Review: Godzilla: Awakening

The old adage about judging books by their covers certainly applies to Godzilla: Awakening, a special graphic novel prequel to the new Godzilla movie co-written by the film's screenwriter and published by Legendary Comics. It's an excellent, exciting cover drawn with great care and detail by one of the American comics artists who is probably near or at the top of most fans' lists of Best Guy To Draw A Giant Monster. As editor Bob Schreck writes of the cover process in the book's ten pages of backmatter, "The moment I was made aware that [associate editor] Greg [Tumbarello] and I were putting together a Godzilla book in conjunction with Legendary's new film, two words immediately popped into my head: ARTHUR. ADAMS."

It's a fine design for the titular monster, a character that Adams has drawn in various forms for various publishers as far back as the 1980s and as recently as 2012, one that looks at once like a close relative of the Japanese, Toho version of the character*, like something that might conceivably have existed in nature at one point, and yet it also looks new and different. It's recognizably Godzilla, without looking like a simple cover version of Godzilla.

What's also notable about this particular Godzilla is that he does not look a whole heck of a lot like the Godzilla that appears in the movie. I couldn't find a great image of the film's version in an identical pose, but this is in the general vicinity.

Adams' Godzilla has a much longer, more flexible-looking neck than the movie Godzilla, American or Japanese, and his head is no bigger than that neck, giving him a more reptillian, even serpentine look than a dinosaurian or anthropomorphic design. Coupled with the tail and the rough but even texture of the scales, Adams' Godzilla suggests a crocodile or alligator-like creature to me.

It's notable that the particular design of Godzilla in the new film was kept pretty tightly under wraps until shortly before opening day, in fact, this graphic novel was originally solicited by DC, who are distributing the book for Legendary, with a different cover, showing only a massive tail, smoke and helicopters.

This was actually my first look at the new Godzilla and, as you can see, it doesn't really look like the film's Godzilla, which has much, much smaller arms, much greater girth, an almost non-existent neck, and a tiny little head with a small mouth and beady eyes.

The Godzilla in the comic doesn't look a whole heck of a lot like the one on the cover, either.

Here's first-credited artist Eric Battle's design sheet for the title character, from those pages of backmatter:

The cover, which we can judge the cover by, is great. But the book, which we can't judge the cover by is...much less so.

Written by Borenstein and his cousin Greg Borenstein, much of it reads like stuff cut from earlier drafts of the script, ironically dealing with the more fertile aspects of the movie's narrative that I felt were under-explored, and more promising than what actually made it into the film. Unlike director Gareth Edwards, the Borensteins and their art team aren't shy about showing Godzilla; he's probably on-panel more in this relatively short, fleet-reading 66-page graphic novel than he is on-screen in the film's two-hour runtime.

The story follows Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (the character played by Ken Watanabe) and his father, during their multi-generational search for giant monsters. These include one that the elder Serizawa appear after the bombing of Hiroshima, which resembles a kite designed by H.R. Giger and is first referred to as a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms), like Godzilla's opponents in the film, and is later named Shinomure, "swarm of death"), and Gojira, who Serizawa's dad believes in, and believes to be a sort of benevolent destroyer of malevolent monsters, but the rest of Project: Monarch doubts exists.

The story follows Monarch's pursuit of the monsters through the decades, with Godzilla in pursuit of Shinomure, climaxing in the 1954 A-bomb that was supposed to have destroyed Godzilla (and, here, did successfully destroy his opponent). Before the book ends, we see one Serizawa pass his mission and his belief in Gojira down to the other.

The plot has at least one pretty sizable hole, but otherwise states the same origin story of the monsters seen in the film: Millions of years ago, they fed on radiation and/or each other, but when the Earth became less radioactive, they retreated nearer its core, and were only lured back to the surface with the discovery and use of atomic weapons. However, the elder Serizawa finds evidence of belief in Godzilla throughout human history, with images of the monster appearing in ancient art, despite the fact that Godzilla had been hibernating since before the time of the dinosaurs.

The artwork is rather messy, which, to an extent, is likely a style choice, but given the number of artists involved, and the fact that it is extremely difficult to distinguish who drew what—it all looks like Eric Battle, in differing forms of completion—some of that messiness must just come down to poor quality. In addition to Battle, Yvel Guichet and Alan Quah are credited as pencilers and Lee Loughridge as colorist, perhaps finishing their art (and thus explaining the hazy, washed-out look, and the fact that it all seems the work of the same hands). It's jittery and dynamic, but sacrifices clarity in service of motion, and is remarkably un-cinematic for a comic about a movie monster, tying in to a movie (I've read a lot of Godzilla comics this summer—in fact, I've read just about all of them—and, form a strictly visual standpoint, this was the worst in terms of storytelling).

Loughridge gives Godzilla, who regularly appears in splash pages, but only relatively rarely in consecutive panels, a wash of what looks like some sort of camouflage paint; he looks spray-painted like a car rather than a living creature with a tactile texture, like the version on the cover.

The Project: Monarch and the world-wide monster cover-up conspiracy still seems promising to me, and this is certainly a fun panel, in which we see one eccentric Monarch scientist is referred to as the "lead Problematica Biologist," studying "this 'Kingdom Miscellaneous'":

Note the giant gorilla, the carnivorous plants, and the huge bird-like skeleton, plus whatever those other things are supposed to be.



*I'm not entirely sure if the below images are drawn by Adams are not,  as some of the images bear individual signatures and some don't, but he's the only artist credited on the table of contents of The Official Godzilla Compendium (Random House; 1998).  These are two versions of Godzilla from the Heisei series, the Godzillasaurus dinosaur that is mutated into the Gojira we know and love, and Godzilla Jr., who would take the place of Godzilla Sr. when the latter dies. Anyway, Adams' version of Godzilla '14 seemed to be on the same spectrum as these designs: 

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If, like me, you think the Arthur Adams cover is the very best part of Godzilla: Awakening, you'll be happy to learn that there are two pages of backmatter devoted to it. The second shows Adams' original pencils and then his inked version of the piece, before it's been colored, while the first shows the vareity of sketches he turned in. Here then are a bunch of other Adams drawings of his version of Godzilla '14:

Schrek chose the best, but I do like sthe sixth and seventh options a whole lot, too.

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Just a quick note regarding Godzilla's roar, as I grew kind of fascinated by that when reading all those Godzilla comics, thanks in large part to the pretty brilliant way that artist James Stokoe decided to draw it in his Half-Century War.

Dark Horse and IDW both use variations of SKREEE-ONK or SKREE-ONG, which probably don't "sound" right unless the movie roar is fresh in your head before you read the onomatopoeia sound effects. Dough Moench, the best sound effect writer in superhero comics history, gave Marvel's Godzilla a variety of MRRAWs and RRAWs. We only see/hear Godzilla roar once in Godzilla: Awakening, and it is a perfectly straightforward ROAAAAARRRR!!

Review: X-Men: No More Humans

Writer Mike Carey and artist Salvador Larroca's X-Men: No More Humans, the next in a new line of Marvel original graphic novels and, as the back cover exclaims, "the first X-Men OGN since the classic X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills," certainly has the heft, scope, scale and cast to earn the designation of novel.

The opening conflict involves the very, very sudden—like, Rapture sudden—disappearance of every single human being on the planet, leaving behind only the world's relatively tiny mutant population. And as big a deal as the extinction of humanity might seem, the problems the X-Men face only get bigger from there. As for the cast, the villain of the piece is a relatively new one—Raze, the possible future son of Mystique and Wolverine, introduced in "Battle of the Atom"—and the heroes are, well, everybody. Cyclops' team and students from Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine's team and student from Amazing X-Men and Wolverine and The X-Men, the ladies from the pages of X-Men, a few characters from what I think is the new X-Factor, the time-traveling original X-Men in their newer, dumber costumes, Magneto and his kids.

Now most of these characters don't have a whole heck of a lot to do, and Carey actually emphasizes that when we see, say, Gambit literally getting a seat at the table during a big meeting of the X-Men leadership, only to get one whole line, or Magneto emphasizing that the threat is so big that he and his children have set aside their differences to work together, and Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver never even get one line. For the most part, the ensemble, primary cast consists of the leaders of various X-Men factions or points-of-view, Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Magneto, and Beast, who has to serve both as a constant source of explanation of what's going on and as the scientific Maguyver to move the plot along whenever necessary.

To Carey's credit, though, despite the extremely short page count of only 128-pages, he does shine the spotlight around pretty quickly, brightly and sharply, with newer and minor characters like Tempus and Triage getting their moments, Northstar having a panel to shine, and many of the various X-Men at least being used in utilitarian ways, thanks to their powers. Like "Battle of the Atom" was, this offers a pretty nice snapshot of where the X-Men line of comics and all of its many characters are at the moment. (End notes explaining who the heck all these mutants are might have been more useful than the 14 pages of back-matter including ads, creator bios and process stuff; I could only identify about 50% of The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants that appear in this, and was completely baffled by a character named "Jason," who was apparently meant to be both very important and someone as well-known to me as, say, Dead Jean Grey).

The only real, non-nitpicky* problem with the book, and its existence as a graphic novel that's both part of the same line that produced Avengers: Endless Wartime and is being sold as a successor to God Loves, Man Kills, is that it reads so very much like an X-Men crossover, like a shorter, more tightly-plotted and less repetitive version of "Battle of the Atom." It's not really about anything, other than X-Men continuity, and because of its format can't even be a big deal in that narrow, less-ambitious sense. Because it's a standalone original graphic novel not written by Brian Michael Bendis (who is currently writing the two flagship X-Men books), one goes in knowing nothing too significant can really happen, something that Carey himself rather explicitly writes right into the script, as when Magneto sarcastically asks which of the many teams of warring X-Men want to be the X-Men today, or during the last two pages, when Storm and Wolverine decide not to fight Magneto and/or Cyclops, with Wolverine telling Cyke "Back off and pretend this never happened," and, in the book's last lines Beast sadly saying (and Carey cynically writing?), "Then we all go back to our corners, don't we? And wait for the next round."

Between that and the opening scene in which Raze infiltrates a high-tech super-science laboratory and effects a human rapture, the X-Men team on the cover investigates the problem, seeking out the one human being left on Earth, while portals from alternate dimensions start admitting mutant refugees from other Earths, seeking sanctuary on our own now all-mutant world, and Raze raises an army of alternate world evil mutants, which includes the "real" Mystique and, eventually, Magneto. The Brotherhood fights the X-Men, and The Phoenix (from an alternate dimension) shows up, escalating the stakes exponentially, but also providing a rather literal deus ex machina, a way to hit a cosmic reset button that undoes pretty much anything of note or consequence that might have occurred during the entirety of the book, which at least justifies its existence by having its pages bubbling over with colorful superheroes with colorful powers and a big, exciting plot.

Sure, it's shallow and ultimately pointless, but it's an entertaining X-Men comic, and let's not allow it to lead us into some form of existential crisis: I had fun reading it, it was competently enough made that I spent almost no time considering the craft instead of the surface pleasures of the story and art and I think it functions fairly perfectly as a bonus helping of what the X-Men line is currently offering.

In fact, as I was reading this, I rather thought of it as the modern-day, trade-only reader's equivalent of an annual. Like, I only read X-Men comics in trade, and, if the trade paperback collections are the equivalent of single, serial published issues, than this is the equivalent of an annual—and extra, bonus issue with a big, splashy story that doesn't interfere with the ongoing storylines of the other books.

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I haven't said much about Larroca, because there's not much to say about his artwork. It is perfectly fine. Not the best in the X-Men line at the moment, but not the worst either. I was pleasantly surprised by how solid his work, here colored by Justin Ponsor and others, was compared to where I last saw a lot of Larroca, Matt Fraction's run on Invincible Iron Man. I was not a fan of Larroca's photo-referenced, computer trick filled artwork on that series, so much so that I dropped the monthly (which I was buying at one point) because I couldn't stand looking at the artwork, although I eventually caught up on the series in (library-borrowed) trade.

This doesn't even look like the art of that guy, which I guess means Larroca has improved drastically, or he was intentionally working in a rather specific style on Invincible Iron Man, purposefully trying to make it look like that (perhaps to make it more "movie"-like, or to accentuate the "realism" of the series, or something; maybe X-Men being more over-the-top superhero fantasy meant he felt he didn't need to worry so much whether his SUVs looked exactly like photographs of SUVs.)

I thought he did a rather poor job of distinguishing the two Jean Greys, who look to be the exact same age, despite the fact that one is a teenager and the other a grown woman (in one panel, teen Jean is actually bigger than adult Jean), but otherwise, this was the best work from Larroca that I can remember seeing.

As for visuals, what's actually most striking is the costume design, as there is a lot of it in here (In all honesty, it would be easier for me to point out X-people not in this book—Jubilee, Bishop, Cable, Colossus, Puck—than to say who is in it, there are so many goddam X-Men here). Obviously Larroca wasn't responsible for...any of it (at least, I don't think so), and instead he must just draw it all.

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I really hate Raze's design, especially if he's going to turn out to be something more than a one-off character from a possible alternate future, as he was in "Battle of the Atom." He is basically just Mystique and Wolverine completely, perfectly blended, so he looks like Wolvie with more volume in his red hair, wearing a white jacket (his mom wears white) with no shirt underneath, showing plenty of blue skin. He wears white pants and boots, with a loin cloth identitcal to his mother's tucked into a belt like his mom's. Who borrows their mom's clothes? Who wears a loin cloth with pants?

I hate the All-New X-Men's new costumes, which look horrible. Rather than being straight out of the 1960s, they are now straight out of the late 1980s, and consist mostly of simple spandex body suits, but with weird arrangements of patterns around them. Jean Grey and Angel have Jim Lee turtle neck collars (And Warren has brown hair now...?), while Teen Beast's costume consists of a weird neck brace thingee that should make it impossible for him to turn his head.

If they are on Cyclops' team, I would expect them to be wearing all-black, and for Jean and X-23 at least to be wearing thigh-high leggings/boots with tiny spandex panties, and for most of the fronts of their shirts missing. That seems to be the uniform, based on Magik and Emma (and Tempus has the leggings, but is otherwise better covered).

I don't understand why Kitty's still wearing her costume from the Xavier-then-Jean Grey school, if she's switched sides.

I like Magneto's all-black look, but man, Quicksilver looks pretty idiotic. I don't think I've ever really liked a Quicksilver design, but this one seems to be his worst ever.

Although an alternate universe version of him shows up with a pretty neat one. It's red, which only furthers comparisons to The Flash, but also matches the outfits of his sister and (sometimes) his father.

I didn't really understand why the students from both schools had identical uniforms on.

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Hey, what's this?

Smoking? In a Marvel comic?

I thought that was verboten?

Actually, I don't see any smoke. Maybe its an e-cigarette that he hasn't fired up yet. Maybe he's vaping...?

I have no idea who that guy is, by the way, but I like his costume.

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One of the mutant refugees from an alternate universe is, apparently, Frieza:

*I did find myself wondering about the rest of the Marvel Universe. There was really no need to address this, and Carey doesn't, but the copy on the back of the book mentions that The Avengers and The Fantastic Four are missing, which begs the question of what they're up to, and then you start wondering why Dr. Strange didn't magic his way out of their predicament, or why Reed Richards couldn't figure out a way to return them all to earth, especially if he had science bros like Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and Hank Pym with him. And why is Thor missing? Does he count as human? And what about all the aliens on Earth? (Kubark didn't get raptured). What about the Inhumans? What about the animals?

I went to the movies and I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past and then I wrote all these words about it.

This sure seemed like a good idea for an X-Men movie, and the time-travel plot seemed like a rather elegant way to simultaneously make a sequel to 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand and 2011's set-in-the-past X-Men: First Class. By starting in a dystopian future and jumping decades backwards, it would seemingly allow the filmmakers to present the greatest pleasures of the original trilogy of X-Men movies—Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan acting at each other, Hugh Jackman's Wolverine—with the chief pleasures of First Class—a mutant period piece with sexy James McAvoy and sexier still Michael Fassbender as Young Professor X and Young Magneto, their bromance rapidly curdling into broenmity.

And the first somber, moody trailers even promised the giant robot fighting everyone who ever watched that shitty '90s X-Men cartoon has been waiting for, plus a who's who of characters and actors from the previous four to six films (do the Wolverine movies count as X-Men movies...?), including more of the fan-favorite characters who had way too little screen time previously, like Ellen Page's Kitty Pryde and big shiny Colossus.

I had relatively high hopes; high enough that I didn't even mind that for some reason they felt the need to put Bishop in it. I've never actually read the two-issue storyline the movie took its title from—I've never been much of an X-Men fan, and have never had much success trying to wade through old Chris Claremont-scripted comics—but I always liked that phrase, "Days of Future Past." It's up there with "God Loves, Man Kills" in terms of X-Men phrases I just like the sound of.

So I went to see it a few weekends ago.

My favorite reviews so far? I really liked Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's too-kind review for The Onion's AV Club, which includes this perfectly true opening paragraph:

For better or worse, X-Men: Days Of Future Past is the first Marvel movie to truly embrace comics-style storytelling. Context-less and origin-story-free, it presumes that its audience is familiar with all relevant character traits, continuities, and fantastic elements. It returns the genre to its geek roots; depending on the viewer, it has the potential to be the most narratively satisfying and fluid entry in the X-Men film series, or the most alienating. It’s a loose adaptation of one of the all-time great Marvel storylines, with Professor X and Magneto using Shadowcat’s powers to send Wolverine’s consciousness back in time to 1973 so that he can help their past selves set aside their differences and avert a dystopian, Sentinel-run future by preventing Mystique from assassinating Bolivar Trask. Readers who are confused by any or all parts of the preceding sentence should take it as a warning.

I liked Andy Khouri's Comics Alliance plot summary/review even better, as it says something similar, only in a much more acidic manner:

It is owing to the series’ bitterly old age that the new film is almost totally devoted to reconciling the conflicting plots and divergent timelines of its predecessors. In this very hilarious way, Days of Future Past is the most faithful adaptation to date, having actually translated to film that most core concept of X-Men comics: hopelessly confusing and eternally jacked up continuity.

Amy Nicholson's Village Voice review bears an unfortunately 100% accurate headline ("New X-Men Meet Old X-Men and Explain Lots of Stuff"), and while I don't agree with Abhay Khosla's overall assessment, I always enjoy reading Abhay writing about just about anything, and I do agree wholeheartedly with his assessment of the Sentinels (And the Future Sentinels opening up their faces to shoot death beams out of them? Am I misremembering, or is that pretty much exactly what The Destroyer did in Thor?)

Personally, I found the film very surprising. Like, I was in a state of almost constant surprise while watching it. Most of those surprises were negative ones, but I was pleasantly surprised several times as well, more and more so by the end. I think the good surprises were maybe the best parts of the film (which is basically me saying "spoiler warning"), but boy were there a lot of negative surprises too, mostly along the lines of I don't understand why this person is even in this movie or It boggles my mind that someone made this particular creative or story-telling choice.

For example, there is the entire section of the film set in a dark—as in, the lighting is very poor—future where a whole bunch of talented, likely expensive actors do next-to-nothing in what appears to be a story section of a new videogame. The trailers (and logic) seemed to suggest that a significant portion of the film would be set in this dystopian future of 2023; it's not. There are two action scenes, a conversation scene between the two guys playing Charles Xavier at different points in time filmed in a dumb way and then occasional check-ins, but the majority of the film takes place in 1973. I'm not sure what they paid Halle Berry or Ellen Page to reprise their roles, but I assure you, that was money quite poorly spent.

That first action scene features Shawn Ashmore's Iceman with a beard (in human form, not when iced up), to let us know it is the future, along with Ellen Page's Kitty Pryde (although I'm not sure they ever use her name?), plus Colossus, Bishop, Blink (played by Fan Bingbing!), Warpath and a fire guy I originally assumed was supposed to be Pyro, given all the call-backs to the previous films, but who is actually Sunspot (according to IMDb. Pretty sure his name is never used either). They all fight the super-adapting Sentinels, except Ellen Page and Bishop, who run away, using Kitty's powers to run through shelves. They hole up in a room where Bishop lays on his back, Ellen Page hunches over him, and glowy stuff comes out of her fingertips and into his temples. This somehow sends Bishop's mind back in time a few days, so he can warn everyone that The Sentinels are coming and they can relocate, so the preceding action scene in which everyone but Bishop and Kitty get killed never really had to happen.

Later, they meet up with the rest of the surviving X-Men: Halle Berry's Storm, Patrick Stewart's Professor X (now in a hover-chair, but not the big, dumb gold hovercraft/tank he tooled around in in the aforementioned shitty cartoon), Ian McKellan's Magneto and Wolverine, who has some gray powder in his hair because, again, the future.

They are all wearing generic black jump suits that look pretty much like what they wore in all the other movies, only maybe with some more padding here and there. While I'm glad Bishop wasn't wearing his Bishop costume, it seems like a rather dull costuming choice. If they are the last few survivors holding out against the army of robots that control the whole world, shouldn't they maybe be dressed more like the good guys in the first Matrix movie, all sweaty and in rags and such? Or, if they're in a dystopian, possible alternate future that will of course be averted, maybe they could have given them some more dramatically alternate costumes? Maybe put Storm in white, for example, or give her a mohawk?

Of all these characters, none of them are the least bit important, save Wolverine. With the exception of Stewart, who gives Wolverine a pre-time travel pep talk and, at one point, shares a scene with McAvoy, they barely even get any lines. Bishop might shout "Blink!" and "Light me up!" and "Aarrrrrrrrggghhhh!" I think Warpath says "They're here." I can't remember Storm saying anything at all, although I'm sure she had at least one line.

Seriously, that's all she does.

Even Page and McKellan are non-presences. McKellan gets a nice death scene, I guess, and he and Stewart hold hands and exchange end-of-the-line pleasantries, but wow, what a waste. Same goes for Page; after her first scene, which involved running into a room to meditate over Bishop's head, she then spends the rest of the movie hunched over Wolverine's head, concentrating really hard. She's done promotional interviews on talk shows for this movie in which she has about 50 times more lines then she has in the actual movie, and during which she is called upon to act more than she does in the film she was promoting in those interviews.

This is a real shame, because I'd really like to see a movie in which Ellen Page plays Kitty Pryde, but it's easy to imagine this experience souring her from doing more X-Men movies (Or maybe not; they must pay well, given that Berry and McKellan showed up to get less screen time and fewer lines then they might in most television commercials).

So Pryde sends Wolverine back in time, thinking really hard and having light come out of her fingers. Wait, you might say, having seen Last Stand and/or having read comics or seen cartoons with Kitty Pryde in them, How does the mutant ability to phase through walls and solid objects also allow her to send someone's consciousness backwards through time into their own past bodies?

The film doesn't bother to explain, perhaps wanting to encourage viewers to write in with their own explanations, in the hopes of winning a no-prize, thus making the experience of watching this Marvel movie based on old Marvel comic books more like the experience of interacting with the people who make those old comic books? If so, I'm gonna guess "Secondary mutation," like Mystique's ability to slide long distances on floors and to bend her legs at weird angles.

In the two-issue comic book story "Days of Future Past," it's Rachel Grey, a powerful psychic, who sends Kitty back in time. But because Kitty is not Wolverine, they couldn't repeat that for the movie. It would have been easier to have a psychic like Rachel Grey or Psylocke (neither of whom are in the movie) or Professor X do this, but I guess they wanted to compromise and have Kitty still involved in the plot line that she played the pivotal role in when it was a comic book, even if it doesn't make any sense. So Kitty has mind time-travel powers now (A female friend of mine who is quite into the X-Men did not care for this development at all, and when I tried to point out that they had to use Wolverine in-story because only he, Magneto and Professor X were alive back then, she pointed out that the writers are just making all this shit up anyway, so they could just make up a way around the weird rules they themselves established to make it so that it had to be Wolverine. I guess that's a fair point.) (UPDATE: Andrew Wheeler said much the same in his review).

Before we jump back to the past, let's finish up with the future: At the climax of the film, all of the future X-Men die rather horribly save three of them, and a Sentinel is about to kill Xavier, Kitty and Wolvie when Wolverine wakes up, his mission accomplished.

And the X-Men who die horribly? They do die horribly. Colossus, for example, who is onscreen more here then in the previous films, but doesn't really have any more lines, is torn in half. I imagine folks at DC were in the audience on opening weekend thinking, Oh shit, we have to make sure part of our Justice League movie is set in a dystopian alternate future so we can tear our guys apart too!

While Fan Bingbing is criminally wasted, let the record show that her powers and their usage are pretty damn neat. It's really too bad that she was cast into what turned out to be the cannon fodder squad of X-Men (Speaking of which, if they were going to just have a bunch of random X-Men fight and die in the future, I wonder why they went with such a bunch of lame ones, instead of using characters already introduced but under-used, like Kea Wong's Jubilee or Ben Foster's Angel, or why they didn't throw a Gambit in there, to tease his apparently in-development movie.)

So, the past. This past isn't the present, i.e. the 21st century setting of the X-Men movies, but the early 1970s. Why, you may ask, other than because it means we get to see Peter Dinklage in era-appropriate costuming?

(Hey, do you remember when his attachment to the film was first announced, and everyone thought he would be playing Puck? That'd be something, huh? I wonder if they'll ever get around to making an Alpha Flight movie. Can't be any less marketable than a Gambit movie. And hell,they can even put Wolverine in it!)

No, the real reason is because James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender were awesome in First Class and we all wanted more of that (Lucas Till's Havok makes a breif cameo, gets two, maybe three lines, while pretty much everyone else from that movie not played by Jennifer Lawrence or the guy from Warm Bodies appear only in their autopsy photos, an evil scientist having apparently dissected them sometime between movies).

Also, in addition to a few of those actors reprising their roles, it allows for more of the fun mutant-ification of American history. For example, did you know that Magneto was involved in the Kennedy assassination, which explains the irregular paths of the bullets fired? Mags says it was because he was trying to stop the assassination, but he was thwarted mid-bullet bending. Why did he bother? Because JFK was a mutant duh.

So Wolverine wakes up in his younger body in 1973, his younger body looking exactly like his older body, except he no longer has white powder streaked into his hair. Oh, and he's totally naked, allowing for a nice, totally gratuitous ass shot—the only nudity in the film and, in fact, really the only even mildly sexually exploitive imagery I can recall (Yes, Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique is technically naked, but she's really just wearing a blue body stocking with sequein-like scales hot-glued over her bathing suit area, or is a special effect, or some combination of the two). That's one neat thing about the Marvel movies, regardless of studio, something you don't ever really get in the comics—effective beefcake.

Wolverine puts on some clothes and goes to Xavier's school, where only Nicholas Hoult's Beast is left, and there he finds Xavier walking, bearded and with long hair, but rather than teaching young mutants to protect a world that fears and hates them, he's decided to while away his days drinking heavily and doing heroin—or, at least, I thought it was heroin when they first showed him tying up his arm and tapping for a vein. Turns out it was...whatever mutant-suppression drug that Beast invented in the last movie. So, super-heroin...?

Eventually, these three decide to break Magneto out of jail to help them stop Mystique from attempting an assassination, as history tells Future Wolverine's brain that her attempt will be thwarted, and she'll end up on an operating table, wherein Dinklage will be able to take her DNA, stick it in his Sentinels, and make them into Amazos (Wait, this is a Marvel Universe-derived film; I guess I should say Super-Adaptoids rather than Amazos), which allow them to mimic powers and successfully murder everyone all the time. (Got all that? Because that's the conflict of the film.)

To free Mags, Wolverine calls upon Quicksilver, who yes, looked terrible on that Entertainment Weekly cover, and in that Hardee's ad, and, yes, they did design him more around the Mercury Quicksilver/Impulse amalgamated hero from 1996's JLX #1, part of the "Amalgam Comics" specials that produced to tie into the DC/Marvel crossover event/storyline, DC Vs. Marvel.

In fact, they play him a bit like a slightly older That Seventies Impulse. Which actually makes sense in the context of the movie, as he's a teenager inn 1973, not the full-grown asshole he is in the present Marvel Universe.

This is, shocking though it may seem, the best part of the movie, as Quicksilver evinces a personality, as well as charm and enthusiasm. And the one special effect scene in which they show us his powers from his perspective rather than everyone else's perspective is as awesome as you've no doubt heard repeatedly by this point (I actually felt a little bad for Warner Bros/DC when I saw this part, as it is going to make the eventual appearances of The Flash in a Justice League or Flash movie look derivative of Quicksilver in this movie and/or Avengers 2, despite the fact that comic book Quicksilver is actually derivative of comic book Flash). The twenty minutes or so he is in the movie are way too short.

For reasons completely unclear to me, Team 1973 thanks Peter Maximoff and then abandon him, despite the fact that his powers could easily solve all of the problems they encounter for the rest of the film (I was incredibly surprised that Quicksilver never returned later in the film, particularly during points of crisis, one of which occurs in Paris, which he could run to rather quickly, showing off his powers and making for another amusing apperarance, and, at the very end, when Wolverine is drowning and all the other characters forget about/stop caring about him; Quicksilver's watching that fight on TV at home with his little sister, and though it would take him about a second to get there and effect its outcome,  he doesn't bother. I was convinced it would be Quicksilver swimming down at super-speed to retrieve the drowned Wolverine, while in fact something weird and confusing I didn't understand happened to Wolvie's body).

In Paris, Magneto decides the best way to stop Dinklage from getting Mystique's DNA is not to convince her to abandon her attempt to assassinate someone, but to shoot her in the leg with a gun, thus ensuring plenty of blood getting spread all over the place (Isn't Mags smarter than that? Why wouldn't he try to, like, incinerate her or something?)

For the rest of the film then, Young Charles and Young Eric are at odds, with Young Beast and Old Wolverine-in-Young Wolverine's-Body on Charles' side. They're attempting to convince Mystique not to keep trying to kill Dinklage, while Magneto is attempting to kill Dinklage, President Nixon and a bunch of other people around President Nixon.

There's a big fight involving them all and the 1973 Sentinels, the actions of Magneto, Xavier and Mystique don't really make any sense, and, perhaps the biggest mystery is why the hell Mystique is  crux around which the film revolves. Is it to make up for the fact that the rest of the X-ladies were side-lined, or simply because Jennifer Lawrence is a big star now, much bigger than she was when First Class was released? (If so, it's still damn weird, as Jennifer Lawrence only appears as Jennifer Lawrence in two, maybe three scenes; most of the time, she's in that blue body suit and made up so as to be so unrecognizable that she could have been Ray Park or Andy Serkis for all I could tell).

Despite the gibberish of the plot, there are still a lot of pleasures in it, ranging from the aforementioned performances and the neat X-Men-ification of U.S. history (I'd still like a First Class 2 and/or 3, myself) and some decent special effect sequences, many of which are at least glimpsed in the trailer. And then there's the pay-off, in which Wolverine wakes up to see how he changed history.

How did he change history? Well, I have no idea what the various butterflies he must have stepped on during the course of the preceding movie might have changed exactly to lead to different outcomes in a bunch of different events from X-Men: The Last Stand, but, long-story short and totally spoiled, he wakes up in his room at Old Xavier's school, which is booming, and there's a string of cameos from X-Men, including ones like Iceman and Storm that we saw die horribly at the hands of the Sentinels in the future. And there's Kitty Pryde! And there's Rogue! And there's a bigger, bluer, furrier Beast, whose one line in this sequence is delivered by Kelsey Grammer (who played  him in Last Stand). And, of course, Famke Janssen's Jean Grey is still alive, as is James Marsden's Cyclops. Hurray! The original movie X-Men are all back together again, thanks to a DC Comics style, in-story cosmic reset of the timeline! Damn, that's some comic book-y storytelling! (Have any films based on comic books done this before, bringing a totally dead character back to life? I can't think of examples).

Weirdly, we don't see Blink, Bishop, Warpath, Sunspot or Colossusus, all of whom also died horribly in the future. Why don't they get little visual reminders that they totally didn't die? Were they never born, or did they never join the X-Men, on account of the messing with the past? The film woulda benefited by showing them somewhere during this passage, I think, as a reminder that Wolverine actually did save all the mutants fighting for survival in the future, and not just the ones from previous films (Additionally, this scene looks as if it's meant to be set in the present, 2014, rather than in the future of 2023, when it should be, based on the rules the movie itself established).

Anyway, it certainly made me excited for the prospect of a future X-Men film, which I understand is already underway, as it means we can at least have Cyclops, Jean Grey and Wolverine in it (I think a lot of the life was deflated from the franchise in the third film, when Cyclops died, and it became a quick march to Jean's death).

Hopefully, in the next movie, they'll give all of these people something more to do, from Page's Kitty and Anna Paquin's Rogue on down to the just-introduced characters like Quicksilver and Blink.

I left as the credits began, as I had no advance warning of a teaser for X-Men: Apocalypse, which I guess was there...? I'm kind of surprised Angel wasn't in this film at all, as it would be weird to have an Apocalypse movie without him.

But as long as they work in the robot horses, I'll be cool with it.

Hey, have you guys been to mattfrankart.com yet...?

Matt Frank is the artist who has been drawing IDW's latest Godzilla ongoing series, and, before that, he drew a lot of covers for the publisher's many Godzilla comics. Frank is an excellent artist of monsters of all kinds, and I've enjoyed my repeated visits to his site, mattfrankart.com, which is full of drawings of monsters, kaiju, dinosaurs, Dinobot Grimlock, a bad-ass Bowser rom Super Mario Bros and at least once pencil sketch of Wonder Woman.

And this gem:

While the creature on the right, labeled Son of Kong, is pretty self-explanatory, I'm intrigued and confused and fascinated with the creature on the left, Kongzilla, who is apparently a hybrid of the greatest monster in film history and Godzilla. But...how...? Can giant Skull Island gorillas and giant, mutated Gozillasaurs mate, and produce viable offspring, despite their obvious physical differences? (Not to mention their obvious differences in size; Kong was officially 50-feet-tall, though his size changed from scene to scene based on how he was scald to different environments, while the original and smallest Godzilla was 164-feet tall, but grew bigger and bigger as the movies progressed).

And even if they could, aren't Kong and Godzilla both males...?

Well, Kong at least is male, but the Godzilla in 1998's American-made Godzilla was apparently female, having produced a bunch of baby Godzillas, and the Toho Godzilla gives me mixed signals; in Son of Godzilla, the last Godzilla movie I watched, he found (or laid prior to the start of the film, and then returned to) a giant egg, out of which hatched a baby version of himself/herself; but in the Godzilla movie I watched just prior to that, Godzilla Vs. The Sea Monster, Godzilla seemed to have a crush on a native girl from Infant Island.

So I have to assume "Kongzilla" would have been created in a lab, mixing the two monsters DNA in a test tube. A very, very big test tube.

This is my second favorite image on mattfrankart.com, based solely on its total weirdness:

I'm not sure what exactly is going on here, but I assume its Godzilla and Mothra anthroporphized (she more than he) into some sort of human-scaled RPG fantasy characters...?

Oh, and I didn't "get" this one the first time I visited Frank's site, but I since realized that it's apparently his interpretation of the monster Godzilla was to fight in a never-made 1994 American Godzilla film that, in synopsis anyway, doesn't sound that bad at all:

Frank is, of course, better for more than just pin-ups, covers and concept drawings. Here's a page from Rulers of The Earth, the first volume of which includes not only an epic Zilla vs. Godzilla battle for the ages (that would be the Godzilla from the 1998 American Godzilla vs. the Godzilla from the Toho films), but this lovely meeting between Godzilla, Mothra and her larva:

Mothra larva apparently are born with an instinctual desire to bit Godzilla's tail.

Meanwhile...

Shouldn't Mr. Swampy's dialogue bubbles be orange...?

I reviewed the first issue of the new Tiny Titans series, Tiny Titans: Return To The Treehouse for Good Comics For Kids today. If you liked the previous 50 issues of Tiny Titans, when it was an ongoing monthly, you'll like it. Plus, Swamp Thing cameo, which means Mike Sterling has to buy it! I was pleased with Art Baltazar and Franco's return to the DC characters, but I have to admit, after Superman Family Adventures, I'd kinda like to see them subject more DCU grown-ups to their style, ala Swampy and a few of the other cameos seen in this issue (Metamorpho, for example, whose right leg I never realized was made out of wood). I sure wouldn't mind a Justice League Advetures or DC Universe Adventures or something by the pair in the future. Baltazar' draws everyone in the DC Universe really awesomely, as his illustrations in the DC Super-Pets Character Encyclopedia demonstrated (the sole exception being his Green Lantern John Stewart, who he draws with hair and a goatee, and who thus looks weird and wrong and evil for some reason).

And, over at Robot 6, I reviewed a quartet of books: Julie Delporte's Everywhere Antennas (excellent, but not for everyone), Pascal Girard's Petty Theft (excellent, for everyone), the new edition of Nicolas De Crecy's Glacial Period (must-read) and Enki Bilal's not-comics-but-similar-ballpark Phantoms of the Louvre (interesting enough).

While getting ready to write that, I went back and read Girard's Bigfoot, which, for reasons I can't comprehend in retrospect, I hadn't read before (And I love comics, Bigoot and Pascal Girard). It's pretty great stuff too; not as funny as Reunion or Petty Theft maybe, but still pretty funny. And in color. And featuring Bigfoot (in a way). Great end pages, too.

Hey, North American publishers!

Why don't one of you translate and re-publish these for sale in our market? Looking for Guillem March books, all I see is Cover Girls and a bunch of Batman spin-offs like Gotham City Sirens, New 52 Catwoman (with Judd Winick!) and Talon...

I really like that Guillem March character's art, but I don't see it in very many comic books that are very good comic books...

A few of the weirdest parts of the weird one-shot Wolverine: In The Flesh #1 (which is weird).

I mentioned this comic briefly last night in discussing the trade paperback All-New X-Men/Indestructible Hulk/Superior Spider-Man: The Arms of The Octopus, as for some reason completely beyond my grasp, Marvel decided to stick it in the back of the book collecting a trio of specials from each of the home books of the characters in the title, all of which told a single, inter-connected story.

I was obviously pretty surprise to see it tacked on to "Arms of The Octopus," apparently there for no reason other than to jack up the page count so Marvel would feel less guilty charging readers $15 for the trade, and, when I got to it, I put the trade down, having finished the story I wanted to read. I picked it up and read "In The Flesh" the following night though.

Wolverine: In The Flesh was a summer 2013 book, apparently originally announced back in 2011. It's drawn (exceptionally poorly) by Dalibor Talajic, with Jean-Francois Beaulieu providing the coloring, but what it is most noteworthy for is the fact that it was written by celebrity chef Chris Cosentino, who casts himself as Wolverine's friend and guest-star in the 20-page, $4 adventure.

I'm using the term "celebrity chef" because Cosentino refers to himself as such, through a different character he writes in the story. "What's a celebrity chef doing in my morgue?" says an unnamed mortician or someone from the coroner's office, when he sees the Cosentino character in the morgue. The back of the book refers to Cosentino as "TOP CHEF CHRIS COSENTINO!" A quick look at Wikipedia tells me he is a "celebrity chef and reality television personality" whose credits include Top Chef Masters, The Next Iron Chef and Iron Chef America (This explains why I've never heard of him before I heard of this comic book, as the only reality shows with which I have any familiarity are Dancing With The Stars and Finding Bigfoot, and he has not appeared on either of those...although I would love to see either of those shows crossover with the Marvel Universe).

He is also a "chef-partner" at the restaurant Incanto in San Francisco; there's a panel in which the name of the restaurant appears, but it was so poorly drawn I couldn't make out the word. This also explains how Wolverine and Cosentino might know one another, as Wolvie was based in San Fran for a while, before moving back east to found the Jean Grey School.

There's a picture of Cosentino on his Wikipedia page, and he doesn't look much like either the Cosentino that appears on the In The Flesh cover (by Tim Seeley) or the one that appears throughout the comic by Talajic, nor do Seeley's and Talajic's versions look much of anything like one another.

So, what possible occasion might there be for Wolverine to team-up with a celebrity chef and reality television personality? If you guessed something funny, guess again.

San Francisco is apparently wracked by a series of brutal murders by a serial killer known as "The Bay Area Butcher," a killer who removes the limbs and organs from his victims. The city is so worked up, that it's on the verge of rioting, we're told, and the National Guard has been put on alert just in case they do.

Wolverine, wearing street clothes as he does throughout the comic, shows up at a crime scene and asks the aforementioned mortician/coroner guy if he can help in anyway. The guy says to stop by the morgue later, and Wolvie does, but before doing so, he stops to pick up someone he thinks can help.

There's a page set at what is apparently Icanto, where Cosentino is...doing something to pig corpse...I think? ("Hey guys, I need to fabricate this pig," he says to some off-panel guys). Wolverine picks up Cosentino and takes him to the morgue to look at corpses with him, and Cosentino vomits. When the bald mortician guy asks what Cosentino's doing there, Wolverine says, "I'm the best at what I do. He's the best at what he does." Remember, that's Cosentino writing about himself!

Wolverine wants Cosentino to look at the cuts, since he knows "meat cuts like no one else." After regaining his compsure, the chef notices that the corpses look like they were butchered in a way similar to the way people like him butcher animals. Also, he notices marks that look like they came from the sort of cattle prod used at slaughterhouse. The professional medical examiner and the super-old crimefighter with super-sense somehow missed that!

Wolvie and Cosi follow a radio report to a neighborhood, where they find another corpse, and then begin questioning nearby food trucks when they find a fast food wrapper near the body...which is in a trash-strewn alley, where one might expect to find a fast food wrapper.

They investigate the trucks, but one truck—one that has been getting rave reviews—is closed, and whoever runs it is acting suspicious. In fact, he's so suspicious, he lacks a scent, so our heroes trail him. (The Butcher, it turns out, doesn't have scent. When he's about to murder a naked lady, he soliquies about his tragic past, mentioning getting sick, losing all his hair and losing his scent.

I thought for a moment he was referring to having cancer, but does one lose one's ability to produce a scent when one has cancer? I don't know. The script never says anything more specific than "sick."

So anyway, the food truck getting rave reviews? It's totally been selling human meat. That, surprisingly, isn't much of a plot point, or even addressed directly, beyond The Butcher saying at one point that he's ready to move on from serving human meat to superior mutant meat, and he is, of course, delighted when he captures Wolverine, as Wolvie's healing factor would provide him with an endless supply.

The Butcher does indeed catch Wolverine, shocking him with the stun wand and then tying him down with...exercise bands? Dirty bandages? Packing tape? The art's not real clear on this point, but, whatever it is, it sure doesn't look like something sufficiently durable to hold Wolverine down for too long while you butcher him.

Wolverine gets caught because Cosentino decides to pack it in after an all-night stake out, but, on the drive home, has second thoughts, and returns to the abandoned building where Wolverine is held captive. He's not hard to find.

In addition to not securing him well, The Butcher doesn't do a very good job of hiding the fact that he's keeping a prisoner either. No wonder he gets taken down by a reality television personality.

So, in the climax, Cosentino unties Wolverine and almost gets in a knife fight with The Butcher, but Wolverine come sto his rescue and, after a brief but blood nine-panel fight scene, he stabs and punches out The Butcher.

On the last page, Wolverine returns to the restaurant, where he does prep work with one of his adamantium claws, since the injured Cosentino can't chop so well.

Here are the weirdest parts.

First, Cosentino seems to have a particular and strong disdain for vegetarians, which seems downright weird, considering that this is a story in which people who eat meat are tricked into eating the flesh of their fellow human beings, and raving about how good it is. You know which San Franciscans did not get tricked into cannibalism by The Butcher? Vegetarians.

And yet:

I...have no idea what anything in that panel means. The mortician guy needles Cosentino for his squeamishness around dead bodies, probably a fair point given that Wolverine brought Cosentino in as an expert to examine said bodies. Cosentino angry calls him a vegetarian, for some reason, and Wolverine thinks that is funny, saying "I guess what they say about you veg-heads is true!"

What do they say about us veg-heads? And how is it true? That we smell? I honestly don't get it.

Cosentino returns once again to insult vegetarians near the end of the same scene:

Again, I don't get it. What's the point? What's the message here? A vegetarian diet is not good for you? Is that the moral of the story? Would the mortician still have his hair if he ate fabricated pigs?

And then there's that bit at the end, in which Wolvie uses his claws not only to eat off of—something I've seen before—but to cut up some vegetables that are going to be served to other people to eat.

That can't possibly be sanitary. Like, I'd say "Do you know where those claws have been?" but we all do know where those claws have been. In this story, for example, they've been in the gut of The Butcher. And in and out of God knows how many people over the years. And, when not being used to cut through walls, doors, robots, weapons, aliens, ninjas and so on, Wolverine stores them inside his own body.

Or, wait, does Wolverine's healing factor work to sanitize his claws? So that every time he SNAKTs 'em back into his arms, his healing factor kills all the germs that might be clinging to them? If so, then I guess maybe it's not such a terrible health risk to eat food prepared with Wolverine's claws. But it's still gross. And, were I passing by the kitchen window and looked upon that scene, I'd still probably place a call to the health inspector.

Review: All-New X-Men/Indestructible Hulk/Superior Spider-Man: The Arms of The Octopus

No, seriously, that's the title of this particular graphic novel: All-New X-Men/Indestructible Hulk/Superior Spider-Man: The Arms of The Octopus. Marvel left all of the participating characters' adjectives attached to their names, and included all of their names before the subtitle. You might think it would make more sense to just call this thing Arms of The Octopus, as it's not like there are any other All-New X-Men/Indestructible Hulk/Superior Spider-Man trades out there that they would need to distinguish this from, but you, my friend, are not involved in Marvel's trade program. Nor will you ever be, because you are a rational human being, and not a pack of rabid wolves with a ouija board, magic eight ball and dart board.

The reason the title is so unwieldy is that it is attempting to reflect the three books the "Arms of The Octopus" storyline originally ran through, All-New X-Men Special #1, Indestructible Hulk Special #1 and Superior Spider-Man Team-Up Special #1. They may seem like three completely unrelated titles from completely different corners of the Marvel Universe, and that's because they are, but Marvel's done similar big stories in seemingly unconnected books in the recent past. Previously, they would connect three annuals with a single story; here they went with "specials," perhaps because "annual" implies something that happens on a yearly basis, and that would mean they wouldn't be able to use a #1 should they do it again the following year.

The story is written by Mike Costa, a writer who had done quite a bit of work on IDW's various licensed comics (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, G.I. Joe), and does a fine job of finding a way to connect these three rather disparate books and characters into a story that seems completely organic and logical. And while the fact that the story occurs in specials rather than the main books, and is written by a different writer than the writers handling the monthlies starring these characters (Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Waid and Dan Slott, respectively*), means that nothing too terribly important or meaningful to their overarching stories can occur, Costa does a pretty great job of making the stories feel somewhat important...if not advancing the various plots to any great degree, at least reinforcing some of the themes and conflicts from their home books.

The story is also pretty funny, I thought. It's a serious story played straight, but the way the characters interact with one another is quite amusing. Costa gets similar mileage out of the time-lost teenage X-Men from the 1960s in the 21st century that Bendis does, particularly Beast and Iceman, and their interactions with the "Superior" Spider-Man (Who, remember, is actually Otto "Doctor Octopus" Ocatvius's mind in Peter Parker's body) is great, as this Spider-Man is dour, arrogant, easily frustrated and given to supervillain-style speeches and outbursts.

The plot is this. The four original X-Men who haven't quit the Jean Grey School like Angel has—that is, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast and Iceman—journey to New York City to spend the time being teenagers. Beast meets an attractive grad student who is studying time travel related science under a professor of Beast's (from the past), and he goes back to her lab to meet his former teacher, Dr. Jude.

Suddenly, they're attacked by Doctor Octopus...a young, dumpy-looking Dr. Octopus in green spandex and with a bowl-cut haircut. This can't possibly be Doctor Octopus, as no one knows better than Spider-Man, who shows up to boss the teen heroes around and punch out what may be himself from the past.

They try to figure out what's going on with the Silver Age Dock Ock's sudden appearance, but can't study him too closely, as he's giving off incredible amounts of gamma radiation—a possible side-effect of time travel? Naturally, Spidey calls in the world's foremost expert on gamma radiation, Dr. Bruce Banner. While all the doctors are trying to puzzle things out, The (also dead) Abomination shows up and starts wreaking havoc, at which point it's assumed that somehow the X-Men's presence in the present is messing with the time stream, and they decide they have to check on their time machine before any more villains come through.

And then there's a bit of a twist, which Costa telegraphs just so. It's a neat twist; nothing mind-blowing, but enough to keep the story interesting, enough to keep it from being too predictable. Each chapter is narrated by a different brilliant scientist/superhero: Hank "Beast" McCoy, Bruce Banner then Octavius. And each is drawn by a different artist, all of whom are quite good, and all of whom are close enough in style that the changes aren't jarring...particularly the first two, who are extremely compatible. They are, in order of appearance, Kris Anka, Jacob Wyatt and Michael Dialynas. As I said, they are all good, but I think I like them in that particular order as well, with Anka being my favorite of the three and Dialynas my least favorite.

Despite the goofy title, it's actually a satisfyingly sizable, super-fun superhero comic, and one I'd recommend. Perhaps especially if you can borrow it from a library, as Marvel's charging $15 for the 120-page adventure.

Of course, it's not the only story in All-New X-Men/Indestrucible Hulk/Superior Spider-Man: The Arms of The Octopus. Included for no reason I can imagine other than that they needed to jack up the page count above 120 pages if they wanted to charge $15 for the trade, they've included weird-ass Wolverine one-shot Wolverine: In The Flesh #1 (which X-Men x-pert and fine writer Paul O'Brien reviewed quite well when it was originally released), a long-in-the-works Wolverine comic written by a celebrity chef I've never heard of, in which Wolverine teams up with said celebrity chef. I didn't read it yet, but I may before I return the trade to the library. It's such a weird place to find it though, as the only real connection to the story that it follows is the extremely tenuous excuse that, perhaps, Wolverine is an X-Men, and there are some X-Men in the preceding story. But with all the other places a Wolverine one-shot could be collected—like, say, a trade collecting any of the many comics in which Wolverine is prominently featured, perhaps a collection of one of the three ongoings with Wolverine in the title, perhaps Savage Wolverine, which is a continuity-lite, anything-goes anthology series featuring Wolverine comics by different creators.

But no, they just stuck it in the back of this trade because...they had some extra pages to fill, I guess?

I was not 100% satisfied with this product.

As Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were among the first comics I started reading, I've always had a special place in my heart for 'em, and one of my great regrets in comics collecting is that I didn't snap up all of the original, Mirage-published trades when they were still widely available (The only two I actually bought were the first volume, a phone-book sized one that collected the first 12 issues and the four "micro-series" one-shots, and Vol. 4, the one collecting the "Return to New York"). (UPDATE: Oh wow, what's this?! There goes my discretionary spending for the next month or two.)

As a teenager, in the days before the Internet, I rather studiously studied things like the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide for TMNT appearances, and tried to track down as many as I could, even the hard-to-find ones like the shorts in Anything Goes #5 or Gobbledygoodk, for example (checking comics.org, I think I ultimately collected all but 13 issues of the original, 62-issue volume of TMNT, but only two issues of Tales of...).

I was therefore pretty thrilled to hear that when IDW announced they would be publishing a new TMNT comic, they would also be collecting the original Mirage material. Unfortunately, like a lot of IDW's franchise-specific efforts, I found myself a little bewildered and overwhelemed by their strategies, which involved a line of trades collecting their new comic (and trades collecting their miniseries and their series of one-shots), another line collecting just the Eastman and Laird material, another line collecting the mostly non-Eastman and Laird material, another line collecting Tales of... and another collecting the Archie Comics series.

After waiting, let's see...years, I finally decided to start buying some of their collections of the Mirage material (I had already started reading their collections of the new, IDW original series, although I left off with the fifth volume) with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Classics Vol. 1.

I wasn't entirely satisfied.

I'm not entirely sure of the format I would most want in a TMNT collection, but whatever it was, I'd want it to be 1) black-and-white, 2) chronological, 3) comprehensive, and 4) easy to navigate.

This first volume isn't any of those anything.

It's 100-pages, and collects a single issue of the original volume of TMNT, Michael Dooney's 1988 issue #13 (one of those 13 issues I had never read), and a selection of shorts from the 1989 Mirage trade paperback, Shell Shock, which itself was a selection of short stories, some of which were original to it, others of which appeared elsewhere (The book was apparently a sort of fund-raiser for the Literacy Volunteers of Chicago, which explains a very weird scene in one short in which Splinter instructs a guy curled up with a bottle on a park bench with the words "Learn to read, get a GED. IT's not going to be seasy but you can do it. There are groups all over the country--literacy volunteer, programs, adult education classes, community colleges or libraries who are working to help dropouts and adults to improve their reading skills" and more...all in a single word balloon!)

Art by Jim Lawson, George Hagenaur and Eric Talbot

The IDW trade doesn't contain the fine print that you'll find in most Marvel and DC collections, explaining where the material collected was originally printed, nor does the table of contents say what's from where, only noting #13 and the titles of the individual stories from Shell Shock, the only clues as to those stories' source being the (un-credited) A.C. Farley cover of Shell Shock, which appears after the last page of #13.

Well, that and the fact that the back cover includes the words "Volume I contains Mirage Studios #13, along with a collection of stories from Shell Shock trade paperback."

In terms of context, Kevin Eastman, who has been working particularly closely with IDW on their various Turtles comics projects, does provide a new introduction that talks enthusiastically, and somewhat persuasively, about how allowing a bunch of other talented creators to work on he and Peter Laird's characters over the years have helped them discover new elements of characters that they regarded as their own. But it's not specific to these particular comics, which is, again, something I would have liked. You know, a paragraph about how Michael Dooney started working with them on Turtles comics (he does offer a few sentences on how Dooney first pitched them with "You guys never put enough BABES in the TMNT comics!"), and how the Shell Shock book came about, or how they chose these particular stories.

Well, as for the content, it's about what is to be expected. I found myself a little out-of-sorts re-reading some old-school TMNT material of late, as I of course have grown to be a much more knowledgeable and sophisticated comics reader and consumer of culture, pop and otherwise, over the last twenty-some years (well, maybe I should say "somewhat" instead of "much"), while those stories haven't changed.

They don't strike me as the be-all and end-all of comics storytelling the way they used to (when I had little to compare them with, save half-forgotten memories of random issues of Marvel's G.I. Joe and Transformers that relatives had bought me when I was home sick from school), and much of my affection for them now comes from the sort of rough charm they bear, and my own respect and nostalgia for the characters, the creators and the time period in which they were first produced and when I first encountered them.

Dooney's story, "The People's Choice," finds the Turtles going for a camping trip by an abandoned house on the edge of a pond. There they encounter an alien "BABE," as Eastman's introduction might refer to Jhanna, a democratically elected humanoid from a distant planet, where popular elections are immediately followed by death matches between the rivals in order to certify the results. Jhanna's rival shows up the next morning, along with a gang of colorfully different aliens, and everybody fights. Spoiler warning: Jhanna and the Turtles survive, and defeat the bad guys.

The Shell Shock shorts, 11 of the 26 from the original collection, range from 2-10 pages, and are mostly from Eastman, Laird and familiar Mirage contributors like Jim Lawson, Ryan Brown, Eric Talbot and Dooney. They are almost all set in New York City and deal with the Turtles as urban vigilantes and/or encounter-ers of the bizarre (Donatello runs across an energy being in a Dooney-created super-comic take on the genie-in-a-bottle fairy tale, for example).

It was weird reading them, because I had previously read three of 'em, the silent Turtles-go-to-the-drive-in short from Anything Goes and two shorts from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness role-playing game source books I used to love (As I've mentioned before, my path to Turtles comics went from the after school cartoon to the RPG to the Mirage comics; and to DC comics, come to think of it, was the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon to the Dungeons & Dragons RPG to DC/TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons comics). I recognized the Anything Goes story immediately, but the other two I knew I had read before, but I wasn't sure where, so that was mildly frustrating as I racked my disintegrating memory (I found the answer online, not in this book).

While it was fun reading all of these, as they were like "lost" comics I never had access to before, the best of the lot were probably those by Michael Zulli, a Mirage artist (Puma Blues, plus a TMNT story arc that stood out even among the radically different versions of the characters and comics the rotating creative teams brought to the pages) who went on to great acclaim in a variety of unexpected places, including DC/Vertigo's Sandman and some Batman comics. He has a pair of contributions, both co-written by Stephen Murphy. "O-Deed," a weird dream imagery story that culminates in a nightmare, and "A Splinter in the Eye of God?," in which Zulli's Splinter attempts to meditate while clashing images of pollution and the natural world pass all around him.

Zulli's characters evolve quite a bit between the two stories, and it's interesting to compare his first turtle (Michaelangelo) with the turtles (all four of 'em), who appear in the later story.

Zulli and Talbot

His first Turtle looks more or less like the Eastman/Laird designs rendered in his style, whereas the later Turtles look far more humanoid and turtle-like, with noses that split the difference between a turtle "beak" and a human nose, and little ear holes.

Zulli

(From what little I've seen of the latest Turtles movie designs, they seem to suggest Zulli's designs to me more than those of any other TMNT artist I can think of).

Zulli's first story is basically verbal gobbledygook over imagery, although I liked the tender detail of Spliter referring to Michaelangelo as simply "Michael." The latter reads something like a prelude to his later TMNT story arc. His Splinter is by this point pretty amazing, an almost photo-realistic drawing of rat man in an open robe, revealing the mammalian hind legs he runs bipedally on, and a vaguely, almost Beatrix Potter-esque rodent face. Zulli draws bones and a dove with amazing precision as well.

The coloring by Digikore Design Limted (that's how its spelled on the title page; not sure if that's a typo or that their name) is unwelcome, in part simply because I've never really been able to get my head around the idea of color turtles comics, as the very concept seems somewhat oxymoronic. The turtles are creatures of black and white comics, and they never seem quite right in a color environment. (The thick black lines of the Eastman/Laird comics don't accept colorization too well, and the art tends to look worse in color than in black and white, and it seems a crime to put planes of color between some of Zulli's line work and the eyes of readers).

They seem to do a decent enough job of coloring though, keeping all four turtles in matching red masks throughout and bearing identical green flesh-tones (the latter has become one of the ways various Turtles tale-tellers have tried further differentiating the characters, by giving them all a slightly different shade of green skin).

There are a few missteps though, as in the 1985 "Don't Judge a Book..." story from one of the RPG books, in which the Turtles don Halloween costumes in order to go out among people, but wind up trashing their costumes during a fight with some would-be burglars. When one tears the pink dress off of one of the guys and finds a shell, the shell is colored the same pink as the dress. In another story, a police SWAT team is outfitted not in traditional navy blue or black, but red and gray. And in the story "The 49th Street Stompers," the Turtles face four opponents, including two women in body suits, which are colored garish solid pink and blue.

Eastman and Dooney

It's not the TMNT collection I would have wanted, but, as Donald Rumsfeld once said, you go with the TMNT collection you have, not the one you may wish you had. Or something like that. It's been a while since I've had to listen to anything Donald Rumsfeld might have said.

And it's not like I'm not going to by the rest of them or anything.

I'm not entirely sure what is in vol. 2—Amazon says issues #16, #22 and #23, which would make it an all Mark Martin collection, and thus tied together by creator but out of order—but hopefully the rest of Shell Shock shows up somewhere, as it includes a Stan Sakai Usagi Yojimbo team-up, several Eric Talbot stories, including one with a werewolf and another in which Mike and Raph accidentally do nitrous, and a Michaelangelo solo story featuring art by Richard Corben.