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.

- JC

House of M: Others

Since my original House of M post, I've been tracking down the various tie-in issues and miniseries from that event, to see how they might alter my impression of the story as a whole. And ultimately I've found it's not just the changes from the Marvel universe we know that make the House that Bendis Built so intriguing. Often it's the things that haven't changed at all.

Bruce "Hulk" Banner spends his alternate reality vacation (Incredible Hulk, Peter David) in Australia, bonding with Aborigines who are helping him make peace between his "two minds," and claims he's never been happier. So his dream reality doesn't involve a reunion with his deceased wife Betty?

Similarly, in the main miniseries, Jean Grey is still dead, and Scott Summers is instead married to Emma Frost - something even Emma wonders about when their memories are restored. I was all set to blame Jean Grey's "Live, Scott, live!" brainwashing from the end of Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, and then I read Christos Gage's House of M: Civil War miniseries, about Magneto's rise to power in the Houseverse. Here we learn that even in this Magnus family fantasy world, Magneto's first child (Anya) still died, his wife Magda still left him, and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch still grew up orphans. And I started to wonder.

Perhaps the writers were suggesting that most of us, on a day to day basis, don't really wish for a life so different from the one we already have. The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver didn't sit everyone down and ask them for their alternate reality wish-list, they had a telepath scan everyone's minds. So the lives they made were just a little better than the ones people had been living before. Lives people believed they could have, with just a little luck, or a little more work, with a few telling exceptions.

In House of M: Iron Man (Greg Pak), Tony Stark's dead, demanding father is alive again, but a villian, so Tony can face and reject him on his own terms. And in Mark Waid's House of M: Spider-Man, Peter Parker was married not to Mary Jane but to his murdered first love Gwen Stacy (and they have a son!), and Gwen's dead dad and Peter's Uncle Ben were both alive again as well. The tragedy of Peter is that he lives his whole life in regret, carrying ghosts everywhere he goes. It's enough to bring Gwen, Captain Stacy, and Uncle Ben back to him in the House reality, but when the world is restored, Peter is left wondering what it means that Mary Jane was left out of his other life and mourning a son he never actually knew. Even Peter's dreams, in the end, are just another reason to be emo.

Wow. When I put it like that...I'm kinda depressed now. Get over yourself, Spider-Man! Go look at pictures of some Giant Flemish Rabbits: http://z.hubpages.com/u/109006_f260.jpg or something.

- JC

Dark Reign: New Nation

As part of the Dark Reign storyline, Marvel put out a book of five 8-page previews of new series or minis set to launch within the next few months. What's fascinating is how each of these writers handle the task of getting a comic into about a third of the normal length.

War Machine: Crossing the Line (Greg Pak) and Skrull Kill Krew: Breakfast in America (Adam Felber) are both pretty standard short stories. They're both simple and true to the premise of their respective books. In War Machine, Iron Man's friend James Rhodes goes looking for bad guys to kill because he's a soldier and has no problem with killing. For this 8-page short, he finds a bad guy and kills him. Skrull Kill Krew is pretty much the same thing, only the main dude's killing Skrulls. Again, the story is short and predictable, solid writing with a few good jokes but nothing outstanding.

In Secret Warriors: Declaration, Brian Michael Bendis and Jonathan Hickman give us a glimpse inside Nick Fury's head. Fury's new team has already been introduced through a sort of backdoor pilot in Bendis' New Avenger series, so the short just sets the tone for the ongoing book. Rather than trying to cram a story into 8 pages, this is more of a vignette - if it were fanfic, it would be a drabble. It works well for what it is; Bendis writes good dialogue, so we get to see a classic Captain America WWII speech with a Band of Brothers feel. It's also interesting to see an old soldier/spy approaching the 21st century War on Terror with his 1940s idealism intact.

Agents of Atlas: The Heist was probably my favorite story in the book. I met Gorilla Man in X-Men: First Class and was looking forward to seeing him in action with his team. Jeff Parker really used the 8-page format brilliantly, introducing a group of people I was expecting to be superheroes, yet here they are stealing all the gold from Fort Knox. The reason for the heist ties into the Dark Reign overplot, but we get a full adventure that sets the group up for what's to come. It works as a short story because the idea is so simple; we get 6 pages to see how they pull off the heist and a couple pages at the end to find out why. It's not a standard plot for a super team, and it works beautifully.

The story that actually got me to pick up the book, and the one I'll probably follow in series form, was New Avengers: The Reunion: Suspicion (Jim McCann). It's about the aftermath of Secret Invasion, with Ronin and Mockingbird reunited. I was intrigued by interviews with the writer that showed he was very excited about the relationship dynamics between these two, and, as previously blogged, I liked what I saw of Mockingbird's return from years of captivity on a Skrull homeworld. The story is a prelude of what's to come rather than a self-contained plot, and it does an interesting job of showing us Mockingbird's mental state. She's returned to a changed Earth, where some friends have died, and others have fought one another in a Civil War. Her husband is just glad she's home and ready to act like nothing happened, but she's working through some PTSD and trying to figure out who she is and what the world is now. I came into this short hoping for a great superhero love story, and I still think and hope that's where Reunion is headed, but what I got was a great psychological study. Now I'm not just excited about where Ronin and Mockingbird are headed as a couple. I'm equally invested in where Mockingbird's journey is taking her alone and how she'll balance her past and her future.

- JC

Incredible Hercules: Sacred Invasion

I'm really enjoying Incredible Hercules (Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente) as a series. You've got a superhero who is also the classical definition of a hero - half god, half human - who is thousands of years old and trying to grapple with the modern world of superheros with a boy genius at his side (see previous post on Amadeus Cho). It's somewhat similar to certain episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which claims that Kevin Sorbo is the real Hercules who is producing a TV show about his life, but rather than the half-god going incognito, Incredible Hercules is out and proud and facing a world full of all kinds of supers - mutants, aliens, chemically enhanced soldiers, and more.

With Sacred Invasion, the writers have taken it to another level and created I think the cleverest crossover tie-in I've ever seen. While the Skrulls are invading Earth, Herc's sister Athena calls a conference of all human deities and says if the Skrulls win, the deities will lose their followers and be destroyed as well. They decide to fight back by directly attacking the Skrull gods, and they form a strike force (which Amadeus quickly labels the God Squad). Herc's team includes the Inuit SnowBird, the Mayan Eternal Ajak, a Japanese god of death who speaks in haiku, and an Egyptian god (I forget which one). They travel in a ship, granted to them by an Aboriginal deity, that moves through the dreamtime to seek out the Skrull gods and kick their butts.

It's not just the usual crossover story ("and THESE heroes fought the bad guys over THERE!"); it's unique to these characters and a brilliant side of the larger conflict to explore. And then it's grounded in world mythology, and that's always a big win with me.

- JC

World War Hulk: Incredible Herc

It's a well known fact that no one really likes a boy genius. If Star Trek: The Next Generation and Doctor Who couldn't pull it off, there's not much hope for other examples of the genre (though I'm one of the weird fans who actually likes both Wesley Crusher and Adric, so I could be on shaky ground with this argument).

Marvel has a new character, Amadeus Cho, who is a really fascinating boy genius. He's aware of the physics in everything around him, so when he's going to do something we get these colorful equations around his head, which is artistically very exciting. In one book, a man with a gun is running toward Amadeus, who sees a pipe on the ground in the man's path and calculates the exact time and place to throw a pebble so the man slips on the pipe. Other heroes could hit the pipe with a superstrong throw or create an energy field to knock the man over; Amadeus simply puts Archimede's theories into action.

Unlike the traditional boy genius, the key difference is that Amadeus isn't just a goody two shoes out to help the good guys. He becomes fixated on the Hulk, and sees a very noble person even when the Green Goliath is coming to carry out a mission of vengance against other superheroes. Amadeus is in a place where he can use his powers of brilliance to help people or get people hurt because of a misguided and very realistically young view of the world. He paints some people as fascists and others as heroes, and as intelligent as he is, he's not really wise enough to tell the difference.

I also like how Amadeus is used to make the Hulk more of a hero again. Some recent writers fixated on the idea of Hulk as a monster, asking how he can cause as much destruction as he does and not have some civilians get killed. The kid faces Hulk down and says he's hacked into S.H.I.E.L.D. and read his files, and found that Hulk has never killed anyone. The only time people have died as a result of Hulk's actions was when they separated Bruce Banner's personality from the big green guy. As many tanks as he's thrown across the desert, as many helicopers as he's pulled down, no soldiers have died - and Amadeus says it's because Hulk is like him. He sees the math in everything, and uses that to make sure no one gets hurt. With that speech, he restores Hulk to the character I find most interesting, the gentle giant I first met on Saturday morning cartoons.

I'd also love to see Hulk's longtime nemesis General "Thunderbolt" Ross acknowledge this. I want to see a scene where he says, "Look, I know you're not actually a bad guy, but in the current economy we can't afford all this property damage."

It's nice to see Marvel make a tired old trope new again, introducing a boy genius and making it work by adding enough of the actual teenager back in to make it interesting, and using him to bring a fresh perspective to classic characters we've had for years.

And now Amadeus is running around with Hercules, so that's going to be interesting.

- JC