Diving into Deadpool

According to popular twentieth century comic book artist/industry bad word Rob Liefeld in a recent Newsarama comment thread, his co-creations Cable and Deadpool are now “the center of the X-Universe and Deadpool is the most popular character in comics, soon to be fronting 4 monthly titles.”

That’s not remotely true, of course.

Even if you define “comics” as “American superhero comics,” Deadpool was outsold in August by titles featuring Captain America, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Wolverine’s son, Batman, Dick Grayson-as-Batman, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, The Flash Barry Allen, Batwoman and Batgirl III (That’s not counting team and ensemble titles, of which plenty of others out-sell Deadpool, but comparing Deadpool to The Fantastic Four or Justice League doesn’t seem fair).

And as for how many titles Deadpool fronts, Marvel’s only announced three (and how long will that last?). But even if it is four, Deadpool’s still not fronting as many as Batman, Superman (when he gets back in town), Wolverine and probably Spider-Man, depending on the month.

I thought it was kind of astonishing for Liefeld to be bragging about Deadpool’s current popularity, precisely because it seems so very surprising.

His relatively long-running (for modern comics) solo title was cancelled in 2000 at #69, to make way for short-lived Agent X, which featured a Deadpool-like character who ended up not being Deadpool. Whether it was cancelled originally due to low sales, or as part of an ill-advised rebranding that killed it, Deadpool was title-less for a few years, at which point he returned in Cable & Deadpool, which lasted fifty issues before getting axed.

When he got his own title again in 2008, it apparently proved successful enough to justify more and more Deadpool comics. From outside Marvel’s offices, it’s not clear why they feel comfortable putting out multiple Deadpool comic all of a sudden. The main title is selling respectably—50,000-ish units in August—but is hardly a hit book.

Maybe it’s a relatively rare instance of the character itself being popular enough to moves 50,000 books, so Marvel can hire writers and artists who don’t cost as much as those at the Mark Millar/Brian Michael Bendis level, and thus its cheaper for them to produce Deadpool, making it a more profitable book?

I have no idea.

But it seems quite remarkable that in so little time Deadpool went from sharing a title to having two ongoings—Deadpool and Deadpool: Merc With a Mouth—with a third one, Deadpool Team-Up, set to start publication next month.

What accounts for the sudden surge in relative popularity? I can’t guess.

Maybe it has something to do with his appearance in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which I haven’t seen yet, but which I understand features a Deadpool that’s pretty different than the comics version), or the announcement of an upcoming Deadpool movie starring Ryan Reynolds.

Maybe Marvel is just being extremely shrewd and short-term profit-oriented (surprise!). That is, perhaps someone at Marvel HQ noticed that the Deadpool solo was doing surprisingly well and/or making a lot of profits due to how cheap it was to produce compared to hit comics, and they decided to strike while the iron was hot and sell as many Deadpool comics as possible while Deadpool comics seem to be selling.

At any rate, hearing about all these new Deadpool title announcements has had me wondering about the character and his popularity. I thankfully missed his introduction in the nineties (I never liked Liefeld’s art, even as a teenager reading a couple of Image books), and have never been very interested in Marvel’s mutant comics.

As I’ve mentioned before, I could sort of see what people could see in the character. Aspects of his look and personality seemed borrowed from Spider-Man, but he also had guns and killed people like The Punisher, and, of course, he had ties to the X-Men, and a whole lot of people really liked the X-Men for a really long time. I just couldn’t see it for myself, because I never really looked.

A few months back, I finally got the opportunity to do so, when I was gifted a moving friend’s comics collection, which included a sizable run of Deadpool comics, with only a few holes here and there. It was among the first of that wheelbarrow full of old comics I read (runs of Cable, Gambit and some various X-Men comics are still in a pile, daring me to read them), in order to satiate my curiosity about the character.

So over the course of a couple of weeks, I worked my way through a bunch of Deadpool comics, and typed up my thoughts on them while doing so.


Deadpool #44

This is the earliest Deadpool issue I have, and although it’s from the summer of 2000, it’s worth noting just how much Marvel comics have changed during these past nine years.

The cover has the old, pre-little red box with white “Marvel” Marvel Comics logo, it has the little box in the upper left corner for a picture of the lead character (which I believe originated in response to the way comics used to be racked, in spinner racks. So even if most of the cover were obscured by the rack or the comic right below it on the rack, a browser would be able to spot the character in the corner), it only cost $2.25 and it was approved by the Comics Code Authority.

This story is entitled “Cat Trap (Or: Wakanda Merc Are You?),” and is the first part of a two-part crossover with Black Panther. It’s written by Christopher Priest, who was also writing Marvel’s Black Panther ongoing at the time, and drawn by J. Calafiore.

I like Priest quite a bit, and his superhero books are ones I’m always glad to find in back-issue bins (I managed to track down his whole Justice League Task Force run and have just about completed his run on DC’s The Ray, but have a long way to go with his Black Panther yet).

He’s one of those writers whose name I’m surprised I don’t see more often any more. He’s great with character, he’s very funny (often without being silly) and he seems to be constantly trying new and different ways to tell the same old stories.

As this story starts, Deadpool is apparently sharing an underground base with a couple of roommates—villains Titania and Constrictor—and as the story opens, it’s been infiltrated by The Reverent Michael Ibn al-hajj Achebe, whom as far as I can tell is basically just an off-brand Joker.

He hires Deadpool to kidnap the new Black Panther’s leopard, Preyy (with two y’s…not sure how that’s pronounced). The new Black Panther is, apparently, Erick Killmonger (Best. Name. Ever.), who is filling in for T’Challa while he…sits in a chair in some weird, undeground Wakandan Star Wars-looking labyrinth of wires and sci-fi stuff, I guess.

Anyway, it’s a whole lot of back-story, but I got through it without giving up and throwing the comic against the wall, as when I try reading X-Men comics form this period, so Priest is clearly doing something right.

The story itself is pretty simple. Because the new Black Panther, whom narrator Everet K. Ross calls “KillPanther” is hanging out with the Avengers during this period, Deadpool must fight the Avengers.

(In another sign of how old this comic is, The Avengers consist of Triathalon, Iron Man, Hank Pym, The Wasp, and She-Hulk.

So after a few pages of back-story filling-in, there’s a lot of rat-a-tat-tat banter between various players, and then a fight scene. Priest stays outside Deadpool’s head for the most part, so his craziness makes him seem more remote and amusing than when he’s played more sympathetically, as a point-of-view character.


Black Panther #23

“Cat Trap” continues in BP, which is drawn by Sal Velluto and Bob Almond (So now the characters all look bigger, rounder and more realistic than they did under Calafiore’s flatter, more jagged and compact figure work).

Deadpool and his roommates have been captured by The Avengers, who go to Wakanda looking for their captured teammate Triathalon (Deadpool teleported him along with Preyy).

Velluto’s Deadpool is really weird looking; the featureless face makes the head look extra tiny atop the titanic body Velluto gives his superheroes.

There’s a lot of fighting in this.


Deadpool #45

This is apparently the climax of Priest’s run on the title, in which the specific circumstances he set up are all taken away. Titania’s revealed to be, um, another character (I probably don’t need to worry about spoilers on nine-year-old comics, huh?), Deadpool and his roomies lose their pad, and a curse ‘pool’s been suffering from—in which he is given the face of Hollywood actor “Thom Cruz” is taken away.

Priest gets some gags out of that, but man, I hate when superhero comics half-use real celebrities and public figures like that. Either give him the face of Tom Cruise or don’t. You can say “Tom Cruise” in a comic book without getting sued, particularly in circumstances like these where it’s clear you’re not trying to pretend your Tom Cruise is the real Tom Cruise (Tom the Dancing Bug gets away with it pretty regularly). And if you’re afraid Cruise might be too litigious, try a different celebrity (Maybe Freddie Prinze Jr. woulda signed off? He was cool being in The Ultimates).

But by going with “Thom Cruz” it just calls attention to the fact that you’re—the writer, the editor, the company, the company’s lawyers, whoever—wants to make a particular joke, but is afraid to. And nothing is less funny than caution.


Deadpool#46-#48

This is the launch of a new creative team…or at least a new writer, Jimmy Palmiotti. It’s a three-part storyline entitled “Cruel Summer,” and it’s basically a noir-ish sort of crime story in which a femme fatale seduces Deadpool before turning on him.

It’s executed well enough, although the femme’s betrayal lacks much impact because it’s so hard fto imagine a beautiful woman seriously falling for Wade Wilson who, under his mask, has a Freddy Krueger-like face of red, peeling skin over various pits and boils.

What makes this story arc really special, however, is the art. It’s provided by Paul Chadwick, with Ron Randall on inks.

Man, look at this stuff:

Just gorgeous.


Deadpool #49

Palmiotti gets a writing partner in Buddy Scalera, and Chadwick is gone, replaced by Michael Lopez (Jon Holdredge replaces Randall on inks). This one’s entitled “Cat Magnet,” by which they mean “Pussy Magnet,” but apparently didn’t think they could get away with it (Still Comics Code approved, by the way).

Basically, the story consists of Deadpool, his scarred face disguised, meeting one remarkably scantily clad and sexually aggressive woman after another, often in unlikely places—including an ER nurse and a package delivery person. Deadpool would have to be stupid not to suspect that something is up, but if he does, Palmiotti and Scalera don’t share his suspicions with the reader.

As it turns out, each of these women are the same person, his shape-shifting ex-girlfriend Copycat. (Ah! So the title has a double meaning!)

The cover is by Kevin Nowlan. This run sure has a lot of great talent on covers. It also credits Chadwick and Randall on art, and fails to mention Scalera. Makes me wonder what was going on behind the scenes as these were coming out. The original creative team sure didn’t last in its original form very long at all.


Deadpool #50-#51

Check out these two covers, one by Arthur Adams, the other by Darick Robertson (The latter of whom even Bob Kane-inizes his signature. Neat).


Palmiotti and poor, never credited on the cover Scalera are joined by Darick Robertson on pencils (Holdredge is still inking).

That Robertson sure knows his stuff, and it’s nice to see his art on this old, grittier paper with more comic book-y coloring. There are none of the weird computer coloring effects that are endemic to Marvel comics these days. The skies are drawings of skies, not photos dropped in. Ditto the cityscapes and the moons. It’s all just nice, bold drawings, with nice, bold bright coloring. Beautiful.

This is probably the strongest of Palmiotti’s run (that I’ve read), in which he applies a standard element of superhero comics to Deadpool just to see what happens. In this case, it’s giving Deadpool a sidekick, Kid Deadpool.


Deadpool #52-#53

A two-parter featuring Deadpool versus two scantily clad, serial-killing twin teenage sisters with Barbie doll bodies. It’s pretty silly-bordering-on-stupid stuff, and it was in this issue that I noticed something that would grow to be a pet peeve of mine throughout this experience, the pop culture references.

They’re easy to make and can be funny, but they sure don’t have much shelf life. I think I noticed it here simply because the narration boxes mention Jennifer Lopez’ Oscar gown on the first page, and the second page has a character refer to the killer sisters as “those two Brittany-looking twins.” In 2001, “Brittany-looking” had a different meaning (and certainly different connocations!) than it does in 2009, and I wonder what it will mean, if anything, if this is read in 2019, or 2069 (I don’t think it will be, but still)

Oh, another new art team for this “Talk of the Town” storyline. It’s Anthony Williams and Andy Lanning, and their work is pretty nice.


Deadpool #54-#55

And now it’s time for a guest star! It’s a two-part Punisher story, drawn by Georges Jeanty and Holdredge. Two great covers, by the two artists probably best associated with The Punisher at this period in his career:

Deadpool doesn’t really translate to Tim Bradstreet’s realistic world as easily as Frank Castle does, does he?

This story is a continuation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s initial Punisher story, Welcome Back, Frank (which Palmiotti inked). It turns out, Ma Gnucci had a single, surviving relative, who would inherit all her money after her untimely death, so long as the condition of her will is met—her death must be avenged.

So Ma’s nephew Peter Gnucci hires Deadpool to kill The Punisher for him.

The two killers fight and fight and fight and—surprise!—neither of them dies.


Deadpool #56

It’s the end of another creative team’s run, although, to be fair, the word “team” might not really apply, given all the comings and goings. For this issue, Palmiotti himself is gone, and Scalera gets the sole writing credit. Karl Kerschl’s on art now, inking himself.

With this single issue, Scalera does a deck-clearing story along the lines of the one Priest provided at the end of his run, with all of the supporting characters being sent away from Deadpool, and his home again getting destroyed.

The issue is divided into two plots.

One follows Deadpool trying a variety of Wile E. Coyote-style traps to catch and kill a super-speedster named “The Street Speeder,” whose costume is yellow and blue and who says little other than “Meep meep” (GET IT?!).

The other follows Copycat disguised as Deadpool to go on a date with and then beat the hell out of an X-person. Siryn, I think. I suppose I should be thankful I got this far without a single reminder that Deadpool is technically an X-Men character.

This, by the way, is the first one without the Comics Code Authority stamp of approval on the cover. There’s no Marvel replacement rating either though.


Deadpool #57-#59

The title received a pretty radical makeover with #57, and I wonder if it caused much—or even any—confusion among comic shop patrons the week it was released. It certainly confused me, when I sat down to try and put all the Deadpool comics in order to read.

Marvel ditched the logo with the character image in the corner (the image shape had, over the months, shifted from a rectangular one to a circular one). The new logo is in a completely different smaller, thinner font, and is actually much smaller than the name of the storyline. In fact, based on the logo, it seems like it is an entirely different book, one called Deadpool: Agent of Weapon X.

Adding to the confusion is the big #1 on the cover, with a smaller “57” under it. So this looks like the first issue of a new series, but it is actually the fifty-seventh issue of an old series in disguise (This doesn’t seem to be a matter of Marvel relaunching and retaining their old numbering, as they sometimes did, because “Agent of Weapon X” and this weird numbering only lasted three issues).

The covers for these three issues, by the way, are by original Weapon X series artist Barry Windsor Smith, and they are thus fairly awesome.

Here’s the cover of #58, in which Smith must draw a trio of terrible costume designs:
Deadpool’s temporary new look makes him look like a little KGBeast, doesn’t it?

The new writer is Frank Tieri, and the new, more steady art team is Georges Jeanty and Holdredge.

Tieri seems on pretty sure footing with all the Marvel super-people and shadow organization intrigue, and while his version of Deadpool is a zany, agent-of-chaos type of character, the rest of the narrative doesn’t conform around Deadpool’s personality. That is, the story would be pretty straightforward and serious if you plucked out Deadpool and plopped in, say, Wolverine, which is probably how it should be.

While I like the way Tieri constrains the comedy to Deadpool’s character instead of the structure of the book in general, I don’t think his Deadpool is particularly funny, and he seems to go for an abundance of pop culture gags. In Deadpool’s very first panel, for example, he mentions that “Barbie Girl” song (the existence of which I had completely forgotten), Liberace, VH1’s Behind The Music, Magilla Gorilla, The Weakest Link and Gilbert Gottfried.

The plot involves the old Weapon X re-starting as a free agency, offering alumni like Sabretooth and Deadpool amped-up powers and resources if they come to work for them. In Deadpool’s case, he gets his face back, but he can’t reconcile working with Sabretooth, who’s been killing and eating people left and right, and some of the other bad guys—especially the agency sets its sites on his ex.

Sabretooth totally murders her, by the way.


Deadpool #62

I’m missing two issues, including the final “Agent of Weapon X” one (presumably, he avenges Copycat without actually killing Sabretooth), and the first issue of the next arc, which is also designed to look like a stand alone miniseries.

This one’s called “Funeral For a Freak,” and once again has the little confusing numbering going on. (This is also, by the way, the first cover featuring the little image of a red, white and blue ribbon above the silhouette of the World Trade Center towers. I guess I never noticed when these first arrived on Marvel covers and when they went away, but they seemed to be there for a while).

Tieri, Jeanty and Holdredge engage in an odd mid-nineties, “Death of Superman” era parody, in which Deadpool is seemingly killed (he actually just has amnesia and is living on the streets) and is replaced by four different new Deadpools. No idea how it started or ended, as I only have the second and third parts of the arc.


Deadpool #67

In some ways, this is the best of the Deadpool issues I read, as it’s the first in which the writing is very sharp and the art’s really great.

It’s written by Gail Simone, who is perfectly at home writing superheroics and comedy simultaneously, and the art comes courtesy of Udon studios—I’m not sure who does what on art chores, as the credits don’t parcel out credit by the task, but from pencil to colors its all well done, boasting the look of anime cels-as-panels that Udon was doing so well at the time.

Having missed a few issues, it seems Deadpool’s status quo has changed quite a bit again, but it wasn’t too difficult to feel my way through the issue. Deadpool is hanging on to a shrunken Rhino, whom he’s using as a key chain, and is tasked with body-guarding Dazzler, in all her disco roller-skating glory.

While this is the all-around best creative team I’ve read on the book, even they didn’t last long. According to comics.org, they took over with #65, and the series was canceled with #69.

Some old first issues I've recently read

Captain America: Dead Men Running #1 (Marvel Comics) I was pretty excited to finally find a copy of this comic, as I somehow missed it the first time around, despite the fact that it featured cover art by Derek Hess, the Cleveland-based rock poster artist (and avowed Captain America fan). The interior art comes from Danijel Zezelj, and while there's obviously a bit of a gulf between the two men's respective styles, they're at least close enough on the spectrum that a reader shouldn't get whiplash when they open the cover and start reading.

I was pleasantly surprised by the comic, perhaps because I was expecting it to not be very good—I guess I've mentally sorted modern Captain America history into Brubaker and pre-Brubaker, with the former being the good stuff, and the latter the bad. But this issue read an awful lot like a Vertigo style comic that just so happened to feature a Marvel character in it (quite a few of the Marvels from the first years of this decade read like that actually, on account of Marvel hiring Vertigo editors, writers and artists to work on their comics; these creators among them).

Darko Macan scripts this one, and the focus is on a small group of American soldiers and some little kids lost in a jungle, surrounded by enemies, and beginning to despair tha they're not going to get out of this alive. That's when a U.S. military plane drops a single man in a parachute off, not far from where they're lost. But of what help can a single man really be in their dire straights, they wonder aloud. Ha ha, buck up guys, that one man is Captain America! Hooray!

After a middle section in which Captain America is viewed through these soldiers' eyes, there's a few twists near the end that flip the script in an intriguing way. I wanted to get the next two issues in the miniseries, not just because there were two more Hess covers on them,
but because I wanted to see what would happen next. And in serial comics storytelling, that's exactly what you want your readers to feel like when they get to that "to be continued" in the last panel.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Marvel ever collected this into a trade, either because it's only three-issues long, or because Macan and Zezelj don't have names that move trades the way other cover credits do. Collect this book Marvel. I promise to buy it!


El Diablo #1 (DC/Vertigo) Speaking of Zezelj and Vertigo comics, here's a Veritgo comic illustrated by Zezelj from 2001. Brian Azzerello handles the script, in which DC's old Western hero is kept off-panel for the bulk of the first issue, appearing as little more than a silhouette when he appears at all. They play up the otherworldy aspects of the original iteration of the character, to the point where he seems to almost certainly be a ghost or spirit of some kind—or at least a super-sneaky dude who is a really, really good shot.

The protagonist is a former bounty hunter who settled into a new role as the sheriff of a town, and he finds himself being forced to go back to hunting men when El Diablo rides into town and slaughters a bunch of outlaws.

There's obviously something in the sheriff's past that links him to El Diablo, but Azzarello teases it with a few sensational clues without revealing it in this first issue. Again I found myself eager to see what happened next, although this time I'm in luck—there is a trade collection of the miniseries, although no local library has it.

It can be pretty weird reading a Vertigo comic from the late-nineties or early-aughts and thinking of how incredibly tame they are, even compared to mainstream DCU books these days. For example, last week's Batman: Widening Gyre #1 featured several pages of Etrigan the Demon eating severed heads and other body parts and a Poison Ivy whose entire costume consists of a leaf over her vagina. I didn't see any mature readers stamp on that. El Diablo #1 did have a little "suggested for mature readers" tag on the cover, but the only "mature" bits I noticed were one instance apiece of the words "fuck" and "pussy," and a sex scene in which you can see part of a man's ass in one panel.


The Hood #1 (Marvel/Max) Now is probably a poor time to try reading the first issue of this 2002 miniseries by Bryan K. Vaughan, Kyle Hotz and Eric Powell. Over the past few years, Brian Michael Bendis has used Vaughan's character extensively in his Avengers comics, first building him up as a sort of Kingpin of super-crime, then involving him in some sort of magical storyline (I'd dropped New Avengers by this point), and making him a key player in the post-Secret Invasion, "Dark Reign"-branded Marvel Universe, where he sits at a table with such archvillains as The Green Goblin, Loki and Dr. Doom.

If his current ubiquity and the primacy of Bendis' flatter, more generic bad guy version of the character taints the original Hood story, this first chapter gets off relatively easy, as The Hood isn't The Hood yet, but still just Parker Robinson, a low-level crook and pretty scummy individual who nevertheless loves his ailing mother and girlfriend enough to lie to them and try to make enough fast money to help them out.

This issue is pretty much all Parker actually, and there's relatively little Marvelous going on. A plainclothes Electro shows up at a bar, and a Hydra recruiter gets a beatdown from Parker and a friend as payback for 9/11 (Not that Hydra was responsible, but they are a terrorist organization, and Vaughan uses the incident to draw a line between Parker and really evil pricks).

We basically follow him through a night in his life. He visits his mom in a hospital/sanitarium, he meets a friend at a bar and learns about a smash-and-grab job, he visits a prostitute, he visits his pregnant significant other, he goes to rob a warehouse but finds instead of a shipment some kind of monster wearing a red cloak and boots, he kills it and takes its clothes, and he then discovers they hold some kind of power while he tries to flee muggers.

Vaughan's pretty good at this sort of character-focused work, and he can be a very clever writer when it comes to dialogue and setting up certain scenes (I was struck by how he out-Bendises Bendis when it comes to a street-level Marvel Universe crime story; the subject matter and situations are familiar to the sorts of stories Bendis has often written for Marvel, but the dialogue is all much more natural sounding).

He's also lucky enough to be working with some talented artists with unique styles. Hotz has a cartooniness to his work, but not a silly or child-like sort of cartooniness. His work is a bit abstracted, but it retains a hard edge. It's loose and fun, but perfectly effective, and serves Vaughan's script well.

This is a Max series, with a big old "explicit content" warning on the front, but all that's explicit is the language. The only difference between this and, say, a Bendis-written Marvel book is that when a character says "fuck" or "pussy," it appears as "fuck" or "pussy," instead of "@#$%" or "@#$%&." It's also only $2.99, rather than the $3.99 price tag that Marvel's Max books were the first to carry.

I was eager to see how the magical boots and cloak would effect Parker's life, but I didn't have the next five issues. There is a trade of it, although not anywhere nearby.


Ruse #1 (CrossGen) I bet there's a fascinating and funny book to be written about the short-lived publisher CrossGen, although I don't know if anyone will ever write such a book, because a) I have a feeling all of the employees may have signed some kind of wacky non-disclosure form gagging them from talking about what went on in the CrossGen Compound and b) comics professionals seem to hate to say anything bad about one another and/or their employers, on account of how small the industry is.

My own exposure to the publisher's work is extremely limited (although I've got a whole stack of Sojurn with art by—ugh—Greg Land sitting there in the corner now, thanks to the same collection from which all of the books in this post came from). I think I read a few issues of something involving swords and a boat drawn by George Perez, and at least one other issue of Ruse.

I remember kinda liking that issue, although I think CrossGen imploded shortly afterward. I did kinda like this issue too.

The premise is on the simple side, but it's extremely well executed. What if Sherlock Holmes lived in the CrossGen Universe, and Dr. Watson was a hot chick with a time-stopping super-power she's trying to keep secret? That's it, really. Maybe writer Mark Waid's version of Sherlock Holmes, Simon Archard, is a bit more of a total cock than Holmes though. As someone who's only read a couple of Doyle's original stories assigned in school, I'm most familiar with Holmes from various movies, and his cock-ishness seems to vary from film to film. But Archard? Total cock.

Of course, you might be a total arrogant prick with no social skills if you were as smart as Archard is. (Batman's a real asshole, for example, and like Archard and Holmes, he's a master of detection and deduction).

In this over-sized first issue, we meet him and his blonde assistant Emma during the drawing room climax of a mystery we weren't privy too. The murderer attempts to make his escape, and Archard kicks his ass and saves a helpless hostage in a pretty dramatic action scene in which stopping the bad guy and saving the girl seem completely impossible to everyone but Archard.

From there, we learn a bit more about our protagonists, including the fact that Emma has some kind of crazy super-power that she's not supposed to use under any circumstances, since once she uses it she'll expose herself and/or lose a bet or something.

The pair then attend a fancy party, take on an extremely difficult case, solve it and determine there's much more to said case than was originally apparent, the comic ending with a cliffhanger climax in which another lady with another crazy super-power appears.

The crazy super-powers are a bit jarring at first, as is the setting, which looks like Victorian England under a different name, but it's actually some sort of sci-fi facsimile, I guess (also, there are a little race of gargoyles that flie around, which no one seems to pay too much attention too). The sci-fi elements seemed to come out of left-field to me, but I put that down to my own unfamiliarity with the CrossGen line. Perhaps if I was reading this as it was originally released and intended to be read, I'd know it's set on a particular planet or in a particular dimension or whatever.

Anyway, if you can roll with that, it's solid, solid work. Waid's Archard is a fun character, the sort that's 50 steps of everyone in certain arenas, but at the expense of being socially inept (Emma is as much as social buffer for Archard as she is his assistant), Emma is an appealing point-of-view character, and Waid's presentations of various mysteries and their solutions is clever.

Butch Guice's art, inked by Mike Perkins and colored by Laura DePuy, is gorgeous, maybe more gorgeous than usual. I'm having trouble recalling where I've seen it look brighter and sharper.

The Melancholic Spider-Man

All the original Marvel characters had their own adjectives—the Fantastic Four was, obviously, fantastic. Thor was mighty, the Hulk was incredible, Iron Man was invincible, the X-Men uncanny and Spider-Man was, at first, amazing. He would later be sensational and friendly neighborhood, as well.

But he was never depressing. At least, he never starred in a comic book called The Depressing Spider-Man, but that's only because someone thought Peter Parker: Spider-Man had a better ring to it. Last night I sat down with three issues of the book from 2001, and by the time I finished the third one I had almost completely lost my will to live.

Now, I don't know if Peter Parker: Spider-Man #33-#35 are representative of writer Paul Jenkins' run on the title or not, but they are some incredibly downbeat comic books. Like, so downbeat I'm not even sure why they exist. Well, I can sort of almost kind of see the logic that since this was the title with Spidey's secret identity's name right there in the title that they'd want to focus on his inner, emotional life over his superheroic exploits but, my God, not like this, not like this!

Issue #33 bears a cover of young Peter Parker and not-dead-yet Uncle Ben at a ball game. It's drawn by Humberto Ramos, and it's a kinda funny image. You see Pete got konked on the head by a flyball and is seeing stars, while various game-goers react to that and other events in exaggerated, cartoonish ways.

Kinda looks like it might be a fun comic, right?

Then you turn the cover and, on the first page, Spider Man is clinging to the spire of a skyscraper, thinking about how fast time is moving now that he's getting older, and, in th elast panel on the page, we see his unmasked face, his eyes filling with tears, and his narration box reads: "This is the day my Uncle Ben died."

Uh-oh.

Page two, Aunt May visits Ben's grave. The next twenty? Peter goes to a Mets game by himself, all the while flashing back to ones he attended with Ben as a kid and the life lessons he learned at those games, including the last one they attended together—just three days before Ben died!

Okay, well, that was a bit of a downer, I thought, but not a bad piece of super-melodrama, really.

On to #34. This one's got Spider-Man on the cover, doing something Spider-Man-ish, plus a guy with glowing blue laser eyes. This one's gotta be a more standard superhero book, right? (And by "standard superhero book" I mean not completely focused on the brevity of human life).

The first three pages deal with a couple of monks freaking out about another of their order having escaped the monastery. Apparently, he's a mutant of some kind with the Cyclops-like problem of laser blasting and killing whoever he looks at. And he's on the loose!

Meanwhile, in the city, Aunt May gives Peter a used set of salt and pepper shakers shaped like an angel and a devil, which Jenkins writes into the story specifically to set up a sight gag referencing the angel on one shoulder, devil on the other cartoon staple. For some reason, artist Mark Buckingham draws the shakers huge though. Like, they're the size of jars.

Peter is at this point still married to Mary Jane, but they're separated (geographically but not legally, if I remember millennial Spider-marriage status quo correctly), and he's not sure if he should go on a date-like outting with his sexy neighbor, although he eventually decides to go to a neighborhood fun fair with her.

That's where the laser-eyed monk is heading. He kills a whole bunch of people by looking at them, he fights Spider-Man a bit, but, in the end, he gets aboard one of those, tilting, spinning amusement park rides that's a bit like a giant cup you stand in and while it spins around (here called "The Wall of Death").

The specifics of his eye whammy are that a) it only goes off if he's standing upright as opposed to laying down and b) the longer he keeps his eyes open, the more life-energy he expends and the closer he gets to death.

He wants to ride this ride simply because it allows him to see the stars as he expends all his energy in looking at them, and dies. Spider-Man, hero that he is, fails to save the suicidal laser-eyed monk.

So this is essentially a done-in-one story about a mutant monk committing suicide right in front of Spider-Man. William (that's the monk's name) sees the stars, but also sees God (William switches pronouns from I see "them" to I see "Him" as he dies). Spider-Man looks down at the dead monk, and then up at the night sky, and envies him: "All I see are little points of light against a big black blanket. A vast shroud of nothing, infinitely far away. Somes I wish I could be as lucky as William."

Presumably Jenkins means Spidey's an atheist and wishes he could believe like William could believe. Or perhaps he wishes he were dead, and put out of the misery that is his life? After 40 pages of vicariously living it, I can understand where he's coming from.

Sheesh. Well surely Jenkins will lighten things up next issue, right? He can't keep providing emotionally punishing stories month in and month out. No one reads Spider-Man comics to be bummed right the hell out, after all.

So that brings us to #35, on which Ramos draws Spider-Man sitting with his chin on his knee (uh-oh) talking to a little boy about something. Fuck. I bet it's something sad, isn't it?

That little boy is excitedly running home from school on the first page to tell his mom that he got invited to a classmate's birthday party, but inside he finds her laying face down on the couch of their filthy apartment, beer cans and an empty bottle of gin piled around her.

"Momma. I got home from school," he tells her sadly, awakening her. When he asks where dinner is, she says she has a headache and it's in the fridge before shes passes out again. He goes to the fridge, but all he finds are two cans of beer in it.

Jesus. Spider-Man doesn't appear until page five, and man, even Spider-Man's not gonna help any here. The boy goes to his room and fishes a collectable Spider-Man card out of a box under his bed, and suddenly Spider-Man appears with a, "Heya, Secret Sidekick!"

The boy, Lafronce, tells Spider-Man all about his day, and Spidey tells him about the villains he fought. But it's not really Spider-Man! No, it's the imaginary Spider-Man that Lafronce summons to hang out with him as a way of coping with his miserable life.

We wallow in Lafronce's terrible life for a few more scenes. Here he is at school drawing his hero Spider-Man hanging out with he and his mom, there are his aunt and uncle arguing with the principal that he should have Lafronce taken away from his mother, here he is coming home from school again this time finding a mean man beating on his mom, here's imaginary friend Spider-Man again, and there's a social worker talking about how he's doing everything he can for Lafronce over the phone, while we see him at a golf course.

Then one day Lafronce goes home and finds his mom's body being removed from their apartment. Apparently she's been dead for three months, and Lafronce was living with her the whole time?(!?!)

At the end of the story, he has another conversation with imaginary Spider-Man who is apparently going to quit being his imaginary friend now, and when he's ready to leave Lafronce, imaginary Spider-Man says "Big men don't hug each other when they part ways..they shake hands."

Ready for the last page surprise ending? Spider-Man has removed his glove and mask to shake hands with Lafronce and...Spidey's a black man!
It's a neat image to be sure, and certainly a surprise ending. Perhaps Jenkins is trying to say something about how we project ourselves into our heroes, or want them to be like us, all I could really think was Jesus, if Lafronce actually got to meet his hero like that, would that be just one more disappointment to learn that Spidey is actually just an ineffectual, whiny white kid?

Part of me wouldn't mind reading more of Jenkins' run on this title just to see if it's all like this, and part of me hopes I never come across any more. I don't think I can stand to read any more about the human misery and suffering in Spider-Man's world. After all, isn't that what all the comics set in our world are for?

So which ones are the good Transformers comics?

Like many millions of Americans, I paid actual cash money to go see a movie called Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen last month. And then I went home, curled myself into a little ball in the back corner of a dark room, and rocked back and forth, weeping for our world.

I don’t really want to talk about the film, as the wounds it inflicted on my mind and on my soul are still too fresh. Seeing it did send me on a bit of a Transformers jag though, and I re-watched the admittedly not-very-good 1986 Transformers: The Movie



(although, credit where credit’s due, the opening two-minute scene, in which Unicron floats between the red and blue suns to devour a planet full of robots, is a better bit of film-making than anything in either of the two live-action flicks), and I then turned to my longboxes to re-read some of the Transformers comics I had acquired during the toy-turned-multimedia franchise’s early 21st century resurgence in popularity.

To my (mild) surprise, these comics weren’t very good.

By “these comics” I’m referring to the Dreamwave Productions ones, some of which I really liked when they first came out. These consisted of two “G1” miniseries, followed by a short-lived G1 ongoing. There were others that I had bought and read—a miniseries sub-titled The War Within and the Armada series based on the terrible cartoon with an extremely cool line of toys—but I didn’t care for them the first time around, so I had no desire to reread them.

Actually, all of the Dreamwave books were apparently pretty bad. The ongoing and second mini were deathly dull, full of far too many panels like this. The first series wasn’t great or anything, but it held up okay. Of course, it was powered exclusively by nostalgia—it was all the toys I grew up playing with, all the robots I spent the half-hour before G.I.Joe came on at 4:30 p.m. watching after my grade school day had ended, back and appearing in a medium I now prefer to toy or cartoon. The premise of the book was even that the Transformer robots from the ‘80s, having long lain dormant and assumed destroyed and lost, had returned to renew their war.

I knew that IDW had since acquired the license for the comics, but I hadn’t been reading their books at all (In addition to having gotten my fill via Dreamwave’s books, IDW’s were too highly-priced for me). I had read their initial Infiltration miniseries in a black-and-white digest while sitting in a bookstore a few years back, and liked that well enough. I sought out what was available at the library, and got another IDW collection, this one entitled Transformers: Stormbringer. It was by Simon Furman and Don Figueroa, and dealt with the origins of the Transformers race war, and how they came to planet earth in this new, IDW continuity.

I suppose it was an okay read, but it really struck me how weird it was that it was basically just a sci-fi, space opera type of story that just so happened to be branded as a Transformers series. The characters were all robots, and they shared the (often super-silly) names with the various toys, and, on occasion, a few of them did transform, but, for the most part, there was nothing in the story that necessitated it being about transforming robots.

Maybe that sort of seriousness is what some people liked about it—I understand that Furman and Figueroa are pretty popular among Transfans—but it struck me as kind of pointless. If you’ve got the Transformers license and are telling stories about giant robots defined by their ability to transform into vehicles, and your story could just as easily be told with a cast of humans or talking space baboons or fungus people instead, well, you’re not really making the most of things, are you?

I’m open to reading more IDW Transformer comics (provided I don’t have to pay for ‘em), but I was pretty disappointed that while they were a bit better than the Dreamwave ones (and thousands of times better than the live action movies), they still weren’t very good.

So what are the good Transformers comics? Surely there must be some, right? I mean, they’ve been publishing them for over 20 years now, they can’t all be bad, right?

I naturally assumed that the best Transformers comics must be the original Marvel ones then. That would explain why the comics license has remained active; the originals must have been so good that they left fond memories with a whole generation of readers, still eager to continue the experience.

As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t really read comics growing up, usually only when relatives brought some home from the drugstore along with a filled prescription when I was home from school sick or something. I had only read one Marvel Transformer comic before, #17, of which all I really remembered was that the cover was pretty terrifying and that it was set on Cybertron and featured Blaster, the lame, Autobot version of Soundwave (I don’t know if it was just me or what, but with the exception of the Dinobots, I kind of hated all the Autobots—none of them were really anywhere nearly as cool as their Decepticon enemies, either in their designs, or voices or characters).

I was thus very excited to find a handful of old, battered, yellowed Marvel Transformer comics in the large comics collection recently bequeathed to me. Now I would discover whether Marvel’s were indeed the good stuff or not (Although recent evidence has emerged on the Internet that they probably weren't).

Well, six issues later, I’ve discovered that these comics aren’t very good either. I daresay they may be better than the other ones I’ve read though, at least in so much as that they were mostly done-in-one, easy-ish to follow and many of them at least had something to with the Transformers being unique lifeforms and/or revolve around Transformers issues of race wars, civil war and being unwelcome visitors on planet earth. The bulk of the Dreamwave and IDW comics I recently read, on the other hand, dealt with religious cults among the Transformers for some reason.

This has, by the way, all been an incredibly long-winded way of saying that I’m going to spend some time over the next few weeks or months taking a closer look at Marvel’s Transformers via these back issues, since I might as well try to make some use out of them.

So, first up is 1986’s Transformers #44, which contains “The Cosmic Carnival” by writer Bob Budiansky, penciler Frank Springer and inker Danny Bulanadi.
The cover certainly looks promising, containing as it does a robot beast fighting a reptilian monster on top a speeding semi truck while a robot on a motorcycle speeds straight into the truck’s grill. Also, explosions.

It opens with a splash page of a long, serpentine space ship, with beams of light shooting from its length at random intervals. Budiansky’s narration is actually pretty cool, so long as you remember to read it in the voice of the narrator of Transformers: The Movie, you know, the voice that says “It is the year 2005…” in the clip I linked to above:

From somewhere in deepest space it comes—A rippling serpent of cold, pitted steel. Its origin is unknown…its destination unclear. Only pinprick shafts of light disturb the dark monotony of its patchwork-plate skin…revealing nothing of their true purpose…or their sources.

It’s pretty purple, but no more purple than your average superhero comic of today that still employs narration.

“In a nearby sector, a far more familiar spacecraft continues its journey,” says the narrator on the next page, in a panel showing a spacecraft completely unfamiliar to me. Apparently, it is the Autobot starcruiser Steelhaven, traveling between Nebulos and Earth (Nebulos, by the way, was the name of the planet that the title character in IDW’s Stormbringer tried to destroy, I think).

Aboard the ship are Optimus Prime, Goldbug (who is apparently Bumblebee 2.0), some Autobots that don’t play any part in the story, and some humanoid natives of Nebulos, who underwent “the Powermaster process.”

One of them was actually named Lube. Oh, to be nine-years-old and not find the word “lube” completely hilarious!
Optimus is putting on a little holographic light show for the Nebulans about the sad state of affairs of the Transformers, while high-collared Nebulan HI Q gets in on the exposition game, when suddenly another holographic light show intrudes upon the ship.

It is an ad for a space circus (that’s what those lights from the ship on the first page were, ads being beamed from a space circus train), and the circus looks completely insane:

Seriously, take a good, long, hard look at some of the featured attractions. For example, one of them is an octopus riding a unicycle while balancing a gigantic dragon on a super long crutch/pole.

The Autobots are all WTF until they spot the Autobot Sky Lynx near the tail end of the ad. That’s him, the thing that looks like a cross between a pterodactyl and a space shuttle. He’s named Sky Lynx, even though space shuttles fly in space rather than the sky, and he doesn’t look anything remotely like a Lynx. You can tell he’s not a G1 Transformer based solely on his name.

Optimus decides to figure out what one of his warriors is doing performing in a circus when it should be working towards his ultimate goal of Decepticon genocide, so he and Goldbug pay the steep admission needed to investigate.

Among the cages and displays at the sideshow, they make an unexpected discovery:
When the children refuse to perform tricks for the crowd, their human keeper and carnival barker type Berko shoos the crowd away and scolds the children. The ‘bots try to free them, only to discover their cell is electrified.

Optimus demands to spake to the manager, so Berko introduces them to Mr. Big Top…

…seen here smoking a cigar that looks to be about the size of Optimus. Note the giant ashtray in the foreground.

Mr. Big Top informs them that the kids and Sky Lynx have all signed a contract and are here voluntarily as performers, and gives them passes for the show.

Optimus is still suspicious:
In fact, he thinks there’s “More than meets the eye” to the goings on at the circus.

Hmm, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before…
Oh, right.

Mr. Big Top slithers into the spotlight in the center ring to introduce “the star of our show—that metallic master of aeral acrobatics—Sky Lynx!”

In pterodactyl form, S.L. swoops o ut of cage, and, in a very confusing panel, transforms into a weird, bestial form (a lynx, I guess?), jumps around a bit on some high platforms, and then dives toward the ground in lynx mode, only to transform into a space shuttle and glide safely to the ground.

Backstage, Optimus and Goldbug talk to S.L. and learn how he came to be here. He was apparently flying the children through space when they saw the ad for the circus and went to check it out. When Berko discovered that they had no money to pay admission, he struck a deal with them, wherein they exchange their services for admission.

But as long as they’ve been there, they haven’t been able to work off their debt, and the children are trapped in an electrified cage that will blow up if anyone but Berko tries to open it.

This is a comic book with an important moral for children: Never sign a contract until after you’ve read the fine print. Also, you might want to have your lawyer look it over first.

When Berko comes to break up all the chatting, Optimus and Goldbug ask him to release Sky Lynx and the children, and, unprompted, Berko launches into a flashback of his own, telling how he went from being a common earth hobo to Mr. Big Top’s right tentacle man:
Optimus Prime, master negotiator, manages to sway Berko with a simple one-sentence offer to give him a ride back to Earth:
They launch a plan. While Berko releases the children using his special electronic key and they all pile into Goldbug, Optimus turns into a semi and he and Sky Lynx have a page-long fight with the other circus performers:

The audience loves it!
Mr. Big Top isn’t about to let his star attraction drive away in a Volkswagen, however, and kicks Goldbug’s ass, and pulls the humans out of him.

I love how he holds the teddy bear in one of his tentacles too, as if he thinks it is one of his foes.

While Big Top is threatening his former employee, Goldbug puts himself in reverse and WHOMP, Mr. Big Top gets locked in the cage.
Together the Autobots, children and Berko return to the Autobot starship and they all head for earth, where the Autobots will resume their mission to exterminate the Decepticons, the children to reunite with their parents, and Berko to resume being a hobo, albeit now one in a spiffy purple costume.


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

Speaking of giant transforming robots, were you aware of the existence of these two films?





Suddenly the Go-Bots don't seem so bad anymore, do they?

The patrons of the Hold It Inn bar in New Jersey aren't very bright

Okay, so a huge, heavily-muscled, pissed-off guy with weird hair, a pair of some kind of crazy shoulder pads and a wrist-mounted crossbow comes into the bar and their first impulse is to make fun of him?

Granted, he hasn't quite made it apparent that he's completely insane just yet—he has two personalities, a fancy-talking smart guy named Donald and a violent, stuttering thug named Roadpig—and he did live his huge-ass cinder block-topped club outside with his motorcycle, but still, dude doesn't exactly have the Safe To Fuck With aura about him, does he?

Now, in the defense of the Hold It Inn patrons, Donald/Roadpig did order a plate of chocolate doughnuts from a bar. What kind of bar serves doughnuts? By the plate full, no less?

At any rate, three panels and a SPLAT! CRUNCH CRACK! later, two of Roadpig's tormentors go flying through the front window and the others are eating his boots and fists.

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

That scene was from 1989's G.I. Joe #83, by Larry Hama, Ron Wagner and Fred Fredericks. It was in the stash of old comics I received last week, and one of the handful of issues of Marvel's old G.I. Joe comics I actually bought and read as a little kid.

I remember it very clearly, because of this particular panel:


I thought that panel was totally hot when I was 12. Not only could you can see Zarana's bare mid-riff and left shoulder as usual, but you could also see a small part of her left breast! Wow!

While Young Caleb had a thing for Zarana, the pink femullet-ed Dreadnok and sister of Zartan, it paled next to the crush he had on his true love of the G.I. Joe universe:
Lady Jaye, seen here in a one-panel appearance in the very same issue.

The cartoon version of Lady Jaye was even hotter than the comic book version, as she had a much cooler hair cut on the TV show:
See?

I'm hopeful that IDW will eventually collect the entire 155-issue Marvel G.I. Joe series, in large part so I can find out what happens in this particular issue:
It sure looks promising.

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

Found in another old issue of Marvel's G.I. Joe series:

This was on one of Marvel's Bullpen Bulletin pages. You can read his responses to a variety of questions if you click on the image. I didn't realize just how long Dwayne McDuffie's been working in comics. It was very cool to read this and see that he had listed his "greatest unfulfilled ambition in the comics field" as writing Fantastic Four. About 20 years later, he got his chance to do so during a short but very successful post-Civil War, pre-Mark Millar/Bryan Hitch run on the title.