Back with more webcomics...

* ERFWORLD recently wrapped up its first book, "The Battle of Gobwin Knob", and I have to admit that Rob Balder and Jamie Noguchi had me fooled. I'd pegged this series as a cute, light-hearted parody of D&D, mainly because that's what you see for the first thirty pages or so: you've got an Evil Overlord besieged by an Alliance of Noble Men and Elves, armies moving and fighting in "turns", all profanity being replaced with the word "boop" (it's much funnier than it sounds)... and there's no shortage of amusing moments scattered about. But once the titular battle actually gets underway, ERFWORLD turns into a tightly-plotted war story that reads like an exercise in strategic thinking: we get to see Parson's tactical plans both before and during the siege, and Balder and Noguchi have a great knack for setting up the dominoes and tilting them over at precisely the right moment. An EXCELLENT start to what I'm sure will be an epic series.

* Ursula Vernon's DIGGER used to be restricted to paying subscribers over at Graphic Smash, but it went "public" a while back and I figure I'd give it a try. The art's lovely, but I thought the story was a bit too formulaic: to wit, a wombat named Digger accidentally tunnels into a distant, magical landscape and has to find her way home. It's done competently enough, I suppose, but this sort of story tends to hinge on an attachment to the characters, and I never warmed up to Vernon's cast. OKAY.

* The opposite is true of BOBWHITE: Magnolia Porter's characters are instantly likeable, though admittedly they're based on some very familiar archetypes (Marlene's the eccentric film student, Ivy's the disinterested artist with no ambition, and Cleo... Cleo needs Ritalin. Lots of Ritalin). So why is this VERY GOOD where DIGGER isn't? I think part of it has to do with the genre: you have to work a lot harder to make the inhabitants of a fantastic/magical world accessible to readers (especially if they're non-human characters), but "slice of life" comics like BOBWHITE and OCTOPUS PIE derive their strength from verisimilitude. I've had conversations with my friends that were a lot like this one. And that's probably why I've enjoyed what Porter's been doing so far.

* DUBIOUS TALES has been over for almost two years now, but it's still worth flagging, because Andrew James does some pretty interesting things in the space of five "books" (one of which is a text-only piece). At first glance, DUBIOUS TALES is a soap opera about a bunch of quirky college students living together somewhere in England. Darren's got a Greek tragedy mask stuck to his face, Caitlin claims to be a demon hunter, Gwilym has some pretty unorthodox ideas about theatre... they're all unusual, and James develops the complicated web of relationships even as he keeps the plot moving at a fairly rapid pace. What I enjoyed most about this series was that you never quite knew what to expect: the gang could be dealing with a perverted landlord one second and fleeing two-dimensional tin-foil demons the next, followed by brainwashing hypnotists from the Soviet Union. And while I would've loved to see more, at least James ended the story on a high note. VERY GOOD.

* It says a lot that even after nearly 150 strips, THE NON-ADVENTURES OF WONDERELLA still makes me laugh on a weekly basis. Whether it's guest-starring Patrick Stewart or Morgan Freeman, or exploring the profound question of what makes mankind unique or showing us the many, MANY flaws of time-travel, Justin Pierce keeps the funny coming. EXCELLENT.

Labels: Diana, webcomics

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Are you still trying to figure out how a man who once tried to sacrifice his nemesis to Magical Goblin People now seems to control the American government? Have you been stunned speechless at the sight of Bat-Signal Jazz Hands? Do you have the distinct impression that this is your daddy's Flash?

If the answer to any of the above is "YES MY GOD MAKE THE HURTING STOP", then you probably understand my current near-total apathy towards mainstream comics. And that's really why I haven't been as active here as I should be: every week I take home a bunch of comics, and I read them, and I find myself with absolutely nothing to say. We've even passed the point where creative failures are interesting enough to merit discussion: I had a lot to say about CIVIL WAR #7 despite it being one of the worst comics Marvel published that year, but Wolverine's Sword of Otaku? What-ever.

And so we return to the Webcomic Review! I let this project lapse a while back on account of Too Much Damn Work To Do, but in the words of Mark Hammill: "I'm tanned, I'm rested and I'm ready to give this town a wedgie again!"

Let's start with SKIN HORSE, the latest from webcomic mastermind Shaenon Garrity. Some of you may recall my high praise of Garrity's previous series, NARBONIC - one of the best webcomics I've had the pleasure of reading - and I'm glad to say that SKIN HORSE retains a lot of those strengths without feeling like a rehash.

As with NARBONIC, SKIN HORSE derives its humor from its delightfully madcap premise: the title refers to a government task force that deals with "nonhuman sapients", such as human/lion hybrids and opera-singing silverfish. The team consists of Sweetheart (a genetically-engineered canine), Unity (a zombie) and Tip (a crossdressing heterosexual therapist), and they constantly find themselves having to quell an uprising of Canadian werewolves or to placate a sentient attack helicopter addicted to "World of Warcraft".

It might take a while to warm up to the characters, because Garrity has avoided using the archetype of the "straight man" as a way of easing us into this world; even Tip, arguably the most grounded member of the cast, has his quirks and isn't at all phased by the rampant weirdness. But once you jump that hurdle, I defy you to not be amused by Sweetheart's penchant for goblin erotica or the misadventures at the Department of Irradiation.

The series has been running since January 2008, but every storyline so far has been self-contained (unlike the "Uber-Arc" that ran throughout NARBONIC). Obviously, this strategy has pros and cons: on the one hand, every arc is theoretically accessible on its own, so if you're pressed for time you could just start with the currently-in-progress Dead Dogs and fill in the backstory at your convenience. On the other hand, my #1 favorite moment of NARBONIC was that exact moment where all the pieces started fitting together, where Garrity's long-term plan was finally revealed. Now, it might be too early in the series' run to completely dismiss the possibility of a "bigger picture", but so far there haven't been many plot elements carried over from one storyline to the next.

Still, those are minor quibbles given the consistency of Garrity's artwork and her fourth-panel punchlines. A lot of craft goes into this comic - check the filenames of each strip and you'll find the Secret Origin of Tip Wilkins - and that's no small feat given its daily format (story strips are posted Monday through Saturday, with Sundays set aside for sketches and fan-art). An EXCELLENT series with plenty of potential to get even better over time.

Labels: Diana, webcomics

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Here's an interesting bit of synchronicity: just as I'm feeling a bit tired of comics, two of my old favorites stage a comeback. Insert Al Pacino/Godfather reference here...

EXILES #1: I may have mentioned that EXILES used to be one of my favorite series back when Judd Winick was writing it. I liked the Tony Bedard run too, warts and all. But then Chris Claremont took over, and... well, I'm pretty sure that if you hold his first issue in your hands and listen closely, you'll hear an eight-man band playing "Nearer My God To Thee". It was that bad.

Enter Jeff Parker, relaunching the book with a new #1, a new team, and a familiar premise with a new twist. I think the most important thing Parker brings to the table, right off the bat, is subtlety; after the electric-jackhammer stylings of his predecessor, it's refreshing to see simple narrative devices like foreshadowing being used effectively - for example, there's a mystery in this issue (hint: somebody might know more than they're saying), but Parker doesn't hang a neon sign that reads HERE IS A MYSTERY OMG.

Being the debut issue, there isn't much here by way of characterization: with the exception of the Panther, the Exiles seem more or less consistent with what you'd expect. But there's plenty of leeway for maneuvering, and Parker's track record leads me to believe he just might pull this off. I'm actually looking forward to the next issue, for the first time in a long time. GOOD.

TIMESTORM 2009-2099 #1: So that other favorite of mine? Marvel 2099. Well, half of it, anyway. I adored Peter David's SPIDER-MAN 2099, and DOOM 2099 was sort-of-okay during the John Francis Moore run but really took off with Warren Ellis, and X-MEN 2099 had no Wolverine (seriously, I want you guys to just stop for a second and imagine a X-Men series running for over two years with no feral Canadians at all), plus it put together an interesting and diverse bunch of mutants without ever doing the Great-Great-Grandson of Scott Summers bit.

So the line had a great run for a while, until it quite literally drowned in editorial interference and that was pretty much the end of it. Well, unless you count Robert Kirkman's attempt to revive the franchise in 2004 (which I don't because my God it was AWFUL but that's neither here nor there). And now it's 2009, and Brian Reed is trying to bring it back. Sort of.

Marvel's traditional stance on future timelines (especially dystopias) is that even if you avert whatever event created the World of Suck, said World will still exist in an alternate universe. From a marketing standpoint, that's a sensible approach: you can keep mining the popularity of those timelines long after the present-day story's moved on (case in point: "Days of Future Past" and the many, many, many spin-offs it's generated since 1981).

I mention this because that's not what Brian Reed does here. The 2099 of TIMESTORM has some familiar elements: Tyler Stone's still running Alchemax, Miguel O'Hara's around, Shakti Haddad is still Cerebra (though she's been boldly - and disturbingly - redesigned), etc. But the furniture's been rearranged too, and normally a writer would just handwave this as being a "different 2099" (which is what Kirkman ended up doing for the Marvel Knights story). Reed does one better: Tyler Stone is using time travel to rewrite the past, and every change causes a ripple effect that alters the "present" of 2099. Frankly, it's a very clever twist - it lets Reed rewrite and reconfigure whatever he wants while maintaining that sense of nostalgia, because as far as we readers know, anything that isn't consistent with the original is a result of Stone messing with the timeline.

Points off for using Wolverine, though. So... GOOD, and I hope this does well enough that we get an ongoing or two out of it.

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Mr. Kyle Baker, you got some 'splainin' to do.

I hate to start reviews with that God-awful cliche "I liked his old stuff better!" but for context's sake, WHY I HATE SATURN still makes me laugh. I say that because I think I picked up and read SPECIAL FORCES expecting the same kind of manic energy you'll find with Anne Merkel and her crazy sister, or with Larry running amok in the streets of New York in I DIE AT MIDNIGHT.

SPECIAL FORCES #4... did not make me laugh.

It may be that I'm just sick of politics-via-comics in general: in a medium where subtlety is the exception rather than the rule, I can't think of many instances where political/military criticism didn't come off as awkward and simplistic, where valid points are submerged under a wave of bile that aspires to be clever and falls far short of the mark (pick a Millar comic, any Millar comic).

Or it may be that SPECIAL FORCES seems to be making contradictory points: on the one hand, Felony and Zone represent an implicit accusation that the United States Army recruited people for the Iraq war who had no business on the battlefield. Baker helpfully attaches news articles describing the recruitment and eventual dismissal of an autistic teenager to demonstrate that there's a bit of truth in this fiction.

On the other hand, these "unfit soldiers" turn out to be as capable (if not moreso) of getting the job done. Doesn't that suggest that the Army was right to enlist them in the first place? If an autistic kid succeeds where entire squadrons of trained soldiers fail (in pretty embarrassing ways), that sends a very different message and doesn't quite match the critical tone Baker's aiming for.

But there's something more essential that's missing here. The situation in Iraq is no laughing matter, and yet I can't help wishing that SPECIAL FORCES had exhibited more of Baker's snark and wit - as it stands, it's pretty much just an EH story that tries to send a message far too aggressively to be successful.

X-MEN: NOIR #4 also came out this week, wrapping up Marvel's first foray into what seems to be a rising Noirverse (although I'm still curious as to how DAREDEVIL: NOIR will distinguish itself from Ed Brubaker's DAREDEVIL: POORLY-LIT URBAN CRIMEFIGHTING WITH FEMME FATALES, CORRUPT COPS AND CRIME SYNDICATES).

This sort of thing can be very tricky to pull off: the last time Marvel tried to import its universe to a different historical period/genre, we got 1602 and its spin-offs, most of which was spent playing Spot The Analogue.

Fortunately, Fred Van Lente avoids this trap by putting together a rather clever string of adaptations: I liked the idea of mutants being swapped out for sociopaths, with the Xavier/Magneto ideological schism taking on a decidedly more realistic dimension. I loved Van Lente's take on Anne-Marie (Rogue) and the resolution to her storyline. The Bolivar Trask/Sentinels prose story ends up with a different moral than you might be expecting.

In fact, the only problem I had with this miniseries is that the X-Men aren't the protagonists: the story's focalized through and narrated by a completely different character (who may or may not be an analogue for a mainstream Marvel figure, it's rather difficult to tell), and that leads us to a confusing last-minute twist ending that didn't really work for me. It's still VERY GOOD, though, and one of the few examples of a cross-genre experiment that successfully adapts superhero characters into other molds and conventions.

Labels: Diana

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NEW SAVAGE CRITICS #1
Written by Brian Hibbs
Art by Kate McMillan
Cover by Blogspot

A new epic begins here! Witness the rebirth of a super-team as Stonetuck, The Hyacinth, Uzumeri Yojimbo, Shan-Ti and Chris Eckert join the Savage Critics! The revelation of Norman Osborn's natural hair color in GOTHAM UNBOUND: THE GREAT PIE HEIST has rocked the universe to its core; as other thrilling secrets come to light, the Savage Critics reunite to unmask the true mastermind behind recent events. Who will live? Who will die? Who will receive the dreaded ASS Rating? Nothing will ever be the same again!

On sale Feb 14 • infinity pg, FC, $0.00 US

Welcome aboard, guys!

And now, a review.

ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL #17 brings the "sixth season" of ANGEL to a close. I was never a big fan of the series - David Boreanaz is about as sharp as lime Jello, and the later seasons had an awkward habit of getting all their female characters pregnant, crazy and dead (not always in that order). But I thought it'd be interesting to see what Joss Whedon had had in mind if the show hadn't been cancelled.

As it turns out, ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL makes for an interesting companion to the current "eighth season" of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER over at Dark Horse, in that the two series have taken the same premise - continuing the Sunnydale Saga past its conclusion - in very different directions.

BUFFY, for example, suffers from an overabundance of "cool" ideas: whether it's Joss Whedon or Drew Goddard or Steven DeKnight writing, what we get is a rapid sequence of interesting concepts - many of which couldn't have been televised even with a substantial CGI budget - but none of those ideas are explored in-depth. An average story arc of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is so compressed that it just runs from plot point A to plot point B, and I don't think there's enough characterization - Buffy, Willow, Xander and the others are just sort of there.

On the other hand, ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL has spent seventeen issues essentially telling one story: Los Angeles has been sucked into Hell after the events of the series finale, Angel's crew has scattered and the civilian population finds itself hunted in the streets by demons and vampires. Angel himself has become human, at the worst possible time.

Brian Lynch has basically taken the opposite approach to the BUFFY teams: seventeen issues on one storyline, no matter how expansive, is a bit much. In fact, despite the fact that the actual LA-in-Hell bit ended last issue, the emotional denouement in this epilogue still gets co-opted by Angel's ongoing feud with the demon lord Bruge. It wears a bit thin.

All that said, I still think Lynch does a better job with Whedon's characters than Whedon himself in recent months; in this issue, you've got Angel coping with his newfound popularity, a lovely posthumous moment for Fred and Wesley, Spike doing what he does best (and yet, at the same time, Lynch finally, mercifully moves past the juvenile "You Touched My Stuff" Angel and Spike routine), and Gunn... well, no spoilers, but there's some dramatically powerful closure there too.

Odd bit of trivia: both the BUFFY and ANGEL comics, either independently or by design (though how likely is that given that they're being produced by different companies?) have now done away with the whole secrecy angle, exposing the supernatural to the world. So Angel's an LA celebrity, and Harmony has turned public opinion against Slayers simply by being an undead Paris Hilton, etc. It's such a paradigm shift that I have to wonder whether Whedon was planning to do that during either series' run; it would've redefined everything.

So I'm going to go with a GOOD for this epilogue and a high OKAY for the series, because it really did take way too long to get where it was going.

Labels: Diana

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I can still remember, how the comics used to make me smile...

These days it's mostly just yawns or facepalms (or, in the case of FINAL CRISIS #6, both at the same time). I promised Brian I'd step up my contributions to the Savage Critics, which, given that I've had the consistency of Damon Lindelof lately, that's totally fair. Except I then spent two weeks scouring the new releases, looking for anything interesting enough to talk about; hell, I'd settle for some controversial news items, but all I've got is JEFF PARKER'S ON EXILES:



And I seriously doubt anyone cares about that except me.

It may just be that January's a slow month, and the only noteworthy new launches tie into either DARK REIGN or FINAL CRISIS, and I'm pretty much just waiting for them to be over at this point. So rather than analyze a specific issue in depth, I'm going to run some old-school bullet points this week.

UNCANNY X-MEN ANNUAL #2: You know, ever since Matt Fraction went solo on UNCANNY X-MEN, the book's felt a bit... flat to me. It's basically turned into a string of unrelated subplots that don't seem to go anywhere: Magneto teams up with the High Evolutionary, then they disappear for six months while Madelyne Pryor resurfaces and starts putting her own team together, only no one seems to care about that because Colossus has gone AWOL and Emma's having a Moment of Angsty Introspection (tm Tom Welling). It all amounts to a rather disjointed Big Picture, which is pretty much the same problem with this Annual - the story's a sloppy mess even by X-Men standards, constantly jumping back and forth to retcon a link between Namor and Emma Frost (ostensibly because of the whole PURPLE REIGN thing), and it's just... I have no idea what Fraction's trying to do here. Maybe it's an attempt to make White Queen-era Emma more sympathetic, but I've had enough frou-frou apologia from the nice folks over at HEROES. And the dialogue... "You're not my prince. Do you always smell like that?" "Yes. Do you?" I say thee EH.

X-FACTOR #39: Peter David gets a cookie for thinking up a rather inventive way out of the whole parenthood storyline. Unfortunately, the end result takes us to a rather conventional place, a place that's become such a tired cliche in the superhero genre that I can't help thinking it would've been a gutsier, more creative move to see things through, so to speak. Even the sharpest character moments, like Siryn's reaction immediately after the Big Twist, are muted because they're so familiar, bordering on tedious. So that cookie has to be, I don't know, bran or something like that. Not as much fun as chocolate chip, but it's OKAY to chew on for a while.

WAR MACHINE #2: Wow. This... really hasn't gotten any better, has it? I mean, I was willing to write the first issue off as a fluke, because I still think of Greg Pak as the guy who wrote PHOENIX: ENDSONG and that cute WARLOCK miniseries with the surprise ending. But this is just... page 7, that splash of War Machine with half of North America's arsenal strapped to his back? That's straight out of the Dark Ages, people. We're talking Rob Liefeld pecs-out-to-there guns-guns-guns Dark Ages. And then on page 17, War Machine... turns into a tank? I have no idea. Though that makes it a nice tie-in to the TRANSFORMERS movie, which was also about stuff getting blown up and not much else. AWFUL, because I can understand Golden Age retro and I can understand Silver Age retro, but why anyone would want to go back to the days of tin-foil radioactive sub-atomic tri-fold variant covers is beyond me.

STARSLIP: Technically not a new release (or, you know, a comic) but I'd like to point out that Kris Straub has just one-upped DC with his latest storyline by: A) destroying the universe, B) permanently displacing his cast into an alternate timeline two years in the past, which means everything you know is not wrong because it did happen and the characters are now scrambling to rewrite history, and C) blowing up the universe actually had a purpose, as it gave Straub an in-story reason to go from this to this. (Okay, that's technically a three-up.) And to top it all off, he's kept me laughing the whole damn way. EXCELLENT.

Labels: Diana

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Obligatory 'splanation for my month-long imitation of Susan Richards: I'm writing my graduate thesis, which means less Ed Brubaker on my desk and more Jack Kerouac. And while there's probably some merit to comparing ON THE ROAD to SECRET INVASION/FINAL CRISIS, I'd much rather keep my studies and my fun-time separate.

Anyway, I finally clawed my way out of Limbo, though it seems I may have accidentally unleashed a great evil back into the world:



So, you know, sorry about that.

And before I get to reviewing: House to Astonish. Why? Because Paul O'Brien and Alistair Kennedy, that's why. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Katz.

Comics time!

There's really no way I can talk about BATMAN: CACOPHONY #1 with anything even approaching a straight face, so without further ado:

Oh my GOD.
Becky, look at that dialogue.
It is so BAD.
It sounds like one of those Millar books.
But, you know, who understands those Millar books?
They only buy it because the women look like total prostitutes, 'kay?
I mean, his dialogue is just so BAD.
I can't believe it's so dumb, it's like, OUT THERE.
I mean, gross! Look!
It's just so... CRAP!

Do us all a favor, Mr. Smith: get thee to a nunnery. Or at the very least go back to film so we can press the mute button and not have to watch Batman channel G.I. Rabbi. Honestly, I know it's fashionable to dislike Kevin Smith these days, and the last thing I want to do is look like I'm jumping on the Hate Wagon just because I feel like it, but this comic... ye Gods, this comic. It's tired, it's cliched, it's downright horrific (because there are some things in this life I never want to see, and the Joker getting bummed by another supervillain is way up near the top of that list). It's the sort of thing that makes you stop and wonder: how the hell did this reach publication? Did no one, at any point in the long and complex process of creating a comic, stop to think that charging four dollars for this piece of dreck is not going to help DC or the comics industry?

And I realize this reaction may be a bit over-the-top for a book that isn't Frank Miller-bad or Chuck-Austen bad, but dammit, we've allowed the mainstream to reach a point where quality and price aren't just detached from one another, they're inversely proportionate. $3.99 for mediocre tripe? Why?

This comic made me think of Kevin Smith as the pushing-40 dad asking today's kids "what's hip". And unfortunately, these kids are precisely the type of idiot that thinks Mark Millar is a pinnacle of talent. So that's exactly what we get: shallow "shock"-oriented scenes like Zsasz's Final Frontier of Self-Mutilation, and dialogue that's completely realistic if you happen to live next-door to a playground for psychotic toddlers.

My only consolation is that the Vegas odds have the rest of this comic disappearing into the night before Smith really gets his groove on. But in the meantime, Brian, I suggest you keep this comic far away from ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN THE BOY WONDER. Together they could tear another hole in the universe, and next time it'll be the Backstreet Boys making a comeback...

Labels: Diana

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So... does anyone remember Ye Olde Days when Issue #1 meant a start, rather than a restart?

Yeah, me neither.

TERROR TITANS #1: As is usually the way with DCU titles, I have absolutely no idea what's going on here, so strictly in terms of the grade I'll go with NO RATING. What I can tell, based on the content, is that we're looking at more evidence of Embiggened Bloodening - teenage superheroes are abducted by teenage supervillains (who seem to be descendants of previous villains, which I'll admit is a nice twist on the original Titans), drugged and thrown into an arena where they fight to the death. Why? Damned if I know, though it's connected to FINAL CRISIS (I know, what a shock, right?). But more to the point, the thing that really got me about this issue is something I've seen pop up more and more often in DC books: the sense of brutality for its own sake. TERROR TITANS #1 isn't as bloody as, say, a Geoff Johns comic, but it's not much fun to read either. And what's more, it feels tacked-on somehow, like there's a sign over Dan DiDio's office door that says "Your Body Count Must Be This High To Write This Comic."

TOP 10: SEASON TWO #1: Okay, so BEYOND THE FARTHEST PRECINCT didn't happen? I can live with that. Even though the original TOP 10 was one of my favorite miniseries, it's been a while since I read it, and I had to go back and refresh my memory because Zander and Kevin Cannon pick up pretty much exactly where Alan Moore left off almost eight years ago - the mess with Commissioner Ultima is referred to as "recent trouble", Irma is still grieving for her dead partner Sung Li, Smax and Toybox are still on Smax's homeworld. I had my doubts about this one - conventional knowledge says it's never a good idea to follow Alan Moore on anything unless you're Neil Gaiman or possibly Jamie Delano. But I'm very pleased to see that the Cannons have captured the spirit of TOP 10 perfectly: at its core, it's a series that takes human problems and pokes fun at them by applying superpowers, so you get "crossover-dressing" where superhero Top Flight secretly dresses up in a different (very, very scary) costume and calls himself Green Bolt; an old man is selling Shazam-esque Magic Words to kids; and, of course, we have the Big Picture murder mystery, much like the Sentinels case in Moore's run. Now, based on all the comparisons I've made, it's easy to see how SEASON TWO could be considered derivative, but changing the basic formula isn't necessary here: it's enough that the Cannons come up with new concepts (like the aforementioned Magic Word peddler) that run along the same lines as the Galactapuss/Cosmouse Secret Crisis War of times past - that's the sort of clever game that makes this issue a VERY GOOD sequel.

NO HERO #1: You might think this doesn't belong in a post about #1's that aren't really First Issues, but so help me, if I have to play another round of Spot That Ellisism, I'm going to scream and vent my rage like the guy on the cover. Look, a bunch of "superheroes" wearing gas masks! And they fight crime! Violently! And they got their powers through DRUGS! And there's a bunch of historical quotes so it all looks So Very Relevant and Important! And our protagonist is So Damn Mad about the State of the World that he punches out his litterbox! That's how mad he is! And there's a Super-Suicide Girl who prefers texting to talking! AWFUL, because I've seen Ellis do this routine so many times it's not even funny anymore. It's like perpetual deja vu by now.

Labels: Diana

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Because all the cool kids are doing it!

In no particular order, my 50 favorite moments in comics:

1. SWAMP THING #56, "My Blue Heaven": Stranded on a distant planet, the Swamp Thing recreates his hometown and is content to live an empty fantasy until a replica of John Constantine starts voicing some inconvenient truths. It's even creepier when you realize that every character on the Blue Planet is really just Swamp Thing throwing his voice.

2. BOX OFFICE POISON: Towards the end of the book, Hildy tells Ed about her little sister Marlys. It turns out the reader has already met Marlys in an earlier, seemingly-unrelated part of the story... a part that becomes incredibly tragic once the missing context is in place.

3. WHY I HATE SATURN: Anne sets out for California to find her sister, only to get hit by the Deluxe Edition of Murphy's Law. If it can go wrong, it will. If it can't go wrong, it will anyway.

4: NIKOLAI DANTE, "Amerika": After a decade of watching Tsar Vladimir commit atrocity after atrocity, Nikolai reaches his breaking point and stabs the Conqueror, only to be struck down a moment later by Konstantin.

5. SPIDER-MAN 2099 #25, "Truth Hurts": One of the better examples of the "everything you know is wrong" plot twist - Miguel learns about his mother and Tyler Stone, and the whole story gets turned on its head.

6. FANTASTIC FOUR #524, "Tag": The Fantastic Four are racing across Manhattan to reclaim their lost powers, but Reed has sabotaged Ben's equipment, intending to become the Thing himself and leave Ben human. But Ben figures it out and swaps his gadget with Reed's, unwilling to let his best friend take the fall for him.

6. STARMAN #80, "'Arrivederci, Bon Voyage, Goodbye": Jack Knight leaves Opal City.

7. CATWOMAN #19, "No Easy Way Down": Still reeling from the aftermath of the Black Mask's attack, Selina gets drunk and decides to rob a museum, until Batman talks her out of it.

8. RUNAWAYS #16, "The Good Die Young": Alex is revealed as the Pride's mole. Quite literally the last character I suspected.

9. INCREDIBLE HULK: FUTURE IMPERFECT: The Hulk defeats the Maestro by sending him back to the gamma bomb detonation, turning Bruce Banner's entire history into an ouroboros.

10. DAREDEVIL #182, "She's Alive": Convinced that Elektra faked her death, Matt digs up her coffin, expecting it to be empty. It isn't.

11. FRAY #8: Melaka kills Urkonn, her mentor and friend, when she realizes he murdered Loo to get her to accept her destiny.

12. DEADENDERS #16, "Smashing Time": Even after the universe rewrites itself, Noah (formerly Beezer) has a moment of distant recognition when he finds an abandoned scooter in the middle of the road. For a split-second, he can almost remember the friends and the life he left behind.

13. BONE #37, "Harvest Moon": In a genuinely creepy scene, a disoriented Thorn pulls her cloak over her head, looking exactly like the defeated Hooded One. It was ultimately a red herring, but that doesn't change the "brr" factor.

14. BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: Jarred out of a vegetative state by the return of his nemesis, the Joker's first words are "Batman. Darling."

15. SPIDER-GIRL #41, "Funeral For A Fiend": Normie Osborn (Harry's son) stops by the hospital to visit Mary-Jane Parker. As he turns to leave, he bumps into Peter - and for a moment, Peter only sees the Goblin and Normie only sees Spider-Man. Then Peter offers his hand; a moment later, they embrace, finally laying the past to rest.

16. TOP TEN #11, "His First Day on the New Job": This is such an Alan Moore thing to do: Joe Pi, the latest officer to join the Neopolis police department, is a robot. He's also the most human character in the series. When Joe realizes Irma Geddon's kids were attached to the late Sung Li, her previous partner, Joe decides to cheer them up with a trick of his own.

17. NEW X-MEN #149, "Phoenix In Darkness": In many ways, I see this as the quintessential post-Claremont Magneto story - "I am your inner star, Erik. I am the conscience you can never silence. I will never let you be."

18. HELLBOY: THE RIGHT HAND OF DOOM: Igor Bromhead has bound Hellboy using his true name, Anung un Rama; moments later, the demon Ualac steals the Crown of the Apocalypse off Hellboy's head. Things seem pretty bleak until Hellboy is informed that "Anung un Rama" quite literally means "he who wears the crown" - that no longer applies to him, so it's not his name. The spell is broken, and much butt-kicking ensues.

19. DEADPOOL #11, "With Great Power Comes Great Coincidence": Deadpool and Blind Al time-travel into a Stan Lee/John Romita Sr. issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. The whole issue's hilarious, but special mention goes to Deadpool's reaction to Harry's (and Norman's) "unique" hairstyle.

20. ASTONISHING X-MEN #15, "Torn": Cassandra Nova turns Wolverine into a six-year-old girl. Awesome.

21. THE AUTHORITY #12, "Outer Dark": The death of Jenny Sparks.

22. GRAVITY #5: His nemesis, the Black Death, has been defeated, but Greg Willis still doesn't feel like a superhero... until Spider-Man stops by to congratulate him on a job well-done.

23. ULTRA: SEVEN DAYS #8: Having been told by a psychic that she would find her true love in seven days, Pearl reaches the end of day 7 alone. When she realizes it's not going to happen, she maintains her composure until someone asks her for the time, at which point she starts crying.

24. BIZARRO COMICS: Mxyzptlk browses through the Hall of Superman Spin-Offs.

25. VEILS: Vivian discovers the truth behind the story of Rosalind and the Sultan.

26. WATCHMEN: The whole book is one big Favorite Moment for me, but if I have to pick a scene, I'll go with Ozymandias' revelatory monologue in the penultimate issue, coupled with the immortal "I did it thirty-five minutes ago." I'll bet you guys anything the studios will rewrite that "downer" ending so that Rorschach and the others save the day.

27. Y: THE LAST MAN #30, "Ring of Truth": Hero faces her demons.

28. COMMON GROUNDS #4, "Time of Their Lives": Forty years after their last battle, Blackwatch and Commander Power meet again. But they're not who you think they are. That last panel with the newspaper clipping turns the whole story on its head.

29. ALIAS #28, "Purple": It's a complete deus ex machina, but I can't help smiling whenever I see that double-page spread of Jessica punching the Purple Man square in the mouth.

30. SANDMAN #37, "I Woke Up and One of Us Was Crying": Barbara defiantly crosses out Alvin's name on the tombstone, and - in Tacky Flamingo lipstick - writes WANDA instead.

31. SUPERMAN: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAN OF TOMORROW?: With the Fortress of Solitude under siege and Superman preparing for his last stand, Jimmy and Lana sneak out to fight the gathered villains themselves. "We're only second-stringers, Jimmy, but we'll show 'em... Nobody loved him better than us. Nobody!"

32. ASTRO CITY #0.5, "The Nearness of You": Michael's decision to remember Miranda puts your typical Crisis-esque multiversal time-travel epic in a completely human context.

33. FABLES #55, "Over There": Having heard the Snow Queen's plans for the conquest of Earth, Pinocchio lays out a surprisingly vivid counter-scenario where the human race unites with the Fables and tears the Adversary's Empire apart.

34. H-E-R-O #4: Jerry finally does something heroic, after losing his superpowers.

35. EXILES #34, "A Second Farewell": Mariko gets another chance with Mary.

36. DOCTOR STRANGE: THE OATH #5: Doctor Strange and Night Nurse get together. Aww, they're so cute!

37. MY FAITH IN FRANKIE #3: "You've broken Commandments One through Three, Seven and Nine. I'm taking you down, Frankie."

38. THE ADVENTURES OF BARRY WEEN: MONKEY TALES #6: Barry jumps into the past to save Sara's life; when he realizes he's succeeded and everything's back to normal, he heads into the kitchen and promptly bursts into tears. It's a powerful reminder that, despite his intellect, Barry's still just a kid.

39. EMPIRE #5: Golgoth realizes his daughter Delfi has become as corrupt and monstrous as he is. So he snaps her neck.

40. MARTHA WASHINGTON: GIVE ME LIBERTY: President Howard Nissen tears down Cabrini Green at Martha's request.

41. THE BIRTHDAY RIOTS: Troy Adams' death shakes Max to his core - when the rioters surround his car the next day, Max just opens the door and lets the crowd beat him, in penance for his betrayal.

42. SUPERGIRL #79: Seconds after she decides to live Kara Zor-El's life, Linda Danvers chafes at all the "secret weapon" talk and goes public, changing everything.

43. LOKI #1: It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it thing, but Rob Rodi suggests a different angle on the Loki/Thor rivalry: in a flashback, we see them as teenagers, and Loki idly carves a heart in the dirt as he watches Thor.

44. MAUS: Not so much a "favorite" moment as one that haunted me for a long time; Vladek describes a particular instance in the Nazi purges where they murder crying children. Despite the fact that it's cats and mice - or maybe because of that - it's an image that stuck.

45. THE SURROGATES #5: Rather than face the reality outside her apartment, Greer's wife kills herself. The real world has a price.

46. ZENITH PHASE 3: Everyone's pretty shocked that the self-absorbed, spoiled superbrat Zenith sacrificed his life to save the Multiverse. Turns out he didn't: that was his mirror-universe double Vertex, the guy who actually was a hero.

47. CRIMINAL #5: For a split-second, you think Leo might have made it in time to save Greta. But, of course, he doesn't.

48. I, JOKER: The unnamed protagonist finds the last recording of Bruce Wayne prior to his death.

49. V FOR VENDETTA: Valerie's letter.

50. WE3 #3: 1 starts howling and wailing for 3 as it goes off to face 4 alone. Breaks my heart every time.

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Oh, NYX. You came and you took without giving. So I sent you away.

Fat lot of good that did.

Even after three years, NYX is still on my Top Five Embarrassing Marvel Moments list: a 7-issue series written by the EIC himself, with delays between issues that varied from nine months to over a year. The jokes would practically write themselves: it took Lance Bass less time to come out, we'd have to send our grandchildren to pick up NYX #8, Quesada was retconning every issue as he wrote it... the whole thing was one big fuster-cluck.

And now, here we are with NYX: NO WAY HOME #1, and all that baggage is... well, still around, really.

So what do we have here? It's a six-issue miniseries by Marjorie Liu and Kalman Andrasofszky. While this is (as far as I know) Liu's first work in comics, she wrote an X-Men novel called "Dark Mirror" a few years ago - it was kinda-sorta okay but lacked any real connection to the characters. It's pretty much the same here, but before we get to that...

Okay, here's the thing. NYX, at the time, was part of a whole movement at Marvel to deliver "edgy" variations on familiar properties. The high concept for NYX, as I recall it (it's been three years and, quite frankly, it's not worth the few seconds it'd take me to research - again, we'll get to that in a bit), was a different perspective on the Marvel Universe's mutant population. Not even street-level, like Bendis' ALIAS; more like gutter-level, as far below Charles Xavier's watchful eye as you can get. Of course, Marvel isn't very good at being deliberately edgy, so you got things like X-23 being a prostitute.



So Liu's not starting out from a great place here. And, more importantly, Marvel's not exactly into "edgy" material anymore. You can tell as much from page 6, where Kiden seems to be injecting invisible heroin into her arm (although, bizarrely enough, two panels later we get a full-frontal shot of Kiden slicing up her arm like an emogirl who's just discovered that Penance used to be Speedball).

Now, the research thing. You know, I've gotten pretty used to recap pages as a quick way of getting up-to-speed on any given series. And I'm honestly surprised there isn't one here: again, these characters haven't been around in three years, and that's assuming someone was still reading when NYX #7 came out in 2005. I'd certainly given up by then. Liu tries to give us a brief summary of what happened, but that doesn't tell us about any of the other characters. And because I don't know anything about the other characters, and there's no room in 22 pages to reintroduce all the players, I'm pretty much not interested in the cast.

(In fairness, this is a problem Liu had before - "Dark Mirror" ultimately failed to really get into the characters' heads, they were all written in a very generic and middling tone, which is pretty much what we get here as well. The characters are just sort of... there.)

Now, it's altogether possible that Liu and Andrasofszky will carve out a halfway decent story from this mess - they've got five issues to go, and the set-up is ostensibly finished (as opposed to Quesada's run, in which six of the seven issues introduced new characters to the "team"). But we're off to a EH start, because I think what this comic really needed was a reason to care about these specific characters and to be invested in their story, and it doesn't deliver that.

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Every now and then, I go back to books I've dropped and re-evaluate them. It's my way of trying to keep an open mind, because as a critic (especially a comics critic) it's way too easy to go from this:


To this:



So with that in mind, I found myself picking up the latest issue of a series I'd stopped reading over a year ago.

The nice thing about Marvel comics in general is the handy recap page that kicks off every issue of practically every series. Case in point: I hadn't even been remotely interested in the events of NEW EXILES since I dropped the book, but even though we're eight issues into the reboot, the plot was totally accessible. Well, insofar as it pertains to the series itself, anyway. I'll get to that in a bit.

NEW EXILES #8 is part two of a story where the French and British Empires are at war, and and the Exiles intervene because this particular reality is crucial to a whole section of the multiverse. Meanwhile, Psylocke is having dreams of Slaymaster killing about two dozen alternates of herself. And then she meets OGUN (emphasis Claremont's).


Yes. Ogun. The magical spirit guy that likes to possess women's bodies. Last seen in 2001, but, of course, it's really Ogun from the 1985 KITTY PRYDE AND WOLVERINE, written by... well, I'm sure you can guess.

Strike one: obscure characters busting out of the Claremont Historical Archive to remind us all why we were happy to see them leave the first time around.

We abruptly jump into a five-page monologue by an Atlantean Gambit who sounds like a preteen Aquaman on speed. It's absolutely painful to read: dense, overly verobse, obvious, using a hundred words to beat into the ground a concept that could be communicated in ten. So much of comics is about "showing", but Claremont seems to think he's getting paid by the word here, because all he does - all he does - is "tell". Atlantean Gambit just goes on and on about how lovely the water is, and how weird New York technology is, and how he's lucky his body is super-strong so he can survive cannon fire... ugh.

Strike two: Blah, blah, blah. Yes, Psylocke, I can see Ogun got the drop on you, Tom Grummett's art is helpfully depicting him whooshing behind you and grabbing your arm - I don't need a mid-chokehold thought bubble telling me "He moved so fast, I never even saw him coming!"

Now, I'll give Claremont credit where it's due, since that happens so rarely: it's nice to see an alternate reality scenario that takes its cue from "real" history as opposed to Marvel history - the high concept here is that the French won the Napoleonic Wars. Oddly enough, such a huge change in the history of the world has nevertheless produced Storm, Ka-Zar, Emma Frost and "Force-X" (eww).

Strike three: to quote Maxwell Smart, missed it by thaaaat much. Claremont can occasionally come up with seeds of interesting concepts, but they never, ever turn out to be everything they could've been.

So... yeah, the reasons I dropped the book are still pretty much in effect here, and there aren't any visible signs of improvement on the horizon. CRAP, and I guess I'll just wait for the next guy to come along.

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It's Marvel's turn in the hot seat...

IMMORTAL IRON FIST #16 wraps up the Ed Brubaker/Matt Fraction run (though Brubaker apparently checked out two months ago, because he wasn't credited for this issue or #15). As I've said before, IMMORTAL IRON FIST made a big impression on me, mainly because I'd never been interested in Danny Rand or the kung-fu-comics genre he represented until now. There was something new and intriguing about this particular interpretation, and I think a lot of it has to do with the way Brubaker and Fraction expanded the concept of Iron Fist into a trans-generational, trans-national identity. And something else began to emerge: not only was Danny Rand not the only Iron Fist, but pretty much every predecessor (with the possible exception of Orson Randall) did a better job of it than he did. The stories of Bei Bang-Wen and Wu Ao-Shi aren't just there to parallel Danny's life, they reposition the present-day Iron Fist as a neophyte, as someone who isn't the master expert of kung-fu mysticism in the Marvel Universe. The whole dynamic of the character - as I saw him, anyway - changed, because suddenly he's got so much to learn and there's actually a direction he needs to follow, and there's room for the character to grow and change.

Which he has, and this issue finally hits the pause button on the non-stop face-kicking so the dust can settle and the characters can come to the forefront. In the aftermath of the Ultimate Tournament of Fiery Bone-Crunching, Danny's re-evaluating his life and his relationships with Luke and Misty, and there's an appropriate sense of melancholy attached to that because this is both an ending and a new beginning, in that this issue also sets up the upcoming Duane Swierczynski run very clearly: the Living Weapons are running across New York, the question of the Eighth City is still up in the air, and there's a rather nasty prophecy uncovered at the very end that will probably play out in the coming months.

So... VERY GOOD, because the timing was impeccable: this series really needed a calm character piece in-between the crazy action sequences, and now that we've had it, we can move on. Will I be checking out IMMORTAL IRON FIST #17? Not sure... Swierczynski hasn't exactly knocked my socks off on CABLE. We'll see, I guess.

We are now leaving the realm of anything even remotely connected to The Good. Don't say I didn't warn you.

The last time I reviewed a Joss Whedon comic, I really tried to avoid discussing the lateness issue, despite the fact that it could (and probably did) affect the way you'd read the comic in question. I'm not going to cut RUNAWAYS #30 the same slack, because there's no doubt in my mind that the delays played a huge part in how crushingly disappointing this finale turned out to be.

See, here's the thing: Joss Whedon's run, in the final analysis, amounts to six issues of an absolutely mundane and unimaginative storyline, in which there are X-Men and Punisher and God-knows-what-else analogues in 1907 for no clear reason that I can see; New York is apparently blown up but gets all better in the future; a new kid joins the Runaways and good lord she's more annoying than the original Bendis version of Layla Miller. And at the end of the day it all goes back to normal.

I'm in "dude, what the hell?" mode here. I may have had problems with the way ASTONISHING X-MEN ended, but there was plenty of good to offset that. Here... well, honestly, there's that one crack Molly makes about Klara's "marital duties", and that's about it. I'm having issues with Whedon's characterization of the Runaways, with the vast number of disposable secondary characters, with the anticlimactic ending (so, wait, it was all about that Irish ditz after all? Boo-urns!). And, yes, in this case the delays really aren't justified, because I can't see anything here that would require a six-month story to last over a year. CRAP.

And finally, YOUNG AVENGERS PRESENTS #6 is a perfect example of how the number of chefs is irrelevant when none of them are willing to turn to the next page of the cookbook.

Here's the deal: I loved Heinberg's YOUNG AVENGERS. The high concept of legacy characters stealing other legacies was wonderfully subversive, because it twisted around the whole "Teen Titans" formula - Teen Hulk is really linked to Captain Marvel, Teen Thor to the Scarlet Witch, Teen Captain America to Isaiah Bradley rather than Steve Rogers. No one is who you expect them to be.

And then Heinberg did what most TV/movie writers do when they get into comics: he disappeared. And here we are, cooling our heels two years later, waiting for Godot to turn up.

Now, on the one hand, I can certainly understand Joe Quesada's reluctance to continue the story without Heinberg. He did a really good job with the characters, it was a great run, and Heinberg had some interesting ideas for the "second season". Plus, there are so few writers at Marvel who'd really be up to the task of handling this particular book. On the other hand, conventional knowledge says the longer these kids are in publishing limbo, the less popular any future appearances will be. So what we've been getting for the past two years is a series of meaningless filler that doubles as exposition infodumps just in case you've forgotten (or never knew) the basics.

And this is exactly what neutralizes any possible interest in YOUNG AVENGERS PRESENTS. Despite the impressive list of writers and artists involved, all we had here was a strict, formulaic pattern applied again and again with virtually no change: a Young Avenger meets someone connected to their origins, they have a long and meaningful chat, the end. Patriot talks to Bucky about race in America; Hulkling gets to meet his "father"; Wiccan and Speed look for Wanda in all the wrong places and find Master Pandemonium instead (don't ask because I don't know) and so on. It's all very dull, because by definition, these writers can't do anything that could potentially conflict with Heinberg's intentions (I get this mental image of Quesada doing the whole Sitcom Mom routine where he stares out a window for hours, and when Heinberg walks in he starts screaming "Where have you been?! Do you know what time it is?! I was worried sick!").

The problem with that is YOUNG AVENGERS only ran for twelve issues, and to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there's not a whole lot of there there. So YOUNG AVENGERS PRESENTS and the other place-holder miniseries are just spinning their wheels in a very, very small circle. Do you know what reading over a hundred pages of familiar exposition can do to a person?


So, yeah, I'm going to go with AWFUL because at least they're trying, whereas it looks like Whedon was totally sleeping on the job.

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More evidence that the '90s were made of LIES: summertime has arrived, and contrary to the Fresh Prince's promises, there is no groove, nobody looks good in 125% humidity, and if you're dumb enough to dance in the open while the sun's up, you deserve the inevitable dehydration and/or dissolution into a puddle of skin-colored goo.

As if that weren't enough, June was a seriously weird month for comics - I read nothing but 2000AD for three weeks (new Nikolai Dante story), and suddenly almost every single series I'm following has an issue out on the 25th. To which I say:




CROSSING MIDNIGHT #19 marks the unfortunate end of the latest ongoing series by Mike Carey and Jim Fern. I liked this one - Vertigo's done a lot with British and American mythologies, and it was a nice change of pace to apply that same exploratory approach and lovely artwork to the Japanese mythscape. Of course, the direct market being what it is, there was no way this series could've lasted more than two years; that said, it's still disappointing that CROSSING MIDNIGHT ends on such an unsatisfactory note. It's pretty much the same pattern most premature cancellations follow: we get a compressed finale that skips through the last act, sacrificing any emotional resonance or genuinely surprising plot twists for a quick, straightforward wrap-up. Only in this case, there is no wrap-up because we get a last-page cliffhanger, and that's the sort of thing that really gets on my nerves - the axe dropped on this series months ago, and the least Carey could've done was deliver a real conclusion to the story. Writers have a responsibility to provide closure for those readers who stuck around to the very end; it doesn't even have to be good closure (see: HARD TIME). But if I'd known CROSSING MIDNIGHT would fizzle out with an OKAY non-ending, I wouldn't have kept buying it for nineteen months.

Sticking with Vertigo, Matt Wagner and Amy Reeder Hadley kick off a new ongoing with MADAME XANADU #1. I wasn't quite sure what to expect here: Wagner's done some amazing work (recent Hunter Rose stories aside), and I didn't know anything about the titular character, so it was worth checking out. And... well, I'm underwhelmed. Something about this issue just doesn't work: the dialogue's stilted even by Arthurian standards ("Grant me this boon, oh generous elm! Thanks be for your sacrifice, leafy grandfather. May the winds spread your seeds far and wide") and there's a guest appearance by one of the most irritating characters in the DCU, the Phantom Stranger, whose entire purpose in any story is to hang around and drop cryptic comments before disappearing. I came away feeling like I'd seen all this before, from the druidic tree-hugging to Merlin doing his Mrs. Robinson thing with Nimue, and while I'm aware that it's only a prelude and that the main story moves out of the Arthurian setting, I honestly couldn't find anything here to make me continue reading. EH and better luck next time, I suppose.

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You know, there are times I recall - quite clearly - how excited X-Men readers were at the news that Joss Whedon would be succeeding Grant Morrison on NEW X-MEN. Granted, that's not exactly how it went down, but thematically, ASTONISHING X-MEN was very much the next chapter in the story Morrison had started. And Whedon's run had plenty of high points: Colossus' comeback was simple and touching, "Torn" was one of the best team-wrecking exercises I've read, and Whedon's characterization was spot-on for his entire team.

And now here we are, at the end of a twenty-five issue run, precisely four years to the week that ASTONISHING X-MEN #1 came out. I've just finished reading GIANT-SIZE ASTONISHING X-MEN, and I don't want to talk about delays, or continuity issues, or projections regarding the upcoming Ellis run. I want to talk about the story. So, obviously, here be spoilers.

It's difficult to avoid comparing ASTONISHING X-MEN and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, despite the fact that it's been done ad nauseum. I'm not suggesting it's a one-for-one analogy, as if to say that Kitty is Buffy and Peter is Angel and so on, but rather that my expectations of the story were based on the typical Whedon season structure: there's a Bigger Picture behind each individual arc and we can't see it until the very end. That's part of what made BUFFY so interesting to me during its early years, that end-point revelation where all the pieces fit together. It's easy to get used to that, to the extent that when the pieces stopped fitting together in the series' later years? Diana smash.

But what happens if the pieces fit, and the Bigger Picture just isn't compelling? Well, you get GIANT-SIZE ASTONISHING X-MEN.

Here's the thing: on a purely technical level, GIANT-SIZE ASTONISHING X-MEN does what it's supposed to do - we get callbacks to earlier emotional points (that last shot of Peter with his hand on his chest), we get the Chekhov principle where various guns introduced in earlier acts go off (the Sentinel from "Dangerous", the end of Hisako's rite of passage, the "truth" about Abby Brand). But it's all so underwhelming, not very "Giant-Size" at all. Everything more or less adds up but the sum just doesn't impress.

Well, that's not quite true, is it? Because Danger just disappears after an obligatory cameo, and Cassandra Nova is presumably still on the loose, and Kitty Pryde is written off in an incredibly open-ended way... I'd think it was all set-up for the next writer, but Warren Ellis doesn't have the best track record for picking up where his predecessors leave off, and even if he did, there's more set-up here than closure.

And on top of that? It's not even good set-up. Kitty is written out in one of the most contrived, convoluted scenarios I've ever seen, with some technobabble about being fused to a giant bullet, the sort of scenario that pulls you right out of the story because it doesn't make any kind of sense. What's worse, Whedon falls into the same trap that's made Joe Quesada's career of late, as once again "magic" proves to be the bane of storytelling. Shockingly, Dr. Strange fubars the juju and everyone drops into a fantasy sequence that would've been effective if it had meant the return of Cassandra, but ends up being backlash because the Retaliator is magically shielded. Somehow. In a way that may or may not have something to do with Illyana Rasputin. This is the point where I just shrug my shoulders and move on.

So here we are, after four years of waiting for the story to play itself out. Was it worth it? Not really, no. ASTONISHING X-MEN turned out to be an OKAY run with some VERY GOOD moments and an EH finish, but sadly, I don't think it ever went farther than that.

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Well, I can't stay away from the Big Two forever, so let's check in and see what Marvel and DC have for us this week!

I must've been possessed by the Great Cornholio to think I could make sense of DC UNIVERSE ZERO. Never in my entire life have I ever felt so excluded by a comic book - they might as well have stamped "THIS IS NOT FOR YOU" on the cover. Look, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the only person who expects a #0 issue (not even #1! #0! Before the beginning!) to actually present the starting point of a story, as opposed to trailers of stories that are already in progress. Is that an unfair expectation? I mean, am I wrong to think DC wants to attract new readers? Because the message I'm getting from DC UNIVERSE ZERO is that, if I haven't been following the 80-something-part storyline that's been threading through the entire DCU line for the past... what's it been now, two years? Three? If I haven't been doing that, I've got no business reading DC comics for the foreseeable future. CRAP, because I'm sick of wasting time and money trying to figure out the DCU for the sake of a decent story.

THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST #14, on the other hand, is a textbook lesson on the benefits of accessbility. "The 7 Capital Cities of Heaven" wraps up after six issues, an annual and a one-shot, and you know what? I loved every minute of it, despite having never read an Iron Fist comic before. I thought Shou-Lao was that guy on MORTAL KOMBAT who laughs when you kick him, and Yu-Ti had me thinking I'd picked up a GI JOE comic by mistake. But none of that kept me from understanding - and enjoying - the Brubaker/Fraction run. A big part of why it works so well is because, aside from meeting the standard head-bashing things-go-splody violence quota, what we have here is an intricate storyline spanning generations, from Danny Rand to his father Wendell to WWI Iron Fist Orson Randall. Iron Fist has become the center of an epic, in the true sense of the word, and that's no small achievement in a year's time. The fact that this specific storyline also contains a martial arts tournament, an exploding bullet train, a gender rebellion and flashbacks to a Golden Age incarnation of the Heroes For Hire makes it all the more impressive. Of course, it's sad that this is more or less the current creative team's swan song, but this is a VERY GOOD, very high note to go out on.

X-MEN LEGACY #210 is a mixed bag. On the one hand, we're still neck-deep in Ye Olde Continuity, with a cover straight out of late-'70s Claremont. And yes, this is a book that's undoubtedly geared towards readers already familiar with a relatively large portion of X-Men history: if you can't recognize David Haller by sight, or you don't know what that excerpt from "The Little Matchgirl" is meant to evoke, you won't find out here. On the other hand, I think it's still possible to "get" what's being conveyed, even without the specifics - this is something Mike Carey does very well, referencing continuity without hinging the entire plot on the assumption that his readers know that continuity. For the purposes of reading X-MEN LEGACY #210, it's not vital that you know what went down between Xavier and Voght; if you do, you get a little something extra out of their last exchange, but if you don't? You still walk away knowing what you need to know. The big development in this issue deals with something Paul O'Brien has called attention to in the past - after a start that lacked any visible long-term direction, we now have what seems to be a concrete premise for the series, at least for the immediate future. Potential downside? The way it's set up, I'm not entirely sure Carey intends to move out of Ye Olde Continuity any time soon, and while I trust his storytelling sensibilities, there's entirely too much nostalgia in the mainstream these days, especially with the X-Men, and it'd be nice if everyone just took a big step forward someday. Let's go with GOOD and see what happens next.

Shifting over to Vertigo, JACK OF FABLES has taken a rather unusual turn. Much like its parent title, this comic occasionally steps away from the present-day plotlines to visit secondary characters or tales from the protagonist's past. Last month, the Pathetic Fallacy tried to stage a production of "Hamlet" that went hilariously wrong, and this month, we're in the Wild West, exploring Jack's first encounter with Bigby Wolf. Now, Jack's always been characterized as a bit of a douche, but Willingham and Sturges usually balance that out with a kind of roguish, immature charm that makes him mildly sympathetic. He's written as overbearingly full of himself, but it's played (quite effectively) for laughs. Not so with "The Legend of Smilin' Jack" - as the last page openly acknowledges, this isn't a funny story. At all. There's no redeeming element in Jack this time: he's cruel, he's murderous, he's a Black Hat straight out of a Clint Eastwood western. It's such an extreme change, in fact, that I'm betting there's something else at work here. A GOOD start, though I'd advise Willingham and Sturges to watch their step - there are certain lines not to be crossed if you want to keep your character likeable, and Jack's been on the edge for years now.

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Sorry for the hold-up, but I've been locked in a cosmic battle between good and evil for the past few weeks (I'll let you guys decide which side I was on). No quarter was asked, none was given, and mark my words, I will get Vista off my computer. If I made it through Rob Liefeld's heyday without having my eyes poked out by Cable's pointy feet, I can beat my husband's fascination with transparent windows...

Anyway, I thought we'd take a look at spin-offs today. It's hardly a foreign concept in the biz: every X-MEN eventually begets a NEW MUTANTS (though, like Pringles and Lolcats, it rarely stops with just one). When they're done properly, spin-offs are a welcome extension/continuation of a great story - of course, that concept is problematized in a mainstream where most stories never actually end (case in point: you have to wonder what would've happened if NEW MUTANTS had supplanted X-MEN rather than supplimented it).

But webcomics can be - and often are - finite, which leaves the door open for the question Peter Milligan put best in ENIGMA: "And then what?"

Aeire's QUEEN OF WANDS was an early favorite of mine; I discovered it during its second crossover with SOMETHING POSITIVE in 2004. It was an easy jump to make; QUEEN OF WANDS had a similar tone in its heavily-cynical approach to geek culture, and if Aeire wasn't as vicious as R.K. Milholland, the guest appearances by Charles Darwin and the Grammar Nazi still amused. QUEEN OF WANDS also had a much smaller cast, allowing Aeire to create a consistent focus on her protagonist, Kestrel, and the people around her.

My memories of QUEEN OF WANDS are mostly GOOD: the art was eccentric, but enjoyable, with marked improvement over the years. And if Aeire had an occasional tendency to overdo the flashbacks within flashbacks and the melodrama, she balanced it out with plenty of light-hearted moments. But what I remember most about QUEEN OF WANDS is the way it ended - in a medium where stories can just stop cold when the writer loses interest, it was a real treat to see Kestrel's journey of maturation and self-discovery come to a kind of natural conclusion. And the day after QUEEN OF WANDS ended, Kestrel appeared in SOMETHING POSITIVE, where she became a recurring character in typical Milholland fashion. And that's a sort of spin-off there, because Kestrel's story goes on after the last panel of QUEEN OF WANDS, even if she's now in the hands of another writer.

Two years later (an eternity in net-time), Aeire teamed up with Chris Daily to produce PUNCH AN' PIE, a QUEEN OF WANDS spin-off featuring the hyperactive, childlike Angela in the lead role. It's a very different webcomic, not just artistically but also in terms of the story, and to be totally honest, it hasn't quite clicked for me. I realize that rehashing QUEEN OF WANDS would've been completely derivative, but at the same time, PUNCH AN' PIE takes a long, long time to start "moving" (as opposed to that oh-so-fitting first page of QUEEN OF WANDS, which pretty much sets the tone for the entire series), and six months in, I just wasn't feeling the same kind of energy that had made QUEEN OF WANDS so enjoyable. That's not to say it doesn't have its moments, but... well, part of the problem might be that I never really liked Angela to begin with, and that's crucial when it comes to spin-offs: it's the same reason why, despite my deep appreciation of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, its sister show ANGEL never held my interest for more than a few episodes at a time - I wasn't fond of Angel (to say the least), so the prospect of an Angel-centric series had me about as thrilled as a diabetic trapped in Willy Wonka's factory. And that's likely why PUNCH AN' PIE just didn't rate beyond OKAY for me.

Having sung the praises of Shaenon Garrity's NARBONIC, it should come as no surprise that I'm recommending LI'L MELL AND SERGIO, a spin-off featuring the irrepressible Mell Kelly in first grade, with brainy nerd Sergio replacing Dave Davenport in the "straight man" role. I don't know why it surprised me to see how perfectly Garrity captured the essence of Mell's character - she did create her, after all - but it's as funny and unpredictable as its parent series. Unlike the QUEEN OF WANDS/PUNCH AN' PIE schism, LI'L MELL AND SERGIO does feel like an extension of NARBONIC in some capacity, and it's especially fitting that Mell is the star, given how perfectly the story of Helen and Dave ended.

Let's move on to the works of K. Sandra Fuhr, an interesting case study in how the malleable nature of webcomics can work to one's advantage. Fuhr's first comic was UTOPIA, a sci-fi comedy which featured, among other characters, a trio of vampires: Mikhael, Harley and Tybalt. They were eventually spun off into their own series, THIS IS HOME, by all accounts the biggest maelstrom of teen angst, rape, murder and melodrama since Laurell K. Hamilton. And when that didn't work, Fuhr took her lead characters, stripped away the pseudo-Gothic trappings, and BOY MEETS BOY was born.

Then she deleted UTOPIA and THIS IS HOME. Poof, not a trace of it left anywhere online. And believe me, I've looked.

The reason I find this so interesting is because you don't have that kind of total dissolution in mainstream comics: even the most massive reboot I know of, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, was never able to completely excise everything that had come before it. That pre-history may not have been in continuity anymore, but it still existed, people still talked about it and - most importantly - they could still access pre-Crisis material on a regular basis. Eventually, DC had no choice but to acknowledge pre-Crisis history again. But with webcomics, you push a button, and as far as the average reader is concerned, the comic never existed. Fuhr was essentially able to retcon her own bibliography. And if traits belonging to earlier versions of the characters bled through... well, how would you know?

Getting back to the actual comics for a bit: BOY MEETS BOY is pretty much your textbook yaoi manga, with an added dose of pop culture that, unfortunately, has become a touch dated by now. The premise can pretty much be summed up in a single page. Still, it's cute enough that I appreciate it on its own terms: for example, you have the gag and its requisite counter-gag, various breakings of the fourth wall and so on. GOOD stuff, all the moreso for being unpredictable with its storylines: you may think you know where the story's headed, but there's usually a twist just around the corner.

A year into the series, Fuhr imported Fox and Collin, formerly of UTOPIA, into the story. Introduced as college misfits and nemeses to Harley and Mikhael, they ended up becoming rather dominant characters, to the point where entire storylines revolved around them. I don't think it came as any surprise to Fuhr's readers that when BOY MEETS BOY ended, Fox and Collin were spun off into their own series, FRIENDLY HOSTILITY, which kicked off with a storyline that fleshed out the wacky Maharassa clan.

I should note that both Fuhr's writing and her artwork undergo a massive evolution as time goes on: if BOY MEETS BOY has some awkward aspects and the art can generously be described as rough and inconsistent, FRIENDLY HOSTILITY hits the ground running with smoother artwork, stronger dialogue, and less of a reliance on the histrionics native to the yaoi genre. In fact, I'd argue that FRIENDLY HOSTILITY leaves yaoi and its conventions behind altogether: it's much more realistic (the occasional demonic cameo aside), more in the vein of a romantic comedy than the out-and-out chaos of its predecessor. It's only right that FRIENDLY HOSTILITY be graded VERY GOOD, in recognition of the author's vast improvement over a relatively short amount of time.

And finally, technical notes:

* QUEEN OF WANDS ran from July of 2002 to February of 2005, followed by a "rerun" of the series from March of 2005 to November of 2006 with commentary by Aeire. Full color. The series archive has a "Storyline" option but it only goes up to 2004; you're on your own after that.

* PUNCH AN' PIE is ongoing, in black and white. The series started at the end of February 2007, and updates Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Unfortunately, the archives are woefully out-of-date, making navigation a real challenge.

* LI'L MELL AND SERGIO is ongoing, in black and white. Girlamatic used to charge subscription fees to read the series, but it's now free of charge. It updates on a weekly basis, featuring multiple artists.

* BOY MEETS BOY ran from September 2000 to January 2004, in black and white. The very last page featured Fox and Collin inviting the readers to check out FRIENDLY HOSTILITY...

* ... which is ongoing, in black and white; the "Problematic" storyline began concurrently with the end of BOY MEETS BOY, while the series proper started in August of 2004.

Labels: Diana, webcomics

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During my (admittedly short) time as a comic book critic, I've reviewed comics that made me happy, or sad, or violently ill; works by writers I can't stand, or admire, or wish would try just a bit harder because they're capable of so much more (you know who you are).

But there's one comic I've never talked about, and likely never will:

WATCHMEN.

To be totally honest, WATCHMEN intimidates me. It's too great a work for me to discuss, and it's such a central part of comics discourse that I doubt there's much I could say that hasn't been said before, by greater critics than myself.

And I'd be content to let sleeping dogs lie, except the comic I'm about to review can't be discussed outside the WATCHMEN context, and that puts me in a rather uncomfortable position. So I'm just going to take a deep breath and see where things go from here. More after the jump.

One of the perks of being a Savage Critic, aside from the company, is that we occasionally get advance copies of comics that have either just been solicited or, on very rare occasions, haven't actually been announced yet.

So when I got a PDF from DC Comics titled MINUTEMEN, I figured it was some colonial-era historical drama, perhaps with some dinosaurs and time-travel thrown in just so we wouldn't forget it was a comic book.

I certainly wasn't expecting a 48-page WATCHMEN prequel by Leah Moore and Dave Gibbons, due for release in July.

Needless to say, I ended up having some deeply conflicted feelings about this comic. So let's start with the positive aspects first: the most obvious pro, of course, is that this one-shot constitutes a return to a world that had been previously self-contained. Granted, it's a prequel, and Alan Moore had already covered most of this the first time around, but the effect on me as a reader is like opening a favorite book for the twentieth time and finding a whole new chapter that I'd never seen before. A sense of the new and the familiar, all the more powerful because WATCHMEN changed the way I read comics.

And Leah Moore delivers a good story, for the most part. Her previous project, ALBION, had left me rather indifferent, but here she really shows a knack for small, silent, understated scenes that drive a huge emotional spike through your heart: Ozymandias handing Mothman his first glass of bourbon with a knowing grin was absolutely chilling, because there's no dialogue, no narration, and yet you just know what Moore's trying to imply.

Obviously, it's the artwork that sells these sequences, and Gibbons deserves a huge round of applause here for sticking so closely to WATCHMEN's character designs. It contributes a lot to that feeling of connection I mentioned - that this really is an organic companion to its parent text.

However, I can't help feeling like the whole project is unnecessary on some level. Part of WATCHMEN's appeal is that it doesn't spell everything out, and we don't necessarily know every detail of what happened in that world Moore and Gibbons created all those years ago. We knew Silhouette and her lover were murdered - did we really need to see it happen? Doesn't that take away from the mysteries of the original, the things left in the shadows? A lot of what Leah Moore does is basically confirm, explicitly, the things her father left to our imagination: yes, Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis were lovers, and the Comedian found out, and Dollar Bill thinking about adding a cape to his costume comes with all the ominous foreshadowing you'd expect...

And when she does add to the mythos, the contributions are questionable at best - nothing in MINUTEMEN technically contradicts anything in WATCHMEN, but there's a hint of that familiar "everything you know is wrong" vibe that annoys me on principle these days (so you can deduce my feelings towards SECRET INVASION too).

Still, in lieu of the Great Bearded Warlock making a comeback, I could settle for this. In short, I'd give it an OKAY if it weren't an early April's Fools' joke.

...

...

Gotcha!

Labels: Diana

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Let's get right in there, shall we?

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #12: Here's my $0.02 on The L Thing, from the perspective of a series-long fan. Do I believe Buffy would sleep with a woman? Yes, provided the woman is a Slayer - that was, after all, the subtext of her dynamic with Faith (especially in "Bad Girls"). However, I thought the execution here was a bit problematic for two reasons. Number one, as Chris Sims points out, the whole "post-coital reveal" really is a cliche these days. Number two, and this is something that bothered me a lot during the show's final years, there's no subtext or ambiguity in the Buffyverse anymore. That was a huge pet peeve for me, because the first three seasons were great at being subtle (ie: you never knew exactly what Angelus and Drusilla were up to behind Spike's back, which left your imagination running on overtime), and afterwards everything was in-your-face-with-a-can-of-mace (I'm thinking here of the near-rape in "Seeing Red" to name just one egregious "geez, what happened to my show?" scene). It could've been more interesting to be ambiguous about Buffy and Satsu, to drop teases and hints, rather than pull the old Wile E. Coyote anvil-to-the-head maneuver. I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Drew Goddard wrote that Season 7 episode when Spike's mother goes all Freudian on him, because that's exactly the kind of bluntness (which, in all honesty, could very easily be attributed to sensationalism) we get here. All that said, this is still a VERY GOOD issue, and Goddard deserves kudos for the abundant humor, to say nothing of the main reason I'm enjoying Season 8: new variations on canonical threats. The vampires in this issue are linked to an enemy Buffy's faced before, and that's precisely the sort of internal continuity mixed with innovation that makes the story even more interesting (and I didn't even like that particular enemy when he turned up).

CABLE #1: Cable, as a character, greatly benefited from MESSIAH COMPLEX: if, in earlier appearances, he either drifted around aimlessly or played at being Robo-Jesus, he's now a soldier with a clear mission and a nemesis who thematically parallels his own situation (after all, Bishop is also a soldier with a clear mission). What isn't apparent by the end of the issue is where Duane Swierczynski wants to go from here, big-picture-wise: is this series set in the New Jersey of 2043 we see here? Or will Cable and the baby be jumping through time with Bishop on their heels? It could go either way, and both options have potential (though I think we need a bigger supporting cast, because Cable monologuing as the baby cries could get old very fast), but we're off to a GOOD start. Special props to Ariel Olivetti for that look on Cable's face when he has to change the baby's diaper. Verily, a fate worse than death... and if this baby turns out to be Jean Grey, we can look forward to the inevitable argument where they both scream "I CHANGED YOUR DIAPERS!" at each other.

LOGAN #1: With Y: THE LAST MAN complete, I've been feeling the lack of Brian Vaughan in my monthly readings (don't ask about EX MACHINA). Now, I'm not a Wolverine fan. At all. But there's a handful of writers who can get me to check out anything they do, and Vaughan's one of them. (Carey's another, which no doubt explains why I feel like I've already passed my Wolverine quota for this year.) So imagine my disappointment when LOGAN #1 turned out to be a rather dull comic. Where is Vaughan's trademark unpredictability? Where are the twists and turns? This issue reads like WOLVERINE FOR DUMMIES, a standard (and standardized) fusion of stock tropes I've seen a hundred times already. EH, because I honestly don't care.

Postscript: The second I finished posting this, I saw that Douglas had beaten me to it.



I call the right side!

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One of the most widespread genres in webcomics is fantasy, specifically that swords-and-sorcery sub-genre usually associated with RPGs (ie: DUNGEONS & DRAGONS). Interestingly enough, many of those webcomics (including all the series we'll be looking at today) have a decidedly subversive tone to them: they poke fun at conventions, they turn basic tropes on their heads, they break the fourth wall with a wink and a nudge. It's probably a reaction to the prominence of fantasy in the mainstream, particularly "serious" fantasy like LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER (you have to wonder what Mel Brooks would've done had he picked Tolkien's trilogy to parody rather than STAR WARS or ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES) - but that reaction leads to a whole multitude of stories that work with, and against, the formula.



LOOKING FOR GROUP by Ryan Sohmer and Lar Desouza is a basic "inversion" scenario - Cale'anon, the only good member of a wholly evil race, falls in with a trio of amoral killers on some sort of ill-defined quest. Despite his heroic intentions, Cale keeps stumbling into situations where he does more harm than good. It's comedy, of course, playing on the protagonist's continual mortification at the slaughter and mayhem, whereas his allies are decidedly less troubled. It starts out rather well, though Sohmer and Desouza lost me mid-second issue, when the story takes a more serious turn at depicting an internal Elvish conflict. The quips keep on coming, but the transition didn't really work for me.

Tarol Hunt's GOBLINS takes a different approach. Rather than deal with alignments (good, evil, lawful, chaotic, etc.), what's inverted here is the racial subtext built into the generic RPG world. Our protagonists are, as the title suggests, goblins - typically cast as the cannon fodder of the fantasy realm. Ironically, this doesn't change just because the story is about goblins: they're totally out of their league, clearly outmatched by "proper" adventurers. And I think that's a big part of why they're so sympathetic: they're the underdogs fighting the good fight, and despite their "monstrosity", their heroism is never questioned. The series does have one rather major flaw: unlike LOOKING FOR GROUP, which made a (hasty) shift from humor to serious adventuring, GOBLINS vacillates erratically between the two. One moment, we're all having a good laugh at stupid barbarians, the next we have to watch as a childlike protagonist is tortured horribly. It can be difficult to reconcile these extremes, all the moreso because there's no real transition between sequences: you're just snapped back and forth. The end result is somewhat paradoxical, because the world Hunt constructs is full of wonder (especially since you're viewing it through goblin eyes), but it's also a world where very bad things can happen to weak and defenseless people, without any mitigating effect.

If you're looking for consistency, I highly recommend Rich Burlew's ORDER OF THE STICK, one of the best examples of fantasy subversion - but beyond that, it's also an excellent webcomic in itself. Because there's more to this series than the jokes and the play on RPG rules and "mystical artifacts" - ORDER OF THE STICK is a true epic, offering a wide array of story elements such as romance, action, humor even during heroic confrontations, and a war worthy of Peter Jackson. Burlew should also be commended for his tight story structure: each phase of the Order's adventures reads like a novel in a series of novels, and elements from an earlier "book" (ie: the Linear Guild) recur in later stages to have real impact on the storyline. And while some might find the stick-figure-esque artwork simplistic, I actually think it's all the more effective given the story Burlew's telling - and, of course, there can be intricacy even in simplicity, which is precisely what I find here. ORDER OF THE STICK is one of my favorite webcomics, and with good reason.

I only recently discovered YET ANOTHER FANTASY GAMER COMIC by Rich Morris, and despite the title, this strip has some unique qualities when lined up with the other webcomics featured here. For example, in contrast to the other series, YET ANOTHER FANTASY GAMER COMIC has no central character(s): it's an ensemble piece styled on an Arabian Nights pattern where every storyline leads to the next tale, which may be set in a different place with a completely different protagonist. So what starts out as the romance of Bob and Gren smoothly transitions to Arachne and Drow politics, then we get Mrs. Bloodhand's story segueing directly into her son's tale. The overall narrative is always in motion, maneuvering very deftly between these "character clusters". As with ORDER OF THE STICK, I should make a note of the artwork - YET ANOTHER FANTASY GAMER COMIC relies primarily on pencil-based art, so if you're put off by that sort of thing, you might want to skip it over... though you'd be missing out on a great series.

From its very first page, Rob Balder's and Jamie Noguchi's ERFWORLD stood out as something... different. I can honestly say I've never seen a creation myth attributed to a trio of giant Elvii before, or a Tome of AOL. It's an adorable series, reductive in that it infantilizes RPG conventions - necromancy is referred to as Croakamancy, the local warlord calls himself Stanley the Tool after the divine hammer he wields (which just happens to look like a child's toy), dragons are referred to as Dwagons, and the artwork reminds me of chibi (well, minus the enormous eyes). Aside from being so damned cute, ERFWORLD has more than a touch of the surreal to it, which is actually unusual in that most fantasy webcomics I've seen take a very realistic approach to the worlds they create. So this is a fun, refreshing deviation from the norm.

Tom Siddell's GUNNERKRIGG COURT uses surreality much along the same lines, both in the artwork and the story: the titular Court is a boarding school that, in terms of visual design, serves as the anti-Hogwarts (which may explain, in part, my affinity for it) - it's dark, it's huge, there are subtly threatening mysteries around every corner. But the surreal feeling derives from the fact that no one, not even newcomer Antimony Carver, seems bothered by things like minotaurs, demons and robots. Also atypical is the setting: where other fantasy writers would put a great deal of effort into constructing an entire world to accomodate their protagonists, GUNNERKRIGG COURT is very centralized - the various chapters all take place either on the grounds or in the immediate vicinity (though, as it turns out, there's no shortage of nooks and crannies to explore within the Court itself. I also appreciated the subdued tone here, as opposed to the pomp and noise surrounding the world of HARRY POTTER - it feels more genuine, somehow, in the absence of people shrieking about Quidditch and magic beans.

And finally, technical notes:

* LOOKING FOR GROUP is ongoing, in color, currently at 125 pages. It updates every Monday and Thursday and its archive is organized by issues, each of which numbers around 30 pages.

* GOBLINS is ongoing, starting in black and white for two months before moving to full color. The series began in June of 2005 and updates erratically. Its archive divides the series into three books (so far), with additional divisions highlighting various "chapters" in the story.

* ORDER OF THE STICK is ongoing, in color, currently at 533 pages. The archive contains only a list of strips without any specific division, but the printed editions separate the series thus far into three books: strips 1-121, 122-300 and 301-484. It updates three times a week, more or less at random.

* YET ANOTHER FANTASY GAMER COMIC is ongoing, in black and white (with the occasional color strip). The series began in May 2006 and updates on a daily basis. The earliest strips in the archive are organized according to the featured characters, but this eventually gives way to individual titles per strip.

* ERFWORLD is ongoing, in color, currently at 96 pages. It updates Tuesdays and Saturdays. Like ORDER OF THE STICK, the archive doesn't divide the strips by story, though in this case it's probably because Balder and Noguchi are still on their first "book".

* GUNNERKRIGG COURT is ongoing, in color, currently at 17 chapters. It updates Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The archive features chapter and page division; additionally, each chapter ends with a bonus page or two featuring less-discussed aspects of the Court's world.

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The last time I tackled a Gail Simone book, worlds lived, worlds died and the Savage Critics were never the same. Will lightning strike twice?

Probably not. I thought WONDER WOMAN #17 and "The Circle" were OKAY.

I'll admit that I struggled with that grade - it was either going to be a high OKAY or a low GOOD. The thing is, I liked the premise; it was an interesting twist on the story of Diana's birth, pointing to an aspect of Themysciran life that had never really been dealt with before. And, of course, Alkyone's prediction could have come true very easily, which goes a long way towards making her and the other members of the Royal Guard sympathetic. Their story was compelling... up to a point.

The major problem I had with "The Circle" had to do with pacing, and this has been a issue for me with Simone-written series going back to THE ATOM and WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY: too much happens too quickly, and there's no room for depth or real drama, not when you're fast-forwarding through the story like Dark Helmet in "Spaceballs". This, in my opinion, has plagued Simone's recent output - a failure to allocate enough attention to the varied story elements. If I were to break down "The Circle" in terms of plotlines, this is what emerges:

A) The backstory of Alkyone and the Royal Guard, coupled with their present-day escape and their targeting of Diana.

B) The Nazis invade Themyscira, get whipped by the mother-daughter team-up of Hippolyta and Diana, and are sent packing.

C) Diana befriends gorilla warriors.

D) Etta Candy may or may not be a spy for Diana's boss or something... I didn't really get that sequence (though I don't fault Simone for that - I'm guessing it's a leftover from the Heinberg or Picoult runs?).

Now, the best stories are those which form thematic parallels between the B-plot and A-plot, the better to integrate them towards the climax: we can think here of how FABLES has moved Flycatcher's long-running character arc into the greater Fabletown/Empire conflict as an example. With "The Circle", though, what we get are two separate plotlines which only intersect in the name of contrivance (ie: the Nazis free the Circle), at which point they separate and are resolved separately - the Nazi cleanup has very little to do with the Circle's attack on Diana. As a result, neither develop any real gravitas: had this been the Circle's story, Simone might have been able to flesh out the other three members of the Royal Guard, and bring their conflict with Diana to a much more potent boiling point, dramatically speaking. But there simply aren't enough pages to do that, because you have Nazis and gorillas running about, smacking each other around. And at no point during this four-issue arc does Simone ever convince me that the Nazis and gorillas were needed.

Ultimately, "The Circle" fizzles to a very unsatisfying conclusion: there's something poignant about Alkyone's final realization, but at the same time, I felt that it just wasn't enough, that more could have been done with the Circle and their complex relationships with Hippolyta and Diana. So... OKAY, because I liked the idea and I wanted to see more, but I didn't.

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Very few moments in comics have had the distinction of making me cry. There was SANDMAN #72, when Nada throws flowers into the river as Dream's funeral boat passes by; Valerie's letter from V FROM VENDETTA; Noah finding the scooter in DEADENDERS #16.

And now we have the conclusion of Y: THE LAST MAN - even as I write this, I've got tears in my eyes.



Well... maybe not quite that tearful.



Better.

Anyway, Y. I'd actually been holding out on reading the last arc until yesterday, when I had all six final issues in my hands. I'm glad I did - while Brian Vaughan packed as much dramatic weight as possible into each individual issue, the sheer impact of the last storyline as a whole made it worth the long (long, long, long) wait.

There's really no way I can do justice to Y: THE LAST MAN and what it meant to me as a reader - for five years, it entertained me, shocked me, made me think, made me laugh, and yes, made me cry. It was consistently well-written and well-drawn, it was complex, and right up to the very end, it never opted for the easier storytelling choice: Vaughan always chose the less-traveled, and therefore less-predictable route, and in the end even the reader's perception of the series itself, of what Y: THE LAST MAN is supposedly about, is challenged.

Taking a broader view for a moment, I like to think Y will be remembered as the post-SANDMAN Vertigo flagship - symbolizing, if you will, a shift in trends from literature-based fantasy to a kind of gritty realism that nevertheless speaks truly and pointedly to the human condition. Not to knock PREACHER, or the still-running FABLES (which continues Gaiman's tradition of mixing myth and reality), but Y was different - more real in terms of the world presented and the way people behaved. I love that the hero of the series was just an ordinary guy; I love that there will never be one true answer to the question of the Gendercide; I love that the book took us all over the planet and really explored the possibilities of a world without men, with all the negative and positive and ambiguous implications therein. I love that the finale made me feel like I'd witnessed the end of a saga - that bittersweet sensation of a wonderful journey coming to its inevitable end.

Thank you, Brian and Pia and everyone who worked on this book. Thank you for recognizing that all tales need endings - and for giving us a conclusion that met the very high standards you set for yourselves. Thank you for five years of EXCELLENT stories.

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The Mad Scientist is a common staple of the superhero genre: you've got Victor von Doom, Tivo spokesperson Arnim Zola, pre-Crisis Lex Luthor and many more. More often than not, these characters skew towards a very specific personality archetype: the megalomaniacal whackjob with Simon Cowell's ego and Tyra Banks' love of monologuing. Of course, since most mad scientists serve as foils to the heroes, these are good qualities to have, because they ensure that we'll want to see the crazy person get taken down. Conversely, this is also the reason there are many stories with mad scientists and few stories about mad scientists, because would you really want to read a six-issue story arc where Doom goes on and on about his brilliance and his heritage and his family tree and then he grows goat legs and uses magical cellphone powers to summon robot insects that... hmm. Right. Moving on...

Anyway, that brings us to today's double-feature:
NARBONIC by Shaenon Garrity and A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE by Jon Kilgannon and Mark Sachs. These webcomics are noteworthy not just for the fact that they directly feature mad science and mad scientists, but also for their very different interpretations of that character type.

To call NARBONIC a comedy is at once oversimplifying things and oddly appropriate: it is, after all, a very humorous and funny story with a fair share of whimsy, and even at its most dramatic points, it never lets the reader take things too seriously. And yet Garrity planned her plotlines so carefully, so methodically, foreshadowing events that would take years to unfold, that the term "comedy" just doesn't seem apt enough.

The story concerns Dave, a Computer Science graduate hired by mad scientist Helen Narbon and her gun-happy henchwoman Mell Kelly. The first thing you'll notice about Helen is that she's unlike any mad scientist, male or female, that you've ever seen: she's obsessed with gerbils, charming even when she lapses into her "mwah-ha-ha" mode, and talks about killing people with a cheerful grin straight out of a Disney movie. All of Garrity's characters are endearingly quirky, and they keep on surprising you as the series progresses.

One of the aspects I most enjoyed was the way Garrity never stuck to a specific situation or formula for very long. The status quo got shaken up so often I'm not even sure there ever WAS a status quo. And there was a tremendous amount of variety in terms of output: for example, every new year would start with an eerily prophetic homage to LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND. Sundays were occasionally devoted to our heroes' Victorian-era counterparts, or to chapters of an epic fanfic concerning evil yogurt (is there any other kind?), or to guest strips amusingly framed as the cast's desperate search for a new artist. And that was just the peripheral stuff - there was no lack of unpredictable fun in the series proper, ranging from a visit to Hell to a Mad Science Convention to a James Bond-esque adventure story.

But what left me most in awe of Garrity was that, from November 2002 to the very end of the comic, she used the filenames of the strips themselves to tell a prose story about a defining moment in Helen's life. That just blew me away, because I'd never seen anything like it - for printed comics, it would be like using the lines between panels to tell a parallel story to the one playing out on the page. That was an ingenious technique, and very demonstrative of the wit and cleverness Garrity used on a daily basis for over six years. If a rank higher than EXCELLENT existed, I'd award it here.

Kilgannon and Sachs' A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE takes mad science in a decidedly different direction: these are the bombastic, domination-oriented nuts we've seen before, but what's emphasized here is something that's (surprisingly) rarely touched upon in this sort of fiction: the fact that mad scientists are, in fact, mad. In this webcomic, mad science is a form of mental illness, a "meme" that cmpels its victims to follow a precise behavioral pattern that, ironically enough, is the quintessential formula for the mad scientist archetype: first they come up with a ludicrous scheme, then they build a giant robot, loudly announce their plans, get chased by the authorities, and finally surrender on the condition that their research is kept intact. This is intriguing notion because it turns what has traditionally been seen as a character archetype into something different.

What appeals to me with regards to A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE is its particular mix of genres and styles: artistically, there's a strong manga influence (big eyes, odd hairstyles/colors, etc.), but it reads like a Warren Ellis story (well, at least Ellis prior to his Year of Whoredom and the resulting creative STDs) - a hard-boiled detective with a dark secret in his past is paired with an avatar of a living planet, chasing down leads on an impending crime across the solar system. It's an adequately-executed premise that doesn't get bogged down by technospeak, as can sometimes happen with sci-fi. GOOD, because the story is fun and functional but it doesn't reinvent the wheel.

Technical notes: NARBONIC ran from August 2000 to December 2006. There's a link on the main page leading to the "Director's Cut" of the series, with added commentary by the strip's creator, Shaenon Garrity. It's primarily in black and white, with the occasional color strip. Additionally, Garrity toyed with panel length and size during the series' run, so keep an eye out for scroll bars on your browser. The Table of Contents is indexed by storyline, and every link leads to a week's worth of strips.

A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE ran from 2000 to 2007, black-and-white for the first chapter and switching over to color for the rest of the story. Unlike NARBONIC, Kilgannon and Sachs have provided a distinct chapter division for A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE; it's a much shorter read, around 400 pages to NARBONIC's 2000+ strips.

Labels: Diana, webcomics

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I hate to kick a man when he's down (because, really, Chris Claremont couldn't be any further down at this point), but EXILES: DAYS OF THEN AND NOW presents the perfect argument to avoid the upcoming NEW EXILES relaunch.

I'm going to expose a bit of a bias on my part here: in earlier times, Judd Winick's EXILES was my favorite X-book. Yes, even more than Morrison's NEW X-MEN. To this day, I think of EXILES as the last truly good book Winick ever wrote: the characters were dynamic and engaging, the line-up was fluid and changed frequently, the premise allowed for some interesting use of the old "What If" scenario, and the pace allowed an occasional introspective issue.

The shine came off during Tony Bedard's run - I tried to support it, but looking back I think Bedard's mistake was shifting the focus from the characters to the plot, and the series lost something in the transition (its "heart", if you will). I liked it, but I didn't love it anymore.

Still, I followed EXILES for eighty-nine issues and an annual (minus the two Chuck Austen runs, of which the less is said, the better). And when Chris Claremont's first issue came out, I took it off my pull list without a second thought.

Now, during my time as a comic critic, I've never concealed my belief that writers can be profiled according to their strengths and weaknesses - that they have certain qualities which travel from book to book. Any series by Mark Millar will utterly fail to understand the meaning of "subtlety" (or "overkill", for that matter); a Brian Bendis-written comic will feature a dozen characters using the exact same speech patterns, and will most likely focus on rewriting Marvel's past rather than directing its present; any women found in a Frank Miller comic will be... well, I'm sure you can guess. Of course, profiling isn't an inherently negative practice: Warren Ellis knows his sci-fi, and you want Ed Brubaker on a crime/noir series, etc. Neither are these values absolute - I suppose it's possible that Garth Ennis will one day write the world's greatest SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE, it's just not bloody likely.

My point is, there are certain qualities I've attributed to Chris Claremont over the years that make him black-list material for me. See, this is what happens when Claremont inherits a book: first he sets it up as a vehicle for his own wish fulfillment (look, Psylocke's back! And there's the male Mystique he always wanted!), then he spins his wheels with the old mind-control/slavery routine, then he starts dredging up decades-old abandoned plot threads (Merlyn, Roma and the Fury - AGAIN). As all this is going on, character dynamics become embarrassingly soaplike and dialogue mutates into some quasi-teen speak that makes you want to grind your teeth. It is, quite literally, "same old same old", and there's a healthy trail of incomprehensible comics Claremont has left in his wake to prove it, if you're inclined to look.

How does this relate to EXILES: DAYS OF THEN AND NOW? Precisely that it's everything Claremont's NEW EXILES won't be. For example, Mike Raicht's protagonist, Quentin Quire, visits four alternate worlds in about forty pages and not once does he meet anyone from the Fantastic Four. Or Storm. Or Kitty Pryde. Raicht depicts four worlds (five counting Quire's home reality, itself an interesting fusion of PLANET HULK and ANNIHILATION), and there's not a single Captain Britain in sight. And the team that ultimately emerges at the end of the issue is a diverse, interesting group - one I'd gladly pick over the Claremont Cast-Off Collection.

That's what used to define EXILES for me: unpredictability, the feeling that a beloved team member could drop dead and be replaced at any moment, that the next alternate reality could be paradise or purgatory, that their next mission could be eating a danish or murdering an innocent child to prevent genocide. For a little while, Mike Raicht brought that feeling back for me, in a GOOD show of variety and inventive decisions - things you won't find when the next issue comes out.

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In connection with this week's featured webcomic, Dan Miller's KID RADD, I want to talk about cross-genre appeal. It seems to me that this particular creative strategy never works out well for the mainstream companies: I'm sure we all recall such catastrophic experiments as I HEART MARVEL and DC's line of ill-fated horror film adaptations. The failure was two-fold there - not only did the core readership stay away, but fans of those other genres such as romance and horror weren't interested either.

That raises an interesting question: can comics accurately capture the cross-genre effect at all? Does MARVEL ZOMBIES scare you? Does it have the same effect as NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD? Or, to make the comparison fairer, did MARVEL ZOMBIES/ARMY OF DARKNESS appeal to EVIL DEAD fans, or fans of horror films in general? I don't think so.

It might be an issue of compatibility: horror, after all, relies on scaring the audience, on audio cues (the soundtrack), on boogeymen leaping out of the shadows. That's not really something a comic can replicate. Then again, romance actually gains something when you have imagery to go along with the words (well, unless you're a fan of the whole overwrought "he thrust his purple-headed warrior into her quivering mound of love pudding" style), and yet: Mark Millar's TROUBLE. Go figure.

The reason this is relevant to KID RADD is because, aside from telling a great adventure story, Dan Miller designs a fictional world that appeals to me as a fan of video games, especially games from the late '80s and early '90s. A lot of KID RADD's humor is derived from conventions you'd probably be familiar with if you ever played a SUPER MARIO BROS. game, and it's precisely that mix of mediums and genres that makes a good webcomic even better.

Radd, our titular hero, is the protagonist of a platform video game where he blasts mindless drones in a quest to save his girlfriend Sheena. The comic begins with an introduction to Radd, his world, the game, and his relationship with the unseen player that controls him. Together, Radd and his player eventually beat the game, repeating the cycle over and over until they master it completely. And then one day, Radd's player doesn't come back.

That's where the story really starts.

Don't let the quasi-simplistic pixel art fool you - Miller actually raises some pretty complicated issues in KID RADD, particularly when it comes to philosophies like nihilism, fatalism and determinism. These concepts aren't explored to any great length, but they add some depth to what could've been a straightforward boomfest. Miller also makes good use of the telescoping plot structure: as the series progresses, the stakes get higher and higher, the tale becomes more and more epic, and Radd evolves and grows.

KID RADD is also noteworthy for the ways it uses its "canvas": combining pixel art, animation and MIDI music, Miller creates a true multimedia experience. Additionally, the entire webcomic is available for download via a self-extracting EXE file: it's about 30MB, over 3,000 files, and like the magic sword in Jeph Loeb's WOLVERINE, I don't know how it works - only that it clearly does. As I understand it, the panels aren't single images but bits and pieces combined with background, foreground and so on to create the complete panel.

For story, art and characterization, I give this webcomic a VERY GOOD, but its technical construction is so impressive that I'm bumping it up to EXCELLENT.

Technical notes: this pixel-based comic ran from February 2002 to September 2004, for a total of 601 comics split into 29 chapters. It's in color and uses a HTML/GIF-based viewer. Though the main page warns against viewing it through Internet Explorer 6, I've been using that for a while now and never noticed any problems (though some MIDI files lag when you stream them online). There's a selection of amusing "extras" available both at the site and in the EXE file - worth checking out after you've finished the story.

Labels: Diana, webcomics

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What better way to kick off this series than by featuring a webcomic about webcomics? Kristofer Straub's CHECKERBOARD NIGHTMARE lays it all out in the very first strip (which doubles as a cast page): Chex is a cartoon character obsessed with webcomics. He wants to go all the way to the top without investing any long-term effort or talent. Since this shake-and-bake strategy brought about the Great Boy Band Epidemic of the early '00s, it's hard to argue with his logic.

Unfortunately for Chex, all he's got going for him is a short attention span and a knack for plagarism. Fortunately for us, that translates into a brilliant comedy that follows our hero's hilarious schemes.

CHECKERBOARD NIGHTMARE has a lot going for it: it's based on a simple four-panel formula where the first three panels set up the punchline and the fourth panel delivers, and this runs on a daily basis for five years, but even Straub's most repetitive gags (ie: Vaporware's choking fetish) never cross that line where they stop being funny. His style of humor is sophisticated without being exclusive, and that's important to me as a reader because I don't see the funny in fart/poop jokes, but the other end of the spectrum can come off as horribly pretentious.

I think the key to Straub's success, the reason why CHECKERBOARD NIGHTMARE is so entertaining, is his understanding of the principles of balance: just when you think you're getting tired of the done-in-one jokes, a whole storyline pops up about Chex's #1 Fan (there is no #2 Fan), or a send-up of cop-based action series, or a glimpse of Dot's ill-fated singing career. And not to spoil the ending, but let's just say Straub makes an astonishing use of continuity during the series' climax.

This strip is also unique in that, while it heaps satire on specific webcomics as well as the conventions of the medium itself, it's also a fairly educational tool. It's part of the strip's duality, a rather clever trick Straub is playing: every strategy or gimmick Chex fails to appropriate has succeeded elsewhere, whether it's using insult humor (SOMETHING POSITIVE), joining a popular webcomic group (Keenspot, Graphic Smash, etc.) or using a "safe format" to attract wider demographics (GARFIELD). These tactics don't work for Chex, largely because he misunderstands why they're supposed to work (and that, in turn, goes to the core of the character's comedic tendencies), but they're the foundations of many other popular series.

So in reading this EXCELLENT series, not only do you come away with a smile, you might actually learn a few things about webcomics too.

A few technical notes to wrap things up: the main CHECKERBOARD NIGHTMARE series ran from November 10, 2000 to November 11, 2005. Though Straub released a few sporadic strips after the big wrap-up, they were mostly topical done-in-one gags. According to the FAQ, the series has no regular update schedule - prior to its most recent August 31 update, the series was last updated September 1, 2006. Straub has since moved on to STARSLIP CRISIS, another EXCELLENT webcomic I'll probably be reviewing at a later date. The archive is conveniently ordered both chronologically and by storyline, making for easy navigation. The strip is primarily in black-and-white, though Straub switched to color during its final year.

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With Jog doing his bit for manga, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to add even more diversity to our humble site by introducing a new regular feature: webcomic reviews! I'll be focusing on free series, starting with webcomics that have run their course and concluded - like graphic novels, they represent a complete, self-contained reading experience. After that we'll move on to ongoing series, alternating between some old favorites of mine and webcomics I've recently discovered.

But before we get to the good stuff, I thought I'd start this prestigious #0 issue (now with exclusive Brian Hibbs triple-fold hologram variant cover - scratch it and it procreates!) with a discussion about webcomics as a whole: why they matter to me, why I get such a kick out of them, and what they have to offer those mainstream readers who may have gotten a bit tired of the current output.

I first discovered webcomics a few years ago, via my dear friend Jacob (who, some months later, put up his own short-lived but brilliant webcomic called NAUSEA, now sadly offline). I'd come back to comics after a long hiatus, and we were discussing genre: even then, when I was still very enthusiastic about the mainstream, I had to admit that the superheroes wore a bit thin at times. It was always such a treat to discover something like Kyle Baker's WHY I HATE SATURN or Judd Winick's ADVENTURES OF BARRY WEEN, proving that the medium could be used for more than just fights-in-tights.

At some point in the conversation, I brought up WHY I HATE SATURN and asked why we couldn't have something like that on a regular basis: no grandiose cosmic spectacles, no superpowers, no suspension of disbelief necessary - just ordinary people hashing out their ordinary lives, with all the drama and fun and sadness and joy that comes with it. Jacob directed me to R.K. Milholland's SOMETHING POSITIVE. I was hesitant at first, for the same reason I'm picky with fan fiction - in a domain without any real quality control, you're taking a leap of faith that the next story you read won't be a reincarnation of THE EYE OF ARGON. Also, there's so many of them, owing to the fact that just about anyone can write and upload their creations online - who has the energy to sort through ten thousand wank fantasies for the good stuff? SOMETHING POSITIVE was, at the time, nearing the end of its fourth year: there was a lot of reading to be done. Jacob assured me it'd be worth the effort.

And damn him, he was right.

Looking back, I can identify several factors that made SOMETHING POSITIVE such a perfect gateway into webcomics for me. First, Milholland's tone resonated with the irreverent atmosphere of the Jemas administration, but with Marvel I always had the feeling that they were holding back: it was okay to make fun of the '90s, but I R SIRIUS KOMIC NAO. Milholland rarely, if ever, restrains himself, and when he goes for shock or provocation, he always seems motivated more by self-amusement than by the desire to target a specific demographic (see: Fred MacIntire versus the Idiot Christians). It somehow felt more authentic, a more direct channeling of the author's voice than anything you'd find in the mainstream. We've all seen good stories (or, at least, good intentions) gone off the rails due to editorial interference and licensing concerns (just look at the current state of Spider-Man, or ask yourself why, as Graeme noted, the "magic reboot" gets used so often lately), and that's something Milholland never really has to deal with. When you're dependent on your readers, you have to keep them happy, and if that had been the case with S*P, this probably wouldn't have happened. Nor this, for that matter. It's a kind of creative freedom you just don't see with the big companies.

Another aspect of SOMETHING POSITIVE that intrigued me was... well, precisely that "alternative genre" I'd been looking for. Here was a dark comedy bordering on satire, with a bunch of friends - abnormal in normal ways, if that makes sense - getting together to bitch about things that annoyed them. Not something you'd easily locate at my LCS, that's for sure. And that was just the tip of the iceberg: I've read sci-fi webcomics, gaming parody webcomics, fantasy webcomics, action webcomics... I never felt boxed in as I do with the direct market, where only a very specific type of story can survive for any significant amount of time (see: every unfortunate cancellation in the history of comics from DEADENDERS to SENTINEL to SMALL GODS). In fact, based on what I've seen, I'd guess that the superhero genre is actually among the least popular in the medium: if it does pop up, it's usually some tongue-in-cheek take on the subject matter (ie: Brad Guigar's EVIL INC.) or downright subversive (Justin Pierce's THE NEW ADVENTURES OF WONDERELLA). I believe that, like fanfic, webcomics partially exist to address a lack - the extremely narrow focus on superheroes by established companies left pretty much every other field up for grabs, just as fanfic seems predominantly occupied with taking the story to places the canon can't (or won't) go.

Now, I'll admit this isn't a flawless medium - the downside to having no higher authority is that writers can (and often do) simply abandon their stories mid-way through, having simply tired of the effort. It happens more frequently than you'd think - Sean Howard's A MODEST DESTINY stopped so many times, and ended so poorly, that I'm sorry I ever read past the first book. The closest analogy would be something like the Grant Morrison/Gene Ha AUTHORITY run, aborted mid-story with little hope of resolution. Another downside is the lack of permanence - just because a work is available one day doesn't mean it'll be available the next. After discovering K. Sandra Fuhr, I was quite interested in her earlier works, UTOPIA and THIS IS HOME... except she'd deleted them. That's a whole block of an author's bibliography that you'll never find in a bargain bin.

The issue of price (or lack thereof) can also be a bit of a sticking point in webcomics. The argument tends to go thusly: on the one hand, most webcomics are free, which means you can start, stop and resume whenever you like, with absolutely no limitations. You get what may be an incredible tale at no cost at all. On the other hand, if things go sour, and you don't like where the story's going, the counter is that since you're not paying for it anyway, you don't really have the "right" to make demands. It's an iffy debate that I'm not getting into now - hell, I've always thought that even paying customers don't complain enough (though when they do, it's bloody brilliant), but it does raise the question of how you'd rate the importance of an editor: Tom Brevoort didn't do much to make AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED readable, but leaving all the creative decisions in the hands of the writer can lead to some unfortunate storytelling decisions - FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE being the most egregarious example, though DOMINIC DEEGAN: ORACLE FOR HIRE has made a few wrong turns as well.

Getting back to the whole price thing: the reason free webcomics are so important, especially these days with the digital piracy issue on the table, is because you have a ready-made alternative to amorphous, institutionalized popularity contests (Zuda) and clunky, uncomfortable efforts to lure you into paying anyway (Marvel's online initiative). And for those who prefer paper comics just because they like the feel, or because they're attached to those familiar icons such as Batman and Spider-Man, ask yourself this: how much are you willing to spend, and for how long, on comics that are decidedly inferior to, say, Rich Burlew's THE ORDER OF THE STICK or Shaenon Garrity's NARBONIC? I understand the attachment - hell, I'm still reading print comics, aren't I? - but at the same time, I could drop Marvel, DC and the rest of them tonight without feeling a very great loss. I haven't done so mainly because there's a handful of writers out there who still interest me, but if they were out of the picture? I would be too.

It's been almost three years since I discovered SOMETHING POSITIVE. I'm still reading it, along with nearly twenty other webcomics from a wide array of genres. I've stumbled onto completed webcomics that ran on a daily basis for five to seven years, huge and sprawling series I could read at my leisure, years compressed to days or weeks. I've read EXCELLENT stories.

And I'll be sharing them with you.

Labels: Diana, webcomics

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I don't even play Portal and I'm addicted to that damn song...

Anyway, during the Savage Critics' short-lived re-enactment of Marvel's Civil War (whose side were YOU on?), Peter Adriaenssens made what I thought was a rather insightful comment:

"I find it interesting that the reviews are considered 'joyless' and 'dreary', as that seems to be one of the prevailing opinions on superhero comics in general these days."

Now, personally, I think Peter's made the Call of Duty 4 equivalent of a head-shot here: enthusiasm, that genuine joy one gets out of reading comics, is hard for me to come by these days. I get terribly jealous of someone like Chris Sims, who seems to pull it off so effortlessly week after week, even when reviewing soul-destroying artifacts of Satanic origin like TAROT: WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE. I just can't work myself up to that level, mostly because the endless chain of mediocre events and crossovers and "oh hell no" moments on both sides of the fence have taken me to a pretty apathetic place, generally speaking. I get a lot more fun and satisfaction out of webcomics (which, Hibbs willing, I may actually talk about here someday!).

I'm going to be fair here, and note that the Big Two are business enterprises and they have every right to prioritize the cash-grab (COUNTDOWN) over quality (CRIMINAL). And I'm not saying that financial motivation can't produce a good story, though I'm hard-pressed to think of a recent sales stunt that I actually enjoyed as a reader: the return of Captain Marvel? World War Hulk? Skrulls? Meh.

So, yes, there are times when my outlook on comics gets a bit dreary and lacking in the fun department, because I'm not having fun and I'm not happy about it.

Then Ed Brubaker puts another comic on the shelves, and I get my groove back.

When I think about comics that have truly impressed me over the last few years, Ed Brubaker's CAPTAIN AMERICA is pretty high up on the list. Since issue 25, Brubaker has taken what could have been an empty sales stunt - I'm looking at you, "The Death of Superman" - and turned it into a true character-driven story full of action and intrigue. With the most recent CAPTAIN AMERICA #32, we're now eight issues into the "Death of the Dream" storyline, there's no sign of the protagonist, and this series isn't the least bit poorer for it.

Part of it has to do with the way Brubaker's almost writing around the Captain's demise now, in that the story's still moving: Falcon and Bucky and the Black Widow are picking up the slack, and Sharon Carter's in a dangerous place, and the Red Skull's endgame - whatever it may be - continues to unfold. I'm still invested in the story and in these secondary characters, precisely because Brubaker's fleshed them out to the extent that they can maintain themselves as credible protagonists even without Cap to provide the context. And that's no small feat: could Superman's supporting characters have held the line together if he'd never come back? Probably not, ADVENTURES OF PERRY WHITE doesn't have the same ring to it (though I suppose that, in the Silver Age, it might've actually made for some hysterically funny reading).

I'm also very appreciative of the way Brubaker's done away with decompression without sacrificing the story's integrity: a lot happens this issue, and a lot happened last issue, and it's gratifying to feel like the story's going places rather than tread water for 22 pages at a time.

For all these reasons, I'm giving CAPTAIN AMERICA #32 a well-deserved EXCELLENT. Bravo, Ed!

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Better late than never? When it comes to WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY #12, I would've preferred NEVER.

Gail Simone seems seriously off her game lately. Between this AWFUL series finale, WONDER WOMAN, ALL-NEW ATOM and GEN13, a trend has started to emerge where Simone throws a bunch of random events and character beats together in the hopes that they'll gel, and they rarely do. Her comics, of late, read like Grant Morrison-lite in that Morrison tends to use the same shtick, tossing out all these weird ideas that don't seem to go anywhere... but with Morrison, the payoff is (usually) worth the confusion. I don't feel that way about WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY.

To be fair, there's nothing wrong with the high concept of superheroes and supervillains living together in a retirement community. In fact, that and Simone's knack for humorous wit got me interested in the series from the very beginning. But she didn't quite pull it off here: twelve issues in, you've got about ninety cast members running around, none of whom are even remotely fleshed-out in terms of characterization, and whatever humor Simone sees fit to inject comes off rather weakly.

On top of that, the storylines deteriorated into half-crossover half-Biblical mush, with all these pastiches being sewn in from seemingly random places (where the hell did that Cowboy Punisher come from?). If I make like Masi Oka and squint until I go blind, I can just about see what Simone was trying to do - Tranquility is a sort of nexus for characters from all comic book genres, which means you could tell pretty much any story you want. But the groundwork just isn't there. And even though WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY was cancelled rather quickly, and I do take that into account when evaluating what was done here, the painful truth is that this book was losing readers long before the axe fell. And I can only attribute that to the lack of a hook, and this, I think, is where Simone's quasi-Morrisonian emulation falls short. Morrison is a thoroughly weird writer, but his best work had, at its core, human (or human-ish) characters you could care about. Simone's no stranger to this principle - it defined her run on BIRDS OF PREY and DEADPOOL/AGENT X before that, and GEN13 more recently - and yet we have books like TRANQUILITY and THE ATOM which just don't allow for any real emotional center. Failing that, you'd have to have a pretty intriguing plot/premise to keep people coming back, and while WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY falls firmly into the "cute" category, that's just not enough in the long run.

P.S. Unless Blogspot lies, this was the Savage Critics' 1,000th post! Happy millenium, guys! Here's to another 1,000 comics savaged!

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This one goes out to Keith Giffen. You wanted snark; snark ye shall have!

MIDNIGHTER: ARMAGEDDON #1 is the latest attempt to revitalize Wildstorm, which - at this point - is soggier than a Jim Balent comic in the hands of a teenager. The imprint's great thinkers, whose vast intellect has brought them to the state of near-collapse they're currently enjoying, have decided that the response to widespread apathy is to tease the destruction of the universe. Don't like Wildstorm? Good news! For fifty bucks, you can watch the whole thing get blown up (maybe)!

I guess my main problem with this issue, and with the underlying premise of this so-called event, is that I've already seen the blasted landscape/dead heroes/everything's crap future. I've seen it in X-MEN, I've seen it in HULK, I've seen it a thousand times... and I'm tired of it. At some point, it's become the default standard whenever anyone wants to depict a future dystopia. Oh, London got crushed by a giant spaceship! Millions of people are dead! A bunch of heroes went missing! Nobody knows what happened! Bleh. Show me a future where Doctor Phil is elected President, or where masses of defenseless humans are forced to watch hourly broadcasts of the Tila Tequila show. That's scary.

What's worse, there's zero dramatic investment in this particular future. Aside from purely cosmetic changes, Midnighter's crew remains more or less the same stereotypiriffic (take that, Mary Poppins!) cutouts they were before. It certainly doesn't help that the characters themselves shrug off Midnighter's apocalyptic vision with about the same lack of interest I feel when I get the latest Britney Spears update. "She got visitation rights? That's nice. The world is doomed? Yes, dear."

Ironically, this future-themed issue has no future to speak of: numbering aside, it's a one-shot (there's no MIDNIGHTER: ARMAGEDDON #2), and I doubt anyone who reads this actually believes Wildstorm is going to shake up its status quo so much. Come to think of it, didn't we already do this Armageddon thing with Captain Atom a while back? The thing is, even if Wildstorm has the stones to actually do something drastic this time, that's still an acknowledgement that the imprint has been so badly screwed up that only a cosmic Ctrl+Alt+Del can fix things. And, to be blunt, that's not the sort of tactic one should rely on too often. It would be more creative and rewarding to work with what you've got rather than toss it all out and start from scratch... but then, creativity and reward rarely synch up at Wildstorm, if this whole Worldstorm abortion is any indication.

AWFUL. Go ahead, Jim Lee, nuke 'em all. See if I care. (Hint: Probably not.)

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Well, it's been an interesting week: some new beginnings, and a somewhat unfortunate ending. Let's get right to it, shall we?

I'm hard-pressed to find a more radical transformation this week than SHE-HULK #22: with Dan Slott's departure (he'd be writing Spider-Man right now if Joe Quesada's shock collar still worked), Peter David takes the book in a completely different direction. That's to be expected, of course - David and Slott have very different senses of humor, with the former leaning more towards quips and puns while the latter works better with goofy, cartoon-esque scenarios - but I didn't expect to become so interested in the story. It may just be that David has more experience in the field, but I found his first issue of SHE-HULK was enough to hold my attention, where Slott's run never really caught on with me. On the other hand, David has a tendency to wear his pop culture influences on his sleeve... X-FACTOR's Singularity Investigations was obviously drawn from Wolfram & Hart (ANGEL), and I doubt it's a coincidence that SHE-HULK #22 is structured on the same principle as the HEROES season premiere: we start the story in medias res, time has passed, and a big part of what compels us forward is learning what's happened in the interrim. Narratively speaking, this is a perfectly fair and efficient tactic, but the timing could be better. Nevertheless, this is a GOOD starting point for David's run: there's a proper balance of action, humor and mystery, though if you're looking for Slott-esque gags, you're better off searching elsewhere.

AUTHORITY: PRIME #1 is another new beginning of sorts, though I suppose anything Wildstorm's doing at the moment is soured by the total collapse of the imprint. It's interesting that this miniseries comes out more or less at the same time STORMWATCH: PHD was cancelled; for all intents and purposes, this can be read both as a continuation of Gage's run and as a sequel to Ed Brubaker's AUTHORITY: REVOLUTION (since the Morrison/Ha run has been completely derailed). When it comes to action sequences, Gage rarely disappoints; in this issue alone Stormwatch goes old-school (it says something that I don't find Battalion's look nearly as ridiculous under Darick Robertson's pen as it probably did ten years ago) and beats up some giant robots while the Authority fends off a Lovecraftian hentai monster. Characterization is a bit on the light side, with a distinct focus on Stormwatch Prime (though there's a case to be made that the Authority has always been comprised of flat, one-note characters anyway). However, there's a definite sense of "road well-traveled" here - I feel like I've read this story before, Stormwatch and the Authority going to war over secrets from the past (though I can't remember whether Wildstorm has actually published a similar storyline). OKAY for what it is, because I know Gage isn't setting out to reinvent the wheel here... all the same, I can't see this being more than a pleasant distraction in the long run.

And speaking of long runs, it would've been nice to say that Gail Simone's tenure on GEN13 comes to a close after a long and successful reign on the title, but... well... no. Don't get me wrong, I liked the first six issues - Simone's characterization of the teens, especially Eddie, was instantly endearing - but somewhere along the way GEN13 seriously lost focus. This "Road Trip" arc had a grand total of four superteen teams running around fighting each other, all through an unofficial crossover with Simone's other soon-to-be-canned Wildstorm title, WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY. It didn't accomplish much other than allowing the kids to whine about their fate some more, and this latest issue - Simone's last - was particularly frustrating because the potential is right there on the page, and she doesn't take advantage of it. Disappointingly EH, especially as a finale to her ongoing storyline. Better luck on WONDER WOMAN, I guess.

Labels: Diana

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With the recent release of X-FACTOR #24, all X-books participating in the upcoming "Messiah Complex" crossover have now wrapped up their pre-existing storylines (with the possible exception of NEW X-MEN, which began a new two-parter last month). I thought this would be a proper time to look at where the line might be headed, and where it's been - as most of you probably know, this is hardly the first time this particular franchise has been revamped. What can we expect of the post-"Messiah Complex" status quo?

Officially, the last X-Men relaunch was May 2004's "Reload". Grant Morrison had left NEW X-MEN, and whether you agreed with his creative decisions or not, there's no question that he had set the agenda for the entire line - everyone from Chuck Austen to Grandpa X himself (Claremont) were taking cues from Morrison's series. His departure seemed to send editor Mike Marts and company into a crazed tailspin, because some pretty embarrassing fubars started emerging across the line (The Xorn Identity arguably being the most deserving of the Sarah Silverman Award for Most Egregarious Failure To Amuse).

In hindsight, I think that "Reload" is best defined by two key aspects. First, there was a serious downgrade in the talent pool: what actually happened when Morrison left was not so much a relaunch but an extended round of musical chairs. Claremont replaced Austen, Austen replaced Claremont. Obviously, their respective books were transformed accordingly - suddenly UNCANNY X-MEN was all about Psylocke, Savior of the Universe, while X-MEN degenerated into a sex-obsessed nightmare soap opera (I leave the driving of the coffin nails to a greater critic than I). Now, in fairness, we did get Joss Whedon out of the deal, and he did hit the ground running, but I think that, even in those early months of his run, ASTONISHING X-MEN was perceived less as part of a line and more as an individual entity, neither incorporating nor dictating plot elements. What this meant, ultimately, was that ASTONISHING X-MEN, UNCANNY X-MEN and X-MEN were all pretty much doing their own thing, with little correlation between the series. Now, some people saw this as a positive thing (myself included): why, we reasoned, would we want to see Joss Whedon saddled with the fallout of Claremont's weird BDSM fetish? Or, conversely, could we trust Chuck Austen to do justice to Cassandra Nova? Probably not.

And while all this was going on in the core books, the satellite titles weren't doing so well either: Judd Winick had jumped to DC a year earlier, but "Reload" marked the end of his pre-written scripts for EXILES. Fans of the series suffered through a six-month Chuck Austen interrim before Tony Bedard was assigned the book. Unfortunately, while Bedard had some clever plot concepts, his run never quite gelled with Winick's character-centric approach (and EXILES has the distinction of being the very last Winick book to not just be readable but consistently good). Meanwhile, NEW MUTANTS was cancelled and relaunched as NEW X-MEN: ACADEMY X, with the same characters and the same writing team of Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir; Chris Claremont's EXCALIBUR was pretty much like every Claremont book, pointless and stilted (I still snort at the thought of Patrick Stewart screaming "That so totally hurts!"). Ironically, for a line that centers itself on themes of change and evolution, not much was different once the dust settled.

Which leads me to the second notable aspect of "Reload": the kitchen-sink mentality. As the core books and pre-existing satellite series were working themselves out (or not, in some cases), Marvel unleashed over half a dozen solo books (and miniseries beyond count), such as ROGUE, JUBILEE, NIGHTCRAWLER, DISTRICT X and GAMBIT. Not one of them lasted beyond twelve issues. It's not that they were all terrible, really... they just failed to make a positive (or lasting) impression.

Judged by those standards, I suppose "Reload" can be considered a failure: Peter Milligan's replacement of Chuck Austen only led to mediocrity of a different sort, as the former X-STATIX writer phoned it in like an American Idol fan voting for Sanjaya. None of the "new" books, save ASTONISHING X-MEN, sold respectably on the direct market; nothing particularly inspiring emerged from it; and the X-Men were still in this quasi-fugue state where nobody - readers, writers, artists, editors and even the characters themselves - had any idea what was going on.

But while "Reload" may have been the latest official revamp, the line underwent another creative shakeup last year, ostensibly a delayed response to HOUSE OF M: Ed Brubaker replaced Chris Claremont on UNCANNY X-MEN, booting the latter to the fringes of the franchise, where he can play out his domination fantasies to his heart's content. Mike Carey took over X-MEN, bringing a decidedly unorthodox approach to the construction of his team and the characterization of said team members (the "villains as X-Men" angle has been used before, but I don't think it was ever as interesting as Carey's roster). At first, the three core books were still doing their own thing: Brubaker had a year-long space epic, Carey introduced some new and bizarre villains, and Whedon... well, Whedon's run is really just an echo at this stage, as it was meant to have been wrapped up a long time ago.

But once the new writers got settled in, something started to emerge: a larger storyline, spanning multiple books. Not the old-school style, where certain panels would have footnotes referring you to issues of different series for the rest of the tale, but... well, what we've had over the last six months or so are individual stories in each book that broadly deal with the same theme - the fallout from the Decimation. Granted, it's something that really should've been handled a while ago; part of the inconsistency in the previous configuration was that, since every writer did his own thing and nobody seemed to care about Wanda's magical hijinks, the whole Decimation thing was mostly just name-checked, except for Peter David's X-FACTOR (the only book to directly deal with Decimation-related themes). But now there's a tangible, visible connection between four books - X-FACTOR, UNCANNY X-MEN, X-MEN, and the well-meaning but painfully-miswritten NEW X-MEN - not just in terms of plot but in their shared depictions of the mutant world. Certain characters from one book make guest appearances in another not just to promote connectivity but also to further their own plotlines. I'd argue that this is the most cohesive the core books have been since the Nicieza/Lobdell run in the early '90s (which was really one book split into two monthly series).

In a sense, "Messiah Complex" is emerging almost as a sort of corrective for "Reload": we have an event that's genuinely story-oriented, in that it deals with the realistic fallout of an unrealistic event (personally, I'm finding the reprecussions far more interesting than HOUSE OF M itself, but that's a matter of preference). For once, this doesn't feel like some editorial mandate hammering round pegs into square holes. Structurally, there's a lot of parallelism between the books - fear of the future, the vulnerability of diminished mutants, etc. But more importantly, the participants in the crossover are proven talents, writers who've been responsible for some pretty engaging comics in recent years. It's a simple formula for success; kind of makes you wonder how nobody's figured that out with all the Civil Wars and Crises and such.

Part of why I'm feeling so optimistic about this relaunch also has to do with credibility. I'm at the point where I sort of tune out Quesada's blatherings about how everything Marvel puts out is rilly rilly kewl, but Ed Brubaker killed Captain America (sales stunt or not, it was a ballsy move that he hasn't yet squandered or undermined), and Mike Carey made the Devil sympathetic, and if they tell me "Messiah Complex" is first and foremost a good story, I believe them. Moreover, if they tell me "Messiah Complex" is going to really change things, I'm somewhat interested to see what happens next, all the moreso given the tidbits that have leaked out - EXILES is cancelled, NEW EXCALIBUR goes to Paul Cornell, Warren Ellis takes over ASTONISHING X-MEN... the emphasis, this time around, seems to be on finding suitable writers for the respective books (something tells me Cornell's Britishisms are going to be the tiniest bit more authentic than Claremont's). I can't stress enough how pleased I am at this development: it shows that the administration has indeed learned from past mistakes, and that can only be good for us as readers.

To reel this diatribe back to the relevant comic, X-FACTOR #24 and the Isolationist storyline is actually a perfect example of these positive aspects of "Messiah Complex": on the one hand, it does build on David's previous X-Factor plots (we now know that Josef Huber was foreshadowed months ago, the mysterious "Uber" mentioned by Detective Jamie), but on the other hand, the implications of the Decimation are never far from anyone's mind, and in fact, the Isolationist's plan emerges as a direct result of HOUSE OF M (albeit a delayed one). David has always been very good at threading crossover plotlines through his own work as seamlessly as possible, and that emerges here as well. The characters are dealing with their own issues, but also with the knowledge that their world - the mutant world - is at an end.

The one downside, perhaps, is that - like all the pre-"Messiah Complex" storylines - there's little closure at the arc's end, since it's all set-up for the big crossover (Carey's "Blinded By The Light" is especially guilty of this, as nothing gets resolved at the end of X-MEN #203). But I'm going to hazard a prediction that "Messiah Complex" will be The Crossover That Got It Right; quite possibly the first successful, well-written multi-series epic since "Age of Apocalypse".

Labels: Diana

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OMEGA THE UNKNOWN #1 is arguably Marvel's most noteworthy release this week... because it doesn't look like something Marvel would publish.

Consider the history: novelist Jonathan Lethem, freshly recruited by Marvel, has chosen to remake a semi-obscure Steve Gerber miniseries on the basis that the original story never got a proper ending, having been cancelled due to low sales. There seems to be a genuine sense of nostalgia attached to the product, as opposed to the usual exploitative self-cannibalism - "let's dig up some graves and see if the bones sell". While I never read the original Gerber mini, it doesn't feel like Lethem is targeting specific aspects of the premise and revamping them so the modern reader finds them "accessible". More to the point, it's a revival of a property that has zero visible ties to the Marvel Universe, and from a marketing standpoint, it probably won't go far on the charts. And yet here it is.

Consider Lethem's story: a bizarre, slightly off-kilter narrative that may or may not be telling two tales at once. It's probably no coincidence that the first page describes this miniseries as "a version of an unfinished dream", because it really does read like a dream sequence, jumping from place to place while vague events unfold everywhere. This first issue was thoroughly weird, shades of David Lynch but without that sinking feeling you get when you realize there aren't any answers coming. Ever. EVER.

Consider Farel Dalrymple's artwork: simplistic, slightly reminiscient of pulp, with faded colors and big, chaotic lettering. It's a far cry from the usual vibrancy and clean order found in the Marvel Universe.

Everything about OMEGA THE UNKNOWN #1 screams "UNCONVENTIONAL!!!", and that's something Marvel hasn't actively pursued in a good long while... not since the days of X-STATIX, I think. And not only is it different, it doesn't flop around awkwardly like other series that would like to be different and go about it in all the wrong ways. The loopy, sometimes awkward dialogue and the abrupt scene shifts and the total lack of clarity all manifest here as conscious choices, rather than the result of flawed writing. On these grounds, I'm going with GOOD for now. We'll see where it goes next.

Labels: Diana

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You know how people sometimes laugh uncontrollably at inappropriate moments? And then there's that awkward feeling because they really should be taking things seriously?

That's pretty much how I felt about PENANCE: RELENTLESS #1. It's so self-important (the title page proudly announces "From the pages of CIVIL WAR"), so... well, relentless in its dark and faux-meaningful atmosphere, and yet my only response was to giggle like a Japanese schoolgirl.

That reaction largely stems from Paul Jenkins' total lack of self-awareness: you can almost hear the entire Linkin Park discography playing in the background as Robbie Baldwin, nee Speedball, shows off his nipple rings (?), watches Marquis de Sade biographies (?!), writes tortured and cryptic entries in his journal (?!?!) and cuts himself up like a Thanksgiving turkey (!!!). I can actually see someone with a wry sense of humor, like R.K. Milholland or Kyle Baker, turn this into a hysterically funny parody of the emo sub-culture and its stereotypes... but Jenkins is taking this very seriously, and apparently expects us to do the same.

Which isn't an easy task, precisely because - in his desperate attempt to give meaning to an utterly meaningless character revamp (I mean, seriously, who thought it was a good idea to turn Speedball into a hybrid of Dennis Rodman and Gerard Way?), Jenkins isn't actually doing anything beyond invoking various shorthand cliches. He's taking all the shortcuts, without actually going anywhere; it's not enough to just throw out random excerpts from the Emo Handbook for Maladjusted Outcasts, not in an age when "darkening up" the happy-go-lucky crowd is an all-too-common trend. In his effort to stress how different Robbie Baldwin is, how any trace of Speedball has been erased, Jenkins forgets to make us care about this new Penance kid (who, by all indications, is exactly the kind of douche you'd slap in the face after thirty minutes of enduring his whining about his poor, misunderstood life).

AWFUL stuff, and I can't see this interpretation of the character lasting for very long without getting retooled. It's just too much of an obvious joke to everyone but its creators.

Labels: Diana

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I agree with Graeme that there's something transparently jingoistic about CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE CHOSEN #1, from its over-the-top cover to its horrendously cliche dialogue - seriously, some of David Morrell's lines could give "DO YOU THINK THIS A ON MY HEAD STANDS FOR FRANCE?" a run for its money. There's a considerable gap between the serious issues Morrell is trying to raise (ie: if you're a soldier in a foreign war zone, will you always recognize your enemies when you see them?) and the simplistic, ethnocentric We Are Right And They Are Wrong Because We Are America way in which these issues are raised. Given that David Morrell created Rambo, I don't know that we should've expected anything more, but Marvel missed the zeitgeist here: it would've been perfectly fashionable to publish this comic four or five years ago, when the post-9/11 atmosphere necessitated an inherently patriotic response (remember Doctor Doom crying in the ruins of the Towers?), but that sort of blind flag-waving has mostly gone out of style, to the extent that overly zealous displays of patriotism tend to earn polite snickers, if not outright parody. And while this particular interpretation of Captain America as a flag with legs was commonplace during John Rey Neiber's run, or Dan Jurgen's, it's a little harder to reconcile with Ed Brubaker's character-centric approach - even as FALLEN SON and mainstream news outlets treated Captain America's "death" as a purely symbolic story, Brubaker's own comic continues to treat Steve Rogers as a person first, icon second. And that makes THE CHOSEN #1 look even more AWFUL than it already is.

Fortunately, readers seeking strong characterization and an intriguing plot can always turn to Brian Vaughan, who kicks off a four-issue run with BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #6. It's gratifying, though not surprising, that Vaughan chose Faith as his protagonist rather than the titular heroine; he always does so well with damaged women like Hero Brown and Mystique, largely because he understands that to make an antihero appealing, you can't be explicit about what's going on in their heads. On TV, we usually only saw understated glimpses of Faith's pain, and Vaughan keeps that up by dropping hints about her mental state rather than be overt about it (ie: the state of her apartment wall). I actually enjoyed this issue more than any of Whedon's, mostly because I feel Whedon's priority when scripting the first arc was to do things that couldn't have been done on television (Dawn the giantess, zombie ballroom dancing, Amy and Willow duking it out in midair and so on). And while the spectacle was entertaining enough, it wasn't quite as dramatically fulfilling as I might've hoped. Vaughan, by contrast, has scaled back the grandiose Peter Jackson-esque sequences for the sake of exploring individual characters, and even devotes a few pages to a surprisingly flirtatious scene between Buffy and Xander (am I imagining things or are those two getting a bit closer than they used to be?) just to keep the overall "seasonal" storyline going. I like the premise; I like the way Vaughan writes the characters; I like that part of this issue is dedicated to a pretty serious warping of Emily Post and her damned salad forks. VERY GOOD.

Labels: Diana

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The interesting thing about WORLD WAR HULK: X-MEN #3 is that it's basically a microcosm of the whole event, in terms of my critical approach to it. See, it's not the kind of story I personally enjoy, so if I were to rate it subjectively, I'd give it an EH.

However, I can't ignore the fact that as a genre piece, WORLD WAR HULK and its tie-ins are actually doing a damn sight better than their predecessors - unlike "Civil War" or "House of M", the basic plot makes sense here, and that much-sought-after moral ambiguity manifests itself because on the one hand, you can sort of identify with the Hulk and his motives, but on the other hand, you can't really support his decision to destroy the rest of the Marvel Universe... though I suppose many readers would like nothing more than to see the Hulk crush Iron Man and the pro-reg morons. But, you know, realistically speaking, it's just not going to happen.

Of course, this is all window-dressing; the "point" of WORLD WAR HULK (perfectly encapsulated in WORLD WAR HULK: X-MEN #3) is to provide the punchy-punchy and lots of explosions. It doesn't have to be profound, and I think Christos Gage understands that - after all, he built this three-issue miniseries around the shaky premise that the Hulk has targeted the X-Men based on what Xavier might have done, had he actually been present at that fateful Illuminati meeting. Of course, the logical error immediately presents itself: he wasn't there, and if the Hulk is going to attack every person who could have been involved in his exile, this crossover would last eight years. Moreover, if Gage were seriously trying to sell the plot, he'd have a pretty big hurdle to jump - we, as comic fans, know the Hulk won't kill Xavier because, as Rene Magritte would've put it, ceci n'est pas une X-Men comic.

Which is why, if you were to look at this comic in terms of narrative progression, what happens is the Hulk fights the X-Men, he fights them some more, Juggernaut turns up for a nicely-rendered double-page spread, and then Cessily of the New X-Men lectures the Hulk on all the crap mutants have to deal with. The Hulk, in awe of being out-angsted, takes off. It's pretty self-nullifying, in that the story has no real consequences for the Hulk or the X-Men (well, except for Juggernaut), but the battle is entertaining enough to justify the miniseries.

On a broader scale, there's a great degree of parallelism between what Gage is doing here and what Greg Pak is doing with the larger WORLD WAR HULK story. To some extent, it's all about Hulk vs. Superheroes, and while I may personally find it tedious, I can't fault it from a critical standpoint: Pak and the other WWH writers are doing exactly what they set out to do, and unlike Millar and Bendis, they're actually achieving their objectives rather than aim high and hit low. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but WORLD WAR HULK: X-MEN and its parent story make for a GOOD summer-actionfest-blockbuster type of comic, and it's probably all the more appealing to readers who are sick of debating the merits of Superhero Registration.

Labels: Diana

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David Lapham is either very clever or very confused.

TERROR INC. #1 is the latest release for Marvel's MAX imprint. Like most MAX comics, what this actually means is that it's a standard Marvel story with copious amounts of awkward sex and violence attached in a very forced and artificial way (not unlike Justin Timberlake's faux-ghetto routine - he's from sodding Memphis, for God's sake, who does he think he's fooling?).

It's a bit backwards, isn't it? Rather than be branded "for mature readers" due to content, I get the feeling that this issue's content was determined with an eye towards justifying the brand. You have to wonder whether Lapham's first draft came back with "MORE BLOOD & BOOBIES" written all over it.

The last time I saw Terror, he stole Arana's severed arm and was trapped in a future nobody cared about. Lapham anticipates this problem and seems to start from scratch, spending most of his first issue introducing the protagonist. This is where I don't know whether he's being smart or scattered: Terror survives by stealing body parts and attaching them to himself, making him a sort of patchwork monster. And the story itself is a chimera as well: a bit of 300, a bit of MARVEL ZOMBIES, a bit of CONAN, a bit of... well, take your pick from the "mercenary tricked by government" sub-genre. Is Lapham just throwing stuff out there in a blind panic? Or was this a deliberate creative decision? It's hard to say for sure, because I've seen plenty of writers gleefully hurl the kitchen sink at their readers' heads in an attempt to engage them; then again, Lapham can be tricky when he needs to be.

Either way, I can't give it much more than an EH, because even if the structure was intentionally designed to mirror the main character, it didn't make for very interesting reading beyond "well, isn't that a cute idea." Part of the problem may be that, as a hybrid creature, TERROR INC. doesn't seem to offer anything you can't find elsewhere; the downside of incorporating so many different sub-genres is that none of them have much breathing room, and if zombies are your thing, you'd probably be more satisfied with something like THE WALKING DEAD or MARVEL ZOMBIES, simply because those books deal with the subject matter as a central theme.

Labels: Diana

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I have mixed feelings about DAREDEVIL #99.

On the one hand, Ed Brubaker's decision to gradually move away from the Frank Miller paradigm is commendable; it's always nice when writers remember there's more to Daredevil's history than the Kingpin, Bullseye and Elektra. And if, when he first started out, Brubaker relied on some of those familiar icons, he's now making a point of using new characters, and old-timers who never really had a chance to dominate the page while Miller's definitive A-listers were around. Spotlighting these less-popular individuals puts some variety and unpredictability back into the equation.

Of course, the flip-side of that decision is that once you start bringing in villains and supporting characters who haven't been around in any meaningful capacity for a while, reintroduction is necessary. You can't just assume that your readers will peg the Enforcers on sight, or that they'll recognize the significance of the name "Cranston" without any context. This issue marks a rare misstep for Brubaker, in that he ends the issue (and the arc) on a cliffhanger that doesn't work if you don't know who you're looking at. No one explicitly identifies this character, whose appearance is very similar to another Marvel villain... it's kind of a mess.

But all that really does is downgrade the issue to GOOD rather than Very Good; Brubaker's a master at this sort of slow-burn criminal conspiracy thing, and the consistency of Michael Lark's artwork lends an appropriately dark and murky quality to the story. I also like how our expectations are being toyed with in very subtle ways - I'd grown so accustomed to Milla being an annoying prat that I never thought there might be a deeper reason behind her latest string of freak-outs; and while Lily Lucca seems to fit the "femme fatale" archetype to a T, she might actually be telling the truth when she says she's not interested in disrupting Matt's marriage. It's these little things, as well as the more grandiose unveiling of master plans, that make DAREDEVIL worth a read every month.

Labels: Diana

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Graeme McMillan has shamed me.

All this time he's been here, endangering his will to live by reading crappy comics so we don't have to, and how do I repay him? By sticking to stuff I'm likely to enjoy anyway.

Well, Graeme, this one's for you! Let's talk about WOLVERINE #55 and the many, many ways Jeph Loeb makes the baby Xenu cry.

In a sense, Loeb is the writer most aligned with the public perception of comics: he's loud, cliched, somewhat incoherent, pretty much the printed equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer popcorn flick. An okay way to spend six minutes, but there's nothing more to see here, folks.

To be fair, this sort of bombastic, all-style-no-substance approach has its fans, and I can understand the appeal of the occasional non-cerebral Things Go 'Splody comic... just as long as you understand that it is a non-cerebral Things Go 'Splody comic. And that's where Loeb messes up, because he quite obviously lacks that sort of self-awareness - you never get the feeling that he's winking at his readers as he writes these horrifically cheesy scenes (that last page is a "KHAAAAAAN!" Photoshop just waiting to happen). No, Loeb - and by extension, Marvel - apparently expect us to take this issue very seriously. They're putting out press releases about how Loeb has killed off a certain long-standing rival of Wolverine (yeah, that'll last). In other words, this isn't a spoof of the overwrought '90s comic, it's a recreation, and we're being asked to critique it based on today's standards.

And, unfortunately, the past few years have raised the bar for comics waaaay over Loeb's head.

Just look at how repetitive, how thoroughly unimpressive this one comic can be: from Loeb's fixation on primordial goo, to Wolverine's first line of dialogue being lifted verbatim from a Loeb-penned scene in HEROES (the one where Niki meets DL's mother), to the Special Sword that saves the day - "Won't say how it works, only that it clearly does." Um, no, Jeph. If you're going to hinge your entire storyline on some Magical MacGuffin that can kill the bloody unkillable, you're damn well going to explain how it works. And, of course, the poor hideous monster has a final moment of humanity (despite Loeb being kind enough to remind us of all his past atrocities, so are we expected to sympathize with him now?) and begs for death, which is duly granted. Ugh.

Even if you ignore the cliches and take an overall look at the story Loeb's telling... well, apparently the whole feral mutant war is predicated on hair color. "One blonde. One black. He knows only one can survive." Thank God for peroxide, I suppose. And then, just as you're wondering whether this is some colossal practical joke played at your expense, a shadowy figure (quite probably Axel Alonso) emerges to reassure us that "everything you've learned is true". Because nothing says "This story will stick" like a mouthpiece promising that it will, and that Wolverine is now... hell, I don't even know. The new spokesperson for Lycanthropes Anonymous? Heir to that abominable Austen storyline with the talking wolves? Even more pointlessly complicated than he was before?

Really, it's that transparent writer's fiat that annoys me the most, the fact that Loeb is constantly reinforcing the events of the story with lines about how the sword "very clearly" works, and how "everything you've learned is true", etc. Rather than use the story to convince us, Loeb basically tells us we MUST be convinced. And I'm not. Mark my words, this whole CRAP story will either be directly retconned or quietly forgotten by the end of next year, emerging only in Wikipedia articles that link it to "Nightcrawler's father is Satan" and "Gwen Stacy's Teenage Mutant Ninja Goblins".

Labels: Diana

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THE ORDER #1 wasn't originally on my pull list for this week, mostly because time hasn't softened my opinion of CIVIL WAR and I prefer to avoid bad-crossover fallout when I can. On the other hand, there are occasions when keeping an open mind leads to unexpected surprises.

This was one such occasion.

Matt Fraction has delivered a first issue that is, in a way, the antithesis of Dan Slott's AVENGERS: THE INITIATIVE. Slott's biggest hurdle, right at the start, was that none of his characters came off as appealing or intriguing; his interpretation of the Initiative is based on forced conscription into an organization with sinister undertones. THE ORDER, by contrast, seems to have been built around the concept of brave men and women volunteering to receive superpowers for a year (and occasionally slipping up). There's a sort of everyman idealism there that isn't too common in today's Marvel Universe, and you can see it even more clearly in the first few pages, which establish Henry Hellrung as a likeable guy who wants to do "the next right thing". This is crucial for a book with an original cast, there has to be at least one sympathetic protagonist with whom the reader can identify. More than any plot twist or gimmick, the protagonists will determine the average reader's reaction to the story. That's why the Runaways, X-23 and the Young Avengers have endured the test of time where so many of their peers (Arana, Freedom Ring, the latest Ant-Man, etc.) have vanished into obscurity.

Using new characters also allows a degree of freedom, and Fraction uses that to set up a surprising twist halfway through the issue. I've always been fond of books that shake up their rosters on a regular basis, and while this tactic has a downside - Fraction basically has to introduce the Order twice in about thirty pages, so there's no room to explore any character except Henry - a fluid and dynamic cast has its advantages.

As Jog noted, the use of media awareness echoes Peter Milligan's X-STATIX (or, more recently, Ellis' THUNDERBOLTS), in that the Order is clearly part superhero team and part PR stunt, and that actually has a hand in how the story plays out. I expected Fraction to use this angle as a way of juxtaposing the Order's pristine public image with their genuine personalities off-camera, but that's not what happens. In fact, it's the public image that gets tarnished, and there's no evidence that the media is either exploiting or being exploited by the Order. So I'm not sure where we're going with that, though I'm certainly interested in finding out.

And now it's time for Starkwatch! Ever since CIVIL WAR ended, Tony Stark has been one of the most erratic characters at Marvel. Some writers see him as a megalomaniacal douche who keeps a heart-encircled picture of Dr. Doom on his nightstand; some insist he's just trying to do the right thing in a crazy world; and some (well, just Adam Warren, really) simply have him going about his superhero tech business. Fraction's version of Stark is a little too close to Company Mouthpiece (ie: "It's what the Fifty-State Initiative is all about - and it's why THE WAR was fought") but overall, he comes off as a relatively balanced figure, quite possibly because he's at a distance from the heart of the story so the issue isn't overwhelmed by The Moral and Ethical Dilemmas of Mister Anthony Stark (or, to put it another way, "TONY IZ IN UR SHIELD, ENSLAVING UR POWURZ"). That might be the wisest way to use Iron Man in any comic that doesn't directly concern Iron Man, as he's become a very unpleasant figure and no amount of FRONTLINE damage control can fix that in one shot.

A GOOD debut, then. I had zero expectations going in, but I like what I've seen and I want to see more.

Labels: Diana

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In an interview that took place prior to the release of MARTHA WASHINGTON DIES, Dark Horse Executive Editor Diana Schutz had this to say:

"I can tell you that before I first read the script, Frank had told me that I was going to cry when I read it."

Yes, Ms. Schutz. I'd cry too if I had paid Frank Miller for this dreck.

To prepare for this story, I reread the Martha Washington trilogy (GIVE ME LIBERTY, MARTHA WASHINGTON GOES TO WAR and MARTHA WASHINGTON SAVES THE WORLD). Boy, that was a waste of time. Not only does MARTHA WASHINGTON DIES fail to make any sense on its own merits (Grandma Martha turns into fireworks because... she met an alien once?), it doesn't even have anything to do with the previous stories, which ended on an optimistic note; suddenly barbarians have taken over the world and it's humanity's last stand (someone's been playing too much WORLD OF WARCRAFT). The switch is so bewildering - and so poorly explained - that you're left completely baffled whether you're familiar with the earlier Martha books or not.

For what it's worth, I do see what Miller's trying to do here; Martha dies while stuck in the same cycle of violence that defined her entire life, and there's certainly something poignant about the fact that she never got out, but she didn't die alone either. However, as is usually the case with Miller in recent years, there's a rather large gap between what you think he might have been aiming for and what actually sees print. Any genuine emotion this one-shot is meant to evoke gets smothered under clumsy, anvilicious political overtones.

I submit MARTHA WASHINGTON DIES as the final, definitive proof that something AWFUL has happened to Frank Miller; not only has he lost any semblance of talent, he's now actively undermining his own legacy by appending such horrors as this epilogue and ALL-STAR BATMAN to his past successes. A word of advice, Frank - sometimes it's better to get off the stage before you're thrown off.

Labels: Diana

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Wildstorm confounds me.

It's no secret that the Worldstorm revamp pulled a Britney and went completely off the rails. What's shocking is that it's been almost a year, and no steps have been taken to realign the imprint.

For those unfamiliar with the plight of DC's redheaded stepchild, here's the Sparknotes version: WILDCATS and THE AUTHORITY were meant to be Wildstorm's flagship titles, only neither of them got past issue 2 before disappearing. The gap was unofficially filled by GEN13 and STORMWATCH: PHD, and they ended up becoming the de facto core series.

All well and good, except no one's treating them that way.

I'm no marketing expert, but when you have two books that set the agenda for the entire line (by virtue of being published while Morrison, Ha and Lee play Dance Dance Revolution or whatever the hell they're doing), it's probably not a great idea to have them come out on the same week every. single. month. Factor in a serious case of underpromotion, resulting in abysmal sales, and it certainly seems like Wildstorm is doing everything in its power to self-destruct.

The real sticking point? Gen13 and Stormwatch are probably the best series currently under the Wildstorm banner.

Let's start with STORMWATCH: PHD #9, the conclusion of a two-part "whodunit". John Doran and his team are investigating the attempted murder of Stormwatch overseer Jackson King, and this is where Christos Gage's background in procedural drama really comes into play; most of this issue strongly resembles the middle act of a typical "Law & Order" episode, where the detectives go about questioning suspects and, through these interrogations, we learn more about the various people involved. It could've gotten tedious rather quickly, but Gage also uses these scenes to reintroduce Stormwatch Prime, and the subtle comparisons between the superhero squad and the detective squad lead to some solid character beats.

If there's a drawback inherent to this issue, it's that Gage is working with a heavy backload of Wildstorm continuity: not only is he running his own storylines, he's also integrated the cast and history of the pre-Authority Ellis run from the late '90s. I don't know how confusing this would be to new readers - technically, you're given all the information you need about Diva, Blademaster, Cannon and the others, but I can definitely see how it might be a little daunting.

Overall, though, it's a GOOD issue: the large cast is balanced well, everyone gets a scene or two to shine, and the twist ending was foreshadowed months ago yet still manages to come off as a surprise.

Moving on to GEN13 #10, which is sort of an antithesis to the cool, professional veneer of Stormwatch: this series is all about a bunch of amateur superkids running blind and wreaking havoc. In a way, it's DC's answer to RUNAWAYS: a group of distinctively characterized teenagers discover they have powers, their parents aren't who they seem to be, and they decide to stick together while being chased by evil forces. But while Brian Vaughan mostly played it straight, Gail Simone prioritizes comedy, and that makes a big difference in how the stories play out.

There's actually a lot going on this month: we're at part 3 of an indirect crossover with Simone's other Wildstorm series, WELCOME TO TRANQUILITY. The Gen13 kids have stumbled onto the quaint but quirky superhero retirement community, and almost immediately run afoul of the resident teenagers, who call themselves the Liberty Snots. ("We're thinking of changing it. But we had T-shirts and everything made already.") Meanwhile, Bobby's backstory is revealed, and a third group of superteens prepare to attack.

It's a VERY GOOD issue from start to finish, funny in all the right places and satisfyingly unpredictable at times - I can't think of another teen hero whose primary influence is Bob Marley, and Eddie's choice of codename is accompanied by a poignant moment that gives a degree of depth to the giant goofball.

And that's it for Wildstorm. Why do I have the feeling I'll be saying that in a broader context within the next six months?

Labels: Diana

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Things I know: That A on his head did not stand for France.

Things you know: Darkseid is.

Things I'd like to know: Exactly how much Jagermeister was needed to come up with "Skrull Invasion"?

Things you'd like to know: Why was Paris Hilton snubbed for the role of Kara on "Smallville"?

Things I should know (but don't): Never post ahead of the boss. (Sorry, Brian!)

Things you should know (but don't): Since I'm on the other side of the Atlantic, I'm usually up and running while the Comix Experience crew's asleep (Do Comic Retailers Dream of Hologram-Foil-Covered Sheep?). Just think of me as your late-late-late-late-late night talk show host.

Things we all know: Kurt Busiek wins!

Labels: Diana

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