Review: World War Hulk: X-Men

Despite the title, the three-issue World War Hulk: X-Men miniseries only accounts for the first 66 pages of this 240-page trade paperback. Also included are two issues apiece of Avengers: The Initiative, Ghost Rider and Iron Man, with one issue of The Irredeemable Ant-Man. Each of these tied into the "World War Hulk" event/story, and are supposedly not alluded to at all in the title of the collection for the same reason they put Wolverine on the cover instead of the rest of the X-Men. It's what they think will sell the most volumes.

If you've never read it, World War Hulk was a 2007 five-issue crossover miniseries that pitted a righteously angry Hulk versus Civil War heavies Iron Man and Reed Richards, plus Blackbolt, Dr. Strange and the rest of the Marvel Universe, who wanted to keep the Hulk and his army of space-alien invaders from wrecking the world in their pursuit of the Iron Man. While it was plotted by group-think, with the Brian Michael Bendis-invented "Illuminati" getting the ball rolling a few years ahead of time, it was written by Greg Pak and drawn by John Romita Jr and Klaus Janson.

Unlike the similarly-sized Marvel crossovers that preceded (and followed) it, World War Hulk was pretty straightforward: Everyone fights the Hulk, although it was given a little more dramatic complexity by the fact that the guys he wanted to punish totally deserved it. After Civil War, who didn't want to see Iron Man and Reed Richards get their faces punched in? Also unlike the other Marvel event series, this one featured characters who acted like themselves, and thus much of it rang true.

This collection if basically just a big handful of the many tie-in series, seemingly chosen at random, and the stories themselves are fairly repetitive. In each one, the title characters fight the Hulk without defeating him; each ends either in a draw or the Hulk victorious, as the real story was of course occurring in World War Hulk itself, not some random issue of the tertiary Avengers book or an Ant-Man comic, and any and all major, dramatic beats would necessarily have to occur there.

I read three of these issues before, and talked about them before, so I won't talk abou them again here (Irredeemable Ant-Man in this column, if you wanna read what I had to say about it when it first came out, and the two Avengers: The Initiative books...aw, I don't feel like looking 'em up. There on the blog somewhere in some 2007-era editions of "Weekly Haul").

The sub-titular story is by writer Christos Gage and artist Andrew Divito, both of whom are pretty great at these sorts of superhero comics.

Gage has to engage into some labored set-ups to even involve the X-Men. Because Charles Xavier sometimes hung out with "The Illuminati" group that decided to shoot The Hulk into outerspace, the thing he's so damn mad about that he's returned for vengeance, The Hulk wants to track down Chuck and ask him how he would have voted on the issue of shooting Hulk into space, and punish him for it if he says he would have said yes.

Charlie could have always just said, "Oh no way Hulk, I totally would have voted to not shoot you into space," at which point the Hulk would go away, but, well, that wouldn't fill 66-pages with fighting.

And so after invading Manhattan and issuing an ultimatum to the world that they deliver Iron Man, Richards and Dr. Strange, The Hulk goes on a side trip to X-Men HQ in Westchester. He fights The Beast and the "New X-Men" characters for one issue—these are the new, teenaged heroes who go to school at the Xavier Institute—in order to get at Chuck (Who does offer to surrender, but the kids won't let him). Then, in issue two, the real X-Men swoop in to fight the Hulk—these are the guys who were then starring in Astonishing X-Men; you know, Cyclops, Wolverine, Colossus, Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost. The Hulk beats them all up, too.

Finally, the other X-Teams all come in to try and help out, so we get one more issue of The Hulk fighting the cast of X-Factor, The Juggernaut, Nightcrawler, Native American Stereotype Man and that space-cat lady someone at The Beat really likes for some reason. The Hulk wins, but is ultimately shamed into just going back to the Manhattan to continue with the plot of World War Hulk after he's shown a graveyard full of dead mutant kids.

As fight comics go, it's about as pure as you can get. Highlights, for me, included The Hulk throwing one character's limbs into Connecticut, punting another character to New Jersey, and removing some special Vibranium knives from his arms simply by flexing really hard and making them pop out.

The artwork looks particularly gorgeous when read in 2012, as Marvel's coloring hadn't gotten as computer effect-dominated at that point as it has today.

Daniel Way, Javier Salteres and Scott Hanna's Ghost Rider story is a fairly standard one about a human host wrestling for control with the parasitic spirit of vengeance housed in his body (well, standard for superhero comics, anyway). The Ghost Rider wants to continue chasing a demon or whatever from the previous issues of Ghost Rider (not collected here), while Johnny Blaze wants to use the Ghost Rider's powers to stop The Hulk.

They fight in a big, splashy brawl of the sort only The Hulk and a flaming skeleton demon thing on a flaming motorcycle can. Ghostie uses the Brooklyn Bridge as a ramp to fly into town and drops a building on The Hulk; The Hulk retaliates by throwing a subway car at him and then jumping off the top of the Empire State Building and landing on him. Eventually, the Ghost Rider takes control of Blaze, and rides away from the crossover and back to his own title.

The artwork is again quite nice, although the computer flame effects are a bit much, distracting from the otherwise very drawn, very comic book-y look of the illustrations. Salteres' Hulk looks especially human scaled and even handsome compared to the more gigantic, monstrous Hulk we see in the other stories, which is also a little on the distracting side. With five different artists—more if you count cover artists like Ed McGuinness—no two Hulks look a like in this book.

Finally, Gage and artist Butch Guice provide the Iron Man issues, which span a time period that begins before the other stories that precede it in this collection and ends after them. Since Iron Man is, at this point, Boss Of All The Superheroes and Hulk's target, this story should be the most important in this collection—it's certainly the most relevant one to the events of World War Hulk, so it's rather surprising to find it at the end of the collection, a collection which doesn't even mention Iron Man, but whose sub-title and cover makes it appear that this is simply a collection of a single miniseries.

At this point in the Marvel Universe, Iron Man was something of a high-tech, superhero-flavored espionage series, and this story is mainly concerned with how SHIELD responds to their director Tony Stark flying off to fight Hulk, and what they do when Stark is taken down and captured. It's serious in tone, much more so than the light-hearted, almost-silly X-Men mini also written by Gage, and Guice's realistic art is perfectly appropriate for that focus.

And that's that. As a collection, it's a real quilt of characters, art styles and storytelling, and the presentation's a bit of a head-scratcher, but it's not a bad batch of old-school fight comics, and none of the art is bad, nor any of the stories poorly-written.

It's been about five years since I first read that Ant-Man issue and was perplexed by all the Old Spice product placement (Old Spice billboards fall in the fighting, a shrunken Ant-Man finds bottles of Old Spice body wash in The Hulk's stomach for some reason), and it's still super-weird to me.

Weekly Haul: November 14th

Man, when it rains it pours. This Wednesday saw a downright daunting confluence of comic book releases and events I’ve been waiting on for months. And, in some cases, years. There was so much great stuff on the shelves this week that the conclusion of Marvel’s blockbuster World War Hulk was pretty damn low on my list of things I was excited about.

There was a new volume of Scott Pilgrim, which always automatically transforms any Wednesday into Christmas. And not just normal Christmas, but Christmas from when you were a kid.

There was the long anticipated, years in the making new League of Extraordinary Gentleman, this time released in a graphic novel, sparing the months of waiting between chapters.

Gail Simone’s run on Wonder Woman began, about a year and half after it should have (If DC had any sense—and, as you know, they don’t—Simone would have relaunched the title “One Year Later,” while Allan Heinberg and Jodi Picoult would have been given original graphic novels to work on).

And Anima, one of sixteen-year-old Caleb’s favorite DCU characters, makes her first appearance since her own book was cancelled (Too bad it was written by my least favorite writer, drawn by one of my least favorite artists, and that it was only to get killed off anyway).

Man, so many comics came out that I reluctantly left a ton on the shelf. Perhaps I’ll be back for you some day, Meatcake #16, Courtney Crumrin and the Fire Theif’s Tale, Yakitate Japan, Doc Frankenstein and others. Captain Carrot and “Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul,” step up your game, guys! And Wonder Girl, stop tying into crappy comics! Why are you making it so hard for me to enjoy Sanford Greene’s art?!

Okay, well, that’s enough talking to the comics I didn’t buy; it’s time to start talking to you about the comics I did…




All-Star Superman #9 (DC Comics) The best Superman book—hell, the best superhero boo— is still the best. In this issue Superman meets another alternate version of himself, in the form of two Kryptonians who have appeared on Earth while he was stuck in Bizarro World. I think we’ve all seen several thousand stories in which Superman meets other Kryptonians only to discover that they’re an awful lot more evil than him, but Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely still make the concept seem fresh, mostly in the way these two ridicule Superman and his peculiarities. The last two pages are just a brilliant sequence, with a dramatic 1-2-3 beat, building to an explanation point bit of punctuation to a poetic, one-issue run-on sentence of a story.

Plus: Jimmy Olsen’s overpants.

Only three issues left of the originally announced 12-issue Morrison/Quitely run. And then what? Hopefully an announcement regarding 12 more.




Avengers: The Initiative #7 (Marvel Comics) Wow, did Dan Slott ever pack a lot of story into this issue! Seriously, there is a lot going on here, and in a more-bang-for-your-buck kinda way then a too-much-story-crammed-into-too-little-space kinda way. We’ve got The Vulturions vs. The Scarlet Spiders in the skies of New York City, with a still angsting over “One More Day” Peter Parker getting involved. We’ve got Justice and Cloud Nine trying to get to the bottom of the “Why isn’t that dead guy dead?” mystery that keeps getting interrupted by crises. And we’ve got some office politics at Camp Hammond, plus a look at Kentucky’s Avengers team and Slott cleverly trying to un-reveal Spider-Man’s secret identity in a way that seems very Silver Age DC, but still more satisfying than a cosmic continuity reboot of the sort Marvel seems to be in the middle of executing. Now that Jeff Parker seems to have left Marvel Adventures Avengers, this is by far my favorite comic with the word “Avengers” in the title.




Batman and the Outsiders #1 (DC) Okay, let’s see if I can remember this all correctly. Originally, DC editor-turned-writer Peter Tomasi was going to write a new Batman and the Outsiders series, replacing Judd Winick’s plain old Batman-less Outsiders, but he wasn’t happy to be paired with artist Koi Turnbull. Tony Bedard was then named the new series’ new writer, and he helped mastermind a five-issue weekly event called Outsiders: Five Of A Kind to explain who would be on the new line-up, a line-up which a DC house ad spoiled weeks ahead of time anyway. Then Bedard and Turnbull were replaced by Chuck Dixon and Julian Lopez and the line-up changed, again being revealed in a DC house ad, this time a retouched version of the previous one, which swapped out a few characters for a few other ones.

And now after three writer changes, two artist changes and a line-up changed, #1 finally hits the stands.

Honestly, curiosity over the tumultuous (and incredibly public) development hell was a pretty big determining factor in deciding to pick this up at all, particularly since it was being written by Dixon. Now Dixon is one of the better Batman-centric action writers, despite the fact that there’s usually not much to the stories other than plot and banter, but I was more curious in how he’d write a book with two lesbians on the cast, given his boneheaded public remarks about gay people in comic books (So what’s this make Dixon? A professional who sets aside his personal views in service of the characters he’s writing? Or a hypocrite who will write stories he finds morally objectionable for a paycheck?)

As for the book, it’s about what I expected, and certainly better looking than a Turnbull-drawn one probably would have been. Batman and Thunder (Lesbian #1!) sit around in a dark room talking about their mission, while Batman’s other agents—Metamorpho, Katana, Catwoman, Martian Manhunter and Grace (Lesbian #2!)—infiltrate a creepy corporation that is studying something I was sick of reading comic books about two years ago (Here’s a hint: its initials are OMAC).

Dixon is on pure potboiler mode here, his usual setting, and he doesn’t do a bad job of reintroducing all the characters. He does mention the relationship between Thunder and Grace, which I was a little surprised of, actually. Lopez’s art is quite nice, and inker Bit and colorist Marta Martinez load it up with welcome details, giving the whole thing a slick feel, full of images that really pop (Sure, the first three pages are wasted on a one-page splash followed by a two-page splash that simply establishes that two characters are parachuting, but at least this waste of space is nicer looking that similar wastes of space). They’ve even given Katana a new costume that doesn’t hurt my eyes (that’s not it on the cover), for which I applaud them, although I do wish Metamorpho and Martian Manhunter would get their heads back to normal sometime soon.

All in all, it’s a respectable team super-book. Nothing revolutionary or particularly interesting so far, but it’s a very well done sort of uninteresting, which is by far the best kind.




Booster Gold #4 (DC) Booster, Rip Hunter and even Skeets all meet their opposite numbers in this fight scene issue, as the six combatants slug it out in the lightning storm outside police scientist Barry Allen’s office window, the same storm that will turn him into The Flash—if the good guys beat the bad guys. Writers Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz reach deep, deep into their longboxes to pull out the identities of the bad guys, and this was the first I’ve heard of either of them (Sorry, I wasn’t reading comics in the ‘80s). This is probably the most serious and least zany of the issues so far, but it definitely has its fun moments, mostly revolving around Skeets.




League of Extraordinary Gentleman:The Black Dossier (DC/Wildstorm) I haven’t read this yet, but I did haul it home form the comics shop, so I figured I better mention it here. Given that this is Alan Moore’s last work for Wildstorm, and the last LOEG book that DC/Wildstorm will be publishing, I wonder if he was able to resist the urge to just totally phone it in, and, if so, how. Flipping through it so far, it looks almost too pretty to mess with. I’m really reluctant to detach the 3-D glasses, for example. Of course, I had the same problem with Lost Girls—the package was just so nice, I was kinda reluctant to handle it at first. Look for a full review in next week’s Las Vegas Weekly.




The New Avengers #36 (Marvel) In this issue, the Republican Avengers defeat the Venom-ized Democrat Avengers in the space of a six-page recap, which seems like quite a waste of a Venom-ized Avengers story, but perhaps that’s because the actual story will play out in writer Brian Michael Bendis’ other Avengers book, the one that’s like four years behind schedule at this point. Meanwhile, Luke Cage talks to his wife while their darling baby is dressed in Iron Fist’s colors, Wolverine invades Jessica Drew’s shower (You know what? I don’t even want to read a Newsarama interview explaining what’s happening in the last two panels of page 14, Bendis, you pervert), and Luke Cage rallies The Initiative, Thor, The Punisher and Howard the fucking Duck to take on The Hood.

As Bendis issues go, this one is pretty jam-packed with events, and I really love artist Leinil Yu’s lay outs, scratchy character designs and the way he draws the rims of characters’ eyes. He also gets to draw a lot of boobs this issue. There’s, like, at least two boobs on every single page. Also, the entire city of New York is naked at one point. You know, Bendis sure writes a lot of scenes in which large groups of people are totally naked in this book. I wonder what the nanke people-per-issue ratio of New Avengers is compared to the industry average…?




Scott Pilgrim Vol. 4: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (Oni Press) Now on its fourth volume, you either already love Bryan Lee O’Malley’s action-packed arcade logic romantic comedy about Canadian twentysomething hipsters, or you’ve yet to experience, or there’s something deeply wrong with you.* At this point, I can’t imagine there’s anything you’d read in a review that’s going to make you love it more or less or try it if you haven’t already. But, for the curious, this issue is aptly named, as our dense young hero must pause from his quest to defeat his girlfriend’s Seven Evil Ex-Boyfriends to get his life in order, which means getting a job, a better living situation and deciding just how committed he is to Ms. Ramona Flowers (while she must decide just how committed to him she is). In that respect, things get a bit more dramatic than they have in previous issues—with whether some of Scott’s more noble behavior is due to his morals or his being a huge pussy being a theme binding much of the volume’s over all story together—but that familiar mixture of crazy-ass action, whimsical silliness, character-based comedy and lighthearted romance is still present throughout. New to the series are some inspired gags making fun of the book’s manga format, like the “Stop!” page at the back of the book, and the color-section in the beginning.

Number of times I laughed out loud: Five.

The one spoiler I’ll give here: Holy shit! That dude cut a whole streetcar in half…with a sword!!!!!




Suicide Squad #3 (DC) Writer John Ostrander seems to finish up the “How come Rick Flag is still alive?” portion of the story, bringing us up to the present in the DCU. I’m pretty lost at this point, mostly because I haven’t been reading Checkmate or Countdown, and I’m having trouble reconciling the business of The General with the only other comics featuring him I remember, Morrison’s JLA stories. This is about the point I’d probably check out, but I’ll be damned if the exchanges between Flag, Waller and Deadshot on the last few pages didn’t get me excited about what comes next, now that the backstory is all out of the way.




Wonder Woman #14 (DC) Well, without even cracking the cover, one thing seems clear—this is bound to be the best issue in the new volume of Wonder Woman so far, judging by the credits. New writer Gail Simone finally comes on board, following a brief stint by J. Torres, who stalled for her by tying into Amazons Attack for a couple of months. Unlike the series’ first writer, Allan Heinberg, Simone is capable of writing at least 22 pages of comics every month, and, unlike superstar author Jodi Picoult, Simone has actually read Wonder Woman comics before. So, even if this is Simone at her absolute worst, it’s bound to be quite an improvement.

And it is although, in all honesty, I still wish it were a lot better.

Part of the problem is the amount of baggage Simone has to deal with. Her Wonder Woman has the same status quo as Heinberg’s—working for a United States government agency devoted to policing meta-humans, hiding under a secret identity with the exact same name as her Wonder Woman identity and disguised only by a pair of glasses**—and the Amazons are currently pretty tainted by Amazons Attack/Countdown (I read the opening scenes with Hippolyta with question marks dancing over my head, unsure of how any of this makes sense…a feeling that resurfaced during “The Society” talk…is this different than “The Injustice League” currently in JLoA?).

Now, dealing with baggage is part and parcel to working on big comic book characters like Wonder Woman, and a good writer will always find a way to make it work, but it seems almost inherently unfair that George Perez got the greenlight to completely rebuild Wonder Woman from the ground up after Crisis On Infinite Earths and Heinberg to do the same after Infinite Crisis, while Simone, a more accomplished writer than either were when they were working on Wonder Woman, is now the fourth writer in just 14 issues, stuck trying to tell a logical story after illogical messes like Picoult’s run and Amazons Attack.

With all those qualifiers out the way, I’m happy to say Simone does an okay job here. The narration on the first five pages, set on the Amazons’ island, is overdone and kind of unnecessary, but the scene itself rings with mythic import. From there, we get Diana mixing it up with a cell of Gorilla City terrorists and defusing the situation in Wonder Woman fashion, some DEO sitcom stuff, and then the appearance of a Captain Marvel villain which sets up a conflict between Wondy and her traditional foes—Nazis.

Terry and Rachel Dodsons’ art is quite nice—I really like their Wonder Woman bottoms compared to Ed Benes’ barely there ones—but they seem stuck in redesign mode, continually redesigning characters that don’t really need it. Captain Nazi, for example, just had a nice redesign in the pages of JSoA, and yet here he gets another new look, this one making him almost indistinguishable from Nemesis, unless you scrutinize the symbols on their chests.

I was pretty disappointed in their Etta Candy, too. I know she’s slimmed down since the Golden Age, but man, here she’s looking positively svelte, the only thing really distinguishing her figure from Wonder Woman’s being that she has slightly bigger cheeks. Come one Dodson, let’s get some meat—er, candy—on Etta’s bones!




World War Hulk #5 (Marvel) There is only one way this series could have featured better onomatopoeia sound effects, and that would have been if writer Greg Pak had enlisted Doug Moench as a consultant. In this issue, the inevitable fight scene that’s been foreshadowed since the first issue finally occurs: The Sentry vs. The Hulk. And it sounds awesome. First contact? “KWAGLOOOOOM!” Hulk punching Sentry’s face? “SPAKOOM!” The resulting explosion? “SPRACHOMMM.” And man, that’s before Sentry even breaks out the crazy energy powers, and we get stuff like “VJJJWOMMMVVVVVVB” and “SPPPPJJZZZZZ.”

I know I’ve said this about every issue, as has just about everyone else who has read it and said anything about it on the Internet, but this was just a ton of fun—a good old-fashioned superhero slugfest, one that’s helped tremendously by the simple selling point and widescreen art by John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson, with Pak and letterer Chris Eliopoulos doing their best to evoke Dolby surround sound in comic book format.

As for the ending, neither Pak nor Marvel managed to mess it up—while Civil War’s last chapter left me confused, angry and irritated, this gave me a sense of relief and closure—it’s predictability being more of the satisfying sort that comes with a perfect ending, rather than a cynical one. (I should note “Best Shots” colleague Troy Brownfieldhad privately called the “surprise” ending somewhere between World War Hulk #1 and #2).

Now, as for the three continuations of this story, in new ongoing Hulk, The Incredible XXXX (Formerly The Incredible Hulk) and the new, never before-announced 2008 series? I’m only at all interested in the middle one, because the name, which is revealed in the house ad in WWH #5, makes me laugh. A Jeph Loeb-written red Hulk sounds like the worst idea ever***, however, and that last one seems more for “Planet Hulk” enthusiasts than anything else. (Confidential to the person in the image: Get a haircut, hippie!)





*And that something is that you and I have extremely different tastes.

**Yeah, yeah, Superman too on the “disguised by glasses” part. There are several dozen reasons why it’s different, which I don’t care to get into now, other than to say Superman’s “secret identity” is widely known—It’s Kal-El—so no one’s expecting him to have a “secret identity” post-Crisis, he has such powers as super-ventriloquism to super-speed to disguise himself, and he’s always had a secret identity (that is, there’s always been a Clark Kent), he didn’t just suddenly adopt one as an adult and have to fake a backstory, the way Wonder Woman apparently must.

***With the possible exception of having Jeph Loeb write the Ultimate Universe.

Weekly Haul: August 1st

(Special note: It’s almost 4 a.m. as I post this, so chances are there are 500% more typos than usual. Feel free to point out any errors and berate me for them in the comments section; it’s the only way I’ll learn)


Action Comics #853 (DC Comics) The fact that no comics critic or comics blogger can stand DC's Countdown seems to be well known at this point. And of late it seems that no one else can stand it either. I mean, prominent DC writers like Geoff Johns and Greg Rucka have publicly, if politely, complained about things they've seen in the book, its new editor Mike Carlin seems to be in a rather foul mood for having to edit the damn thing, and Action Comics editors Nachie Castro and Matt Idelson can't even recommend it in good conscience. In #852, a note on the title page said “This story takes place alongside Countdown #42! Don’t miss an issue!” In this issue, the note on the title page assures readers that reading Countdown won’t be necessary: “If you missed it, we’ll fill you in…!”

And they do. This issue flows quite well from #852, without readers needing to have picked up an issue The Worst Book In The World between. All we really need to know is that Jimmy Olsen has made himself a superhero costume and has been calling himself "Mr. Action" since we saw him in part one of "3-2-1 Action!" two weeks ago (All of which Busiek fills us in on during two panels).

Busiek continues to fulfill the promise of a Countdown storyline that has gone to waste, showing us Jimmy trying to fight The Kryptonite Man and The Kryptonite Monkey using a combination of pluck and the randomly occurring superpowers of his pre-Crisis (On Infinite Earths) adventures (Busiek also explains away an error in the early issues of Countdown, regarding how Jimmy knew that the Red Hood was Jason Todd, a former Robin, and that Dick Grayson was also Robin, although Busiek inadvertently underscores another error in the weekly. During the Lightray death issue, Superman heard Jimmy's signal watch from space, although it doesn't work when Supes is off-planet). Seeing Jimmy trying to play hero is a lot of fun, but, like so much of what has made Busiek's reign on the Superman books seem so inspired, the best bits are the throwaway ones, like see-through villain The Exomorphic Man doing a perp walk, or the mention of Doctor Sivana's invention of The Ünternet, the world wide web for supervillains (Man, I’d love to see what its comics blogosphere looks like).




Clockwork Girl #0 (Arcana Comics) This book cost me only 25 cents, which means it would have to suck pretty bad not to at least be worth what I spent on it (That’s less than the sales tax on two full-priced comics). Artist Grant Bond and co-writers Sean O’Reilly and Kevin Hanna show off their upcoming book about mad scientists with different fields of specialization and their young creations, a robot girl and a monstrous little boy. The character designs and Bond’s art are nice to look at, and what little story we’re given is interesting, if not very sharply written. But I was still a little dissatisfied with the read, which consists of 15-pages of comics, two pages of a minicomic represented too small to really enjoy, an introduction, and 11 pages of designs, commentary and pin-ups. With so many pages devoted to things that weren’t comics for a book that hasn’t even come out yet, it felt a little like watching the special features on a DVD before watching the film itself—or ever having seen a preview for the film. Worth a quarter? Definitely. Worth any more than that? No, not really. I’ll give #1 a shot on the strength of the art, but this preview worked as a sort of reverse-sales pitch on me, making me uninterested in a product I hadn’t previously known even existed.





Detective Comics #835 (DC) My gut told me to pass on this issue from guest-writer John Rozum, as I've been doing with most of the non-Dini issues of 'TEC (none of the ones I've read have been any good), but it features The Scarecrow, and I love The Scarecrow (and lack the willpower to resist favorite characters in all but the most extraordinary circumstances). I was happy to see that Rozum is exploring a new-ish angle with the character (Dr. Crane is trying to inspire fear here without the usage of his chemicals), ignoring Judd Winick's Were-Scarecrow development (#3 on the list of Dumbest Ideas Judd Winick Has Ever Had), and that the artist he's working with is Tom Mandrake, who is an all-around perfect Batman writer (Not sold on his Scarecrow thus far, though. Tim Sale's still the all-time champion Scarecrow drawer in my book). The first part of a two-parter, there's little—all right, nothing—that really makes this particular story stand-out among Batman stories, but to paraphrase Stephen Baldwin in Threesome, "Batman is kinda like pizza. When it's bad, it's still pretty good." And this isn't bad Batman, just mediocre Batman.





Fantastic Four #548 (Marvel) I’ve been really enjoying Dwayne McDuffie and Paul Pelletier’s run on FF, but this issue left me kind of cold. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, there’s just not much going on in it at all. The Fantastic Five (the current FF plus Reed) fight the Frightful Five (the Frightful Four from last issue, plus a surprise guest-villain revealed on the last page) to save the captive Sue. That’s it. That’s the whole plot. It’s all executed well enough, but it’s nothing that really says, “This was worth being forced to look at a Michael Turner image and bring it into your home.” And speaking of that image, check out the cover. What do you think is happening? Are they falling through space or the night sky? Has Sue created individual invisible floating force field discs for those of them who can’t fly to ride on? Isn’t it odd all of their feet have been so cleverly concealed? (There’s a hint of Storm’s toes peeking out behind Mr. Fantastic’s bicep though). What’s that blotch of light behind the logo and Panther’s cape? Did Johnny just sign the big “4” symbol in the sky? My heart sank even further when that guest-villain appeared, as it just reminds me of Reginald Hudlin’s confused semi-reboot (maybe) of Black Panther (This particular Black Panther foe was completely recreated and redesigned for “Who is the Black Panther?”, although he seems to be sporting his original look here).





The Irredeemable Ant-Man #11 (Marvel) Who’s more irredeemable, Eric “Ant-Man” O’Grady or that mustachioed master thief Black Fox, who took advantage of the chaos in Manhattan during the Hulk’s attack to steal his only friends Nintendo Wii? Why’s Mitch such a psycho; it’s not just because Eric burned half of his face off, is it? Did the Recap Ant sustain any injuries during last issue’s WWH tie-in? How many jokes can Robert Kirkman possibly make about the cancellation of this series in the course of a three-page letter column? The answers to these questions and more are within! Panels like the last one on page 16, with it’s clever use of asterisks and footnotes to call Eric on his shit, make me a little sad to read, seeing as how we’ll only get one more issue of this series. Part of me hopes this Ant-Man will stick around the Marvel Universe as Ant-Man for a while, simply because I love the costume and way it looks when Eric’s all shrinky among full-sized superheroes. I can’t really see him joining either team of Avengers or the Thunderbolts, however, on account of I’d hate to see what Bendis or Warren Ellis might do with the character. He might work in Avengers: The Initiative, but I’d prefer to see him reappear in something Robert Kirkman-written. Maybe Kirkman, Hester and Parks can start pitching Marvel on a new Defenders series? I promise to buy it, so that’s one right there, Marvel.






Justice League Unlimited #36 (DC) The Justice League Unlimited end of Cartoon Network's Justice League series offered plenty of lessons for the company on how to reposition many of their second- through bottom-tier characters. Which makes a lot of sense when you consider that part of producing those later episodes, during which the team's roster expanded from seven to what seemed like seventy heroes, included a bunch of people sitting around thinking of how to boil down characters to their most vital elements, redesign them visually and make them palpable for mass audiences far beyond the tens of thousands of people that read any given DC comic book. DC Comics seemed to learn some lessons from the series—restoring John Stewart to something resembling prominence for example, and making Skeets and Booster a duo again—but the company sure as hell didn't take any lessons involving The Question to heart.

The few episodes he was prominently featured in recast him as a street-level noir hero who was also a paranoid conspiracy theorist, heavily accenting his Rorshachishness (which is really Questionliness, I know). Instead, DC thought the best way to market the character to the most readers would be to kill him off with lung cancer caused by cigarette smoke and replace him with a hard-drinking, self-loathing, lapsed-Catholic Hispanic lesbian ex-cop. Financially, we don't really know how successful that change has been, and won't until Rucka's Crime Bible mini drops (Yeah, 52 sold like gangbusters, but it's hard to say how much of that was due to the fact that people were excited to see Vic Cage die of cancer and replaced by his protégé, a gambit which has proven successful exactly one time since the end of the Silver Age. I know personally, that was my least favorite part of 52, and I followed the book despite the out-of-place Question/Montoya bits, not because of them).

Anyway, this is all just a long way of saying that fans of the Vic Sage Question, particularly as characterized on JLU, should check out this issue, which focuses on the faceless crime-fighter has he unravels a worldwide conspiracy by shape-shifting aliens to take over the earth. Writer Simon Spurrier hits all the conspiracy theorist high notes, or at least those as have been filtered through pop culture (Chupacabras, grassy knoll, Loch Ness, the C.I.A., Lovecraftian Elder God, crown jewels, a warehouse like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark), ties it into the DC mythology (Durlans!) and includes a couple of neat turns. The story is, ironically, both a little hurried and a little repetitive, and reads like it could have been an outline for the first year of a Question series, but it's a lot of fun, and a wonderful look at what could have been in the DCU proper (and maybe what should have been). Min S. Ku’s pencil art, like most of that on the Johnny DC titles, is serviceable, aping the look of the cartoon without achieving anything else noteworthy.

Best part? At a press conference, a U.S. senator finishes his speech and asks the crowd “Any questions?” Vic shouts “Just one” and shoots him with a laser gun.






Justice Society of America #8 (DC) Just like JSoA #7, this issue finds wrier Geoff Johns zeroing in on a single member of his sprawling cast, focusing the limelight into a laser and drilling into their fictional skull. Last time it was the new Citizen Steel, this time it’s the new Liberty Belle (the old Jesse Quick). Johns shows an almost Roy Thomas-ian obsession with drawing connections between past stories from all over the DCU, and he pulls it off quite nicely, taking such mostly separate threads as All-Star Squadron, Damage, a previous, failed Justice Society relaunch attempt, The Titans, and several Flash stories and sewing them into a pleasing tapestry DC fans can wrap around themselves and snuggle in, bracing against the cold, uncaring Current State Of The DCU. This is what Johns does best, and JSoA is some of his best work to date. It’s wonderfully written superhero melodrama that not only reveals how much he loves the characters, but demonstrates why we should too, putting forth very convincing arguments. Personally, I groaned to see Jesse becoming Liberty Belle II all of a sudden, as she seemed to be one more random case of the DCU’s terminal legacitis, but Johns finally tells the story of why Jesse Quick is now Liberty Belle, and it works quite nicely. The art comes courtesy of Fernando Pasarin, who was responsible for the issue of “The Lightning Saga” featuring The Legion of Super-Abs. He acquits himself just fine, with his major problem being that he’s not Dale Eaglesham (Speaking of which, why isn’t he Eaglesham? Instead of Eaglesham contributing to “Lightning Saga,” only to need Pasarin to fill in here, shouldn’t Pasarin have drawn Eaglesham’s chapter of the “Saga” and Eaglesham drawn this issue of JSoA? That would have reduced the number of different artists on the guaranteed-trade of “The Lighting Saga” from four to three, and kept the look of also-guaranteed-to-be-collected JSoA more consistent?)

Note to DC: I would totally buy a Liberty Belle Archives. Or borrow it from the library, anyway. I’d definitely buy an affordably priced trade full of Golden Age Libby stories.

Another note to DC: If JSoA is one of your best-selling titles, now’s probably the time to make with the reprint trades featuring heroes in it, right? Trades collecting things like All-Star Squadron, which featured previous incarnations of Steel and Libby. I’d buy it. Swear to God. And if it were a Showcase Presents or two or three collecting every All-Star book, from the 16-page preview in Justice League of America #193 all the way through the end of Young All-Stars, not only would I buy it, but I’d drive all the way to New York City and kiss each and every person at DC HQ on the lips. Or, if they have moustaches like Dan Didio, I’d shake their hands.





Metal Men #1 (DC) Whew! I was sooo worried about this title. 52 not only showed all the potential of the Metal Men in the modern DCU, but it made good on it, turning Doc Magnus and his creations into some of the most interesting characters in super-comics during the length of the title. Clearly, they were primed for a comeback, Grant Morrison, who apparently wrote all the Magnus/mad scientist bits, was certainly the guy who needed to write it, and Duncan Rouleau, who kicked so much ass on the two-page origin story, was clearly the guy who needed to draw it. Then came that godawful Superman/Batman story (godawful by even Superman/Batman standards) which was a hard reboot of Magnus and the Metal Men (or, at least, the first issue was…I couldn’t stand to read any more by that particular creative team), thus undoing any momentum acquired in 52. This miniseries was at least partially created by Morrison (It’s “based on ideas by,” like All-New Atom and Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, both of which I dropped after giving them a try), with Rouleau drawing (Yay!) and writing (I don’t know if you’ve read The Nightmarist or not, but if you did, you may join me in saying, “Uh-oh…”)

Anyway, the first issue over, and my review basically boils down to “Whew!” It’s nowhere near as bad as I feared, and while it’s not as awesome as I had hoped, it wasn’t a bad read either, featuring some great art, all the things I expect from the Metal Men (uniting to form a contraption of some sort, “dying” horribly at the end of their adventure) and plenty of threads continued from 52, including Magnus and Morrow’s relationship, and the idea that the metals themselves have personalities, making Magnus less the Metal Men’s maker than their midwife.

The thing I was most worried about—the reboot—was kind of equivocal, and I don’t think we get a very solid answer here. The only thing that definitely seems off regarding the timeline is the fact that Magnus had yet to invent the Metal Men and Morrow was still a respected member of the scientific community only four years ago (subtract the year covered in 52, and that means that every story involving the Metal Men and T.O. Morrow happened within the last three years, which obviously can’t be).

Rouleau does a great job introducing the Metal Men (plus the extra “woman,” Copper) and their personalities, particularly given how little space is devoted to them, and the scientific theory sections seemed perfectly Morrison-esque (I honestly wouldn’t have guessed Morrison wasn’t writing them if no one told me). The Metal Men adventure and the Magnus/Morrow flashback are book-ended by some stuff involving time travel and ancient alchemy (plus some allusions to Aquaman’s namesake and some characters from the under-appreciated “Obsidian Age” arc of JLA).

As with Nightmarist, I think Rouleau’s layouts and sense of baroque design sometimes get in the way of his storytelling—particularly in the opening scene where we don’t yet have our bearings and already there are multiple fonts and sound effects cluttering up the art and dialogue—and the narration is slightly more complicated than it needs to be (I don’t think we need to know the number of minutes and seconds one event is occurring before another, for example), but so far, so good.





New Avengers: Illuminati #4 (Marvel) If I had to reduce a review of this issue into a single syllable, I think I'd have to go with "Bwuh...?" It is seriously all over the goddam place. Like a lot of bad comic books with the name Bendis somewhere in the credits, you know it's not necessarily a case of no one involved knowing quite what they're doing, which makes this issue not so much a train wreck as a circus train wreck—you're fascinated not simply because of the (metaphorical) destruction and carnage alone, but because there are burning clowns, giraffes and elephants running around in the charred, candy-striped wreckage (Note to self: Never try to think of a colorful simile after 1 a.m., no matter what).

In this penultimate chapter of Brian Michael Bendis, Brian Reed, Jim Cheung and Mark Morales’ let’s-just-fuck-with-Marvel-continuity-because-it's-there-and-just-asking-to-be-fucked-with miniseries, the creators take on Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones' Marvel Boy for 22-pages of one set of creators doing their level best to diminish the work of another set of creators for no apparent reason (Spite? Is spite the reason?). We open with a few pages of the Illuminati discussing the women in their lives (That is apparently the reason for the cover...or, part of the reason. A large part seems to be that Cheung just isn't very good at cover work, and so he's repeating a past Illuminati cover. Only he kind of messes it up, positioning the women in different places than their male counterparts, which makes me wonder if it's an intentional self-homage after all, or just an honest accidentally repeat of a previous cover lay out. None of these women appear in the book, and only Sue and Clea get more than a mention in the dialogue). The dialogue is all fine, and it does manage to fairly naturally capture the sound of a group of guys talking about the women in their lives. Or, at least, it would be fine if it were five ordinary guys, and not the freaking Sorcerer Supreme, the Scion of Atlantis and Charles Xavier talking about how women are never satisfied. Bendis and Reed manage to make some of the most idiosyncratic characters in super-comics sound exactly like your dads' friends sitting down for a game of poker. The scene has nothing at all to do with anything that follows, or anything that preceded it in the series, and seems to be included just to be irritating.

The conflict is that Morrison’s Marvel Boy miniseries has just ended, and the Illuminati decide that if Noh-Varr makes good on his threats to conquer earth, it could be trouble. So they break into his prison and attack him mentally and physically, encouraging him to maybe become a superhero like the original Captain Marvel (well, Marvel’s original Captain Marvel, not the awesome one), instead of attacking Earth without provocation. This seems to be the same sort of groupthink that makes these usually-pretty-smart-guys act like idiots every time they get together in this series. Seeing a hornet’s nest and thinking that one day they may get stung by a hornet, they get together with some sticks and poke the nest, saying, "Don't sting me! Don't sting me!"

Marvel Boy is himself reduced to a generic teenager, with nothing to say save, "Dude, put on some pants," when he sees Namor, and act like these lunatics messing with him have given him food for thought, instead of just reinforcing his ideas. Remember that infectious sense of rebellion and hip iconoclasm covered in an ironic super-hero Christmas wrapping paper in Morrison and Jones' series? The Brians have sucked it all out of the character who, it's worth noting, isn't really properly introduced here. If this is your first exposure to the character, you may find yourself wondering why the heroes are screwing around with him. If you're familiar with the series that spawned him, you may be wondering why Marvel hasn't passed some sort of law forbidding Bendis from touching any thing created by Morrison (didn't they learn their lesson with the coda of "The Collective" in New Avengers?)

Truly a terrible, terrible comic book from at least one writer who knows better (I'm not familiar enough with Reed's solo writing to speak to whether or not this kind of work is beneath him) but, like I said, fascinating nonetheless.





She-Hulk #20 (Marvel) It’s Dan Slott’s second-to-last issue before Peter David takes over, and with Ty Templeton assisting, Slott not only starts to wrap everything up, he seems to rush through a half-dozen plotlines he’d previously planned to get around to at some point, like one in which Shulkie argues in favor of the Marvel Universe over the Ultimate Universe before the Living Tribunal, who wants to destroy it (It takes all of three panels to summarize, prompting Colonel Jameson to point out, “That was a pretty big cosmic story you rushed through.”) Rushing through is what this issue’s all about, which makes for an incredibly dense read practically spilling out of every nine-panel page. All of the regulars get some serious panel time, plus we get Man-Thing, Richard Rory and Ducktor Strange. For this issue at least, Slott has returned the book to the feel of it’s earlier stories, in which it was like an Ally McBeal set in the Marvel Universe. This issue read like an Ally McBeal set in the Marvel Universe clip show, wherein all of the clips were from episodes you’ve never seen. Like Ant-Man, this was another enjoyable read that was simultaneously depressing, as it’s coming to an end. Not the book itself, mind you, but the current creative team’s run, and they’re promising an extremely different—and thus far unrevealed—direction.





World War Hulk #3 (Marvel) Let's run down the checklist here. Wonderfully illustrated, and managing to stay-wonderfully illustrated without getting more and more rushed and less and less detailed with every passing issue. A big, important story firmly set in the Marvel Universe, with a mixture of emotional conversations and heroes hurting one another, which doesn't assign motivations to characters willy-nilly to move the pre-ordained plot forward in unnatural ways. There are political points and attempts to capture the current zeitgeist, only they're ever so subtle, and much more complicated than, "Much of the U.S. government’s reaction to 9/11 was immoral and ill-considered, but you dumb Americans let the bad guys win because you're scared and lazy!" It's Marvel's biggest most important story at the moment, in which every line spoken or drawn will likely have impact in a half dozen other books, and yet it's bang on time (Or are they ahead of schedule? I just read the last issue two weeks ago?)

What does this all add up to? World War Hulk being everything that Civil War should have been and was trying really, really hard to be.

With this issue, the Hulk crosses the very last name off his "To Smash" list, and sets in motion a plan of perpetual vengeance that seems a little, well, insane. (I guess that's what the solicitation copy for #4 meant by "Everyone GOES! TOO! FAR!"). General Ross also gets a nice moment to try his best against the Hulk, even seemingly wounding the big guy. Like the last two issues, this one is a ton of fun from start to finish.

So as to not seem like I'm going soft here, I will complain about two things. First, Dr. Strange's Cloak of Levitation isn't supposed to cast an astral form like the rest of his clothes, and yet here it's shown all astral (This is a mistake that is now becoming so common, I have a feeling it's about to become the official status quo of Strange's astral image, due to the critical mass of mess-ups on this front).

Secondly, I got the David Finch cover in my pull, and my shop was charging extra cast for the John Romita Jr. cover, the one that actually reflects the style and aesthetic of the insides of the book. I honestly don't understand the rationale of the interior artist doing the incentive variant covers; it sorta defeats the whole idea of incentive variant covers doesn't it? Like, "Hey, check out how this cover might have looked if this other artist were drawing it! And by "other artist" we mean the exact same artist!"

And, just out of curiosity for readers who might be reading Marvels I’m not (include Namor, Thor and everything set in space), are there reasons in other books that would explain why time displaced Captain Marvel, Namor, Thor and Silver Surfer aren’t getting in on this?

Weekly Haul: July 18th

Action Comics #851 (DC Comics) One of the things that initially attracted me to Countdown was the promise of a storyline starring Daily Planet cub reporter Jimmy Olsen, a perfect Everyman character in the DCU, and a character whose potential hasn’t really been met much since the original Crisis (I do like Morrison and Quitely’s version of him in All-Star Superman quite a bit, though). Well, we know how well that’s turned out. That’s why this particular book, what with its above-the-logo “A Countdown Tie-In!” slug, came as such a relief. Kurt Busiek, the regular Superman writer and Action Comics fill-in-writer who’s actually written many more issues than the “regular” writing team, is handling the script, and he’s summarizing much of the Jimmy-gets-powers plotline and even redoing scenes from recent Countdowns, only here they’re much better drawn than in the original book.

The plot? Jimmy realizes he’s activating bizarre superpowers in times of stress, and contemplates putting them to use as an honest-to-God superhero, like his pal, Superman. Meanwhile, he’s assigned to tag along with Clark Kent, who’s covering a trial of the new Kryptonite Man (from “Up, Up and Away”). Also, there’s a green simian doing…something that seems to be gradually turning him into a green Titano-type threat. And we get a flashback to how Jimmy first got his Superman signal watch, and it involves a stroke of pure genius—giant, perpetually drunk Scottish robots. In kilts. It’s great, fun stuff; superhero comics at their best, really, in which continuity is a strength, not a weakness. Haven’t read a single issue of Coutndown? Never read “Up, Up and Away?” Don’t worry; you don’t really need to. (The mention of “Chris” is probably the only real stumbling block to this being perfectly self-contained, and it’s just a one-sentence aside).

The art comes courtesy of penciler Brad Walker and inker John Livesay. Walker’s unfortunately been in the position of doing a lot of drawing on books that make it hard not to compare him to other artists (He did the sequel to Villains United and some Superman fill-ins, for example), and while I’m still not quite used to his impossibly huge-chested Superman, he does quite well with all of the other characters, and his storytelling flows smoothly. And his apes? Awesome.

The only gripe I have about this book? It prominently features Superman and Jimmy on the cover. I think some giant drunken robots in kilts and a green gorilla would have moved more copies. Assuming everyone who enters a comic shop makes their purchases along the same criteria I do, anyway.




Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis #54 (DC) Remember last week when I was talking about Green Arrow: Year One, and I mentioned DC’s bad habit of putting lame-ass pun on the covers of their comics? This week’s Aquaman contains a good example. For absolutely no reason at all, above the logo are the words “Master of His Domain!” The story within has nothing to do with Aquaman’s domain, really; in fact this Aquaman isn’t a king and doesn’t really have a domain to master, and even if he did, most of the story takes place on the surface anyway. Now I’m not sure who comes up with these things, or why they thought an allusion to an old episode of Seinfeld (1990-1998, just to let you know how old the joke is) would be an amusing thing to put on the cover. But to do it on a cover in which Aquaman grasps the hilt of his sword, the blade between his legs, while a handful of mermaids look up at him, smirking, smiling and, in one case, pointing and laughing? They’re either lameo-s who don’t really pay much attention to the art on their covers, or they’re geniuses. Only they know for sure. Anyway, it’s a really nice cover by the Dodsons.

Inside the book, Tad Williams ratchets up the speed with which he’s winding the title down, so much so that I’m actually more excited about the title right now than I’ve been so far. There are a ton of supporting characters and villains from the last few years of Aquaman comics, including a surprise DCU Big Bad and the Human Flying Fish, whose little flapping wings are absolutely hilarious as rendered by Shawn McManus.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, at this point it’s probably best for DC to let the Aquaman franchise lay fallow for a few years until they can figure out what exactly they want to do with it (hint: involving Aquaman himself might be a good idea, since replacing an original character with a new version hasn’t worked since Wally West became the Flash), but Williams and McManus have been doing great work here, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more Aquaman stories from them somewhere down the road. When you consider the incredible mess Williams is cleaning up here, and the restrictions he’s working under (i.e. he can’t use Aquaman himself), it’s even more impressive that this book is readable, let alone sometimes pretty enjoyable.




Avengers: The Initiative #4 (Marvel Comics) Thus far, I’ve read exactly two “World War Hulk” books—World War Hulk #1 and the last issue of Irredeemable Ant-Man. So I may not be the best judge of how well this book ties into the tapestry of the multi-book event, but as far as I can tell, it’s a really good tie-in, as it shows us events from the first issue of WWH (Iron Man vs. the Hulk, the collapse of Avengers Tower), from different perspectives, giving us a few new background scenes along the way (like War Machine having a pre-loin-girding chat with Iron Man), without contradicting the events I’ve seen in other books (the way a lot of “Civil War” tie-in books did). Dan Slott is really great at this kind of thing; you can tell he knows and loves the Marvel Universe, its characters and history, and respects and builds on them when telling his stories. I mean, he even has Rage telling off Triathalon about who has Avengers seniority on the team. Anyway, the story finds the Initiative reacting to Hulk’s initial threat, with the Rage, Slapstick and the new kids assigned tasks like crowd control, although they eventually break rank to confront the Hulk. His over-arching storyline isn’t hijacked so much by the crossover as it dovetails into it, as pieces are moved forward in several ongoing plotlines. There are times when I wish Slott were writing the whole Marvel Universe (at least until I remember Jeff Parker. And Fred Van Lente. And Bendis when he’s on. And…)




Birds of Prey #108 (DC) Okay, so on the cover we have a woman with a grievous leg wound straddling a woman who has lost the use of her legs. They both wear glasses, and are heavily exerting themselves. I’m not sure what the name of this particular sort of thing might be, but I’m positive it has to be fetish for someone. Kind of odd choice for a cover image too, considering the awesomeness inside, but maybe they wanted to keep that four-page spread of every character who’s ever worked for Oracle ever (outside the Suicide Squad and Bat clan, of course) a surprise. A surprise that I’ve just ruined.

The story, like that in Aquaman is in pretty clear winding down mode. This issue is the official epilogue of the “Whitewater” story, and ends the Katarina take-over storyline that’s been running since the OYL jump. Plus, there’s a two-page send off to the Secret Six, and the true origin of Misfit. It’s a pretty good read, provided you don’t think about it very hard. Or, you know, think about it at all.

The recently resurrected, big-time superhero Ice gets a one-line send off, and appears in all of two-panels, completing her resurrection story on the same not on which it began, making her merely the maguffin (I’m hard pressed to think of a superhero-returns-from-the-grave story in which the superhero returning from the grave is so incidental to the rest of the story).

Oracle and her girls seem a little wantonly cruel in their dispatch of Katarina—was that a fair fight? Did they tie, or did Babs win? Was it just an excuse to beat the hell out of Katarina, who really did seem to have her heart in the right place and had even just presented Oracle with a gift prior to Manhunter wounding her?

Was that awesome group shot of all of the Birds ever really that intimidating to Katarina? Because, she had to know Oracle had all those people on speed dial anyway, right? Wasn’t that the whole point of attempting to take over the operation?

And while it’s not entirely Simone’s fault, Oracle’s whole speech about how her mission is to help people who need it rang a little false when one considers how little—i.e. absolutely nothing—she’s done to help her former agent and successor Cassandra Cain.

That probably does seem like a lot of griping, but I actually did rather enjoy this issue, and it’s only know that I’m thinking more seriously about it and rereading some of the scenes that some of this stuff occurs to me.

Okay now, question time: Who are those three super-types between Nightwing and Misfit? Anyone? Anyone? Because I have no idea.




The Brave and the Bold #5 (DC) See, this is why we love George Perez. In JLoA #8 by Brad Meltzer and Shane Davis, Batman fights Legion martial artist Karate Kid. The fight itself gets six panels, spread across six pages, with most of the blows that are exchanged occurring off-panel. In Countdown #50, by a trio of writers and penciler J. Calafiore, we see outtakes from that same fight (um, never mind the fact that Karate Kid’s ethnicity seems to have changed; it’s still the same character). There the fight gets thirteen panels over the course of three pages, most of them close-ups on Batman’s fists and K.K.’s open hands, with the pair apparently ultimately blocking one another’s blows. The effect is not unlike a fight in an action movie in the Michael Bay style, in which the camera zooms in on details, so that it is the point-of-view that we see moving, not the combatants.

In this issue of Brave and the Bold, writer Mark Waid and George Perez give us another Batman vs. Karate Kid fight. This one gets 12 panels on one single page, and, to stick with the film metaphor, consists mostly of medium shots, so that we can see the combatants bodies, and the way they move, like in an old school kung fu movie, where the camera is set down in one place and the characters fight, because watching people who know kung fu fight one another is a hell of a lot more interesting than watching a zoom lens in use. Perez’s fight choreography is simply amazing here, as one blow leads deftly to another. Oh, and because watching Batman and Karate Kid kung fu fight is merely awesome, Waid and Perez have outfitted them both with Legion flight rings, so that they’re flying while fighting, making the fight super-awesome (Seriously, panels seven thorugh nine? The greatest thing you’ll see in a comic book this week. Maybe your whole life).

And keep in mind, this is only one page of Brave and the Bold #5.

As with the previous four issues, this one seems to be at least twice as long as a normal comic book, in part because of just how damn much Perez can pack into a page, and in part because there’s just plain a lot of things going on, with the book structured as a sort of team-up between team-ups. In the future, you have Batman and the Legion of Super-Heroes (Waid/Kitson variety), and in the “present” you have Supergirl and Green Lantern and Adam Strange.

Both threads, which seem to be tying together now for next issue’s conclusion to the arc, are well-done, and both are imaginatively conceived. Waid isn’t going the easy route here, picking characters that play off of one another intuitively. He’s being plenty creative—I mean, Batman and the Legion of Super-Heroes? That’s about as out-of-left field a team-up as you can get in the DCU, and it works beautifully. Brainy and Bats are simply perfect foils for one another. As far as in-continuity, DCU books go, this is probably DC’s very best (along with Busiek’s better Super-books).




Giant-Size Marvel Adventures Avengers #1 (Marvel) I loved Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk’s Agents of Atlas. And I love Parker and Kirk’s Marvel Adventures Avengers. So it should go without saying that a Marvel Adventures Avengers/Agents of Atlas crossover, by Parker and Kirk, is the kind of comic book I’m going to love. But I’m going to say it anyway: I loved this comic book.

Kang travels back in time to urge the “Avengers” of the ‘50s, Jimmy Woo’s Agents of Atlas, to find Captain America frozen in a block of ice. They thaw him out instead of Iron Man and company, leading to an altered present in which Kang is about to be made ruler of the world. Unless the Avengers can go back in time and stop him. And since these stories are all done-in-ones, it probably won’t surprise you to find out they do. It’s not the end point that’s interesting here though, it’s the way we get there, and how Gorilla Man and Wolverine get along.

Sweetening the deal are two classic (that is, “old”) Golden Age stories of the first appearance of Namora and Venus. Neither are very good reads (or are credited to any writers or artists in particular), but they are kind of interesting. I dig Namor’s old costume, and the crazy perspectives and strange lettering of Namora’s story, and Venus’ story seems like a Golden Age precursor to a magical girl shojo. And while I’ve never worked within the magazine industry proper in any capacity beyond doing a few interviews and writing a few articles in my underwear in my apartment and emailing them to editors, I’m pretty sure it can’t possibly be as insane as those last two pages of this story imply that it is. Imagine the office politics parts of 13 Going on 30 or The Devil Wears Prada fused with Golden Age Wonder Woman stories (with all the superhero/action-adventure bits sucked out) and you’ll have a pretty good idea how crazy this story is. (Any Marvel writers in the reading audience can feel free to pitch your contacts at the House of Ideas a new Venus miniseries that’s The Devil Wears Prada-meets-Wonder Woman. I don’t mind).




Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #4 (DC) As excited as I was to read this story, it was also incredibly depressing. With this issue done, we’re back to the only Captain Marvel stories on the stands being those produced by Judd Winick in Trials of…, which is a farther departure from the Marvel mythos than most Elseworlds featuring the characters, and Countdown, in which we can see a buxom, tarted-up Mary Marvel in black leather being all, I believe the term is, “ebil.” Jeff Smith brings his miniseries to a conclusion, one which promises the potential for future adventures, but if there’s more Smith Shazam to come, it’s not been announced, or even rumored. I was kind of surprised, and even a little disappointed, at Smith’s version of Mr. Mind. He looks pretty cool, and retains his size and radio (sorta), but the current DCU version (pre-cocoon) designed by Jerry Ordaway is actually superior; he kept the eyeglasses-like look by giving his Mr. Mind bulging wide eyes, for a character that was evil, but silly evil. Smith’s Mind just looks evil, and the revelation that he’s just a worm doesn’t really seem a surprise to anyone, as it was at the end of the original “Monster Society” epic. Speaking of which, I still want a new trade collection, DC.




The Spirit #8 (DC) Darwyn Cooke cooks up a brilliant set-up for this issue’s adventure, one which leads to some tense suspense and some great comedy. I just hope I’ll be able to look at the Spirit again someday without thinking of him as “Mr. Sexypants.”





Super-Villain Team-Up/M.O.D.O.K.’s 11 #1 (Marvel) Marvel makes it’s first real attempt to capitalize on M.O.D.O.K.’s newfound, unexpected and yet irresistible popularity among fans, a popularity owed entirely to the Internet and comics blogs (You’re welcome, Marvel). Will it prove a success? Honestly, I don’t see how it couldn’t. You’ve got Fred Van Lente, who, in addition to a lot of Marvel work I haven’t read, has given the world Action Phiolosophers! (Thanks, Fred!). You’ve got Eric Powell on the cover. You’ve got an Ocean’s Eleven/heist flick homage/parody thing going. And, just in case a giant-headed, acronym-named, kind of a dick, crazy-ass Marvel villain isn’t enough of a draw, you’ve got what I presume must be ten or eleven more crazy-ass Marvel characters, including in this issue The Armadillo, Mentallo, Puma, Spot, Living Laser and Rocket freaking Racer.

The actual plot, whatever it is, has yet to begin. Van Lente hasn’t gotten to the mastermind-lays-out-the-heist-plan portion yet, with this issue focusing on introducing several of the players and gathering them together. The art come courtesy of Francis Portela and Terry Pallot. I wouldn’t have minded a more cartoony take, given the inherent silliness of the characters involved, but Portela’s more representational style works well too, contrasting that silliness with the real world that makes it silly.





Ultimate Spider-Man #111 (Marvel) Wow, it’s quite a week for Spot fans. Not only does he appear in Super-Villain Team-Up, but the Ultimate version of the character makes his first appearance in USM. While it was nice to see him there, and an interesting use of him (appearing, but in a story that doesn’t actually have anything to do with him), Brian Michael Bendis’ attempts to make him seem a little less lame, explaining the character’s powers as scientifically as possible, describing his look as a sort of human lava lamp, with the spots moving all over him, seems to dampen the stupid, stupid appeal of the character—he’s essentially a cartoon character, covered in “portable holes.”

Of course, Ultimate Spot isn’t the focus of this issue, a long, emotional, well-written conversation between Aunt May and Peter Parker about his double-life as Spider-Man. I think Bendis absolutely nailed it, and I find it fascinating that he had her discover the secret so early in this Spider-Man’s fictional carrer (Relatively speaking, of course; we are past the 100 issue mark now, but the “616” Spider-Man kept his Aunt May in the dark, for, what, almost 40 years?). I think this book has long been Bendis at his very best, and this issue struck me as one of his better ones in recent memory, returning to the relationships between two of the core characters after several arcs focusing on guest-stars. I actually started to tear up a little when May gave Peter her answer as to whether he should leave her house or not, and Bendis perfectly nailed both the appeal and the tragedy of working at a newspaper in a few sentences, the latter in Peter’s mention of “[I]t’s this hub of information for me. Anything going on in the city…anything. And the paper knows about it in two seconds,” and the latter in “[A]nd smart people arguing about morals and ethics and integrity that most of them feel they have to not live by, or the paper will fold.” That’s pretty much the plight of the American newspaper at the dawn of the 21st century, right there. It’s really issues like this that make me wish Bendis would dump half of his titles to focus on two or three. I for one wouldn’t mind someone else writing his Avengers books and Marvel’s Halo tie-in if it meant USM could always be this good, and Bendis could pump out another monthly book just as could.

Actually, the May/Peter conversation isn’t the most important thing about this particular ssue either. No, after 110 issues, this is Mark Bagley’s last as penciler. I’m really sorry to see him go, and would prefer he just stay on this title for, you know, ever, but at the same time I could understand his desire to never have to draw Peter Parker’s hair again his whole life. His replacement is Stuart Immonen, whose chameleonic style has made it hard for me to decide how good a fit he’ll be. I didn’t like his Ultimate X-Men one bit, for example, but loved his Nextwave. Marvel eases him in, here, as Bagley draws the May/Peter scenes, while a flashback to a Spider-Man/Spot fight is drawn by Immonen. He certainly seems to nail Peter, but I don’t think he’s quite gotten Spidey yet. His Spider-Man looks like full-grown adult Spidey, whereas Bagley’s always had a kind of extra boulbous head and skinny little build thing going on.





World War Hulk #2 (Marvel) I found myself thinking a lot about two particular things I’ve read on the Internet this week in between the panels of World War Hulk. The first was Brian Cronin’s Comics Should Be Good post abouthow Chuck Austen’s writing style presaged the way both Marvel and DC have started seeing most of their big stories written*. And the other was this must-read post from Tom Brevoort about Mark Millar’s initial pitch for Civil War, complete with notes from Brevoort and Joe Quesada**.

Reading them both back to back, it seems pretty clear that Millar’s Civil War was at least formulated using Cronin’s formula attributed to Austen, that of “I want C (plot) to happen, and I want B (inciting incident) to be the cause, and I will change A (character) however I have to make that happen.” Millar’s pitch is full of things like, “a friend of Speedball’s” or “some hero, maybe Speedball” and “Happy Hogan’s son, if he has one.” And that what Millar had initially envisioned was meant to be totally awesome, not “Cap surfing on a jet” awesome, but awesome-awesome: “We also have some great set-pieces like Iron Man, Giant Man and so on capturing and taking down guys like the Ghost Rider,” Millar writes. “This should be shameless; every trick in the book. It should be a fan-boy orgasm and we should love every minute of it…”

Looking back, I don’t remember any great set-pieces in Civil War, and of the only real “Holy Shit!!!” moments I can think of in the series proper, it seems one was a fake out (Thor’s back…and he’s pissed!) and the other was, according to this, Brevoort’s suggestion (Spidey publicly unmasking).

What’s this have to do with World War Hulk? Well, thus far, this is a series that is actually delivering all those shameless, “fan-boy orgasm” moments. In just this issue, there are several times where writer Greg Pak and penciler John Romita Jr. give up splash pages and/or panels to big moments of Marvel characters doing big, impressive things, iconic-looking panels you can just drink in while the eight-year-old in the back of your head gasps with delight. Dr. Strange getting a full page to cast a spell, Hulk pounding the pavement on the very next page, The Thing and Hulk trading punches, the Human Torch going nova on the Hulk, and two whole pages of General Ross posing in front of a New York sky full of helicopters.

And yet, Pak isn’t just changing characters to make the plot happen as he wants. If the Hulk we know and love, be it from reading comics featuring him for decades or if this is our second Hulk comic, really came to New York threatening to pulp a cadre of big Marvel heroes, and anyone who stood in his way, wouldn’t Rick Jones show up to try to talk sense to the Hulk? Wouldn’t She-Hulk try to make peace? Yes, yes they would. Pak knows that, and he puts it all in there.

Even his Hulk, who seems to have sufficient motivation to want to do all this smashing, here seems to be given further motivation. Listening to the way several of his Warbound cut him off and seem to speak for him, one wonders how much he’s being peer-pressured into some of this stuff.

Anyway, this is all just a roundabout way of saying that World War Hulk seems to be Civil War done right. Giving us the Marvels at their most Marvelous, beating the crap out of each other, and doing so in a way that respects them as characters and doesn’t pretend to need a fig-leaf of real world relevance in an attempt to make us feel less-guilty for enjoying a supposedly “guilty” pleasure (You’ll notice a lack of mentions to post-9/11 politics and the liberty vs. security debate in Millar’s pitch).






*And I should note that I’ve actually read very few Austen comics. I quit his “Pain of the Gods” JLA arc halfway through, one of only three times I’ve dropped a Justice League ongoing, and I read a few issues of his Action Comics run, which I didn’t like much, and some of his X-Men in trade, which didn’t seem any worse to me than a lot of the X-Men comics I’ve read in trades. So I can’t personally vouch for how accurate the theory presented at CSBG is regarding Austen acting as forerunner to stuff like Amazons Attack and Civil War, but the event/story-creation-as-math-equation part seems dead-on, whatever the origin.


**About which I’d just like to say that Millar’s impulses all seem to be good ones (even the Hulk Babies which, would be a neat visual and tough challenge for our heroes, although the thought of Hulk sleeping his way through an alien harem seems fine for Ultimate Hulk, for whom his unleashed Id is sometimes manifested in a sexual way, but very, very wrong for our Hulk), and the story sounds a lot better at the pitch stage than it turned out. There are plenty of scenes described within that never materialized in the miniseries itself, and Millar’s pitch seemed to be a much longer, more action-packed tale than the one we got. I can’t help but wonder how much an artist who was both fast and good, like, say, John Romita Jr. or Mark Bagley, and/or an accelerated publishing schedule (12 issues bi-weekly, for example) would have helped the book.

Weekly Haul: June 13th

Countdown #46 (DC) I think Graig Kent at Rack Raids summed it up perfectly, in his review of last week’s #47:

For the DC die-hard it’s like adopting a schizophrenic cat: you want to love it, but it keeps biting and scratching you and it shows you no affection at all… and yet setting it free, for some reason, is the hardest thing to do. But it’s for the best if you just let it go. You may miss it, you may wonder how it’s doing, but you’re really better off without it.

I wanted to stick around for at least the first five issues, to make sure I read the Sean McKeever written, Tom Derenick penciled issue before deciding if I wanted to shell out $2.99 each week for a book that’s not really very good. While last week’s issue was an improvement over the first four, this sixth issue is right back in not very good territory. I don’t mind throwing $2.99 away each week on a frustrating read, but, at the same time, I don’t want to encourage DC to keep at it, either.

The thing about a weekly series though is that it’s awfully hard to drop. Literally. I mean, it's there waiting for me to pick it up every single time I go into the comics shop. I have it in my pull, right? So when I showed up at the shop today to get my books, if I wanted to cancel it, I’d still have this week’s issue in my pull, so even if I did cancel it, I’d have one more issue to read. And what if that one’s good? Then I have to add it back in my pull the next week. I guess I could just make a special trip between Wednesdays to cancel Countdown, but that seems like an awful lot of work, doesn’t it?

I hate to say this, because I realize it’s everything wrong with the direct market, but man, it’s almost easier to keep buying a title I’m not crazy about than to cancel it.

Anyway, this issue features the sensational character find of 2007, Forerunner. That’s her on the cover, knocking Jason Todd off the roof of a quaint cottage that’s in the middle of Washington D.C. for some reason.

I hated her the instant I saw her.

I think it’s her crappy, ‘90s X-Men name, which is clunkily obvious, descriptive and unimaginative, but, unlike DC characters with similarly obvious, descriptive and unimaginative names—like, say, Fatale, Bane or Doomsday—the word she’s named for isn’t very interesting or cool-sounding.

It also reminds me of the character Harbinger, since the word is a synonym for the word Harbinger has taken for her name



But, again, “Harbinger” sounds a lot cooler than “Forerunner,” doesn’t it?

And, for some reason, she also reminds me of Access,



that character co-owned by DC and Marvel, which they created for that silly Marvel vs. DC crossover series in which fans could vote for who would win predetermined character match-ups (regardless of whether or not it made any sense or not).

Also, she has a stupid Jedi padwan braid. How could you not instantly hate a character that has one of those?

Aside from Forerunner, here’s what else that wasn’t very good in this week’s issue of Countdown:

—The Rogues’ version of the diner scene from Pulp Fiction.

—Inertia doing a body shot off of Mirror Master.

—Mirror Master using the words “Weddin’ Tackle”

—A piece of the Rock of Eternity still in Gotham. Didn’t, like, every single magical hero in the whole DC Universe, including know-it-all Phantom Stranger, scour Gotham and collect every single shard to reassemble the Rock, as seen in Day of Vengeance Infinite Crisis Special #1?

—Mary Marvel willing to kill already. Come on, it’s only been a week since she went to the dark side

—Donna Troy just kinda sitting there while the Amazons attack Washington D.C., killing folks left and right

—Donna Troy and Jason Todd having the conversation you would assume they already had the last time they talked

—More Cliffs Notes versions of the JLA/JSA team-ups collected in Crisis on Multiple-Earths. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I read the trades, how about we use that space for something mildly interesting, like some more secret origins by stellar artists?



There were some positives, however:

—A demon made out of babies

—The demon saying he was going to eat Mary's flesh and “suck the digested waste” from her intestines. Yeah, it’s super-gross, but it’s original. I mean, how many times can comic book demons threaten to suck the marrow from the hero's bones?

—The return of Sleez, the agent of Apokolips who once forced Superman and Big Barda to make porn together. Seriously.




JLA: Classified #39 (DC) The next installment of Peter Milligan’s long-delayed “Kid Amazo” story, which reads like the middle chapter of a sort of interesting story which isn’t really a Justice Leaguer story at all. It might make for a better read in a trade, which is obviously what it was intended to be (And I don’t mean to imply that this book is a case of decompressed storytelling; since this story was originally announced as an original graphic novel, this is one instance in which everybody knows the writer is literally writing for the trade. Carlos D’Anda’s art continues to suffer from a lack of clarity and connection to the DCU as we know it, and this issue seems to be the worst of the lot. The Justice League seems to be based in their old Happy Harbor cave headquarters for some reason, Professor Ivo looks like neither his human self or his deformed self (he’s drawn to resemble Amazo’s almost exactly, from the point ears and black nails to his physique), and there is one panel that I can’t make heads or tails out of. On page 11, the fifth panel. The one with the red, Carnage-y looking things. What the hell is that supposed to be exactly? On the first few counts, some better art reference would have cleared that problem right up.




Justice #12 (DC) And thus ends Alex Ross, Jim Krueger and Doug Braithwaite’s slick, 12-part, nostalgia-driven paean to Alex Ross’ personal favorite DC superheroes and their villains. It occurs to me that the impulses behind this series, which I quite enjoyed, are remarkably similar to the ones behind Brad Meltzer’s JLoA, which I despise. Both are the results of a grown-up fan reshaping the DC-owned, created-by-committee shared setting to suit their own personal tastes. So why does JLoA bug me so much, while Justice doesn’t? I think it’s because when Ross plays with DC’s toys, he goes off and does it in his own little corner, which I’ve taken to calling the Ross-iverse, and thus the stories aren’t canon, they are simply meant to be enjoyed and then their events forgotten. But Meltzer’s been playing within the DC Universe proper, and his changes are all taken as canon, which forces the rest of the universe to conform to them. Also, Ross and company seem to be able to hit upon that which makes the various Justice Leaguers cool in the first place; Ross “gets” Plastic Man, Aquaman, Martian Manhunter and Captain Marvel, even if he refuses to play by the bits of their history he doesn’t like (Aquaman’s son having been killed, for example), while Meltzer’s understanding of the Justice League characters is limited to a smaller circle (none of the above are even in JLoA, for example), and is radically idiosyncratic (Few fans seem to agree that the Leaguers call each other by their first names constantly, or that half the Satellite League would be cool with brainwashing the other half, for example).

Krueger and Ross also use multiple color-coded first-person narration boxes per issue, just like Meltzer, and they’re just as pointless here as they are in JLoA.

But as for this particular issue, it’s the winding-down of the epic more than the climax, which I think occurred a few months back, when the League first donned their action figure-ready suits and stormed the Legion of Doom’s headquarters. Little of it is terribly original—the bad guys betray one another, the good guys don’t and thus win; the Joker is so crazy no one wants to work with him, and then he kills his fellow villains in revenge for not being allowed to team-up with them; and so on. The one original twist seems to be Batman’s optimistic speech that maybe this time really will be different, that maybe this really will be the last battle between supervillains and superheroes for the betterment of humanity, rather than simply another round in an endless cycle of conflict (Given that this isn’t continuity, the speech has more weight than it would in a DCU story, where we could immediately snicker at the sentiments).

Otherwise, this has been one, big, long, beautiful and ultimately kind of shallow tour of the awesomeness of the late ‘70s DC Universe, if Plastic Man and Captain Marvel were incorporated into it a little earlier, and if it were being painted. On one hand, it’s the sort of story that seems beneath Ross’ talent, but, on the other hand, he and his collaborators were so incredibly thorough in their inclusion of every element of the DCU they liked that it seems like they were approaching the project as the ultimate one dealing with Ross’ nostalgia as its subject matter. Like it was JLA: Liberty and Justice to the hundredth power, which makes it seem forgivable. (How thorough are they in including everything Ross likes about the DC characters? There’s even a Legion of Superheroes appearance, one that, given the costumes and make-up, offers a new possibility for what’s going on in “The Lightning Saga.” I’m actually kinda surprised they didn’t think of a way to include a flashback to the JSA in action).

So, now what? I wouldn’t mind this team doing some super-comics in JLA: Classified (with Ross co-plotting and doing design work, not painting; I’d honestly prefer to see Ross devote his painting time to more worthy endeavors, like Kingdom Come or U.S.), or perhaps even JLoA, when Meltzer leaves. Over and over while reading this series, I’d come to an image of the whole Ross League standing there—the Big Seven, the Hawks, Plastic Man, Captain Marvel, Satellite Era Leaguers—and thinking now that’s a Justice League.

And, of course, no one's had much luck with an Aquaman or Captain Marvel ongoing to date...




New Avengers #31 (Marvel Comics)
In case you forgot, the solicitation copy for this particular issue of New Avengers went like this: “No hype! No BS! The most important last page of any Marvel comic this year! Do not miss it!” I’ve got to admit, I was intrigued about this bold claim, and had a hard time imagining what it could possibly be. I mean, Marvel has already brought Bucky Barnes back to life, retroactively impregnated Gwen Stacy with the Green Goblin’s kids, turned Iron Man and Reed Richards into their most hiss-able villains, publicly unmasked Spider-Man, brought their original Captain Marvel back to life and killed off Captain America. There ain’t a whole lot left to do with their characters that would be even remotely shocking, certainly not anything that could trump the things they’ve already done this year (i.e. killed Captain America). Short of Spider-Man and Wolverine making out on that last page, I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly be exciting or shocking.

Well, I was wrong. It is shocking. It was shockingly uneventful. Want to know what happens on that last page? I’ll tell you. Back in Dr. Strange’s house, Wong, Jessica Jones and Baby Cage are all sitting around, waiting to find out if the New Avengers were all killed by the Hand Ninja in Japan or not. Then they find out that they weren’t. Then Baby Cage opens it’s eyes really wide, as if surprised about something. The end.

If that page is somehow important, I’ve got to admit, I don’t get it. Even in relation to the one genuinely shocking reveal in this issue, which actually occurs on pages 19-21. (If this were the sort of blog where I believed in “spoiler warnings,” this is probably where I’d put one; I’m assuming that, since you’re reading a review of the issue in question, however, you’ve either already read it or aren’t the sort to get bent out of shape about spoilers). Elektra really wasn’t Elektra all along. She was a Skrull.

I’m with Iron Fist on this one, when he asks “What-- What does this mean?” Yeah, I don’t get it. Elektra’s a Skrull—so what? And what does it have to do with Baby Cage opening its eyes on page 22? And why is this supposed to be important?

I suppose it could be that if she’s a Skrull, then maybe some of the other Marvels are Skrulls, like Reed Richards, Hank Pym and Iron Man, but that seems like an enormous cop-out. I mean, people were half-seriously guessing “They all turn out to be Skrulls” by the time Civil War #2 dropped. How ridiculous would it be if we find out that, yes, indeed, they were all Skrulls all along? It’s all a little too “Clone Saga” for me.

As for the previous 18 pages, it’s more of the New Avengers fighting ninjas, which apparently never gets old. Oh, and “Elektra” sets Cage on fire. I’m not entire sure why, but, as Graeme McMillian pointed out at Savage Critics, it’s an incredibly odd scene, one which (coincidentally, I hope) presages an upcoming cover image in which The Falcon, another prominent black Marvel hero, is set on fire.




Tank Girl: The Gifting #1 (IDW) This is a…curious book. While T.G. co-creator and writer Alan Martin is on board, handling the script, it’s awfully hard to think of a Tank Girl story as a Tank Girl story if it’s not drawn by Jamie Hewlett (or, in the case of the Vertigo mini Tank Girl: Apocalypse, an artists who draws sort of similar to Hewlett, like Phillip Bond). And Ashley Wood is about as far from Hewlett, aesthetically, as one can get. Not that there’ s anything wrong with Wood’s art—it’s actually quite good—it’s just so atmospheric and abstracted in a more realistic than cartoony sense that the characters just don’t look like Tank Girl, Booga and the gang, and thus don’t feel like them (Tank Girl, after all, isn’t a character like Superman or Batman, who has a history of various interpretations; it’s pretty much been either Hewlett, or the live-action film version, or nothing).

Wood’s sense of design doesn’t seem particularly Tank Girl-esque either, as she and her mates seem to spend most of their time in party dresses rather than post-apocalyptic punk get-ups. Maybe that’s merely a matter of trying to update the fashions for 2007, but if Tank Girl doesn’t have a mostly-shaven head with random offshoots of hair, if her clothes don’t look like they were pulled out of a closet that recently suffered a bomb attack, if there aren’t some prominently placed bandages about her person, I have a hard time even recognizing her (Hell, there aren’t even any tanks in the issue).

The story still reads like classic Tank Girl—that is, fairly random gags that aren’t as funny as they are weird—but the disconnect between the same-old writing paired with radical new art left me a cold to the whole endeavor. It’s interesting from the outside looking in, but it’s not very entertaining, certainly not as an immersive, comics-reading experience.




World War Hulk #1 (Marvel) Ah, that’s much better. Unlike the last big Marvel Universe crossover (and, come to think of it, the one before that), this story has a very simple hook that anyone can grasp pretty much immediately (Outside of the short in the Giant-Size Hulk special, I haven’t been reading any of the “Planet Hulk” story, or any of the various prologues and lead-ins to this story, and the first two pages were more than enough to know what’s up with this story), a writer I have no preconceived notions of (positive or negative), and an artist whose work I love and who I regard as the quintessential Marvel artist. And since Marvel has spent the last year or so completely vilifying Tony Stark and (to a lesser extent) Reed Richards and (to an even lesser extent), the Illuminati as a group (I mean, they totally slaughtered those Skrulls in #1, right?), I found myself actively excited to see Hulk beat the hell out of them.

And, unlike Civil War, there doesn’t seem to be any gray areas here, or even black and white areas that the writer is telling us are supposed to be gray. Iron Man and his cabal exiled the Hulk, then destroyed his planet, inflicting mass casualties. Hulk is nice enough to give an evacuation order before attacking Manhattan. Go Hulk, go!

I was not without reservations, here. This is a version of the Smart Hulk, and I prefer some version of the Dumb Hulk, one that doesn’t speak in complete sentences (At least he continues to use the word “smash” as a catch-all verb to denote any kind of offensive action, as in “I’ve come to smash”) and I’m not too fond of the tiara, armor (which, on the Hulk, seems redundant) and Hercules-like leggings look, but I stopped noticing either rather quickly. There’s also a pretty cheap reconciliation of the post-Civil War status quo, in which Iron Man essentially tells bitter enemies like Dr. Strange, Spider-Man and She-Hulk (hulked out again, for some reason…?) that it’s all cool now, which seems a rather anticlimactic resolution—even if it proves temporary—to months of built up, interpersonal conflict.

But back to the smashing. Holy crap, is there some awesome stuff in here. Hulk standing on the prow of a spaceship punching asteroids out of the way, Hulk calling out Blackbolt, Hulk hitting Iron Man so hard that he takes all of Avengers Tower down with them. Wow. This series is off to a great start, and I’m pretty excited about the remaining four issues. But then, I really dug Civil War #1, and that really excited me for the rest of that series, and it didn’t turn out so well. So perhaps I should temper that excitement with caution. At the very least, I learned my lesson during Civil War and now know to avoid the tie-ins, particularly any written by Paul Jenkins which also happen to involve Sally Floyd.