- RD
Friday, October 2, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Dark Avengers #9
Ares* is one of Norman Osborn's Dark Avengers. His 10-year-old son Phobos** is in superspy training with Nick Fury's Secret Warriors, unbeknownst to his father until now. In Dark Avengers #9 (Brian Michael Bendis), Ares finally follows his son to the Warriors' base, and has the confrontation with Fury that readers have been waiting for ever since the Secret Warriors were introduced in the pages of Bendis' Mighty Avengers.
Except there's no fight. The fetching cover at the top of this post is just a cover. After bashing his way through the base defenses and b*tch-slapping another of the Warriors, Ares engages Fury in a remarkably level-headed discussion. He asks the spymaster what the Warriors have been up to, what Fury has been doing with his son. Fury explains. Ares the God stands there, head hung low, actually ashamed - a powerful image, and clearly one that resonates with his big-eyed son.
Ares admits that he doesn't really know how to be a dad - it turns out Zeus wasn't such a hot role model - and doesn't know how to help his son deal with and make use of his emerging powers. And so long as Phobos is happy with the Warriors, Ares gives Fury his blessing to train the boy (while of course promising vengeance should any harm come to his son).
It's a wonderfully unexpected done-in-one tale. Who'd'a thunk Ares would worry about being a good father? Bendis makes it work, reminding us that sometimes admitting his weakness is the strongest thing a father can do.
It's a wonderfully unexpected done-in-one tale. Who'd'a thunk Ares would worry about being a good father? Bendis makes it work, reminding us that sometimes admitting his weakness is the strongest thing a father can do.
- JC
* The Greek God of War.
** The Greek God of Fear, though I don't believe it's yet been established if he's an ancient deity in a 10-year-old's body, or a 10-year-old-child with the same powers as some older or purely mythical Phobos. He mostly acts like a kid.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Marvel vs. the Reset Button
RD and I spent a couple of hours yesterday debating Decimation, Exodus, and their effects on the social metaphors at the heart of the X-Men. (See our previous two posts for details.) The process has brought into sharp relief concerns I've had for a while now regarding the direction of Marvel's two biggest franchises, the X-Men and Spider-Man, under Joe Quesada's editorship.
The direction in question being bass-ackwards.
On the X-Men & the Mutant Decimation
After those last couple of posts, I looked up precisely what Quesada and his writers had said in interviews about Decimation: why the decision had been made to reduce the number of mutants in the world to a mere 200 or so, and what it meant for Marvel storytelling. I found this 2005 conference call with Quesada and Ed Brubaker, one of the X-Men writers at the time.
Brubaker says that, "the Marvel universe will look more like it did in the 1960’s, where there weren’t mutants around every corner. Readers will see in this story that the government will once again begin to change the way they look at mutants." And a little further on, Quesada is apparently directly quoted as wanting to "put the genie back in the bottle" for Marvel's mutants. "He says they’re trying to make their stories matter more by cutting down on mutants, adding that the thing that makes mutants appealing is that they are a minority, and fans can often relate to that aspect."
Unfortunately for Joe Quesada, mutants are not genies. They're toothpaste, and trying to force them back in the tube is never going to work.
Decimation fails on a metaphorical level because Marvel overdid it - 200 mutants in the world are no longer a minority, they're a statistical insignificance. An endangered species and a minority culture are two entirely different things. More importantly, resetting mutant relations to the 1960s goes against everything the Marvel universe is supposed to stand for. Unlike DC, Marvel has always been about reflecting our own world. Heroes and villains duke it out in New York and San Francisco (even Cleveland sometimes!), not Metropolis or Gotham. Relationships between minorities (virtually all minorities, whether based on race, religion, orientation or whatever) and the mainstream have dramatically changed in the last 40 years. Readers identified with a smaller mutant populace in the 60s, in a time when minority populations were smaller in our world as well, and less open about their difference. Not so today. You can't just shove the mutants back into the closet.
Yet for sheer storytelling purposes, Decimation fails for the opposite reason. They under-did it. If the argument is that the X-Men books have too many characters for readers to follow and care about, then why didn't the Decimation depower or drive off stage more actual X-Men? It's like a TV executive saying that a show's ensemble cast is too large, then firing all the non-speaking extras.
Of course, I'd argue killing or depowering surplus X-Men is a mistake anyway. Every character in the franchise is someone's favorite, however strange, gross, or Rob-Liefeld-influenced. I happen to be a Maggot fan. A cast like this are toys in a toybox - if a writer doesn't like some of 'em, or a lot of them even, they can do what Joss Whedon did. Pick a small, manageable team, tell stories about them alone, and ignore the rest.
On the Erasure of Spider-Man's Marriage
When Marvel finally magicked away Spider-Man's marriage at the end of 2007, I was saddened but not really surprised. Quesada, had been arguing for this outcome for years, not just behind the scenes but also with the fans in the message board trenches. He insisted that marriage had turned Peter Parker into an old man, desperately uncool. I thought this was utterly ridiculous. A married Peter, a single Peter, surely they weren't so different? It wasn't until Quesada had implemented his "Brand New Day" that I realized he'd actually had a point.
The single Spidey of BND and beyond feels like a college student again. He's living paycheck to paycheck, constantly wondering where his life is heading (besides full-speed towards a man wearing a fishbowl on his head). He's in a constant state of free fall. The 1987-2007 married Spidey often lived paycheck to paycheck, changed careers a couple of times, and rarely knew where he was headed either (besides full-speed towards a man with a robotic scorpion's tail protruding from his posterior), but at the same time he had a sense of stability. His wife was a source of strength, and a constant variable in the mathematics of responsibility that Peter spends so much of his mental energy deliberating.
Now the marriage never happened. The entire Spidey ballgame has been changed, and in ways more complex than a simple breakup.Amazing Spider-Man writer Dan Slott, in a reply to a previous post on this blog, argued that the retcon changed very little about Peter & MJ's past: "in the current run of ASM, Pete and MJ still had a life together and all of those past stories still happened (though they happened as a 'committed couple living together' and not 'a married couple living together')."
But there is a difference between a couple in a committed partnership and a married husband and wife, or pair of wives, or husbands. You can debate the philosophical and religious significance of marriage - whether it's "just words," whether it truly changes anything about the way we live and love each other - but clearly it means something to a whole lot of human beings, or else we wouldn't be fighting so stringently these days over its definition and eligible parties.
What's more, it clearly means something to the writers and editors at Marvel as well, or they wouldn't have to use the devil and a sweeping retcon to end Spider-Man's marriage. If marriage wasn't that big a deal, a superhero divorce wouldn't be either.
And for the readers, there's a cost beyond that stability in Peter's life, that little bit of hard-won happiness after all his tragedies. Stan Lee took Peter Parker through high school and to college. His successors allowed Peter to graduate, get married, and even try to start a family. Now he seems stuck in amber, a swinging single unlucky-in-love 20-something forever more. After watching Marvel set Peter's emotional clock back 10 years, how can we expect him to ever move forward again?
When I read Amazing Spider-Man today, it doesn't feel like an ongoing chronicle of one man's epic life. With its star no longer allowed to grow and change, it feels like a series of episodic adventures, no matter how smoothly one blends into the next. It feels more like a great Spider-Man animated series (or DC comic) than a flagship Spider-Man book.
In trying to bring Marvel's two biggest franchises back to basics, Joe Quesada hobbled them. He undermined the spirit of evolution that has made readers love and relate to them for years. Our lives, our politics, our relationships, and our communities move on with time. Stan Lee's original brilliance in developing the Marvel Universe was in giving us comic heroes that grew with us.
I'd like them back, please, Joe.
The direction in question being bass-ackwards.
On the X-Men & the Mutant Decimation
After those last couple of posts, I looked up precisely what Quesada and his writers had said in interviews about Decimation: why the decision had been made to reduce the number of mutants in the world to a mere 200 or so, and what it meant for Marvel storytelling. I found this 2005 conference call with Quesada and Ed Brubaker, one of the X-Men writers at the time.
Brubaker says that, "the Marvel universe will look more like it did in the 1960’s, where there weren’t mutants around every corner. Readers will see in this story that the government will once again begin to change the way they look at mutants." And a little further on, Quesada is apparently directly quoted as wanting to "put the genie back in the bottle" for Marvel's mutants. "He says they’re trying to make their stories matter more by cutting down on mutants, adding that the thing that makes mutants appealing is that they are a minority, and fans can often relate to that aspect."
Unfortunately for Joe Quesada, mutants are not genies. They're toothpaste, and trying to force them back in the tube is never going to work.
Decimation fails on a metaphorical level because Marvel overdid it - 200 mutants in the world are no longer a minority, they're a statistical insignificance. An endangered species and a minority culture are two entirely different things. More importantly, resetting mutant relations to the 1960s goes against everything the Marvel universe is supposed to stand for. Unlike DC, Marvel has always been about reflecting our own world. Heroes and villains duke it out in New York and San Francisco (even Cleveland sometimes!), not Metropolis or Gotham. Relationships between minorities (virtually all minorities, whether based on race, religion, orientation or whatever) and the mainstream have dramatically changed in the last 40 years. Readers identified with a smaller mutant populace in the 60s, in a time when minority populations were smaller in our world as well, and less open about their difference. Not so today. You can't just shove the mutants back into the closet.
Yet for sheer storytelling purposes, Decimation fails for the opposite reason. They under-did it. If the argument is that the X-Men books have too many characters for readers to follow and care about, then why didn't the Decimation depower or drive off stage more actual X-Men? It's like a TV executive saying that a show's ensemble cast is too large, then firing all the non-speaking extras.
Of course, I'd argue killing or depowering surplus X-Men is a mistake anyway. Every character in the franchise is someone's favorite, however strange, gross, or Rob-Liefeld-influenced. I happen to be a Maggot fan. A cast like this are toys in a toybox - if a writer doesn't like some of 'em, or a lot of them even, they can do what Joss Whedon did. Pick a small, manageable team, tell stories about them alone, and ignore the rest.
On the Erasure of Spider-Man's Marriage
When Marvel finally magicked away Spider-Man's marriage at the end of 2007, I was saddened but not really surprised. Quesada, had been arguing for this outcome for years, not just behind the scenes but also with the fans in the message board trenches. He insisted that marriage had turned Peter Parker into an old man, desperately uncool. I thought this was utterly ridiculous. A married Peter, a single Peter, surely they weren't so different? It wasn't until Quesada had implemented his "Brand New Day" that I realized he'd actually had a point.
The single Spidey of BND and beyond feels like a college student again. He's living paycheck to paycheck, constantly wondering where his life is heading (besides full-speed towards a man wearing a fishbowl on his head). He's in a constant state of free fall. The 1987-2007 married Spidey often lived paycheck to paycheck, changed careers a couple of times, and rarely knew where he was headed either (besides full-speed towards a man with a robotic scorpion's tail protruding from his posterior), but at the same time he had a sense of stability. His wife was a source of strength, and a constant variable in the mathematics of responsibility that Peter spends so much of his mental energy deliberating.
Now the marriage never happened. The entire Spidey ballgame has been changed, and in ways more complex than a simple breakup.Amazing Spider-Man writer Dan Slott, in a reply to a previous post on this blog, argued that the retcon changed very little about Peter & MJ's past: "in the current run of ASM, Pete and MJ still had a life together and all of those past stories still happened (though they happened as a 'committed couple living together' and not 'a married couple living together')."
But there is a difference between a couple in a committed partnership and a married husband and wife, or pair of wives, or husbands. You can debate the philosophical and religious significance of marriage - whether it's "just words," whether it truly changes anything about the way we live and love each other - but clearly it means something to a whole lot of human beings, or else we wouldn't be fighting so stringently these days over its definition and eligible parties.
What's more, it clearly means something to the writers and editors at Marvel as well, or they wouldn't have to use the devil and a sweeping retcon to end Spider-Man's marriage. If marriage wasn't that big a deal, a superhero divorce wouldn't be either.
And for the readers, there's a cost beyond that stability in Peter's life, that little bit of hard-won happiness after all his tragedies. Stan Lee took Peter Parker through high school and to college. His successors allowed Peter to graduate, get married, and even try to start a family. Now he seems stuck in amber, a swinging single unlucky-in-love 20-something forever more. After watching Marvel set Peter's emotional clock back 10 years, how can we expect him to ever move forward again?
When I read Amazing Spider-Man today, it doesn't feel like an ongoing chronicle of one man's epic life. With its star no longer allowed to grow and change, it feels like a series of episodic adventures, no matter how smoothly one blends into the next. It feels more like a great Spider-Man animated series (or DC comic) than a flagship Spider-Man book.
In trying to bring Marvel's two biggest franchises back to basics, Joe Quesada hobbled them. He undermined the spirit of evolution that has made readers love and relate to them for years. Our lives, our politics, our relationships, and our communities move on with time. Stan Lee's original brilliance in developing the Marvel Universe was in giving us comic heroes that grew with us.
I'd like them back, please, Joe.
- JC
[What he said. - RD]
Sunday, September 20, 2009
a post that requires a new joe quesada tag
I do not read any comics with X-Men in the title. I have not read House of M, any of the Decimation stories, anything by Grant Morrison, or Matt Fraction's latest offering, Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: The Exodus, which JC just reviewed. I like Matt Fraction. I don't blame him in the slightest for doing the best he could with the X-dross that he has been given by years of mismanagement. I blame Joe Quesada. However, this concept of putting the remaining 200 mutants on an island is either the worse metaphor in history or just a really stupid plot development.
JC says the mutants have been talking about their culture since before House of M, and it's been seen as a metaphor for any "minority" (usually gay but sometimes any generic non-privileged) "culture" (that is, the stereotypical behaviors or markers collectively identified by the privileged [or, more accurately, the media] and used when talking about/reporting on the minority in question). (To save time and abuse of quotation marks, I'm going to use the term "gay pride" for people who have chosen to identify themselves and act in ways that have become stereotypical. This is in contrast to those who are gay but not connected to or identified with the stereotypical subculture. No offense is intended.)
The difference, you stupid bastards, is that gay pride is a chosen way of life. Being a mutant is a quirk of genetics. There is nothing connecting mutants to each other any more than bald people are connected to each other. They may have support groups and wear T-shirts with funny bald jokes on them, but there is no inherent bald culture. There is no inherent gay culture. There is no inherent mutant culture. While I appreciate the dramatic uses of the competing ideologies (let's call it Magneto v. Xavier), no writer should ever have tried to create mutant pride as an exclusionary concept (i.e. Xavier's kids using Magneto's separatist doctrine). The concept of mutant culture is particularly ridiculous in a world where not everyone with extra-human abilities is a mutant.
And then came the de-powering of the mutants, leaving only 200 people (in the world? in the country? wtf?) with powers due to mutant genes. And then they began to be persecuted MORE. Again, not having read the books, I just can't understand how this is a logical storyline. With only 200 (give or take) people in question, they could all be rounded up by secret police in the middle of the night. The teams of really strong superheroes fight back against the secret police, at which point the secret police are like, "Okay, just don't go in there." The Powers That Be battle the mutants in private and turn public opinion against them. They don't use their political power and write laws that affect only 200 people. That's just idiotic.
And now, apparently, the mutants are so persecuted that they have decided to go and live on an island. I get that, sort of; they've been written into a corner and the Dork Avengers are not letting up anytime soon. To spare their allies the pain of guilt by association, they separate themselves entirely and plan to do their world-saving with a little extra travel time. JC lauded this as a chance to build that mutant culture they've been talking about since 2001. It's still pretty stupid; you can't tell me that you wouldn't be safer underground or in a series of secret bases than on an island where you could all be taken out by one well timed bomb.
But either way, 200 people isn't a culture, it's a commune. A group of people who have nothing more in common than the fact that they're been persecuted by the rest of the (country? world? after this many decades with X-teams saving people's asses, how is public opinion really anti-mutant?) are not a community. They haven't chosen to be together because of their common values, opinions, behaviors, or landscaping. They have been exiled to the island, a sort of Survivor in reverse, which does not a community make. The characters are following the story to it's logical conclusion, but it has no basis in the new themes of culture and community.
If this is meant to be a continuation of the gay pride parallel, it's the shittiest, most exclusionary treatment I've ever seen. No federal protections for gay employees? Go live on an island! Not allowed to marry your partner? Get married on the island! Having trouble adopting? Next stop, the island! F*%$ that s@&!, man. Just f*%$ it.
JC wondered if perhaps this was meant to be a reference to the founding of Israel after World War II. The difference there, of course, is that the Jews did have a common culture, obviously, and while they were being offered/commanded to live in this place, they could build on their extended families and strong religious beliefs to build their new life. The mutants, like the bald, have nothing in common beyond their DNA.
I don't plan to read how Fraction treats the x-commune (although if they turn out to be the Others, I will personally apologize for everything bad I ever said about Joe Quesada), but I'm sure JC and those like him who do read Uncanny X-Men are hoping for strong characterization and good dramatic arcs to make up for the utter absurdity of the past several years. It's about time.
- RD
Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Exodus
The Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Exodus one-shot (Matt Fraction) establishes yet another new status quo for Marvel's x-tended mutant family, and it might just bring the X-Men's mission statement back into focus in the process.
For years, the X-Men fought to make the world recognize that no matter if you're black, white, blue, have gills, or shoot lasers from your eyes, we're all just people. It was Magneto who tried to divide "homo superior" from the "flatscans," until Grant Morrison's team in New X-Men started using that derogatory term as well, and teaching their students that mutants don't act or think or learn like humans.
Say what?
I get the intended metaphor about cultural/orientation pride, that in the modern age we need not assimilate and act like the majority so that our voices can be heard. The problem is, it doesn't work for the X-Men. There are subsets of mutants who have shared common experiences and developed their own unique cultural identities: Xavier alumni, Morlocks, the Brotherhood, etc. But outside of a small handful of telepaths, why should mutants think or learn differently from anyone else?
The X-Men's core metaphor seemed even more muddled in the Decimation that followed House of M, as the mutant population was severely reduced and rebranded as "endangered."* Aside from a few genetic markers, how are mutants a species? What is the "mutant culture" that they fear is now doomed to die out? With all this focus on survival, a series that had been a provocative exploration of issues of race and identity suddenly and strangely seemed to be more about life in our uncertain age of global terror. Not an unworthy metaphor in its own right, but I wasn't sure it had much to do with the X-Men.
Yet Matt Fraction may just be pulling it all together again. In the wake of proposed anti-mutant legislation, riots, and the imposition of martial law in their city by Norman Osborn, Cyclops has officially divorced the X-Men from the United States altogether. He's established a new mutant sanctuary on an island off the coast of California and issued a statement of intent to the world: here the X-Men will stay, with any and all mutants and their families who will join them.
"We have been, and always shall be, sworn to protect a world that hates and fears us. Only now... we shall all be free."
The idea of an emancipated mutant homeland is not quite new; in the late '90s, Magneto bullied the world into allowing him to run Genosha as his own mutant kingdom. And of course Norman Osborn immediately tries to paint Cyclops' new "Utopia" in the same light, as a militant state of crazy people. But this isn't a former terrorist running a mutant dictatorship, it's the X-Men, trying to save the world like they've always done without any government legislation or angry mob around this time to interfere with how they live at home and off duty.
The idea of the X-Men and their fellow mutants building a new nation seems far more in keeping with the series' base metaphor than the "there are only a few of us left, we can't make powered babies no more, and crazies want to kill us all off" schtick of the last few years. (It's Star Trek IV, and the X-Men are the whales?) Can one small band simultaneously serve as superheroes and Founding Parents? It's going to be fascinating to find out. And in the process, the X-Men might just be inventing that distinct mutant culture they've been so emo about saving from extinction ever since the Decimation.
The sequencing's a little off, sure, but I'm willing to forgive that.
*Let's not even talk about the fact that Joe Quesada supposedly encouraged the decimation because there were too many mutant characters in the Marvel U, yet only a small fraction of the dozens of current and former X-Men actually lost their powers. And a few of those joined new teams anyway. Huzzawah?
For years, the X-Men fought to make the world recognize that no matter if you're black, white, blue, have gills, or shoot lasers from your eyes, we're all just people. It was Magneto who tried to divide "homo superior" from the "flatscans," until Grant Morrison's team in New X-Men started using that derogatory term as well, and teaching their students that mutants don't act or think or learn like humans.
Say what?
I get the intended metaphor about cultural/orientation pride, that in the modern age we need not assimilate and act like the majority so that our voices can be heard. The problem is, it doesn't work for the X-Men. There are subsets of mutants who have shared common experiences and developed their own unique cultural identities: Xavier alumni, Morlocks, the Brotherhood, etc. But outside of a small handful of telepaths, why should mutants think or learn differently from anyone else?
The X-Men's core metaphor seemed even more muddled in the Decimation that followed House of M, as the mutant population was severely reduced and rebranded as "endangered."* Aside from a few genetic markers, how are mutants a species? What is the "mutant culture" that they fear is now doomed to die out? With all this focus on survival, a series that had been a provocative exploration of issues of race and identity suddenly and strangely seemed to be more about life in our uncertain age of global terror. Not an unworthy metaphor in its own right, but I wasn't sure it had much to do with the X-Men.
Yet Matt Fraction may just be pulling it all together again. In the wake of proposed anti-mutant legislation, riots, and the imposition of martial law in their city by Norman Osborn, Cyclops has officially divorced the X-Men from the United States altogether. He's established a new mutant sanctuary on an island off the coast of California and issued a statement of intent to the world: here the X-Men will stay, with any and all mutants and their families who will join them.
"We have been, and always shall be, sworn to protect a world that hates and fears us. Only now... we shall all be free."
The idea of an emancipated mutant homeland is not quite new; in the late '90s, Magneto bullied the world into allowing him to run Genosha as his own mutant kingdom. And of course Norman Osborn immediately tries to paint Cyclops' new "Utopia" in the same light, as a militant state of crazy people. But this isn't a former terrorist running a mutant dictatorship, it's the X-Men, trying to save the world like they've always done without any government legislation or angry mob around this time to interfere with how they live at home and off duty.
The idea of the X-Men and their fellow mutants building a new nation seems far more in keeping with the series' base metaphor than the "there are only a few of us left, we can't make powered babies no more, and crazies want to kill us all off" schtick of the last few years. (It's Star Trek IV, and the X-Men are the whales?) Can one small band simultaneously serve as superheroes and Founding Parents? It's going to be fascinating to find out. And in the process, the X-Men might just be inventing that distinct mutant culture they've been so emo about saving from extinction ever since the Decimation.
The sequencing's a little off, sure, but I'm willing to forgive that.
- JC
*Let's not even talk about the fact that Joe Quesada supposedly encouraged the decimation because there were too many mutant characters in the Marvel U, yet only a small fraction of the dozens of current and former X-Men actually lost their powers. And a few of those joined new teams anyway. Huzzawah?
Saturday, September 12, 2009
a thousand times argh
I honestly wasn't going to do this, and then I put some meringues in the oven and had an hour to kill. So let's discuss the utter soul-destroying travesty that is Buffy Season 8 #28.
Andrew Hosts Masterpiece Theatre is derivative but still funny. My personal favorite was the broken heart visual aid, which made me go, "Aww!" in two different ways. The Faith/Buffy (I wish. Hee! Sorry) scene is very true to them both and says a lot about how far they've come, even since they moved from the screen to the page. Daddy!Oz is cute and inspirational, and I really liked his pep talk to Willow. The drug analogy got a little heavy-handed in the show, and I appreciate that they've backed off of that but can still play it as a convincing addiction.
I don't think anyone ever really thought Willow had anything to do with Twilight, even after the bit with Evil!Future!Willow, so the main plot of the story fell pretty flat. The lack of action made this feel more like fanfic than an episode of the show, which is disappointing after so many strong issues. And I love you, Georges, but I have to agree that the art is a bit *cough* sketchy.
And then. I mean. What the good goddamn was Jane Espenson THINKING?
The whole reason we love Joss is that his characters are real. Emotions take time to build, people make stupid decisions, they have variously logical and irrational leaps of mental health and stability, just like real, flawed, stupid, beautiful people. And above all, they don't fall in love instantly.
You can tell me all you want that they've been heading toward this, the tension and hints of whateverthehell angst and UST and blahblahblahvaguelyincestuouscakes. I totes didn't see it, though JC assures me the signs were there. But seriously? Think about Xander. His first girlfriend, a demon magnet, fell on a spike, and ow. His second girlfriend, an actual demon, was only just warming up to him again after he left her at the altar (for completely understandable and valid reasons, but that's an entirely different post about his issues) when she was killed in battle. His most recent girlfriend was also killed in battle, quite recently, in fact. What the heck - excuse me - what the FUCK about his dating history means that he's going to think it's okay to get involved AGAIN with a girl he has more than once made clear is like a sister to him? Mooning over Buffy? It's a little season 1, but she's proven to be near immortal, so of course he'd think she's safe. Macking on Dawn? Not in the least bit appropriate or reasonable. It's just not Xander, and it made me lose all faith in Jane Espenson.
Sure, it's somewhat believable for Dawn to cherish the remnants of her childish crush on Xander. It might even be expected that as she grows to adulthood, she would be able to mention it, to joke about it, and then to ignore and disregard it, because unless you're Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, that sort of thing just doesn't look good. (It doesn't look good on them, either, but they're rich and kookoopants so there's nothing we can do.) But it's too simplistic. It's a cop-out, an easy way to create more drama for the overall story arc. It turns the bad-ass Dawn we've come to love back into that whiny little brat who got in trouble once a week and wrote melodramatic diary entries. I mean yeah, we all did that, and then we turned 16 and got over ourselves. Dawn did too, and responsibility looked good on her. And now she's the little kid putting on Lip Smackers to impress her sister's cute guy friend, and he's the creep who is letting her.
I'm not really fussy about the age difference (what, five years? I've beat that by a factor of four) or even the fact that Xander is starting to look like the town bike. The kiss just isn't in character, and it ruins my whole feeling about this book. To be fair, I was mightily pissed when Dawn first showed up in season 5, so I'm going to keep reading and hope I'm proven wrong.
Plus, my damn meringues didn't set up. Too many pecans.
- RD
Edit: JC informed me that the plots are approved if not written by Joss himself, so of course I shouldn't put the blame entirely on Jane. The way I see it, if your name is next to the words "Written by," you are responsible for something this craptastic. I did say I'll keep reading; I've seen many a character arc work itself out in an unexpected way (Cordelia, Wesley, Dawn herself), so I'm fully prepared to recant my initial reaction. But I'm going to need a darn good reason.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Agents of Atlas #10
Agents of Atlas #10 (Jeff Parker) took me longer to read than any other comic this month, and I loved it.
We've got goddesses with copyright complaints, an examination of the last 80 years in Killer Robot development, the rights of workers in evil empires, a history of men and dragons as enemies and allies, and a man trying to cope with the fact that the girlfriend he saw just last year (from his out-of-time perspective) has actually had a half-century to get her evil on.
By virtue of its wacky cast, Atlas has never been like any other Marvel book, but these days that uniqueness is extending to format as well. The latest issue is divided into chapters, each new scene arriving with its own title heading. It's also quite dialogue-heavy, with 2-3 times more words per page than your typical comic. Yet not a word goes to waste, as various characters and subplots are developed, laying the groundwork for future storylines even as they advance the current "Terror of the Jade Claw" arc.
It's a little more demanding read than most comics, and maybe that's not to everyone's taste. Word on the street (and by the street I mean the interwebs) is the Agents are swimming in the low-selling/critically-acclaimed end of the Marvel pool these days. Perhaps their upcoming throwdown with the X-Men or their shiny-new-extra-filled-Dark-Reign-tie-in hardcover will help inspire new readers to give Atlas a chance and see the incredible story-value they're getting for their bucks. I dunno.
What I do know is that month by month, Parker is creating a whole new world and fitting it seamlessly into the nooks and crannies of the Marvel we know. I'll gladly devote some extra reading time to these Agents for many, many moons to come.
We've got goddesses with copyright complaints, an examination of the last 80 years in Killer Robot development, the rights of workers in evil empires, a history of men and dragons as enemies and allies, and a man trying to cope with the fact that the girlfriend he saw just last year (from his out-of-time perspective) has actually had a half-century to get her evil on.
By virtue of its wacky cast, Atlas has never been like any other Marvel book, but these days that uniqueness is extending to format as well. The latest issue is divided into chapters, each new scene arriving with its own title heading. It's also quite dialogue-heavy, with 2-3 times more words per page than your typical comic. Yet not a word goes to waste, as various characters and subplots are developed, laying the groundwork for future storylines even as they advance the current "Terror of the Jade Claw" arc.
It's a little more demanding read than most comics, and maybe that's not to everyone's taste. Word on the street (and by the street I mean the interwebs) is the Agents are swimming in the low-selling/critically-
What I do know is that month by month, Parker is creating a whole new world and fitting it seamlessly into the nooks and crannies of the Marvel we know. I'll gladly devote some extra reading time to these Agents for many, many moons to come.
- JC
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
should we call it Marvney? or Disnel?
No one knows just how the Marvel-Disney merger (we're calling it that rather than "assimilation") will change our beloved comics, but we've got a few guesses. Here are the top ten:
10. Tony Stark reveals to Jack Sparrow where all the rum has gone.
9. MAX unveils Who Punished Roger Rabbit?, a charming buddy comedy in which Frank Castle's new partner teaches him to kill 'em with kindness.
8. Casual Friday introduced to Marvel bullpen so the editors can leave off the mouse ears once a week.
7. Scrooge McDuck goes swimming in Norman Osborn's money.
6. The official battle cry becomes, "A-V-E-N-G-E-R-S A-S-S-E-M-B-L-E."
5. Spokespeople deny rumors that Stan Lee has been cryogenically frozen. Mr. Lee is unavailable for comment.
4. New animatronic children in the "It's a Small World After All" feature fur, steel skin, and telekinesis.
3. Rictor and Shatterstar are introduced to Exodus International.
2. Tobey Maguire is replaced with Zac Efron in Spider-Man 4. Critics rave.
1. Wolverine becomes a member of Goof Troop, Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers, and the Disney Princesses
- JC & RD
[Yes, we know Sony still owns the rights to Spider-Man, but we like Zac Efron. Shutup. - RD]
[JC adds, "Tell them he was in Firefly!" - RD]
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
for the record
EDIT - JC is a dork. He said it came out today, and I believed him. Let's pretend I wrote this on Sept. 22 instead, mkay? Thx. - RD
Runaways #14 comes out tomorrow, and I don't think I've looked forward to a comic this much since-- ever, actually. I don't usually pay attention to when comics are released. But it's my turn to lambaste Immonen and Pichelli for their continually wretched work on this once-great book, so I wanted to make a few predictions.
1. Someone will say something both entirely out of character and pointless. It will probably also be misleading, confusing, and possibly factually incorrect. The most likely candidate is Chase, discussing his parents or uncle. If Chase is completely glossed over, it will be Nico, angsting about something she probably already worked out back in, oh, Volume 1.
2. Klara will show no signs of a personality, nor will anyone discuss how she is feeling after having a beloved team pet die on her.
3. Nico and/or Karolina will not only still be wearing their ridiculous outfits, but they will stand in unnaturally and uncomfortably revealing poses.
4. Victor will be entirely ignored. Molly will have a few cute lines but ultimately be ignored as well.
5. Hunter Stein will either be a) not who he says he is, b) a deus ex douchebag who offers to solve all of the Runaways' problems, c) killed stupidly, or d) all of the above.
6. There will be precisely one amusing joke and four or five jokes that either don't make sense or just aren't funny.
7. The ending will be stupid.
Runaways #14 comes out tomorrow, and I don't think I've looked forward to a comic this much since-- ever, actually. I don't usually pay attention to when comics are released. But it's my turn to lambaste Immonen and Pichelli for their continually wretched work on this once-great book, so I wanted to make a few predictions.
1. Someone will say something both entirely out of character and pointless. It will probably also be misleading, confusing, and possibly factually incorrect. The most likely candidate is Chase, discussing his parents or uncle. If Chase is completely glossed over, it will be Nico, angsting about something she probably already worked out back in, oh, Volume 1.
2. Klara will show no signs of a personality, nor will anyone discuss how she is feeling after having a beloved team pet die on her.
3. Nico and/or Karolina will not only still be wearing their ridiculous outfits, but they will stand in unnaturally and uncomfortably revealing poses.
4. Victor will be entirely ignored. Molly will have a few cute lines but ultimately be ignored as well.
5. Hunter Stein will either be a) not who he says he is, b) a deus ex douchebag who offers to solve all of the Runaways' problems, c) killed stupidly, or d) all of the above.
6. There will be precisely one amusing joke and four or five jokes that either don't make sense or just aren't funny.
7. The ending will be stupid.
And the more I think about it, the sadder these things make me. I recently read a few Official Comic Website reviews of this run, and I was so disappointed to see the reviewer praising some of the exact things JC and I have criticized. The guy said that he was glad to see the book "back on track" and implied that the writers since BKV have been lacking. (He also contradicts himself when discussing Pichelli's art, saying in the #12 review that Nico "seems to have swallowed some sort of Amazon growth hormone" but then mentions in #13 that "Nico and Karolina were a bit too masculine in their portrayals" in earlier issues. What?)
On reading those reviews, I nearly signed up for a profile on IGN.com just to tell the reviewer and everyone reading just how very WRONG he is, and then I remembered I'm only the 1/2 comic fan and commenting on a board might push me up to .65 which we'd have to round up and "Two Comic Fans" just isn't a catchy title. But then I thought a little harder about what this book means to me, what the kids mean and how they SHOULD be characterized. I tried to see the Immochelli run with the excitement I had for BKV, or even Joss (who I dig) or the zombie arc (which was weak but coherent and entertaining). And I just couldn't. As much as I want to like and praise this creative team, this team of women working with such rich characters, I can't see where they're coming from. What am I missing?
- RD
Friday, August 28, 2009
Runaways #13
Welcome to another exciting episode of Just How Badly Can They Screw Up RD's Favorite Comic?
With Runaways #13, Kathryn Immonen continues to bury some clever ideas under mounds of muddled dialogue and weak [and in some cases, conflicting - RD] characterization. Low points include:
1. Nico's spells: The witty phraseology of Nico's magic has long been a highlight of this series. Here, she casts three spells, and two of them were utterly wasted. "Crystal Light" made Klara's plants vanish, along with the debris of the house, but how? I didn't have the first clue what it was supposed to mean or accomplish. [All that came to mind was the nasty diet drink that comes in a powder that you add to your water so you can pretend you're being healthy when actually you're drinking cancer juice, but what does that have to do with mutant vines? - RD] "Mood ring" turned a cut on Hunter Stein's cheek into a lie detector (I think?), yet we never actually see Nico use that to test the man (more on that in a second). Kudos on "Abraham Lincoln" to create an instant log-cabin, though. THAT was good.
2. Klara: Remember how she was actually getting some page-time in the last two issues, even if most of that was a dubiously justified freak-out? Well, despite all the trouble she's caused, she gets exactly zero lines of dialogue here, and only one panel of any significance. She's calmed down, without any explanation. Apparently all it took was a sammich and a juice box. Oh kids, such simple creatures, no matter what century they're from.
[THIS was one of my biggest problems. Klara's freakout was such a huge deal in the first issue of this storyline - I thought FOR SURE we would get some major characterization and possibly some post-traumatic counseling for the poor girl. Turns out it was a momentary dramatic lapse in sanity and Karolina has taken care of it (because even with Nico back in take-charge mode, something as deep as an emotional breakdown is Just! Too! Much! for the "leader" to deal with, OMG don't even get me started on the utter shite Immonnen is doing to Nico's characterization and how badly I wanted to PUNCH HER FACE when she... okay, I'll stop). - RD]
3. Hunter Stein: So Chase is sure he accidentally killed his uncle, and insists the Runaways can't trust the man claiming to be Hunter Stein. Fine. So why doesn't anyone bother to follow this up, to ask Hunter point-blank about his "death"? Wouldn't that be the first thing you'd do in this situation? Instead, the Runaways ignore him - endangering themselves in the process - until they can put him to work. The plot is kept moving at the expense of any semblance of character logic, and it knocks me right out of the story. To make matters worse, Hunter devolves into a ridiculous plot bunny to reveal all the wondrous inventions hidden away in the Runaways' own home that the teens have heretofore failed to discover. Hunter goes so far as to accuse the Runaways of being the "least curious group of kids" he's ever seen. Exsqueeze me? We're talking about the kids who discovered their parents were super villains, dug up a whole bunch of said parents' hidden toys and magics, and used those tools to turn themselves into kick-a$$ superheroes. Is this writer seriously trying to tell me that these kids are lacking in imagination, just so her new character can become their spirit guide? Is she really trying to put a Magic Adult in the last comic that should ever need one?
4. Bard Reffrinse, Ur Doin It Wrong: Nico starts comparing Chase to Hamlet while accusing him of "uncle-cide", and Karolina replies, "But Hamlet doesn't actually kill his uncle, does he?" Umm, actually he did. With the stabbity stabbing. It may be said that I'm a little obsessed with my Shakespeare (teeny bit), so lines like this will bother me all out of proportion. If it was meant to suggest that the kids aren't all that classically educated (perhaps in keeping with the arc's title, "Homeschooling"), then that's a little too subtle for me. If the italics are meant to imply that Karolina is in fact referring to Chase rather than the original Hamlet (perhaps so Molly and Klara won't overhear the older girls discussing if their bud just ended a dude?), that too needs explication. Because otherwise I'm just gonna think somebody doesn't know their classic literature* and completely failed to GTS**.
There could be a fascinating plot fighting to get out here, there could even be some interesting takes on the characters, but Runaways is drowning in nonsensical, non-sequatorial characterizations and fuzzy dialogue. I'm just incredibly frustrated with this book right now.
[For the record, we could have gone on for pages about the total suckitude of this issue, but mostly I just want to say SERIOUSLY KATHRYN IMMONEN PLEASE STOP. YOU ARE RUINING EVERYTHING THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY ABOUT THESE CHARACTERS. IF YOU DO NOT SHAPE UP, I WILL STRIKE YOUR STORYLINE FROM THE RECORD. - RD]
- JC
* Which is fine. Not everyone's college degree is as awesome, useful, and lucrative as my B.A. in English Literature.
** And that's just sad.
With Runaways #13, Kathryn Immonen continues to bury some clever ideas under mounds of muddled dialogue and weak [and in some cases, conflicting - RD] characterization. Low points include:
1. Nico's spells: The witty phraseology of Nico's magic has long been a highlight of this series. Here, she casts three spells, and two of them were utterly wasted. "Crystal Light" made Klara's plants vanish, along with the debris of the house, but how? I didn't have the first clue what it was supposed to mean or accomplish. [All that came to mind was the nasty diet drink that comes in a powder that you add to your water so you can pretend you're being healthy when actually you're drinking cancer juice, but what does that have to do with mutant vines? - RD] "Mood ring" turned a cut on Hunter Stein's cheek into a lie detector (I think?), yet we never actually see Nico use that to test the man (more on that in a second). Kudos on "Abraham Lincoln" to create an instant log-cabin, though. THAT was good.
2. Klara: Remember how she was actually getting some page-time in the last two issues, even if most of that was a dubiously justified freak-out? Well, despite all the trouble she's caused, she gets exactly zero lines of dialogue here, and only one panel of any significance. She's calmed down, without any explanation. Apparently all it took was a sammich and a juice box. Oh kids, such simple creatures, no matter what century they're from.
[THIS was one of my biggest problems. Klara's freakout was such a huge deal in the first issue of this storyline - I thought FOR SURE we would get some major characterization and possibly some post-traumatic counseling for the poor girl. Turns out it was a momentary dramatic lapse in sanity and Karolina has taken care of it (because even with Nico back in take-charge mode, something as deep as an emotional breakdown is Just! Too! Much! for the "leader" to deal with, OMG don't even get me started on the utter shite Immonnen is doing to Nico's characterization and how badly I wanted to PUNCH HER FACE when she... okay, I'll stop). - RD]
3. Hunter Stein: So Chase is sure he accidentally killed his uncle, and insists the Runaways can't trust the man claiming to be Hunter Stein. Fine. So why doesn't anyone bother to follow this up, to ask Hunter point-blank about his "death"? Wouldn't that be the first thing you'd do in this situation? Instead, the Runaways ignore him - endangering themselves in the process - until they can put him to work. The plot is kept moving at the expense of any semblance of character logic, and it knocks me right out of the story. To make matters worse, Hunter devolves into a ridiculous plot bunny to reveal all the wondrous inventions hidden away in the Runaways' own home that the teens have heretofore failed to discover. Hunter goes so far as to accuse the Runaways of being the "least curious group of kids" he's ever seen. Exsqueeze me? We're talking about the kids who discovered their parents were super villains, dug up a whole bunch of said parents' hidden toys and magics, and used those tools to turn themselves into kick-a$$ superheroes. Is this writer seriously trying to tell me that these kids are lacking in imagination, just so her new character can become their spirit guide? Is she really trying to put a Magic Adult in the last comic that should ever need one?
4. Bard Reffrinse, Ur Doin It Wrong: Nico starts comparing Chase to Hamlet while accusing him of "uncle-cide", and Karolina replies, "But Hamlet doesn't actually kill his uncle, does he?" Umm, actually he did. With the stabbity stabbing. It may be said that I'm a little obsessed with my Shakespeare (teeny bit), so lines like this will bother me all out of proportion. If it was meant to suggest that the kids aren't all that classically educated (perhaps in keeping with the arc's title, "Homeschooling"), then that's a little too subtle for me. If the italics are meant to imply that Karolina is in fact referring to Chase rather than the original Hamlet (perhaps so Molly and Klara won't overhear the older girls discussing if their bud just ended a dude?), that too needs explication. Because otherwise I'm just gonna think somebody doesn't know their classic literature* and completely failed to GTS**.
There could be a fascinating plot fighting to get out here, there could even be some interesting takes on the characters, but Runaways is drowning in nonsensical, non-sequatorial characterizations and fuzzy dialogue. I'm just incredibly frustrated with this book right now.
[For the record, we could have gone on for pages about the total suckitude of this issue, but mostly I just want to say SERIOUSLY KATHRYN IMMONEN PLEASE STOP. YOU ARE RUINING EVERYTHING THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY ABOUT THESE CHARACTERS. IF YOU DO NOT SHAPE UP, I WILL STRIKE YOUR STORYLINE FROM THE RECORD. - RD]
- JC
* Which is fine. Not everyone's college degree is as awesome, useful, and lucrative as my B.A. in English Literature.
** And that's just sad.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Spider-Man and the Human Torch
Spider-Man and the Human Torch collects Dan Slott's five part miniseries from 2005, with five separate stories of team-ups between the webhead and the hothead. It chronicles the evolution of a friendship through the years - from the squabbling teens of the 1960s to something close to brothers in the pre-reboot 2000s. Each issue evokes a different era of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, marked by changes in their supporting casts, yet the tone rarely strays from pure wacky fun. With one impressive exception.
The collection includes the most poignant tale you will ever read about the most useless super-conveyance in the annals of comicdom: The Spider-Mobile. The real story of why a guy who can swing from a web with the greatest of ease needs a frickin' car is seriously and unexpectedly beautiful, and worth the price of the book all on its own.
The collection includes the most poignant tale you will ever read about the most useless super-conveyance in the annals of comicdom: The Spider-Mobile. The real story of why a guy who can swing from a web with the greatest of ease needs a frickin' car is seriously and unexpectedly beautiful, and worth the price of the book all on its own.Equally worthy of a shout-out is the tome's final issue, a little too talky to be succinctly summarized here, but a great summation of the contrast and the bond between the two titular heroes. From a 2009 standpoint, it serves to reinforce the tragedy of Spider-Man's "Brand New Day" reboot. Not only has Spider-Man lost the life he'd built with Mary Jane (a life that made him the envy of rockstar superhero Johnny Storm), but in forcing the world to forget his secret identity, he's diminished some fantastic friendships (pun intended).
Some may think Spider-Man works best as a tragic loner, but I don't buy it. He's worked hard to forge these relationships, through 40+ years of funny books, and he deserves to enjoy them in full.
And if that weren't enough, Slott even finds a way to incorporate these classic Hostess ads into canon. If that ain't great comics, then I don't know what is.
- JC
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Uncanny X-Men First Class #2
In Uncanny X-Men First Class #2 (Scott Gray) Nightcrawler's Exciting Adventure With the Inhumans comes to a promising if not 100% satisfying conclusion.
Here, Nightcrawler (Kurt Wagner) is put on trial for his interference with the Terrigenesis ritual, whereby human-like Inhuman children are physically mutated and granted super-powers. He makes an impassioned argument that the children are "perfect from birth," and it is wrong for their elders to enforce mutation on them at such an early age. He goes so far as to evoke "another society" with a genetic superiority/inferiority complex--but I'll allow both Nightcrawler and Scott Gray a pass on Godwin's Law as the former is himself German. It's logical, and perhaps even important, for the spectre of Nazism to haunt a German mutant. (And suddenly I'm wondering if anyone ever wrote a scene wherein Nightcrawler and Magneto get into an intense debate/discussion about WWII Germany. I find it hard to imagine Chris Claremont missing out on that idea, but I'm not sure I've yet come across it myself.)
"I know your traditions span centuries," Nightcrawler says, summing up his case, "But a healthy society should always have the capacity for change... I find it tragic that, in a culture where no two beings are alike, you should demand such conformity."
It's a wonderfully eloquent argument, and a bit of a pleasant surprise. After Nightcrawler's swashbuckling antics last issue, I was afraid his very good questions about the Inhuman lifestyle would be brushed aside--that pat statements would be made about judging other people's cultures from the outside, and Kurt would end up apologizing for running off half-cocked. I was glad to see him given his dignity instead, and his arguments given some weight.
If only some. Inevitably the other X-Men show up in Attilan, Nightcrawler's trial is cut short, and a big honking mutant vs. Inhuman fight ensues. In the middle of this, Nightcrawler is confronted by the Inhuman Karnak, who says he was never subjected to the Terrigen mists, and assures Kurt that he is no less valued by his people because of this fact. This may be the start of a decent rebuttal to Kurt's concerns, but sadly the argument never gets pursued any further.
Then again, perhaps the beginnings of a great debate are the most that can be asked of a title set in the Marvel universe's past. Props to Mr. Gray for getting these questions out there, and here's hoping that future writers of the Inhumans pick up that gauntlet.
I'd still like to see more jokes and wacky banter in Uncanny First Class, though. (As much as I've enjoyed the Wolverine-kicked-over-the-horizon gag.)
- JC
Here, Nightcrawler (Kurt Wagner) is put on trial for his interference with the Terrigenesis ritual, whereby human-like Inhuman children are physically mutated and granted super-powers. He makes an impassioned argument that the children are "perfect from birth," and it is wrong for their elders to enforce mutation on them at such an early age. He goes so far as to evoke "another society" with a genetic superiority/inferiority complex--but I'll allow both Nightcrawler and Scott Gray a pass on Godwin's Law as the former is himself German. It's logical, and perhaps even important, for the spectre of Nazism to haunt a German mutant. (And suddenly I'm wondering if anyone ever wrote a scene wherein Nightcrawler and Magneto get into an intense debate/discussion about WWII Germany. I find it hard to imagine Chris Claremont missing out on that idea, but I'm not sure I've yet come across it myself.)
"I know your traditions span centuries," Nightcrawler says, summing up his case, "But a healthy society should always have the capacity for change... I find it tragic that, in a culture where no two beings are alike, you should demand such conformity."
It's a wonderfully eloquent argument, and a bit of a pleasant surprise. After Nightcrawler's swashbuckling antics last issue, I was afraid his very good questions about the Inhuman lifestyle would be brushed aside--that pat statements would be made about judging other people's cultures from the outside, and Kurt would end up apologizing for running off half-cocked. I was glad to see him given his dignity instead, and his arguments given some weight.
If only some. Inevitably the other X-Men show up in Attilan, Nightcrawler's trial is cut short, and a big honking mutant vs. Inhuman fight ensues. In the middle of this, Nightcrawler is confronted by the Inhuman Karnak, who says he was never subjected to the Terrigen mists, and assures Kurt that he is no less valued by his people because of this fact. This may be the start of a decent rebuttal to Kurt's concerns, but sadly the argument never gets pursued any further.
Then again, perhaps the beginnings of a great debate are the most that can be asked of a title set in the Marvel universe's past. Props to Mr. Gray for getting these questions out there, and here's hoping that future writers of the Inhumans pick up that gauntlet.
I'd still like to see more jokes and wacky banter in Uncanny First Class, though. (As much as I've enjoyed the Wolverine-kicked-over-the-
- JC
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Fantastic Four: Dark Reign #5
A few months ago I raved about the first issue of Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four: Dark Reign miniseries. I've kept quiet about the issues since, because I kept waiting for Hickman to pull a plot out of his hat and make good on that early promise. Instead, we got three issues of alternate reality silliness that went nowhere (doesn't Sue make a sexy gunslinger? Doesn't Sue make a bad-@$$ World War 2 commando? Oh look, it's the ever-so-merry Elizabethan FF*!), and now the series has wrapped with little more than a tease for Hickman's upcoming run on the regular Fantastic Four title.
Reed returns from his interdimensional jaunt. He lies to his wife about dismantling the machine that just endangered his family's lives. (How does the "smartest man" in the Marvel universe keep forgetting what a bonehead move that always is?) Norman Osborn backs off from the Baxter Building after the Richards' son Franklin shoots Norman in the shoulder with a pop-gun. How's that work? Never explained. And we get a glimpse of shadowy beings waiting between dimensions, promising to help Reed in his ambiguous quest to "solve everything." Which is also apparently the title of Hickman's first regular FF story.
Oh, and Reed has become convinced that the only thing that could have saved the world from the consequences of the Marvel's Civil War, Secret Invasion, etc. would have been if he had faced these problems alone. If he's wrong, it's hubris worthy of a Greek tragedy. Yet so far we've seen nothing to contradict Reed's supposition, and I'm more afraid that Hickman really does intend for Reed to be that unique. It's an utterly implausible conceit: in a multiverse of infinite** possibilities, we're to believe Reed Richards is the only man capable of saving the Earth from Skrulls and itself? Did Reed's Reality Bridge transport this series into the DC Universe by mistake?
Perhaps the story of the Bridge was doomed*** from the start. Perhaps the reason no one has explored alternate-reality problem solving in 40+ years of Fantastic comics is because there's no satisfying place for that story to go. Even if Reed discovers some great solution to the world's dilemmas, can we truly appreciate a resolution the hero never personally had to fight for? Or maybe this story has barely begun, and Hickman will wow us yet. But that still won't excuse these 4 out of 5 issues of FF: Dark Reign in which nothing really happened.
Marvel, please. If you've got a story that's at least passably self-contained, go ahead and make it a mini-series. If an arc is just the beginning of a longer epic, I'm cool with that too, just put it in the main title from the start. Is that so much to ask?
- JC
* No relation to 1602's Four from the Fantastick
**That word still means what I think it means, right?
**Not a pun, the Doc's not even in this story - unless his latest fiendish plot is just that cunning?
Friday, July 31, 2009
Top 5 Marvel Marriages
Marriage is awesome. Even in the Marvel universe, however tragically unhip Quesada will claim it makes a person. To prove this fact, and to celebrate RD's and my impending nuptials this Saturday, I give you:
5. Jessica Jones & Luke Cage: What do Marvel's premiere interracial couple have to say about black men and white women? I have no idea, and honestly, I don't really care. What matters to me is everything they say about men and women, full stop. Bendis writes them as a beautifully normal couple in a crazy world. Their conversations about diaper changes, grocery runs, and raised toilet seats help make the the New Avengers matter. We know these people, and what they're fighting for.
Top mush moment: Jessica's speech at their wedding, from New Avengers Annual #1 (Bendis).
"This world is a scary place. You being an Avenger--it's so... scary. Every day there's some idiot in our face trying to ruin it. And ever since we got together, I just haven't cared. And no goon attacked us at our wedding, so I'm going to take that as a good sign. And even if the worst happens... It's a weird feeling--But I know we can deal with it. Look at that kid over there. Look at her. We made her. And I love watching you be a father. So much so that I'd wear this big poofed-out dress. I just wanted to let you know in my words. This is why I said yes to all this crazy. That's why."
Sorry. Bendis likes to make with the yak-yak. But all that stuff, that's how I feel about RD. I mean, not the stuff about her being an Avenger (that'd rock) or making babies (just yet) or goons attacking (I hope they don't, but we'll deal). But the world-is-crazy-but-who-cares-cause-she's-there? Absolutely.
4. Reed (Mr. Fantastic) Richards & Sue (Invisible Woman) Storm: Do these guys need an explanation?
Top mush moment: Ultimate Fantastic Four #7 (Warren Ellis). In the Ultimate universe, Reed and Sue are in their early twenties, and they've only just acquired their powers. Sue's a genius biologist to match Reed's head for physics. She drags him out of his lab, insisting he let her run some tests on his new physiology...
Reed: "Can we make out afterwards? Only I think I'm getting good at it."
Sue (kissing him): "You started out good at it. You're getting fantastic."
Yes, I realize they're not actually married in the Ultimate universe. But the fact is--and I realize how lame I'm about to sound, but hey, what's the internet for, if not for embarrassing personal admissions (and porn)--the first time I got to make out with RD, I showed her this scene afterwards. Because it was the first time I'd made out with anyone, and RD, kind and compassionate soul that she is, had said something to me not unlike Sue's line above, so I just had to share.
I'm that colossal a dork, and she's marrying me anyway.
3. Bobbi (Mockingbird) Morse & Clint (Ronin nee Hawkeye) Barton: Eight months ago, I barely knew who Mockingbird was. Now, she and Ronin are #3 on this list. See previous posts re: New Avengers: Reunion (Jim McCann) for why.
Top mush: New Avengers: Reunion #4. Once married, now technically divorced, Clint & Bobbi decide to try dating for the first time.
2. Peter (Spider-Man) Parker & Mary Jane Watson: Still married in my mind--not to mention Stan Lee's hi-larious newspaper strip.
Top mush: Honorable mention to Peter & MJ's wedding in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (Jim Shooter & David Michelinie), but I'm actually going to go with Amazing Spider-Man #491 (J. Michael Straczynski). Pete and Mary Jane have been separated for a time (don't ask), Peter just helped Captain America take down Doctor Doom in the middle of a crowded airport (like ya do), and now he's finally got a chance to tell her...
"I can do 'all these things' because you believe in me. Because you give me the strength and will to get them done. Everything's easier when you're there and harder when you're not. Without you, nothing works the way it should. But when you're there, in my life, I feel like I can do anything, MJ. Anything."
I'm mozzarella, I know, but again--approaching the big day that I am, this is how I feel. It's amazing (no pun intended) how one person can turn every problem and struggle on its head, with nothing but their presence.
And the #1 marriage in Marvel comics...
1. Scott (Cyclops) Summers and Jean (Insert Codename Here) Grey!*
It's trendy among some X-writers these days to say that "all Jean ever did was die on Scott," and I think that spectacularly misses the point of this couple. The reason Jean & Scott are the greatest pair in comics, the reason their love story is one of my favorites in all of fiction, is precisely because of all the dying, and replacement by dopplegangers, and alternate-possible-future children showing up, and everything else they've endured. Luke & Jessica, Peter & MJ... they talk about getting through the crazy together, and they live in the Marvel universe too, so they're certainly not exaggerating. But Scott & Jean have been through more than all the other couples on this list combined. Their honeymoon was 12 years long, wandering across an Apocalyptic future Earth, while they raised Scott's son Nathan (The Man Who Would Be Cable) and started a revolution. The mess that is the post-Morrison X-verse is just one more temporary setback. Love like this is unstoppable.
Top mush moment: from Uncanny X-Men #296 (Scott Lobdell), the panel below. Flying and kicking ass together towards the end of the "X-Cutioner's Song" 1993 mega-crossover.
"As opposed to Cyclops, Jean Grey has always embraced her mutant abilities. Blessed with the natural talents of telepathy and telekinetics, she felt she couldn't be any happier with her mutant gifts. That was before Scott Summers. Before she'd sacrificed her life on his behalf--only to learn there are greater powers than death in the universe... and the greatest of these is love."
*****
So clearly, committed partnerships rule. I couldn't be happier to be getting a ring if it was green and turned willpower into solid light holograms.**
- JC
*Surprised readers raise their hands. Anyone? No?
**Was that a bit much, honey? [This is why we're not having a ceremony. He would have wanted to write his own vows, and I don't think he could have gotten this post down to 2 minutes. - RD]
5. Jessica Jones & Luke Cage: What do Marvel's premiere interracial couple have to say about black men and white women? I have no idea, and honestly, I don't really care. What matters to me is everything they say about men and women, full stop. Bendis writes them as a beautifully normal couple in a crazy world. Their conversations about diaper changes, grocery runs, and raised toilet seats help make the the New Avengers matter. We know these people, and what they're fighting for.
Top mush moment: Jessica's speech at their wedding, from New Avengers Annual #1 (Bendis).
"This world is a scary place. You being an Avenger--it's so... scary. Every day there's some idiot in our face trying to ruin it. And ever since we got together, I just haven't cared. And no goon attacked us at our wedding, so I'm going to take that as a good sign. And even if the worst happens... It's a weird feeling--But I know we can deal with it. Look at that kid over there. Look at her. We made her. And I love watching you be a father. So much so that I'd wear this big poofed-out dress. I just wanted to let you know in my words. This is why I said yes to all this crazy. That's why."
Sorry. Bendis likes to make with the yak-yak. But all that stuff, that's how I feel about RD. I mean, not the stuff about her being an Avenger (that'd rock) or making babies (just yet) or goons attacking (I hope they don't, but we'll deal). But the world-is-crazy-but-who-cares-cause-she's-there? Absolutely.
4. Reed (Mr. Fantastic) Richards & Sue (Invisible Woman) Storm: Do these guys need an explanation?
Top mush moment: Ultimate Fantastic Four #7 (Warren Ellis). In the Ultimate universe, Reed and Sue are in their early twenties, and they've only just acquired their powers. Sue's a genius biologist to match Reed's head for physics. She drags him out of his lab, insisting he let her run some tests on his new physiology...
Reed: "Can we make out afterwards? Only I think I'm getting good at it."
Sue (kissing him): "You started out good at it. You're getting fantastic."
Yes, I realize they're not actually married in the Ultimate universe. But the fact is--and I realize how lame I'm about to sound, but hey, what's the internet for, if not for embarrassing personal admissions (and porn)--the first time I got to make out with RD, I showed her this scene afterwards. Because it was the first time I'd made out with anyone, and RD, kind and compassionate soul that she is, had said something to me not unlike Sue's line above, so I just had to share.
I'm that colossal a dork, and she's marrying me anyway.
3. Bobbi (Mockingbird) Morse & Clint (Ronin nee Hawkeye) Barton: Eight months ago, I barely knew who Mockingbird was. Now, she and Ronin are #3 on this list. See previous posts re: New Avengers: Reunion (Jim McCann) for why.
Top mush: New Avengers: Reunion #4. Once married, now technically divorced, Clint & Bobbi decide to try dating for the first time.
2. Peter (Spider-Man) Parker & Mary Jane Watson: Still married in my mind--not to mention Stan Lee's hi-larious newspaper strip.
Top mush: Honorable mention to Peter & MJ's wedding in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (Jim Shooter & David Michelinie), but I'm actually going to go with Amazing Spider-Man #491 (J. Michael Straczynski). Pete and Mary Jane have been separated for a time (don't ask), Peter just helped Captain America take down Doctor Doom in the middle of a crowded airport (like ya do), and now he's finally got a chance to tell her...
"I can do 'all these things' because you believe in me. Because you give me the strength and will to get them done. Everything's easier when you're there and harder when you're not. Without you, nothing works the way it should. But when you're there, in my life, I feel like I can do anything, MJ. Anything."
I'm mozzarella, I know, but again--approaching the big day that I am, this is how I feel. It's amazing (no pun intended) how one person can turn every problem and struggle on its head, with nothing but their presence.
And the #1 marriage in Marvel comics...
1. Scott (Cyclops) Summers and Jean (Insert Codename Here) Grey!*
It's trendy among some X-writers these days to say that "all Jean ever did was die on Scott," and I think that spectacularly misses the point of this couple. The reason Jean & Scott are the greatest pair in comics, the reason their love story is one of my favorites in all of fiction, is precisely because of all the dying, and replacement by dopplegangers, and alternate-possible-future children showing up, and everything else they've endured. Luke & Jessica, Peter & MJ... they talk about getting through the crazy together, and they live in the Marvel universe too, so they're certainly not exaggerating. But Scott & Jean have been through more than all the other couples on this list combined. Their honeymoon was 12 years long, wandering across an Apocalyptic future Earth, while they raised Scott's son Nathan (The Man Who Would Be Cable) and started a revolution. The mess that is the post-Morrison X-verse is just one more temporary setback. Love like this is unstoppable.
Top mush moment: from Uncanny X-Men #296 (Scott Lobdell), the panel below. Flying and kicking ass together towards the end of the "X-Cutioner's Song" 1993 mega-crossover.
"As opposed to Cyclops, Jean Grey has always embraced her mutant abilities. Blessed with the natural talents of telepathy and telekinetics, she felt she couldn't be any happier with her mutant gifts. That was before Scott Summers. Before she'd sacrificed her life on his behalf--only to learn there are greater powers than death in the universe... and the greatest of these is love."
*****
So clearly, committed partnerships rule. I couldn't be happier to be getting a ring if it was green and turned willpower into solid light holograms.**
- JC
*Surprised readers raise their hands. Anyone? No?
**Was that a bit much, honey? [This is why we're not having a ceremony. He would have wanted to write his own vows, and I don't think he could have gotten this post down to 2 minutes. - RD]
Monday, July 27, 2009
details, details
Another reason I don't read a lot of comics is that I don't have the required capacity for minutiae. Now I'm no dummy; I love me some crossword puzzles, and I'd go head-to-head with any other Jeopardy! viewer at 7:30 weekdays (oh, Trebek), but the sheer amount of detail needed to comprehend the vast universes and the characters living therein frankly blows my mind.
Take a look at the X-Men. You've got Uncanny X-Men, Ultimate X-Men, X-Men First Class, Uncanny X-Men First Class, Unspammy X-Spam First Spam, and so on and so forth. Most of those books are in slightly different universes. If you want to read any of the others, you have to separate out which is canon in which book, and then there are the other X-teams and the Canadian teams and the Wolverine teams (that guy is the town bicycle, am I right?) and books with writers who don't write the book anymore but they begged to finish their own damn storylines and they've been going for like 40 years and they've only aged about 10 and GOOD GOD EMMA FROST PUT SOME CLOTHES ON. NO ONE NEEDS TO SEE THAT. EVER.
Just now, I was telling JC how much I like the way he looks in his purple shirt. We're getting married in 3 days, I can do sappy shit like that. He says,
"I don't have a purple shirt."
"Wait, what?" says I.
"I've never had a purple shirt," he says confidently.
Dear readers, I bought JC a purple shirt and two new pairs of pants no more than a month ago, and he wore the purple shirt twice. He agreed that he looks very fine in it. Now he's forgotten it ever existed. (Edit: He found the shirt on the shelf with the tags still on it. We were both wrong.)
AND YET. Mention just a few words to this same man - "House of M" or "Chris Claremont" or, god forbid, "Spider-Man reboot" - and he'll expound for hours, discussing not only the main storyline but all adjoining storylines and interviews with the writers and artists and editors and why he doesn't care for Joe Quesada. (Neither do I, for the record, but only because I blame him for every sucky script I read.) I think that without the capacity to hold these details in his head, he'd simply be flipping the pages for the pretty pictures, so I appreciate the enormous brain power that goes into his comic habit.
It's not easy to be the partner of a comic fan. Every night at the dinner table is an adventure in the vast network of connections between comics, books, TV, and movies that is JC's beautiful mind. I can usually remember my to-do list from one day to the next, but his fully coherent stream of consciousness astounds me. When he starts talking, all I can do is sit back and enjoy the ride. It might not be so frustrating if the babble didn't contain its own inertia, if I could easily redirect him by asking about his day at work or telling a funny story of my own; more often than not, he'll listen more-or-less patiently while I talk, and then pick up where he left off, always adding, "Just one more thing, just let me say this one thing." And then, because I love him, I sigh and let him keep talking. I've learned more about the Marvel Universe in the past two years than I ever thought it was possible for a non-comic-reader to know. And I've loved every minute of it.
He'd better wear that purple shirt tomorrow.
- RDWednesday, July 22, 2009
hey look at that! a post on the very day a comic came out!
SARA PICHELLI WHAT THE HELL.
Oh hi. I just read Runaways #12, titled "Homeschooling: Part Two - Functions and Relations." It made me sort of angry.
I'm not sure why Kathryn Immonen decided to vague things up at the beginning. Who is making this speech? I thought Karolina, JC thought Nico. Either way, it's a great emo introduction to the issue, but there's nothing to really tie it in. Is this meant to express the group's feelings about losing their home (again) and their friend (also again)? Or just explain why Karolina is so ridiculously thin (anorexia caused by test anxiety)?
The conversation between the teens is less hip but more stilted even than in the last issue. Maybe it's because I'm a Bendis girl (and JC writes the same way, with as many words per panel as humanly possible), but when a four-panel page includes two largely identical shots and one close-up with only 10-20 words per panel? Too slow. By the time Karolina responds to Victor, I've forgotten what he said or why she's making a snide (vaguely racist against Cyborg Americans) comment.
However, Molly busting out the BSG reference? Never not hilarious.
More troubling is the way the teens are acting towards each other. Though they've argued before, I can't recall an entire issue in which NOTHING HAPPENED. A few arcs ago, they were affected by Nico's Scatter spell, after which they realized that their strength as a team was in sticking together. Now, Klara has been randomly plot-bunnied into a completely unexpected mental breakdown (...seriously?) and the rest of them are fussing about what to do.
Look, Immonen. The point of the Runaways is that they've gotten past the normal teenage shit. Well, not the prom and the crushes and the not infrequent stupid decisions, but the indecisive irresponsibility. These kids have taken the weight on their shoulders because of their evil parents. They grew the fuck UP. I get that you want them to be carefree teens thrust into a world of pain and danger and high stakes, but they've been there and done that. They know that above all, they have to DEAL WITH IT.
[I think the opening monologue is more of the same, here. The blank page is Nico's metaphor for how she feels when she's trying to come up with a spell to fix whatever the team's gotten itself into now. It's the pressure she's under as both a leader and a literal miracle-worker, every time she has to step up to the plate. But while that's an interesting pressure to explore, like RD says, but the execution is just not Runaways. They are NOT freaking Hamlet. They act first and angst later. Runaways are dynamic by definition. - JC]
For that matter, why the hell has Nico suddenly decided to not be the leader? In the past, Karolina has been the nurturing earth mother flower child while Nico puts on her stompy boots and makes a plan. Apparently Nico forgot to wear her big girl panties (did she lose them along with the rest of her outfit and her fashion sense?) and is just cuddling Klara while the others bicker and stall until Chase's uncle shows up. I'm pretty stoked about that - JC says Chase mentioned that he murdered a carjacker during Vaughn's run - and the military guys are usually fun, so I'm not done reading yet.
And back to my first point, SARA PICHELLI WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON WITH
THOSE SLUTTY FAIRIES. Are we supposed to assume that Nico generated them on purpose? Somewhere in her subconcious she thinks that fairies are wee, buxom, naked lasses? Aside from what that says about Nico's character, did YOU really think that the exaggerated proportions and maximum skin showing was absolutely necessary in this comic? I AM SO TIRED OF THAT.
And... I sort of hate to bring it up, because I'm not an artist so it's not like I could do it better, but I get the feeling that Chase's facial expression on the last page was meant to be very important. However, and this is a big however, I can't tell what the f#$% it's supposed to be. At first I thought it was a sneer, then I thought it was disgust, then I thought maybe Chase smelled something nasty or he had to pee really badly. Maybe next time just go for "stone faced" if you can't pick out a clear expression.
Enough from me. I'm going to go take the cat for a walk.
- RD
Oh hi. I just read Runaways #12, titled "Homeschooling: Part Two - Functions and Relations." It made me sort of angry.
I'm not sure why Kathryn Immonen decided to vague things up at the beginning. Who is making this speech? I thought Karolina, JC thought Nico. Either way, it's a great emo introduction to the issue, but there's nothing to really tie it in. Is this meant to express the group's feelings about losing their home (again) and their friend (also again)? Or just explain why Karolina is so ridiculously thin (anorexia caused by test anxiety)?
The conversation between the teens is less hip but more stilted even than in the last issue. Maybe it's because I'm a Bendis girl (and JC writes the same way, with as many words per panel as humanly possible), but when a four-panel page includes two largely identical shots and one close-up with only 10-20 words per panel? Too slow. By the time Karolina responds to Victor, I've forgotten what he said or why she's making a snide (vaguely racist against Cyborg Americans) comment.
However, Molly busting out the BSG reference? Never not hilarious.
More troubling is the way the teens are acting towards each other. Though they've argued before, I can't recall an entire issue in which NOTHING HAPPENED. A few arcs ago, they were affected by Nico's Scatter spell, after which they realized that their strength as a team was in sticking together. Now, Klara has been randomly plot-bunnied into a completely unexpected mental breakdown (...seriously?) and the rest of them are fussing about what to do.
Look, Immonen. The point of the Runaways is that they've gotten past the normal teenage shit. Well, not the prom and the crushes and the not infrequent stupid decisions, but the indecisive irresponsibility. These kids have taken the weight on their shoulders because of their evil parents. They grew the fuck UP. I get that you want them to be carefree teens thrust into a world of pain and danger and high stakes, but they've been there and done that. They know that above all, they have to DEAL WITH IT.
[I think the opening monologue is more of the same, here. The blank page is Nico's metaphor for how she feels when she's trying to come up with a spell to fix whatever the team's gotten itself into now. It's the pressure she's under as both a leader and a literal miracle-worker, every time she has to step up to the plate. But while that's an interesting pressure to explore, like RD says, but the execution is just not Runaways. They are NOT freaking Hamlet. They act first and angst later. Runaways are dynamic by definition. - JC]
For that matter, why the hell has Nico suddenly decided to not be the leader? In the past, Karolina has been the nurturing earth mother flower child while Nico puts on her stompy boots and makes a plan. Apparently Nico forgot to wear her big girl panties (did she lose them along with the rest of her outfit and her fashion sense?) and is just cuddling Klara while the others bicker and stall until Chase's uncle shows up. I'm pretty stoked about that - JC says Chase mentioned that he murdered a carjacker during Vaughn's run - and the military guys are usually fun, so I'm not done reading yet.
And back to my first point, SARA PICHELLI WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON WITH
THOSE SLUTTY FAIRIES. Are we supposed to assume that Nico generated them on purpose? Somewhere in her subconcious she thinks that fairies are wee, buxom, naked lasses? Aside from what that says about Nico's character, did YOU really think that the exaggerated proportions and maximum skin showing was absolutely necessary in this comic? I AM SO TIRED OF THAT.And... I sort of hate to bring it up, because I'm not an artist so it's not like I could do it better, but I get the feeling that Chase's facial expression on the last page was meant to be very important. However, and this is a big however, I can't tell what the f#$% it's supposed to be. At first I thought it was a sneer, then I thought it was disgust, then I thought maybe Chase smelled something nasty or he had to pee really badly. Maybe next time just go for "stone faced" if you can't pick out a clear expression.
Enough from me. I'm going to go take the cat for a walk.
- RD
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Runaways #11
If Runaways #11 were a beer commercial, the slogan would be, "Tastes hip! Less filling!"
I also would really like to have seen a little more development of Klara's relationship with Old Lace, considering her intense reaction to the dinosaur's death. She spends the early part of the issue cuddling with Old Lace in front of the television, only to demand that the others "get that dead thing away from me!" after OL dies saving her life. The line isn't consistent with her character (what there is of it), nor is it a particularly natural thing for a traumatized kid to say. [Considering that as a resident of the early 20th century, she would have had a lot closer relationship with death than most people today, I would have expected sorrow or indifference, but not repugnance. - RD]
Brian K. Vaughan's original Runaways stories were a soap-operatic teenage roller coaster. After Joss Whedon sent Nico, Karolina, Victor, Chase, Molly, Xavin, and Old Lace on a time travelling vacation, Terry Moore attempted to give the teens a little grounding, setting them up in a malibu mansion abandoned by Chase's parents. From there they fought aliens and zombies, and started to rediscover their super-heroic ambitions.
New writer Kathryn Immonen and new artist Sara Pichelli, in their first issue, blow the Runaways' cozy home life to smithereens again. Literally. It's a crystal-clear statement of their intentions: to make Marvel's premier youth-rebellion book feel edgy again. But as the same clarity isn't always evident in the execution, the results are decidedly mixed.
Immonen works a little too hard to remind us that the Runaways are adolescents, flighty and hormonal. At the risk of sounding like an old man at 28, the fast-paced, jargon heavy dialogue, with internet-speak every other word, wants to be more charming than it is. And some important bits of characterization get muddled in the sound bytes.
For example, a few issues back, Xavin left the Runaways to take Karolina's place on trial on the alien world of her birth. Now Karolina is angsting (and flirting with Chase). Will she ever see her lover again? Does she have to start over as a single girl? So Nico sits her down and tells her: "I don't think it's the last thing Xavin will ever do, but it is the last thing she did for you. So just honor it... and yourself. Okay?"
Is Nico telling her friend:
a) "Don't worry about it, buddy, Xavin'll be back in no time!"
b) "Go on with your life, Xavin would want you to be happy! But don't settle for a dirty boy like Chase."
c) "You're gay, remember? And I'm curious. Let's make the 1950s weep!"
c) "You're gay, remember? And I'm curious. Let's make the 1950s weep!"
Each of these could be variously interpreted to fit with Nico's character [whether her character this week is "inspiring optimist" or "slutbomb" - RD], but it's not really clear what she actually means to say.
I was glad to see Klara finally getting some character time, but disappointed that she felt so inconsistent with the Klara of the past 10 issues. Terry Moore never seemed to know what to do with Klara, so he treated her like Molly's sidekick and exposition-companion. It was cute, but it ignored what really makes the character fascinating and unique: she's a girl from the 1910s stuck in the modern world. Now Immonen seems to have turned Klara into a chronic couch potato. The concept has potential; of course the boob tube would be fascinating to a kid who grew up in a time before them. But Klara's been around TV for a while now, and she's never been this addicted. Nico's suddenly worried that Klara's going to develop a "Vitamin-D deficiency," after several issues of Klara running around outside with Molly. If Klara's withdrawing into herself and becoming a TV zombie, this might be a perfectly natural reaction for a girl out of time; it might even be a perfectly natural delayed reaction. But it seems more like Immonen wasn't sure what else to do with her and wanted to shove her out of the way.
I also would really like to have seen a little more development of Klara's relationship with Old Lace, considering her intense reaction to the dinosaur's death. She spends the early part of the issue cuddling with Old Lace in front of the television, only to demand that the others "get that dead thing away from me!" after OL dies saving her life. The line isn't consistent with her character (what there is of it), nor is it a particularly natural thing for a traumatized kid to say. [Considering that as a resident of the early 20th century, she would have had a lot closer relationship with death than most people today, I would have expected sorrow or indifference, but not repugnance. - RD]
I really haven't decided yet how I feel about Sara Pichelli's art. I love some of the little details, like Victor reminding us he's a 'bot by plugging a modem directly into a port on his own arm. I love the playfulness when Chase and Victor are dancing. The shots of Chase on the ground feeling Old Lace's passing through their psychic bond were truly heartbreaking, and easily the best scene in the issue.
I like some of Pichelli's dynamic poses (when the older girls aren't breaking their backs) and exaggerated facial expressions, but these dance right on the knife's edge between expressive and unnatural. Witness Nico squinting at her fruit salad.
Closing one eye and screwing your mouth up like that, they're pieces of two different expressions. They're both in the pensive family, sure, but... Go try and make this face in the mirror. Feels weird, doesn't it?
Then there's Nico's new wardrobe and body-type. RD soap-boxed about this some in her review of issue 10 (speaking of gender), but what struck me is that this is another case of previously strong characterization getting muddled. The artists of Runaways have always taken Nico's clothes right off of HotTopic.com, but Nico's choices in the past have been definitively goth-prep, giving her some of the coolest costumes in comics. Now, suddenly, she's goth-punk. Those are two distinct styles, and different enough that I believe the change would warrant some dialogue.
Also, I'm a bit confused by those dirty little scratches everyone has on their noses and under their eyes. Judging from the coloring, they're all taking lessons in being a drunk from W.C. Fields. Also not an atypical part of the teenage experience, I guess. More worrying is the way they all seem to have developed a bad case of vampirism, and not the cool kind. The least bit of overhead light, and even Latino Victor and California girl Karolina are sparkling like Robert Pattinson.
Oh, and late in the issue, the sound from the TV indicates Klara is now watching an infomercial for a fitness machine, yet the screen still shows the soap opera from earlier. Whoops.
- JC
[I'd like to note that because I don't pay very close attention and because they traded hairstyles, I spent the entire issue thinking Chase was Victor and vice versa. That's not entirely abnormal for me; I got Victor and Xavin confused in earlier issues when Xavin was in human-boy mode. But there really should have been some defining character moment (aside from the plugging into the arm thing, which I completely missed) so I could tell them apart. So I count it as a double fail. - RD]
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Magneto Testament
Magneto Testament (Greg Pak) is the first Marvel hardcover I've seen to include a Teacher's Guide in the back. That fact alone says much about the story. It's not just the origin of the X-Men's greatest foe, but a serious holocaust drama, closely modeled on real history and real human lives. And the real beauty, and tragedy, of Testament is that it never needs to be a superhero story at all.
If a person were to pick up this story without ever having read an X-Men story (or having seen the films), they would never guess the protagonist was a mutant. Max Eisenhardt's journey takes him from schooldays in 1930s Nazi Germany, to the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, and eventually to the infamous concentration camp of Auschwitz. Every horror that befalls Max and his family, every neighbor's sacrifice that sustains them, and every cruelty that dooms them all ring true because of the painstaking work of Testament's creative team.
The tale is deeply grounded in research; Pak's extensive endnotes in the collected edition excavate the story page by page, revealing the actual historical people and events from which even seemingly minor details were drawn. (We all hated compiling bibliographies for our papers in school; who'da thunk they could make a comic book more impressive?) The script is excellent. Pak sketches in the broad strokes of history for context, then pulls his focus in tight the on small and human moments, brought to gut-wrenching life by artist Carmine Di Giandomenico. The whole epic is near-perfectly paced, and deftly balanced between grinding heartbreak and slivers of hope. And for those of us who do know the man Max Eisenhardt will one day become, there's a second story hiding in plain sight.
Pak and Di Giandomenico evoke Max's future with a perfectly simple recurring visual trick: a glint of light reflecting off metal. It's there when Max hurls a heavy javelin in school games, and when he's scrounging for coins in the gutter. It's there on the knife in Max's hand as he watches two Nazis beating a man in an alleyway, as his uncle stops him from getting involved, getting himself killed. Those of us who know his power and his future can't help wonder - perhaps he could have killed those soldiers, perhaps he could've saved that man? And it makes the tale of Max's impotence in that terrible time and place only more potent.
As the background for a loathed and beloved comic book villain, it makes Magneto's place in
the X-Men universe all the greater. The horrors he experiences in these pages haunt every Magneto story to come (even the hokey ones), for this is the world he always fears might return, if he can do nothing to stop it. And that fear, in turn, drives him to inflict his own terrors on others. Yet in his long history in the X-Men universe, Magneto has also enjoyed the occasional stint as a hero. Horrid 1980s purple costumes aside, I hope he may yet again and for good. After spending these five issues with young Max, I find myself hoping that Magneto's story might somehow yet wind up in the light. I want his story to find, if not a happy ending, then at least a measure of peace.
Still, it's just as important that Testament can be read as if Max were just an ordinary man, with no special abilities or destiny. The power of any story, no matter how fanciful, comes from our ability to believe. We will believe a man can fly because deep down, we all know what flying feels like, or what it should feel like. We will let a fictional character break our hearts because we've been broken, and we've watched others be broken. We know fictions, even science-fictions, are made for us because someone in the world has felt this way. But there is a special double-edge to a story like Magneto Testament, enriching the fictional life of a comic book villain, even as it pays homage to the struggles of millions of survivors and victims of a real-world genocide.
- JCSunday, July 12, 2009
Uncanny X-Men First Class #1
Scott Gray's new Uncanny X-Men First Class is perfectly uncanny so far, but could still use some more of that First Class magic.
This new take on an old series brings the fan-favorite 70s X-Men line-up back to the funnybooks: Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Banshee. Phoenix is featured on the rocking cover, but so far has only merited one tiny cameo scene. The first issue taps all the classic Claremontian story beats: hateful-fearful mobs of New Yorkers forcing an X-Man to question the mission; giant robot fights in the Danger Room; cheesy boastful mid-action dialogue; Wolverine picking a fight; Colossus being all sensitive and noble and stuff; random men hitting on Storm.
It also has a solid story of its own to tell about Nightcrawler visiting Attilan, city of the Inhumans, a place where nearly everyone is just as unique in appearance as himself and no one gets called a freak. Of course he begins to wonder - would he be happier here? Is he really obligated to put up with the world's crap? But there may be a serpent in this garden, because he finds that children are being mutated against their will!
Well, not really. Most anyone who's read an Inhumans story before will be aware that the ceremony Nightcrawler interrupts is a perfectly natural part of Attilan culture. Human-looking children walk into the Terrigen Mists when they come of age, and they come out with funky new powers and often with a wild new alien appearance. If you go in a cute blonde and walk out a tall purple baldie with fewer fingers than you started with, well, them's the breaks. I think it's supposed to be a puberty-sucks-sometimes metaphor. That Stan Lee, such a subtle guy.
Actually, Nightcrawler kind of has a point. It IS pretty creepy. But I'm not expecting Marvel to let one X-Man overturn the crux of Inhumans culture; it wouldn't really be PC to their fictional society. Also, the series is set in the past. But we'll see how that plays out next issue.
The problem with UXFC #1 is that it's all a bit po-faced. That's also true of the original Uncanny era during which this book is set, of course; when I read the old 70s X-Men comics, most of the humour I find now is probably not of the intentional variety. The fact that everyone takes everything so seriously is what makes it hilarious. (That, and the way they all spend nine-tenths of their day expositing madly in their head.) But I've been spoiled by Jeff Parker's original X-Men: First Class, Bendis' New Avengers, and Brian Vaughan's and Joss Whedon's Runaways. When I read a modern team-book, I want more banter, playfulness, and just plain off-the-wall wackiness. I want the characters to take each other just as seriously, to treat each other just as politely, as my friends and co-workers treat each other.
I've said it before; I think the First Class line works best by having fun with the X-Men characters in a way most of the other mutant books haven't allowed for many an emo year. And I believe Scott Gray is capable of bringing the comedy; his Wolverine short in the Uncanny X-Men First Class Giant-Size was great. Hopefully as UXFC goes on, he'll find more of a balance.
- JC
This new take on an old series brings the fan-favorite 70s X-Men line-up back to the funnybooks: Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Banshee. Phoenix is featured on the rocking cover, but so far has only merited one tiny cameo scene. The first issue taps all the classic Claremontian story beats: hateful-fearful mobs of New Yorkers forcing an X-Man to question the mission; giant robot fights in the Danger Room; cheesy boastful mid-action dialogue; Wolverine picking a fight; Colossus being all sensitive and noble and stuff; random men hitting on Storm.
It also has a solid story of its own to tell about Nightcrawler visiting Attilan, city of the Inhumans, a place where nearly everyone is just as unique in appearance as himself and no one gets called a freak. Of course he begins to wonder - would he be happier here? Is he really obligated to put up with the world's crap? But there may be a serpent in this garden, because he finds that children are being mutated against their will!
Well, not really. Most anyone who's read an Inhumans story before will be aware that the ceremony Nightcrawler interrupts is a perfectly natural part of Attilan culture. Human-looking children walk into the Terrigen Mists when they come of age, and they come out with funky new powers and often with a wild new alien appearance. If you go in a cute blonde and walk out a tall purple baldie with fewer fingers than you started with, well, them's the breaks. I think it's supposed to be a puberty-sucks-sometimes metaphor. That Stan Lee, such a subtle guy.
Actually, Nightcrawler kind of has a point. It IS pretty creepy. But I'm not expecting Marvel to let one X-Man overturn the crux of Inhumans culture; it wouldn't really be PC to their fictional society. Also, the series is set in the past. But we'll see how that plays out next issue.
The problem with UXFC #1 is that it's all a bit po-faced. That's also true of the original Uncanny era during which this book is set, of course; when I read the old 70s X-Men comics, most of the humour I find now is probably not of the intentional variety. The fact that everyone takes everything so seriously is what makes it hilarious. (That, and the way they all spend nine-tenths of their day expositing madly in their head.) But I've been spoiled by Jeff Parker's original X-Men: First Class, Bendis' New Avengers, and Brian Vaughan's and Joss Whedon's Runaways. When I read a modern team-book, I want more banter, playfulness, and just plain off-the-wall wackiness. I want the characters to take each other just as seriously, to treat each other just as politely, as my friends and co-workers treat each other.
I've said it before; I think the First Class line works best by having fun with the X-Men characters in a way most of the other mutant books haven't allowed for many an emo year. And I believe Scott Gray is capable of bringing the comedy; his Wolverine short in the Uncanny X-Men First Class Giant-Size was great. Hopefully as UXFC goes on, he'll find more of a balance.
- JC
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Farscape: D'Argo's Lament #3
The third issue of Farscape: D'Argo's Lament (Keith R.A. DeCandido) is a tragic squandering of fannish potential. Much of the issue is spent in flashback, as Ka D'Argo tells a shipmate the epic tale of his youth, signing up for the Luxan army, his first experiences in war and how he met his doomed love, Lo'laan. At last, an official Farscape story fleshes out the hints and teases the series' fans picked up over the show's four years on TV.
Only it isn't epic, and it doesn't flesh anything out. The plot and dialogue are bland and spare, adding little information and no emotion at all to the character's known backstory. And Neil Edwards' sketchy, underdeveloped art compounds the problem. Time and again in this issue, he's given great material to draw; however flawed the script, a strong artist could still have turned the basic set-ups into something truly special. Yet instead he turns an intergalactic war into a pedestrian affair. A two-page spread is wasted on a boxy spaceship, some warriors standing around with their hands at their side, and some faces squinting in close-up. D'Argo and his fellow Luxans, brought so fantastically to life on television by the Jim Henson Company, all look the same. The greatest tragedy in this book is that it marks the first appearance of the dreaded Scorvians, who are mentioned a few times in the TV series but kept off-camera. Edwards gets to design a classic Farscape baddie for the first time, and what he gives us are four green dudes with Bart Simpson heads in featureless black unitards. It's unitarded.*
With the infinite budget of comic books, DeCandido and Edwards somehow manage to confine D'Argo's Lament to a soundstage Doctor Who would've laughed at in the '70s.
- JC
[*Direct all complaints to me. JC asked me to take it out but I was laughing too hard to find the delete key. - RD]
Only it isn't epic, and it doesn't flesh anything out. The plot and dialogue are bland and spare, adding little information and no emotion at all to the character's known backstory. And Neil Edwards' sketchy, underdeveloped art compounds the problem. Time and again in this issue, he's given great material to draw; however flawed the script, a strong artist could still have turned the basic set-ups into something truly special. Yet instead he turns an intergalactic war into a pedestrian affair. A two-page spread is wasted on a boxy spaceship, some warriors standing around with their hands at their side, and some faces squinting in close-up. D'Argo and his fellow Luxans, brought so fantastically to life on television by the Jim Henson Company, all look the same. The greatest tragedy in this book is that it marks the first appearance of the dreaded Scorvians, who are mentioned a few times in the TV series but kept off-camera. Edwards gets to design a classic Farscape baddie for the first time, and what he gives us are four green dudes with Bart Simpson heads in featureless black unitards. It's unitarded.*
With the infinite budget of comic books, DeCandido and Edwards somehow manage to confine D'Argo's Lament to a soundstage Doctor Who would've laughed at in the '70s.
- JC
[*Direct all complaints to me. JC asked me to take it out but I was laughing too hard to find the delete key. - RD]
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Ultimate Spider-Man: Requiem Part 1
[When he emailed me this post, JC was careful to say, "Don't read this until you read the comic!" I think he's learned something about how much I hate spoilers. Pardon me while I go read Ultimate Spider-Man: Requiem Part 1. - RD]
[Okay, I'm back. That was rad. - RD]
Spider-Man: Requiem Part 1 of 2 (Brian Michael Bendis) serves both as an epilogue to the disaster-movie "Ultimatum" storyline that ended the first volume of Ultimate Spider-Man and a love letter to the series as a whole.
Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson has returned to the shattered ruins of New York, along with editor Robbie Robertson and reporter Ben Urich. Jameson, as we saw in "Ultimatum," has accepted at last that Spider-Man was a hero all along. This is a different Jonah than we've seen in any Spider-Man before. He's mature. He's quiet. And it lends a special poignancy to the issue, that what may be Spider-Man's last story will be told not by Aunt May or Mary Jane, not by someone who loved him from the start, but instead by this man. Watching Jameson sit there in the wreck that was his office, finally trying to understand the young man he so loudly and incessantly judged, allows the story to be both epic and intimate all at once.
As Jonah works, digging through old pro-Spider-Man stories he'd never allowed Urich to share, we're treated to a flashback, an untold adventure of Spider-Man and Iron Man. It's a nice nod to Bendis and Spidey's brief but glorious Ultimate Marvel Team-Up spin-off series. We see Tony Stark interviewed by Mary Jane, grappling with big questions of heroism, terrorism, and what it means to be a violent role model in the world. It's the kind of philosophical dialogue at which Bendis really shines, bringing to the surface questions that have always been implicit in the superhero genre. And Tony's particular perspective seats him neatly in the Arthurian tradition, a man who believes that as human nature will always beget violence, so there must always be those willing to defend those who can't defend themselves. This is how Iron Man has always worked best: a modern knight, Round Table style; a noble man and a nobleman.
It's also great to have both of Ultimate Spider-Man's regular artists sharing this issue, with the modern-day segments drawn by Stuart Immonen and the flashbacks by original series artist Mark Bagley. Their styles are very different, yet both pack so much life and motion into their lines, and its a treat to see them side by side. Bagley's softer, more rounded characters evoke the innocence of younger days, an effective contrast against Immonen's sharper, wearier newspapermen of the present.
- JC
[Okay, I'm back. That was rad. - RD]
Spider-Man: Requiem Part 1 of 2 (Brian Michael Bendis) serves both as an epilogue to the disaster-movie "Ultimatum" storyline that ended the first volume of Ultimate Spider-Man and a love letter to the series as a whole.
Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson has returned to the shattered ruins of New York, along with editor Robbie Robertson and reporter Ben Urich. Jameson, as we saw in "Ultimatum," has accepted at last that Spider-Man was a hero all along. This is a different Jonah than we've seen in any Spider-Man before. He's mature. He's quiet. And it lends a special poignancy to the issue, that what may be Spider-Man's last story will be told not by Aunt May or Mary Jane, not by someone who loved him from the start, but instead by this man. Watching Jameson sit there in the wreck that was his office, finally trying to understand the young man he so loudly and incessantly judged, allows the story to be both epic and intimate all at once.
As Jonah works, digging through old pro-Spider-Man stories he'd never allowed Urich to share, we're treated to a flashback, an untold adventure of Spider-Man and Iron Man. It's a nice nod to Bendis and Spidey's brief but glorious Ultimate Marvel Team-Up spin-off series. We see Tony Stark interviewed by Mary Jane, grappling with big questions of heroism, terrorism, and what it means to be a violent role model in the world. It's the kind of philosophical dialogue at which Bendis really shines, bringing to the surface questions that have always been implicit in the superhero genre. And Tony's particular perspective seats him neatly in the Arthurian tradition, a man who believes that as human nature will always beget violence, so there must always be those willing to defend those who can't defend themselves. This is how Iron Man has always worked best: a modern knight, Round Table style; a noble man and a nobleman.
It's also great to have both of Ultimate Spider-Man's regular artists sharing this issue, with the modern-day segments drawn by Stuart Immonen and the flashbacks by original series artist Mark Bagley. Their styles are very different, yet both pack so much life and motion into their lines, and its a treat to see them side by side. Bagley's softer, more rounded characters evoke the innocence of younger days, an effective contrast against Immonen's sharper, wearier newspapermen of the present.
- JC
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Astonishing X-Men #30
The Astonishing X-Men save the world (maybe) by phoning a friend with a space gun in the literally explosive conclusion to the "Ghost Boxes" story arc. And sadly, it's not nearly as ridiculous as it sounds.
Writer Warren Ellis, since taking over Astonishing from Joss Whedon, has had the X-Men's alpha team investigating a covert conflict between mutants from a parallel reality and artificial pseudo-mutants created in this one. (Still not that ridiculous. No, really. It's all about the hard sci-fi execution; Ellis is a master of semi-plausible technobabble.) By this issue, they've tracked the pseudo-mutants back to their creator: former teammate Forge, who has apparently fallen off the sanity wagon again. Having found an open gateway to the other mutants' parallel reality, he's been using his mutants to fight against the alternates, who he insists are scoping our reality out for conquest. He's gone so far as to build another gateway himself, and is preparing to send a whole army of his Nutrasweet X-Men through to the parallel world to wipe out the potential invaders. So Hank "Beast" McCoy calls his girlfriend Abigail Brand, a S.W.O.R.D. agent who lives on a space station and defends Earth against alien invasions for a living, and has her blast a superlaser through the interdimensional gateway just in case.
"Just in case," are pretty close to Hank's own words. They can't take the chance, he says, that Forge might be wrong. So rather than risk another invasion - and how many of those have the X-Men fought off in the last six months, let alone the rest of Marvel's heroes? - they shoot a space gun down the rabbit hole. A space gun, Hank explains, that will "turn to foam" every living being and building in a ten-mile radius around whatever's on the other side. Essentially, Hank's lady friend dropped an atomic bomb on the X-Men's problems. On the possibility of future problems, really.
The metaphor for current world events and military tactics is so obvious it's practically a Looney Tunes anvil chorus. In the age of terror, with modern technology and weaponry, we don't wait for the invasions any more. We commit terrible acts from afar in the hopes of preventing or forestalling even more terrible acts in the future. We make the hard choices, blah blah blah preemptive-strike cakes.
But this is NOT the X-Men's metaphor. Comic book superheroes in general, for all the problems they solve by fisticuffs, have been telling us for years that killing bad guys is unnecessary. That it's better to face the same rogues again and again than to give up on the possibility of human redemption. Because by killing the bad guys, we become no better than them. Because killing begets killing, and the cycle can only stop if we stop it. Because some rogues will see the light and become heroes called Rogue. They're ancient, tired, cliched ideals, but I still believe in them. That's why I'm a comic book fan. I like my superheroes old school, Gandhis who punch people really hard.
I'm not saying every superhero has to be a Gandhi, but the X-Men always have been. The X-Men are symbols of hope and evolution. They embody the idea that you don't have to get bitten by a radioactive plot device to be a Punching Gandhi, you might just have been born that way. Maybe you're a freak and nobody likes you because secretly you're that awesome. Awesome enough to love the world that hates and fears you, even if you have to punch it sometimes. Or at least, that's how it used to work.
Ever since Grant Morrison's New X-Men, the X-Men have been increasingly isolated from the world, finding less in common with the rest of humanity. They've been making darker choices. They've abandoned Xavier's dream of peaceful coexistance with humanity in favor of a war to survive. And that saddens me, because there are plenty of other superheroes out there to explore war-on-terror metaphors and issues of idealism vs. expediency. (The Punisher, for instance, or Ellis' own creations over in The Authority.) I'm not saying there shouldn't be X-Men stories about these things, but they shouldn't be at the center of the X-Men's ongoing mission. Marvel's mutants have a message of their own, a really special and important one.
If the X-Men are going to make these terribly dark, hard, "modern" choices, then they need to be earned. I should be convinced that there was no better way, rather than feeling like they took an easy out at the expense of ten square miles of possibly innocent alien civilians. Someday, I'd really like to see the X-Men acting like heroes again, not nuking other people's realities because they took the crazy guy's word for it.
- JCSunday, June 28, 2009
Uncanny X-Men First Class Giant-Size
Uncanny X-Men First Class Giant-Size, despite its unweildy title, is a fresh start for a classic era of X-Men adventure. It takes the First Class brand of X-Men action, with its done-in-one (or two at the most) plots, goofy comic-strip backups, and smiling mutants, and applies it to the team of the '70s. And it took three writers (Scott Gray, Roger Langridge, Jeff Parker) and five artists (Dennis Calero, Sean Galloway, Craig Rousseau, Cameron Stewart, David Williams) to do it. Cyclops is the last of the original X-Men at Xavier's school (though Jean Grey promises to reappear as Phoenix in the next issue), and Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, and Banshee have just joined the team. It's a little unclear whether Sunfire and Thunderbird are still running around the mansion as well, off-panel, or if this issue is set after they've gone, but such continuity-cop details aren't really important to the story.
And there's a great story here. Or six of them, depending on your point of view.
A framing tale shows Cyclops struggling a bit with the fact that the New Team isn't the same as the Old Team. They didn't come to Charles Xavier as Gifted Youngsters, and they don't behave like students. When they're brought to live in a swank mansion with a cool Danger Room full of holograms and robots, they're not interested in running through a carefully strategized training exercise. They want to break stuff. That anarchistic spirit is a big part of why we fans love them, but it makes sense that Cyclops of all people would need a little time to adjust to that, which is something we don't see much in the original '70s stories. This is precisely why I love the First Class tales: they find all the cracks we'd forgotten were in the classic stories, and exploit them in the most fun way possible.
(I contrast this with some of the current continuity X-books, which find the cracks in classic stories and exploits them in the angstiest way possible. Oh, look, it's another Machiavellian shame in Professor X's past! How ever will the X-whoevers react?)
And as Cyclops tries to get to know his new team, Moira McTaggert offers him a set of taped "interviews" she conducted with the new X-Men, each describing an adventure they had in their teens, as they were first coming to terms with their mutant gifts. It's a blatant ploy to make the adult X-Men just as accessible and hip to younger readers as the original teenaged First Class, but the vignettes are clever and engaging enough to make it work. My personal favorites were Banshee's tale - in the form of an Irish folk song written by a friend of Banshee and performed in my head by Flogging Molly - and "Wolverine: Agent of S.N.I.K.T.." Since Wolverine can't remember his past, the idea of a "young Wolverine" tale is patently ridiculous. Wolverine himself knows that better than anyone, and thus gives us some glorious hogwash, lampooning everything from other Marvel heroes to spy fiction to Arthur Miller in the process.
It's not a perfect comic. The characterization in the framing story errs a little on the side of caricature in places. Colossus, for instance, is portrayed as provincial, naive, and comic book Russian enough to start planting crops in the school lawn, saying, "If we don't farm, how will we eat?" (It's funnier if I choose to see this as a fear that without home-grown veggies, his new life in America will mean all McDonald's all the time.) But there's far more entertainment packed into UXFCGS than even six initials should allow, well worth the cover price. Particularly when the cover in question is the Skottie Young masterpiece seen above.
- JC
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