Comics! Great Expectorations!

It's Marvel Comics' show this week at the comic shop, and the obvious reason is the launch of yet another sooper-dooper multi-crossover event, "Fear Itself." If you're thinking it's been only a very short time since the end of the previous sooper-dooper multi-crossover, you're entirely right, and what's even odder is how similar "Fear Itself" is to its predecessor, "Siege," in so many ways. In both cases, continuity-wide changes are promised that almost certainly won't happen; in both cases, the central story revolves around Thor and his fellow Asgardians - and in both cases, the actual issue-by-issue execution of writing and art will in all likelihood be irresistible. The writer-artist team here is Matt Fraction and Stuart Immonen, and the first issue is so good that even a reader as sceptical as I am will be entertained even while they're muttering "but, but."

Our story so far: the Asgardian god of fear, Skadi, has delusions of all-fatherhood and has seeded the human world with hammers that look bigger and sleeker than Thor's famous Mjolnir, and Skadi is found by the daughter of Captain America's old foe the Red Skull. As those two start to cook up eee-vil, a more domestic strife is brewing in the city of Asgard itself, which crashed into the Oklahoma plain at the end of "Siege." Thor's irascible father Odin, the original all-father of the gods, is irritated that Thor is joining with his mortal allies the Avengers to rebuild Asgard. Odin interrupts a feast his people are sharing with the Avengers in order to tell everybody that Asgard is returning to the stars, that he's rebuilding Bifrost the Rainbow Bridge and taking all the Norse gods and godlings back home (the ominous Watcher shows up briefly to, um, watch - which enrages Odin still further, prompting him to shout "I am the father of all things! I am the fury and the extinction! The leader of souls! The commander of warrior gods!" It brought back many memories, for this long-time Thor fan).

He demands that Thor choose between his mortal and immortal loyalties, and when Thor chooses mankind, Odin slaps him around just for kicks and tells him he's coming back to Asgard anyway. The all-father senses that Skadi has returned, and he's obviously preparing for the battle that's coming, in which the heroes of Asgard and Earth will face off against the god of fear and his hammer-wielding warriors. Fraction has very little in the way of character-based writing to do here (and far too many opportunities for social commentary, but what can you do?), it being basically a premise-setting issue, but Immonen's artwork is yet another step forward in a progression that hasn't slowed down since "Superman: Secret Identity." Although even upward progressions can have nervous tics, I guess, and this issue certainly does: everybody spits. The good guys, the bad guys - there's spittle everywhere. We can hope for dry mouths in future issues.

Marvel's other ongoing 'big event' mini-series, "Avengers: The Children's Crusade," continues this week as well, with really good writing by Allan Heinberg and rip-snortingly fantastic artwork by Jim Cheung. In the last issue, the fat hit the fire when the impetuous Young Avengers went to Latveria in order to find the long-lost Scarlet Witch, who fled there and gave herself amnesia in the wake of the "House of M" storyline. We learned that she had fallen in love with Latveria's king, Doctor Doom - and that he had fallen in love with her and very much didn't want her to remember her own past, for her sake and humanity's safety. The grown-up Avengers followed the Young Avengers, and Magneto (the Scarlet Witch's father) followed as well, and a gigantic, predictable battle ensued that was momentarily interrupted by the return of Iron Lad, the teenager who would grow up to be Kang the Conqueror, and who in this issue helps the Young Avengers to spirit the Scarlet Witch back in time to an alternate time-line - only time-travel is very complex, and they don't really know what they're doing, and by issue's end all they've succeeded in doing is restoring her memories and thereby putting the whole Marvel Universe at risk.

If that all sounds confusing, that's because it is - but then, this issue is just the mid-point in the mini-series, so some amount of textual muddle is to be expected, Cheung's artwork certainly makes the confusion easy to bear, including yet another eye-popping two-page splash panel like the one we commented on last time:



And Heinberg's writing is very enjoyable too, including his ongoing and very refreshing characterization of Doctor Doom as a bit more complex than he's usually portrayed. "She was happy here," he tells the Avengers. "We were to be married." And when Magneto says, "My daughter would never have married you. Not willingly. What have you done to her?" Doom's response is chillingly correct:

I have been trying to save her. From You. From all of you ... who sought to destroy her. And now, because of you, the most powerful force in the universe has been unleashed into the timestream, where she can rewrite the past or the future just as easily as she said the words "No more mutants."

Two big event-titles, both firing on all cylinders, and yet the Marvel comic that pleased me most this week was a regular old ongoing title that hardly ever pleases me at all: "The Uncanny X-Men." Marvel has been coming out with "Point 1" issues of its books, billed as good jumping-on points for potential new readers who might be leery of picking up titles in the middle of long-running stories. This latest issue of "Uncanny X-Men" is one of those: 534.1 (that "534" seems utterly unbelievable to yours truly, but we'll let that go), written by Kieron Gillen and pencilled by Carlos Pacheco. It has a straightforward, two-pronged plot: the X-Men (now basically comprising almost all the handful of mutants who were left on Earth after those three little words "No more mutants" - including both former villain Magneto and Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner, who, as the super-powered son of a human man and a woman from Atlantis, was Marvel's first mutant long before anybody but Mendel had ever heard the word) race to stop an evil group of scientists from causing a major earthquake, and a media consultant tries to work with Magneto to improve his image with the public. I certainly wasn't expecting the issue to please me more than those big-e events for which I admit I have a sweet-tooth, but it did: Gillen's writing sparkles, and of course Pacheco's artwork is always great. The highlight of the issue for me was Gillen's characterization of Namor as a bit of a lout, not a sterling super-hero at all. When he's confronting one of the evil scientists, for instance, he snarls, "Only Namor has the ability to make the earth move. And he reserves the privilege for one woman at a time. Unless they have experimental friends." That's a far cry from the 'tortured hero' conception of the character that held sway back in the '70s, but I like it just the same.

Of course, there's a couple of sooper-dooper crossover events brewing at DC Comics as well, but this week clearly belonged to Marvel. Maybe we'll get to Superman and Doomsday next time!

Comics! Avengers Assemble, volume 1!

Our book today is the great graphic novel collection Avengers Assemble,Volume 1, originally published in an oversized hardcover a decade ago and now at last re-issued in paperback. I owned and often re-read the hardcover (an indulgence I seldom make for graphic novels, but this one was well worth it), but alas, it failed to survive the ravages of my Summer of Homelessness, and since in the meantime the thing had never appeared in paperback, I assumed the worst and figured it never would.

But we live in the great age of comic book reprint collections, and so here it is - a burstingly colorful volume featuring the first nine issues of the title's late-'90s relaunch, written by Kurt Busiek and drawn with mind-boggling mastery by George Perez.

This relaunch happens in the wake of Marvel's disastrously poorly-conceived attempt to 'coolify' some of their most venerable titles by giving them entirely into the hands of a few fan-favorite artists and having a kind of company sack-race to see who could dump the most crap on the market in the shortest amount of time.

The Avengers and lots of other Marvel heroes (but not the X-Men) had voluntarily sacrificed themselves, you see, by leaping into some kinda void in order to defeat a boringly all-powerful bad guy named Onslaught. This gave Marvel a chance to do two things at the same time: 1) finally have a continuity that was mutants, mutants, and more mutants, and 2) launch a series of books set in a new continuity, where the origins of titles like the Avengers or Captain America could be entirely re-thought. It seemed like win-win. But even a win-win scenario will quickly head south if it involves boneheaded and blasphemously untalented fan favorite artist Rob Liefeld, and this one did. Liefeld is the most notoriously inept artist to get regular work since Herb Trimpe, and he's not only inept but droolingly adolescent, so obsessed with his ability to draw huge boobs that he infamously even gave a pair to Captain America.

So this relaunch continuity quickly descended from crappy-but-bearable to unbearably crappy to so-crappy-we-want-our-old-crap-back, and Marvel learned once again that it had some fans of things other than its best-selling books (sadly, the company apparently needs to re-learn this lesson every decade or so - witness the lineup of the current Avengers, featuring Spider-Man, the Thing, four clones of Wolverine, President Obama, and some free tacos). An event was concocted - Heroes Return - and the divergent reality was scrapped in favor of re-starting a handful of flagship Marvel titles starring old favorite characters as fans remembered them, not as a comics convention full of overgrown drunken frat boys felt like making them.

Hence, this Avengers #1, written by Kurt Busiek, drawn by George Perez, and opening in a rare moment of complete peace and quiet for Marvel's most powerful super-team. They're back from their alternate-dimension adventures, yes, but they haven't fully adjusted and aren't even officially a team again - just a small group of friends sitting around talking in stately Avengers Mansion, wondering about the meaning behind the day's outbreak of attacks on many Avengers past and present by various beings that seemed plucked from Norse mythology. Norse mythology, you say? Why, that sounds right up Thor's ally - except Thor disappeared in the super-confusing lead-up to the switcheroo, and his own title didn't get a relaunch with the others.

But he soon appears, looking ragged and telling a tale of having found himself alone in the ruins of Asgard. It turns out several of the city's most powerful magical do-hickeys - including the Twilight Sword and the Norn Stones - had gone missing ... only we learn they're now in the hands of Morgan le Fay, the centuries-old sorceress and dedicated Avengers-hater. She uses those talismans - and the reality-altering powers of the Scarlet Witch - to create yet another new reality: this one a warped variation on the medieval times Morgan loves so much, in which a huge team of temporarily re-imagined Avengers serve as her brainwashed personal bodyguard. Seems like the perfect plan - since this IS reality now, there's no chance of anybody opposing her.

It's a daring move on Busiek's part, re-launching the book with just the kind of alternate-reality storyline that raised fan ire and caused all the mess in the first place. But it's an entirely justified gamble, since a) Busiek is a very strong comics-writer who generally doesn't set challenges for himself that he can't meet, and b) he's joined here by the aforementioned legendary George Perez, whose artwork on this Avengers run (this first volume of "Avengers Assemble" and the two that will - hopefully quickly - follow it in paperback) is the best of his entire career. The result is a triumph of good old-fashioned superhero comic entertainment.

Morgan is eventually defeated (she's fighting about forty Avengers, so she didn't have that much of a chance), and the team eventually settles in back at Avengers Mansion to do that most quintessential of all Avengers activities: picking a new line-up. Busiek is a lover of comics essentials - a firm believer in the 'if it ain't broke' school of writing that's all but vanished from comics these days - so his new team has no Gilgamesh, no Doctor Druid, no Rom the Space Knight ... instead, we get Avengers staples: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, and the Vision, plus a wild card, Warbird, and two requisite new additions - Justice (who spends the entire run pumping his fists in excitement and generally tripping over himself) and his girlfriend Firestar (who spends the whole run, girlfriend-style, moping and criticizing him).

There follow some really fun issues full of Perez's amazing artwork (with one fill-in annual by Carlos Pacheco) and Busiek's spot-on characterizations - the highlight of which is certainly "The Court-Martial of Carol Danvers," in which the Avengers are forced to deal with the fact that Warbird likes to drink while super-heroing.

My only quibble? Well, apart from the fact that a super-team that faces such world-class dangers as Kang or Ultron would never voluntarily saddle itself with a pair of dim bulb third-stringers like Justice and Firestar, I in fact do have a very small quibble with this first volume - really, with just a touch of Busiek's dialogue. At one point when the extended team has gathered to discuss the threat of all those Asgardian attacks, somebody asks the Black Widow her opinion - and Busiek has her say "I'm not sure my record entitles me to speculate" - surely a reference to the string of issues where she lead the team back in the 1990s. Those issues were written by Bob Harras and drawn by Steve Epting, and in my opinion they remain the least-appreciated great arc in Avengers history - well deserving of a couple of nice graphic novels just like this one.

But those are pretty minor quibbles - the Black Widow is just one panel, after all, and the Avengers have always had dippy third-string members mixing with their A-listers. On the whole, this big volume does nothing but delight. Avengers fans should snap it up right away and then wait impatiently right along with me for the subsequent volumes.

Comics! A Clash of Titans!

There's something primordially satisfying about superheroes fighting other superheroes - it's always far more compelling than superheroes fighting anybody else. I don't know why that is, but I've been enjoying it for eons just the same. And some superhero fights are just undeniably more enjoyable than others - and that part I do indeed understand: it's all about iconic value. If you take two superheroes with no iconic value and have them fight, absolutely nobody is going to care who wins (well, fanboys will care, but since nobody cares about them, we're in the clear). Daredevil verus Power Man? A mere statistical blip. Captain America versus Wolverine? A classic waiting to happen (and I do mean waiting! despite the fact that these two should make a riveting rumble-epic - two perfect fighting machines, neither of whom gets tired, one armed with an unbreakable defensive weapon and one armed with unbreakable offensive weapons - they've never had a satisfying fight, despite having had a very satisfying Mike Zeck fight cover. Go figure).

And the greater the iconic value, the greater the power of the imagery involved, the better the fight - or so it used to be. In terms of power-specifics, no fight in the DC universe should be more enjoyable than Superman versus Wonder Woman, but although just such a fight was done very well a few years ago, DC can actually field an even more iconic confrontation: Superman versus Batman. Despite the fact that Batman has no super-powers and should therefore lose in about a tenth of a second, the staggering iconic weight of comics' two most recognizable figures carries the day - as was perfectly illustrated (literally, in this case) at the climax of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, when a grizzled old Batman fights a stronger-than-ever Superman - and comics readers everywhere held their breath (it's my hope that we'll someday see a live-action special effects extravaganza version of that very scene - with Bruce Willis playing Batman, of course).

It's trickier over at Marvel, since their most iconic character, Spider-Man, is also something so rare he has almost no parallel in comics: a totally non-aggressive hero. It just doesn't feel right to have him showing up in the books of other characters, throwing punches at them - he's a sweet-faced good-natured young guy who'd rather talk and joke than establish a alpha-male dominance. It's true that Wolverine has quite a bit of iconic value nowadays too, and there were satisfying moments to that storyline a few years ago where he felt compelled to take on the entire Marvel lineup of heroes one by one.

But for me, the real Marvel kicker has always been Thor versus the Hulk. Not just because of the power involved, although it was always neat wondering what would happen if Marvel's two most powerful characters duked it out (that's the one thing that stopped fights between the Hulk and the Thing from being equally compelling - no matter how well-done the confrontation was, the reader always knew the Thing was going to lose), but also because the nature of the iconic value here was completely polarized: Thor was an intelligent, refined, quasi-Shakespeare-spouting god from a shining city, and the Hulk was a near-bestial pea-eyed creature of incoherent rage. That always added a zest to their rare confrontations.

Or at least, as mentioned, it used to. Nowadays, their confrontations aren't rare anymore, and writers who were children in the 1970s are now comic creator's united in one solid belief: that Thor is some ponce who's totally dependent on his magic hammer to last even five seconds against the super-cool Hulk. Sigh.

A perfect case in point came out to comic stores this week: the third issue of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes: The Avengers," the comics-companion to the new cartoon series on Disney. Don't get me wrong: the issue is really well done, written with deceptive wit by Chris Yost and drawn with nifty vigor by Scott Wegener. In it, two celestial bad guys - the Stranger and the Collector - place a wager on who would win in a fight, Thor or the Hulk (most Marvel super-villains are in fact just this kind of barely-disguised fanboy). They brainwash Thor into attacking the Hulk, and the show is on.

Wegener does something that's by now very familiar in such fights: he gives Thor a great opening out of the gate specifically because he knows Thor's going to get his Asgardian ass handed to him in short order - and that's just what happens here. Thor gets in precisely one good shot and then spends the rest of the abortive fight getting punched around by the Hulk. The Stranger and the Collector (I forget who bet on whom, but it doesn't matter - they're both windbags) keep commenting on how Thor, despite his power, is probably going to lose because, as the decades-old Marvel tagline goes, "the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets." And if you fight an opponent who keeps getting stronger the more angry he gets, and you aren't similarly blessed, you're certainly going to lose eventually.



So Thor blasts the Hulk with a lightning-bolt smack from his mystic hammer (no explanation as to why it doesn't seem to hurt the Hulk - writers hardly ever bother to explain that, although I'd really like to know), and then the Hulk starts knocking him around until the fight is interrupted by Thor coming to his senses. Inconclusive, you might say, and hardly unprecedented for being so. A few years ago, in issue #5 of Mark Millar's epic first run on "Ultimates," we get the same thing. In that story line, Thor is a seedy hippie with an enormous glowing hammer and the Hulk is a snarling gray-skinned cannibal with an attitude problem. Millar's approach to this retooled Avengers fiddles with virtually every established tenet of that super-group - but he leaves the familiar Thor-Hulk rope-a-dope untouched: his Thor is given an impressive initial success against the Hulk specifically because it's going to count for nothing - the Hulk's going to shrug it off and knock Thor into the middle of next Tuesday. Millar's Thor arrives on the scene in an impressive burst of lightning and smugly enumerates to the fallen Hulk specifically what damage has been done to his body ("you've got three broken ribs, a punctured lung, a shattered spine, an enlarged gall bladder," etc.) - then the Hulk swats him across midtown Manhattan like last year's graffiti. Sigh.

It all prompts me to recall the good old days, when 'equal' meant 'equal' and when, at Marvel anyway, house policy forbade iconic fights from having clear-cut winners. I specifically recall, of course, the halcyon summer of 1973 when Marvel ran its very first cross-title storyline, a six-issue event dreamed up by Roy Thomas and written by Steve Englehart, in which the company's two most powerful super-teams at the time, the Avengers and the Defenders, were tricked into fighting each other. The plot involved Loki and Dormammu and a quest to assemble some sort of mystic do-hickey and enslave all of reality, but like most fans at the time, I didn't care about the plot - I just loved the prospect of seeing so many superheroes square off against each other.

And square off they did! Some of the match-ups were interesting, and quite a few were absurd (and at least one turned out to be awkward, in light of Marvel's later continuity: Captain America fought the Sub-Mariner, and neither acted like they knew each other or had been comrades during WWII - mainly because it would be a couple more years before Roy Thomas himself thought up the Invaders, the super-team to which Cap and the Sub-Mariner belonged, so in 1973 it didn't exist yet) - the Silver Surfer fought the Vision, the sad-sack Swordsman fought the Valkyrie, Iron Man fought Hawkeye, Doctor Strange fought Mantis and the Black Panther (he just puts them to sleep, rather than turn them both into caterpillars), but all of that was mere prelude to the climax of the whole event: Defenders #10 - Thor versus the Hulk.

Oh, I can't tell you how I lived for that issue! How my beagles and I trooped dutifully to the corner variety store to see if that longed-for delivery had come (this was in the days before the Internet, when corner stores allowed dogs inside and nobody had posted shipping schedules for comics). These two characters had only fought once before, in a maddeningly off-scene two-panel encounter years ago in the Avengers, nine long years before, but this issue promised a full-length showdown.

I wasn't disappointed: with Englehart writing and the underappreciated Sal Buscema drawing, Thor and the Hulk square off in L.A. and duke it out for seven glorious pages ... it had everything any fan could ever hope for - except a winner. Instead, after he's had them trade blows for a while, Englehart has his two characters lock up in a straining match, each trying to move the other without success, until finally their two teams show up and convince them to stand down.

Defenders #10 was blissful for me, but looking back on my callow younger days, I realize that instead of being pleased I should have fired off an angry letter to Roy Thomas, taking him to task for placating mindless Hulk-fans with what amounted to a stalemate. Of course, back in 1973, I didn't have access to the Good Book that now rules my life, the Holy Text that I now consult for guidance on every one of life's most important questions.

I refer, of course, to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, expanded edition.

In that mighty tome, the facts are clearly laid out. Thor has 'class 100' strength, meaning he can lift (press) over 100 tons. The Hulk, the Handbook notes, also has 'class 100' strength - but only when he's enraged. In his 'normal' state, he can only lift (press) about 70 tons. In other words, he needs to get mad and stay mad to approach Thor's level of strength. And even when he's there, he's only there - where Thor is too. The Handbook is silent on how much more than 100 tons Thor can lift - it's possible that the Hulk would be significantly weaker than Thor even after he himself reached the 100-ton range. If I were to write that irate letter to Roy Thomas today (much as it grieves me to say so, I don't believe he's a reader of Stevereads), the point I'd make would be very simple: if, when the fight starts, the Hulk is only two-thirds as strong as Thor, the fight would never last long enough for the Hulk to win. Added to which Thor's vast centuries of combat experience fighting monsters just like the Hulk - there's just no way things would result in a stalemate, let alone a loss for Thor.

And yet lose he does, time and again. Even if we don't talk about the recent animated movie that features a Hulk-beating-Thor sequence so long and detailed it practically qualifies as S&M porn, there are still plenty of comic book fights between the two in which the Hulk wasn't even inconvenienced - just take the nancy-boy's croquet mallet away from him and slap him around like a Girl Scout until you get bored.

The moral of the story? Everything was better in 1973.

Comics! A Grand Old Time!

As the new year begins, the dust settles in the company continuities of both Marvel and DC, and the editors of their super-hero comics evidently decide (or were ordered by their masters, now newly sensitized to the lure of Hollywood money?) to put away the dark backdrops of the past few years and embrace a somewhat simpler, somewhat brighter outlook.

Of course this will appeal to me, although I'm the first to admit some good stories came out of all that darkness. At DC, there were several back-to-back 'dark' events - most recently the "Darkest Night" mini-series that started with lots of superheroes getting violently killed but ended with lots of superheroes getting brought back to life. And at Marvel, the storyline in which villainous Norman Osborn gained political ascendancy in America and drove all the heroes into hiding (or into maximum security prison cells) led to some fantastic comics; I griped about it at the time, but the fact is, having evil win a big round led to a lot of great stories and great moments - and of course the ultimate pay-off, the story in which Osborn finally gets his comeuppance.

Both those story-arcs are over now (well, "Blackest Night" continues to limp forward as "Brightest Day," but although it's better than it seems, its ultimate worth remains to be seen - right now, its main purpose seems to be to re-introduce DC readers to the 'classic' Aquaman and invent a supporting cast of friends and enemies for him, perhaps as prelude to giving him a comic of his own again), and both companies are free to return to straight-up superhero stories, which is fine by me. A major beneficiary at Marvel is Spider-Man, whose comic is at a high point it hasn't reached in years.

But like I said, I'm also a beneficiary! For instance, I'm back in time 50 years, back to getting Adventure Comics and Superboy every month. True, things have changed - the Legion of Super-Heroes I'm reading in Adventure Comics is now a group of adults, not perky teens, but writer Paul Levitz and artist Geraldo Borges are making it all great anyway (and DC's got another Legion title for stories from the group's youth, so I really can't complain); and the Superboy I'm reading about isn't Clark Kent when he was a teenager, it's Connor Kent, a dreamy hunk-clone of Superman (with a little of Lex Luthor spliced in - yes, this Superboy has two daddies) - but I confess, despite the weird artwork (everybody has such eeensy-weeensy facial features)(but alas, Humberto Ramos can't draw everything), this title is growing on me.

And DC is at least partially acknowledging their bright new day with a series of  covers designed to highlight the iconic nature of their characters, which is neat. Superboy's cover features him flying straight at the reader, followed by his faithful companion Krypto the super-dog, and the cover of Adventure features the Legion logo (which bears a very encouraging resemblance to the logo of a certain literary magazine...) and five grim, anorexic stick-figures who, I guess, are supposed to represent several of the sexy women of the Legion. I mostly concentrated on that wonderful logo.

Over at Marvel, there's considerably more darkness to overcome. It's not just the year-long power-grab of Norman Osborn - that power-grab was only made possible by the events of Marvel's 'Civil War,' in which Tony Stark/Iron Man spearheaded a government initiative to register every super-hero, pay them a government wage, and dictate what they do with their super-powers. Captain America died at the climax of that story, which is about as dark as dark gets, and eventually Osborn chased Tony Stark from power and took over himself - so once the 'big three' of Marvel's super-team the Avengers, Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man - were reunited, you'd expect lots of hard feelings all around.

Writer Brian Michael Bendis obviously decided the big three needed a private adventure in which they could heal their fractured relationship, and in the five-part mini-series "Avengers Prime" he cooked up a doozy, an epic story in which our heroes are suddenly transported to the mystic realm formerly occupied by Asgard, a mystic realm now in chaos and being taken over by Hela, the goddess of death. Our heroes are separated, and much sound and fury ensues, and eventually they come together and face off against the forces of Hela - artist Alan Davis has never done better work than in this series, and in this final issue he presents us with a truly wonderful two-page spread of what death's army might look like if it were run through a Wagner-filter:



I admit, I pay much more attention to visuals than to writing in comics, but even so, this issue also has a perfect little moment of character-work. It comes at the end, when an abashed Tony Stark is trying to apologize to Captain America for everything - the superhero registration business, the 'Civil War,' all of it: "All of those things ... all the things I said, and did ...I'm ... I'm so, so sorry. I know that's not enough, but I hope you will allow me the chance to earn your friendship  back. I don't deserve it ... I just hope you let me. I'm not half as good at ... at anything as I am when I'm doing it next to you." It's trite, but somehow it works - a line that effectively summarizes Bendis' entire writing career.

And if the events of the "Civil War" cast a dark shadow on the future of Marvel Comics, that's nothing compared to the events that sprang from the mini-series "House of M" (which I praised here despite the objections of Kevin the Noted Comic Book Snob!), in which the tormented hero Scarlet Witch used her reality-altering powers to wipe out nine-tenths of all the mutants in the Marvel Universe. In her agony to make everything simpler, she speaks three fateful words, "No more mutants" - and suddenly the Marvel continuity contains just a handful of mutants struggling to survive as a species. That was years ago, and again, many very good stories have come out of that premise - but there was always going to come some kind of reckoning, and it's looking like Marvel's fantastic mini-series "Children's Crusade" will be that reckoning.

The series is written with acute sensitivity by Allan Heinberg and drawn with eye-popping virtuosity by the great Jim Cheung (in a perfect Steve-world, he would be drawing the teenaged-Legion every month, but I'll take what I can get), and it tells the story of what would happen if two young heroes named Wiccan and Speed - a shy (and gay) sorcerer and a brash young super-speedster - became convinced that a) somehow the Scarlet Witch was their mother, and b) that she was alive somewhere and they should find her. This naturally aligns forces against them - mainly the Avengers, who don't want these kids to blunder into a cataclysm - and forces in their favor, mainly their fellow teen allies on the Young Avengers, but also joined by Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch's brother, and Magneto, the father of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Their search eventually takes them to Latveria and a confrontation with none other than Doctor Doom - a confrontation that prompts Cheung to give us a wonderful double-page spread of his own:



In this issue, part 4 of a 9-part story, this series finally comes into its own as the premiere slam-bang event of the entire Marvel line in 2011. The Scarlet Witch has no memory of the terrible things she did in her previous life - she believes she's simple Latverian gypsy girl Wanda Maximoff, and Heinberg has added the perfect Stan Lee-style twist: Doctor Doom, the monarch of Latveria, has fallen in love with her ("Given my history," he wryly tells Wiccan, "even I find it difficult to believe"). He thinks its sheer lunacy for Wiccan to want to revive her memories - and with them her devastating powers - but the decision might be taken out of his hands anyway, since shortly after Wiccan shows up to 'rescue' his 'mother,' both the Young Avengers (with Quicksilver and Magneto) show up and the Avengers, who are determined to prevent another 'House of M' style catastrophe.

This issue is full of great moments, but for my money, the best of them is the confrontation between Wolverine (who is, for reasons known only to the Marvel Accounting Department, now an Avenger) and poor befuddled Wanda. Wolverine has always had only one simple solution in mind for the whole problem of what the Scarlet Witch did to her fellow mutants: kill her before she can do anything worse - and in the longshot hope that her death will restore the reality she changed - and for one more reason: out of simple revenge for a nearly-successful genocide. Wiccan can't understand such a mentality:

"What is wrong with you? You're supposed to be one of the good guys."

"So was she. Until she slaughtered her friends and wiped out an entire species with three little words ... 'no more mutants,' right Wanda? Well, you got your wish, sweetheart. Thanks to you, there's only a few of us left. And now, thanks to me, there's about to be one less."

Needless to say, he's stopped from killing her, and the issue provides a cliffhanger ending, and the story keeps barreling along. I know I shouldn't be allowing myself to enjoy it as much as I am - probably issue #9 will take a year to ship - but I can't help it! If this series continues as it's going, it'll be the best thing Marvel's done in years. I'll keep you posted.

Comics: Last week!

Last week's comics were all over the place in terms of quality, but certain images stand out. Let's pick two for Marvel and two for DC and see what we get, shall we?

Marvel's worst image of the week would have to be the cover of the latest issue of the Avengers' most recent re-launch:



although I'll give this monstrosity its due: it perfectly reflects the disaster this opening run of the book's first storyline has been from the start. It's hyperactive, confused, and incredibly misleading (nothing even closely resembling that scene happens in the issue, needless to say). 'Old' Hulk is grabbing Thor's tunic; but Thor is smacking him across the face with his hammer; but Thor's helmet is falling off, for some reason; but there's some weird-looking young woman jumping over the two of them like it was a dance contest; but the Avengers logo is shattering, for some reason … etc. Actually reading the issue isn't any less painful or distracting – just more prolonged.

DC's worst image isn't actually bad – but it also serves as perfect visual shorthand for the whole issue's contents. Smack dab in the middle of the latest issue of the Teen Titans, we get this:



That's sensitive young Connor Kent – i.e. Superboy – getting all sympathetic with Wonder Girl (because this is the 21^st century, the scene takes place after they've done some heavy kissing and caressing), pausing in the middle of a make-out session to hear about all the things that are bothering her this week. It's plodding, TV melodrama-type stuff, and that's been a besetting problem with the Titans for about 900 issues now: no writer has come along in quite some time who seems willing to just ignore the impossibly complicated back-stories of every single character on the team and just make the book exciting again. Instead, we get scene after scene like this one (although usually not so prettily drawn), in which meaning and melodrama are hashed out endlessly in place of anything actually happening. It's possible the writer and artist felt they needed to get this stuff out of the way first – the set-up for next issue looks very promising, at last – but we'll see.

Luckily, it's not all bad news! DC also furnished one of the best issues of the week, in which Lex Luthor, thinking he's dead, has an issue-long angry discussion with Death herself – the teenaged girl-waif Death from Neil Gaiman's interminably pretentious “Sandman” run. At one point, Lex (who here proves again and again the truth of the old theater axiom that villains get to be ten times more interesting psychologically than heroes), trying to figure out what's going on, makes a ranting mention of DC's biggest, most-hyped crossover event of the summer, saying all of this must be connected somehow to the Black Lanterns and Darkest Night. To which Death has an answer that's hilariously blasé:



And even that panel can't hold a candle to the best visual of the week. Over at Marvel, Ben Grimm has been given the ability to temporarily revert to his human form, and he and Johnny Storm decide to make the most of it by filling the day with a host of long-postponed 'normal' activities that Ben could never quite do in his monstrous Thing persona. And one of those activities is a pure gift to us long-time fans:



Impossible to beat that, this time around. But who knows what the next batch of comics will hold?

Comics: The Children's Crusade!

Comics this week held lots and lots of interest, but surely the most interesting – and best-executed – item on the list was the first issue of the new Avengers mini-series “Children’s Crusade,” written with extremely appealing understatement by Allan Heinberg and penciled with his usual eye-catching mastery by Jim Cheung.

The plot revolves around two members of the so-called Young Avengers, Billy Kaplan, code-named Wiccan, a young mutant magic-caster, and Tommy Shepherd, code-named Speed, a young mutant super-speedster. Something in the confluence of those descriptions will strike old-time comics readers as familiar, and that’s the plan: Marvel readers have seen the sibling-mutant-one-does-magic-the-other-runs-really-fast combination before, in long-time (grown-up) Avengers Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch (we won’t belabor the obvious fact that Stan Lee could think up ten code-names in his sleep that were better than ‘Wiccan’ or ‘Speed’ … yeesh …).

The aforementioned plan hauls in so much back-story that it literally can’t be effectively summarized here (suffice it to say a) the similarity in powers leads young Billy to think he and Tommy must share some kind of connection with the Scarlet Witch, b) the Scarlet Witch’s powers recently drove her homicidally crazy, and c) both Billy and the grown-up Avengers are very curious to know if there is a connection and what dangers it may pose for everybody) – this is most certainly a mini-series for long-time in-depth Avengers fans to savor and discuss, but it will almost completely baffle every other person on Earth (this is the signature flaw of the Young Avengers in general – the whole thing is very much an ‘insider’ series and always has been).

But that’s OK. Fans need their bon-bons too, right? And for those fans (among which I count myself, since a) I’ve been reading  Avengers forever, even during its most wretched eras, and b) the plot could bring about some major changes in some very big, very good story-lines), this series looks to be the treat of the summer. Not only are Cheung’s pencils full of his trademark detail and gentle, almost implied feel of motion (he always uses a more low-key tempo when drawing these characters, who clearly fascinate him), but Heinberg’s dialogue wonderfully straddles the line between sounding authentic and crackling with drama.

From first to last, this is a quintessential ‘Marvel’ production: there’s an opening ‘splash’ page, lots of character-driven conflict, some smile-inducing humor, and a hum-dinger of a final cliffhanger page. But the interest-factor here is amped just a bit by one thing Stan Lee and Don Heck never got around to showing us in the original Avengers: the gays!



Because in addition to being a magic-wielding mutant with mommy issues, Billy is also gay (perhaps there’s something causal? After all, many of the young gay boys I know are also magic-wielding mutants with mommy issues …). And the book doesn’t just archly hint at it – Heinberg confronts it directly, mainly because Billy’s boyfriend Teddy (no Bill and Ted jokes, please) is also super-powered and also a member of Young Avengers. At one point in this first issue, he gets all protective of Billy with Captain America, no less (Cap turns out to be wonderfully tolerant, of course, which is odd for somebody who grew up in 1930s Brooklyn, but he’s the artistic type, so …). In the first few issues of their own comic, the relationship between Billy and Teddy was pretty clearly implied but virtually never given the kind of direct exposition it’s given here, and if that’s a sign of the times, it’s mighty refreshing.

There are two roads open to this mini-series: it can either fiddle around on the margins of one of Marvel’s biggest story-arcs of the last twenty years (the reality-altering Scarlet Witch despairingly uttering those three words: “No more mutants”), or it can confront that story-arc directly and perhaps fundamentally change Marvel’s current continuity. I’m guessing it’ll do the former, but there’s always hope for the latter. Either way, I’ll be watching.

Comics! Two new teams!

Comics this week included the start of two new teams from Marvel Comics – a company which has learned that nothing sells like excess and can now be counted upon to give us multiple X-Men teams, multiple Spider-Man teams, about 100 different upcoming graphic novels of the various splinters of “Dark Reign,” and, somewhat belatedly, about half a dozen new post-“Dark Reign” super-teams.

The first of these new teams isn’t a first issue – it’s just business as usual for “Thunderbolts” (issue #144! When did that happen? Can there really be that many virgins out there with disposable income?), a book built on the idea of super-villains forming a super-hero team for one reason or another (to dupe the public, to redeem their souls, etc). In the wake of “Dark Reign” and the downfall of Norman Osborn, a new team of Thunderbolts is formed in this issue under the leadership of good guy Luke Cage, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. Of course, I just-in-general like the way Marvel has been increasing its usage of Cage, but the idea of putting him in charge of a new team – at least as written by Jeff Parker (with surprisingly retro art by Ken Walker)– really works.

Of course, the main draw of any new team book is the team itself, the picks, the potential chemistry. That draw is all the more dramatic when the team in question is composed mostly of villains or quasi-villains, most of whom certainly aren’t trustworthy. This time around there are some characters I barely recognize – Mach V, Ghost, Songbird (I know the last only from the epic “Avengers Forever” – no idea what’s her deal in normal continuity), Moonstone, Crossbones – although the way Parker writes them makes me at least curious to know more. The team has its resident in-house genius (in this case Hank Pym) and at least two surprising additions that I, for one, didn’t see coming: the Juggernaut, here portrayed as physically immense and pretty openly threatening (in the ‘real world,’ there’s simply no way Luke Cage would allow onto his team a grinning schemer with Hulk-level strength, but hey …), and … the Man-Thing, a non-sentient muck-monster who can’t speak, can’t understand speech, and has virtually no powers to speak of. Not exactly a team player (although he’s been on a team before! I may be the only person here old enough to remember that, however).



Add such wrinkles to the mix and throw in a genuinely didn’t-see-it-coming cliffhanger ending, and I’m certainly hooked enough to read the next issue.



The second new team really is new: a freshly not-dead Steve Rogers, given a free hand by the President, forms a “Secret Avengers” team meant for covert operations and strategic pre-emptive strikes at the bad guys, sort of a Black Ops version of the higher-profile Avengers. It’s a great idea (although ironically enough, the premise for it given in this issue – which kicks off Marvel’s new “Heroic Age” – is that the world in the 21st century has grown so rotten and un-heroic that such a team is necessary), and it’s a premise obviously being enjoyed by writer Ed Brubaker and “Dark Avengers” artist Mike Deodato (when “Dark Avengers” came to its end, I really hoped Marvel would find another team-book to put Deodato on … the fact that it goes right on being the Avengers is all the sweeter).



And again, the main point is the roll-call. In this case it’s Steve Rogers – dressed in a kind of generic-superhero suit and not carrying his famous Captain America shield (or even a really, really tough duplicate, which is the least you’d think he’d do, considering that his entire fighting style is built around having the thing on one arm) – and a team of Marvel second-and third-stringers: Moon Knight, a kid in Hank Pym’s old Ant-Man get-up, Jim Rhodes and the Black Widow (from this summer’s “Iron Man 2”), the Beast from the X-Men (doing duty here as the requisite in-house genius), Nova, and … in another surprise move I find fascinating, the Valkyrie, an Asgardian warrior-woman and long-time criminally underused member of the Defenders (the Marvel group the Secret Avengers most closely resembles, naturally) – it’ll be interesting to see how Brubaker develops her character.

It was a little weird, seeing a Marvel team-book with no marquee names at all – I assume these characters were chosen by Brubaker specifically on the condition that he could mess around with them to a greater degree than he could with the usual roster of Avengers, and I’ll be looking forward to that in the next issue. This issue also ends with a heck of a cliffhanger, so I’ll definitely be around next time.

Comics! Three Number Ones!

Comics this week included three first issues spanning two thousand years of super-heroics. First issues don’t mean as much these days as they once did, but I can’t help but get a little excited about them even so – they represent such potential to be squandered!

The first issue of DC’s new limited series “Legacies” takes us back to the very beginnings of that company’s super-hero scene: World War Two is about to break open, and gangsters are running the streets of America’s cities. Suddenly, ‘mystery men’ are appearing – The Crimson Avenger, the Atom, the Sandman … swathing themselves in mist, using their fists and guns to bring crime-waves to a halt. The artwork is done by Andy Kubert (with inks by his legendary father Joe), but that’s the only reason to check in with this first issue (apparently, different creative teams will handle different issues). For better or worse, the ‘dawn of superheroes’ story-bar was set incredibly high by “Marvels” - hell, even Marvel’s own “Marvels Project” hasn’t been able to equal that earlier classic, and despite having a much, much grander story to tell, “Legacies” doesn’t even come close. Yet, at least.



The first issues move into the present day with “Avengers” #1, a confused, over-talky jumble of an issue that was probably supposed to compensate for its glaring weaknesses by brandishing the fact that it’s written by fan favorite Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by fan favorite John Romita Jr. (although the JRJR cover is easily the worst he’s ever done in his entire career). It starts with Steve Rogers solemnly telling about thirty super-heroes that he needs them – they all have slightly different reactions, but that’s OK, because we don’t see most of them again in this issue. Instead, we cut to a dinner/reception where Steve Rogers is again christening a new Avengers team, but this one is much smaller, a core team that makes almost no tactical sense at all (there’s Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Spider-Archer, Spider-Wolverine, Bucky … and, in case the team encounters any, you know, super-villains, Thor and Iron Man). This team is attacked in the middle of their first meeting by Kang the …

…. sorry, I nodded off. Yes, this new Avengers team is attacked in their first issue by Kang the Conqueror, in a gambit that seems insane even for Bendis. To put it mildly, Kang is over-used as a go-to Avengers bad guy (he was even the inaugural villain for the young Avengers, for pete’s sake). He tells our heroes that their ‘children’ will be responsible for unleashing an untold horror on the human race, and he enlists their help to come forward in time and prevent that from happening. This is obviously a job for the aforementioned Young Avengers, but that doesn’t seem to occur to Bendis, so we’re off to the races next issue. Fans of Bendis and JRJR will continue to buy the run – Bendis will be on it for about six issues, and if history is any guide, Romita penciled his last issue before this one even went on sale (this issue has a prose backup feature describing the origin of the Avengers …. It’s violently uninteresting, so we’ll skip it for now).



We jump forward thousands of years for our third first issue, a new #1 for the venerable Legion of Super-Heroes. The draw here isn’t the fairly good artwork by Yildiray Cinar (which certainly sounds like a Legion name – it’s not revealed in this issue what U.P. planet he’s from – my bet is Bismoll) but rather the return to Legion-scribing duties of Paul Levitz, who wrote some of the team’s greatest adventures about fifty years ago and is therefore presumed to have a solid grasp of what makes the Legion tick. There are two drawbacks to this theory: first, this Legion is composed of ragged-looking adults rather than the sexy teenagers Levitz last wrote about, and second, this series springs directly from a story-arc over in “Superman” a couple of years ago, which makes this issue feel just about as heavily c0ntinued as “Avengers” #1 did. Needless to say, good first issues shouldn’t feel heavily continued from something else – their whole point is to clear the clutter from the stage and start things fresh. Instead, the plot of this issue mostly revolves around the potential rehabilitation of the villain of that Superman mini-series, a xenophobic bigot code-named Earth-Man.

The issue was largely uninteresting despite two distinctly high-octane surprises, but DC’s background strategy here is certainly working on this long-time Legion fan: I’m perfectly willing to stick around and give Levitz the benefit of the doubt.

Still, for not one, not two, but three first issues to have this little oomph between them …

Essential Avengers Volume 7!

Our book today is Essential Avengers No. 7, which carries Marvel’s ‘essential’ black-and-white omnibus collections of the Avengers forward into the 1970s and features some fascinating themes and moments in the series’ run. This volume makes for great reading, mainly because the writers of these issues – Steve Englehart, Gerry Conway, and Jim Shooter – were all comics fans themselves and were resolutely writing for adults who could be presumed to have better things to do than read comic books all day.

The anthology starts off with a bang – or is that a Kang? (sorry- couldn’t resist) As with any super-team book, certain bad guy story arcs get recycled, and this book opens with two of those familiar arcs in full bloom: the Avengers squaring off against the Squadron Supreme (think: a watered down ripoff of the Justice League, and you’ll have it pretty close) (hence the joke made by the Avengers’ resident bow-and-arrow man Hawkeye in the recent crossover mini-series in which the Avengers meet the actual Justice League; he assures everybody they’re just dealing with some watered down ripoff of the Squadron Supreme!), and the Avengers dealing with the recurring villainy of the time-travelling villain Kang the Conqueror.

The Squadron Supreme story is writer Steve Englehart at his most socially sardonic, mixing some lively superhero action sequences with cultural and political commentary, some of which appears to be delivered by none other than Nelson Rockefeller (it’s a long story):

They [the Avengers]’re not the real problem anyway – I am, I and all the other corporate and conglomerate executives who have taken control of this country! We run your lives and you don’t know it – since so few of us ever stop out from behind the scenes. Even then, all you see is an image – a carefully-crafted image, like any other products! We talk a lot about honesty, and pride, and team spirit – but what we really want is power! The talk’s just to get you to give it to us. And you do! We commit the most outrageous acts – turn completely around on anything we’ve ever claimed to stand for –and you go right along, pretending not to notice…

And as for the Kang story, well, there Englehart abandons all subtlety: the Avengers’ biggest gun, Thor the Norse god of thunder, is in these opening issues just coming off several frustrating encounters with Kang, and the highlight of this segment comes when Thor has finally had enough – he knocks Kang outside of his citadel and decides to finish things once and for all, in a classic sequence that features brute force over political commentary.



Another long-time Avengers story-theme that’s done very well in this anthology is the team’s changing roster. The Avengers was the first super-team book to make such a big fuss over this question of who was in and who was out – previously, various members would wander into and out of team-pages largely based on what use the writers had for them (anybody they couldn’t use that month was said to be ‘on a mission’ or some such). Here, it’s a media event, with reporters doing television specials on the speculation leading up to the announcement of a new team-roster. And there’s an illicit thrill for Avengers readers, too, in this theme – there’s always something fun about seeing a new lineup in place for the first time, wondering how its dynamics will play out (I wonder if this tradition will be maintained when Marvel re-launches the Avengers in the wake of the Siege mini-series … it would be a shame if the opportunity were wasted), speculating on the character interactions.

The roster in this entire ‘essential’ volume is remarkably stable: there’s the Beast (a former X-Man whose slow integration to the team is the thematic spine of this volume), Captain America (here written a bit less woodenly than previously or afterwards), Iron Man, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, Hank Pym (here going under his Yellowjacket persona), and the Wasp … and for most of the volume, that core is joined by the disastrously boring revived character of Wonder Man (the Sentry of his day, as it were).

That team fights the Squadron Supreme, Doctor Doom, a lameass bad guy named Graviton, lots and lots of each other (Vision squares off against Wonder Man, the old World War II speedster the Whizzer takes on Cap, Iron Man, and the Beast, and – in one of the first panel-sequences that really started to show the burgeoning strengths of artist George Perez – Ant-Man comes believably close to taking on the whole team), and, of course, Ultron: the anthology’s epic confrontation with Ultron, the near-indestructible killer robot first created by Hank Pym, is not only the brooding high point of Jim Shooter’s writing career with Marvel Comics but also some of George Perez’s most visually detailed and arresting work to that point (Perez, as many of you know, continues still to improve as an artist – as seen most recently in Legion of 3 Worlds but also in yet another Avengers/Ultron showdown, from about ten years ago).



There are fill-in issues (including one with atrocious Herb Trimpe artwork and one with atrocious George Tuska artwork), naturally, and there are sub-plots that go nowhere or get metamorphosed along the way (Englehart , for instance, was notorious for that), but page-for-page, this is yet another fantastic volume in Marvel’s ‘essential’ line. Bring on volumes 8 and 9, I say; let’s hurry up and get to the Steve Epting 90s!



(a perhaps unnecessary end-note: of course Marvel's 'essential' volumes are in black-and-white, so the glorious colors you're seeing in these examples won't appear in the book you'll be buying - but that book is a whole lot less expensive than buying all those issues would be, so resign yourself to using your imagination a little, for pete's sake ...)

JLA/Avengers!

Our book today is JLA/Avengers, the graphic novel collection of the epic four-issue collaboration between comic book giants Marvel and DC in 2003 and 2004, now finally out in a trade paperback in a bookstore near you.

For many comics fans (myself certainly included), this story line is a kind of dream come true: an elaborate and highly detailed team-up/fight between the greatest super-hero team of the Marvel universe, the Avengers, and the most iconic super-hero team of the DC universe, the Justice League - here written by a comics fan who manages to 'get' just about every one of the many characters he's writing, and drawn by a comics legend and fan favorite. The comic-reading public had been promised some variation of this collaboration at every fan convention and trade show for the last thirty years (artist George Perez slips in funny visual references to all of them in the course of this story), and here popular writer Kurt Busiek is finally given permission not only to have the core members of both teams meet, but to have them fight - with a couple of actual winners and losers (non-comic fans have to realize how very, very rare that is in the comics world).

Now that all four issues have been collected, first in a deluxe slipcased hardcover and now in a handy trade paperback, it's easier to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the story - it has plenty of both. In any mega-thingamabob like this, the organizing plot device will be a Maguffin of massive proportions, and in that JLA/Avengers doesn't disappoint: a cosmic super-baddie from the DC universe, Krona, wants to know what came before the Big Bang. He wanders through one alternate universe after another (destroying most of them in the process, as cosmic super-baddies tend to do) in search of the answer, until he gets to the Marvel universe, where the cosmic chess-player The Grandmaster tells him he knows of a being who pre-dates the Big Bang - he offers to make introductions, IF Krona can best him in a game of cosmic chess, using the super-heroes from two alternate universes as living chess pieces. Instead of immediately eviscerating The Grandmaster, Krona agrees - and so the Justice League and the Avengers are pitted against each other!


This presents Busiek with his first major problem, because he's enough of a comics aficionado to want to use only the quintessential members of both teams as his key players. For the Justice League this is comparatively easy: it's the roster even most non-comics fans will know by name - Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Aquaman (to which add that perennial unknown, the Martian Manhunter, and Busiek's quite appropriate addition of Plastic Man). For the Avengers it's much trickier - you want a roster that has a good deal of physical power but that also represents the team at its best. Busiek picks a great central core: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hank Pym, the Wasp, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, and Quicksilver.

Comics fans can spot the problem right away, at least in terms of having the two teams of chess-pieces initially square off against each other: the Justice League would mop the floor with the Avengers. The Justice League roster includes three characters with world-class super-strength, four characters who can move at super-speed, four characters who can emit energy-beams of some kind or other, five characters who possess (or can summon) some form of invulnerability ... etc. By contrast, the Avengers contingent has two characters who are entirely dependent on technology (and one who is a piece of technology), two characters with no super-powers at all, only two characters with any degree of invulnerability, and only three characters with any degree of super-strength (and only one of those, Thor, has it in comparable degree to that possessed by half the Justice League team) ... etc.

If this thing were being handicapped by Las Vegas bookies instead of written and drawn by comics fans for comics fans, the resulting fight between these two teams would take about five minutes. After those five minutes, Thor would be the only Marvel character still standing - and he'd be facing Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and the Martian Manhunter, so he wouldn't be standing for long.

But that's never how things happen in the world of comics, and Busiek knows it (you can tell he knows it by the two absolutely priceless scenes in JLA/Avengers where he bucks against it - once by having Batman 'spend fifteen minutes beating up some loon in kevlar' offstage - i.e. the allegedly badass Punisher, and once by having Captain America handily demolish the allegedly badass Prometheus ... while uttering my single favorite line from the book, "Try fighting the Wehrmacht, mister - it teaches you FOCUS!" Hee). So the battles between the two teams in his book are more prolonged and even-sided affairs.


Of course long-time comics fans will have dreamt of some of those battles, and they'll disagree with some of Busiek's outcomes. Some of the fights he orchestrates are iconic in their own right: Batman and Captain America, for instance, are each respective company's most popular and well-known non-superpowered character, one a grim nighttime avenger of wrong, and the other a flag-wearing champion of right. How on Earth can you call a winner in such a fight? On his side, Captain America has not only the super-soldier formula coursing through his body (and making him, at least according to The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, virtually incapable of getting tired) but has years of experience fighting all kinds of opponents. And on the other hand, you have ... Batman, the least beatable of all super-heroes, powered or otherwise.

Busiek solves this particular problem cannily (he makes them so experienced they don't need to fight - they become the ones who realize both teams are being used as pawns in a bigger game), but that still leaves him with lots of others. DC's Flash is just plain and simple faster than Marvel's Quicksilver. DC's Green Lantern has access to technology (his ring) that just plain and simple outclasses the technology of Iron Man's armor. DC's dark-eyed emotionally-controlled team 'outsider' Martian Manhunter has all the powers of his Marvel equivalent, the Vision, and lots more besides. And who on the Avengers even approaches the balance for a character like Wonder Woman - as powerful as Superman and with five hundred times his fighting experience?

It's to Busiek's credit that in addition to side-stepping some of these problems by getting the two teams co-operating on the double, he also shifts his focus onto the differences in the two teams - and by extension the two universes and the two companies. At one point Aquaman comments to Superman that the heroes of the Marvel universe seem generally less powerful than those of the DC universe ("and," Aquaman points out, "their world is stacked against them"), and although this doesn't cut any mustard with Superman (he's portrayed throughout as interestingly disdainful of the Marvel heroes' inability to inspire the populace), it's a great motif running throughout the book. We're told that the Marvel Earth is smaller than the DC version, and louder, and less healthy (Superman's senses note harsher sunlight and higher blood pressure) - and this perfectly reflects the more hardscrabble, more human kind of superhero that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko wanted to create forty years ago, specifically as a comment on DC's larger-than-life icons.

At one point when the Avengers' expert marksman Hawkeye rejoins his comrades, the Wasp warmly welcomes him with a friendly peck on the cheek, and it's a winning, natural moment - and unthinkable in DC's more Olympian cast. Busiek puts little moments like that everywhere in his sprawling cosmic epic, and they all work.


The whole book largely works, and by far the most moving moment comes when our combined heroes are faced with a choice: go on living in the fantasy-world caused by the forcible combining of their two worlds, or fight to separate those worlds and restore both their realities. In order for them to make an informed decision, The Grandmaster shows them a kaleidoscope of key moments from their respective realities - a guided tour of the very worst things that comics readers have seen happen to these characters over the last twenty years. It's a surreal moment, as long-time readers realize all they've been through with these characters ... and when it's over, our heroes do just what heroes always do: they choose to suffer for the greater good.

Again, JLA/Avengers mostly works, and reading it again after a lapse of years allowed me to pick out not only more of the delectable little character moments Busiek includes but also more of the fantastic, fanatical, insanely detailed penciling work of George Perez, who manages, in the course of four issues (and all at once on the cover of the fourth), to draw just about every major and minor character in the entire history of both Marvel and DC. Virtuosity like that becomes almost scary, but in a good way.

And at the end, of course, the door is left open for other such epic adventures! To which I have an obvious suggestion but one nevertheless I'd love to see: the full cast of Golden Age characters from each company, fighting and then teaming up against Hitler, the Red Skull, Per Degaton, and whatever other baddies come to mind. JSA/Invaders! Who's with me?