stumbling collapse of a finish than some spectacular, laughable, unimaginable collision.

Bendis' run spun out of the events of Avengers Vs. X-Men, a massive status quo-shaking event series in which he was one of the main architects and writers, and was premised on a two basic ideas. First, that Cyclops had done something horrible (he not only took over the world and beat up most of the Marvel Universe, he also killed Charles Xavier), making him a wanted man and an absolute pariah to all but a handful of longtime allies. Second, Beast decided to bring the original X-Men–the teenaged versions of himself, Cyclops, Angel, Iceman and Jean Grey–forward into the present/their future, in order to shock Cyclops back to his senses...or, at the very least, allow Teen Scott to tell off Adult Scott.

These ideas allowed Bendis to write two interconnected X-Men books–one featuring Adult Cyclops and his outcast team of mutants, the other featuring the teen X-Men, who it was eventually determined were stuck in the present–as well as providing an awful lot of tension. The time-travel element especially, as even the most rudimentary understanding of time-travel (i.e. that gained from watching cartoons and reading comic books) would dictate that the X-teens had to go back at some point (the complicated but once strictly enforced rules of time travel in the Marvel Universe are a different matter, and Bendis excused himself from those with a weird "Time is broken" sub-plot tacked on to one of his many event/series).

Hell, even just a basic awareness of how comic books work at the Big Two publishers all but promised that Bendis would have to put things back to some semblance of where he found them when he left. He introduced a seemingly un-resolvable issue...surely he would resolve it, rather than leaving it for another writer, right?

Not so much. The teens are, of course, here to stay (All-New X-Men has already been relaunched). Which is fine: Cyclops is MIA after the events of Secret Wars (or, actually, after the mysterious events after Secret Wars, which the "All-New, All-Different" Marvel Universe skipped over), Jean Grey is dead, Angel is...I lost track (but suffice it to say, quite different than his First Class version), Beast is further mutated so as to look nothing like his original version and Iceman, well, Iceman's really the only true duplicate. The fact that there are basically a million X-Men means having a few doubles hardly matters. It's not like they all always need something to be doing at any one time anyway; the writers and artists use the dozen or dozens they like in the the many X-books, and the others are just left in the limbo of the Marvel Universe occurring off-page until someone decides they want to use Maggot or Jubilee or Cannonball or whoever.

As for the other storyline, regarding Cyclops' place in the Marvel Universe, well, that is apparently To Be Resolved...Bendis just lets it fizzle in his run.

As for the conclusion of that run in Storyville, which collects the last six issues of Uncanny, is simply six single-issue stories, each more-or-less devoted to a single group of characters or plot-point, providing some form of punctuation...even if it is more often than not an ellipses. And, if you're wondering why the conclusion of All-New's storylines might appear in a collection of Uncanny well, as he did during his run on the Avengers franchise, Bendis never let the title of the comic dictate its contents.

The first, drawn by Chris Bachalo, finds Alex "Havoc" Summers meeting with his brother Scott at The New Xavier School, where flashbacks reveal how Scott unilaterally decided to disband his X-Men team and his school, and his break-up with Emma.

The next, drawn by Kris Anka, teams Magik up with Kitty, as their friendship is renewed and they return to the fold of the "real" X-Men, those based at the Jean Grey School. It's set partially on Monster Island, so, in addition to treating readers to Anka art, it treats us to Anka art depicting classic Kirby monsters.

That's followed by another Anka issue, devoted to Dazzler taking her revenge on Mystique, who abused her rather badly throughout much of Bendis' Uncanny.

The penultimate issue, drawn by Valerio Schiti, follows Cyclops' now teacher-less students, The Stepford Cuckoos (here dubbed less evocatively "The Stepford Sisters") and the new characters Bendis co-created for Uncanny, as they strike out on their own. They do alright for awhile, with Goldballs becoming an unlikely celebrity, but things eventually go sideways, and they realize they still have a lot to learn. They're never officially called "The New Mutants" as a team name, but they are alluded to as such. In a more expansive time for Marvel's merry mutants, perhaps they would be starring in a book entitled The All-New, All-Different New Mutants.

And the final issue is renumbered #600, even though it is the 36th issue of this volume of Uncanny, because Marvel only appreciates high numbers when they end in two zeros. Uncanny X-Men also recently relaunched, with that title going to what appears to be the post-Secret Wars version. I can't imagine it will last 100 issues without being relaunched and renumbered, but I'm certain there will be an Uncanny X-Men #700 eventually.

This issue, illustrated in jam fashion by a mixture of artists from throughout Bendis' run on the X-Men books and frequent collaborators of his (of which there is obviously overlap), is basically an issue-length intervention for Beast, based on his having kicked off the two series with his time-travel shenanigans and some other acts of madder-than-usual science (this story, incidentally, doesn't acknowledge that the whole time he was doing all this stuff, he was also part of a clandestine group of super-geniuses trying to save the Multiverse and occasionally having to snuff out alternate earths in New Avengers and the long run-up to Secret Wars, all of which really makes the time travel business seem like small potatoes...relatively, anyway).

In between, Bendis ties up all that he's going to tie up: Colossus makes amends with Magik, Adult Iceman comes out to Teen Iceman (resolving the weird question that Bendis left dangling when he outted Iceman, as to whether the past version was gay and the present one was straight, raising the specter of a text that posits homosexuality as a choice), Jean chooses Teen Beast over Teen Cyclops and Eva Bell reappears to tell Beast to join the cast of one of the too-many Inhumans books.

Also, Cyclops initiates a Million Mutant March in Washington, D.C. which doesn't make any goddam sense, no matter how you want to think about it. Paul O'Brien called the scene "unearned," and I think he's right; also, I think you should read Paul O'Brien's review instead of mine. Too late? Well then, read his and mine.



*Or Power Man III, depending on whether you want to count Erik Josten or not. I don't.

Review: Avengers & X-Men: Axis

Well, I really liked the logo.

Perfectly designed so that the "A" can be read as an "S" and an "I" when upside down, whoever designed the Axis logo has transformed the word into one that looks the same upside down or right side up. It was rather well used for the covers of the nine-issue event miniseries, most of which featured two characters on either side of the word "Axis," so it could be difficult to tell at a glance which way was up and down at a glance (On the cover of this collection, only the tiny little Marvel logo and "Bonus Digital Edition Included" tag let you know whether it's the heroes or the villains who belong ton the top).

It also fits with the overall premise of the book. The word does not refer to the Axis Powers of World War II, as one might reasonably believe, given the fact that The Red Skull is the major villain of the series, but rather a fixed line of reference around which something could rotate (Note the line through logo, completing the "A"). Here, the axis is that of morality or alignment, to use the role-playing game word for it.

Unfortunately, the rest of comic isn't nearly as inspired or well-executed as the logo and cover designs. This is both a shame and somewhat surprising, because the basic premise is so simple: The heroes have become villains, and the villains have become the heroes.

Now a large part of the problem with writer Rick Remender's Axis plot is that as simple as the above premise sounds, its set-up, fall-out and resolution are extremely complicated, in terms of incident. There's that, and then there's the fact that the demands of a nine-issue limited series meant to act as the spine of a line-wide cross-over event don't really make for the ideal exploitation of that premise.

The two pages of synopsis marked "Previously..." at the opening of the first issue, which include six large panels taken from other books and paragraphs of text accompanying each, start during the climax of Avengers Vs. X-Men and the killing of Professor Xavier by a Phoenix-possessed Cyclops, and the rest of the events are from Rick Remender's own Uncanny Avengers series (Aspects of the story of Axis actually go back even further, to incorporate the events of House of M...and some bullshit X-Men comics from the nadir of Marvel Comics in the '90s, but the big stuff is all from Uncanny Avengers).

To summarize that summary, just as Captain America had put together his half-Avengers, half-X-Men "Avengers Unity Squad," The Red Skull had stolen Xavier's corpse and somehow stuck Xavier's brain into his own head, giving him super-psychic powers.

Most of Uncanny Avengers dealt with the fall-out of that–with a diversion into the Apocalypse business Remender seems to always be writing–and, when the series ended, Magneto had killed Red Skull on Genosha, where the Nazi super-villain was in the process of building a concentration camp for mutants. Somehow smashing the Skull's skull in released "Red Onslaught," the Red Skull version of Onslaught, who, um, I don't know, Wikipedia that shit, I guess.

Axis proper opens in Los Angeles, where The Avengers Unity Squad and some other random-ish Avengers are fighting Plantman and trading tedious quips like they're all Spider-Man all of a sudden ("Assume anything green is your enemey, Avengers." "Even kale?" "Especially kale." I guess The Kale Growers of America should have bought that ad space in Marvel comics when they had the chance!).

The Avengers start to bicker, and then start arguing pretty savagely with one another, and then outright fighting. This is mostly due to the influence of Red Onslaught, who is sending psychic hate waves all over the world, but it starts gradually, and the make-up of these Avengers are so new and foreign to any other Avengers books I had read that I don't really know how they all get along anyway (The Vision is there all of a sudden; The Hulk is there and he has seemingly gone through his bi-annual personality re-vamps; Thor is here, and he's lost Mjolnir but hasn't yet lost his arm, so I guess the Thor in this entire series is taken from somewhere in the middle of Thor #1; Sam Wilson is now Captain America).

Iron Man continually uses "raincheck" as a verb, something he does throughout the series, so I'm assuming it's just a weird writing tick of Remenders, and none of the editors decided to say, "Hey Rick, I think this eighth instance of Iron Man saying 'raincheck' is a bit much. You're starting to sound like Claremont here, with your constant repetition of the same slang."

The Avengers eventually get their shit together, thanks to a psychic-blocking doodad of Iron Man's invention, and while the entire world breaks into random rioting, they eventually trace the hate-waves back to Red Onslaught on Genosha, where Magneto and a handful of X-people are already fighting him.

Once the Avengers, a random calvary of X-Men and other assorted character (Sue Storm, Nova, Medusa) start dog-piling on Red Onslaught, he unleashes his secret weapons: A pair of Stark-built Super-Sentinel robots, specifically designed with Civil War-related counter-measures pulled from Stark's sub-conscious brain via Skull's super-telepathy and built as the ultimate superhero-fighting and capturing countermeasure.

It works beautifully for a while, until Magneto comes up with a brilliant plan: If the robots are designed specifically to take down superheroes, they won't be able to deal with supervillains, and so he brings a completely random assemblage of villains to the party (Mystique, Sabertooth, Enchantress, Loki, Doctor Doom, Deadpool and, most randomly of all, Carnage, Hobgoblin, The Absorbing Man and Jack O' Lantern, whose new design I liked a lot...I really like characters with pumpkins for heads in general, though).

If this strategy sounds familiar, you may remember when Grant Morrison used it in 1998's JLA #17; that's the one where Prometheus takes down the Justice League using special, anti-superhero stratagems programmed into his brain, but is helpless to defeat Catwoman, as she's a villain. It worked fine as a few panels of a one-issue story, even if it does fall apart if you pick at it. It shouldn't matter if you classify the person swinging a bullwhip at your genitals, as Catwoman did to take down Prometheus, a "hero" or a "villain"...the defense against bullwhips would still be to either block them or dodge them, whoever's swinging them).

It's really just a reason to get some villains in the scene for the big switcheroo, of course, (And that at least explains why Magneto didn't just pick up some old allies from his Brotherood of Evil Mutants, but also picked out random Spider-Man villains who someone else somewhere in Marvel editorial had plans to put in Axis tie-in miniseries).

The plan is to have a couple of magic people cast a spell reversing the tiny bit of Xavier that's in Red Onslaught with the dominant Red Skull personality, giving the heroic bit control and reducing the evil bit.

It doesn't go according to plan, exactly. It works, dismissing Onslaught and rendering Skull unconscious (and presumably with Xavier in the driver's seat and Skull now tied-up in the trunk), but it also affects everyone on the island. As I said, good guys are now bad guys, and bad guys are now good guys.

And here we come to a problem.

What exactly does that mean? The idea seems to be that every hero has a little piece of evil in them, and every villain a little bit of noble, altruistic goodness, and that the spell simply reversed the proportions, bringing the evil out of all the heroes and making them bad, while bringing the good out of the villains and making them good.

This is really much more of a DC Comics concept though, as most DC villains are just evil-with-a-capital E. Over the years, layers of psychology have been given to the likes of Black Adam, Lex Luthor and Sinestro, but whatever their motivations, they're essentially rotten apples, characters who either want to rule the world or rob banks. They may have more justification than, say, The Joker, but they're just no damn good, in the same way that despite paranoia or overzealousness, DC's heroes are all good, upstanding, saintly citizens (something Geoff Johns and other writers have been rebelling against as much as possible of late, but no matter how many Parademons and monsters you have Aquaman and Wonder Woman kill in battle, they're never going to be anti-heroes like Wolverine, The Punisher and Ghost Rider).

For some of the affected, it is as literally true for them as it is for Red Skull. Genesis, the clone child of Apokolips that Remender introduced in Uncanny X-Force and has been part of the cast of Wolverine and The X-Men, apparently does have a literal seed of villainy in his inner-workings, and this spell "inverts" his Genesis and Apokolips identities (and appearances).

But it doesn't work so well with, like, anyone else. Magneto and Dr. Doom, for example, haven't really ever been evil-for-evil's sake, at least not since the mid-60s, and while both often commit despicable acts, they have always been justified in the minds of the characters, and able to be rationalized to others (Magneto especially of late, as he has literally been on the X-Men team for the last few years). No one's a villain in their own minds, and all that.

Neither of these two villians seem affected at all by the spell, really...except during one scene later in the book where Doom addresses his people in Latveria and apologizes for being such an evil tyrant to them; in personality and relationships with other characters, though, he remains unchanged.

Deadpool is also unaffected; he's there because he sells books, but his "inversion" affects his fashion more than his personality, and so he continues to talk utter nonsense and behave as usual, he just now talks with hippy slang.

Why this is such a problem is that the inversion happens in issue three, which means Remender still has six issues to fill with good guys-gone-bad and bad guys-gone-good.

Now, if this were an old-school, summer annual style event, with two oversized bookends, the story might work much better. Imagine issues #1-3 of Axis compressed into a 48-page Avengers & X-Men: Axis #1, and then every title's annual telling a story about the individual characters now that they've had their alignment's switched around, concluding with Avengers & X-Men: Axis #2, where the problem is resolved and almost everything goes back to normal, save a plot thread or three to explore in future issues of ongoing series.

But Remender doesn't have that option, and so he has to keep going. And that means he has to essentially keep the Avengers and X-Men operating as teams, which doesn't really work if they are all suddenly evil (well, he didn't have to, I suppose, but the book would have been particularly disjointed if it spent the next four or five issues spending a few pages on 40 different characters one at a time).

The now evil core group of Avengers (plus Medusa, because Marvel's trying to push The Inhumans) stay together, but wipe a bunch of the characters off the board by capturing almost all of the non-mutant characters. They repeatedly say they'll stick together because it serves their interests, but it's not clear how.

A few do go their own way, at least temporarily: These include Tony Stark, who rather than just being randomly evil like most of his peers, has his selfishness and arrogance amplified. He's basically the character he was at the start of the first Iron Man movie. It's weird that Remender picks and chooses which characters have motivations for their actions, specific aspects of their character that change, while others are just bad guys for no reason.

Then there's the Hulk, who develops a Hulk's Hulk (not unlike the Null that appeared in Matt Fraction's short-lived Defenders revival), unimaginatively named "Kluh," who has black skin, a white mohawk and glowing red lines around his torso, looking vaguely like one of The Worthy from Fear Itself.

Meanwhile, The X-Men decide to overthrow humanity for, um, some reason, wiping them all out. Apparently, the inversion of all of the X-Men's heroic natures is...that they are genocideal maniacs? (This doesn't work too well, considering that almost none of the evil mutants have ever wanted to go quite that far).

The wild cards in this new round of Avengers vs. X-Men fighting are Spider-Man, Nova, Old Man Steve Rogers, the latest Nomad (Rogers' son, apparently? I've never heard of him) and, of course, all of the villains-turned-good.

After much fighting, including one–just one–character being able to reverse his own alignment-reversal to go back to being good again by pure force of will, the remaining good guys and bad guys-gone-good are able to cast another inversion spell, this one putting everyone back to normal.

The only exceptions are Iron Man, who is able to use his technology to shield himself, and the two guys standing next to him: Havoc and Sabertooth. Iron Man would go on to star in Superior Iron Man (and presumably be restored to good again before or during Secret Wars), and the other two characters will presumably be dealt with in Remender's relaunched Uncanny Avengers, which prominently featured Sabertooth on the cover.

So in the end, it was a very simple, rather fun idea, but a very small one, and it didn't really work in the complicated, serious Marvel Universe, nor to support an event book of this scale.

I suppose some of the tie-ins might have been good, though, particularly if they offered their writers the opportunity to do more with the inverted moral alignments than Remender does here. That is, if there are tie-ins that explore how an inverted Sam Wilson or Nightcrawler differs from the regular version, aside from just being a psychotic maniac...you know, if other writers do with other characters what Remender does with Iron Man and pretty much no other character in this series.

The artwork is unfortunately all over the place, and isn't even divided by acts or arcs within the series as a whole. Adam Kubert, Leinil Francis Yu, Terry Dodson and Jim Cheung all pencil the book, but come and go randomly. Kubert's there for the first, second, seventh and parts of the ninth issue, for example. Yu for the third, fourth, eighth and part of the ninth. There are nine different inkers (no, not one per issue; don't be silly) and five different colorists. It's all pretty okay artwork, and the book makes visual sense, but hoo-boy does it read like a deadline-dodging, last-minute jam book thrown together at the last minute. It's a sharp contrast to the story, which Remender was building to for years.

The opening sequence, drawn by Kubert, is particularly weird, as all of the pages have extremely wide borders filled with the Axis logo repeating over and over like the comics panels were being framed by Axis wrapping paper.

It is a nice logo, though.


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

So anyone have any recommendations for Axis tie-ins to pursue in trade? Were any of them any good? I remember thinking the Hobgoblin mini looked intriguing when I saw it in the shop, and I'm curious about the new Jack O' Lantern.

Review: Avengers: Rage of Ultron

Avengers: Rage of Ultron is, by my count, the fourth in Marvel’s new-ish series of original graphic novels, and the third that I’ve read.

Its timing and its title are both reflective of the publisher’s desire to have a book on the stands ready and waiting for anyone curious about the characters and interested in spending money on comics featuring them after seeing Avengers: Age of Ultron. That likely also explains the Avengers line-up drawn on the cover; while all of those characters along the bottom do appear in the book, only The Vision plays a major role. The others? Confined to a 23-page an opening scene set “Years Ago,” while the rest of the book is set “Today.”

It’s not a bad idea, really. Marvel doesn’t have anything that resembles the movie Avengers too closely in print, and the Age of Ultron series that the film took its sub-title from has more in common with the Terminator franchise than the Avengers films. And this book, written by Rick Remender and drawn by Jerome Opena, Pepe Larraz and Mark Morales, is certainly competently made. As a regular reader, if not exactly a fan of or expert on, any of these characters or creators, I found the book engaging and enjoyable.

I wonder how new-reader friendly it actually is, though. Of the two Marvel OGNs I’ve previously read, Avengers: Endless Wartime and X-Men: No More Humans, this hews a lot closer to the latter than the former, in terms of how confident Remender is that readers will be up-to-date on the week-to-week goings-on of the Marvel Universe.

I, for example, knew enough that I could easily make heads and tails of many of the changes that took place between “Years Ago” and “Today” in the Avengers: Former Falcon Sam Wilson is now Captain America, Thor is now a woman, Sabretooth is an Avenger and Hank Pym is back to using the name “Giant-Man” while dressed in a costume that makes him look like a big red ant.

But I still had no idea who the hell “The Descendents” were, although they appear to be robots of some sort that look extremely human, right down to the fact that the one codenamed “Fater” looked old and had wrinkly flesh. They all had odd names that made them sound like millennial superheroes: The Urn, The Swine, The Origins and The Ideal.

Oh, and Starfox is in this too…so, if you are picking this up on a whim after seeing Age of Ultron, maybe you want to read it near a computer with  its browser aimed at Wikipedia…?

There’s a nice introduction by Kurt Busiek, who remains one of the better writers to ever tackle The Avengers in my estimation, and it goes a long way towards explaining what makes Ultron such a great villain for the team, and an all-around appealing character (Me? I think it’s the jack o’lantern face, which was part of the reason I think the film’s design was a bit of a letdown). Perhaps inadvertently, Busiek also explains the tangled web of relationships involving Ultron and the various Avengers, most particularly his father Hank Pym and his son, The Vision. These relationships are quite important to the proceedings, although Remender doesn't devote much attention to making sure the reader knows much about them.

The story opens with an old-school line-up of Avengers fighting a more-or-less classic-looking Ultron, who is attacking New York City while trying to take control of America’s nuclear weapons to do his world destroying thing (I gotta admit, I really liked the homemade meteor idea from the movie; has any supervillain tried to create that precise extinction event in such a mannter before…?).

A geography-addled Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Beast, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Wasp and Hank Pym (then going by Yellowjacket) are The Avengers, and in a battle the length of a regular issue of a comic book, they manage to defeat Ultron….mostly thanks to Pym.

Then we pick up in modern times, and we find out where Ultron—or at least that version of Ultron—landed after Pym and company shot him into outerspace.

The current Avengers line-up? The Captain America Forrmerly Known As The Falcon, Thor (the lady version), The Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Spider-Man, Sabretooth, The Vision in his latest ugly redesign and, of course, Pym.

Tensions are already high among The Avengers, as Pym and The Vision have been arguing about whether or not robots and various forms of artificial intelligence are really alive or not, and thus whether shutting them down is killing them or not. Pym does most of the narration in the book (although it opens with Ultron narrating before the narrators switch, oddly enough; I found myself reading Ultron’s narration in James Spader’s voice…that’s gonna stick with me for a while, I think).

There’s a lot of agonizing in Pym’s narration, and his interactions with The Vision, Ultron and his ex-wife The Wasp. It’s extremely melodramatic, to the point that it’s almost tedious.

As for the specific conflict driving the narrative, Ultron landed on Titan, home of Thanos (a no-show) and Starfox, which must be some kinda robot moon or something…? Or else it has the means for Ultron to turn into into a Cybertron-looking world, with his giant face on it. He moves it the many lightyears into Earth’s orbit pretty quickly, and then begins to assimilate people, as robotic lifeforms tend to do in TV, film and comic books, I guess.

Pym has the means for shutting Ultron down, the same robot-turner-off thing he used earlier and that The Avengers were not too happy about his using, as it “kills” robots, and so the team has to take on Ultron while trying to decide whether to simply “kill” Ultron with the device, or if they can figure out a way to stop him without resorting to kinda sorta lethal-ish force.

Remender, who has been writing the Avengers franchise’s C-Title for a while (Uncanny Avengers, a recent plotline from which recently took over much of Marvel’s publishing line for the event series Axis), does a fine job of using Jonathan Hickman-like stakes in the conflict.

The longer The Avengers wait to push the robot-killing button, the more time Ultron has to turn their teammates and innocent civilians into automatons, so that the potential death toll in the lose/lose scenario just gets worse and worse. Push it immediately, and dozens die. Wait a few minutes, hundreds die. Wait too long, millions die. Then billions.

Ultron gradually picks the Avengers line-up off, one-by-one, until it’s just Captain Falcmerica, Pym and The Vision debating on whether to kill him or try something riskier, with a weird, unexpected assist coming from Starfox, the love-powered Titan (A character, I almost said, who I don’t expect to ever see in a Marvel Studios movie…but then, a few years ago I would have said the same thing about The Vision and every single character in The Guardians of The Galaxy, so what do I know?)

In addition to being remarkably tied to the current status quo of the Marvel Universe, with no real effort put into introducing the characters and concepts to new readers, the book is seemingly quite relevant to the comics line…or at least as much as any coic book can be at this point, with a cosmic re-set button of some sort expected to arrive at the climax of Marvel’s current event series Secret Wars.

Ultron kinda sorta dies in a temporary way, and it takes the sacrifice of an Avenger to do it—the last page makes it perfectly clear that neither are dead, but the scene has the sort of finality that suggests Remender is officially putting two particular toys from the Avengers playset away for the foreseeable future.

The artwork is quite a bit rougher than in the other OGNs of the line. Opena has done a lot of work with Remender before, on the Uncanny X-Force title, and they work well together. Opena’s artwork tends to be dynamic and his characters expressive in an occasionally exaggerated way that fits the histrionics so many of the characters go through in this story.

That said, much of the action is confusing where it should be clear, as there’s only rarely a strong sense of where the various players are in relation to one another in the big battle scenes (Particularly in the “Then” team’s battle with Ultron). Several sequences I needed to re-read repeatedly until I could figure out what was happening, and it was usually the dialogue that explained it, not the imagery.

If you only read modern superhero comics, this probably isn’t even something you’ll notice, but man, if you jump back and forth from high-quality action manga to these sorts of decent-but-not-greate superhero comics, it’s glaring.

Opena and his collaborators are pretty weird with tears, too, and there were at least two scenes where the same image is used repeatedly in consecutive panels, manipulated to suggest a camera slowly zooming in on the subject. The effect is lost, however, because the bigger the art gets, the less distinct it looks, and the more its composite lines become visible, drawing attention to the fact that the art is being recycled.

Again, it’s not a sin, but it knocks a reader out of the moment, calling attention to the technique and making said reader question Opena’s motivations (If you’re already committed to drawing 112 pages, are those extra four panels really going to break your hand?).

It’s not perfect then, and maybe further away from perfect that it is close to it, but if one walks out of the theater wanting to read a comic book in which the Avengers fight Ultron, there aren’t exactly a lot of easy-to-find books that fit that particular bill. A reader could certainly do worse.

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

….Like Age of Ultron and Age of Ultron Companion or The Mighty Avengers Vol 1: The Ultron Imperative, for example. Marvel seems to have put out  some Ultron-specific collections to get ready for the movie,  like Avemgers: Ultron Unbound and while there are good comics in some of Marvel's recent collections with the word "Ultron" in the title, they're not exactly the ideal comics to hand a would-be comics reader who knows nothing about the medium, but liked what they saw on the silver screen, you know?

Review: Uncanny Avengers Vol. 5: Axis Prelude

First, and perhaps most importantly, what's wrong with The Decemberists? The Decemberists are a great band, Leather-wearing Mutants...and Rick Remender, who wrote this scene in Uncanny Avengers Annual #1, which Marvel stuck in the back of the collection Uncanny Avengers Vol. 5: Axis Prelude, where it doesn't really fit or belong.

Also, The Decemberists may have been "indie" in 2001, when they self-released their first album, but they've had four fucking albums with Capitol Records by this point. I can't speak for Iron and Wine or Grizzly Bear, as I've not listened to either as much as I have The Decemberists, but I'm pretty sure the mutants in this scene—and/or Remender—aren't using the word "indie" correctly here.

This portion of the collection, which is drawn by Paul Renaud, is actually the strongest part of the book, in large part because of the unusual mix of characters Remender brings in under the collective name of "The Avengers of The Supernatural"—Dr. Strange, Blade, Satana, Ghost Rider Johnny Blaze, Man-Thing and a never named or otherwise identified Manphibian—and the fact that they all appear in a five-page sequence entitled "Martian Transylvania Super Hero Mutant Monster Hunger High School," in which The Avengers are jocks, the mutants wear leather and have bad haircuts and the supernatural characters are nerds.

The rest of the collection is exactly what the sub-title says, and, if you've heard or read anything about Axis already—even if just the solicitations for the series, or its premise—then there is absolutely nothing surprising about anything that occurs. It's three issues of Uncanny Avengers scripted by Remender and drawn by three different artists (Sanford Greene, Salvador Larroca and Daniel Acuna) and two issues of Magneto by writer Cullen Bunn and artists Gabriel Hernandez Walta and Javier Fernandez, all culminating with a cliffhanger in which The Red Skull assumes the form he wears in Axis (a form that, were it still somehow a surprise when encountered, would likely elicit an "Oh shit!" from older readers with memories of 1990s Marvel, and blank stares from others).

Let's first dispense quickly with the bulk of the collection, the stuff that isn't the Renaud-drawn annual. The Avengers Unity Division, the half-mutant, half-not-mutant squad that Captain America formed as a PR move in the wake of the Cyclops-lead mutant overthrow of the earth in Avengers Vs. X-Men, has just finished the long-ass adventure that filled up the whole first four collections of the series, involving Apocalypse dynasty politics, Kang and Immortus (and thus time travel shit) and The Red Skull, who had the late Charles Xavier's brain somehow shoved into his own skull with his own brain, giving him Xavier's mental powers. Somehow.

The Unity Division got messed-up pretty bad in the proceedings, with Havok having half of his face horribly burned and Wonder Man getting stuck inside Rogue in the same way Carol Danvers used to be stuck in Rogue.

Meanwhile, the Red Skull and his S-Men have set up a concentration camp for mutants, and Magneto wants to go kill him for that, but instead he ends up getting captured, along with Havok, Wanda and Rogue. Once free, Magneto, immediately goes about killing The Red Skull, ultimately smashing his head in with an armful of bricks. The mutant heroes are really, really mad about this for some reason, despite the fact that a) The Red Skull is an actual Nazi from World War II who just built a fucking concentration camp. And even if they want to be moral absolutists about not killing, even guys who are essentially Hitler, but worse, well, isn't it weird that like 20 pages earlier they were sitting around drinking beers with their BFF Wolverine, whose killed, like, a couple thousand people or something, and who had just vowed to kill The Red Skull himself. Hypocrites. (Oh, and in the Annual, Thor mentions all the frost giants he's "destroyed;" now, I'm sure those frost giants were real jerks and all, but I'm more sure still that they didn't participate in any organized attempts at genocide.)

Anyway, Red Skull then gets back up and is like, "Hey, I'm Onslaught now! And check it out, I'm all giant and I've got horns and tentacles for some reason! I'm all kaiju-ed out! Meet you guys in the pages of Axis, K?"

And that's the end of the Axis Prelude part of Uncanny Avengers Vol. 5: Axis Prelude; the rest of the book is devoted to the weird-ass annual.

The premise involves maybe the lamest, laziest, over-done plot motivator in X-Men comics: Mojo, the extra-dimensional TV producer who is generally just an excuse for a writer to get away with writing crazy shit with as little imagination or set-up as possible (See also Jason Aaron's far superior Astonishing Wolverine & Spider-Man).

As I said, there are some interesting ideas floating around in this script, including the passing suggestion that while Captain America and the Avengers may be engaged in a sincere effort to (finally) start doing something to help the world's mutants as they struggle with the constant threat of genocide, no one—not even the mutants—seem to have all that much sympathy for the plight of the world's monsters, who are even worse off.

Mainly though, it's interesting because it offers us a rare look at a comic book writer apparently suffering a crisis of faith about his career in the script of a comic book he's writing.

So Mojo finds hiself in a room with a group of TV executives, who are disappointed in his latest show (The intriguingly titled "Devil Dinosaur's Power Pack Force Antique Roadshow", a "Frankenstein" that Mojo says "was created in this room based on your team's notes." Things get meta immediately, with Mojo a singular creator with a special vision that is constantly being diluted by his corporate masters. He pitches "Avengers of the Supernatural," and is immediately bombarded with "notes," and a threat from the head executive: "Mojo understands that if he fails us again...I'll release the critics on him. There are Chinese hells more pleasant." Behind the executive, wearing high-tech body armor with glowing bits to it, are a group of men, some fat, some with beards, some balding, some with glasses; these are, apparently, the fearsome critics (Man, I haven't read a Marvel comic making fun of the people who read Marvel comics since...why, it's been almost two weeks now!).

From there, the story and Mojo's TV show become one and the same, with Mojo narrating. The Unity Division are all hanging out at the mansion, with about half of them shooting pool and the other half lounging in bathing suits by the pool (This, by the way, apparently takes place before all the comics that precede it in this issue, so the entire line-up is still present). Dr. Strange's supernatural crew shows up and there's a fight scene, ending with the Uncanny Avengers all getting glowing headbands, and then we cut to the aforementioned TV show, which recasts our heroes as characters in a high school drama.

It all falls apart when Johnny Blaze loses control of the spirit of vengeance somehow, and Ghost Rider motorcycles around, fighting everybody and trying to judge/destroy the whole world, a feat he at first tries to accomplish by popping a wheelie and flying his flaming motorcycle to the moon and looking down on the entire planet with his guilt-inducing "Penance Stare."

The Marvel heroes—man, mutant and monster—join forces to defeat The Ghost Rider spirit, re-caging it in Blaze. And then, on the final page and a half, Remender seems to question himself, through dialogue between two of the extra-dimensional television executives:

Hey, I'm a critic! I can help you Remender stand-ins decipher the story! It is unimportant, it is sloppy and derivative and it is bad.

But it could have been worse. It could have been any of the five comics that preceded it in this collection.

That annual sure had a nice Arthur Adams cover, though, didn't it?

Briefly on IDW's Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 3

As I've been reading and reviewing my way through volume 2 of Mirage's Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, I figured it was time to check in with IDW's reprint program of the same comics. They have been collecting both volumes of Mirage's old Tales comics—the seven-issue, 1987-1989 volume one and the 70-issue, 2004-2010 volume two—in a single series of colorized trade paperbacks. Their first two collections covered the entire first volume of Tales, while this third collection features the first four issues of the second volume.

As with the previous Tales collections, this one features a new cover by artist Jim Lawson, who drew two of the five stories within (the "Seeds of Destruction" story from #2 and the six-page "The Grape" back-up from #4), and the cover scheme is basically the same as all previous Tales collections, with the various heroes (here, just the Turtles and Splinter) fighting the various bad-guys (one of the worm guys from #1, the Foot mystic from #2, the worm/shark/octopus/Oroku Saki monster from #3 and #4) in a single scene.

There are two changes of note from the original comics being collected.

First, the logo on the cover of this collection is that of the original Tales series, complete with the "Eastman and Laird's" being prominently featured as part of the logo, whereas the issues in this collection all bore the Tales of The TMNT logo, eschewing including the names of the creators and using the "TMNT" acronym, which was more prominently featured in the Turtles title this volume of Tales was tied into (I like the original logo much better, just from a simple design point-of-view).

Also, as with almost all of IDW's TMNT reprints, this collection is colorized...and no one gets a byline for doing the coloring. A Ronda Pattison gets a "cover colors by" credit, but that's it.

In the past, I've noted some strange, usually bad choices made in the colorizing process, but this volume didn't seem to have anything too egregious. The worm men in the first issue are all a fleshy, peach color, similar to that of earthworms, whereas I likely would have went with something closer to white, to reflect their centuries of living in a sunless underground cavern. And the hybrid ex-Shredder monster in "The Worms of Madness" is colored a golden brown, rather than the shark-gray I imagined him to be while reading the black-and-white original story. But these aren't mistakes, just matters of personal preference, I suppose.

This was the only panel that really jumped out at me during a flip-through as being too terribly off:

That's a panel from #3, the first half of "The Worms of Madness" by Steve Murphy, Rick Remender and John Beatty. It's a "cover" panel of one from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #21, the final issue of the three-part "Return to New York" storyline in which the Turtles finally defeat the back-from-the-dead Shredder, whose helmet is always colored either gray or silver. Here, it's red and gold with a silver face plate, for some reason.

Oh, and there's a weird mistake in this Eric Talbot fronstpiece from the same issue. Check out the point of the sai in Raphael's left hand:

Not sure what that is, but I imagine it was supposed to be taken out before this went to press.