Some recent Marvel trades I read, um, recently:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deadpool: Too Soon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Strange Vol. 3: Blood in the Aether

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It does!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

These are some of the Marvel collections I've read lately:

All-New X-Men: Inevitable Vol. 1–The Ghosts of Cyclops

Some eight months or so have passed since the end of the previous volume of All-New X-Men, and something very dramatic has happened involving Cyclops, The Inhumans and the Terrigen Mists during that time–something that lead to Cyclops' death and the whole world hating and fearing him all over again.

That gap, and the mysterious events that occurred during it, have allowed writer Dennis Hopeless to begin his new volume of the title somewhat in media res. The first half of this six-issue collection is essentially a putting-the-team-together story, while the second half sets up their new status quo and sets them against some classic X-Men villains.

Hopeless has inherited not only the title, but also most of the cast of Brian Michael Bendis' series: The original five X-Men, who were pulled from the past to the present in order to try and talk sense to grown-up Cyclops, and not only did they fail, but they all got stuck here.

Of those five, Teen Jean is MIA (she's appearing in Jeff Lemire's Extraordinary X-Men, which is by far the less interesting and entertaining of the two books, at least in my opinion). Teen Iceman is hanging out in Austin, Texas. Teen Angel is still dating Laura, former X-23 and current All-New Wolverine, and they are hanging out in Vail, Colorado. Teen Beast is driving around the country in a VW bus-pulled camper called The Nerd Wagon, which has a Bamf-powered engine that allows them to teleport as need be. For reasons never made clear, recent Jean Grey School graduates Evan and Idie are with him (All that Teen Beast and friends would seem to have in common with these two X-teens are their relative ages; they never really hung out with them in the previous volume of All-New X-Men or in Wolverine and The X-Men).

Those two really stick out because, unlike Laura, who was part of Bendis' team, they are new, seemingly random additions, and Hopeless hasn't made much of a case for either of them being needed here. Idie at least brings some diversity to the otherwise all-white, mostly male team, but Evan? Well, I suspect he's here because the next collection will feature an Apocalypse-related cross-over, but I guess that remains to be seen.

Oh, and what of Teen Cyclops? Well, he's half laying low, dodging his friends and any attention, given the fact that his grown-up self went on to do...something pretty bad (And he'd already conquered the world and killed Charles Xavier in Avengers Vs. X-Men, becoming a wanted terrorist). But he's also tracking some new gang of mutants calling themselves "The Ghosts of Cyclops"; they don masks reminiscent of Cyke's last mask, speechify and basically just knock around tables and commit petty crime.

Teen Cyclops obviously takes that pretty personally, and sets about trying to take them down solo. He does pretty well too, given that they are just a group of untrained college kids with no real idea what they are doing, but he gets in over his head enough that the rest of the team unites to help him and, eventually, make him realize that he needs them after all.

From there, they become a more-or-less normal supehero team, teleporting all over the world to save people from natural disasters and the like. In Paris they run into The Blob, here given a fun, funny motivation for a life of crime, and Hopeless toys with the idea that their old enemy has had years to become a better, more experienced fighter, one used to trading blows with the more powerful adult versions of the X-Men, while they are still essentially "Year One" era teenagers who have yet to log many hours in the Danger Room (This is perhaps somewhat undercut by the idea that the X-Teens have been here a good long while now and should have gotten used to the idea of not underestimating the modern versions of losers from their past, and the presence of Laura and Angel's Black Vortex power upgrade).

The volume ends with a cliffhanger, as Toad too is in Paris, and attacks and kidnaps one of these X-Men, which seems to be in sharp contrast to the more benign Toad of Jason Aaron's Wolverine and The X-Men but, again, who knows what happened during the eight-month gap.

Hopeless seems very much dedicated to the idea of an old-school, classic superhero team comic here, as is readily apparent by the fact that he's not writing for the trade, as there's a three-issue arc and another that is at least four issues long, only the first three chapters of which appear here.

Additionally, each of the characters has a sub-plot of some sort that isn't bound to the particular story arc, but continues as a through line in all of these issues, and will likely to continue to do so. The most prominent of these is probably the tension between Angel and Wolverine; All-New Wolverine seems intent on taking point in any and all dangerous situations in a way that is reckless to the point of seeming insane. As when she throws herself off a cliff to beat Angel to the bottom of the hill while skiing. For fun.

Obviously, Angel has a hard time watching his girlfriend constantly taking bullets and setting herself on fire, and more than once vomits at the violence she subjects herself to, on the belief that her healing factor will help her recover from anything. Having also recently read the first collection of All-New Wolverine (and the annual, which was fun and funny), this portrayal seems somewhat at odds with how she appears in her own book, but, as with all of the sub-plots, it's a story-in-progress.

Hopeless is lucky enough to be working with pencil artist Mark Bagley (inked here by Andrew Hennessy), and not only has Bagley's career made him pretty much the ideal candidate for a Marvel comic featuring teen heroes and/or classic, old-school superheroics, but he's one of the few artists who is fast enough that he doesn't need fill-in artists to help him make a monthly, or even a more-than-monthly schedule, so that this collection is all Bagley and Hennessy, from start to finish.

I'm not sure why the book is called All-New X-Men: Inevitable on the spine and in the fine print but not the actual covers of the actual comics, but I suppose at the very least it will help separate it from the other collections of All-New X-Men with the same volume numbers on the spines of the collections.

Of the three books featuring X-Men teams Marvel is currently publishing, this is my favorite, and the one I would recommend, on the strength of its relative quality and its distancing itself from any X-Men mega-plot involving M-Pox and Inhumans and whatnot (The third, Uncanny X-Men, is drawn by Greg Land, so I didn't even bother looking at that one, nor will I).

Daredevil: Back In Black Vol. 2–Supersonic

So different was this second collection of Charles Soule's Daredevil run that I actually had to check the spine a few times to make sure that this was, indeed, the second volume of the series I had previously read, rather than the third. While that first volume read like a graphic novel, this one reads like a few chapters of one, and is different enough from that last volume that it honestly felt like I had missed a half-dozen issues or so.

Right from the first issue–or the cover, actually–we find ourselves in familiar, over-played Daredevil territory, with Elektra. In a two-part story, drawn not by Ron Garney, but Matteo Buffagani, Elektra attempts to kill Daredevil because she thinks he has done something with her daughter, who may or may not be Matt Murdock's. Matt, like the reader, didn't even know she had a daughter, and, it turns out, she didn't–it was some sorta mind control business to get her to kill Daredevil.

Blindspot, Daredevil's new sidekick introduced last volume, appears but briefly. Long enough to slow down a killing blow from Elektra, and get his arm broken for his effort. He later appears in a page set at Night Nurse's clinic. (Yay! Night Nurse!). With the post-Secret Wars Daredevil having his secret identity back, he and Elektra are on some particularly weird footing, as he knows she used to know, and now she doesn't, which he realizes puts her in sort of a horrible spot (She thought she was cheating on him...with himself). Soule commits a fairly cardinal sin of these sorts of soft reboot/continuity-altering shenanigans: If you have to deal with them at all, for God's sake, don't dwell on them. The next two issues, he dwells on them some more, however.

In those, drawn by Goran Sudzuka rather than Ron Garney, Matt goes to Macau to use his powers to win a ton of money at poker in a casino, which is all part of an elaborate–but fun to read!–plan to get to stay at a particular floor of a hotel, close enough to a briefcase full of something mysterious he needs, that has something to do with the Elektra story (He later says what is in the case, but it seems like he may have been lying). Spider-Man shows up for this story, as in the Peter Parker version, and Spidey knows something's not quite right with Daredevil, but he can't put his finger on it. Because Spidey too used to know Daredevil's secret identity, and know doesn't, and so there is still more talk of this (and a fun little game of keep-away as Spidey tries to press the issue).

This is actually the first time I've read a story featuring the new, post-Secret Wars Spidey and I'm not sure how I feel about that glowing costume. It's looked just fine on the Alex Ross-painted covers I've seen, but looks kind of weird and awkward here.

And that is that. Rounding out the collection if Daredevil Annual #1, which features a 20-page lead story written by Soule and a 10-page back-up by an entirely different creative team. They are unrelated to one another, an unrelated to the four issues of the main series that preceded them.

The longer, Soule-written story is a team-up with Echo in which they encounter a new form of Klaw, who spreads himself like an infection, transforming anyone who hears him into sound wave people. Echo, being deaf, is conveniently immune. She goes to Daredevil and the Emergency Broadcast System for help. It's a fine little story, mostly notable for artist Vanessa R. Del Rey's squiggly artwork and dramatic, elaborate lay-outs (My favorite part is a minor, silly detail, in which Echo seems to stop and take the time to tie feathers into the bandages she wraps around her forearms for absolutely no reason other than the fact that it's kinda sorta her costume; it's not like she dons a mask or any sort of identity-concealing, practical gear.

The 10-pager that closes out the volume is by writer Roger McKenzie and artist Ben Torres, and functions as a kinda sorta origin story for some dumb villain named Gladiator with circular saw blades mounted on his forearms. Torres only rarely seems to draw them in motion, which seems like it defeats the purpose of having such blades mounted on your forearms. It's not a bad story, but it's not a good one either; one imagines we'll be seeing the character in the future, as otherwise this is just kind of a head-scratching page-filler that helps justify using the Echo story in an annual instead of holding it as a fill-in issue.

So no Garney, almost no Blindspot, no complete story and predictable Daredevil enemies and allies–aside from the new costume and color scheme, this second collection was almost nothing that the first volume was, and suffered accordingly.

E Is For Extinction: Warzones

There is a sort of almost essential element of pointlessness to all of Marvel's 2015 Secret Wars tie-ins, which were almost all "What If...?"-style miniseries meant to kill time and fill slots in the publishing schedule, but that pointlessness could be insidious, as it could make one wonder what about these random, non-canonical miniseries was really any more pointless than any other super-comic? The whole endeavor, as much fun and as well-made as many of these series were, brought with it a sort of existentialist dread.

This one's a good example.

Its writers Chris Burnham and Dennis Culver and artist Ramon Villalobos doing an extended riff on Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's 2001 relaunch of the X-Men franchise, taking as its title that of New X-Men's first story arc. A decade and a half later, that three-year Morrison run (Quitely didn't stick around for much of it), seems stronger now than it was then, and then it was like a punch in the face (Here I might suggest you go read Paul O'Brien's review of this collection, as he is the best writer about the X-Men I know of, and does a far better job of contextualizing New X-Men in franchise history than I ever could).

But what's the point of it, other than to remind readers how great Morrison and Quitely's run was? To pull out old costumes and concepts, point at them and say, "This was cool, wasn't it?" To maybe try and condense the broad themes and storytelling models of that series into just 80 pages?

I'm not sure there is one. I'll be damned if it wasn't fun to revisit that era and its concepts, anyway.

Zagging where New X-Men zigged, Charles Xavier shoots himself in the head with two guns to get Cassandra Nova out of his head. Why two guns? Because that makes an artful, X-shaped blood splatter on the blank wall in one of those big, clean, Quitely-like settings.

From there, we jump ahead an undisclosed amount of years into the future ("X Years Later," naturally). Now Magneto  has opened "The Atom Institute," and he leads a new team of New X-Men: Beak, Angel, Glob, Quentin Quire, Basilisk, The Stepford Cuckoos, Dust, Ernst and Martha. Meanwhile, the surviving "old" New X-Men–Cyclops, Wolverine, Emma Frost and Beast–struggle with their fading powers and feelings of irrelevance. They are here cast as the Neanderthals, and Magneto's students as the homo sapiens in the evolutionary metaphor that Morrison pursued.

The U-Men, District X, Xorn, evil white Beast, the Phoenix business, Wolverine killing Jean Grey, plus all those other characters previously mentioned, plus the costumes and colors and concepts of New X-Men...this is the comic book equivalent of a cover song, maybe a concept album full of covers from another band. It works. But it makes me feel weird though, as I contemplate meaning vis a vis superhero comics books.

Included in the back, in large part to give this enough pages to be collected into a trade, is the first issue of Morrison and Quitely's New X-Men run. In part, this is a smart move, as it provides a great bridge. Like what you just got done reading? Well, here's the first issue of the run that inspired it. Like that? Then you, my friend, need to invest in some trades.

On the other hand, it underscores how different Villalobos art actually is from Quitely's, something that's not as readily apparent when you're not looking at them side by side. DC should get Villalobos to do his Quitely impression for some Superman and Batman and Robin books.

Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 1: The Boys are Back In Town

Well this was a blast.

David Walker and Sanford Greene reunite the original Heroes For Hire for...well, for no reason, really. Mostly because Iron Fist wants to re-team with his best friend Luke Cage to have adventures together all the time again, but Luke's grown-up and has a wife (Jessica Jones) and kid (Danielle) to take care of.

The pair meet to pick up their old Heroes For Hire secretary or administrative assistant (depending on who you ask) when she's released from prison, take her out for dinner and help her recover a necklace of her grandmother's that fell into the hands of a notorious Marvel gangster.

It turns out to be a lot less simple than that, as their friend turns out to be in cahoots with bad guy Black Mariah (this version quite different than the corrupt politician version on Netfliex's Luke Cage) and the necklace turning out to be the fabled street magic artifact The Supersoul Stone. Suddenly, a bunch of minor Marvel villains of the mostly silly variety are gunning for Luke and Danny.

While the plot is played pretty straight, Walker seems to have taken some delight in rounding up off-beat characters to throw at his heroes, some of whom only make cameos. The dialogue is quick and clever in buddy cop movie fashion, with much of the tension coming not from any kind of racial dynamic, but because of the fact that the heroes are in such different places in their lives and, while they enjoy one another's company and have history, they aren't exactly on the same page any more.

Regarding racial dynamics, Walker touches on it with the whole idea of "street magic" and the Supersoul Stone, something that Luke insists everyone in Harlem has grown-up hearing about, but which rich white guys Iron Fist and even the Sorcerer Supreme himself Doctor Strange have never even heard of ("There are as many forms of the mystical arts as there are martial arts, and no practitioner of either can master all," Strange tells them, "Nor are all worthy of mastering.")

Luckily neighborhood magician Senor Magico is there to set them straight.

Greene's art, like Walker's dialogue and character choices, tends towards the light. His Cage is pretty much a walking sight gag, drawn as enormous, almost elaphantine in size, and generally stuck in small spaces, like a booth at the Excelsior diner or a tiny rental car that Jessica forces him to get when she needs the family car one day.

This is the kind of book where Ruby Tuesday and Gorilla-Man (not to be confused with Gorilla Man) are as likely to show up as Tombstone or Jessica Jones, where you can find a character referring to Strange as a "pendejo" or hear the words "Fistball Special" and jokes about how hard it is to brand something with the word "fist." I loved it.

It's the kind of comic that, had it been published 15-years ago, would have been relegated to a "street-level" comic, but here it's really more "neighborhood level," and while there is crime and violence in it, it's all cartoonish enough that it lacks the sort of grit and grime that it would have had back in the days of the Marvel Knights imprint. Rather, this books is spiritually closer to something like Ms. Marvel, All-New Wolverine or Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew actually  gets an amusing cameo, rooting for Luke's shirt to get ripped off during a fight), with one foot in the "funny" side of Marvel's funny book line (Howard The Duck, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Patsy Walker, etc) and one foot in the serious side of the line (Daredevil, the X-Men and Avengers books, etc).

That story about the Supersoul Stone fills up four-fifths of this collection, while Flaviano replaces Greene for the fifth issue, a done-in-one story. Centered around radio personality Jimbo's show, "The Yo, Jimbo Show," it's essentially a sort of Rashomon deal in which various callers and witnesses discuss the apparently reunited Power Man and Iron Fist team's battle against Manslaughter Marsdale. It culminates with Luke and Danny joining Jimbo inside the studio to set the record straight, and Marsdale coming there for revenge.

Flaviano's style is distinct from that of Greene's, but it has a similar flavor, and he sticks with the Cage-as-a-giant visual motif that leads to so many great visual gags, as in a panel here where one witness claims that Cage has the power of flight.

Also, in this issue Danny builds "a modified version of the Fantastic Four's Fantasticar" using instructions he found on the Internet. He intends to call it The Power-Fist Mobile, but Cage refuses to let him call anything "Power-Fist," so Danny settles for The Fist Mobile (The Fistasticar seems more natural to me, given its origins, but whatever).

Finally, I did want to mention Jessica Jones' role in this story, as I've heard some grumbling on the Internet that here she seems to be reduced to the role of nagging wife, like a character on a 1960s sitcom getting mad at her husband for going bowling with the guys instead of staying around the house with her and the family (Here's a pretty thorough piece on that, with lots of looks at Greene's great art). I don't want to say this reading isn't valid, and it was probably more striking if these comics were being read serially, where one might see just one scene with Jessica arguing with Cage about not wearing one of his nice shirts out since it was just going to get destroyed anyway every month or so. Especially since this series started coming out when Netflix's Jessica Jones was presenting a version of the character much closer to that from Brian Michael Bendis and Michal Gaydos' Alias series than to her post-Alias portrayal  (which was also mostly written by Bendis, but in the context of his variou Avengers comics).

Read now, though, and all in one sitting, her apperances didn't strike me as those of a wet blanket or nagging wife so much as the supporting character she serves as in this series. While she is usually angry and trashing Luke and/or Danny, that's Jessica's character in a nutshell, right? Angry and talking shit all the time? She's presented as the person Cage would rather be with than out getting into fights with his immature bachelor friend, and many of the jokes featuring her are among the stronger ones (Like why Luke has started saying "Fiddle faddle" now, and why she can swear as much as she wants, and how Luke can tell she likes Danny).

Her role is certainly smaller than that of Luke or Danny, but then, this is Power Man and Iron Fist, not Power Man and Iron Fist and Jewel, or Jessica Jones' Husband, Power Man and Power Man's Pal, Iron Fist, you know? Her relative lack of panel-time in the first five issues of a series starring her husband and his friend seems as natural as, say, Alfred seeming like all he does is serve Batman food and sass him. Jessica is here, like Alfred in Batman comics, a supporting character.

Perhaps the release of her own series, now entitled Jessica Jones for closer association with the TV show, will salve the irritation some fans of hers have felt at her small role here. I am curious to see how this book and Jessica Jones will read next to one another; I've only flipped through the first issue of Jessica Jones, but stylistically and tonally they are polar opposites and, of course, Gaydos' art is all dark and photo-referenced, so it seems to be set on an entirely different planet than Power Man and Iron Fist is.

Star Wars Vol. 3: Rebel Jail

This is the first of the collections of the Marvel's main Star Wars title that I didn't purchase for myself, more so because I had missed its release than because I was dissatisfied with volume two. I just noticed it on the shelves of the library one day, realized I missed it and supposed that meant I should maybe just start reading the trades from the library instead of buying them for my home bookshelves. Now that I have read it, I'm actually kind of glad I missed it at the comics shop. It's not very good, certainly not when compared to the previous two volumes and Vader Down.

Jason Aaron continues to write the series, and while his scripting is still relatively strong, the collection suffers a bit from two main problems. First is simply one of structure. The title comes from a four-issue arc that is the center of the trade, illustrated by pencil artist Leinil Yu and inker Gerry Alanguilan (whose somewhat bland take on the characters and world of Star Wars might make for a third main problem, actually). It's sandwiched between Star Wars Annual #1, by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Angel Unzueta, and another Younger Kenobi On Tattoine solo story written by Aaron and drawn by Mike Mayhew.

"Rebel Jail" features an antagonist leading a strike force of droids to a secret jail where the Rebellion keeps its worst prisoners, an antagonist who hides his face, says he sympathizes with Leia and wants her to win the war, but that he also wants to teach her that she needs to be completely ruthless, as he's seen the true evil of the Empire. His plan is to execute all of the prisoners in their cells, and to more or less force Leia to join him in doing so, or die.

Who is this mysterious character? Well, it's completely obvious in context. The annual, which immediately precedes "Rebel Jail," introduces us to rebel spy working deep undercover as an administrator on Coruscant. When he has to break cover to try to rescue some high-level prisoners and assassinate Emperor Palpatine, he learns just how evil Palpatine is ("I'm not even the same species of monster") and takes a blast of force lightning to the face. He survives, but just barely, and with a new appreciation of how Palpatine's complete lack of morals actually gives him a strategic advantage.

So when one turns the pages and sees this helmeted, masked character telling Leia he knows her, he felt betrayed by her, she needs to toughen up and so on, it's not difficult to imagine who it is. Aaron nevertheless presents it as some sort of suspenseful mystery to be drawn out.

The other problem? The early issues of the series were in part so successful because they focused on the core group of heroes from the first three films working together, as opposed to focusing on new, minor characters like so much of the expanded universe material has. Here the band is pretty thoroughly broken up.

Leia gets the majority of the focus, and here she is teamed with new character Sana and other new character Dr. Aphra, Darth Vader's new ally from the pages of Darth Vader (which I also gave up on buying, but that because I didn't like the art and found it unpleasant to read). When the prison gets attacked, Leia and Sana forge an uneasy alliance with Aphra (who turns out to have been Sana's former lover? Ha ha, take that Star Wars bros! This arc stars all ladies, two of of them "of color" and also lesbians!).

Luke and Han are off on their own side mission. Charged with buying supplies, Han loses all of the money gambling and so they are forced to try smuggling to earn back the money. Their scenes are all played strictly as comedy, making for a sharp and grating contrast to the more deadly serious business in the prison which, remember, is all about morality, war, crime and punishment and suchlike. Their plot line eventually intersects with that of Leia and the ladies, but not until the final issue, during which they are mostly unconscious.

The droids get even less panel-time; Aaron writes a funny bit in which C3-PO thinks he engages in fisticuffs, but its not particularly well-drawn. And as for Chewbacca, he's completely MIA; I am assuming this story is set during the events of his own (pretty damn good) miniseries, which I covered here.

So that thing that made the first volume so exciting? The heroes of the original Star Wars trilogy vs. the villain of the original Star Wars trilogy, a sort of high-quality, paper expansion from Episode IV in the manner of the original Marvel Star Wars comics, only with the level of care and respect that the material rates in 2016 vs. 1977? That's no longer here. The quality is, mostly (Yu's not as strong as John Cassady or Stuart Immonen, at least not with this material), and so this reads an awful lot like the sort of Star Wars comics that Dark Horse was producing right before they lost the license, specifically the later issues of the Brian Wood-written one.

As for the Kenobi story, it is as lovely looking as previous Mayhew/Star Wars comics...and about as dull, as really, there's only so much Aaron seems able to do with the "Kenobi just kinda hangs around on Tatooine for like 20 years" set-up, particularly in these only occasional, 20-ish page installments. It does look like he's setting something up for the next installment though, that will tie-in to the future/present a bit, but I was a little surprised by how uninteresting these Kenobi stories are, especially considering how awesome John Jackson Miller's prose novel Star Wars: Kenobi, which is set in this same basic time period, is. I wonder if Marvel should maybe just hire Miller for the Kenobi issues...?

Finally, it just now occurred to me as I was putting the cover into this post how bad a cover it is for this particular volume. As I said, Leia stars in the title story arc, which accounts for a good 80 or so of the 130 story pages in this collection, and yet it's those two goofballs from the comedy relief interludes that are on the cover. Probably on account of the fact that they are dudes.

Star Wars: Darth Vader Vol. 3–The Sho-Torun War

The third-ish collection of Kieron Gillen's Darth Vader series (depending on how you want to place Vader Down in the timeline) consists of Star Wars: Darth Vader: Annual #1 and issues #16-#19 of the Darth Vader ongoing. Structurally then, it is akin to the Star Wars collection just discussed, leading off with an annual (drawn by Leinil Yu and inker Gerry Alanguilan) that serves as the first chapter of a story arc in the monthly series, still being drawn by Salvador Larroca (not a fan, although, as stated in previous volumes, he does well enough here, given how many characters have frozen metal faces, and how much of each page is technologically-driven set-dressing).

Vader is on a "diplomatic" mission to the titular planet, an important mining planet with an elaborate court culture that is toying with rebelling against the Empire. That makes it the sort of diplomatic mission that is perfectly-suited to an emotionless invincible robot space wizard like Vader. He basically kills a whole bunch of people (with some help from his droids; Triple-Zero's completely un-subtle attempts to encourage the court to drink the poison he's slipped into their drinks is particularly charming), and installs his own preferred puppet, giving her a damn cold reminder of what happens when planets piss off The Empire. And I mean that literally; he presents her with a gift that she could probably use as a paper weight or a conversation piece, but also performs the function of letting her and anyone who sees it know The Empire is totally cool with killing on a planetary scale.

Yu does a pretty great job on the art in this issue, and is particularly effective of portraying Vader as the kind of cool, never riled customer who just walks calmly through all kinds of terrible dangers, occasionally parrying a blaster bolt with his light saber or casually waving his arm to call upon The Force to fuck some shit up for him.

"The Shu-Torun War" begins in earnest after that, as Vader must return to the planet with a bunch of Stormtroopers and AT-ATs to aid his puppet leader in putting down a rebellion by the many mining barons who aren't down with this new world order. It's a pretty good Darth Vader story, playing him off of various other characters from The Emperor, to some of his surviving rivals that Palpatine set up for him in the first volume (his presentation of one of them to The Emperor is pretty cool), to a sassier-than-usual Triple-Zero, to his ally on Shu-Torun.

Gillen and Larocca also devise a pretty great set-piece in the war, involving giant, tower-sized drill-ships that fly through solid ground like rocket-ships. It's the sort of inventive scene that punctuated the first six films, but was missing from the seventh.

Review: Runaways: Battleworld

Each issue of each series tying into Marvel's massive, months-long Secret Wars event contained a pretty simple and straightforward one-page, four-sentence explanation of the premise behind it all. To make that short story long, essentially the entire Multiverse was gradually collapsing, and the superheroes who knew of the oncoming cosmic catacylsm were powerless to stop it. Dr. Doom seized the opportunity to do something (I haven't read the main Secret Wars series yet, sorry) that collapsed the remaining universes into a single, hodge-podge "patchwork" planet consisting of various "domains" that are, for all intents and purposes, their own little continuities. Relatively few people living in the various domains seem to realize they are part of a bigger, stranger world, and fewer still are able to move between those domains.

This was such a big deal that Marvel suspended the publication of pretty much their entire superhero line for months while Secret Wars played out, temporarily canceling all of their books (and therefore allowing for new #1s and relaunches afterwards) and replacing them on the schedule with a bunch of temporary miniseries and one-shots, the fact that the status quo would be both temporary and anything-goes giving the creators involved a welcome set of two-word directions: "Go nuts."

For a significant portion of 2015, then, the Marvel comics line reflected the nature of the Marvel Universe in-story, with sometimes seemingly randomly rebooted and remixed characters and concepts filling up just about everything outside of the main Secret Wars book. Marvel rather shrewdly launched many series bearing the titles of their most popular events and franchise-specific crossovers (Civil War, Planet Hulk, Age of Ultron Vs. Marvel Zombies, pretty much every X-Men crossover story since "Days of Future Past," etc); a pretty great bit of marketing, really.

It also allowed for the kinda-sorta revival of more off-beat and fan-favorite books missing from the publishing schedule for a long-time, like Runaways, the 2003-laumched, Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona-created series that did a few remarkable things for the Marvel Universe and line back then, including introducing a group of young and diverse characters long before that seemed to be a major priority for the publisher, and introducing a concept or characters that were actually new and were able to gain at least a little traction, something direct market readers don't really seem to want, and that the Big Two are set-up to discourage (If you're an inspired comics creator, why create a potentially profitable new character or team to gift to Marvel or DC, when you could retain the rights yourself by publishing your great new superhero concept elsewhere?).

The title had plenty of ups and downs over the past decade and change, and had cycled through several creative teams of varying levels of popularity and ability before being MIA for a few years (a few of the characters being dispersed to cameo here, or appear in a short-lived series there). Secret War now gave Marvel a good excuse to publish a new version of Runaways, and, perhaps most importantly, to assign it to some particularly gifted creators, at least one of whom seems like one of the last folks you'd expect to find writing a Marvel event series.

That would be Noelle Stevenson, co-creator of Boom's successful Lumberjanes series (and co-writer of its earlier issues) and the creator of Nimona (one of my favorite books of 2015). Honestly, considering her resume, this seems a little like a waste of her time and talents, at least from the perspective of a reader and fan of hers (From her point-of-view, however, it might actually be incredibly lucrative; if she's got a good royalty deal and these various Secret Wars collections do as well in trade as, say, the Civil War collections have, she could be making checks off this thing for a good long time).

Stevenson is, sadly, just writing, rather than writing and drawing (I'd love to see what her version of most of these characters look like), and her artistic contribution seems to have been limited to a single variant cover. She's paired with an incredibly talented artist, though, one of my favorites in the superhero business, Sandford Greene. His is a very loose, very dynamic style featuring slightly cartoony character designs and an incredible amount of energy in his line-work. His work is in the same arena as that of creator Alphona, and he is therefore a perfect match for this group of characters, this particular story and a team-up with Stevenson.

Just as so much else about Secret Wars' "Battleworld" setting is remixed and rejiggered, so too is the line-up and premise of Runaways. The originals were a small group of teens, each the children of supervillain parents who, upon realizing that their parents were actually evil, decided to runaway together. Of those characters, only one appears in the Secret Wars incarnation: Molly Hayes/Bruiser (Karolina Dean/Lucy In The Sky and Nico Minoru/Sister Grimm were both appearing in the pages of A-Force while this was being published, if you're wondering where some other original Runaways might have run off to).

The rest of the cast is pulled from all over the Marvel universe, but what they share in commons is that they are all super-teens and all have some form of a rebellious streak: The X-Men's Jubilee, Hulk/Herc supporting character Amadeus Cho, Cho's fellow Incredible Hercules cast-mate Delphyne Gorgon, Hulk character Skaar, Cloak and Dagger and Sanna Strand/Frostbite, who is apparently from something called X-Men 2099. Also appearing in fairly prominent roles are X-Man Pixie, Marvel's original teenage sidekick Bucky Barnes and Valeria Richards.

Almost all of the characters are reimagined in one way or another, generally in minor ways that don't affect their personalities much, like having the grown-up teens like Bucky, Cloak, Dagger and Skaar being contemporaries of the others, for example. Some of the reimaginings just seem random (like Cloak having Dagger's powers and Dagger having Cloak's powers*), but the most pervasive form of reimagination being asesthetic and, again, mostly minor (Amadeus wearing glasses, Dagger with dreads and a billowing white coat, etc). I particularly liked this version of Bucky, who has the smokey, make-up smeared eyes of the Captain America: The Winter Soldier version of the character.

Though only four issues long, Stevenson plotted the series as if it could rather easily have been a six, eight or 12 issue series; hell, it could have been an ongoing series. It takes about an issue and a half to set everything up, and about an issue to resolve everything. The actual running away part of Runaways is really only about 20-25 pages long, but set-up so that Stevenson and Greene could have inserted as many issues as they wanted to make/Marvel wanted to publish between #3 and #4. Given the simplicity of the premise, the richness of the "Battleworld" setting and the strength of the characters–the cast is almost exclusively fan-favorite characters, with clearly defined personalities–it's really kind of a shame this is such a short series.

It opens in The Victor Von Doom Institute for Gifted Youths, the Secret Wars answer to the sorts of super-schools that have proliferated in the Marvel Universe over the past few years (The Jean Grey Institute, Avengers Academy, The Future Foundation). Our heroes are a Breakfast Club of various types, who, due to an elaborate set of misunderstandings, all end up in detention together. That also means they all end up on the same "team" for some sort of weird final exam at the Institute. Thanks to Cho's gaming of the system, they learn that what appears to be a big Tron game is more of a Battle Royale, and that Valeria and Doom have been tricking the super-kids into killing one another until they winnow the school body down to the cream of the crop.

Our heroes do what the original Runaways did when they learned a terrible secret about their own lives: They run away.

That takes us to the running-away portion, where our heroes visit a few of the other regions/domains of Battleworld, like The Valley of Doom from the pages of 1872 and Weirdworld from Weirdworld. Eventually they realize they have to go back and set things right at the school, which they do. You can see then how easy it would have been to stretch this series, as there are a lot of domains on Battleworld, and these new Runaways could have ran to and through all of 'em, with the Bucky-lead upperclassmen of the Institute hot on their heels.

Instead, the story ends somewhat abruptly, but even still, it seems to promise continuing adventures, as a final form of the team–which lost and gained members due to deaths and changes in sides–all posing in a further adventures group-shot panel that practically promises a sequel. Given the temporary nature of Battleworld, though, it's hard to imagine how they would do that, although looking at that cast, I think Cho is the only one currently appearing in a post-Secret Wars series (The Totally Awesome Hulk), although I wouldn't be surprised if Jubilee pops up in one of the X-books.

To my surprise, this collection ends with Secret Love #1, the all-around excellent anthology one-shot that I originally wondered how and where Marvel would collect. Featuring five short stories, I assumed they would be divvied up between the titles featuring characters they are associated with. For example, the six-page story featuring the Battleworld version of Ghost Rider Robbie Reyes meeting the Battleworld version of Kamala Khan would seem to belong in the Ghost Racers collection, the three-page Squirrel Girl comic would belong in the first post-Secret Wars collection of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and so on.

Secret Love's inclusion here just seems completely random, like they weren't sure where else to stick it. None of the original Runaways characters appear in any of the stories, nor do any of the characters featured in the Secret Wars version of Runaways. (It's worth noting that there's no indication on the cover or the back-cover copy that Secret Love is even in this collection, just a bit of fine print in the corner of the back cover noting that that the book is "Collecting Runaways (2015) #1-4, written by Noelle Stevenson and illustrated by Snadford Greene, plus Secret Wars: Secret Love #1."

And it's not very big fine print, either.

See?

Regardless, both Runaways and Secret Love are fantastic superhero comics, evincing a great sense of humor, likable characters being generally likable and all-around great art. It's a pretty good way to spend $15.99 of your comic book budget.



*Scratch that. Apparently Cloak and Dagger somehow switched powers in the "real" Marvel Universe prior to Secret Wars. See the first comment for the correction.

Review: Method Man

I suppose there are two ways to look at Method Man’s exra-hip hop career as an actor, comic book character and professional brand name.

The cynical view is that he’s trading on the fame he’s rightfully earned as a rapper, exploiting it for every possible penny. The more generous view is that he’s using that rightfully earned fame to segue into projects like doomed sitcom Method & Red or How High simply because he thought it would be fun to do a TV show or make a stoner movie with his pal.

I take the more generous view, in part because I understand the desire to make things you like, whether you’re necessarily good at them or not, just for the fun of it. God knows if I had a comparable amount of cachet, I’d be doing the exact same thing (Well, I might make a musical romantic comedy rather than a stoner flick, but you know what I mean).

Which brings us to new-ish graphic novel Method Man (Grand Central Publishing), which features a “concept by” top-billed creator Method Man, and stars a character who looks an awful lot like Method Man (who likes to smoke pot like, you know, most Method Man analogues).

Method Man is renowned as a huge comic book fan, and so it’s no surprise that he created or co-created (or just stamped his name and likeness on) a Method Man graphic novel, because really, what comic book fan wouldn’t want a comic book named after themselves, starring a version of themselves?

He’s got an ace artist working with him too: Sanford Greene, whose style seems equally informed by manga and hip hop art, pretty much the perfect artist for a project like this. David Atchison gets the third credit down; “script.” Atchison is attached to the similarly ambiguous celebrity-fueled comics project Occult Task Force.

So, how is it? Let’s ask one of the random demon characters that bedevils our protagonist:


Yes. “Meh” just about sums it up. (You did say “meh,” right random demon character? I wouldn’t tell if all those e’s were long or short e sounds.) But not just a plain old “meh,” a long, drawn-out “meh,” one that ends with an exclamation point.

See, this is a kind of fun, kind of terrible graphic novel that amounts to absolutely nothing at all, and I still kind of dug it, for a couple of reasons.

The story, such as it is, consists of the extremely common premise of a private investigator dealing with paranormal stuff. It’s given a Biblical gloss—Lilith, Cain, Tower of Babel, leviathan, Spear of Destiny, ark of the covenant, Mount Ararat—but even these bits and pieces are present in dozens of other comics (For example, within the last month or so, I’ve read The Lost Book of Eve, Chrono Crusade and Final Crisis: Revelations, all of which use some of ‘em).

A prose page one prologue tells us all about P.I. Peerless Poe, a direct descendent of Cain. He bears the mark of Cain, which attracts supernatural phenomena, and the power of “the wrath of Cain,” a sort of berserker rage. He trained with The Order of the Sacred Method, a group of warrior monks who protect earth from Biblical monsters to atone for Cain’s sin, but he’s since dropped out, turning to booze, pot and paychecks.

The story opens with Poe prowling through a sewer with a shotgun and flashlight, looking for a neighborhood kid who was reportedly abducted by a giant red alligator. His narration quickly recaps just about every bit of information in the prologue, so the story is repetitive and redundant by the time it actually begins. Instead of a kid or an alligator, he finds a dragon-like monster, and an old man from his old Order, who hires him to help save the world.

That begins a brisk—a little too brisk—eighty-six page race from the nameless city to Stonehenge to Mount Ararat to the Chapel Perilous to the Tower of Babel, picking up two more companions and the Spear of Desinty before going to battle against Lilith and handily winning. A war millennia in the making knocked out in the space of an afternoon.

The pacing is disconcertingly off, as if 140-page story got chopped down and squeezed into a too small space, so little occurs beyond exposition and plot advancement. (It also feels like a pitch for an ongoing series; like something Greene and company might have put together to give to a publisher and try to sell them on a monthly Method Man or a series of graphic novels).

None of the characters get a chance to crystallize, or even justify their existence. Any one of them would have been sufficient to drive the plot; the others appear and disappear with no real consequence, which is especially weird given the way one of them leaves the story. (What is played as a dramatic moment just seems silly.)

For example, here’s the entirety of the heroes’ infiltration of the Tower of Babel, a four-phase plan:

That didn’t take long, did it?

The other odd thing about the book is the way swearing is handled. I talked about comic book swearing in a post about Secret Invasion recently, how there’s a tension between a writer’s desire to use swear words in their stories and a publisher and/or writer’s desire to pseudo-censor their swear words; a sort of implied, “Hey, we’re grown up and authentic, but not that grown up and authentic!”

Method Man eschews the Brian Michael Bendis method of using “@#$%” to stand in for four letter words (As in “@#$% you, you @#$%ing @#$%!”), using a method that’s even more transparent. When Peerless swears, in narration or dialogue, we get the first and last letters of the word, with hangman-like spaces between.

So, for example, if he’s being chased by a monster through the sewers, he’ll say “S - - T!”

Seeing a horde of demons descending from the darkness, he thinks, “On a scale of 1 to 10, this is f - -ked up!”

When a monster runs away, it “runs like a b - - - h.” A demon that scratches his face is a “son of a b - - -h.”

So, the F-word, the S-word and the B-word are all off-limits, as is the N-Word, which is used colloquially in the abbreviated form, as in “N - - - - a what?”

Damn and hell are cool, as is talking about drinking, drugs and “getting dome.”

It all seems pretty arbitrary, and extremely goofy, particularly since there’s so much of this fake-ass swearing throughout the comic. If you can’t say “shit!” in your comic, why not just say “crap!” or “oh no!” or nothing at all? This way of handling it clearly communicates what the swear word is, as well as the fact that the writer and /or publisher are afraid to use the word.

And why can’t Method Man say “shit,” anyway? This isn’t like Bendis’ Marvel work, where kids character Spider-Man can’t be seen hanging around folks dropping F-bombs. This is a $14 graphic novel created by and kinda sorta starring a rap artist no one younger than 13 should even know exists.

Yet for all these weaknesses, I didn’t exactly hate this book either. I liked spending time with a comic book hero who spoke in something of a hip hop vernacular (even if they get all goofy with the half-edited swear words). Bendis can’t really get away with a lot of dialogue he tries to write for Luke Cage, for example, or Chuck Dixon with the words he tried putting in Thunder’s mouth during his short Batman and the Outsiders. It always seems painfully awkward—an old white guy trying to write young and black. Atchison and Method Man don’t have that problem; how much more authentic can a hip hop hero be than one who is an actual hip hop hero?

I liked some of the sillier scenes too, like Poe and two of his allies hiding in the corpses of demons, which they wore like mascot suits, their faces sticking out of the dead creatures’ mouths.

And Greene’s art is, as always, a treat. There’s just so much energy in his lines and the shapes he chooses; Greene just whips your eyes all around his pages, presented here in black and white, with tones by Kelsey Shannon.

Here’s the third page, in which Poe stumbles upon a monster, and makes a break for it:

Greene’s character designs are pretty cool, too. Aside from the Method Man character, Greene designs three other members of the Order, a young girl, another young man, and an old man, plus a ton of monsters including a leviathan, a behemoth, Goliath and Barabus.

I can’t in good conscious call this anything other than a bad graphic novel, but it’s still a pretty fun bad graphic novel.