On Secret Empire, Marvel's not-so-problematic problematic event series

I can't recall another instance in my comics-reading life where online reaction to a particular storyline was so virulently negative but, upon my consulting the text, I failed to see where exactly the anger was coming from. In the case of writer Nick Spencer's year-long "Secret Empire" story, which began with the "Avengers: Standoff" crossover event and built through the 25-issue Captain America: Steve Rogers series before reaching its climax in the Secret Empire miniseries, a great deal of the fan, reader and just casual observer upset seemed to stem more from the marketing of the book--up to including comments from Spencer and others at Marvel--than the text of any of those books.

Well, that and, of course, the political climate in the real United States around the time the long-simmering storyline started ramping up. Just as fascists were overthrowing the United States of the Marvel Universe, the real United States of our universe had just elected a president who attracted fans of fascism, as well as actual, self-proclaimed Nazis and white supremacists; a president who, at one point, even proclaimed moral equivalency between a crowd of demonstrating Nazis and white supremacists and the people who were protesting them in Charlottesville, after one of their members literally murdered a counter-demonstrator.

So yeah, bad timing.

The plot of Secret Empire is, on its face, as comic book-simple as possible: A hero goes bad and, because this hero is Captain America, he betrays the United States and its globalist super-police army SHIELD for its rival, Hydra, which has long been aligned with his World War II-borne enemy, The Red Skull. Hydra is, in the Marvel Universe, essentially crypto-Nazis, adopting some of their affectations and aesthetics. Spencer went to rather great pains to decouple Hydra from actual Nazis in the pages of Captain America: Steve Rogers, but Twitter-ers either weren't reading or didn't care.

Among the louder concerns I still remember hearing about? It was offensive that Captain America would join Hydra, since Hydra is kinda sorta Nazi-ish (Although Hydra was created by Jewish creators Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in the mid-1960s as an opposite army for SHIELD and company to fight; after the one-time Nazi Red Skull joined, it was later retconned to be a centuries-old organization that allied itself with the Axis Powers during World War II. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe--i.e. the popular Marvel Universe--they seem to have originated with the Nazis rather than with ancient aliens, but then, I don't watch Agents of SHIELD so I don't know for sure).

It was offensive that the character would join Hydra, since he was created by two Jewish comic book creators, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon.

It was offensive that a variant cover depicted Magneto as a member of Hydra, since Magneto is Jewish (For what it's worth, that was just a variant cover*, showing a popular-ish Marvel character in a redesigned costume, little different than a Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane or Venom version of Magneto; this version of Hydra is completely generic, even anodyne in their fascist philosophy of the strong should rule the weak, something perfectly in line with life-long mutant supremacist Magneto's own philosophy; and you can't judge a comic book by its cover, let alone its variant cover, as Magneto's not a part of Hydra and in the 400+-page Secret Empire collection, his only appearance are two panels of him chucking chunks of metal at a Hydra helicarrier near the climax).

Reading the actual Secret Empire collection, however--which, in Marvel's curation, includes Secret Empire #0-#10, Free Comic Book Day 2017 (Secret Empire), Captain America #25 and Secret Empire Omega--it is, for the most part, as politics-free as can be. Spencer's massive story reduces Hydra's philosophy into that simple strength > weakness formulation that is, perhaps, uncomfortably close to the whole idea of superheroes. There's no real racial component or nationalist component, except to the degree that Inhumans--whom Marvel has spent several years transforming into the new mutants--are a persecuted minority, and thus have to stand in for all minorities, I guess (Mutants, if you're wondering, have established their own breakaway nation-state in northern California somewhere off-panel). But then, that's the bad guys, the villains persecuting them; the book doesn't suggest that Inhumans/mutants/minorities should be persecuted any more than any of the scores of X-Men stories featuring anti-mutant bigots can be read as a writer or publisher's endorsement of bigotry.

At its heart, the storyline remains almost as simple as it seemed from the start. Steve Rogers, the original Captain America, was zapped by Kobik, a sentient cosmic cube with the brain of a little girl, near the climax of "Standoff." Cosmic cubes being reality-warping paperweights that grant wishes, they make for nice, easy tools for super-comics writers, an in-story free pass to do pretty much anything the writer wants. As I've said before, Cap being made into a Hydra sleeper agent by virtue of a cosmic cube is little different than had he been zapped with a beam from a gun marked "Acme villainizer." It's a pretty simple heel turn, albeit it one that hundreds and hundreds of pages were devoted to chronicling.

I suppose it's possible Spencer did part of his storyline too well, in that he didn't make things quite a simple as he could have. Kobik was brainwashed by The Red Skull to believe that Hydra was the cat's pajamas, and so when circumstances arose in which she had to fix Steve Rogers, she also fixed the fact that he wasn't Hydra by making him Hydra. But in the pages of Steve Rogers especially, Spencer gave Rogers' new memories and magically-altered history a lot of attention. Kobik appeared to have re-written the world so that, in Steve's and the rest of Hydra's understanding, in reality, they were going to win World War II, break with the Axis and usher in an age of benevolent dictatorship for the entire world, but for the fact that the U.S. created a cosmic cube and re-wrote reality to suit their vision, and so Cap was simply remembering what he believed to be the "real" version of events, and fighting to restore that version.

Here, then, is where Spencer gets political, but it's a lot more subtle than having the United States conquered by Nazis. The war of Secret Empire, and the year or so worth of comics leading up to it, was essentially a conflict of narratives, between characters who believed in different sets of facts, different histories, different realities, albeit with a superhero twist. In Captain America's narrative, Hydra was not only right, they were the rightful rulers of the world, having already won it once, but they were robbed by the U.S.' usage of the most fantastic weapon imaginable. In the narrative believed by Cap's adversaries, the rest of the heroes of the Marvel Universe--which, remember, is supposed to be just the real world + superheroes, he believes in an insane lie planted in his head by Kobik.

Less subtle, but more subtle than Twitter would have one believe, is the fact that Spencer has the United States crumple almost immediately to the idea of benevolent dictatorship, and these Americans are, in fact, even willing to put up with an awful lot of sueprvillainy in their day-to-day lives, like black, spikey super-robots and a surveillance state, if it means they don't have to worry about terrorists.

Okay, maybe this isn't all that subtle; passages of Secret Empire #1 read like less timely takes on the 9/11-era security vs. freedom debate than what we saw in Mark Millar's Civil War (we don't have to call it Civil War I now, do we...?), and I suppose there is a belated, if clumsy, indictment of America's quick embrace of neoconservatives in times of danger, but...I don't know, it's pretty garbled. Steve Rogers' Hydra is much more Bush administration than Trump administration, and it's much more The Empire/First Order from the Star Wars movies than either. (For what it's worth, the original "Secret Empire" was a Watergate-era Captain America storyline by Steve Englehart and Saul Buscema that was an indictment of the Nixon administration, ending with a pretty strong implication that Nixon himself was the head of the evil organization that had infiltrated the U.S.).

The story is, quite naturally, a complete mess. At around 400-pages, it had an appreciably epic scale, and it is a rather rare Big Two "graphic novel" that reads like a novel. It took me two sittings, including the better part of a sick day, to read. Spencer writes the entire thing, but because this isn't just a storyline but an "event," it sprawled throughout Marvel's entire publishing line--Wikipedia says there were some 23 different comic book titles that tied-in, ranging from one-shots to whole story arcs from different books--and so one imagines a great deal of what happens in the book and seems to come out of left field was done so on purpose, leaving it up to, say, the X-Men writers to detail the founding of the new mutant nation or Kitty Pryde's team's adventures in the Darkforce dimension and so on.

But because of the publishing strategy, like Civil War II, this collection includes some stops and starts, and doesn't flow all that fluidly; there's an awkward, scattershot approach to it as a whole (it's worth noting, however, that this reads a lot better than Civil War II, and makes a heck of a lot more sense...that said, a lot of scenes and status quos in Secret Empire are premised on the events of Civil War II, which, I suppose, makes it necessary reading).

Visually, it's even worse. There are about six primary artists, meaning pencil artists or artists who handle everything, and too many inkers, colorists and "with" credits on the table of contents. Worse, little to no effort was put to finding and hiring artists whose styles mesh in any appreciable way. The two artists responsible for the most pages are probably Steve McNiven and Andrea Sorrentino; the latter has a style I personally abhor and find incredibly challenging to read. It's extremely photo-referency, to the point tat it looks like photographs run through filters.

It's quite off-putting, especially when sandwiched between pages of more traditional-looking pencil-and-ink super-comics work. For example, Sorrentino's Iron Fist wears a mask that doesn't have the opaque white eyes of, um, every drawing of Iron Fist ever, but it has big eye holes cut into them. Some of Sorrentino's art just seems...inaccurate, too. For example, Civil War II ended with Iron Man Tony Stark kinda sorta dying, his body going into a vague coma-like state, while an AI based on his own personality began appearing to Riri Williams, his kinda sorta legacy replacement, Ironheart.

Throughout Secret Empire, Stark plays an understandably large role, and the AI seems to now be Stark in hologram form; it even wears a suit of armor independently, and rarely if ever appears with Ironheart. Spencer has Stark saying and doing all kinds of very un-AI-like things, but Sorrentino goes even further, to the point where he just seems to be drawing Tony Stark, not a hologram of Tony Stark or a suit of Iron Man armor with a hologram of Tony Stark's head projecting out of it. Were it not for the colorist almost always remembering to color Stark's head blue when, say, he goes into a bar in Montana disguised in a hooded sweatshirt, there would be no suggestion of what Stark actually is at the moment.

And man, then there's the action scene near the beginning, where Captain America and Hydra route Iron Man and a mess of superheroes who meet him in battle in Washington D.C. A bunch of...stuff happens, including Thor getting sent to a different dimension, Cap wielding her hammer, Scarlet Witch being possessed by a demon, but none of that is actually apparent, or even really makes sense as it's happening, and it's not until later dialogue that we begin to figure out what the hell happened in the battle, as it is mostly just vague poses, with some yelling and sound-effects.

It's actually kind of the opposite of how comics are supposed to work.

In the first passage of the story, that told in the #0 issue and the Free Comic Book Day issue, Captain America actualizes the plans he has been laying throughout Steve Rogers. Via mind-control, he captures and turns most of SHIELD to Hydra, taking his long-time girlfriend (and former SHIELD Commander) Sharon Carter hostage, rather than taking over her mind, too.

Captain Marvel, The Guardians of The Galaxy, Alpha Flight and a bunch of heavy-ish hitters are off-planet preparing to fight an alien invasion that Cap secretly planned, and then he turns on a super-force field, locking them out in space to face an infinite wave of alien invaders until they die.

A sizable swathe of heroes like Doctor Strange and the current Defenders are battling a small army of sueprvillains in the streets of New York City when all of Manhattan gets shunted off into the Darkforce dimension, further dwindling the heroes available to fight Captain America and Hydra.

Finally, realizing that the heroes and the U.S. are under attack, Tony Stark (or his AI...whatever) sends everyone to Washington D.C., where they are surprised to find themselves facing Captain America and Hydra. Sorrentino draws the 10-page battle sequence and, as stated above, it's illustrated gibberish and nonsense, just artfully designed images that fail to tell a story.

That may be, in part, because it is hard--no, impossible--to imagine how on earth the likes of Baron Zemo, The Taskmaster, Arnim Zola and a couple of other Hydra knuckleheads could possibly slow down, let alone take down the combined might of The Avengers, The U.S. Avengers, The Champions and others...Spencer and Sorrentino just end the scene with a dramatic image of Captain America holding Mjolnir above his head, but, um, I don't really see how that translates into him beating up, say, Hercules and two different Hulks, you know? So perhaps Spencer's script urged Sorrentino's vague art on.

The next passage, some 40 or so pages into the collection, is where we see the state of the Hydra-controlled United States and...it's kind of hard to suspend one's disbelief enough to buy, honestly, which is really saying something, because mere pages before I was okay with, say, a big red Hulk with a mustache and aviator glasses fighting alongside a character named Squirrel Girl, you know?

America is now a dystopia, so radically changed in everything from basic geography to school text books that it seems like years, rather than maybe weeks, have passed. The world Spencer and artist Steve McNiven and Jay Leisten here present us with seems like the sort of alternate future that "Days of Future Past" or Age of Ultron were set in.

Congress has semi-surrendered the United States to Hydra high command, with Captain America Steve Rogers acting as their leader. Cap also leads The Avengers, which now consists of former Thor Odinson, Deadpool, a reprogrammed Vision, a possessed Scarlet Witch and a handful of villains, like Doctor Octopus (I think that's who that's supposed to be) and Taskmaster and The Black Ant, who continue to serve as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Spencer's Secret Empire narrative.

As previously mentioned, Inhumans are rounded up and put in prison camps, while mutants have formed their own independent nation state on the West Coast (um, again). The streets are patrolled by Hydra storm-troopers in head-to-toe black-and-red costumes with skull-shaped masks and spiked billy clubs, and Hydra robots built with adaptoid technology hunt superheroes.

Most of the remaining heroes now dwell outside of Las Vegas in The Mount, where a distracted Tony Stark AI tinkers with shit and Hawkeye Clint Barton and Black Widow try to keep everything together.

Things get more hard to swallow before they get less hard to swallow, including Captain America ordering the televised execution of Rick Jones--by firing squad!--and the aerial bombardment of Las Vegas, essentially wiping the city off the map.

From there, our heroes splinter for a while. Hawkeye endorses Stark's plan to take a team--Hercules, Mockingbird, Quicksilver, Sam Wilson and Ant-Man Scott Lang--to seek out shards of the cosmic cube in order to "fix" Captain America. Black Widow, meanwhile, has her own plan: To assassinate Captain America. Spider-Man Miles Morales, still believing there must be something to Ulysses' vision of him killing Cap on the stairs of the Capitol building from Civil War II, volunteers to join her, and The Champions, Wasp Nadia Pym and Ironheart all go with, to support their Spidey.

Meanwhile, Captain America struggles to rule America and keep his cabal from turning on him, all the while seeking out the cube fragments for himself, which actually serves to keep him from going completely into, like, Doctor Doom territory, as the existence of the cube means he really can undo every sin he commits, up to and including bringing Rick Jones back to life.

While the main plot is going on--and, it will surprise no one to hear that its resolution involves the various groups of heroes extricating themselves from their various predicaments and then all returning to D.C. for a dramatic Round Two--there's a pretty goofy parallel track in which a bearded, amnesiac blond hunk named Steve Rogers finds himself lost in the woods, where he encounters versions of Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson, The Red Skull and a few mysterious ladies. During these sequences, Spencer narrates rather purpley about hope, and how exactly these scenes all relate to the rest of the action involving the other Steve Rogers is, well, it's ultimately kind of dumb.

Bearded Steve Rogers is essentially the parts of Steve Rogers that Kobik had to excise from Steve to make him Hydra, although it's awfully vague; perhaps this Steve is the original, "real" Steve, and she replaced him with the other, Hydra-affiliated Steve on Earth, trapping the other Steve in the cube with her? At any rate, by the climax, there are two Steve Rogers-es fighting one another, one of them borne of each of the two previously mentioned dueling narratives.

Remember what I said about a relative lack of subtlety? Well, here we're borrowing liberally from the Superman-fighting-himself-in-a-junkyard section of Superman III. You know how it ends--Secret Empire received such a negative reaction that Marvel made the insane move of issuing a press release to assure readers that as bad as things might seem for Captain America at the beginning of the story he will, in fact, make it out okay in the end (Oddly, even one of the characters we are told dies during the events of the series--Black Widow--is teased as very much alive at the end of the story).

Even the Bad Cap sticks around. Much of Secret Empire Omega, which serves as an epilogue, features the two Steves having a conversation, with Good Cap set to go out and try to atone for what his evil doppelganger did while he was stuck in a cosmic cube or whatever, and Bad Cap doing pull-ups in a prison cell, where he can remain a viable Marvel villain.

What's next? Well, Marvel relaunched Captain America as part of their "Legacy" initiative, meaning it launched with a new, random-feeling high number. The new creative team of Mark Waid and Chris Samnee are incredibly talented, and seemingly especially chosen for their ability to tell more classic-feeling Captain America narratives.

I'm sure they will be good comics. I don't see anyone talking about them, though; is that a good thing or a bad thing...?



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So the whole time I was writing this post, the hardcover collection of Secret Empire was sitting within arm's reach of me, which means I've spent an awfully long time with that cover in my peripheral vision. It is one of the covers for Secret Empire #1, repurposed as the cover for the entire collection, and it just just a spectacularly poor choice for the cover, based on the characters chosen to place on it. Few are in the story in any sizable way.

Captain America obviously plays an enormous role throughout the series, and Captain Marvel and Doctor Strange play sizable roles as well. Most of the other characters, though? Rocket Raccoon appears in several scenes alongside Star-Lord, and Ironheart and Ms. Marvel play small roles.

Thor and Spider-Man, though, appear at the beginning and the end, maybe a sentence or two of dialogue apiece. I have no memory of Medusa, "Old Man" Logan, Storm or any Human Torches in the book at all...I think Logan might have been in there somewhere.

Meanwhile, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Spider-Man Miles Morales, Sam Wilson, The Punisher and Maria Hill don't even get as much cover-space as the SHIELD helicarriers or the Chitauri warship.





*Marvel was obviously listening, though, and reacted to concerns. That "controversial" Hydra-ized Magneto cover is not one of the 34 variant covers that appear in the back of this collection, which does include many Hydra-ized covers in two different formats, the vast majority of them featuring characters who are not Hydra agents in the story itself.

Review: Monsters Unleashed: Monster-Size Hard Cover

Marvel was not kidding around when they named this collection of the five-issue Monsters Unleashed "Monster-Size." It's 14 by 21.6-inches, which might be hard to picture exactly, but, for context, your average trade paperback or comic book is just 6.6-by-10.1. This massive hardcover dwarfs those Street Angel one-shots Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca have been publishing with Image, which are 8.8-by-12.2, or those Alex Ross/Paul Dini one-shots like Superman: Peace on Earth and Batman: War on Crime, which were 9.8-by-13.2.

It is a big comic book. I'm fairly certain it is the biggest comic I've ever read, with Lauren Weinstein's Goddess of War coming the closest (and that was only 10-by-14.9 inches, and remains the most annoying comic I own, as I have no idea where to properly store it). It's a coffee table book, but only in the sense that it is big enough to be a coffee table. As I am typing this, it is sitting on my kitchen table next to me, and it takes up almost half of the table.

Does that massive size matter? Yes, in this particular case, I believe it does. That's because it made the act of reading Monsters Unleashed, a between-events event series that seemed mainly an exercise in maintaining the publisher's ownership of the title of their early 1970s horror anthology, into an experience in and of itself. I may forget plot particulars and which characters or artists participated in the future, but I likely won't forget lugging the huge, heavy tome home from the library, dropping it with a room-shaking thud on my living room floor and reading its poster-sized pages, with some panels the size of some other comics' splash pages.

The story is written by Cullen Bunn, and he works with a different artists on each of the five issues: Steve McNiven and Jay Leisten, Greg Land, Leinil Francis Yu with Gerry Alanguilan and Michael Jason Paz, Salvador Larroca and Adam Kubert. None of these are artists that I would have necessarily picked as an ideal artist for a story involving Marvel's heroes fighting the old Jack Kirby and Stan Lee-created monsters from the pre-Fantastic Four Marvel comics (I probably would have tried to get Nick Bradshaw, whose hyper-detailed style is so similar to that of Art Adams, one of comics' finest monster artists). In fact, there are at least two artists on that list whose work I actively dislike.

Regardless, these huge pages are an incredible showcase for an artist's work; these pages are slightly larger than the size in which most Marvel comics artists used to draw, before the art was reduced to fit into a comic book. That gives a reader an unusually close look at their work, when suddenly no detail is too small that it can't be pored over, and its component shapes and lines scrutinized. I must confess that Land and Larroca, two reference-heavy artists whose work I dislike and, in the case of the former, actively keeps me from reading books he draws, look better-than-ever here. Even if they are drawing over photo reference (and I don't know that's what they do, I just know that's what it looks like), it's difficult to notice on such a big canvas as that offered here.

Additionally, the format infuses all of the pages with import, as almost no panel is smaller than a splash page. And when Bunn does script a splash page, or, heaven forfend, a two-page splash, well it's like one is reading posters rather than comics.

It is therefore a little unfortunate how little there is to Bunn's story. The premise I described above, suggesting Spider-Man and the Marvel heroes battling Fin Fang Foom and the Atlas/Marvel monsters, sounds a simple one, and that simplicity was actually a selling point, particularly since the series was immediately following Civil War II and the crossover series before that was the complex, DC "crisis" style Secret Wars. Despite the covers and the the virtual promise of that premise as seen in the Monsters Unleashed Prelude collection, that wasn't quite the idea of Monsters Unleashed.

Rather, there are three groups of monsters, and the Kirby/Lee creations are but one of them and, honestly, they play a very small part in the proceedings. Giant monsters that we will eventually be told are called "Leviathons" begin raining down on Earth in the form of huge, blazing meteors. Immediately upon landfall, they arise and attack the nearest city, keeping all of Marvel's participating heroes fairly busy. The Atlas/Marvel monsters eventually ally themselves with the superheroes to fight off the alien Leviathons, the idea being that if any giant monster is going to conquer Earth, it's going to be one of them. And, finally, the day is saved by a half-dozen brand new giant monsters, who aren't introduced until the fifth and final issue (and who would go on to star in the ongoing Monsters Unleashed monthly series, which was announced before this event series even wrapped up and, I believe, demonstrating Marvel's willingness to greenlight just about anything, regardless of what the market might be interested in and/or able to support).

Bunn perhaps wisely introduces Marvel's many heroes by the team, with each assembling to battle a Leviathon, and having their names announced in little text boxes next to them: The Avengers (the ones from the Mark Waid/Michael del Mundo series; the Unity Squad and the U.S.Avengers are MIA), The Champions, The X-Men and The Guardians of The Galaxy are introduced as monster-fighting squads in the first issue, with Captain Marvel and Alpha Flight appearing at the beginning of the second. A few solo players are also involved, including Black Panther and, relevant to the story, Elsa Bloodstone and Moon Girl from Moon Girl and Devi Dinosaur.

Also introduced is a mysterious little boy obsessed with monsters, who has some sort of connection to the Marvel monsters like Fin Fang Foom, Gorgilla and company. As the Leviathon shower gets stronger and stronger, Foom and his forces eventually join the fray--Vandoom tries to earlier, but gets mistaken for a "bad" monster and slapped away--and hold the line, while the heroes figure out what's what.

What's what is this: The boy, Kei Kawade, is an Inhuman with the ability to summon, transport and apparently command (to a degree) any monster he draws. Medusa and Karnak show up at Parker Industries to explain some legend of an Inhuman with similar powers who fought off the Leviathon hordes in the ancient past. So, like Civil War II, the very next Marvel crossover event series to follow it was centered on a new Inhuman (I couldn't help but think of former Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada's explanation as to why he wanted to do the whole "No More Mutant" thing; that he felt "because they're a mutant" had become too easy a catch-all origin for any emerging super-character in the Marvel Universe. Here, then, is a pretty concrete example of how Inhumans are the new mutants).

With the help of Moon Girl, who has created a machine to translate the Leviathons' roars, Kei eventually decides to create his own monsters, but, again, these don't appear until the very last issue. When they do, they fight the leader of the Leviathons, they lose for a while and then they win. And...that's the whole story.

There are some fun moments to it all--how could there not be?--but it was really rather surprising what little story there is. What surprised me most was how little the Marvel monsters had to do, to the point that few of them are even named, and only a handful get any lines at all, with those that speak generally only getting a token line or two (FFF gets the most dialogue, but even then his total number of lines could probably be counted on a single hand). Also weird was the fact that the Marvel heroes all acted like they couldn't tell the Marvel monsters from the invaders; granted, many of these characters are relatively new faces, but I'm pretty sure everyone fights Fin Fang Foom eventually (I know both The All-New Wolverine and The Totally Awesome Hulk already have, within the first few issues of their solo titles) and hell, Orrgo was just on the SHIELD payroll as recently as The Howling Commandos of SHIELD and played a part in the "Standoff" storyline.

Some of the new monsters look potentially interesting, but then their weak entrance and similarly small roles in the story mean they are really nothing more than names and designs at this point, so it's actually kind of weird that Marvel green-lit an ongoing in which they star along Kid Kaiju, the superhero name that Spider-Man Miles Morales gives to Kei.

Were this not the biggest comic book I had ever read, and not filled with gigantic, immersive splash pages, it would be a more-or-less completely forgettable story. While I have no idea who it was at Marvel that suggested collecting it in a $50, raft-sized format, it was a pretty good suggestion.

Review: Avengers Vol. 6: Infinite Avengers

I'm afraid I got a little lost while trying to read writer Jonahan Hickman's Avengers books in collected rather than serial form. In my own defense, it's a somewhat challenging series to follow, as Hickman has been writing both Avengers (starring one of the several "official" Avengers teams) and New Avengers (starring "The Illuminati," only a handful of whom have ever actually been Avengers for very long, and only one of whom is currently on an Avengers roster). Both series are somewhat interconnected, and both dovetailed into Hickman's Infinity; parts of the three titles were collected in collections under all three headings during the course of the Infinity storyline.

After reading this and realizing I apparently missed what happened to, like, most of the team—11 of the 17 characters shown on The Avengers "machine" roster don't appear at all in the six issues collected in Avengers Vol. 6—I had to go consult the Internet to realize I missed a collection, Avengers Vol 5: Adapt or Die (Volume 3 was entitled Prelude to Infinity and Vol. 4 was entitled Infinity, so I just assumed Infinite Avengers followed those two; Hickman just really, really loves that word, I guess).

That said, this reads rather satisfactorily as a standalone unit. Yes, events in previous issues and story arcs are alluded to—mainly the one that occurred in New Avengers Vol. 1: Everything Dies, rather than any collection of Avengers—but generous flashbacks explain those events within the pages of this book, which is a good thing (as I forgot some of them) and makes this a much more accessible book than one might expect the sixth volume of such a dense series that's been so deeply entwined with other titles could possibly be.

Captain America is having troubling dreams, which it turns out, are actually memories. He remembers being invited to join The Illuminati—Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Namor, The Black Panther, Dr. Strange and The Beast, who Charles Xavier elected to replace him should he die, as he did in Avengers Vs. X-Men—and they find themselves faced with a difficult, even impossible moral dilemma. They refer to them as "incursions," but, essentially, alternate Earths from alternate universes are regularly coming into collision courses with the Marvel characters' world and, if the two come into contact, both worlds (and the universes those worlds belong to) will be destroyed. The only way to avert the destruction of both Earths and both of those Earths respective universes is to destroy one of the Earths, which means The Illuminati may have to destroy an entire Earth in order to save two entire universes (including theirs).

When the idealistic Cap comes into conflict with his more pragmatic (and, it's well worth noting, particularly for this story, infinitely smarter) colleagues, he convinces them to reform the Infinity Gauntlet and let him try to use that to stop an incursion. He does so, but at the cost of the Infinity Gems; all of them shatter, save the time gem, which disappears.

The others then wipe Captain America's mind via Strange's magic, and kick him out of their cabal. But his subconscious mind remembered, and revealed these events to him in his dreams.

He therefore assembles Black Widow, Hawkeye and Thor, and together with Hyperion and Starbrand, they break into Tony's lab to confront him. Fighting naturally ensues—Cap comes across as rather brutal thug in this scene, punching an un-armored Tony and threatening to beat him bloody for "using" him and contemplating or perhaps having already committed planet-wide genocide—but before either side wins, the broken time gem reappears and hurtles them all into the future.

The remainder of the book consists of the gem periodically appearing and hurtling the team further and further into the future. In each jump, they meet a new team of Avengers of some sort, and, during each jump, one or more of the initial team falls away from the gem, reappearing back in Tony's lab in the present, until, at the climax, it is only Captain America, standing face-to-face with a trio of characters (or versions of the same character, I guess) who exist outside time and have found a way to stop the time gem from shunting Captain America through time.

Hickman has rather often been compared to Grant Morrison, particularly since Hickman inherited the Avengers franchise from Brian Michael Bendis a few years back, and immediately started telling an incredibly ambitious story on a scale as vast as anything Morrison ever wrote for the Distinguished Competition involving their premiere superhero team. (One of the futures visited here is actually rather evocative of at least one aspect of Morrison's 853rd Century from DC One Millions, in which 20th century superhero symbol/sigils are passed down to others, with the accompanying names and powers).

Given that Hickman has also made use of DC analogue characters in his line-up, giving Marvel's Superman Hyperion a particularly large role, it occasionally seems like Hickman is writing Avengers as if he would rather be writing Justice League, an impression that his upcoming Secret Wars, which sounds so much like the climax of Crisis On Infinite Earths with a twist, should only further.

That thought crossed my mind while reading this volume as well, particularly as the other Avengers fall away and Captain America faces characters in the far-flung future alone. The entire conflict between he and The Illuminati revolved around his unwillingness to cross certain moral lines, to sacrifice the lives of many in order to save far more.

He refuses to choose the lesser of two evils and, in his big speech to the time-traveling immortals at the end of time itself, he finally unloads about how sick he is of all the "clever" people telling him that he's just not smart enough to understand:

I don't let people die because it's the lesser of two evils, or expedient, or because it serves the greater good...

I don't compare the act against something else--I see someone who needs help...And I help. You think it's a weakness. You think it's simple...but you're wrong. It's what makes us human...which is exactly what we're supposed to be fighting for. I know who I am.

I rescue the helpless. I raise up the hopeless. I don't measure people's lives...I save them.

That sounds like a rather Superman-like thing to say, doesn't it? And a rather un-Captain American thing to say.

I understand Captain America fell out of the sky into frozen water and went into suspended animation before the United States got around to dropping atomic bombs at the end of the second World War, but Captain America was still a soldier in World War II; how on earth does he make a speech like that without sounding like a giant fucking lying hypocrite?

Nevermind everything he's done since being thawed out and working with the U.S. government and SHIELD, which he briefly lead for a while. Captain America, like America, is all about the lesser of two evils, of committing acts of violence to serve the greater good (In this very story he wasn't trying to "save" Tony from making horrible choices at the beginning, he was threatening to beat him bloody. When he confronts Tony and Tony asks him if he'd like to talk about the mind-wiping, Captain America cuts Tony off a few time sand, when he hears something he doesn't like, he punches him. Hell, at this very story's end, when he returns to the present, Captain America tells the assembled Avengers that they're going "to hunt down each and every member of Reed and Tony's secret society").

Certainly, I don't think Captain America or America itself has ever had to make lesser-of-two-evil choices on the scale that Avengers and New Avengers is forcing upon our heroes—that is, talking about killing billions to save trillions and trillions more—but it's weird to see Cap so virulently opposed to the concept itself. It would seem to be the scale, not the principle, that he's really opposed to, but he articulates it in the sort of absolutist terms of the black-and-white (pre-New 52) DC Comics superheroes, not the terms of the morally gray Marvel heroes.

Superman, faced with two bad choices, will always find a third way to save everyone. Captain America, Iron Man and Reed Richards used to be the same way, at least up until around the turn of the century and, even more so, House of M and Civil War, where dubious moral compromises became the order of the day.

Speaking of finding a third way, this story arc contains a major pivot that leads to the Avengers/Illuminati conflict of the next volume:

Here the third choice is another violent choice, and one that does nothing to address the apocalyptic dilemma of the incursions. Captain America is repeatedly told he can either stand by and let the Illuminati save the world, even if their strategy involves destroying worlds, or he can help them save the world by destroying other worlds, or he can repeat Civil War and try to take Iron Man on and down...and then who saves the world?

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

Ha ha, all of that was about the writing, wasn't it? I didn't even mention the artwork. This is a stereotypical review of a comic book on the Internet, isn't it?

Well, the art isn't too terribly interesting, I guess.

It's by pencil artist Leinil Francis Yu, whose work I really rather like, and inker Gerry Glanguilan, with Sunny Gho coloring all buy one issue (which is colored by Matt Milla).

Yu's action scenes involving multiple players are generally just weird panels where a bunch of people pose with their mouths open, but his storytelling is otherwise pretty strong, and he turns what could have been very boring pages, like a Bendisian 16-panel page in which superheroes have a meeting, into much more dynamic and interesting pieces...although I suppose such a page only looks good here if you've seen it done very poorly elsewhere, and Marvel has done a lot of superheroes-having-a-meeting pages very poorly in the past.

Hickman gives Yu a bunch of fun shit to draw, as the jumps to the futures start 48 years into the future and the second-to-last one occurs 50,000 years in the future...before the final issue, which is set outside of time in "Fractured Temporal Space."

Some of the futuristic versions of Avengers are kind of neat, like the holographic version (while others are a bit tired, like the giant mecha Avengers), and there's some weird, creepy stuff with technology going on, as when Captain America has a bug bomb shoved under his eyeball.

I don't really care for Yu's Black Widow, who is ridiculously well-endowed—and usually fairly unzipped—and yet still executes all these crazy flips and such. Maybe her breasts are full of hydrogen or helium...?

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

The back cover contains the words "Original Sin Comes Crashing Into Avengers Tower!", which seemed particularly strange to me after I read the volume, as it has absolutely nothing at all to do with Original Sin, although there are probably some parallels to be drawn between Nick Fury's address of moral dilemmas as posed and answered in that book versus Captain America's arguments against such actions as articulated here.

Looking up the original covers on comics.org, the covers of the issues collected herein apparently did bear the Original Sin logo and cover design.

If I had to guess, the tie-in has to do with secrets being remembered...specifically, that The Orb's Watcher eyeball "truth bomb" had a delayed reaction on Captain America, retrieving the memories that Dr. Strange magic-ed away while he was asleep one night.

Interestingly, trade itself reads as if Captain America's dreaming mind retrieved those memories, and makes no mention of The Orb, The Watcher, the truth bomb and exposed secrets. I wonder if anyone picked these issues up specifically because of their "Original Sin" logos and were disappointed to see nothing other than a rather vague, thematic connection between the two storylines.

Review: Infinity

This is, however, a terrible cover, saying nothing about the book other than that Thanos is in it, and that he takes excellent care of his teeth for someone obsessed with death.

I really rather enjoyed Infinity, the Jonathan Hickman masterminded and written Marvel crossover/event series.

At least in the form in which I read it, the form of a gigantic, 630-page hardcover collection with the size and scope to truly deserve being called "a graphic novel." Even though it is a collection of serially-published comics: A half-dozen issues each of New Avengers and Infinity and 10 issues of Avengers.

The thing about the modern Marvel event series—DC has temporarily abandoned the field after The New 52, only offering one true big event in favor of smaller, franchise-sized crossovers and line-wide theme months—is that while the publisher does lay out a buffet of comics under the umbrella title of the event, it's up to the reader to basically curate their own experience. If you want to read it monthly, then you can choose to just read Infinity. Or just Infinity and its more important tie-ins (Here, Hickman's two Avengers books). Or everything with the word "Infinity" in the title. Or just the books featuring characters, creators or premises you like with the word "Infinity" in the title. Or some other configuration.

You could also wait for the collection, in which Marvel more-or-less pre-curates your Infinity experience for you. That's what I did with this book; I waited long enough for the dust to settle and the important parts of the story to emerge and get put together between a single set of covers (Yes, it costs a $75 fucking dollars, but that's what public libraries are for, if you feel no particular compulsion to own the book, and you probably shouldn't).

(One could also follow along by simply reading Andrew Wheeler's amusing summaries at Comics Alliance.)

I mention that merely because I suspect my experience of reading it in this particular form—one big, continuous narrative only occasionally broken up by the need to eat or sleep or go to work—made it a much more enjoyable one than it would have been were I reading it in 20-80-page installments once a week or once a month, over the course of half a year or so, likely picking up all sorts of puzzle pieces that I would only later find didn't really have anything to do with the final story (I ran across the Guardians of the Galaxy tie-in issue in the collection Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Angela, for example; that had almost nothing to do with the story of Infinity, it turns out, and was so insignificant to the story that it merits a two or three-panel dramatization within this collection).

Also, the not paying for it has got to help a lot. I know from reading Secret Invasion and Civil War how frustrating it is to pay too much money for a branded tie-in that has no real import or no real pay-off in the story itself. I suspect that if I had attempted to read Infinity the good old-fashioned, Wednesday Crowd reading way, I would have hated what little I made it through before giving up entirely.

But 600 pages of curated comics, for the free? Yeah, that's a good way to read the story.

The presentation here is pretty unique too, I think. There are two byzantine credits pages at the beginning, saying who did what in which comic book collected—Hickman wrote almost all of it, with Nick Spencer-co-writing a handful of Avengers issues; artists included Mike Deodato, Stefano Caselli, Jim Cheung, Jerome Opena, Dustin Weaver, Leinil Francis Yu and others—but unless you're very diligent, and, for some reason, decide to keep referring back to those credits pages while reading, it's difficult to tell which comic book the section you're reading originated in.

That is, there are no individual covers and story titles and credits demarcating the end of one issue and the beginning of the next. Rather, it's presented like a novel. There will be an all-white page with a chapter title on it—"Orbital," "The Last Lesson," "Plans and Intentions"—and then a few pages of comics before the next chapter. It's all rather seamless.

The artwork, if you're familiar with the names of the above artists, changes noticeably, but also changes so often that a sort of baseline aesthetic is established, and even an experienced reader will likely go a few pages before noticing a different artist is drawing, and generally only, say, when you see the way Yu draws an eyeball, or the way Deodato abuses his computer to drop blurry photos into the backgrounds in the most unnecessary of ways (For example, one panel had a photo of the moon in the back. Just draw a fucking circle! Use a compass if it's too hard! If we see a large, luminous circle in a black sky, we'll figure out it's the moon; we don't need to see all the craters).

The surprisingly seamless (or seam-lite) feel of the artwork may have something to do with the fact that the cast is largely an unfamiliar one. Well, it's large for one thing, and while most of the names are familiar, there are a lot characters in here who aren't exactly Spider-Man and Wolverine (both of whom appear briefly in the opening, and then disappear); there are a lot of Inhumans and space guys and new Hickman creations and Thanos' "The Black Order/Cull Obsidian" (almost none of whom are dark in color or where much black, oddly enough) that I didn't know if they were new or not, because the extremities of the Marvel Universe isn't my bag.

It may also have something to do with the fact that while I named some of the artists who contribute the most work, there are quite a few more, and those weren't counting the inkers and colorists. The book has the look of a studio work; not in the sort of uniform, page-to-page look that a manga studio might be able to produce, sure, but neither in the sort of "All hands on deck! Deadline's in six hours, guys!" look of some of the rougher DC Comics with more than three artists involved.

As for the story, it is appropriately big for a book called Infinity, but also, once it gets going, rather simple.

It involves a convergence of the two plot-lines in Hickman's two ongoing Avengers books, both of which I like quite a bit, from what I've read to them previous to this.

The simpler of the two would seem to be New Avengers, which should really be called The Illuminati, as it features the Brian Michael Bendis-created concept of a cabal of the smartest and most influential Marvel Universe leaders secretly meeting and pulling strings behind the scenes. The current incarnation—Doctor Strange, Namor, The Black Panther, Mister Fantastic, Black Bolt, Iron Man and the X-Men's Beast, the latter of whom is in for the temporarily dead Charles Xavier—are currently trying to secretly deal with a fantastic problem with mind-boggling moral implications.

Apparently, alternate Earths from neighboring dimensions keep appearing close to their own Earth (the one we call 616) and, with no Spectre to push the world's apart, Gardner Fox-style, they have to come up with a solution to save their world. The best they've been able to come up with is to destroy the alternate Earths, before they collide into their own Earth, destroying both.

Namor, who is, remember, a dick, and Black Panther, whose little sister now rules Wakanda as queen and is advised by a bunch of dicks, find their countries at war on account of the events of Avengers Vs. X-Men, which makes playing nicely on the same team somewhat difficult for the pair.

In Hickman's Avengers book, he's introduced the biggest and most powerful Avengers line-up I've seen, in a book that is probably the closest thing to Grant Morrison's '90s run on JLA with Howard Porter, John Dell and occasional fill-in creators that I've yet found. Iron Man invents a sort of Avengers machine to recruit members, and the huge line-up has swelled to include Captain America, Captain Marvel, Thor, Hyperion, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Black Widow, The Falcon, Shang-Chi, Hawkeye, Wolverine, former X-Men Sunspot and Cannonball (who have taken the Wally West/Kyle Rayner comic relief/POV character role from JLA), Manifold, a new Smasher, a weird new take on Captain Universe and new characters—or new versions of old characters, in perhaps one case—Abyss, Nightmask, Ex Nihilo and Starbrand. Whew!

Those last four were later additions, and the earlier books of the series have dealt with the already pretty huge Avengers line-up dealing with them, as they showered Earth with "origin bombs" and pulled all kinds of crazy cosmic bullshit.

As for that simple plot that powers Infinity, it goes like this. An ancient race known as The Builders, whom Abyss and Ex Nihilo were kinda sorta in the employ of at one time, are destroying the galaxy, wheat thresher style, on their way to Earth, which they would also like to destroy. "The Galactic Council" (i.e. The Illuminati...but in space!) rally all kinds of Marvel alien races and band together to try to stop The Builders in Star Wars-dwarfing space battle after Star Wars dwarfing space battle, and The Avengers recruit their most powerful recent antagonists (Ex Nihilo, et al) and head into space to join the fight.

Meanwhile, learning that Earth is currently Avengers-free, Thanos decides to attack, with a somewhat ambiguous goal (looking for an Infinity Gem, and/or collecting bags of heads) masking his true goal—to find and kill his son, who is hidden on Earth among the Inhumans.

So it's a war on two fronts, with the away team pretty outmatched, despite entire space empires worth of cosmic help, and the home team dealing with Thanos' armies, lead by the five super-powerful members of the Black Order (this bit actually reminded me a bit of the also decidedly simple, and better than most stories in its class, Fear Itself, at least in the way Thanos' Obsidian generals mirrored the hammer-wielding Worthy).

The remaining Earth heroes and The Illuminati have to deal with the Thanos mess, and hope to hold him off long enough for the space war to wrap up and the other Avengers come back to help beat-up Thanos. Meanwhile, Blackbolt is up to something. And of course, an alternate Earth could materialize at any moment and obliterate the world...or compel the Illuminati to commit planetary genocide.

So lot of big ideas thrown about at machine gun pacing, with clever uses for powers and comic book science being employed as tactics in the course of the wars.

I do hate to keep bringing up Grant Morrison—or at least, Grant Morrison circa the turn of the century—as I get the feeling Hickman gets unfairly compared to him far too often already, but Hickman's take on the various super-characters reminded me quite a bit of Morrison's take on the JLA, in which the characters are very remote and, a few jokes or a single character trait apiece aside, don't have all that much in the form of personalities, but rather are interchangeable soldiers, functionaries who are so caught up in the escalating scales of the threats they face that there's no real need to concern ourselves with any personal conflicts they might be facing.

Are Captains Marvel and America confident, or do they feel out of place fighting among god-like aliens in battles in which worlds live and die? Who cares? They're kinda wrapped up in the fighting of those battles at the moment.

This isn't the case with the Thano/Illuinati side of the plot. Many of the characters have semi-silly magnetic poetry names, and speak in florid pronouncements, but there is a much (relatively) smaller scale to plots like the invasion of a single planet by a single invasion force, for example, or Thanos wanting to kill his son, or Black Bolt not wanting to let Thanos kill a bunch of his people, and so forth. The motivations and conflicts among m any of these characters are still quite grand, but things like wars between nations and geo-political rivals are at least human in scale.

For all of the talk one hears about the unlimited special effects budget of the comics page, I found the art somewhat ill-suited for depicted space battles between armadas of huge space ship. At their best, we get a sense of scale in large drawings of huge numbers of ships, but they don't move, and the artists rarely give us more than establishing shots—there are no dogfights or anything akin to that. The scale here dwarf that of your biggest Star Wars battle, but it doesn't move or sing and thus doesn't thrill like even the most dryly staged and unimaginative Star Wars battle scene.

At best, the space ship fights work in extreme long shot, as we see chunks of gray and white metal in the background, laser beams like Christmas tree lights between them.

The supehero battles are a lot more successful, of course, and Hickman and his collaborators do some weird and strange things with the space team of Avengers. They are outnumbered by their many alien allies—Gladiator, Ronan The Accuser, etc—but appear in the fray with odd bits of armor and masks, occasionally astride weird little vehicles. My favorite out-of-place character in this is probably The Falcon, who gets a big, bizarre, vaguely prehistoric bird-shaped helmet that allows him to participate in space fights.

Also note Spider-Woman on a speeder-bike thingee with Hawkweye behind her, fighting alien spaceships with a bow and arrow in space.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the good guys ultimately win, not even losing any token, temporary casualties as is so often the case in these sorts of crossovers (Well, I'm pretty sure thousands died, but no Avengers). What is surprising is all the stuff that Hickman has his good guys try in the course of winning, some things failing horribly (like a last resort to release a new "Annihilation Wave" from the Negative Zone, a threat so dire it once powered it's own galactic-spanning crossover event series) and some things succeeding remarkably well (like Thor having Mjolnir punch a hole in a seemingly unstoppable villain to inspire a planet full of guys who carry big, blunt weapons).

Again, like Morrison's JLA, the story ends with a sort of exciting, sort of depressing note—as bad as all this might have seemed for our heroes, it was nothing compared to what it could have been, and what it will be next time. The end of the world (or galaxy or universe) doesn't just appear and win or lose once, but it's something that's always coming, more persistently and more insistently each time, and requires constant fighting. Entropy is an inevitability, and superhero fights, like life itself, is basically just a stalling tactic.

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

A cheery thought, I know.

So let's end on a fun note. A Lockjaw note.

Lockjaw is, of course, the giant bulldog with a tuning fork on his head and a handsome mustache that serves as the Inhumans' modes of transportation, given his ability to teleport himself and others. He is awesome.

He appears throughout the book, generally in a seemingly small role, as he helps Black Bolt and Black Bolt's brother Maximus The Mad in their bizarre machinations.

Lockjaw: The only reason an Inhumans movie might be a good idea.

He also gets maybe the single most bad-ass scene in the entire series. Here is Lockjaw taking out one of Thanos' generals, Supergiant, all by his bad-ass bulldog self:

Fuck yeah, Lockjaw!

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

Hey, is it weird that in a hand-to-hand fight against one of Thanos' generals, the orange guy in gray armor called Blackdwarf, that Black Widow's costume gets torn up a lot more than Shang Chi's?

Ha ha ha ha! No, of course not! He wears spandex and she wears crepe paper. It's a simple matter of the materials they make their costumes out of, and has nothing to do with artists preferring to draw women with their clothes torn off then men with their clothes torn off. Obviously.

My last post on Superior. I promise.

Mark Millar tends to write a lot about political issues, and even includes actual, real-life politicians within his comics (President George W. Bush and members of his cabinet appeared in both The Ultimates and Civil War, for example, President Barack Obama appears in Superior), and war often plays a big role in those comics. But, based on the comics he writes, I have a hard time discerning what sorts of politics Millar himself might hold, aside from being very pro-Millar and very pro-capitalism, particularly in that it can help enrich Millar.

Take Civil War, for example, which was discussed and even, to some extent, sold as a timely dramatization of the post-9/11 security vs. liberty debate as seen through the lens of Iron Man and Captain America punching each other.

Millar cast the security side of the debate as the bad guys, clearly aligned with the Bush administration, the first issue ending with a scene of a trio of Marvel's science dickheads—Iron Man, Hank Pym and Mr. Fantastic (who had just recently been outted in someone else's dumb comic as pro-Joe McCarthy)—promising to capture Captain America and force him and all the other recalcitrant superheroes to sacrifice their liberty in the name of security. They immediately start abusing the constitution, killing someone for resisting an unlawful arrest and even building a superhero version of Guantanamo Bay to indefinitely defer the likes of lawyer-by-day, superhero-by-night Daredevil.

So they're the bad guys, right? But in the last issue, the heroes of 9/11—a sort of Village People version of first responders—tackle Captain America and make him realize that he's the real villain, so he gives up, and Iron Man makes a smug speech about how extra-constitutional power is okay in this instance, because he's a smart guy who will do the right thing with it, so no one should worry.

In the security vs. liberty debate the book was supposedly about, all I could definitely tell about Millar was that he was in favor of Captain America surfing on jet fighters, Goliath getting killed by a robot clone monster and selling as many comics as possible by weird, random, almost-immediately reversed stunt plot points like Peter Parker revealing his secret identity to the world and the dead-from-cancer Captain Marvel appearing out of nowhere all of a sudden for some reason.

The politics of Superior aren't very clear, either, although it's not as concerned with politics as Civil War or any of Millar's Ultimates works have been.

There's just this one scene that sort of sticks out, like a rough edge from an early draft Millar forgot to smoothe out.

Superior, the Superman-analogue who was once a 12-year-old boy with multiple sclerosis named Simon who wished himself into Superman when a little talking monkey in a astronaut's uniform appeared and offered to grant him any wish, is talking to Chris, his only confidant:

Simon's mom was always praying that "America would get fixed again too." Simon/Superior thinks perhaps America really "needed" a superhero at that moment in time.

It's weird because those statements aren't really based on anything we see within the context of what has come before, nor are they really touched on later in the story, after he tells Chris he wants to start doing more to really change people's lives for the better.

Now, at almost any point in American history it's easy to imagine a person, especially a grown-up adult, saying that America needs to be put back like it used to be. It's an essentially conservative position, just by definition of the word conservative, but Simon/Superior never elaborates on what his mom thinks specifically needs fixed again: The economy? The war? Eroding social services and the safety net they provide for the poor? The loss of civil liberties to President Bush and Iron Man? Too much liberties for gays? Too easy access to birth control and abortions? A black guy being president?

No clue.

Prior to that statement, the only things Superior really does to help America are prevent accidents, usually in rather dramatic fashion—he catches a falling space station, he stops a speeding train with his bare hands (although it woulda been easier to just move the dude off the tracks before the train could hit him), he drags a lost Russian submarine to land, he carried off a nuclear power plant reactor as it was melting down, he threatened the bullies that picked on him and Chris and, we're told, he prevented every single accident and crime in New York City for three years.

Perhaps that was what was wrong with America, in his mom's view? Too many accidents and urban crime...?

After Superior meets with Obama to talk to him "about winning the war in Afghanistan," Superior goes ahead and does it solo in a single night's work (one suspects Millar doesn't have the greatest grasp of what the "war" in "Afghanistan" actually entails; here it is basically just a bunch of easily identifiable by X-Ray and telescopic vision Taliban members who can be easily captured and arrested by a Superman). The rest of his super-deeds take place in a two-page montage, in which he helps other countries, like preventing a earth quake in China and a flood of the coast of Australia, and brings "more food and volunteers in a single afternoon than citizens expected to meet in a lifetime..."

So perhaps that was what was needed in America? America needed to be the world's policeman, the world's fireman, the world's aid worker, but it needed to do so infinitely better than it had been doing...?

I don't know. I don't suspect Millar does either. It was just a few errant lines of dialogue setting up a tease about the nature of Ormon. But it's a strange reference that asks a question and then never provides an answer.

Millar, Superior and "The R-Word"

How can a reader tell when something written in a work of fiction represents the author's viewpoint and when it is merely dialogue the author is using to represent the viewpoint of his characters?

That's a tricky question to wrestle with, and, personally, I don't see any reason to ever assume the latter over the former with any degree of confidence.

That said, when an author has three very different characters use the same increasingly rarely used, no longer socially acceptable, completely un-PC term three times in the same relatively short story? Well, that at least can make a readers suspicious of the author.

I bring this up because I just read a trade paperback collection of Superior, the 2011, 7-issue Leinil Yu-penciled series that Marvel Entertainment published on their creator-owned/keep-Bendis-and Millar-happy-at-all-costs Icon imprint. It was written by Mark Millar, no stranger to having folks arch their eyebrows at the words of his narrators and characters and getting uncomfortable about the degree to which the characters speak for the author.

If you haven't read it—and you needn't—Superior is either a rejected pitch for a Superman comic that DC didn't like as much as Millar's Red Son, or it's an idea for a Superman story that Millar had but realized if he just changed some characters and costumes (here, extremely slightly) as he did with Wanted, he could get away with using DC characters for another publisher, and reap the financial reward of the book and/or the movie adaptation. (This isn't a review of the book; I'll get to that in the near future, but this one aspect struck me as so strange and made me so uncomfortable, I thought it worth noting in its own post before proceeding to the formal aspects of the comic and assessments of the overall quality).

This is the narrator of the book, the Lois Lane character Madeline Knox, who starts narrating about halfway through the first issue, but isn't actually introduced until this scene in the third issue:

While there's no indication of how old she is, it would be safe to assume by her profession—a popular, New York City-based television journalist and newscaster—and her success in that field that she's no younger than her mid-twenties, and more likely somewhere in her thirties. In other words, awfully old to still be casually using the word "retard" (Particularly in front of strangers in public, I imagine).

In her defense, she does tell the reader, just two pages prior that, this scene takes place "Back when all I cared about was how much I weighed and what my ratings were...I don't think I was a very nice person back in those days."

No, she doesn't seem like it, and I suppose ranting and raving about "a retard convention" is a decent shorthand to prove just how not a very nice person she was "back in those days" (a strange turn of phrase, since the point in time she's narrating from is just a few weeks later).

Here's another character in the book from a big "twist" scene a few issues later. He's Ormon, and he is a (spoiler, if you do wanna read this book and experience as its writer intended it to be read) demon from hell:

As a demon from hell, I suppose it's not surprising that an evil character would use any hurtful word, although as a 500-year-old demon from hell*, it's a strange example of word usage. "Simpleton" or "fool" sure sounds more like something a demon from the late 16th century might say. Then again, he's talking to a 12-year-old boy, so maybe he's using their language (Do 12-year-old boys still say "gay" and "retarded" to mean "anything negative in any general way," like I, to my shame and regret ,used to when I was in grade-school? Or have those words and their usage in that way been pretty much stamped out?)

Here's another character from the book, an actual 12-year-old boy, although through the infernal powers of Ormon he's been transformed into Superior's arch-villain Abraxas (While the word "Abraxas" has origins that pre-date comics by centuries, it's worth noting that both Marvel and DC have villains named Abraxas; the DC version spelled his name "Abraxis" and appeared in 1992's Armageddon: Inferno, while the Marvel one appeared in a Fantastic Four annual from 2001):

So that's three characters in seven issues saying some derivation of a word I haven't heard spoken since...Tropic Thunder, maybe...? And that I don't think I've ever read in a superhero comic published by Marvel or starring Superman, but I could be wrong. (Actually, I'd bet some money it was used in Millar's Kick-Ass more than once, although I only made it about half-way through that miniseries).

Anyway, three seems a lot for a comic book published in 2011.

*Now that I think about it, maybe he's not 500-years-old, but merely hasn't been able to convince anyone to sell a soul to him in 500 years, and he's actually the same age as all demons; the comic doesn't get too deep into demonic biology or the cosmic origin of angels and demons or anything.

Review: Indestructible Hulk Vol. 1: Agent of SHIELD

You've got to give it to Mark Waid—the guy certainly knows how to relaunch a tired, stale, stuck-in-a-rut franchise in a new, fresh and immediately appealing way.

He did just that with Daredevil by simply breaking with the last few decades of characterization of the title character as a brooding, doomed super-ninja whose loved ones were always getting murdered and who was always in an understandably foul mood (and he did so there without rebooting or retconning the character or his history, but simply by building a recognition of a need for change in outlook directly into the character's understanding of himself). (It didn't hurt that Waid was working with some of the best drawers of superhero comics in the industry on Daredevil, with Marcos Martin, Paolo Rivera and Chris Samnee drawing a lot of those comics).

When Marvel announced their "NOW!" initiative, in which they were putting all-new creative teams on all of their books, relaunching them with new #1s and giving them new, easy-jumping-on-point directions, Waid got the Hulk, a character who has been more than a little unmoored for much of the past decade (They shot him into space for a while, had him come back as the end boss in a line-wide crossover event story, they paired Bruce Banner with The Hulk's son, they replaced Banner and the green Hulk with a Red Hulk and, in the last Hulk comics I read, they had Hulk and Banner surgically and magically separated into two distinct beings).

So here's what Waid came up with: Bruce Banner is a brilliant scientist with some issues who occasionally turns into a semi-mindless, indestructible engine of unfettered destruction (as per usual), only Waid has his Banner come to terms with this fate as a more-or-less eternal and inevitable state of affairs. Realizing that there just isn't a "cure" for The Hulk, that The Hulk is truly "indestructible" (hence the new I-word adjective replacing the more traditional "Incredible"), he needs to quit wasting his time trying to rid himself of The Hulk and wasting his life (and considerable brain power) on running from, hiding from and fighting against the military.

So he offers SHIELD Commander Maria Hill, who after her one-note introduction in Mark Millar's Civil War has become quite a fun supporting character thanks to folks like Matt Fraction in Invincible Iron Man, a deal: Give him the resources he needs to devote himself to making incredible inventions to benefit mankind a la Tony Stark and Reed Richards while he's himself and, when he's The Hulk, use him to smash stuff for SHIELD ("Stop thinking of Hulk as a bomb," Banner tells her, "Think of him as a cannon. On those occasions when I do go green, it will be SHEILDS's job to point Hulk in a suitable direction.")

Waid also gives Banner a new mission statement/mantra: Hulk destroys, Banner builds.

The first volume contains the first five issues of the new series, and as inspired and refreshing as Waid's new take is, and as efficiently as he presents it, he spends pretty much the entire first issue laying it out in a maybe over-obvious, telling-more-than-showing sort of way (although Waid has Banner arrange it so that he meets Hill and makes his offer just before she's about to initiate a SHIELD raid where having the Hulk go in first would prove immensely helpful—this, then, is a far cry from the old Bruce Jones version of the title. We've got a Hulk by page 12, and he sticks around for a six-page fight scene).

The bulk of the script-side of this volume is set-up of sorts, as Banner and The Hulk have their job interview with SHIELD in the first issue, and then we see Banner slowly set up a lab, recruit a staff, be given a new, rather ironic new home, meet with and try to convince Tony Stark that he's a no longer the sort of threat that should be shot off of Earth against his will, and then face an underwater army commanded by Attuma (sadly, there's no Namor guest-appearance). While it does seem like the book is still settling in to its premise by the last page, it's hardly decompressed: There are new villains, conflicts fights in just about every single issue (or two, in the case of Indestructible Hulk #4 and #5).

For an artist, Waid is teamed with penciler Leinil Francis Yu (inked by Gerry Alanguilan and colored by Sunny Gho), and while I like Yu's art quite a bit, he's lacks the clean, smooth style of most of Waid's Daredevil co-creators, and their superior story-telling skills. He draws nice, twisted, highly emotive faces, science-fiction stuff (functional and smashed into junk) and big, gnarled Hulk muscles—He's a good choice for the title, really, but perhaps not the ideal choice.

All in all, this is very good superhero comics, and it's the sort of comics I'd happily read serially were Marvel charging $2.99 a pop for it, but this is one of the $3.99 books, or part of their You'd Be A Fool To Buy This Monthly Instead of Waiting Six Months To Read the Trade For Free From the Library line.

One thing I wasn't sold on was the Hulk's new "costume." When Marvel first announced their "NOW!" initiative, in the wake of DC's "New 52" reboot and branding initiative, they did so with a Joe Quesada-drawn image of a bunch of their characters, many of them given change-for-change's sake design tweaks. For example, Iron Man was drawn in yellow and black armor instead of his standard yellow and red, Thor was wearing a couple of swords on his back and the Hulk was wearing shiny metal pants and some armor which, on the face of it, seems as silly as, say, giving Superman armor (You know, like Jime Lee and DC did with their New 52 redesign of Superman).

I've heard Waid say on Twitter (I think it was) that the armor isn't there to protect the Hulk, but to protect Banner. In these first five issues, I've seen little evidence of the armor serving any real practical function, save for in the last two issues (the ones dealing with Hulk's fight against Attuma), in which it apparently generates some kind of breathable air for The Hulk and Banner. After reading the first volume, it seems that the armor was thought up by someone else—perhaps Chief Creative Officer and occasional variant cover artist Joe Quesada—as simply something different for something different's sake, a big, obvious, in-your-face clue that something was different now.

If that is the case, they need hardly bothered. It's clear something is different now. The Hulk's main comic stars the original green Hulk again, in a premise that hews close to the original conception while also being something new and a logical evolution of that original premise and, most importantly, it's really rather good.

And those are the best sorts of differences of all.

Review: Ultimate Comics Avengers Vs. New Ultimates: Death of Spider-Man

Yes, that is the actual title of this hardcover collection, although the six-issue miniseries it contains was originally published under the only slightly less onerous title of Ultimate Comics Avengers Vs. New Ultimates, with the "Death of Spider-Man" phrase running running as a banner a top each of the covers, where one might expect the title of the book to be, with the actual title running along the bottom.

Whether used as part of the title or merely as branding effort that looks like a title, the phrase "Death of Spider-Man" seems awfully out of place attached to this storyline, and I imagine it must have proven extremely irritating to anyone who encountered this story by paying actual money for it—$25 for the hardcover, or $24 in six monthly-ish payments for the serially-published chapters in comic book form—given how little the story actually has to do with the death of (Ultimate) Spider-Man.

Sure, the cover the publisher ran with was the one featuring a character that looks like a cross between The Punisher and Captain America (it's Ultimate Punisher, wearing something he doesn't actually wear inside the book) taking shots at Spider-Man with a sniper rifle, but you can count the number of pages on which Spider-Man appears in this book, and the number you come up with will be very low. Wait, I'll do it now: It's nine. Nine of the book's 144 pages have Spider-Man.

His role in the story is pretty incidental. SHIELD Director Carol Danvers' team of super-heroes, The Ultimates (Or "New Ultimates" of the title) are basically the old Ultimates Captain America, Thor, Iron Man and a new Black Widow and a new Giant Man, who replace the ones who died (The personnel changes, and the introductions of all of the other characters in this story, apparently happened somewhere between the end of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's second volume of The Ultimates and this series; Marvel quit numbering the volumes after a while, and re-branded the line as "Ultimate Comics ____" instead of just "Ultimate ____" somewhere during that time, so it's difficult to tell what happened when, where and in what order). Former SHIELD Director Nick Fury has his own team of super-heroes, who I suppose are called The Avengers. They are a black ops team consisting of The Punisher, Blade, War Machine and Hawkeye.

The two teams fight, with each believing the leader of the other team is corrupt and a traitor who needs to be destroyed. They are both being manipulated by a third party, who is so firmly ensconced in the cast that I suppose he was previously introduced as well. About two thirds of the way through the book, the two teams are fighting in New York City, and when hometown hero Spider-Man sees The Punisher training a sniper rifle on Captain America, who is busy beating the shit out of Nick Fury without letting his old friend and ally explain himself (because Ultimate Captain America is a psychopath), he decides to intervene. Not by webbing The Punisher's gun nozzle, or webbing Captain America to safety, or doing anything at all very Spider-y, but rather by jumping in front of jumping in front of Cap just in time to get shot in the side.

He's pretty badly hurt, but Captain America assures Spidey and the reader that it was "a clean shot," and that he was going to be fine. The Spider-Man disappears for 60 pages, with two panels of the epilogue devoted to letting the readers know that he is, in fact, dead; one of these shows his funeral in extreme long shot (That didn't stop it from being the cover of the sixth issue, though).

Did Spider-Man die as a result of the gunshot wound he suffered? I know from reading news sites devoted to comic books that he did not, but it is completely unclear from this book, which is, you'll recall, partially entitled "Death of Spider-Man."

The series was written by Mark Millar, and it was kind of a depressing read in that it seems to fit so seamlessly with what he was doing in his first two volumes of The Ultimates and his Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four, back when Marvel's "Ultimate" brand and "Ultimate Universe" setting were so carefully constructed and curated by Millar, Brian Michael Bendis and a handful of artists. This suggests a comic book series or story that has been going on since the beginning of the Bush administration—the villain's plan, by the way, is to both covertly and overtly arm revolutionaries in axis of evil countries with super-powers to topple their regimes—and yet there isn't actually a straight line from what Millar was doing with Hitch way back when and what he is now doing here with artitsts Leinil Francis Yu and Stephen Segovia.

Rather, the "Ultimate" line ran into Jeph Loeb, his strange take on the concepts, the "Ultimatum" cross-over, his Ultimate X, re-titling, re-booting and a general 180-degree turn away from the premise of The Ultimates and the Ultimate line.

In other words, this sort of suggests what might have been, if Marvel and Millar just kept doing what they started out doing, instead of doing what they did.

The uncomfortable grafting-on of "Death of Spider-Man" aside, it's a fine comic, featuring all of the positive aspects one might expect from a Millar-written or Ultimamtes-starring comic—widescreen, action-movie inspired action scenes, self-consciously cool dialogue and lines—without any of the negative aspects one might dread from a Millar-written or Ultimates-starring comic.

Yu's art is particularly good, and I was a little surprised to see how well he could do Hitch-like versions of the characters and present a Hitch-like world. He's not imitating Hitch by any stretch of the imagination, but he can do realism quite well when he wants to, and the majority of this book has an extremely similar visual aesthetic to the original Ultimates comics.

I've always liked Yu's art, or at least what I've seen of it. I like the way he draws the tops of the bottoms of character's eye-lids, and all the times he draws characters with open-mouthed, teeth-baring faces. I'm not sure what this expression is mean to convey, exactly, but I like looking at it, and the fact that it's as distinct to Yu's comics work as a signature.

I like Millar's version of Ultimate Punisher, who differs from Regular Punisher in that he's slightly more insane, and Millar doesn't play as coy with that fact as writers-who-aren't-Garth Ennis usually play with the regular Punisher.

I also liked seeing vampire hunting vampire Blade in here, and seeing how well he fit into the Avengers-like milieu. Regular Blade could certainly be a regular Avenger in the regular Marvel Universe.

Despite being poorly labeled and poorly marketed, this ended up being a decent enough read, and was certainly far better than I expected (Even Millar's "African-American Hulk" didn't induce cringing!), and well above average in terms of a comic series starring the Ultimates (or New Ultimates or Ultimate Avengers or Whoever).

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By the way. See this lady?

Did you know Natalie Portman played this lady in a movie? It's true!