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pretty great, and probably the best of the many costumes he's worn over the years (I think the wings being completely withdrawn when he's not flying helps a lot).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.

Meanwhile...

I wonder why publishers don't pursue married writer/artist teams with the same last name more aggressively? Just look at the space on the spine it saves! Since writer Kathryn Immonen and artist Stuart Immonen have the same last name, AdHouse only had to put one name on the spine of the book!

That book is, of course, Russian Olive To Red King, which probably features the best writing or drawing from either of the pair, and is their least commercial and most challenging work to date. I find even the name challenging, as I keep referring to it alternately as Black Olive to Russian King, Red Olive to Russian King, Black Olive to Red King and its proper title.

I reviewed it for Las Vegas Weekly this past week, and you can read my short review of the book here.

I also reviewed Lion Forge Comics/IDW Publishing's collection of Joelle Sellner, Chynna Clugston Flores and Tim Fish's Saved By The Bell collection for Robot 6 this week. I found the finished work pretty disappointing, but do keep in mind that the disappointment was of the purest sort: I was really looking forward to a comic book based on one of my favorite live-action TV shows of all time, by one of my favorite artists of all time (Clugston Flores).

One of the many mind-boggling things about it, for me personally anyway, was just how un-sexy it was. There's the bikini car wash scene above.

Here's a few panels featuring Kelly and Lisa in their underwear:

I know it's a kids comic and based on a TV show for kids (even if all the kids who watched it are now in their thirties and forties), but I remember that show being rather sexually charged (although I watched it from about ages 14-17, when everything was rather sexually charged), and while I can't speak for Fish, who drew the above panels of the oddly flat and trapezoidal butts, I know Clugston Flores is a great drawer of sexy teenage girls.

Well, here's hoping that Lion Forge does a Saved By The Bell: Remix miniseries at some point, giving talented, wildly-imaginative creators the chance to produce a Saved By The Bell comic that is as bonkers and stylized as their Miami Vice: Remix comic...

You can read my review of Saved By The Bell Vol. 1 here.

Finally, I reviewed Cyborg #1 for Good Comics For Kids. It was alright, but it was just alright, which isn't really much better than being bad in today's super-crowded field. Cyborg is a character that, like a lot of those created to be–or primarily thought of as–team players, was rendered uncrecognizable by the New 52-boot, which divorced him (and characters like him) from everything noteworthy, likable (or just plain him) about him. Sure, Cyborg got "promoted" to the Justice League from the Titans, but that would have meant more if he had worked his way up there after years with the Titans, you know? (Actually, James Robinson similarly promoted Cyborg to the League during his short, troubled run...but Cyborg and a handful of other new recruits disappeared from the line-up after only an issue or three).

I'm not crazy about the new, new, new, new redesign, either. I liked the previous one, with the C/gear emblem on the chest, better than this one. Please note that the above image does not feature the current Cyborg design, but I went ahead and used it here anyway, because that's my favorite image of Cyborg that has appeared on a DC Comic since the New 52-boot. Or maybe ever; I don't know.

You can read my review of Cyborg #1 here.

Review: All-New X-Men Vol. 3: Out of Their Depth

The third volume of Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen's All-New X-Men, the series dealing with the original, teenage X-Men visiting the present Marvel Universe and refusing to go back until they fix it, opens with the resolution of a particularly manipulative cliffhanger. When Cyclops and his team appear on the lawn of Wolverine's X-Men school and headquarters to pick up anyone who wants to defect to Cyclops school, Emma Frost's protegees The Stepford Cuckoos accepted, as did one of the original five, left unrevealed until the first issue of this volume—It's Angel (although Uncanny X-Men Vol. 2 made that clear anyway).

The first four of the five issues contained in this volume  deal with the events of Angel's defection and its aftermath. This includes some fighting, like a diamond form Emma slugging Wolverine, and some emotional heart-to-hearts about mind-control, as when Kitty tries to comfort a despondent Jean Grey.

These four issues are all penciled by Stuart Immonen and inked by Wade Von Growbadger (who I think may just be the best of the current X-Men art teams, but I don't know; Olivier Coipel and Nick Bradshaw are pretty amazing too).

That story arc also signals the resolution of the Mystique, Sabertooth and Mastermind plot, which has been to rob and rob and rob until they've amassed a small mountain of money in a warehouse, with which Mystique offers to buy Madripoor off of Madame Hydra. Wolverine, Kitty and the new kids are on their trail, culminating in a big-ass fight scene with other players involved, like The Silver Samurai. The good guys naturally win, and at least some of the bad guys are caught...although Mystique escapes SHIELD custody almost immediately. While I'm all for big-ass fight scenes, especially ones drawn by Immonen and including quipping combatants like teen Iceman and teen Beast, the most interesting part of the story arc occurs a little earlier, when the X-Men hear Alex "Havoc" Summers' dumb-ass press conference from Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1, and Kitty replies at length, in a scene that basically amounts to Bendis telling Rick Remender to shut up.

It takes a full page, and follows some commentary from various X-Men, but Bendis, through Kitty, explicitly re-couples the traditional X-Men/mutant metaphor as one that refers, however broadly, to (insert any other persecuted minority of any kind here), having Kitty tell a story from her childhood in which a boy she had a crush on found out he was Jewish. "So, no offense to your brother Scott," she says in summary, "But he sure as hell ain't talking for me."

And, of course, more interesting than that big-ass fight scene is the part during which the "All-New" X-Men meet the Avengers Unity Division from Remender's Uncanny Avengers for the first time. This naturally leads to some fighting—like when Jean picks up the "No more mutants" memory from Scarlet Witch's mind—but, more interestingly, some weird bonding between Alex and Teenage Scott, where the Alex Summers from the present gets to try and reconnect with a past, more pure and uncorrupted version of his estranged brother.

This Avengers team shows up a little later too, in the aftermath of the climactic fight, and I found some of the interactions to be pretty amusing. Bendis does some pretty clever dialogue throughout this volume.

The highlight of this volume, however, is the fifth and final issue in the collection, which reads an awful lot like one of Jeff Parker's issues of X-Men: First Class: It's lighthearted, fun and funny, and features very striking artwork, of a much more cartoony style than any of the other X-artists of the moment, even Bachalo.

It's by David LaFuente, and is one of those quieter, day-in-the-life stories that super-team comics occasionally have between major plot-lines. In this instance, Rachel Grey and the time-travelling, teenage version of the alternate future version of her mom repeatedly, awkwardly bump into one another, Iceman convinces Cyclops to steal Wolverine's Jeep and go into town where they try to make new friends and meet girls at a street fair, and Jean accidentally discovers from adult Beast that teen Beast had a huge crush on her, and, in a scene that is more than a little weird, the two teenagers make out, while holographic versions of variously mutated adult Beasts hang in the air around them, sort of watching.

This issue was a lot of fun, and, as always, it was a lot of fun seeing Bendis do humor—this read a bit like some of his better Ultimate Spider-Man writing—and allowing an artist whose style is pretty far afield of the Marvel house style (which exists on a much, much broader spectrum of art styles than the DC house style at the moment).

As for what happens next, it's Battle of The Atom, which I reviewed in brief here.

Review: Secret Avengers: Run the Mission, Don't Get Seen, Save the World

This book is one of the many books I fully intended to buy in trade form, that I saw when the component issues were being released serially and thought to myself, "I'm going to write that down on my To Buy list and get it when it's in trade," and then, as the months passed, my interest waned and I saw that I can read it for free from the library, and do I really need to own it? Wouldn't I be just as happy reading it once? And if it does turn out to be the sort of thing I want to read over and over again for the rest of my life, well, I suppose I can buy it at some point in the future (Or, actually, I guess I can keep borrowing it from the libraries).

I've found this happens an awful lot with Marvel trades, as so many of their comic books are so expensive I see little point in reading them serially, and it's always going to be easier to buy a new comic on a Wednesday afternoon when you see it there looking at you then six months later, when you have to remember and order it, you know?

Anyway, Run the Mission, Don't Get Seen, Save The World collects a nice, short, economical run on the title Secret Avengers—the espionage-oriented book of the ever-growing Avengers line, essentially taking the Ed Brubaker corner and established tone of the Marvel Universe and having Captain America Steve Rogers and hand-picked teams run missions, each of which is a done-in-one adventure, and each of which is drawn by a different artists, many of whom aren't artists one would expect to find on a monthly Avengers title.

The six issues are from 2011, and pair Ellis with Jamie McKelvie, Kev Walker, David Aja, Michael Lark and Stefano Gaudiano, Alex Maleev and Stuart Immonen and Wade Von Grawbadger. Each features the sort of high-concept, pseudo-science based on real science plotting that Ellis is known for, as well as generally clever plot construction and execution. Characterization is, for the most part, kept to a minimum, and most of the characters involved talk in brusque, professional and interchangeable dialogue, with notable exceptions being the X-Men's Beast, Hank McCoy, and the unstable, crazy Batman of the Marvel Universe, Moon Knight.

This was from a time in the ongoing Marvel Universe saga in which Steve Rogers had come back to life after his assassination via time bullets or whatever, and his former sidekick Bucky was still serving as the official Cap, while Rogers was wearing a mask-less costume, using an energy shield and going by either Commander Rogers or The Commander, having taken over the role of SHIELD Commander and Boss Of All Superheroes (this being from the period in which who held that role defined much of the Marvel Univere's ongoing story, as it changed hands from Maria Hill to Tony Stark to Norman Osborne to Rogers).

If there's an ongoing storyline here, it involves Rogers and his agents fighting The Shadow Council, I think it was, one of the many, basically interchangeable anti-SHIELDs of the Marvel Universe.

In the first issue, Rogers, Black Widow, Moon Knight and Beast infiltrate an abandoned secret city hidden underneath Cincinnati, only to find that it's been reoccupied and put to an awesomely ambitious and bizarre usage. This is probably the strongest of the issues, in part because of McKelvie's clean, smooth, expressive artwork (although his Beast is kind of lame, looking a little too much like a dude wearing a cat-mask; I don't think model sheets for Beast have existed at all in the 21st Century, given the fact that every artists draws him differently; in this volume alone, he looks like at least three different characters entirely), but in larger part because of the scale and stakes of the plot, and the amount of characterization and interaction Ellis manages to pack into this one. Only Rogers comes out as a basically blank slate.

McKelvie draws Commander Rogers' flechette gun, which shoots three little shields.

It also features some really goofy "flechette" guns that shoot non-lethal icon-shaped projectiles. Rogers' shoots out little Captain America badges, while Moon Knight's shoots out little crescent moons.

Next up, Rogers, Sharon Carter, War Machine and Valkyrie seek to solve the mystery of a villager-abducting ghost truck, featuring nice expressive art by Walker; then Rogers, Carter and Shang-Chi attempt to stop a version of Captain America's most visually-interesting foes from importing and weaponizing transmatter from a bad continuity (explained by Beast in flashback), as drawn by Aja, who does some rather magnificent, Escher-like lay-outs, in which the characters savagely battle in panels with no gravity or sense of up and down.

Lark and Gaudiano's Moon Knight, in his formal wear.

As for the second half of the book, Rogers, Carter, Black Widow and Moon Knight (wearing his mask with a white suit, for a nice formal variation of his costume) infiltrate a hotel where a drug dealer is selling powdered Lovecraft creature bones as a power-up drug (this is the Lark/Gaudiano ish; sadly, Lark only does breakdowns); there's an incredibly complicated story in which Black Widow must jump back in time to save her dead teammates without letting anyone know (drawn by Maleev, whose Beast looks like the Kelsey Grammer one from the third X-Men movie),

Maleev

and, finally, a pretty cool story in which Rogers, Carter, Widow, Valkyrie, War Machine, Moon Knight and Beast infiltrate and ultimately destroy a building with some terrible, world-ending secret creatures in the basement, the day being saved with some inspired uses of Marvel Universe techonology (including War Machine flying an elevator car with his rocket boots and Beast creating a fake, building-engulfing inferno to empty the building).

Immonen

That's the Immonen-penciled story, making this issue something of a Nextwave reunion and a perfect note for Ellis' short run to end on. I'd rather highly recommend this as a continuity-light introduction to Ellis at his work-for-hire best and/or a handful of some of Marvel's less-prominent super-characters and/or the work of a half-dozen creators or so who have bodies of work well worth tracking down if you like what you see of them here.

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

In their annual re-examination of the year that was in Big Two super-comics and media tie-ins, Robot 6's DC Comics expert Tom Bondurant and Marvel Comics expert Carla Hoffman touched on Tom Brevoort's arguments that numbers don't matter when it comes to comics.

I beg to differ with Brevoort, personally. So I just read this book, right? Say I liked the whole Secret Avengers concept, and wanted to read more Secret Avengers comics. Where would I go from here? I plugged this title into Amazon, and found it listed both as Secret Avengers: Run the Mission... and as Secret Avengers Vol. 3: Run the Mission... (the "Premiere Edition" hardcover I got from the library didn't have a volume number attached, for whatever that's worth).

So then I just typed "Secret Avengers" in, and found three different Secret Avengers Vol. 1s, listed thusly:

Secret Avengers Vol. 1: Reverie (Marvel NOW)

Secret Avengers by Rick Remender Vol. 1

Secret Avengers Vol. 1: Mission to Mars

There seem to be three different Secret Avengers comic book series released in the course of the last few years—oh, and there's an unnumbered Fear Itself: Secret Avengers in there too, just to make things more confusing—each with their own volumes 1, 2 and/or 3. A comic shop with a knowledgeable seller of comics could no doubt help walk a curious reader through, but if I were looking to buy these online or borrow them from the library (and thus looking at an online library catalog), it would be fucking murder making sure I read them in the proper order, which is apparently something like Volumes 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, with Run The Mission... and Fear Itself somewhere amid all those repeating volume numbers.

Surely numbering the damn things 1-10 would be a lot easier.

Worse still is when they change the titles along with the numbers. Like, I'm enjoying Mark Waid's Indestructible Hulk, having just finished Indestructible Hulk Vol. 2. But I understand they're relaunching the Waid-written Hulk title with a new title, just plain Hulk, which means Waid's run will like include something like three or four numerically consecutive volumes of Indestructible Hulk, followed by Hulk Vol. 1...?

I still haven't finished the Hercules run by Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente, because I started reading it in singles and wanted to switch to trades, but got lost as they kept changing the titles of the book they were writing and their Hercules was appearing in...

Since I just wrote bullet points for the previous volume, I guess I'll do the same for All-New X-Men Vol. 2: Here To Stay

•I did mention how much I like this series in my previous post on the previous volume, right? I'm actually pretty surprised to find myself so thoroughly enjoying a Brian Michael Bendis-written comic book again after having gone so long since doing so, and so thoroughly enjoying an X-Men comic (Usually when I do find one I like, like that Rick Remender X-Force from a few years back, they end up changing artists, character line-ups and/or rebooting the title within a few collections).

I think a large part of my enjoyment of this series comes from reading it in trade, where Bendis' decompression and various irritating writing ticks are minimized by reading a whole half-dozen or so issues in one sitting rather than 20-pages a month, and, of course, by not having to pay for it, as the only cost involved is simply time, rather than time and money.

•That sub-title rather implies that not only did the original, teenage X-Men of 1963 decide not to return to the past after the events of the first volume,  but also that they could be around for a rather long time. I suppose they could even stay indefinitely, really, couldn't they? Like, at various times, various X-Teams have included refugees from the future—Cable, Bishop, Rachel, Hope—so why not some from their own past?

•This $25 hardcover collection ($25!) only collects five issues worth of the series, so it's actually less economical than buying the $4 issues serially...unless there's some digital copy being factored in. It looks and feels a bit longer than it actually is though, as there are some 22 pages of variant covers and process material in the back, taking up the space that a sixth issue otherwise would have. I would have loved that process stuff as a teenager, but now it just seems like a bit of a waste of space and paper to me, especially if one considers Marvel's charging you for six issues worth of comics, but only giving you five plus fuller.

•It was rather disheartening to see Stuart Immonen and Wade Von Grawbadger, the major selling point for the first collection, disappear so quickly. This volume contains issues #6-#10, but Immonen and Grawbadger only handle #9 and #10; fill-in artist David Marquez draws the first three/fifths of the book. And does so quite well, he's just not Immonen, and his presence is something of a disappointment to anyone picking this up and expecting to read a Bendis/Immonen book.  

•I know the Marvel Universe used to have a pretty strict rule about the way time travel worked in the publisher's shared setting, in which the timeline couldn't really be altered, and that any travel and interference would simply create a different, branching timeline, but Marvel's pretty much done away with that, right? In addition to this book, I know Brian Michael Bendis wrote a time-travel story in one of his many Avengers books that didn't deal with that at all, and I just finished reading Fantastic Four Vol. 2: Road Trip by Matt Fraction, Mark Bagley and company, and that featured the FF screwing around with the past pretty intensely. But then, I understand one of the consequences of Age of Ultron, which I still haven't read (that book been checked out of pretty much every library in Ohio since its release, so I guess it's awfully popular with Ohio library patrons), was that time was broken or something.

•The main story points in this volume are as follows: 1.) Kitty Pryde takes on the task of "training" the original X-Men teens, which includes teaching Jean to deal with her prematurely developing psychic powers (which includes a few lines that seem straight from the movie Man of Steel, 2.) Young Cyclops goes off on his own to investigate things, and he's confronted by Mystique, who poses as a not-as-bad-as-she-really-is version of herself (I could have sworn Wolverine totally killed her once and for all and that she was never coming back in one of those Jason Aaron-written trades, but man, that was dumb of me to think that), 3.) Young Angel finally meets Old Angel, who doesn't look or act any older or more experienced than  him (Props to Scott Beattie for filling me in on the Angel situation in the comments of the last post on this series; Bendis, perhaps wisely, glosses over all that nonsense), 4.) The Angels meet the Avengers, and then The Avengers confront the X-Men at their mansion, in a genuinely funny scene in which we don't actually hear the argument itself, but Old Iceman and Kitty's impressions of Captain America and Beast (two panels of which are above), 5.) Jean Grey, having never read Identity Crisis (lucky girl), starts messing around with mind-changing and memory-wiping of her teammates, 6.) Mystique puts together a mutant gang to rob banks, instead of do the usual mutant crimes of...being involved with the ins and outs of  X-Men continuity and crossovers, I guess, 7.) Young Cyclops gives Young Jean a copy of the invitation to the wedding their future selves will have, which fucks with both of their minds. Wait until someone introduces them to their kids, some of whom are as old or older than them as them and also attending the school, and, finally, 8) Old Cyclops and his new X-Men show up in fancy new costumes that better telegraph the fact that they are totally the villains now.

•I like that when Mystique appears to give Young Cyclops advice about being a good man and doing the right thing, she does so while wearing a belt made out of baby skulls, or, if not actual baby skulls, then metal or plastic or something meant to look like skulls. I thought about that belt for a while, and while it looks very supervillanous, I then realized lots of young people wear skull imagery on their belts and t shirts and jewelry and stuff, so it' s not that weird, but a skull belt like that would look more natural with, like heavy metal band t shirt, a pair of pants and some black boots instead of, you know, that weird white dress Mystique has been wearing for, like, my whole life.

•I also liked that when Old Angel appears, he is wearing a costume that is so damn close to Mystique's. They both apparently like long white loin drapings and high white boots.

•Lady Mastermind, which I guess is the name of an X-Men villain now, appears in a scene in which Mystique breaks her out of a SHIELD cell. Rather than wearing an orange jumpsuit, she's wearing the costume seen above.

Either because SHIELD prisons have a very lax dress code and they let her wear whatever she wants, or because the folks who run SHIELD prisons are perverts and that is the prison uniform. I wonder if they make Grey Gargoyle wear the same get-up now...?

•Anyway, when the rebel X-People show up near the end of the book, letting Wolverine's student body know that their new school is currently offering open enrollment, we see that Emma Frost's new costume looks so much like Lady Mastermind's that I had to flip back and make sure they weren't the exact same character.

Is it odd that two blond mutant women with mental powers would wear almost identical tops that are such an unusual fashion choice that I'm not even sure how they work, exactly; underwire and electrical tape, maybe...?

Magik is also wearing black, and a belt, hot pants and thigh-highs that exactly match Emma's.

•I half-like Old Cyclops' new costume, with the ruby red X-shaped visor. I like when the X-Men go to such extraordinary lengths of self-branding. I don't care for all the other extraneous red lines all over the costume, though. It's too busy, and takes away from the focus, the big, red, laser-shooting X where his face should be (Also, the lines on his legs suggest that he's wearing chaps, even though I know he's not. When he was possessed by the Phoenix Force in Avengers Vs. X-Men, his Phoenix costume had a little read triangle over his area visually suggesting a thong being worn over his tights. I guess that's how they try to designate Cyclops turn toward villainy, by giving him various visual signifiers of sexy pants of some kind...?).

•Magneto looks remarkably bad-ass in his new outfit, and all-white's a pretty good choice, especially if they're trying to win hearts and minds and not look like supervillains and terrorists (that's why "White Queen" Emma Frost and Magik wearing black, dominatrix-like outfits seem odd choices, but perhaps all of this will be explained in Uncanny X-Men, this book' s sister title, following Old Cyclops and his gang. "We're wearing black now because we're in mourning for our people, Scott. And we're wearing tiny shorts and showing our cleavage to help recruit young, male mutants to our cause. If you were 17, which school would you sign up with? The one run by a four-foot-tall Canadian with Civil War hair, or the one with teachers wearing thiese outfits?").

The shape of Magneto's helmet might be a little too evil-looking thought, and it somehow feels wrong for him to stray so far from purple to me. I have a hard-time with Magneto cognitively though, as I generally think of him as the elderly Ian McKellan, rather than the big, buff, white-maned character in the comics.   That is a large part of the reason I think I liked his costume from near the end of the Grant Morrison run so much, as it so closely resembled a movie costume, but had the comic book Magneto wearing it.

•Should I be looking forward to reading the "Battle of the Atom" all-books-on-deck X-Men crossover, or dreading it...?

Some thoughts on All-New X-Men Vol. 1: Yesterday's X-Men

•I still find it amusing that of all the possible X-Men titles out there, basically Any Adjective + "X-Men", they chose to call this particular title All-New X-Men, as it is the X-Men title starring the five original X-Men, displaced in time and brought to the modern Marvel Universe. It is therefore the book about the least new X-Men of all (Shortly after this title launched, Marvel re-launched Uncanny X-Men with a new #1. It is also being written by Brian Michael Bendis and is serving as a companion to this book; they probably should have switched the titles of the two).

•Less-than-accurate title aside, I really like the new logo.

•The book is visually a great one all around, from logo to coloring. That's due mostly to the contribution of pencil artist Stuart Immonen, inked here by Wade Von Grawbadger, who is one of the most perfect superhero artists, capable of drawing action and emotion, spectacular powers and run-of-the-mill, day-in-the-life stuff equally well, and doing so with enough flair and individual style that the artwork is nevertheless exciting and his (This may be comparing apples to oranges, but just before sitting down to write this, I re-read an issue of Forever Evil that David Finch pencilled, and Immonen's work looks even better when seen as a visual chaser, rather than something independent; I've never been a Marvel vs. DC kind of guy, but, speaking objectively as someone who reads as much from both publishers as I can, there is an incredible gulf in quality between the average DC comic and the average Marvel comic at the moment; probably the widest in my own personal memory).

•The premise of the book follows closely on the heels of Avengers Vs. X-Men, in which you'll recall Cyclops, Emma Frost, Namor, Colossus and Magik were possessed by The Phoenix Force, went completely bonkers and took over the world—temporarily—before the Phoenix Force was ultimately dispersed, un-doing the "No More Mutants" thing so that now new mutants are, um, mutating again. It ended with Cyclops essentially the worst villain in the Marvel Universe, having completed a years-long slide from having grown up to be his generation's Charles Xavier to growing into his generation's Magneto. Driving that point home, he killed—or, more likely, "killed"—Xavier and is now hanging out with Magneto.

In the pages of some comic I didn't read, Cyclops must have escaped, and now with the help of Magneto, Magik and a rather reluctant Emma Frost, he's building his own X-Men school and trying to save/recruit the new mutants popping up all over the world.

This puts the real X-Men in something of a bind, as most of them would rather not go to war with Cyclops again. Even if they win—and given that there's about 195 of 'em, they're gonna win—it would mean "mutant civil war" and maybe ending up killing Cyclops.

Bendis has Iceman, one of the original X-Men and one of the two modern X-Men in the book who has known Cyclops longest and best, says "I'm telling you, if the young us saw what was going on today it would feel worse than the mutant apocalyptic nightmare we used to worry about!" He says some variation of this enough times that Beast eventually hears him and decides to travel back in time, convince the five original teenaged X-Men—Cyclops, Jean Grey, Angel, Beast and Iceman—to come back to the present with him in order to confront modern day Cyclops.

Things go less than perfectly, as Beast is in the process of dying from another of his periodic mutations while hatching this plan of his, and the original X-Men scare Cyclops off before getting a chance to give him a good talking to, and they see enough of the modern Marvel Universe to know that it's all screwed-up, and not the future they wanted, so they intend to stay and fix it.

•I imagine this read much, much better in trade then it would have in single issues, and not just because everything Bendis writes reads better in trade then in single issues, or because it was a ridiculously expensive $4-per-20-pages. If you just read my synopsis above but haven't read the comics themselves, then you probably see some holes and have some questions  about Beast's cockamamie plan. It's all explained within this volume, but reading it in one sitting, questions about why he would do something that nutty or how it wouldn't destroy the integrity of the space-time continuum or whether characters' continuity are wonky only nag for 20-40 pages or so, whereas if you were reading this in monthly installments, you might spend two months wondering why teen Jean can read minds, or how Beast thinks he won't re-write the past by brining his past self to the future and so on.

•This may have been the best Bendis Marvel comic I've read in a while...certainly since the last time I read any of his Ultimate Spider-Man comics (many of which Immonen also drew—coincidence?). The one time he writes particularly Bendisian is during the fourth issue, in which the first two and a half pages are straight Cyclops narration, which eventually bleeds from narration boxes into old-fashioned thought bubbles, and then teen Jean starts yelling at him to "Stop!! Stop Talking!!" (Because she could hear his thoughts/Bendis' narration, of course).

•The Phoenix Force apparently altered the abilities of those that were in possession of it and/or blasted with it, so Cyclops, Magneto and Emma are all experiencing difficulties with their powers. I really like how Immonen draws Cyclops' eye-beams in this story, coming out of his visor in a straight line, but surrounded by a corkscrewing aura of energy. This is apparently because he can't control it quite as well as he used to, and/or it's more powerful, but it also makes for a strong visual contrast with teen Cyclops' eye-beams, when they try to eye-beam one another later in the story.

Well, one advantage of serially published comics over trades is that the former are easier to scan images from to post on your blog

•I also like how colorist Marte Gracia renders Magneto's magnetic powers, generally as subtle tracers of energy in the Mutant Master of Magnetism's favorite color:

•Beast doesn't die, of course, but he does mutate...again. I think he's meant to be a new version of "ape Beast," but he doesn't really look like any of the previous Beasts, and seems more 'Squatchy than any past incarnation I can remember:

•I'm not entirely sure if Bendis realized it or not, but one aspect of his story echoes that of Grant Morrison's millennial run on the franchise, a run that has mostly been undone as much as possible (And Bendis has has a weird relationship with Morrison concepts in the Marvel Universe, pretty much un-writing Morrison's Marvel Boy during his time on the Avengers franchise).

Bendis has Grown-Up Cyclops repeatedly blaming the Phoenix Force itself for the evil acts he committed while all Phoenix-ed up in Avengers Vs. X-Men, assigning it responsibility for things like killing Xavier and taking down Emma and so on. Magneto essentially tells him that's bullshit, and that he's just deflecting responsibility to make it easier to deal with.

Morrison's New X-Men opened with Cyclops questioning his own morality, assigning blame for some of his own dark thoughts to a time in the recent past (before I read any X-Men comics) when he was possessed or under the control of Apocalypse. So when he thinks something bad or wrong, he questions whether it's him thinking it, or if it's the linger effect of Apocalypse' influence. Ultimately he comes to the realization that he's him and his own thoughts, and that he was assigning blame for his own rebellion from emotional repression to an outside other.

•Okay, now I have a question for any regular readers of X-Men comics: Where's Angel at these days? As teenage Angel notices, he seems to be missing from the modern X-Men, and no one seems to want to tell him where he is at the moment. Is he currently dead too?

Review: Avenging Spider-Man: The Good, The Green and The Ugly

This trade collects five issues of what is essentially Marvel's current version of the old Marvel Team-Up, which paired Spider-Man with a different co-star each issue, now given a title that makes sense only in that it's meant to suggest an association with Marvel's most popular branding device at the moment, "Avengers."

After all, Spider-Man does nothing in the way of avenging in these issues, which are quite light-hearted adventures that play up the character's fun and funny side, and, of the three Marvel heroes he teams up with in the three stories within, one of them doesn't even have any association with The Avengers.

The first of the stories collected is an all-Immonen one-issue She-Hulk team-up, a Spidey/Shulkie comic from the creative team behind 2010 Top Shelf graphic novel Moving Pictures, which was about a pair of people making tough choices during World War II, while the Nazis were pillaging the art of the continent.

Oddly enough, this one is also set in and around a museum!

I find that one of the best ways to judge whether a Spider-Man comic is any good or not is whether it manages to make me laugh at all, and this made me laugh:

(The art really sells that joke; not sure if it's the speedlines or the figure work that do the heavy lifting, or simply the combination of the two, but that's a joke that would very easily not be very funny if drawn differently).

In this story, She-Hulk's team-up with Spidey lasts a lot longer than she would have liked, as the wall-crawler tags along to a museum function she has to attend for work. There some cultists attempt to steal some ancient Egytpian maguffin, and the cat goddess Bast arises.

It's full of the same sharp wit Kathryn Immonen's scripts usually are, and the super-short length (just 20 pages) keeps her sometimes overly wild plotting (see Hellcat, Herald, X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back for examples) in a nicely constructed, easily digestible package. It's great fun to see Stuart Immonen—a great, and greatly undervalued artist—drawing something light and fun like this, rather than the sorts of epic angst-fests we've seen him doing for Marvel lately (Fear Itself, Bendis-written Avengers comics).

That's followed by a slightly flabbier two-parter teaming Spidey with another super-strong superheroine, Marvel's current Captain Marvel Carol Danvers. This one's written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, penciled by Terry Dodson and inked by Rachel Dodson, making for another extraordinarily high-caliber art team for what is essentially something of a trifle of a comic.

In this one, Danvers offers Peter Parker a free flight to Boston to visit his aunt, in Danvers' own personal airplane, but the pair get pulled into superhero action against a spunky, jet-packing 99-percenter and an overzealous independent security contractor in a mechanized suit of super-armor. It's incredibly predictable—I've seen this almost exact same twist used in half the page-count by Grant Morrison in the late '90s—but DeConnick writes fun banter, and the art is super-slick.

I hadn't noticed previously, when I'd seen the cover image online before, but Danvers is actually wagging her index finger at whoever is shooting at her and Spidey on the cover. From a distance—the distance at which the image is visible as a little jpeg on a computer monitor, for example—it looked more like she was holding up her first two fingers.

The image makes a lot more sense now, although it's still kinda weird; it's such a frozen image, confined to a particular split-second—we can see where the bullets hit and are arcing away from her invulnerable skin—that allowing for motion in it like that seems pretty off.

The final story is another two-parter, featuring Deadpool, who must be "the Ugly" being referred to in the title). It's written by Kevin Schinick (whose name I'm not familiar with) and drawn by Aaron Kuder. It's a pretty Deadpool story, which means it's kind of in your face and annoying, but it has some pretty decent moments.

The first half features Deadpool in Spider-Man's subconsciousness, trying to guide him through his dreams in order to rescue him from a villain purportedly attacking him through his dreams. And then there's a reveal in the second issue, in which the incredibly unlikely (anywhere other than a story featuring Deadpool, anyway) villain: The Hypno-Hustler.

I really liked Kuder's style, which reminded me quite a bit of Frank Quitely's and Chris Burnham's in many panels (mostly in character design and in the way he draws his lines), and he has a pretty swell version of the Green Goblin (who appears in hallucinatory form only). Take away that guy's pupils, and he looks pretty damn horrifying, doesn't he?

So in The Good, The Green and The Ugly we get stories that are pretty great, pretty good and pretty decent, all of which adds up to not bad at all.

Review: Fear Itself

Odin's evil twin—an ancient, forgotten god who feeds on human fear the way other gods might feed on human worship—has awoken, and he drops a bunch of Thor-like hammers to earth. There, they fall into the hands of various Marvel heroes and villains, mostly of the big, strong guy-capable-of-lifting-heavy-objects variety (The Hulk, The Thing, Juggernaut, Attuma, etc), and the hammers proceed to possess and redesign them, and the characters set about wreaking as much havoc as possible, in order to create more fear, in order to make their boss, who is known as The Serpent, stronger.

Odin's plan for stopping the Serpent is burning the village in order to save it, destroying all life on earth to cut off the Anti-Odin's source of power. Thor would prefer to team up with his pals Captain America and Iron Man, rally the Avengers and all the heroes of Earth. Everyone fights, the tide ultimately turning when Thor and company give a select group of good guys Thor-like weapons, temporarily redesigning them and powering them up from superheroes to ultra-superheroes capable of taking down the Serpent's powered-up guys.

The plot of the Matt Fraction-written, Stuart Immonen-penciled Fear Itself is as simple and straightforward as that of Greg Pak and John Romita Jr.'s 2007 World War Hulk, the Marvel event/crossover series which it most closely resembles. Just as Pak did with World War Hulk, Fraction chooses a pretty small core cast of characters, tightly focuses attention on them, tells the entirety of the story within the series itself (rather than leaving important bits to be covered in one of the sundry tie-ins) and is able to maintain a level of accelerating spectacle—big, dumb action scene followed by bigger, dumber action scene—without breaking any of the characters or the "rules" of their Marvel Universe setting.

In other words, like Pak, Fraction doesn't really need to cheat in order to get his story over, and that is likely one of the reasons this reads like the best of these types of stories since Marvel started publishing them in 2005.

Of the others, Mark Millar wrote just one, 2006's Civil War, in which the writer used the characters like toys, and had them behaving randomly in order to force whatever story beats he wanted to occur, leaving it for the rest of the publisher's writer and editors to make sense of it over the course of the next year (a period in which much of Marvel's output consisted of little more than their editorial staff and freelancers publishing attempts at No-Prizes).

Brian Michael Bendis wrote the remainder, 2005's House of M, 2008's Secret Invasion and 2010's Siege, the last of which I'm still not convinced even qualified as a story, and while the popular writer has his strengths, beginning and ending stories are not among them, nor is pacing, or giving any of the often quite-talented artists he works with anything interesting to draw.

In other words: Fear Itself is one of the good ones of this type of story (I haven't read the one that followed it yet, this year's Avengers Vs. X-Men, which tried a new strategy of having different writers script different sections of the book, so although one of those writers was Bendis, I suppose it's possible that that particular story will read better than some of the previous ones written by the guy who has written 50% of all of Marvel's modern event/crossover stories).

The collection I read includes a prologue that appeared in Fear Itself: Book of the Skull, written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Scot Eaton and Mark Morales. It's not terribly interesting, and involves the Red Skull's daughter, also called The Red Skull, seeking one of those evil Thor hammers The Serpent sent to Earth, and a flashback to Captain America, Bucky and Namor in World War II. Eaton's drawings are nice, but the panel-to-panel continuity isn't perfect (consecutive panels in action scenes occur in a setting that morphs, characters the dialogue said had the skin of their backs removed are shown with the skin on their backs not removed, etc). The plot isn't essential, but it does tie the event more directly to Captain America (Actually, the Captains America, as at the time this was published, Bucky Barnes was Captain America, and Steve Rogers was going by "Commander Rogers," and was Marvel's then-current Boss Of All Superheroes, a roll previously filled by Norman Osborn, Tony Stark, Maria Hill and Nick Fury).

The rest of the collection is simply the seven issues of the Fear Itself miniseries, and it barrels ahead in a straight line, no zigging and no zagging. Mention is made of various big events that happen off-panel, like the entire city of Paris dying, for example, events that were probably covered in the many, many tie-in series, but all of the important story beats occur here; Fear Itself the event may be the same big, sprawling maze that all of these sorts of stories are, but Fear Itself #1-7 is a corridor, and one can have a pleasant walk through it without exploring any of the twisting hallways it opens into if one doesn't want to.

Wisely, and, one imagines, market-savvily, the story's main protagonists are the stars of Marvel Studios' big three franchises, and the ones that featured prominently in The Avengers: Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. Thor's part in the story especially echoes his part in his movie, dealing with his conflict with his father regarding the worth of humanity, and his friendship with particular Asgardian warriors. Fraction distills Iron Man/Tony Stark down to a core trait in one of the series' biggest, crowd-pleasing attempt moments (see below).

Among the changes (or illusions of change) that occur in the series, the "The Marvel Universe Will Never Be The Same!" and the "long-term repercussions" bits, are the deaths of Bucky Barnes (which leads to Rogers resuming his old costume and codename) and of Thor, neither of which must have stuck very long, as they are both hale and hearty and starring in their own comics as I type this.

The other Avengers barely appear—Hawkeye and Luke Cage get a few lines, while some characters, like Red Hulk, literally just stand in the background. Spider-Man has a very weird scene or two. Thing and Hulk appear mostly as antagonists. The X-Men are completely absent, save for Wolverine being one of the heroes who gets powered-up at the climax (and, naturally, he's on the cover of the collection).

I imagine a large part of why this felt so successful to me as a reader was that I waited until now to read it, and did so as a collection, so I didn't have to wait a month between installments to pick things apart, unlcear events in one chapter were resolved in the next, rather than just hanging there, nagging at me for another month, and I wasn't distracted by any of the tie-ins.

I remember reading complaints online about certain plot-points as they occurred. When Bucky is killed (or "killed") in the third issue, for example, it's not at all clear that he is killed (the lay-out of the two pages in which Sin/The Red Skull kill/"kill" him are probably the weakest in the book, as Immonen's lay-outs are otherwise crystal clear), but the fourth issue is, of course, just a page-turn away, and there he is, laying on a slab, a couple of characters declaring him dead.

Similarly, Spider-Man declaring the fight too hard and the odds too much against them and swinging off to see his family before the end of the world (rather than fighting with all his strength against the end of the world) left a lot of readers with a bad taste in their mouths; in the collection, it's followed a few pages later by Aunt May telling Spidey to Spider-Man-up and get back in the fight, so the taste certainly doesn't linger.

Immonen's art is fine. He draws the whole thing (save the aforementioned prologue), and while it's done in a rather tired "widescreen" format and much of the imagery seems a bit tired, following so close on the heels of another Asgard-related Marvel crossover, and while the powered-up looks for many of the characters are rather uninspired (The Thing's evil mode was the only design that really popped out at me), he gets the job done, and in his usual elegant manner.

He might not have been given all that much cool stuff to draw, but what he does drawn is drawn well, and the action is handled much better than that in Siege, which featured many of these same characters and settings in similar fights, with a great deal of motion in the dynamic artwork (Maybe it helped that the characters here were fighting with hammers, while much of the fighting in Siege involved the unexplained Sentry's vague, unexplained powers doing vague things...?). A big strong guy with a hammer hitting another big strong guy with a hammer, or a lightning bolt hitting a guy with a shield and throwing him across a page are just more conducive to cool comic book drawings than, say, an explosion in the distance.

If Marvel is planning to continue doing stories like these, and I see no reason why they would stop based on how well Avengers Vs. X-Men sold, I do hope future ones are more like this and less like most of the others. Having Fraction write 'em instead of Bendis, and Immonen draw 'em instead of, say, Steve McNiven or Olivier Coipel might be a good place to start.

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

By far the strangest part of the book occurs in the first issue of Fear Itself, when Commander Rogers and an ally are at a protest that turns into a riot in New York City.

I vaguely seem to recall there being some snark and complaints about this scene when it was originally published, and that it was thought to have something to do with the ginned-up, fake controversy of the "Ground Zero Mosque" (or "Islamic center, blocks from Ground Zero," as it might be more accurately described), but, if so, Fraction, Immonen and Marvel are hilariously vague in the scene, with only phrases like "Let them build it" and "tragic site, a sacred site" and "nothing should be built here...this place should mean something" offering clues.

The signs the protesters carry simply say things like "Is Nothing Sacred?" and, my favorite, "YES!" Fraction makes very, very vague allusions to the Tea Party movement at one point, and many more concrete references to the economic downturn in these early parts of the stories, but it makes for a reminder that if you're going to play it safe, you probably shouldn't bother with politics in the first place.

Because the manufactured "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy is so long passed at this point, it's difficult to remember it while reading this story—I honestly only thought of it because I remember online chatter—and because it is quickly followed by Tony Stark's announcement that he is going to rebuild Asgard, it makes it seem as if the protesters were arguing over that.

Additionally, the protests eventually devolve into a riot, with police officers in riot gear shooting mace and tear gas at bottle and brick throwing protesters; obviously at this point, a New York City riot over the "Ground Zero Mosque" seems fanciful, now that we've seen so many images of police using pepper spray and tear gas on demonstrators and protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, and it's many off-shoots (And damn, did you see those sickening videos of demonstrators at University of California of Berkley being hit with batons? Certainly everyone's seen videos and photos of the cop pepper-spraying the seated, peaceful protesters at the Davis campus).

Anyway: That scene looks as alien and disconnected from reality as any of the stuff set on Asgard or Nazi polar castles or the Serpent's magic underwater prison when read in December 2012, dating the story and simultaneously making the creators and publishers look timid, half-assing an attempt to ground their story in reality.

Otherwise? Pretty good event comic, guys.