Review: Ultimate Comics Avengers: Next Generation

Anyone trying to read the comic books Marvel published in their Ultimate universe imprint, which has changed its name from simply "Ultimate" to "Ultimate Comics", featuring that imprint's version of the Avengers characters has my sympathy.

The first three stories were rather clearly labeled and self-contained, making them easy enough to find if, say, you were scrolling through a list of offerings from a public library. There was 2002-2004's 13-issue series The Ultimates. Then there was 2005-2007's 13-issue The Ultimates 2. Then there was 2008's five-issue The Ultimates 3. Easy-peasy.

And then? Well, there was 2009's five-issue Ultimatum, one of at least a half-dozen miniseries featuring the word "Ultimate" or a derivation of it in the title and starring at least a sizable swathe of the characters from The Ultimates cast (You know, Ultimate Enemy, Ultimate Fallout, Ultimate Nightmare, Ultimate Secret and so on). And then there were Ultimate Avengers, Ultimate New Ultimates, Ultimate Comics The Ultimates, Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates...all miniseries, most by writer Mark Millar, and few appearing in trade collections that have the exact same title as the comics had when published serially, and some not even having the same title on the cover of the actual book as the one that's on the title page of the very same book.

So I've given up, and am just ordering them at random. This particular book, for example, says "Ultimate Avengers" on the cover, "Ultimate Comics Avengers: Next Generation" on the spine and in the fine print on the title page, and the comics inside were originally serially published as Ultimate Comics Avengers.

Why doesn't the mass audience that loves superhero movies read superhero comic books featuring the same characters they love? Because the people who publish those comics are crazy people doing their damnedest to keep people from reading them.

Just a theory. Anyway, this is written by Mark Millar, the guy who re-created Marvel's Avengers as "The Ultimates" along with artist Bryan Hitch, and I think it's his triumphant return to the characters, after Jeph Loeb had his way with the franchise in Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum (I say "think" because, like I said, I can't really make sense of the series now that it's a series of miniseries with ever changing titles; this was published in 2010, though, which would have been right after Ultimatum). It is penciled by Carlos Pacheco, and inked by five inkers.

What I found most notable about it was that it was not very good, nor was it very interesting, not even in the ways that Mark Millar-written comics can be good (or, sometimes, "so bad they're good" or, at other times, "so incredibly, insultingly terrible that they are fun to read" or, at still other times, "so aggressively juvenile and so desperate to be adapted into a movie that they are funny"). Compared to his first 26-issues featuring these characters, or a later story featuring some of them, it seems rather phoned-in and lifeless.

It opens with a full-page drawing of Samuel L. Jackson-playing-Nick Fury, who Pacheco and company have rendered to so closely resemble Samuel L. Jackson that he looks more like Samuel L. Jackson then he ever has before; amusingly, he looks even more like Samuel L. Jackson then the character in Boom Studio's Cold Space, a comic book co-created by the real Samuel L. Jackson to star a Samuel L. Jackson-like character that Samuel L. Jackson could play in a movie.

"What the %@#&?" he says.

Then we turn the page and we get a two page splash, in which we see The Ultimates' headquarters, looking like it always does, with Samuel L. Jackson and Ultimate Hawkeye (still in the unfortunate costume that Joe Madureira designed for him in Ultimates 3) in the foreground. The building looks clean and pristine, although there are a couple of cranes and a bit of scaffolding in the upper left-hand corner.

"I disappear for ten minutes and the whole place goes to hell," Jackson says, in direct contrast with the image. It looks like The Ultimates are maybe adding an addition to their base in a rather ambitious remodeling project, not like they have hired contractors to help them build their way out of hell.

Ultimate Hawkeye is recruiting Jackson to help him go after Ultimate Captain America, who has "gone rogue" because he "knows about The Red Skull."

Millar then flashes us back one day earlier, to when Cap learns about The Red Skull, the first issue/chapter ending with the surprising revelation of the connection between the two, which I will now reveal so "spoiler warning": Ultiamte The Red Skull is not a Nazi like Regular Red Skull, he's a neo-Nazi who is also Captain America's own son! Eh? How about that? Didn't see that coming, did you?

Apparently before going off to die in the war, Cap knocked up his girlfriend, the government took her baby away, made him into a super-soldier due to the fact that he inherited his dad's super-soldier serum through is dad's, um, super-soldier serum. But it turns out he was a bad seed, killed all his trainers, and then peeled off his own skin leaving only red, gory muscle tissue which somehow never healed up or scarred over, but remained red forever. And he got some tattoos on it. He went on to become a mercenary.

So now Captain America wants to beat him up or kill him or something, and the feeling's mutual.

It's a good thing they put some iron cross tattoos on Ultimate The Red Skull's head, and showed him throwing a baby out the window, because otherwise it's really, really hard to root for Millar's Captain America, upon whose head the "A" stands for France, but Asshole. As in, Captain America: Total Asshole.

I must admit, however, that Captain America being an unlikable bully and super-jock is at least occasionally amusing:

In order to bring in Cap, Jackson must assemble his Avengers, who are all new characters, or at least new versions of characters.

There's a new Black Widow, there's Ultimate War Machine (whose huge, Japanese-style mecha armor transforms into a car), there's a character named Red Wasp (Ultimates 2 villain Insect Queen wearing a rather inspired dominatrix version of The Wasp's original Silver Age costume, and replacing Utlimate Wasp, who died horribly and gorily in Ultimatum), and there's a new Hulk, who is green and smart (and whom the others derisively call "Nerd Hulk").

So Cap's trying to kill Red Skull, The "Ultimate Avengers" are trying to stop Captain America and also kill The Red Skull and things proceed as expected: Everyone fights a lot, and The Red Skull gets killed (Captain America impales him on a pointy bit of a jetplane, although the Skull manages to survive...only to be shot in the face by another of the Avengers).

Millar's political commentary is fairly muted and confused here, limited to Jackson dissing Obama by saying "our nice, new president" had "castrated" his military organization, which would only embolden supervillains (Obama never appears on panel, as Bush did in Millar's original Ultimates run) and a few terrorists talking about Secretary of Defense Hilary Clinton's cankles. The "heroes" remain ruthless, unlikable fuck-ups, with the worst offender being the guy with "America" in his name. Millar's Captain America kicks The Hulk in the nuts, calls all The Avengers grade school insult names and not only doesn't support the troops, he repeatedly sucker punches and beats them all up.

This hasn't changed since Millar's 2002 comics about the characters, of course, and so if Millar was saying something, he's not saying anything different. Was The Ultimates a commentary on Bush Era America? Then why is the commentary the same, as we enter the Obama Era?

Regardless of the relative weaknesses of the scripting, Pacheco and his quintet of inkers do a fine job, and this serves as a pretty good argument that while Hitch did a hell of a job on the first two volumes of The Ultiamtes, he was hardly the only human being capable of producing highly realistic (to the point of being photorealsitic), "widescreen" superhero action comics that nevertheless look more drawn than photoshopped.

I suspect this may read better as a whole, just as Millar's original Ultimates comics read better in their 13-issue blocks then they did as individual issues, but the comics aren't as easy to read like that anymore. For one, Millar's no longer in control of his own little universe, as here he's responding to events in comics written by Jeph Loeb and Brian Michael Bendis and, as would happen in a later story (which I actually read first) the sorts of crossover tie-in demands that the Ultimate Universe was conceived as being exempt from. For two, The Ultimates is no longer an identifiable brand or franchise, or easily follow-able series of comics. Rather, it's now a series of miniseries by different creators, and one need consult one's local comic shop for expert advice on what to read and in what order.

DC's September previews reviewed

This September DC's "New 52" will be a year old, the initiative having begun the last Wednesday of August 2011, with new books shipping each and every Wednesday throughout September. So the thirteenth issue of each of the surviving series would normally be shipping in September 2012, however DC has instead announced a special #0 month, in which each title will publish a special #0 issue detailing the origin of the star or some aspect of the book, presumably new reader friendly stories that offer good jumping on points.

DC had previously had a "Zero Month" following the conclusion of their five-issue 1994 Zero Hour series, which rebooted aspects of the DC Universe for the first time since Crisis On Infinite Earths (in-story, Hal Jordan had destroyed the entire universe save for himself and a handful of superheroes, who had to re-start existence with a new Big Bang, which resulted in some tweaks to DC continuity, mostly impacting perennially difficult characters like Donna Troy, Hawkman and the Legion of Super-Heroes). During "Zero Month," every DCU title published a #0 issue featuring silver ink in the logo and zero, a pin-up like posed cover of the star in action, and a self-contained, done-in-one story reintroducing the character. For that month, DC's whole line was like a sample platter; if you ever wanted to try out a DC series, that was the time to do it (For what it's worth, that was probably the month I bought more DC Comics than ever before).

DC since did a few other theme months in which everything was supposedly a character or book defining, jumping-on point issue, like Big Head Month and Eisner-Style Logo Month and, most recently, the post-Infinite Crisis One Year Later month.

This time around, they're using a uniform cover design in which full-color images of the heroes leap through black-and-white covers of previous issues of their series. It's a pretty striking image concept, and should go a long way toward distinguishing their books from DC, Boom, Dark Horse, IDW and Image covers on the racks, but there's a danger that they will form a sort of visual white noise, too.

For example, three of the five books with Batman in the title will feature practically identical covers:



I imagine many of these books will be quite welcome by frustrated DC readers who just want to know what's in continuity and what isn't—Green Arrow and Nightwing seem especially relevant to that question—but the danger of these books is that they have to stand up to what came before.

For example, Batman: Year One. Can the motley crew of creators working on DC's 13 Batman books, three of which are about Batman himself, one of which is about Batman and the current Robin and another of which is about Batman and his international allies, top the classic Batman: Year One...? If the creators have the audacity to try and overwrite aspects of it, they had better be able to.

Also challenging will be the books whose origins were just told. While a lot of the "New 52" books began en medias res, with the characters' origins and histories presumed either unchanged or just tweaked (the Bat-books and Green Lantern books, for example, or Wonder Woman, Aquaman and so on), others began by telling the origins of their stars, and so it seems a little early to re-tell those stories, you know?

In the mean time, here's a look at some of the books that jumped out at me for good or ill (mostly ill). As always, you can read the full solicits at Comic Book Resources (or elsewhere) if you like.



BATGIRL #0
Written by GAIL SIMONE
Art and cover by ED BENES
On sale SEPTEMBER 12 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
• How did Barbara first become Batgirl? What led to her to don the cape and cowl?
• Witness Barbara Gordon’s shocking injury and her inspiring drive to recover and walk again!

Yikes. I actually kinda pity Simone and Benes here—Can they provide a story that's even better, or at least as good as, 2003's nine-issue miniseries Batgirl: Year One, by writers Scott Beatty and CHuck Dixon and artists Marcos Martin (!) and Alvaro Lopez, while also working in the mysteriously still-in-continuity Batman: The Killing Joke, and do it all in just 20 pages?

I pity them because I already know the answer.


DC UNIVERSE PRESENTS #0
Written by TONY BEDARD, JAMES ROBINSON, ROB LIEFELD and DAN DIDIO
Art by CAFU, MARAT MYCHAELS, TOM DERENICK, ERIC BATTLE and others
Cover by RYAN SOOK
On sale SEPTEMBER 19 • 64 pg, FC, $5.99 US • RATED T
• Five all-new adventures featuring the Blackhawks’ Mother Machine, Hawk and Dove, Mister Terrific and O.M.A.C. in this super-sized issue!
• Featuring the beginning of storylines that will play out across the entire New 52!

Huh.

It's an oversized special featuring short stories starring various characters who had their titles canceled due to low sales...? I don't understand the economics of this particular publishing decision.

And looking at the creators, I have a hard time seeing this as an artistic decision, but maybe that's just a jerk, and DiDio, Liefeld, Robinson and Bedard have important stories to tell, and Derenick, Battle and CAFU have created art sufficiently different from all their previous art to demand the world see it.

I think "Canceled Comics Cavalcade" woulda been a better title...


THE FURY OF FIRESTORM: THE NUCLEAR MEN #0
Written by JOE HARRIS
Art and cover by YILDIRAY CINAR and MARLO ALQUIZA
On sale SEPTEMBER 26 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
• Jason Rusch and Ronnie Raymond try to return to civilian life after losing the power of the Firestorm Protocols…but when danger threatens them, will they be able to survive?
• Is this the end of Firestorm?

Well, I don't see a "FINAL ISSUE" in there, so I assume that no, no this is not the end of Firestorm. Maybe next month though!
,
This one doesn't sound very origin-y, does it? Although considering the fact that their origin is less than a year-old, there isn't much to re-tell, is there...?


GREEN ARROW #0
Written by JUDD WINICK
Art by FREDDIE E. WILLIAMS II and ROB HUNTER
Cover by IVAN REIS and JOE PRADO
On sale SEPTEMBER 5 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
• Oliver Queen is young, rich and reckless…what could possibly go wrong?
• Discover the events leading up to the birth of Green Arrow, and Ollie’s history with Roy Harper!

Note the presence of Judd Winick rather than current GA writer Ann Nocenti. Winick had an extremely substantial run on the character, lasting through several title changes and renumberings, prior to "The New 52" reboot/relaunch, so it's particularly surprising to see him writing this. If you had to single someone out as being responsible for the decreased popularity of Green Arrow, from the relative highs of the Kevin Smith-written relaunched title to the pre-reboot doldrums, Winick's the most obvious candidate.

What's interesting about this issue is that it will be telling the same story—or a replacement story—for 2007's Green Arrow: Year One by Andy Diggle and Jock (which I personally thought was redundant at the time, given the fact that nothing had really changed about Green Arrow's origins since the last few times they re-told it), and telling a story that will presumably be at least somewhat similar to that in the early episodes of the upcoming CW drama, Arrow.

Also, it singles out "Ollie's history with Roy Harper!" How does a Green Arrow who has only been around for five years have time to take on and train a sidekick who grows up and graduates to become a grown-up superhero in his own right? DC seems to have done away with a majority of Harper's generation of characters, but he and Dick Grayson remain in continuity, complicating matters. I guess we'll see how they handle it soon enough (Well, I won't see it firsthand, because I'm not gonna read this or Nightwing or Red Hood and The Outlaws, but I'm sure someone would, and then that person will write about it, on the Internet, and then maybe I'll read about it).



GREEN LANTERN #0
Written by GEOFF JOHNS
Art and cover by DOUG MAHNKE and CHRISTIAN ALAMY
...
On sale SEPTEMBER 5 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Combo pack edition: $3.99 US
PROLOGUE TO THE THIRD ARMY!
• The introduction and origin of a surprising new Green Lantern!
• Where are Hal Jordan and Sinestro?
This issue is also offered as a combo pack edition with a redemption code for a digital download of this issue.

To quote Facebook friend and my former "Best Shots @ Newsarama" colleague Lan Pitts:

Yes, DC comics. You needed a black guy as a Green Lantern on your cover holding a gun and what looks to be a ski mask. That's exactly what you needed.

On the other hand, this comic is written by Geoff Johns, so the handgun-wielding Green Lantern wearing what looks like a fetish mask to me looks like it will be exactly the sort of stupid/awesome thing I so enjoy about Geoff Johns' DC writing...


Okay, I could tell at a glance that everyone's going to be making fun of Guillem March's cover for Catwoman #0 which is, admittedly, pretty awful. But a worse offender is his Star Sapphire Carol Ferris on the cover of Green Lantern: New Guardians. I can't even begin to guess what's going on wither her anatomy and the perspective. I imagine having those ripped-through-covers immediately behind the posed figures is screwing with the perspective on a lot of these covers (if you scroll through 'em all, you'll notice in a lot of them the figures don't really seem to be smashing through the covers, simply posed in front of 'em), but still, I can't make any excuses for March here: Ferris is a mess.

That said, his Saint Walker and Kyle Rayner look pretty great, don't they...?



JUSTICE LEAGUE #0
Written by GEOFF JOHNS
Art and cover by GARY FRANK
Variant cover by IVAN REIS and JOE PRADO
1:100 B&W Variant cover by GARY FRANK
On sale SEPTEMBER 19 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
...
• Billy Batson takes center stage in this issue as he unleashes the awesome power of Shazam in a special origin story!
• Also featuring the not-to-be-missed origin of Pandora and the next seeds of TRINITY WAR!
This issue is also offered as a combo pack edition with a redemption code for a digital download of this issue.

It's really too bad that Geoff Johns and Jim Lee wasted the first six issues of this title telling the origin story of the new Justice League, as now they don't have anything to put in the #0 issue dedicated to their origins. It's a double tragedy in that the story they stretched out over six issues would actually read a hell of a lot better if they compressed it down into a single 32-page comic like this. Ah well.

Dig that Gary Frank cover. I used to live in a big, old Addams Family house with a couple of roommates, and I lined this one long, narrow hallway with Alex Ross posters of the Justice Leaguers. They were a pretty big hit with visitors, who enjoyed what complete and utter assholes all the superheores looked like under Ross' brush. Captain Marvel especially looked like a monstrous jerk, with a big, stupid, spiteful shit-eating grin.

The expression Frank gives him on this cover? Pretty great too.

This is the best look I've seen of the new costume so far. Surprise—it looks just awful.


NIGHTWING #0
Written by KYLE HIGGINS
Art by EDDY BARROWS, RUY JOSE and EBER FERREIRA
Cover by EDDY BARROWS
On sale SEPTEMBER 19 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
• It’s the origin of Dick Grayson in The New 52!
• From orphan to super hero – it’s all here

This one should have to cover a lot of ground, including what's in continuity now and what's not. If Grayson was still Robin, for how long, and why did he stop being Robin? Was he ever on a team called The Teen Titans, and who was on it with him (Kid Flash Wally West, Wonder Girl/Troia Donna Troy and Aqualad/Tempest Garth no longer seem to exist; Cyborg joined the Justice League upon becoming a superhero, and Beast Boy didn't debut until, like, a month ago, after Grayson was already Nightwing).

Less importantly to everyone who is not me, did Nightwing ever rock that mullet ponytail? Did he have the Nightwing costume with the big-ass collar? Did he he used to have a cooler costume with a blue bird symbol in the middle of it instead of the more Batman and Robin-looking red one...?


THE PHANTOM STRANGER #0
Written by DAN DIDIO
Art by BRENT ANDERSON and SCOTT HANNA
Cover by BRENT ANDERSON
On sale SEPTEMBER 5 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
• Learn what happened to The Phantom Stranger after the FREE COMIC BOOK DAY story!
• Who has been sacrificed? Who is guilty? Who can save us? And who…is The Phantom Stranger?
• Major players in The New 52 will be introduced in these pages!

I discussed this book, along with Sword of Sorcery, Talon and Team 7, at Robot 6, if you'd like to read a few paragraphs on each. They all look and sound more like miniseries than new ongoing series, which is probably appropriate, as I can't imagine any of them lasting too terribly long, this one especially.

I don't quite understand why DiDio is writing this series himself when he has to know that just about any name, including complete unknowns, would have fewer negative associations among potential readers than his does.


RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS #0
Written by SCOTT LOBDELL
Art by DWAYNE TURNER
Cover by KENNETH ROCAFORT
On sale SEPTEMBER 19 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
• Learn how Jason Todd came back to life after being killed by The Joker.
• Do you really need another reason to check out this issue?

So Jason Todd was still murdered by The Joker, and still came back to life...? If you were going to reboot your continuity, and you wanted to use a grown-up, alive version of Jason Todd in your comics, wouldn't you just erase "A Death in the Family," and make it so that Jason Todd was never actually killed...?

Well, however it is that he came back to life, I have to assume it wasn't because Superboy-Prime punched the walls of continuity so hard that the reverberations brought him back to life, which is what Judd Winick and DC's editorial staff decided to do Pre-New 52.



This is a really, really, really terrible costume. But then, as I've noted before, superheroes have a really hard time turning the owl motif into a decent costume.

And as I noted at Robot 6 in the previously linked-to post, this reminds me an awful lot of Azrael. I wonder why he doesn't take the name Owlman...? The Earth 3 Injustice Society Owlman hasn't appeared in the New 52U yet, has he...?



Is it just me, or does it look like Team 7 is wearing discarded Star Wars Storm Troopser costumes, sans helmets...?


TEEN TITANS #0
Written by SCOTT LOBDELL
Art by TYLER KIRKHAM and BATT
Cover by BRETT BOOTH and NORM RAPMUND
1:25 B&W Variant cover by BRETT BOOTH
On sale SEPTEMBER 26 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
• Focusing on the origin of Tim Drake; how a would be Olympic star and computer genius went on to become Batman’s third Robin.
• Plus: The beginnings of Skitter and Bunker.

Aww...

Perhaps because I was just starting to read comic books around the time Tim Drake was being introduced, this solicitation promising a new origin story for Tim Drake makes me unaccountably sad. I used to feel, like, close to Tim Drake. He was a point-of-view character that worked for me because he was my age when I started reading Batman comics, and was finding his place as a character at the same time I was finding my place as a reader.

I don't know how much they will have changed his origin, of course, but "would be Olympic star" sounds awfully different from "brilliant and plucky kid who figured out Batman and Robin's secret identities all on his own."


Hey, look at all those superior to the New 52 costumes...!

Someone remind me—why isn't this the new Teen Titans line-up, instead of Scott Lobdell/Brett Booth creations wearing Tron-inspired suits and other eye-assaults...?

I mean, if that was the Teen Titans line-up, then it would be furthering synergy between the comics and the cartoons, and potentially feeding audiences from one into the other. That's what entertainment businesses like DC Entertainment are all about these days, right?


Finally, let's end this post on a terrifying note. You know those scantily-clad, crazy expensive anime style "Ame-Comi" statuettes DC does? Well, now they are getting into gender-swapped characters. Behold, sexy anime Brainiac:

Sleep tight!

Someone check my math:

Okay, so Friday DC announced a new Batman spin-off, Talon among a crop of four new books. And earlier today they released the solicitations for their Batman family of books which they plan to ship in September, making it apparent that they aren't canceling any of the twelve existing Batman titles, which means come September there will be 13 Batman titles.

So if the DCU line consists of 52 ongoing monthlies (and it does, since they're caneling four books to make room for the four new ones), and there are 13 Batman books, that means that 25% of all DCU comics will be Batman comics, right? 13 + 13 = 26, and 26 +26 = 52, right?

I know Batman is a pretty popular character, but good God, one quarter...? And you know what's weird? Robin/Red Robin Tim Drake, Spoiler/Batgirl Stephanie Brown and Batgirl/Black Bat Cassandra Cain, all of whom have carried their own titles in the past, don't have their own books yet, so it's not actually all that hard to imagine the Batman line eclipsing even more of the DCU line in the near future, as books like Savage Hawkman and Grifter are inevitably canceled.

Another Mothman.

America's Very Own Monsters is a 1982 illustrated prose non-fiction book for young readers. It runs just 48 pages, devoting a few pages each to ten folkloric monsters who live, or whose stories are set, in the United States.

Mothman is, of course, one of these ten, and you can see artist Tom Huffman's depiction of him on the cover; that's him in the middle. Huffman's black and white art is quite moody, and fits the tone of the book quite well. Writer Daniel Cohen doesn't write much about each beast—he can't, really, given the audience and the small amount of space he has to work with—but Huffman tells a bit of their stories through his artwork, and, more importantly suggests possible stories for the creatures to star in, giving young readers enough clues to let their imaginations run wild with them.

I loved the artwork as an adult; I would have been fascinated and terrified by it as a child.

Each of Cohen's chapters is made up of short, topical paragraphs devoted to the highlights of each monster story's body of lore, told in short, declarative sentences.

The "Mothman" chapter, for example, begins like this:

Point Pleasant is a small town in West Virginia. Something scared a lot of people there. The "something" was about six feet tall. It looked like a man. But it had huge wings. It coulf fly at 100 miles an hour.

People called it Mothman.

Cohen goes on to tell the story of the initial 1966 Scarberry/Mallette sighting and the dramatic Wamsley sighting at the Thomas house, in which the Mothman climbed onto the porch and peered through the window, but only vaguely, and the only witness named is Connie Carpenter. He also briefly explains the equivocal resolution of the flap of sightings: Some scientists thought it was a bird that people were simply misidentifying, some people thought it came from a UFO, but we'll probably never know for sure what it was.

Huffman draws two images of the Mothman. Each chapter opens with a small drawing above the title/monster name, and is followed by a larger, more dramatic image.

This is Huffman's drawing of the Mothman above the chapter heading:
Regardless of how "accurate" it is, it's a very nice image. Note the way Huffman uses the sketchy little lines to suggest darkness or fogginess or simple blurriness. The image is indistinct, and the reason it's indistinct is itself indistinct. But it's nice-looking, and there's a suggestion of the moon and a shape that's vague enough that it could be a winged humanoid, or a large bird or even a giant moth. It might have arms, or it might just have wings of varying degrees of darkness. The eyes can't be seen at this angle.

Huffman gives the reader a clearer look at his Mothman in a spread on the following pages. Here is the right half of it:
It's an even nicer image as it appears in the book, as the four paragraphs of prose are integrated into the image, appearing in the white space Huffman frames as the light coming from a lamp hanging from the ceiling in the inside of the Thomas home (here simply referred to with the words "a family"). We see a curtain rod, curtains and the walls, all rendered in the delicate crosshatching that makes up Huffman's illustrations.

As for his Mothman, well, it looks decidedly off-model, looking more like a bat-winged Nosferatu than the picture of Mothman that emerged from witness reports. Huffman's Mothman clearly has a humanoid head, a nose, a mouth, a chin, a neck and even ears and, as a result, doesn't seem quite as mind-bogglingly weird as the creature of indeterminate appearance that's usually reported.

I like how Huffman depicts the brightness of the eyes without the use of color though, the pure, line-less white the same as that he uses on the moon and the lamp-light on the opposite page: They must be shining with light, as everything else rendered in that manner is (save, perhaps, the window pane, although it is on the inside of the house, where the lights are on, rather than outside the house, where it's dark).

The simple juxtaposition of the dark, strange human-like creature with the mundane, domestic window and curtains, and the scant protection the latter offers from the former is a very effective scary image though, isn't it?

I didn't scan anything else from the book, but Huffman has a lot of fairly effective drawings in here. The small, above-the-heading images generally show equivocal evidence of the creature, and then the larger illustration shows it in all it's glory. So, for example, Bigfoot opens with a drawing of a footprint, and you turn the page and see a drawing of a huge hairy humanoid striding away from the reader and, on the next page, a close-up of Bigfoot's face. The chapter on Goatman opens with a drawing of graffiti on a brick wall reading "Gotaman was here," and the next image is that of a shadowy goatman holding a hatchet and charging into the bright, white-space headlights of an oncoming car.

In addition to Mothman, Goatman and Bigfoot, Cohen covers (and Huffman draws) The Skunk Ape, Washington's Demon Cat, The Flatwoods Monster (another really great illustration), The White River Monster, The Beast of Busco (that's the giant snapping turtle said to live in a lake in Churubusco, Indiana), The Thunderbird and Lake Champlain's Monster.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

In this month's "A Month of Wednesdays" column, covering every May-released graphic novel I read in the month of May, you'll find short-ish reviews of Best of The Three Stooges Comicbooks Vol. 1 (Not sure why they spelled it "Comicbooks" instead of "Comic Books" myself), Joe Daly's Dungeon Quest Book 3, Adam Warren's Empowered Vol. 7, Jeffrey Brown's Star Wars: Darth Vader and Son, The Three Stooges #1: Bed-Bugged and Other Stories and Leela Corman's Unterzakhn. You can read it here.

June 6's "Comic Shop Comics" canceled...

...on account of there not being any comic book-comics released today that I wanted to buy and read.

But, in the interests of checking in on the make-up of the direct market and the things I don't like about it (Spoiler: $3.99 comics, writing-for-the-trade and geography/shop coverage are big factors), and in the interest of having a post for Wednesday night, let's take a look at the comics I might have bought. In a better world....

Action Comics #10:This is one I would have been reading monthly if it were $2.99, but it’s $3.99, so I’ve been trade-waiting this series.

Animal Man #10: I’m trade-waiting…but not as enthusiastically as I’m trade-waiting Action Comics, as I’m pretty sure that after 90 or so issues of the original DC/Vertigo series, I’ve probably read all the Animal Man comics I need to read in my lifetime, unless they are totally awesome Animal Man comics (I sure would like to see the old, pre-Morrison Animal Man strips some day, though…DC should consider putting together a DC Comics Presents almost-trade featuring some of ‘em to try and capitalize on the relative popularity of Jeff Lemire’s new volume of the series.

Creator Owned Heroes #1: This title is pretty funny given the book is shipping the same week as the first More Watchmen books. I know absolutely nothing about it though, other than the fact that it costs $4 and is from Image Comics.

Dark Avengers #175/Hulk #53: Two Jeff Parker-written series (I think; Hulk means Red Hulk, while Incredible Hulk means Green Hulk, right?) that I’ve found too complicated to follow/keep track of. I hope to read ‘em both in trade…probably once Parker’s runs on them ends.

Defenders #7: This is one of those Marvel comics I would have been reading all along if Marvel priced it at $2.99 instead of $3.99. The ideal price for it, I've found, is fifty cents.

Dial H #2: I’m maybe trade-waiting, depending on how reviews are (If bad, I’ll at least look for a trade through my library). I really like the conecept of the hero dial, and enjoyed a few of its iterations in the past, like the original strips collected in the Showcase Presents: Dial H For Hero trade, and Mark Waid's use of it in the (still-unpublished?) Silver Age event series and the character Hero from the late, actually-pretty-great Superboy and The Ravers series (By the way, if I'm remembering correctly, Hero was a gay, Puerto Rican teenage hero with the world's greatest superpower who hung out with Rex, The Wonder Dog in the 1990s DC comics. How is it he's not still around, but we get all these 90's-style Image heroes in the new DCU like, I don't know, Bunker, Skitter and Tom Ridge?). How was the first issue, by the way? Did any of you particularly dig it…?

iZombie #26/Sweet Tooth #34: Two Vertigo ongoings I’m waiting to end before checking out in trade; I like the artists drawing both of those series a whole lot.

Mudman #4:I wanted to read the first issue of this series, but my old, bad shop didn’t order it (“We don’t order rack copies of Image Comics unless someone pre-orders them,” was the rationale, I believe), so I decided I’d just have to wait to check out and read it in trade format someday.

Popeye #2: I was really impressed with the review copy of the first issue I read (and shared that enthusiasm here), but not so much that I’d pay $4 for the second issue. I’ll likely check out the trade when IDW eventually publishes it.

Super Dinosaur #11: Trade-waiting. Robert Kirkman's public persona sometimes makes me feel pretty weird when approaching his comics work, which usually results in my simply not really approaching it. That said, this is entitled Super Dinosaur, and its title thus has two of my favorite words in it.

Pre-New 52 review: Green Lantern Corps: The Weaponer

This trade collects the story "The Weaponer" from five issues of the previous volume of Green Lantern Corps, shortly after writer Tony Bedard inherited from Peter Tomasi. These would have been published around spring of 2011, and thus would have been one of the last story arcs in the title before the "New 52" relaunch of the publisher's entire line.

Bedard's story isn't a terribly ambitious one, nor a particularly deep one, but he does a fine job of coming up with a premise to hang a Green Lantern story on, and to continue to do the sorts of things that the today's Green Lantern fans seem to have enjoyed the most from Tomasi and writer Geoff Johns.

Bedard pinpoints a minor character from a minor detail in an ancient Green Lantern story, and extrapolates a story arc to hang around him. Hal Jordan's archenemy Sinestro had a yellow power ring, which was forged by him on the planet Qward in the anti-matter universe, right? Well, someone must have forged it for him, and that someone is the Weaponer of the title, a big, behemoth specimen of the pink-skinned Qwardians, who pencil artist Tyler Kirkham draws as a cross between Roman god Vulcan and your typical Qwardian.

That character settled on and fleshed out, the rest of the story is merely a matter of plugging in the members of the cast and having them react as they are most likely to react, which here involves the two color-coded Corps going to war with one another.

The Weaponer is very upset for Sinestro for several different reasons, but the one that I remember most clearly a week or so after reading this had to do with the time Sinestro returned to Qward, conquered it, and turned it into a sort of munitions factory to build yellow rings and yellow lanterns for his Yellow Lantern Corps, which he calls The Sinestro Corps.

So he wants revenge on Sinestro, and has stumbled upon a powerful weapon to help him do it: The White Light of Creation, which figured rather prominently in the end of Blackest Night and throughout Brightest Day, although Weaponer's possession of it is never really explained...apparently like the rest of the White Light stories, it was going to be resolved at some point in the future, but DC decided to reboot their whole universe, scuttling all of the in-process stories. He uses this light, which appears in the form of a net on the inside of his shield, to instantly create new weapons with which he can counter any enemy, making him a pretty tough customer.

His plan for taking on Sinestro is to capture Sinestro's daughter, bring her back to his place, then wait for Sinestro to show up to rescue her, at which point he'll beat Sinestro up. Not exactly Byzantine, but it works well for this title, as Sinestro's daughter is a Green Lantern, and she's dating Kyle Rayner, one of the stars of the book (co-star John Stewart is largely absent for much of the story, having little more to do than any of the other Lantern characters who fill out the supporting ensemble, like The Big Rock Guy or The Purple Robot Lady).

It is then nothing more than a bunch of fighting. Weaponer Vs. Kyle, Kyle Vs. Sinestro, the Green Lanterns Vs. The Weaponer, The Weaponer Vs. The Sinestro Corps, The Sinestro Corps Vs. The Green Lanterns Vs. The Qwardians Vs. The Weaponer, and so on. It's rather paint-by-numbers, but certainly fun if you like this sort of thing, and there's nothing bad about the story. I remain rather fascinated at how big the Green Lantern franchise has gotten. When I started reading comics, there was one (1) Green Lantern, and DC had killed off Hal Jordan, benched the other human Lanterns, and did away with the entire concept of the Green Lantern Corps. Now there are some six or seven differently-colored Lanterns Corps, and several of them are full of distinct, recognizable characters. Like the X-Men franchise at Marvel, the Green Lantern franchise is almost big and self-contained enough that it can function as it's own self-contained line divorced from its publisher's shared, "universe" setting and, in fact, it might function better that way.

Kirkham's artwork, inked here by Batt and Rob Hunter, isn't as crisp or detailed as that of his predecessor Patrick Gleason on the book, or Doug Mahnke on the main Green Lantern title, but it's perfectly decent artwork, serviceable in its storytelling and its ability to get across the dozen or so very well-designed characters that appear in these books. I liked it a bit better than that of Fernando Pasarin's on Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors.

This story must have taken place at the same time as the first story arc in Emerald Warriors, as it to features a scene where one of it's characters—here, Ganthet—vomits up blood which takes the shape of Atrocitus and delivers a message, and it also hints at the conflict and villain in the "War of The Green Lanterns" crossover story between all the Green Lantern titles. It's nowhere near as crazy, over-the-top violent as Emerald Warriors though, indeed there's only that one scene of blood-vomiting, and the only instance of ultra-violence occurs early on, when The Weaponer hits a Sinestro Corps member on the head so hard with his hammer that the poor villain's head and torso liquify, his severed jaw bone flying toward the reader. After that, it's mostly just ring-on-ring, laser beams and force field violence.

Oh, and Firestorm flies into one of the issues for a while, which is really, really random. I read that scene form a different perspective in Brightest Day, during which it happens in-context. In GLC, we see it from the Lanterns' perspective, and it really does seem like Firestorm is just flying through, on his way from one issue of Brightest Day to the next.

After the reboot, both this title and this creative team would stick around, but not in the exact same way. Peter Tomasi would return to Green Lantern Corps as writer (Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors was scrapped in the reboot), with Pasarin and several others assuming art chores, and Guy Gardner and John Stewart serving as co-stars. Bedard, Kirkham and Batt, meanwhile, moved to the brand new title Green Lantern: New Guardians, which starred Kyle Rayner and representatives of the rest of the colored Corps.

Is superhero decadence a chronic condition?

The following panels are from the story "New World Order," the first story arc in Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA run, and they were first published in 1997: Two members of The Hyperclan, a group of alien superheroes who have come to earth and effectively replaced the Justice League, suddenly, violently turn on Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who muses about how much comic book superheroes have changed over the years. Instead of just robbing banks and suchlike, they threaten to cripple you and attack your loved ones (In his first adventure as Green Lantern, Rayner's girlfriend was brutally murdered by a supervillain, who then stuffed her corpse into their refrigerator, giving birth to the term "women in refrigerators").

Rayner's Morrison-penned observation about how cruel and evil supervillains were getting appeared in a couple of comic books from 15 years ago.

This year, in an issue of Justice League, a series that replaced the series that replaced JLA, its current writer Geoff Johns wrote the following scene, in which a villain tortures Steve Trevor and threatens to murder his family if he doesn't tell him how to break into the Justice League's headquarters:

That same month, the same writer wrote this scene, in which the villain Black Manta threatens to kill a heroine's family, after he finishes murdering her:

I suppose one could say that nothing's changed much in 15 years, but that wouldn't really be true. Fifteen years ago the Justice League writer was commenting on the trend in a dismissive fashion, essentially ridiculing the writers of the time, whereas today the Justice League writer is writing his super-comics in the same fashion that Morrison felt compelled to comment negatively on back then.

Super-comics aren't standing still, they're devolving.

(links)

As far as I can tell from this vantage point, looking back at the notes I took during the week of various comics news stories that grabbed my attention, exactly two things happened this week: DC outed a new, alternate universe version of Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott, and a a Wall Street Journal writer said a mean thing to J. Michael Straczynski, the comics writer who is best known in 2012 for saying mean things about Alan Moore.

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

Since print is dead and I get all my news from NPR, I did not first encounter Tim Marchman's "Comic Book Smack Down" in The Wall Street Journal, but in this post from The Beat, where it was referred to as "The Wall Street Journal's Comic Book Smack Down."

Here's one of the sharper, pointier criticisms in his overall great takedown of Marvel and DC and the market they created and its inability to sell comics to the millions of people who are obviously extremely interested in the characters those comic books generated:

If no cultural barrier prevents a public that clearly loves its superheroes from picking up a new "Avengers" comic, why don't more people do so? The main reasons are obvious: It is for sale not in a real bookstore but in a specialty shop, and it is clumsily drawn, poorly written and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in years of arcane mythology.

Beat writer Todd Allen calls the above slam over the top, but it sounds completely reasonable coming from an interested-but-not-immersed reader, like Marchman obviously is, the sort of reader who will see more general interest comics like Guy Delisle's Jerusalem or Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?. Even allowing for differences in style, how does one look at the art in one of those books, or Cleveland, and then look at, say, Mike Deodato on Avengers or Greg fucking Land on an X-Men comic and not think, Yeesh, these look clumsily drawn.

I think any one with a shop to visit can probably pick up any random volume of Showcase Presents or Essential reprint books and any handful of modern DC and Marvel comics and see just how greatly the quality of artwork has been devalued at the two publishers over the course of the decades. On one hand, sure, the art in a new issue of Superman might look more energetic and dynamic than it did in 1962; on the other hand, Superman doesn't look like the same person from panel to panel, and the background, if there is one, is just a photo taken from Google Images and dropped in using a computer.

As for whether or not it's poorly written, I don't know for sure; I dropped the Avengers books I was reading years ago, and while I occasionally check back in via the library, they are still Brian Michael Bendis comics. It's difficult to talk about how poor the writing is also because, as I spoke about a little bit in discussing that DC/WildStorm crossover series the other day, writing in general has gotten more sophisticated, but not necessarily better; the writers assume the readers are older and smarter and don't need their hands held as much, but they also often don't have collaborators skillful enough to carry certain sorts of storytelling off, and they also neglect new readers to the point that their stories can be "incomprehensible."

As for the last bit of criticism regarding today's Avengers comics (and, by extension, Big Two super-comics), the bit about readers needing to be "steeped in...arcane mythology", Beat contributor Paul O'Brien said this in the commments thread:

It’s not quite true that AvX only makes sense if you know years of history. If anything, it makes LESS sense if you know the full history, because then you’ll know that the Phoenix has had human hosts several times before and not much came of it – which blows the entire premise of the story out of the water. For it to make sense, you need to know the history – and ONLY the history – that the story itself brings up.

I've noticed that problem a lot at DC since the Identity Crisis age of DC Comics began, wherein writers rely on that history or continuity in order to make events seem important or shocking or to take certain creative shortcuts, but then they get that history or continuity so badly wrong that it alienates everybody: People who don't know the characters or history being referenced will be frustrated that they don't know who's who and what's what, while those who do will be frustrated with the fact that they're being told wrong factual information. Generally, other writers in later stories will have to come in and explain these discrepancies to everyone's satisfaction...or at least try to (Examples from DC include everyone knowing everyone's secret identities in Identity Crisis, Max Lord making a heel turn in Countdown to Infinite Crisis, all of Countdown, the opening chapters of Final Crisis, etc; the main Marvel one that sticks out to me is Mark Millar's Civil War series).

Personally, I think the disconnect between superheroes selling movies so successfully and not being able to sell the same audience on their comics may simply be that it's not that people like superheroes in general, but that they like superhero movies and not superhero comics...

I'm sure accessibility has something to do with it too, in terms of how easy it is to access one versus the other. My hometown, for example, has no comic book shop and no book stores, but does have a movie theater.

And, of course, there's also my own pet complaint about super-comics: It costs $4 for 20-22 pages of a comic, which will be somewhere between 1/6th and 1/48th of a complete story, depending on whether it's a crossover or not. That's about half a ticket to see The Avengers movie right there, and it's $4 more expensive than the cost of watching an episode of the Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes cartoon at home.

I already discussed my feelings about the JMS dig in the WSJ piece; a week or so later, I'll agree it's a low blow, but also still believe JMS deserves all the rhetorical low blows he gets.

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

Sean T. Collins articulated why the WSJ piece was important at all in this piece for his blog. You should definitely read his piece if you haven't already; in fact, I'd rather you read it then waste time reading my ranting and raving.

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

Also well worth your time? The Comics Journal's weekly Nate Bulmer/Tucker Stone/Abhay Khosla team-up column, in which both Stone and Abhay address the plight of the creator and the WSJ piece. Here's a paragraph from Khosla:

According to the Wall Street Journal, mainstream comics are “clumsily drawn, poorly written and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in years of arcane mythology,” an opinion devastatingly unfair to those of us who think comics are also miserably colored and hastily lettered. It takes a village, WSJ. Most surprising, the article violates the fan community’s long-standing aversion to Specific Examples. Watchmen 2 punchline J. Michael Stracynszki is referred to as a “former He-Man scripter” and the “rough equivalent” of “Z-movie director Uwe Boll,” while “industry powers like Brian Michael Bendis, Joe Quesada, Grant Morison and Dan Didio … are the men most responsible for the failure of the big publishers to take advantage of the public’s obvious fascination with men in capes… contemporary superhero creators [who] tend to come off as pretentious autodidacts or failed cult leaders.”

In other words, it’s another installment in “Bam! Pow! Mainstream comics Aren’t Just For Kids or Adults or Really Anybody with Any Sense Anymore.”

It's a great piece.

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

There's been a lot of talk about female superheroines in the movies lately, with Marvel's Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada reportedly saying he didn't think there was a character or an actress to play her that could carry such a film (right before Marvel studios announced they were developing a film based on Carol Danvers/Miss Marvel/Captain Marvel).

Personally, I hope we see a female superhero movie very soon, and that it's Fantomah, starring Laura Dern and directed by, I don't know, David Lynch, maybe.

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

Here's a fun one from Noah Berlatsky's Hooded Utilitarian blog: Kurt Busiek explaining why Batman is not Green Lantern (Except, of course, for when he is).

In addition to Busiek's basic argument of the great value of shared universe settings—that is, "Because it's fun to have the characters meet"—I've always liked the way it challenges the writers why somethng doesn't happen when it comes up, even if it's something super-simple. Like, say for example, "Why doesn't The Flash run over to Gotham City and cut its crime rate in half in the course of a single super-speed afternoon?" The answer may just be as simple as "Because Batman is a possessive, territorial control freak jerk who would just get mad at The Flash for visiting Gotham City," or whatever.

As for why Batman doesn't have a power ring, Geoff Johns did give him a Green Lantern power ring for a minute in Green Lantern #9 (the Green Lantern #9 Geoff Johns wrote in 2005, not the more recent one), I think it's fair to say Batman has at least as much willpower as Hal Jordan, whether the writer who has been writing Hal Jordan for like eight years now will admit it in a story or not.

My guess is that being a Green Lantern requires a great deal of stupidity as well as will, and the Guardians just don't want to tell anyone that. Like, you have to have a lot of will power, but you also have to not be that bright. "Hal Jordan, you have the ability to overcome great fear—and you take direction as well as a sheepdog. Welcome to The Green Lantern Corps."

Batman, like Sinestro, is probably a little too ambitious, cunning and controlling to have a power ring, and while Bats might not have ended up as a space-Hilter like Sinestro did, he might also have been too irritating for the Guardians to work with, so they sought out someone who was kinda dim, and settled on Hal Jordan.

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

Speaking of Berlatsky, he's got a fine piece up on Slate which discusses the now imminent release of the Before Watchmen comics, and uses it to discuss creator's rights issues in Big Two super-comics and their multi-media spin-offs. Little of the information in that piece will be new to you, but Berlatsky offers a very nice overview of some of the bigger stories on that front since DC made its announcement. Plus, Noah Berlatsky! And Before Watchmen! In Slate!

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

Hey, good news! Drawn and Quarterly is going to publish a Lisa Hanawalt book. That's one of my favorite publishers and one of the artists I was most pleased to discover this year, so, as far as I'm concerned, that's a match made in heaven.

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

Did you guys read the dialogue in those preview pages from Earth 2 featuring the new alternate universe version of the Golden Age Green Lantern, who is now homo- rather than heterosexual? The ones that show big, strapping Alan and his tiny boyfriend mashing mouths and talking about their vacation plans or whatever? Did you see that one panel mentions a bullet train?

Scott's original origin involved a train disaster. So given the fact that James Robinson is writing Earth 2, what are the chances that there will be a horrible, fiery train accident in which Alan's beau dies a horrible death, thus motivating Scott to become an angsty superhero? That would explain all the burning skeletons on the cover of the issue featuring Alan Scott...

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

I haven't been skimming, let alone reading, all stories about the gay Green Lantern that have been showing up in my Google News feeds all week—and there have been a lot of 'em!—but I have noticed images of Hal Jordan from either the movie or the comics showing up to illustrate some of those stories. I've also seen a few headlines saying things like, "How will this effect Ryan Reynolds' film franchise?" (Seriously, is there anywhere to go but up...?)

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).

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

By the way. See this lady?

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

Oh man, now I can't wait to meet the new Doiby Dickles!

You know, given the news that...you know is now...you know.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

Hey, the chief and I both take our coffee the same way! (Black with two sugars, that is, not with robot debris and rubble). Anyway, as promised, I have some thoughts to share with you about Superman Family Adventures #1, the most anticipated (by me) superhero comic of the year, at Robot 6. You can go read it.

Comic shop comics: May 23-30

Aquaman #9 (DC Comics) There's a scene in here where the lady who looks like Shakira from Warlord but is actually a new character named Ya'wara, uses her jungle-cat summoning powers to summon a pair of jaguars to eat a guy. That doesn't sit well with Aquaman, who says, "Stop! We only kill when we have no other choice." It occurs after she's killed...let's see...one, two, three, four! Four other dudes.

This is another fairly slight issue of Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis and several inkers' run on the book, which feels rather obviously written-for-the-trade in a way that makes me wich I would have waited for the trade. Black Manta goes after another of "The Others," Aquaman's old superhero team that used Atlantean artifacts as weaponry, and this one has some sort of ill-defined power I didn't understand from the visuals (He either gains strength from the ghosts of army guys, or particular skill-sets from the ghosts of army guys? I don't know). Meanwhile, Mera manhandles old Dr. Shin, grabbing him by the collar and smashing him into his refrigerator hard enough to dent it, demanding he give her some exposition about Aquaman's new secret origin.

The unexpected one-sentence reveal that serves as the cliffhanger was a pretty compelling surprise, and the artwork remains fairly strong, but the book also remains a too-slowly paced, too-greatly padded story of unpleasant people being violent to one another.

Empowered Vol. 7 (Dark Horse Comics) I'm only 35 pages in, but based on the quality of the previous six volumes and how much I enjoyed them, I feel fairly comfortable predicting that this will end up being pretty great.

Hulk Smash Avengers #4-#5 (Marvel Entertainment) And so ends Marvel's five-issue weekly miniseries about the Hulk fighting the Avengers in different eras of their respective histories. The fourth issue features the gray-skinned, gangster version of The Hulk, "Mr. Fixit," fighting the West Coast Avengers Hawkeye, Mockingbird, Tigra, Wonder Man and Iron Man (in a red and light-gray suit that says "iron" better than his usual yellow suit). It's by Jim McCann, Agustin Padilla and Jamie Mendoza and there's nothing to it, really; I wasn't just describing the combatants above, or a broad outline of the plot, that's the whole issue. I liked seeing Tony Stark's Burt Reynolds-style mustache, and the title of the story, "What Smashes In Vegas," made me smile for a half-second.

The fifth and final issue brings up to the present, or, more accurately, the rather recent past: After Civil War and World War Hulk, before Secret Invasion. SHIELD Director Iron Man has Bruce Banner in a cell, and is trying to get him to reveal the true identity of the Red Hulk to him. Meanwhile, the Mighty Avengers Ares, Ms. Marvel, The Sentry and Wonder Man fight the Red Hulk.

This one's by Fred Van Lente and Michael Avon Oeming, and while it's also little more than an extended fight scene—that is the premise of the series, after all—Van Lente couches it in Iron Man and Bruce Banner's conversation with one another, and draws a parallel between the addictive, demonic power of the former's alcoholism and the latter's rage-fueled Hulk-outs. Van Lente makes this the moment where Bruce finally figures out who exactly the Red Hulk is, although he keeps the information from Iron Man, which whom he isn't exactly getting along at that point (I still don't understand why Red Hulk doesn't have a mustache, but I suppose Jeff Parker probably explained that at some point in his Hulk run, which I hope to read in trade someday, probably when its all over).

Oeming's art is as strong as always, and it's a real treat seeing it applied to Marvel characters, particularly these Marvel characters at this point in their fictional history, as they all tend to be drawn in Marvel's realistic house style, with the computer coloring gimickry and photo reference and occasional computer-assisted photo-swiping. It's nice to see The Sentry smacking the Red Hulk, and see their fists, chests and heads looking so big, boxy and abstracted; I liked all the gritted teeth and big, black lines suggesting furrowed brows and dimensions suggested by planes of ink.

Oeming's art work looks like a bunch of drawings, and doesn't seem to be trying to disguise the fact that its a bunch of drawings, and that's rare enough to be refreshing these days.

Superman Family Adventures #1 (DC) Um, I don't think that's the right sound effect in that last panel, guys. More on this book at Robot 6 later today.

Review: Star Wars: Darth Vader and the Lost Command

I quite quickly became fascinated with the very concept of Darth Vader as a comic book leading man while reading this collection of one of Dark Horse's millions of Star Wars branded miniseries. So much of the character's most appealing traits, so many of his signifiers, so many of the things that make us think "Darth Vader" and, if you're like me, "cool," are aural rather than visual—The deep, golden voice echoing in the helmet, the unnerving breathing noises that sound like an intensive care ward, the theme song—that I was curious to see how the character worked in a purely visual medium like comics.

Certainly there are cool visual elements to the character design as well, including the cape, the all-black costume that threw him in such sharp contrast when flanked by his all-white henchmen and the occasional gray-uniformed bureaucrats and flunkies and his imposing size, but none of that stuff seems as important to me as the way Darth Vader sounds, or the way a Star Wars movie sounds when he enters a room.

Then there's the mask-face, which is even more fixed and frozen than the Doctor Doom mask that allegedly inspired it; Doom's human eyes can at least always be seen glaring through the little square windows in his iron mask, but Vader's face has no more emotion than a plastic action figure of the character. He simply cannot emote visually, and it was up to James Earl Jones' voice acting and the guy inside's gestures and poses to convey anything about what might be going through the character's mind.

So here he is starring in a comic book, which has no sound save what the writer and letter can suggest through occasional sound effects (And here writer W. Haden Blackman and letterer Michael Heisler eschew trying to simulate Darth's breathing, reserving sound effects only for typical comic book occasions; that is, there are WHAMs and BOOOOMs and KER-RACKs for punches, explosions and hull-breachings), and in which his face, gestures and poses will do all the emoting for him, save what the reader can get out of Blackman's dialogue for him.

Rick Leonardi, who penciled the book, and Dan Green, were certainly up for the challenge, and the book held not only my interest but also that initial fascination I mentioned. There are all kinds of images of Darth Vader moving and acting in ways that seem fairly alien to the image of the character I'm most familiar with (the one in the first three Star Wars movies, seen scores of times a piece; I've read a handful of Star Wars comics before, although their number and complexity frighten me from reading too many in the same way that X-Men and Legion of Super-Hero comics have frightened me, but this is the first I've read in which Vader was so prominently featured). The image at the top of the post is a good example. That's Vader leaping into battle from a flying troop ship, although, taken out of context, he could just as easily be skipping, dancing, or tripping.

I love the simplicity of his face; two circles for eyes, a small circle for a nose—which makes him seem a bit like an old-school, 1920s or '30s cartoon character, one of those species unspecified animal men that The Animaniacs spoofed—and a mouth that looks like the cow-catcher on an old-timey train. Darth Vader's face is practically an emoticon.

Leonardi and Green do manage to wring emotion from it though. Context is usually used to tell us what he must be thinking or feeling, but most action scenes merely have him making the above face, and thinking and feeling whatever Darth Vader's mask must think and feel.

Some scenes tilt his head, so that the rim of helmet seems to form an angry eyebrow line, eclipsing a chunk of the wide eyes to make an angry face (Cover artist Michael Kutsche achieves something similar, although his photorealistic art is such more emotionless than Leonardi's pencil and pen creation, which can achieve a degree of animation). A similar effect is achieved by lighting him from below (a standard filmmaking trick).

The artists also use the medium in ways that late-seventies, early-eighties filmmaking couldn't (at least, not very easily), having their Vader's cape not only flutter dramatically, but occasionally flare up, like raised bat-wings, or whip behind him. Even simple tricks, like a single motion line and careful positioning can suggest a powerful, active Darth Vader unknown from the films, by suggesting he has leapt superhuman distances.

Blackman makes it easy on his artists in several ways. This series is apparently set directly after the conclusion of Revenge of The Sith (that's the last one they made, although it's technically supposed to be part 3, if Star Wars isn't your thing), and so Natalie Portman's character is still fresh in his mind (which becomes a plot point near the climax), and so there are many memory and dream scenes in which Vader appears as his human, un-masked self. There are several scenes in which he's shown out of costume to various degrees as well, and the climax involves him getting banged around so badly his mask and helmet come off, revealing a character that looks like someone Frank Miller might have drawn in a Sin City strip.

The story involves the son of Grand Moff Tarkin (one of my favorite three-word phrases), who has gone missing. Two feuding search parties are formed—one lead by Vader, and another by Tarkin's kid's pal and they are forced to work together (Helpfully, Vader's Storm Troopers wear white, the Imperial officer douchebag's wear black). This leads to a bunch of action scenes, as Vader and company fight and kill a whole bunch of folks while closing in on their prey. There's some more personal, character-driven stuff—this is meant to tell of how Vader came to give up on the happy memories of Natalie Portman and embrace the dark side more fully, and how he ingratiated himself to The Emperor with his cunning and ruthlessness and power—and it's all quite ably communicated, but, as was the case when I was eight, all I really want to see out of Star Wars is laser-swords and laser guns, space ships and monsters.

The artwork is great throughout. Colored by Wes Dzioba, it's all very comic book-y, with a degree of chunkiness and flatness, and an almost tossed-off quality to many of the panels and the thick, black lines that compose them. In contrast to many of the Star Wars comics I've seen, this didn't look overly fussed-over, and, it may be worth noting, that perhaps because of its setting in the fantasy time-line, it's full of humans and occasional droids, but no crazy aliens, the palette is white and blue and gray and black, and the vehicles and machinery all have a lived-in, down-to-earth feel about them. This is the galaxy far, far away as it appeared in the the first trilogy, a galaxy that looked like you could probably find it somewhere in the continental United States.

I'm not sure if this book would be of any interest to those with no interest in Star Wars—it's hard to say for me at this point, but I think it functions as a complete enough unit that even someone with no prior knowledge or experience would be able to follow it, but if you have no interest in Star Wars, then I suppose even seeing how Leonardi draws that emoticon-mask in a comic book story won't exactly be enough to draw you into picking this up. But it's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with it, and the artwork is top-notch and, to my amateur's eye, even better than much of what you can find in the many other Dark Horse minis.