Comics! Fear Itself Accelerates!

I know what-all I'm supposed to be noticing in this week's release of the 5th issue of Marvel's increasingly entertaining "Fear Itself" mini-series about an Asgardian super evil-god (who happens to be uncle to the mighty Thor) and his attempt to take over Earth by transforming a handful of heroes and villains into mindless, hammer-wielding agents of destruction. At the end of the previous issue, we saw several plot-lines cranking up the excitement: Captain America was charging into the fight to avenge his fallen friend and former sidekick Bucky, Tony Stark was sacrificing his hard-won sobriety merely to gain the listening ear of Thor's near-omnipotent father Odin, and Thor himself was squaring off against both the magically-transformed hammer-wielding Hulk but also the magically-transformed hammer-wielding Thing. This current issue has been billed for the last month as exactly what its title suggests: a mammoth brawl.

So I duly paid attention to Tony Stark's wonderfully testy dialogue with Odin ("I can't express to you how disappointed I am that you actually showed up")(which is met by the perfectly imperious, "You are a war-brother of my boy, Stark, and thus I grant you special dispensation. But don't push it"). And I duly paid attention to Thor's scenery-exploding battle with the possessed Hulk and the possessed Thing, which was done in the Stuart Immonen style to such perfection that I begin to wonder if Marvel currently has a better artist. When Thor blasts his hammer right through the possessed Thing, he's fairly businesslike about it, noting that things are different with the possessed Hulk ("And him I liked. But you? You were always a giant pain in the ass")(a far cry from the Stan Lee style 'thees' and 'thous' of cherished memory). And I duly paid attention when the mad god bad guy shatters Cap's supposedly indestructible shield like cheap china (difficult to get worked up about it, since this is the third time in thirty years Marvel's pulled that particular surprise).

But despite all that, I couldn't help feeling distracted by one other scene, one that wasn't heralded by the fanboy press but is in its own way far more significant, in terms of Marvel continuity. The possessed Thing lies dying, and his 'niece' and 'nephew' Franklin and Val Richards rush to his side. And Franklin makes an astonishing revelation: "'Member how I told Mom and Dad that I wouldn't use my powers? That I knew how powerful they made me, and how dangerous that was until I got older, so I wouldn't ever, ever, never use them? I lied." And then, in a burst of white light, he not only heals Ben Grimm but completely undoes the Asgardian enchantment that had transformed him.

I'm not sure how old mini-series author Matt Fraction is, but some of us remember the original story of Franklin's mysterious powers like it was yesterday. Gigantic, reality-warping powers on a level to worry the Watcher and prompt the boy's father to put him in a coma for a while, to save all life in the universe. Fraction's deus ex machina here is a far more drastic measure than I suspect he realizes - in that one panel, he raises the possibility of a far greater threat to the Marvel universe than some dime-a-dozen crazy Agardian. The powers that be at Marvel have said over and over again that "Fear Itself" will have lasting consequences for continuity, but I just bet this particular consequence hasn't been thought through at all. How could it be? Franklin could simply disintegrate Thor's crazy uncle - and restore Bucky to life, and restore Manhattan to its pre-invasion state of repair, etc. Fifty years of Fantastic Four stories have characterized Franklin Richards as the ultimate ticking time-bomb, and in this issue of "Fear Itself" Fraction detonates that time-bomb without seeming really to notice what he's doing.

A great, enjoyable issue, of course ... but some things distract from the main events ....

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! A Bad Day at Forbidden Planet!

You win some and you lose some when it comes to comics. I know this. Crap can come in all guises and colors - it can even be published by DC, although always in a comfortingly small percentage when compared with Marvel, which has been having a love affair with crap since it gave Herb Trimpe a regular paycheck. This increases the caution when buying Marvel comics, but still: all comics are mighty expensive these days, and some of them have won major science fiction awards usually reserved for works of un-illustrated prose, and it's widely acknowledged that the audience for these things is older - and presumably a bit more discriminating - than it's ever been. You'd like to think a new series about a super-powered football player or truck driver wouldn't even get past the conference stage, and that every artist who's allowed to work on one of these $4 comics would at the very least be doing more right than wrong.

So I bought a bunch of comics this week, and that bunch of comics kicked me in the teeth over and over and over again, and that's depressing. You win some and you lose some, I know, I know - but two things made me hope for better this time around: first, when I was reading these things (on a rainy Fung Wah trip back to Boston), I was really in need of a pick-me-up and consequently more vulnerable to disappointment. And second, I had the always-fun experience of buying that bunch of comics not at my usual haunt of Boston's Comicopia, and not even at new discoveries like JP Comics & Games, but instead at that dragon-horde of legendary comics shops, Broadway's Forbidden Planet. That also ups the expectations just a bit, as irrational as that is.

And Forbidden Planet wasn't the only one upping my expectations (actually, I doubt they give a crap about my expectations one way or the other, although the staff of hipster doofuses there is really quite a bit nicer than you'd expect, considering that New York City retail staffs and comic book staffs are two of the rudest sub-categories of human beings on Earth) - the subject matter here helps quite a bit too.

Take Thor, the focus of quite a few recent comics postings here. The second issue of the new Matt Fraction/Pascual Ferry run on that character's main title was one of the crappy comics I got in my stack of crappy comics - and for a new arc of a book featuring such a high degree of talent to stink on only its second issue is something of a new speed record.

The issue features painted pencils by Ferry that are duly gorgeous, but the minute you stop gawking and start reading (almost always a bad idea, when it comes to Marvel comics), all that fascinating stops cold. The characters here - aside from the I! Am! Freed! hyperventilating bad guys, that is - spend the issue acting like morons, and none more so than Thor. The little scene I liked from last time, the one in which Thor tells Jane Foster that he actually misses his evil half-brother Loki? Well, that scene is repeated in this issue, only now Thor's whining to Balder, and incredibly, one bit of that whining goes like this: "All this loss wouldn't be so bad to bear, were I granted someone to bear it with. Someone of my blood, of my flesh." Spoken to Balder, who was recently revealed to be a son of Odin and Thor's brother - a revelation Thor admitted to when questioned by Balder. Guess Matt Fraction didn't read that issue, or didn't like what he read.

Thor matter-of-factly tells Balder that he's going to 'bring Loki back' and then at the end of the issue flies off to do just that - with no explanation of how he's going to do that, let alone why. I finished the issue feeling absolutely certain that if you asked Matt Fraction how on Earth Thor can suddenly raise somebody from the dead, his answer would be "Because I say so." Always an encouraging thing, in a writer.

That particular burst of crap was disappointing because, as we've covered here, I like the character of Thor and have enjoyed some runs on his book more than any other Marvel titles I've ever read. And Marvel wasn't done with the pointed depression! Another title I really enjoyed from the House of Ideas was the Invaders, and I've always thought reviving the book would be a great idea. Granted, my thought was always to set it in World War II and give us more of the adventures the team had back then, but when happenstance and the work of a handful of writers brought back all the original Invaders in the present-day Marvel universe, I admit I started to think of a modern team-revival as well.

Wish I hadn't. Because as soaringly good as the Alex Ross covers for this mini-series are, the inside artwork by Caio Reis is a bitter disappointment and would be even if I were to discover that Reis is actually only 10 years old. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that, and although it might prompt me to make diplomatic comments to his mother, if I were alone with the tyke himself, I'd say: you know, you could have tried a little harder here, and here, and here. The writing here, by Christos Gage, is fairly good, but for Pete's sake, Gage and Ross created the concept of the reunion and the story of this arc - would it really have been impossible for Ross to give a few pointers to this Reis person (or conduct a more extensive talent-search in the first place), to avoid saddling hapless readers with panels like this one:

Still, the Invaders is just a neat-o concept, not something to which I'm imaginatively wed. Too bad the same can't be said for that greatest of all Edgar Rice Burroughs creations, John Carter of Mars. Those are books I've read and re-read for the whole of their life on Earth, loving them, thrilling even to the hackneyed prose and the less-than-successful volumes in the series (if there's anybody alive who's read Thuvia Maid of Mars more often than I have, I'd like to meet him - hell, it's pretty clear from the book that even ERB didn't read it all the way through after he wrote it). Naturally, I've always yearned for it to be translated to the medium of comics. In 1977 I got that wish in spades when Marv Wolfman and the great Gil Kane started a wonderful series for Marvel - a series that really deserves its own Masterworks volume and that had distinct high-notes. But 1977 is a long time ago, so naturally I was thrilled that morning at Forbidden Planet to find a company called Dynamite bringing out the first issue of a series called "Warlord of Mars."

I should have taken as my first sign of trouble the cover by Joe Jusko, a crappy cartoon version of the iconic Frank Frazetta poster I've loved for decades. And the inside of the issue was even worse, being the first part of a "tale of two worlds" arc that follows the entirely human gold prospector John Carter and the giant Thark warrior Tars Tarkas as their separate adventures lead them, presumably in three or four issues, to meet on the plains of Mars. The pace is pokey, the artwork is stiff and mechanical, and the very title of the series - 'Warlord of Mars' - is, by my reckoning, about 30 issues away. Even at the $1 cover price, I was overcharged.

My love affair with the concept of John Carter of Mars made that piece of crap harder to bear - so just imagine how bad my reaction was to the latest issue of DC's Adventure Comics featuring my beloved Legion of Super-Heroes. The Legion is my favorite DC creation and their richest piece of comics history, and this run on Adventure is being written by Paul Levitz, one of the greatest Legion writers of all time. To put it mildly, this is not where I expect to find crap.

And yet, crap I found. Not the story, mind you - it was good and fast-paced and multi-layered as are all Levitz productions. No, the problem here was the artwork by Eduardo Pansica, which featured Legionaires who looked like they're five years old - all his characters are gaunt, asymmetrically angular, and oddly posed, but that's not the worst of it. No, the worst thing was the faces, those endless horrible pre-pubescent faces all caught in the very moment of an orgasm they neither want nor understand. I don't know who DC's art editor is these days, but for grife's sake, Paul Levitz himself has worked with some of the best comics artists of the last four decades, and he had to have seen these pages before, for instance, I did. So he saw the indelible image of Ma Kent fondling a four-year-0ld Brainiac 5 into extremely premature ecstasy - and he thought it was OK? There's absolutely nothing OK about this image:

And yet I'll carry it with me to my cryo-chamber, now that my unfortunate eyes have beheld it.

You know the comic you're reading is crap when the back-up feature - starring the Atom, by all that's holy - is more entertaining than the main feature. I hear on the grapevine all sorts of fascinating things about my beloved Legion - that more titles are in the offing, that the current management at DC is slowly starting to realize what older teams have periodically had to relearn: the Legion has a huge number of insanely devoted fans who will turn almost any well-done Legion product into a solidly-selling item.  I hope it's all true, but the success or failure of any Legion venture in this day and age hinges entirely on that 'well-done' part, and that can't happen with this Pansica guy doing the penciling. Nor should it have to happen that way, dammit! The Legion is a venerable property for DC - it should no more be a training ground (or dumping ground) for third-stringers than should Superman or Batman. In Adventure Comics, DC has given the Legion the exact right writer - an artist to match isn't too much to ask.
So, you win some and you lose some, and I can always hope for better next week. And in the meantime, I'll always have that iconic image to close out my little screed:

Comics! Thor relaunches!

Well, here the issue itself is, the capstone on our aforementioned glut of Thor-comics, so I could hardly refrain from mentioning it. It's Thor #615 (flat-out amazing that Marvel didn't relaunch the whole thing with a spurious first issue – an adult must temporarily be in charge at the House of Ideas), featuring writing by Matt Fraction and typically gorgeous artwork by fan favorite Pasqual Ferry.

Those two names – especially the latter – will give any alert reader the tip-off why more hasn't been made of this change in creative team: neither Fraction nor Ferry will be sticking around. My guess is that they were both contracted for six issues – the length of a graphic novel – and that Fraction will write all six and Ferry will draw four before bailing (if reneging on work-contracts were a super-crime, every single creator in comics today would have to start wearing iron face-masks and calling themselves “Doctor”).

In the meantime, the two are faced with the same old problem that's always confronted writer and artist teams working on Thor: how do you handle his dual heritage as a character? Tough enough to write a super-hero who's as powerful as a god and keep things dramatically interesting (ask any Superman writer), but what do you do when your character is a god?

Naturally, us long-time Thor fans can't help but hark back to Stan Lee, who knew perfectly well that this would be the central dramatic hurdle of the character. And he was typically canny about it: not only did he saddle Thor with a fairly draconian weakness (if he lets go of his hammer for longer than a minute, he reverts not just to the powerless mortal Don Blake but to the crippled powerless mortal Don Blake – sheer Lee over-the-top genius), and not only did he periodically have Thor get banished to Earth by his tubby nutso father Odin, but he was careful to switch up the nature of the character's adventures. For three months, he'd be fighting the Absorbing Man or androids on Earth, and for the next three months he'd be off in space saving the Colonizers of Rigel from Ego the Living Planet.

(Lee and Jack Kirby also had the inspired idea of cutting Thor's actual adventures in half and putting a back-up feature in almost every issue, “Tales of Asgard,” where they could give readers their fill of the cosmic Wagnerian side of the character, thus freeing the front half of the book for often more mundane adventures)

The old challenges with the character are still here in this effective relaunch: Thor is still the most powerful Marvel character (able to lift well over 100 tons, able to fly, invulnerable, able to control the weather, and possessing roughly 2000 years of combat experience), effectively ruling out the viability of nine-tenths of the potential villains you might run against him. And in response to this challenge, Matt Fraction does indeed hark back – but only about ten years, to the character relaunch done by Dan Jurgens and John Romita Jr. in 1998. Then, as now, Asgard is attacked by a new group of immensely-powerful super-baddies we've never heard of, setting the stage for some of the epic action sequences Ferry does so well.



The main difference here is that Asgard isn't attacked directly – it's in ruins on Earth, after all, in the wake of the “Siege” storyline. Instead, the extra-dimensional void left by Asgard's absence is attacked by the aforementioned super-baddies, who are trying to take advantage of the fact that the universe is out of joint to score a little quick real estate.

The issue itself is just dandy, with only a couple of reservations. Ferry's artwork is eye-popping as usual, and there's a quite good little moment where Thor reminisces about his evil half-brother Loki, conceding that he was evil but admitting that he misses his brother just the same. Don Blake is still here as Thor's alter-ego, but it's the least well thought-out aspect of this current incarnation of the character (and the new wrinkle that Thor and Blake aren't the same person, that they can have cute little internal bickering sessions, needs to die a speedy death). And Odin is still technically dead, off in the realm of death fighting eternal battles to protect the home dimension. So Fraction has some junk to clear away.

Because as is so often the case, the basic Stan Lee template for this character is the best one – not for sentimental reasons but because it works better than any other. Before Fraction departs for the next project he's always 'dreamed' of doing, he needs to fix three things: a) he needs to get Asgard off Earth and back into its normal place in the cosmos, b) he needs to return Odin to life and the kingship of Asgard, and c) he of course needs to return Loki to the ranks of the living, since you can't have Thor without his best villain.

Fortunately, the kind of big cosmic story Fraction has chosen to kick things off here can easily accomplish all three of these well before the Thor movie opens, and then all will be right again with my favorite Marvel character.

Great Moments in Comics!

A full week of comics from both the big super-hero companies, but sometimes it's fun just to concentrate on the little moments writers and artists work into the bigger stories! I've been reading comics for a long, long time, and I can honestly say most of my best memories of them are scattered shots of just such moments, rather than the bigger stories and crossovers and what-nots I'm supposed to be remembering.

I'll do a few longer postings collecting some of those classic moments from across the decades, but for now I thought I'd start with a Great Moment from this very week, featuring Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner.

The long background: Namor is one of Marvel Comics' oldest, most storied characters (the Human Torch and then later Captain America being the other two marquee-caliber names), the son of a human fisherman and a princess of the undersea kingdom of Atlantis. As this description might hint, Namor is also - quite accidentally - Marvel's very first mutant: he's a hybrid with the pale skin of his father (Atlanteans are deep blue in hue, don't you know) and the water-breathing ability of his mother, but he has traits neither one possesses - mainly, he's got little wing-thingees on his ankles that allow him to fly, and he's preternaturally strong. But Namor has a claim to the affection of Marvelites everywhere that goes beyond his superhero stats: he's a great character, and, miraculously, he always has been. Namor is headstrong, irritable, proud, stubborn, prone to snap-judgements but not always wrong, and he's never been changed from that winning template, the perfect middle-ground between your standard hero and villain. And since his Atlantean physiology gives him a much longer lifespan than that of a normal human, no gimmickry is needed to have him right here, slapping around whoever's pissed him off in 2009. He doesn't currently have his own ongoing monthly title at Marvel, but that's as often as not a good thing - it allows writers to handle him exquisitely and consistently give him great lines, and that's certainly been the case in 2009 during the whole "Dark Reign" story-arc.

(That arc, for those of you joining us en medias res: psychopathic killer Norman Osborn has cleaned himself up and managed to worm his way into control of Marvel's amped-up equivalent of the C.I.A.; he's drafted other psychopathic killers to masquerade as his "Avengers" while hunting the real heroes into hiding; he's conducted clandestine deals with other Marvel super-baddies like Loki and Doctor Doom - and Namor, who just recently turned on Osborn, thereby earning his ire, which is not a good ire to have)

The short background: twenty years ago, a writer took Marinna, one of the dumbass-useless characters John Byrne invented for his dumbass Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight, and made her attractive to Prince Namor (Marinna was a yellow-skinned, fish-eyed amphibious slip of a thing, a uselessly derivative character as was everyone else on Alpha Flight), who, in a decision well-known to other fictional characters (such as Larry King), decided to marry the much, much, much younger girl, even though she had a tendency to turn into a mindless, rampaging sea-monster when stressed.

Cut to the present: Namor has enraged Norman Osborn with his perceived betrayal, and Osborn, it turns out, was prepared for just such an eventuality. He has stressed poor little Marinna (and pumped her full of shark-hormones), and she's now a gigantic rampaging mindless sea-monster - which Osborn sets loose on Namor's undersea people with instructions straight out of the U.S. Army: take all you want, but eat all you take. When Marinna begins consuming Atlanteans, Namor goes to the X-Men for help (only he's too proud to admit that, and he's too proud to ask for it when he gets there, and he's too proud to accept it when it's offered - this one-shot of "X-Men/Dark Reign/The List" is a great little snapshot of what a royal pain in the ass Namor can be, even to his friends). The plan: lure monster-Marinna in and take her down.

Which brings us to our Great Moment! Namor and the X-Men are gathered on the shore of the X-Men island sanctuary, and they can all see the monster approaching. One of the crowd of young mutants there scans the beast and sadly reports, "There's nothing to her but hunger and rage and ... and hate. There's nothing there but hate."

To which Namor - with the deadpan perfection only an 80-year-old warrior king might muster - replies: "Ex-wives. What can you do?"

Hee.

So hat's off to writer Matt Fraction (and the always-gorgeous artwork of Alan Davis, of course) for providing us with our inaugural Great Moment!

Comics! The week's highs and lows!

It's an odd thing, dealing with the creative output of a company like Marvel Comics. This is an outfit that's done more over the last 50 years to rejuvenate comics and update them for adults than any other force in the industry, and yet it's a company that so often has its collective head up its ass that you feel like you should get a complimentary bed-pan with every week's subsciptions.

That's as true today as it ever was, and it's the same old problems: convoluted continuity, creators who don't ever talk with each other, people writing flagship titles while deeply, deeply stoned, etc. You can find some of the same faults over at Marvel's long-time competitor DC Comics, but Marvel has a few besetting problems that are peculiar to itself. One is that they have an abiding affection for sprawling, multi-part multi-title mega-stories despite having almost no talent for pulling them off, and another is that they've got a yearning to be badass that's so overriding it's creepy. Both these problems have an understandable genesis: DC. DC Comics does the sprawling, multi-part multi-title mega-story thing with consummate skill (OK, even they can have misfires - nobody around here will be rushing out to buy Absolute Trinity, if they're crazy enough to make such a thing). And as far as badass goes, DC Comics has Batman. Nuff said.

Surprisingly, however, one of the sprawling multi-part multi-title mega-stories Marvel's currently doing is actually making for extremely compelling reading (the other involves lots and lots of zombies and typifies everything that's wrong with Marvel creatively). I'm talking about the whole "Dark Reign" storyline, in which the United States government, in the wake of a nearly successful alien invasion, has turned over its vast military/homeland security/superhero watchdog agencies to Norman Osborn, formerly the Spider-Man arch-villain Green Goblin and now a suit-wearing media-manipulating clandestine dictator. In the old days, this kind of plot would have been carried on for six issues of the Avengers and then resolved, and Marvel's genius this time around is to keep the whole thing going, to expand and explore its possibilities. Osborn has cynically created his own team of Avengers (after first banishing and now secretly hunting the leftovers of the original team, some of whom are holed up in a hiding place in Brooklyn) and his own team of X-Men (after the genuine items withdraw to an island in San Francisco Bay) and sold them to the American people as the real thing, despite the fact that several members of his teams are just super-criminals wearing hero costumes ('Hawkeye' is secretly lethal Daredevil villain Bullseye, Spider-Man is secretly monstrous Spidey-villain Venom, etc). A nice added touch is that Osborn leads the team himself, wearing super-powered armor and calling himself Iron Patriot.

The various titles and spin-offs of this whole 'Dark Reign' story have been almost without exception fascinating, showing our exiled heroes in some new lights - as overpressured underdogs in constant fear of incarceration - and every month, in "Dark Avengers," giving us a surprisingly entertaining foray into life inside a team composed of sociopaths who hate each other and are mostly kept in line by Osborn's dark charisma. Sad but true: the actual heroic Avengers often weren't written with this kind of wry intelligence.



One of the key details supporting the whole storyline is Norman Osborn's assemblage of raw physical power. If his hand-picked enforcers weren't able to smack down their scattered opposition, that opposition would simply re-take control. Preventing this took some skillful choosing on the part of "Dark Reign"s various writers, and they provided Osborn with a team that includes Wolverine's beclawed natural son, the aforementioned Bullseye, the super-powered psychiatrist Moonstone, the unstoppable but mentally unstable Sentry, and Ares, the Greek god of war. The idea is to make the scattered good guys inferior in every way - not just tactically and financially but physically as well - in a direct one-on-one fight with Osborn's Dark Avengers, they'd get their asses whupped and be locked up or worse. Readers are encouraged to think the same holds true for the X-Men, and that brings us to the mini-series Exodus, which wraps up this week with the one thing you'd think its writer, Matt Fraction, would go out of his way to avoid: the aforementioned direct one-on-one fight, this time between the X-Men and BOTH Osborn's teams, the Dark Avengers and the Dark X-Men.

Granted, this is the series' big finish, so maybe it's natural Fraction wanted to go for the gold. But there's a skill to writing - orchestrating - a big multi-part battle, and geez, how many times does Fraction have to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that he doesn't have that skill before he's forbidden to try it again?

So the big fight is a mess, in so many places I be here all day listing them. Fraction clearly had half a dozen little scenes in mind he thought would be 'cool,' and what happens outside of those scenes, well ... it's only a funny book, right? Yeesh.

So we have Norman Osborn blasting Cyclops two or three times with ray-beams at point-blank range, but Cyclops suffers no damage worse than ripped clothing. So we have Angel scooping up Hawkeye/Bullseye and depositing him across the bay in Marin County (rather than simply dropping him in the water, perhaps from 600 feet in the air), for no apparent reason. So we have Emma Frost entering the Sentry's troubled mind in order to release his inner demons and cause him to fly away from Earth in a blur (rather than simply render him unconscious). So we have Moonstar 'borrowing' powers from "Mistress Hela" sufficient to bring Ares to his knees, but without any explanation of what those powers are. So we see what looks like an evil version of Weapon Alpha get his kidneys and spine punctured by Wolverine


and still be up and fighting several panels later. And so - when it all ends in a truce and the Dark Avengers withdraw - we see Norman Osborn's team at a press conference: Sentry's back and seems none the worse for wear, Ares OK, Hawkeye/Bullseye just fine despite having last been seen fighting Angel to the death over in Marin County, evil Weapon Alpha guy OK, not a Band-aid in sight ... it's enough to make anybody who cares about panel-by-panel common sense throw up their hands in despair, or maybe just throw up.



Things aren't much better in the first issue of another "Dark Reign" spin-off series, "Avengers - the List." In this issue, the real Hawkeye, Clint Barton, one of those exiled Avengers hiding in Brooklyn, decides enough is enough: as long as Osborn is alive, the evil days onto which the whole Marvel Universe has fallen will continue. So Hawkeye decides he will arm himself, do some recon, break into Avengers Tower, and kill Osborn. His lame-ass teammates do some moral dickering with him (this dialogue is written by Brian Michael Bendis, who very often does very much better work - but then, I suppose one of the whole points of "Dark Reign" is that we aren't seeing our heroes at their best), and then he heads off. Artist Marko Djurdjevic provides a nice brooding two-page shot of Barton looking over the Brooklyn Bridge at his brightly-lit target

but what follows doesn't make any more sense logistically than Fraction's Exodus finale. Not only would Hawkeye's teammates never let him go off and attack Osborn's stronghold alone (if for no other reason than that his inevitable capture would jeopardize their own safety) - as it is, they just sit around lame-assedly saying "he's going to get killed" (not quite as catchy as "Avengers Assemble!" is it?), but Hawkeye himself wouldn't do it, for the simple reason that he'd know he had no chance of success.

So I suppose it's thrilling how close Bendis brings him to success (although what constitutes success here - breaking into Osborn's office and shooting him dead with a shotgun blast - raises a snotload of problems on its own, since it's what villains traditionally do). He handles Venom with ease, shoots the fake Hawkeye several times non-lethally, and gets as far as Osborn's office before he's beaten senseless by Ares. I'm guessing the next issue will feature a) Osborn torturing Hawkeye for information about his teammates, and b) those teammates attempting to rescue him from Osborn's clutches, but I'm hoping Bendis will also address the virus of stupidity that seems to be afflicting Marvel's heroes now that they're down and out - this is like the third storyline in which one of those heroes, alone, has tried to assault or infiltrate Osborn's tower, been unsuccessful, and barely escaped. Whatever happened to teamwork?

(Of course, I'm willing to endure all these little gripes if the whole "Dark Reign" concept is eventually going to lead to the mother of all superhero-revenge storylines ... the thing practically writes itself at this point, and it would be extremely satisfying, if done well ....)




Fortunately, writer Fred Van Lente over in "Spider-Man" lightens things up with the week's single best panel/bit of dialogue. In that title, Spidey-hating blowhard J. Jonah Jameson has become mayor of New York City and dedicated his every waking moment to hunting down his web-spinning arch-nemesis. At one point in this issue, when some of Jameson's jackbooted goons are shooting at him, Spider-Man yells, "How can you listen to him? I mean, look at his mustache! It's just like Hitler's!"


Hee.

But it's over in DC Comics that we get the week's sweetest moment, courtesy of Geoff Johns in the second issue of "Adventure Comics." In that issue, Ma Kent cooks supper for Superboy as he has a delicate conversation with Wonder Girl about their relationship, and when the two young people finally kiss (in mid-air, naturally), a watching Ma Kent says to herself, "Good boy," and wistfully touches a photograph of herself and her dear dead husband, Pa Kent, in younger days. It's a well-done little grace note in a title that's very deliberately taking its time, so we'll end with that. But tune in next week when we take in another batch of funny books and see what makes them tick!

Comics! Uncanny X-Men #500!

Last week saw a milestone in Marvel Comics - the publication of the 500th issue of the Uncanny X-Men. Marvel marked the occasion by commissioning a painted front-and-back cover by quasi-deified comic book artist Alex Ross, and Marvel definitely got its money's worth (just how much does Ross get paid for a painting like this? Anybody out there hazard a guess?): the painting depicts all (well, most - the guy with the super-powered pet maggots is nowhere to be seen) the various ages of the X-Men caught between their two most emblematic foes, the mutant-hunting robot Sentinels and the world-dominating mutant master of magnetism, Magneto. There in the background is a ghostly telepathic image of Professor X, who recruited those five young mutants way back in 1963's first issue. Directly below him are the heroes those teenagers became: Iceman, Marvel Girl, Angel, Beast, and Cyclops, whose devastating ruby eye-beams carve an angle through the painting in classic Ross style (he loves the play of light in all its thicknesses). And surging forward toward the foreground is the new team that revitalized the comic in 1975 and changed the face of Marvel Comics forever: Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde, Gambit, Rogue, and of course Wolverine, bigger and better drawn than all the others. It's a bravura piece of work, even for an artist from whom we've come to expect such work.

It would be wrong to say that cover painting is the best thing about the 500th issue of the Uncanny X-Men. It's the only good thing. As for the rest, Marvel has pulled off something uncanny indeed: they've commemorated the 500th anniversary of their most popular title with the single worse X-Men issue ever published.

That's saying something. Uncanny, through its countless variations and incarnations, has published some truly crappy issues over the decades. This issue has to compete with the aforementioned maggot-guy, with the disco-heroine Dazzler, with the onslaught of Onslaught, and with the mini-era of the snub-nosed Wolverine (a manifestation that still confuses us, here at Stevereads). It handles this competition easily; it's worse than all of those eras before it even reaches page 10.

We'll get to page 10, but first a bit of true confession: Uncanny X-Men was never our favorite among the Marvel titles. When it first came out, we bought it of course - at the time, this new imprint Marvel Comics seemed able to do no wrong, and this seemed like another winner. The organizing principle? These super-powered kids, this team of kids and their somewhat creepy instructor (I wasn't the only one who suspected Marvel of doing a quickie-ripoff of the Doom Patrol, which, if memory serves, came out only a few months earlier and also featured a creepy instructor), were born that way. They didn't study with the Ancient One in a mountaintop retreat; they weren't struck by radioactive waste, spiders, rays, or bombs - instead, they just developed their abilities at puberty, the same as all their readers! When I first read it, I immediately started mentally listing all the other heroes who fit the same bill (what can I say? Way, way back then, I was something of a geek): Wonder Woman (who even as a child was stronger and faster than other Amazons) but not Superman (if Krypton hadn't exploded, he'd have been a poor powerless schlub like everybody else), the Martian Manhunter (on Mars, it seems, everybody could shapeshift) but not the Flash, Green Lantern, Atom, or Supergirl. The Sub-Mariner, but not, as mentioned, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, or the Hulk.


(And what of my beloved Legion of Super-Heroes, you ask? I did the rundown on them too! Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, Phantom Girl, Chameleon Boy, Shadow Lass, Shrinking Violet, Triplicate Girl, Matter-Eater Lad, even Element Lad, yes - Wildfire, Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy, Mon-el, Invisible Kid, Sun Boy, Colossal Boy, Princess Projectra, Timber Wolf, no ...)

It was an interesting take, but the first issue was sloppily done. Too much exposition, boring action sequences (even Jack Kirby could nod), and a team of weaklings the Thing alone could probably stomp into the ground before lunch.

The title won me over a few times ("Not a Dream! Not a Hoax! Not an Imaginary Story!" was an unbeatable hook for one issue, and of course there was the great Neal Adams for a too-short while, giving us the first truly great X-story with the introduction of the Sentinels) and lost me a few times, and like everybody else, I thought the 1975 re-launch (featuring Cyclops leading a team of heroes nobody'd ever heard of) was really good. But even during the Dark Phoenix Saga, my comics-reading heart lay elsewhere - with Thor, and Conan, and the Avengers, and Superman, and, of course, the Legion. And like all sensible sentient beings, I've had two parallel reactions to the modern incarnation of the title: one the one hand, a growing and awestruck appreciation of Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men, and on the other hand, a near-hysterical avoidance of the 100 percent pure crapola being produced in all the other X-titles.

Still, when a comic turns 500, you gotta read it. I was there, of course, for Action Comics 500 and was very much not disappointed - it was a great, epic retelling of the Superman story combined with a first-rate Lex Luthor plotline. It delivered.




Uncanny X-Men 500 miscarries. In fact, if it were a baby, it would miscarry so bad it would cause all the other babies in the whole friggin maternity ward to croak.

Some brief background, some of which we've already covered here: the mutant Scarlet Witch, in a fit of pique, warped the world's reality and thereby eliminated the super-powers of all but a handful of Earth's mutants - including Magneto, her father, who was left a powerless wretch. The X-Men still remained, dedicated to fighting the good fight against mankind's intolerance and evil mutants. That brings us to the latest issue, the #500 landmark.

Matters open with decidedly substandard Terry Dodson artwork (how exactly Marvel got substandard artwork out of somebody as talented as Dodson is a mystery all on its own - he shares haphazardly divided art chores in this issue with the notorious Ted Land, suggesting that either Dodson or Land or perhaps both learned rather late they'd be drawing any part of this issue), showing a pretentious artist receiving some old-style Sentinels in order to transform them into a modern art display. Our scene immediately shifts to the X-Men's new headquarters on the Marin Headlands across the bay from San Francisco, whose mayor is right then being flown to meet our heroes by Storm - who, despite now being queen of Wakanda, still finds time to for the whole super-heroing thing. The mayor has been given a 'psychic blindfold' by the X-Men's resident telepath, Emma Frost, despite the fact that she's a super-VILLAIN and always has been (these days she shows this mainly by making snide remarks).

The mayor's on some sort of good-will visit, so the X-Men show her around. Here the artwork is handled by Greg Land, so Emma Frost is of course beautiful - and, um, I guess so is Scott Summers, aka Cyclops, except that he's built like a steroid-popping weightlifter (what, can't Land find pictures of skinny models?). Hank McCoy, aka the Beast (still looking like a great big kitty-cat) shows up, introducing himself as "Hank McCoy, scientist" (which causes no one to laugh, even though it's absurd), and they're all telling the mayor how 'green' their new headquarters is when Warren Worthington, aka Angel, scolds them all for not wining and dining her - he promptly shows her the view of San Francisco across the bay, which kind of defeats the purpose of the psychic blindfold, since she can see her house from here.

When she tells the X-Men (at least, I think these are the X-Men - nobody bothers to enumerate the team-roster; I think it consists of Cyclops, Beast, Angel, Emma Frost, Nightcrawler, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, and maybe-sorta Cannonball) about the pretentious artist-type and his Sentinel-installation, they're understandably upset - they vow to attend the gala opening, just to make sure nothing untoward happens. Exactly why they think mixing mutants with Sentinels, even deactivated ones, would calm things down is a mystery our writers don't bother with; instead, they shift the scene to the gala opening, where our heroes are mixing and mingling with slobbering fanboys (who are mocked even though their real-life counterparts are the ones who'll be buying the damn issue) and growling about the Sentinels standing there. Everbody's in X-Men costumes, and when a big guy dressed as Magneto hands Colossus a champagne glass, Colossus starts to tell they guy he's not a waiter - when gasp! it turns out to be the real Magneto! Why Colossus doesn't recognize the real Magneto when he's six friggin inches away is a mystery our writers don't bother with; instead, Magneto says "Now then, where were we?" uses his apparently-restored powers to hurl Colossus through a skylight, then says' "Now then, where were we?" again.

Angel says "Magneto! Put him down!" Cyclops says "Magneto tactics, team. Response squad, you're with me" Storm says (no snickering now) "Tyrant. Your villainy will be held here." But what follows is nevertheless a disorganized fiasco in which virtually nothing makes sense. Magneto handles everything the X-Men throw at him, then Cannonball hits him really hard and - presto! - we see that he's wearing some sort of power-simulating suit. It naturally comes with a transporter, so Magneto is able to disappear once he's been beaten. In the meantime, Colossus, Wolverine, and Angel (yes, Angel, who manages to take out a Sentinel on his own despite having no powers to speak of other than big, white wings) have defeated the reactivated Sentinels, and our landmark 500th issue thus ends in an ungainly heap.

And part of that ending? Emma Frost telepathically amplifies Cyclops' thoughts as he broadcasts to every mutant on the planet that X-Men headquarters is now a mutant sanctuary, that every mutant who wants to can now come there and be safe. Why on Earth he would say this, when his telepathic broadcast has just drawn a gigantic bullseye on the Marin Headlands location, is yet another mystery. The issue's full of them, and none of them the good kind. To put it mildly, this kind of X-Men execution is as far away from the stuff Joss Whedon was doing over in Astonishing as it's possible to get. In that title, Whedon made a fantastic new epic out of almost entirely new characters and material; in this one, two already-great characters and concepts - Magneto and the Sentinels - are wasted simultaneously.

Who knows what happened? Maybe despite the 499 rehearsals, issue 500 somehow snuck up on all involved. That would explain the lack of any cohesion in this issue, the feeling that it's all been cobbled together at the last minute. It's issue 500, so you have to read it, but there's nothing here to warrant anybody obeying any kind of telepathic summons to show up for issue 501.