Ultimates 3 #3

Previously in Ultimates 3: Hawkeye fought Spider-Man in Central Park for seven pages and then stopped, Hank Pym is unconscious at Ultimates Mansion having consumed an unknown quantity of unknown pills, Quicksilver brought his murdered sister Scarlet Witch’s body back to base, Magneto and his mutant terrorist organization The Brotherhood attacked in order to recover the body of his daughter Scarlet Witch, Sabretooth told Captain America to suck it, Wasp begins to think all of the team’s recent misfortunes might be connected, Quicksilver evacuates the Brotherhood at super-speed and absconds with his sister’s body, and then Wolverine shows up and threatens everybody for no reason. (You can read the 2,000-word version here).

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Welcome to Ultimates 3 #3! This issue has my favorite cover so far: Naked Wolverine having the bottom half of his body chomped by a Tyrannosaur. I wouldn’t mind having a huge version of that in a really nice frame over my mantle. The variant cover is by Frank Cho, and it makes Scarlet Witch’s costume look extremely uncomfortable. My nipples and nether region hurt just looking at it. (What, too much information?)

According to the confounding dateline captions, this issue opens at the Tony Stark’s mansion, which is still located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and it takes place “last night.” You’ll recall the second issue ended “two seconds ago.” I think the narrative is actually traveling back n time…? Perhaps that’s why there’s a dinosaur on the cover? I guess we’ll find out soon.

So, the previous issue ended with Wolverine popping his claws with a SNIKT and telling the Ultimates they have a bigger problem. It turns out he was threatening them with violence after all, he was just saying hello.

Here he scowls and raises his claws, summarizing the events of the last two issues.

“And before her body is even cold, The Brotherhood-- led by Magneto himself--conveniently shows up here, hands you your collective asses and makes off with the evidence… And none of you want to ask why?”

Er, I know this is nitpicking, but they all have their own individual asses. A collective ass would surely be singular, right? A bigger concern is that everything that Wolverine described happening, from the shooting through Magneto’s attack, happened in within fifteen minutes. News travels fast I guess; fast enough for Magneto and the Brotherhood to have heard about it and arrived to attack, and for Wolverine to have heard about it and dropped by. Maybe they were all in the neighborhood.

(Is it worth noting that Joe Madureira seems to be drawing Marvel Universe Wolverine, rather than Ultimate Universe Wolverine? The Ultimate version had long, more human hair than the weird mane/hair helmet of the original, and had a stupid little soul patch. Maybe later artists on Ultimate X-Men started drawing Ultimate Wolvie more like Original Recipe Wolvie, but there will be some scenes set around the time of the first few issues of Ultimate X-Men later in which Wolverine is sans soul-patch and looks like the stocky little monster troll of the Marvel Universe, instead of the younger, sexier Ultimate version.)

Wolvie says Pietro/Quicksilver called his father Magneto, but Hawkeye disagrees:
Wow, that’s pretty mean, Wolverine.

How does Hawkeye react to Wolverine flippantly bringing up the murder of his family?

By shooting Wolverine five times in a two-page spread, shouting, “That is, mutie, you wanna go, let’s go!”

Wolverine doesn’t like being called “mutie,” as that is apparently a very bad slur to call a mutant, maybe the mutant equivalent of the K-word for Jewish folks or the N-word for black folks?

His eyes turn red, and he shouts “ ‘MUTIE’!?! Oh, I’m gonna DIG this, Barton,” while cutting off half of Hawkeye’s stupid mask.

He retracts his claws when Hawkeye says “I’m better off dead anyway.”



This brings me to one of the parts of the series I genuinely thought was kind of cool, along with the KARAKKAKATHOOM sound effect for Thor in the first issue, and the fact that artist Madureira actually drew Sabretooth with outsized teeth on the cover of the second issue, thus justifying his name…a little (I never understood why Sabretooth was called Sabretooth, since he just had slightly pointy teeth and fought with his fingernails anyway).
So look, neat swearing!

Yeah, it’s still that childish “I’d like to say ‘fuck,’ but since this comic actually kinda sorta for kids even though we say comics aren’t for kids and its full of incest and violence anyway, we have to use four symbols to stand in for the F, the U, the C and the K, even though anyone who’s ever heard a swear word before can deduce from the context that we mean ‘fuck” stuff, these are at least some creative symbols. Kinda like Bettle Bailey swearing, when Whover Draws That Series Know draws little storm clouds and skulls into Sarge’s swearing. Here, the F-word contains a tornado, a radioactive symbol and a skull and cross bones. That’s kinda neat.

Thor doesn’t think so though. He’s had “ENOUGH!” of this shit, and will brook no further fighting amongst the Ultimates.

Wolverine huffs and puffs a bit more about “Pietro and Wanda Lensherr” (shit, I thought there last name was Maximoff? Maybe it’s different in the Ultimate Universe?). When Wasp is all like, “Er, not that we aren’t glad you’re here to help boost sales, why do you give a shit?”

Wolverine explains that, “We’re not talking about just any girl here. We’re talking about Magneto’s daughter. And she could’ve been mine.”

What’s that? Perhaps a Wolverine-narrated flashback will help explain!

It’s “after the war”—I’m guessing the Gulf War—and he’s wandering through the Balkan Mountains in the harsh winter, looking for Wundagore, which means something if you’re familiar with the Marvel Universe (Has Wundagore appeared in any Ultimate books?). He collapses—healing factor on the fritz?—and is found by Magda, Wanda and Pietro’s mother.

See, Wolverine was looking for the Witch of Wundagore, hoping she could help him end his immortal life. Instead, he finds himself naked in her bed, with her standing naked in front of the fire. And then they totally do it. In silhouette, of course, because remember, this is for teenage boys, because what other audience wants to read about Wolverine fucking Scarlet Witch’s mom, but also can’t be permitted to see actual nudity?

(There’s a close-up scan. I didn’t scan it myself, but just found it when google image-ing to see if I could find a scan of the two-page spreads. It’s from a review of this very issue by James Hunt, which you can find here. It’s well worth a read, as Hunt seems to have noticed a whole bunch of little continuity glitches I didn’t, like the number of Hawkeye’s dead children, and the state of Wolverine’s memory during the flashbacks. The Ultimate Universe was only about seven years old at the point this book was published; there really wasn’t much continuity for Loeb and his four editors to have to get right).

That’s when Eric Lensherr, who would one day be Magneto, walks in and finds his wife/girlfriend/lover/whatever in bed with a naked Wolverine. Magneto powers up and then throws a big cauldron at Wolverine, throwing him naked down the mountain.

“I’d been cast down out of heaven…” he says, “…Only to learn that I could not find Wundagore ever again.”

Flash forward to The Savage Land, when Wolverine was working for Magneto (as seen in the first arc of Mark Millar’s Ultimate X-Men). Wolvie recognizes Scarlet Witch as Magda’s daughter.

Magneto orders Wolverine to track Wanda and Pietro when they go exploring in the jungle, and kill Pietro.

Pietro clasps his sister’s hand and tells her she looks more like their mother every day (Ew), and Wolverine says he “wasn’t sure what would’ve happened if I hadn’t…interrupted.” (Ew). He sticks his claws in Pietro’s chest (although he narrates that he wasn’t trying to actually kill him, just spook him enough to get him to leave his father), but then TWO-PAGE SPLASH!
Wanda glows pink and the background fills with glowing eyed dinosaurs. Apparently, it was Wanda who filled the Savage Land with dinosaurs, as she was able to bend time in space and rearrange reality; Magneto simply took credit for it. A T-Rex chases Wolverine away.

Once they think they’re alone, well, I guess they start doing it, and Wolverine watches…
So yeah, ew.

Wasp splits up the team, sending half after Magneto in the Savage Land, and keeping the rest with her. Thor, Valkyrie, Wolverine and The Black Panther are the Savage Land team, and when Wasp sees BP, she asks where he’s been and where Captain America is. He doesn’t answer, and Wolverine takes one look at the Panther and asks incredulously if “that’s the Black Panther.” Oh my God, have you figured out his secret yet?

If not, a few pages later, Wolverine let’s the Panther know he knows his identity and he can’t figure out why he’s doing what he’s doing.

Back in New York, Iron Man tells The Wasp he examined the crime scene and discovered that the bullet used to kill Scarlet Witch was a D.N.A.-specific one and was manufactured by Stark Industries. And then he removes his faceplate to reveal…a robot face underneath? And then he hits Wasp with a bolt of electricity!

The Ultimates’ transport lands safely in the Savage Land—hey, I thought people always crash-landed when they visited the Savage Land?—and meet Wolverine’s contacts there, who get introduced in a last-page splash.


There are two admittedly rather cool looking sabretooth tigers, and posed between them are two mostly naked figures.

“I’m Shanna and this is my boyfriend Ka-Zar,” the female says. Sweet, it’s Ultimate Shanna the She-Devil and Ultimate Ka-Zar! And, while it doesn’t say so, I assume the sabretooth he’s leaning on is Ultimate Zabu. How does he differ from "616" Zabu? He's striped. Bad-ass.

And that’s the third issue. We’ve passed the halfway mark!

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Tomorrow night: The Ultimates vs. The Brotherhood! Another genuinely cool scene! An attempted rape scene, demonstrating that this is all very serious and adult! And Ultimate Unus the Untouchable! And don’t forget to come back in a few hours for this week’s Weekly Haul

The neat freak's dirty mouth

Tommy Kovac and Sonny Liew's Wonderland, which I mentioned here and reviewed here yesterday, features some comic book swearing in it, and employs a different strategy for depicting foul language in a comic than a few of the others we've talked about here before, so I thought it might be worth discussing.

If you haven't read Wonderland, either in its original six-issue miniseries format from SLG, or its current hardcover collection from Disney Press, it stars Mary Ann, the White Rabbit's housemaid (who he originally mistook Alice for in the book and movie). Like most of those in Wonderland, she's rather mad, and her particular form of madness revolves around cleanliness. Terms like "obsessive-compulsive disorder" and "neat freak" don't seem to adequately describe the depth of her emotions when it comes to dirt and disorder of any kind.

In the first issue, for example, the sight of a small red jam stain on her clean white apron moves her to snatch the Queen of Hearts' scepter from her and bring it crashing down on the tyrant's head. So it's no surprise that a mess can bring her to swear.

The first time she curses, it's when she's in the process of falling down a well. She bumps her head on the side of it, eliciting a loud "THUD" and a plain old run-of-the-mill cartoon curse:


The well she falls into isn't a water well, however, it's a treacle well. Once covered in treacle, and being pawed at by a trio of treacle-encrusted old ladies, she again snaps:
What's she saying exactly? I don't know, but it must be bad! It's the verbal equivalent of skulls of various shapes and sizes, a few lightning bolts and a black streak. I like this sort of comic-book swearing, as it is so far divorced from "real" swearing that it could really be anything, and the panel isn't really inviting the reader to suss out the real-world equivalent from the clues or context, the way, say, Brian Michael Bendis Avengers swearing does.

All the reader knows is that Mary Ann is completely freaking out, and using language so inappropriate that it can't be rendered into English. It gets worse in the next panel, when she drops English modifiers like "befouled," "bloody" and "blasted":



That seems like a good solution to the problem of how to have comic book characters swear without actually having them swear: Long chains of unique images with negative connotations, but no specific translation.

Another example of the curious phenomenon of swear words in certain comic books

The previously reviewed Shrapnel: Aristeia Rising #1 tells the story of a future, colonized Venus in danger of invasion by the marines, and the citizenry rising up to defend their home planet and government.

There are a lot of swear words in it. I remember coming across "dick," "asshole," "asses" and "shit." (The last one I remember quite clearly, as it was used in a strangely constructed sentence: "This war might'a been thrust on us like stink on shit").

One word you won't see, however, is "fuck." And yet writer M. Zachary Sherman writes a few lines of dialogue in which a form of the word "fuck" is called for—specifically, "fucking"— but rather than actually having his characters say "fucking," they say "effin.'"

Here, for example, is a marine, who's commanding officer has just said, "We're marines, and who can tell me what USMC stands for?" The marine responds thusly:

"You Signed the Mother-effin' Contract, sir!"

Seems strange that the marines would self-censor like that, doesn't it? It's my understanding that the military, they love the salty language.

At the end of the next scene, two miners who have been out drinking and gotten in a bar fight are talking about how things have changed for the worse since the solar war. The male miner, whose name I believe is Jammer, curses the alliance and the marines thusly:

"Effin' alliance, effin' marines..."

Of course, it is the future, so maybe over the decades or centuries "fuck" evolved into "eff." Well, at least it hasn't evolved into "frell" or one of those sorts of made up feature swears...



(Art by Bagus Hutomo and Leos "Okita" Ng)

Oh God I hope the word under the black bar

in this panel of All-Star Batman is "bullshitting"...

More on Bendis' goofy-@#$ swearing in Secret Invasion

As he did in the previous issue of Secret Invasion, writer Brian Michael Bendis included self-censored swear words, represented by caps-locked number keys (i.e. "@#$%!"), in Secret Invasion #6. And, as he also did in the previous issue, he included such self-censored swear words with odd-numbered characters, so that if we assume a one-random-SHIFT + number-key-to-one-letter-in-a-swear-word ratio, there were a couple instances of highly idiosyncratic swearing in this issue as well.

For example, when New York City super-crime kingpin The Hood gathers his syndicate of super-criminals on a rooftop to watch the melee between the Nick Fury lead superheroes and the Skrull invaders, one of them responds to the action by saying, "@#$, are you guys seein' this?"

A three-letter swear word? That can only mean the random villain said one of the following:

"Ass, are you guys seein' this?"

"Fag, are you guys seein' this?"

"Tit, are you guys seein' this?"

Those are the only possibilities I can think of, anyway. I'm not up on NYC criminal slang, but all three of those sound rather unnatural to me. But hell, maybe they just swear funny in the Marvel Universe.

Here, a New York policeman asks some demonstraters with signs welcoming The Skrulls what's up, and the one of them sees some actual Skrulls approaching, and says "@#$, look!"

Again, what did he remark?

"Ass, look!"

"Fag, look!"

"Tit, look!"

Maybe "ass" is the new "damn" in New York swearing style..?

All-Star Batman, Robin the Boy Wonder, and @#$%-ing Batgirl, the @#$%-ing jailbait piece of @#$

This week's new comic book day was haunted by the absence of a comic book that wasn't on the shelves like it was supposed to be, the greatest comic book currently being published in the United States and maybe—just maybe—the single greatest acheivement of mankind since the discovery of fire. I speak, of course, of Frank Miller and Jim Lee's All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder.

The tenth issue was supposed to come out this week, and man, just seeing it's ridiculously long title show up on the Diamond shipping list last week filled me with joy. The last time we checked in with the Goddam Batman, he had painted himself yellow, made fun of Hal Jordan for ten pages, had Robin nearly murder the Green Lantern, and then the Dynamic Duo huddled together in a graveyard crying. How could Miller and Lee top that?

And then the news came: All-Star Batman wasn't going to be shipped to shops after all, and Diamond sent out an alert letting retailers know that DC was asking that any copies that do go out be destroyed.

As crushing as the disappointment of not getting to read an issue of The World's Greatest Comic Book Ever No Matter What It Said on Top of Fantastic Four In The Sixties was, the mind immediately began to reel. Why on earth was the book being recalled? Such things aren't unheard of, of course. DC did the same with an issue of League of Extraordinary Gentleman, in which Alan Moore used the word "douche," the most offensive word in the English language, and to an Elsewords special in which the indestructible Super-Baby gets into a microwave and remains unhurt because it wasn't a Kryptonite microwave.

Of course way back in that decade—um, last decade—DC still seemed to have publishing standards. That was before it became commonplace to see stuff like this in JLA comics, and Superman wouldn't appear on the covers of comics about brutal sex crimes.

But nowadays, what can't you have in mainstream DCU comics? Shameless upskrits of teenage girls Supergirl and Mary Marvel? Dr. Light talking about how he'd like to rape teenage super-girls? Dan Turpin calling The Mad Hatter an "asshole?" The Flash's goofy villains sniffing coke off of prostitues? Superboy torturing Mr. Mxyzptlk? Mary Marvel punching a dog's head off? All fair game.

And All-Star Batman is a book infamous for gleefully pushing the envelope to the trashiest places imaginable; it's kind of the whole point of the book. In the first nine issues we've already had Batman ask Robin if he was retarded, The Joker strangling a woman he's just had sex with, Wonder Woman calling a passerby a "sperm bank," Batman and Black Canary having illicit sex on a filthy dock after just meeting. What on earth could have occurred in the pages of All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder that would have exceeded all that?

The answer turned out to be both more shockingly insane than I would have ever imagined and pretty disappointingly prosaic.

It was just some swear words, which is the disappointing part.

Granted, they must have been the "worst" swear words, like that one that begins with an f, for example, and maybe even the C-word or the N-word, because "goddam," that word that caused Cather in the Rye some of its problems so long ago, has been used in the first nine issues of this book more often than the words Gotham, Joker, Robin or batarang so far.

I know I've talked about swearing in superhero comic books a lot already, so maybe everyone's sick of hearing me go on and on about it. I should note that here I don't see any reason to really forbid swearing, Batman and Robin being present or no (The argument can be made that Batman is a franchise more comfortable with dark, adult themes than most other superhero books, and you need to at least be a teenager to be able to buy this erratically scheduled book anyway. I would hope no comic shop employeed would ever sell any Frank Miller comic to a child. Just stamp this thing "Mature Readers" and Batman can be the goddam motherfucking Batman).

The fact that I have talked about comic book swearing so much lately is precisely why I wanted to post this though. Yesterday The Comics Journal's Dirk Deppey discussed the issue, and he summed up the tension inherent in superhero comics using swear words a lot more elegantly than I had been able to in the past: "DC’s creators are allowed to walk right up to the edge of the figleaf, but the figleaf must be respected nonetheless...it’s why those black bars are placed over the offending words that Miller writes, large enough to cover the majority of the lettering while still small enough to allow a tiny percentage of a few descenders and edges of letters to stick out, so that one can be sure of the words being censored." (Go read Deppey's piece if you haven't yet; he offers a funny conspiracy theory, and reason why there's actually no conspiracy there).

In discussing various strategies of comic book swearing, I generally don't think the "redaction bars" that were being used in All-Star Batman are a very good way to go for most comics, especiall the main-line "universe" comics of Marvel or DC, but it works here, having the effect of a bleeping sound over Jon Stwart swearing on The Daily Show, or the kids on South Park swearing. Employed often enough, with sustained enough bleeps, the bleeps themselves become jokes, irrespective of what is being bleeped out. (I don't know what was being "bleeped" out in All-Star or how often things were; it seems pretty clear that Batgirl was declaring herself "The fucking Batgirl!", and that one of the bad guys called her a "jailbeat piece of ass" and maybe even referred to her as...John McCain's alleged pet name for his second wife).

Which brings us to the completely insane part, which Tom Spurgeon unfortunately already beat me to pointng out: DC prints the comic with all the swear words in the dialogue balloons, and then puts all the black bars on top of them?!

Spurgeon puts it thusly, wondering if there's a good angle for someone to follow-up on still: "[P]rinting a word and then putting a block over it is totally freaking weird beyond anything any of us has ever heard before and all other speculative threads should be stopped while we all sit around and marvel over the sublime goofiness of this practice. Is someone pulling our leg here? Because this sounds insane."

Yes, yes it does sound insane (Spurgeon then goes on to wonder if this means artists also draw Superman naked before drawing his clothes on. I'm torn on this; it wouldn't suprise me if some artists actually did draw the characters naked before drawing clothes on them—Carlos Pacheco did that with some of Khyber's courtesans that actually got posted on Newsarama.com as part of a story about his pencil art on Superman a while back, actually—but then, since no superheroine ever seems to actually have nipples on her breasts and so few heroes seem to actually have penises under their trunks, maybe they do just draw the clothes atop stick figures.

Anyway, I am no intensely curious as to how All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder is lettered. Are there two letterers, one who puts down all the words and then one who covers up the offending ones? Do they print the actual words to make the redactions seem as perfect as possible? Would any three-letter word covered with a black bar look as much like "ass" covered with a black bar?

Spurgeon, Deppey, Newsarama, Comic Book Resources, someone get DC on the horn and ask them about this bizarre lettering practice, please.

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.

Warning: This post is totally full of swear words, and is thus NSFW (or for people who don't like the sailor-talk)

The above is a panel from Secret Invasion #5, depicting the superhero Hawkeye swearing vengeance on all Skrulls for the emotional wringer they had just put him through.

Obviously, it’s a rather goofily melodramatic panel taken out of context like this, and it’s pretty goofily melodramatic in context too. But the goofiest part is that writer Brian Michael Bendis has Hawkeye get so mad that he screams “Every @#$%ing last one of them!”

The persistence of swear words, obscured by the caps-locked number keys, in today’s comic books cracks me right the hell up.

It’s one thing to have characters swear the way that, say, Sarge does in Beetle Bailey, or Hagar in Hagar the Horrible, where it’s just a string of funny little symbols like lightning bolts and skulls mixed in with the @'s and %'s, with no clues to what they’re actually saying. But when Bendis uses the old @#$% style swears, he usually does it in such a context that it’s pretty clear what he meant to say anyway.

Hawkeye is clearly saying “Every fucking last one of them!” because that’s the only swear word that really makes sense in their, right? Bendis does this in his Avengers comics a lot: “@#$% you” is clearly “fuck you,” “Shut the @#$% up” is clearly “Shut the fuck up,” et cetera.

What I don’t really understand is why he bothers to do this. If you’re old enough to be able to read and understand that @#$% means a swear word, then you’ve heard swearing before and will just go ahead and read “fuck” in that panel with Hawkeye anyway. So not only is it the same as saying “fuck,” but it also draws attention to the fact that the writer/publisher is purposely not saying “fuck;” it’s a kind of worst of both worlds situation where the writer looks both crass and cowardly at the same time.

(Whether Marvel comics should have such language is perhaps another argument; they aren’t governed by the Comics Code Authority, they self-rate this particular comic as “Teen-Plus,” one really needs a full-time job to be able to afford Secret Invasion anyway, and is salty language any worse than scenes of shirtless Tigra being pistol-whipped in her bedroom on videotape? Or worse than our heroes totally murdering a bunch of people at the climax of this issue?)

And it’s so easily avoided, anyway. If Hawkeye simply screamed “Every last one of them!” in that panel, what would be lost, exactly, other than the comic strip swear word, reminding readers that as gritty, sexy, violent, morally ambiguous and “mature” as this Marvel comic may be, it’s still one that’s too immature to be allowed to swear like a grown-up comic?

Anyway, the reason I bring this up at all this month is because Bendis writes some pretty weird “@#$%” scenes in this issue. Because he uses those symbols so specifically, at a one “@#$%” –per-implied-word (or part of a word) ratio, you can almost always be sure of what the word is meant to be.

We’ve already mentioned that Hawkeye is probably saying “Every fucking last one of them!” Because “Every cocking last one of them!” doesn’t make sense.

Sometimes it’s slightly more ambiguous. For example, this scene of Agent Brand getting frustrated while trying to free Reed Richards before a bunch of Skrulls rush in and kill her:

She could be saying, “Fuck!” Or she could be saying, “Shit!” Both are perfectly contextually appropriate, commonly used four-letter words used to express frustration. (And here, if Bendis wanted to avoid the kiddie comic comparison, he could have just went with “Damn!” or “Crap!” or even a multi-word, "clean" expression of frustration, like, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…”)

There were a couple of instances where the one-to-one @#$% for swear word substitutions just don’t really make any sense. Or else some of these people just swear funny.

So, for example, here’s Agent Brand again, giving up on a plan to trick a roomful of Skrulls into abandoning ship and deciding to just open an airlock and suck them all out into space instead:

Now, contextually, “Eh, fuck it” would make the most sense. If I were Bendis, I might have just said “Eh, screw it” to avoid having to use the @#$% symbols at all, but “screw” isn’t a bad word. So he probably meant “fuck it.”

BUT! Note that the “@#$%%” used has not four characters, as the four-letter word “fuck” does, but instead has five. Therefore, Brand used a five letter swear word that is inappropriate for a comic book readership of “Teen-Plus.”

Whatever could she have said?

Most of the swear words you don’t seem to be able to say in a non-Max Marvel comic are four letters long: Fuck, shit, piss, cock and the, um, other c-word I can’t bring myself to type.

But a five-letter swear word? Let’s see…

“Eh, bitch it.”

Unlikely; I’m fairly certain “bitch” is okay in a “Teen-Plus” book, either as a noun or verb.

“Eh, pussy it.”

“Eh, prick it.”

Nah, neither of those make any sense.

“Eh, penis it.”

Now, “penis” isn’t really a swear word, but I imagine it’s one that Marvel heroes can’t say unless maybe, maybe they’re talking about an actual penis. But I don’t think they’d let Captain America say, “God, Iron Man, why are you being such a penis about this Registration Act?”

Of course, “Eh, penis it” doesn’t make any more sense than any of the other options, but it’s the last of the five-letter swear words I can think of.

Conclusion: Agent Brand swears funny.

The other odd swear word came from Ares, the Greek god of war who is currently serving on Iron Man’s Avengers team.

Engaged in a battle against Skrulls that think they’re Avengers, Ares rushes up behind a Skrull that thinks it’s Thor and is trying to convince the Avengers that he is actually the Odinson. Ares buries his battleaxe in him mid-speech, saying:

Note that there are only three characters in this swear word, eliminating the obvious “Shut your fucking hole!” Or less obvious “Shut your pissing hole!” or “Shut your shitting hole!”

A three letter swear word?

Did Ares say, “Shut your assing hole!” to Thor before smiting him?

The only other swear word I can think of that would have three letters would be “fag,” but if he attached an “-ing” to it, you’d also add a “g,” making it, “Shut your fagging hole!” That also eliminates “cum,” which, while not technically a swear word, is still something you wouldn’t hear Spider-Man and Wolverine talking about in a Marvel comic.

So, “Shut your assing hole!” it must be. That doesn’t make very much sense, but then I think Ares is probably the kind of guy who gets so angry that he gets flustered and says some pretty nonsensical stuff in the heat of battle.

Stuff like, “Shut your assing hole!”