Atomic Anxiety

Dreamer's Syndrome Hits the Shelves

2008-02-12T11:56:00.001-05:00

Dreamer's Syndrome, written by me and published by White Rocket Books can be ordered directly from WRB. Available soon everywhere else.

To get your copy or check out the website, head on over to the Dreamer's page at WRB.

Captain America & Deadpool Save the World

2007-09-29T19:14:00.000-04:00

Cable & Deadpool 45: "Band of (Oh) Brothers" (Nicieza & Brown).

This book deserves a more fitting end than it's getting.

Cable & Deadpool is going to be canceled. Cable is already dead. Cable is going to get his own ongoing series. Deadpool, on the other hand, is very much alive. Deadpool will not be getting his own series.

Instead, Deadpool has to finish out the string on the current Cable & Deadpool series.

Which is a shame, because this is one of the ten best books Marvel is pumping out these days

In C&D 45, our irascible non-hero gets accidentally shot back in
time alongside Bob the Hydra agent and end up fighting alongside Captain America and Bucky in World War II in a single-issue romp that has Cap and Bucky trying to stop Arnim Zola and Wade and Bob trying to get to Zola to see if he can send them back to the present.

The gags are amusing enough, but what makes the issue is Nicieza's decision to have Bob narrate the story. Bob's moral quandry is deciding which side to be on since he finds himself dropped down in time next to Captain America, the bane of Hydra's existence. He informs us that he's an American first and a Hydra agent second, but it's not an easy choice.

Except that it is because his real choice is to run and hide, which he can't do because Deadpool wants to help - or at least tag along with Cap and Bucky in order to get to Zola. And that's what makes the book worth reading. Humor books can get old and directionless rather fast, but character bits like Bob's desire to run and hide or his pondering about whether staying in the past would be all that terrible provide a solid backbone to keep things moving.

Seems wrong that Deadpool is apparently going to be in limbowhile Cable gets yet another shot at solo-book success.

Thor 2 & 3: KRA-KA-WHISPER

2007-09-19T12:50:00.000-04:00

Thor 2 & 3 (JMS & Coipel).

JMS' Thor is allegedly slow moving.

I hear this complaint all over the place in regards to the title but I don't buy it. Could the stories move faster? Sure, but to claim (as some have) that "nothing happens" seems a bit absurd to me. In the first issue, Thor returns. In the second issue, Thor brings Asgard to Oklahoma. In the third issue, Tony Stark arrives and there's "finally" some action as Thor and Iron Man have a bit of a throwdown.

Could all of this have been accomplished in the first issue? Yeah, sure, but JMS' take seems to be that the return is as much the story as whatever it is that comes next. I'm finding it a solid strategy that plays to JMS' writing strengths and I'm just flat-out enjoying each issue. The art by Coipel, Morales, and Martin makes this one of the most gorgeous looking books on the shelves and provide a perfect visual component to JMS' stories.

JMS' approach in the first three issues is to take the signature story moment (the return, Asgard coming to Oklahoma, Stark) and build a single-issue story around it. In doing this JMS is keeping the book new-reader friendly and developing long-term sub-plots for the long-term readers. In issue 2, for instance, the signature moment is Asgard's arrival in Oklahoma. JMS' Thor is solemn and serious, so he builds in the response of the locals to provide some levity and contextualization. JMS is taking a comic-realist approach to Thor, having the local population react to the arrival of Asgard into their midst - the cops don't like it, the population doesn't quite know what to make of it, and the owner of the land wants to be compensated. We see the "real" commenting on the "fantastic."

Issue 3 inverts this idea, where the "fantastic" comments on the "real." Thor's quest to find the missing Asgardians - whose souls have been trapped in the souls of mortals - begins in New Orleans and allows JMS to use Thor to comment on the real-world devastation of the city, first by Hurricane Katrina and secondly by the United States government's (and by extension the superhero community's) failure to provide help for the people of New Orleans. A mortal man (who turns out to have Heimdall's soul trapped inside of him) rips on Thor for not helping during the storm or in the repairs, accusing him of bringing a false hope to the people of the city. It's a powerful moment when the man tells Thor he won't allow him to use the city as a "some kinda movie set," but it's not a bombastic moment.

That comes next as Iron Man arrives to have a chat with Thor. Whatever one thinks of Tony Stark's behavior from the beginning of the Registration Act, through the Civil War, and into the Director of SHIELD present, I don't think any writer has been harder on Stark than JMS. Where Bendis attempts to give a more well-rounded view of Stark, and the Knaufs deal with the burden being placed on him, JMS treats Stark as an outright bad guy. In Thor 3, JMS doesn't give us a Stark that's controlling everything, but one that is a government lackey. The dialogue is filled with accusations of Tony being a stooge for the political leaders behind the Registration Act.

What's discouraging is that JMS puts these accusations not just in Thor's mouth but in Tony's. It's one thing to have Thor drop phrases to Tony like, "As for your masters," but another to have Tony plead with Thor for a resolution by arguing for a compromise between the government and Thor by saying, "An approach along those lines would make sure my superiors don't lose face." It makes Stark seem weak and sniveling, not as a guy looking to do the right (albeit misguided) thing. For a book that's so smart, it's a childish shot by JMS and it makes him come off as a guy who just wants to take shots at Civil War and not as someone interested in doing anything with it. His decision to have Thor simply check out of the conflict is a better development because it's built not only on Thor's sense of god-driven superiority but on his mission to return all his fellow Asgardians to life.

You would think, however, that JMS has to have Thor address Captain America's death at some point. That Thor doesn't even acknowledge Cap's death to Stark sits like a gap in the story and feels like an unresolved issue until it is addressed.

JMS might take his sweet time in putting everything back the way it was (whatever that means) but I, for one, am enjoying the heck out of the ride.

New Avengers 34: Skrulls Need Not Apply

2007-09-14T18:21:00.000-04:00

New Avengers 34: "Trust, Part Three" (Bendis & Yu).

There is a Skrull story coming, right? The "Trust" storyline is based on the concept of (wait for it ...) trust, stemming from the revelation that Elektra was a Skrull and the New Avengers don't really know each other all that well, so no one knows who they can trust and who they can't and ... and ...

Well, two issues ago there was this whole matter of a plane crashing and Spider-Woman maybe or maybe-not being a Skrull and ... and ...

And since then the Skrull plot got hijacked by the arrival of the Hood plot last issue and that led into this issue's Wolverine v. Hood throwdown and ... and ...

And now the Hood plot has been hijacked by the Symbiote plot.

What?

Exactly.

I understand what Bendis is getting at - that life is so busy that you can't always deal with whatever issue you want to deal with in a given moment. The Hood is going to send Deathlok against the Mighty Avengers so you head to Avengers Tower to protect the people who want to arrest you and ... and ...

And there's a whole mess of symbiotes running around and causing confusion. Which makes sense, because over in Mighty Avengers, that team is fighting ... um ... isn't the Ultron story still going on? Did I completely miss the end of that story or has it not come out yet?

I guess I don't really mind all the new stories getting in the way of old stories since that's been a consistent theme throughout New Avengers and Bendis has announced that all of this will come to a head in the 8-issue Secret Invasion mini-series coming out in April 2008 that Bendis promises will put:

"the exclamation point on this Skrull story. The miniseries in and of itself has a beginning, middle and end like Civil War, but if you’ve been following what’s been going on – it’s a huge payoff, but if you’re just reading Secret Invasion, you’ll get a full, large-scale Marvel Universe story. The conspiratorial aspects of the story pour through both Avengers titles, and then comes to a head in Secret Invasion. Whoever is a Skrull is revealed right away, their plan is revealed and executed and things are left changed. Once you find out who’s a Skrull and who’s not, you’ll see that it’s impossible to put things back the way they were. And like I said – that’s a part of the story. The one thing that identifies this storyline and why I’m so excited to do it, because I’m one of the people responsible for all of the divisions within the Marvel Universe – this story certainly has the ability to be the uniter, uniting things for the first time in literally three years, or even more. There’s nothing like having someone else’s ass to kick to pull all the sides together. But the pieces will definitely be in place to see something that we haven’t seen in a long time."

Great, but does that mean we have to wait until January 2009 to see the Hood story continue?

Don't get me wrong - Secret Invasion sounds awesome and with Bendis and Yu working together I'm sure it'll be great. But what about now?

Now we've still got the New Avengers working through trust issues and Doc Strange has to cast another spell to try and convince everyone they are who they say they are. This time around it's a spell that reveals a "visual projection of the true nature of the individual," which would have some suspense if you didn't see the cover.

NA 34 is a weird reading experience - there's both lots of things happening and lots of nothing happening. It's like being in a car that's spinning its wheels incredibly fast - fast enough to get the car to slide around a bit but not really move forward. Then when it does it lurches and you end up someplace other than where you thought you'd be. When Bendis is writing dialogue like he does here I could read him all day, yet eventually I'd like to see some conflicts resolved. I want to see what happened with Spider-Woman. I want to know what's going on with Skrull Elektra's body. I want to see Deathlok kicking some ass. I want to see a conflict between Avengers New and Mighty ...

But I wouldn't be surprised at all if we all tuned in next issue and instead of battling symbiotes the New Avengers ended up having a picnic with Woodgod.

Which would be cool, but I'd like to see the book move forward instead of continually moving sideways.

Black Adam: The Joys of Sacrifice & Cannibalism

2007-09-11T14:07:00.000-04:00

Black Adam: The Dark Age 1 (of 6) (Tomasi & Mahnke).

Black Adam was the most interesting of all the characters in 52, so it's a shame to see what's become of him.

In 52 we saw the transformative power of romantic love, as Teth-Adam's relationship with Isis brought him to new heights of personal joy. More importantly, the political part of the story was crafted to give Adam some standing with the audience - he wasn't the good guy, necessarily, but he had some level of justification for his actions. Combined with the redemptive power of Isis' love Adam's story had a real strength to it - a strength that DC lost when Isis died and Adam went beserk with grief.

It's only gotten worse for Adam. After a brief dip into Countdown to play creepy-guy-in-the-shadows with Mary Marvel, Adam gets his own LS in which he is so determined to get Isis back that he has his followers beat his face to an unrecognizable pulp so he can get back across the Kahdaq border without ID, then has some of his followers sacrifice themselves to assassin's bullets so he can escape, and then eats his final follower's body for strength to climb to the Lazarus Pit where he brings Isis back to life.

Yeah, what part of any of that makes Adam appealing?

I give Tomasi and Mahnke (whose art is as strong as ever) credit for making the story appealing when Adam isn't. I can't root for Adam to succeed because he's crossed too many lines and seeks no redemption, but I can get interested in reading about his exploits, and The Dark Age is a mildly interesting book. The first issue is solid without ever totally pulling me into the story. It clings too much to the surface when the story cries out for depth.

The second issue is supposed to come out tomorrow and I'll give it a look but if that book doesn't improve things I won't be sticking around for the back 2/3 of the series.

Don't Forget the Back-Up: Avengers Classic 3

2007-09-02T18:38:00.000-04:00

Avengers Classic 3: "Crack in the Armor" back-up feature (McDuffie & Oeming).

I'm not a huge fan of monthly reprints. I'm not really sure what the point is - if you want to read the original Avengers series, why not just go buy an Essential TPB or Masterworks? What's the appeal of buying readily available stories as a monthly comic at current prices?

Obviously there are people out there who want (or will) buy their comics that way because Marvel and DC occasionally roll them out. I give Marvel credit for offering two new incentives for buying Avengers Classic - the super spiffy Art Adams covers and the Dwayne McDuffie and Michael Avon Oeming back-up feature.

And while I can't say that Adams' cover and the back-up feature are worth the $2.99 alone, they are excellent compliments to the Lee/Kirby reprint.

In AC 3, the back-up features Iron Man testing out his new red and gold (and roller-skate capable) against Giant-Man. McDuffie works in the right mix of action and character in the 7-page story. We get to see Iron Man and Giant-Man throw down against one another in a training session for the fun, but the highlight comes after the battle, as Pym questions why they have to keep making themselves more powerful and admits that his own quest for more power comes from an inferiority complex.

There's a great bit, too, where Pym lets Iron Man know he's Stark, which Stark denies, but Pym doesn't buy it. Pym doesn't press the issue, but it's nice to see a more playful, subtly cocky Pym to go alongside the self-doubt.

McDuffie and Oeming display Tony's fondness for alcohol nicely, too, having him remain behind in the limo as Pym enters the Mansion, and having a shot of Stark positioned between the Iron Man mask and bottles of liquor. It's a great image by Oeming: Stark in the Iron Man suit and holding a glass of alcohol, positioned between the mask and the bottle after warning Pym to get a "release valve" to deal with his self-doubt.

You want to explain Stark to someone, show them this page from AC 3. Back-ups often get overlooked, but McDuffie and Oeming's work here deserves any attention it can get.

Superman 666: Busiek & Simonson Goodness

2007-09-01T12:40:00.000-04:00

Superman 666: "The Beast from Krypton" (Busiek & Simonson).

I know this book came out a while ago but I just got around to reading it now and it's the epitome of what a great stand-alone issue can be - engaging, a bit out of step with the status-quo, showcasing different talent, and giving us a different side of the character.

It's fun to see Busiek riff on the "666" issue designation but it doesn't overwhelm the plot; instead, Busiek uses it as a set-up to showcase a darker part of Clark's personality. The premise is that there's a demon from Krypton who hitched a ride to Earth with Kal's rocket and now he's trying to turn Clark into a Kryptonian "Beast of Hell" that will bring about the end of days, Krypton-style.

Clark's mind enters a dream and we see the turn slowly unfold as Superman openly resents anyone and everything associated with his life - from beating up bad guys to Perry White's cigars to Lois. We get to see a "what if Superman turned on his duties" plot unfold that highlights both the grand struggles of Superman and the daily struggles of Clark, and gives a hint to the pressure that is exerted on being the world's number one superhero.

I won't ruin the twist that allows for the issue's resolution, but like a good stand-alone issue 666 puts everything back in place while still allowing for future stories to draw from the issue's contents. Double-sized as it is, Superman 666 feels more like an annual than a regular stand-alone issue but Busiek and Simonson take advantage of that extra space to deliver a solid Superman story.

And hey, you can't go wrong with a Phantom Stranger appearance, either.

Why Aren't You Reading X-Factor?

2007-08-29T13:24:00.000-04:00

X-Factor 22: "The Isolationist, Part 2: Natural Order" (PAD & Raimondi).

Almost everyone who reads comics has that one book that they read and love and don't understand why everyone doesn't read it and love it.

X-Factor is that book for me.

There's nothing universe-changing about X-Factor; PAD has carved out a nice little corner of the Marvel Universe to play in and he pretty much keeps to himself while still managing to touch intelligently on the issues surrounding the MU. There's a constant feeling in the book that PAD actually thinks about what's happening n the MU beyond a plot point. Reading X-Factor is reading the work of a writer who asks, "What does it mean when there's only 198 mutants left? What impact does the Civil War have on mutants? What does being able to make duplicates of oneself really do to the original?"

Whenever I ask people why they don't read the book I often get comments from non-X fans like, "I don't read the X-books. They're too confusing and there's too many crossovers and the newer characters all suck." X-fans will tell me, "It's not really an X-book."

Here's why I like X-Factor:

1) The most consistently good writing of PAD's career.

2) Clear, straightforward art from Pablo Raimondi.

3) Interesting angles on stories. In the current arc the idea of asking for mutants to be protected under the Endangered Species Act is being tossed around, and a side-plot focuses on two Disney-esque teen singers who sing racist anti-mutant songs to packed houses. Whatever angle PAD chooses, it's usually smart and interesting as opposed to being LOUD and UNIVERSE ALTERING.

4) The cast. Under PAD's direction, Jamie Madrox has become one of the more interesting characters on the company's roster. Surrounding Madrox is a group of solid characters: Siryn, Monet, Rahne Sinclair, Rictor, Strong Guy, and Layla Miller that compliment each other well. PAD has smartly teamed-up Theresa and M and they play the good cop/bad cop routine very effectively.

Overall, X-Factor is just a very strong book and month-in, month-out one of the most enjoyable reads out there.

Flash 231: The Flashy Four

2007-08-26T14:33:00.001-04:00

The Flash 231: "The Wild Wests, Part One: Growing Up Fast" (Waid & Acuna).

Tragedy, thy name is Flash.

Of all the things I was expecting or hoping to get out of the new Waid run on Flash, a sense of despondency was not one of them, yet as I read through Flash 231 I was filled with a sense of dread. Or rather, I was full of the characters' sense of dread for their own circumstances, which drag the whole book down a notch and point us right back towards the dregs that was the pre-Guggenheim Bart Allen-as-Flash era.

Flash 231 is an OK book, and Wally and Linda's kids are fun, Impulse-like characters, but the story itself is a drag and that alone makes Flash 231 one of the most disappointing comics of the year, so far.

Wally and Linda have a pair of twins who have these crazy powers and they've aged rapidly and it all makes Linda miserable and puts Wally on Good Husband Alert. You can see that he's walking on egg shells around his wife and while he's trying to do the right thing by her, and Linda's trying to the right thing by him, and they're both trying to do the right thing for their kids ... I get the sense neither Wally nor Linda are in a happy place right now.

If the focus remains with the kids (Jai and Iris), this might not be so bad. There were several times in the issue when it felt reminiscent of the gone-too-soon Leave it to Chance series by James Robinson and Paul Smith where the kid ends up feeling left out by the grown-ups (chiefly, her dad) and their grown-up business and has her own adventures. In such a story one of the keys is that the adults are so wrapped up in their own business that they forget to keep a tight eye on the kids; that happens here, but instead of leading to a kid-driven adventure, it simply allows the kids to hear some vague, worrisome foreshadowing about why they need to become superheroes.

The overall focus of the book is split between the kids and the parents, however, and that, combined with the very unexpected high-comic book-sci-fi feel ends up making Flash feel very reminiscent of Waid's Fantastic Four run. That's not a bad thing, necessarily. It might be fun to watch people who can't hang in an FF plot try to muddle their way through. Certainly some of Linda's frustration stems from her inability to expertly know the machines they need to keep her children healthy.

The end result, however, is that we've got two uber-concerned parents and two hyperactive kids working their way through a lukewarm Fantastic Four plot. (Remember when Franklin was artificially aged? Remember how much that sucked? Flash's take isn't that bad.) I'm going to stick around at least to the end of the first arc, but I hope the mood of the book (and the art, too, for that matter) lightens up considerably. When a sense of the tragic pervades a book like Flash, there's a real danger of drama turning to melodrama simply because of the family dynamic.

I don't think Waid has turned into Robin Williams (the funny guy who wanted to be taken seriously who's now forgotten how to be funny), but after the demise of Bart Allen I was hoping for something fresh and fun. Waid's given us a fresh take on the title, but the story is still a drag.

New Avengers 33: We've Got Bad Guys!

2007-08-25T13:30:00.000-04:00

New Avengers 33: "Trust, Part Two" (Bendis & Yu).

Holed up in Chicago after last issue's plane crash, the Avengers continue to be wracked with issues of trust and doubt. Bendis has made a wise decision in pitting Cage and Spider-Man as the main antagonists of this arc, with Wolverine increasingly playing the voice of reason caught between them.

In an arc that is about trusting the people you ally yourselves with, Cage's demanding leadership grates extremely well against Spidey's humor. With the exception of Luke and Danny, there's not a lot of history between the members of the New Avengers. I have no idea what speed Marvel Time is working on right now (it can't still be 7 years since Reed & Co. went up in the rocket, can it?), but Dr. Strange, Spider-Man, and Clint Barton have been aware of each other since very nearly the beginning, and Cage, Danny, Jessica Drew (who's not around this issue at all, which is a letdown after how last issue ended), and Logan have been on the radar for around 75% of Marvel Time. (If we assume - always dangerous, I know - that Marvel Time has compressed itself roughly equally over our decades.) Logan is the oldest member of the team given his backstory, (even if he didn't "arrive" onto the radar until our 1970s), so it's fitting that he's playing the Voice of Reason.

It might have been more effective to put Maya Lopez, the most recent addition to the Marvel Universe on the roster, at the front of this story to get a fresh perspective on the Avengers. Sometimes we forget out here in the real world that our perceptions of characters like Spider-Man and Wolverine are very different from the perceptions others have of them inside the MU. Bendis is keeping us wide, however, and that stylistic choice keeps us as off-balance as anyone in the text. It's not a bad choice, of course, but it puts a greater emphasis on momentum. Reading about a character who's confused and not gaining any momentum is one thing, having the reader not feel that momentum is another. The theory being that it's better to read about someone who's frustrated as opposed to being frustrated as a reader.

Detective fiction (which is what Bendis always seems to be writing in his Avengers work) works on the principle that there's a mystery to be solved. Bendis' best work is his detective work, but in Avengers the expectation from the audience isn't just the need to have a mystery solved, but the need to have some action to go along with it. (Note - I'm perfectly okay with stories that are all-talking as I am with stories that are all-action, but if you're going to tease action, like with a Skrull invasion, for instance, than you need to deliver on it.) If there's a weakness to Bendis' New Avengers run, it's that the action scenes have left something to be desired. The most recent ninja throwdown is a good example. It's fun to watch that level of carnage, but Yu's art doesn't help as he's much better drawing fewer characters instead of crowded panels. His action sequences are often hard to follow and a team battling countless ninjas just makes it worse.

Bendis turns his attention to villains in NA 33, as the Owl attempts to sell a captured Deathlok to a consortium of villains that includes Madame Masque, Crimson Cowl, Dr. Jonas Harrow, and the Wizard. A visitor arrives, tells the Owl he's doing this without permission and Cowl takes the Owl out as a "cautionary tale." We know from the solicits that this is part of the Hood's takeover of the super-villain community, but it'd be nice to hear it in the text. It wouldn't hurt anything if we'd heard the name. Sometimes Bendis wants to drag these little mysteries out too far, which hurts the reveal from being as effective as it could be. Make us wait on the big mysteries but solve these little ones sooner.

Yu's villain sequence is much more effective than previous fighting sequences, but he takes extra room and has fewer characters to deal with than usual in this book.

NA 33 is a satisfying read on its won, but frustrating given the lack of follow-through on Jessica Drew and more of the Avengers challenging each other as possible Skrulls. The issue is a rare case of a single-issue reading better as it is than it will in the TPB.

Atomic Alert: Alex Ross Returns to Marvel

2007-08-14T18:50:00.000-04:00

Marvel has announced that Alex Ross is coming back to the company for a 12-issue 2008 maxi-series entitled Invaders/Avengers that will see the World War II Invaders tossed forward in time into the Marvel present.

An Alex Ross project is always reason enough to get excited, but the promise of this being an in-continuity story gives it a bit something more to look forward to, as Ross and partner Jim Krueger usually operate outside of continuity.

It's interesting that two of Marvel's big summer announcements (Invaders/Avengers and JMS & Chris Weston's The Twelve) mine the company's deep past. DC has historically been the better company at doing this, so it's cool to see Marvel following suit. One can only hope this bodes well for a future Agents of Atlas project.

X-Men 201: Mystique's Marauders

2007-07-31T14:57:00.000-04:00

X-Men 201: "Blinded by the Light, Part 2 (of 4)" (Carey & Ramos).

Mike Carey is doing a good job tearing the X-Men down. I wasn't thrilled with his previous arc that saw the destruction of Providence, but the current arc is much better. Instead of an arc built on chaos and the unknown, "Blinded by the Light" is a systematic takedown by the known.

Last issue dealt with the various betrayals of the X-Men by Mystique, Lady Mastermind, and the Malice-controlled Omega Sentinel as the Marauders engaged in a sneak attack. This issue the battle continues as the X-Men are taken down and virtually out - the Emma Frost-controlled Cannonball escapes, grabbing Iceman on the way out the door.

There's not a lot of story here, except that the vague revelation that there's much more to the Marauders plan than we've seen. What Carey does well is focus the story around Emma, Bobby, and Sam which gives all the chaos a central thread to take us through the story. A sub-plot with Kitty and Peter provides a nice balance.

If I have a complaint of Carey's writing, it's that this is an X-Men franchise story and not an Adjectiveless X-Men title story. The inclusion of Cyclops, Emma, and Logan take a bit of the focus away from the cast that Carey has established in the book prior to X-Men 200. It's not a bad thing, necessarily, but I'd like to hear something from Lady Mastermind and Omega Sentinel about what their motivations/thoughts are during this attack. It was also a bit disappointing not to see appearances by Cable and Gambit after last issue's takedown, but I'm sure that's coming.

If you don't like Humberto Ramos' art I can see that ruining the story because this issue displays all of his excesses, but I like Ramos' art and I think he makes a better match for Carey's writing style than Chris Bachalo. Ramos likes to draw people standing dramatically and people exploding into action where Bachalo's strength is often more conceptual. The previous arc seemed to be built around Bachalo's strengths while this one is better suited to Ramos. Whether Carey is consciously working his plots to meet his artists' strengths I couldn't say, but the result of the current story, so far, has been pretty successful.

In the back-up, we've got Part 5 of the Endangered Species event. It's good to see a focus on the Beast, but the story hasn't been all that gripping, yet. Solid, but not "must read," by any stretch. Endangered Species is basically just Beast moving from place to place, on his quest to somehow undo Wanda Maximoff's "No More Mutants" decree from House of M. This installment has Hank dealing with the horror of Neverland and, in a bit of a surprise, has him coming face-to-face with the Dark Beast. The strenth of the back-up tale here is that the quiet solemnity balances out the frenetic main story.

Until It Gets Taken Down ... Marvel SDCC Movie Teasers

2007-07-29T19:45:00.000-04:00

Thanks to John Warren for passing along this link to the SDCC sneak-peak clip from the Iron Man movie. It looks beyond amazing.

Here's a YouTube clip of the Hulk from Hulk 2.

WWH: Slapping Around the X

2007-07-29T16:26:00.000-04:00

World War Hulk: X-Men 2 (of 3): "Sworn to Protect" (Gage & DiVito).

SMASH! LEVEL: NON-STOP.

MAIN EVENT: HULK v. X-MEN.

The positive: a near-start-to-finish throwdown between the X-Men and the Hulk. The negative: Too much talking.

That there is too much talking in an all-out action issue might seem like the wrong complaint, so let me clarify - it's not that there's too many words in WWH: X-Men 2, it's that they're the wrong words coming from the wrong people.

WWH: X-Men 2 is an enjoyable issue - it's what I refer to as an "ultimte back-issue comic." When I was a kid, digging through the quarter bins or even venturing through the long boxes, I used to want to get the biggest bang for my buck, so I'd look for books that promised lots of characters and lots of action. If I was going to drop $20 for Daredevil 181, I wanted to balance out my budget a bit with cheap issues of Power Man & Iron Fist or Defenders or Justice League of America. Anything that promised to give me lots of comic goodness for not so much cash.

That's what WWH: X-Men 2 brings to us - lots of X-Men getting knocked around by the Hulk, who's more than happy to make them wish the they had that duck insurance. On that level, the book is an unqualified success, and much of that credit goes to Andrea DiVito, whose fight scenes are crystal clear.

The problem with the issue is that, as a part of World War Hulk, it doesn't match the intensity of the main LS, and I think the reason fo this is that Gage tells this story as an old-school Hulk romp. There's plenty of dialogue being passed back and forth and Gage's Hulk is all-too ready to engage the X-Men in conversation. The WWH-Hulk works best when he says as little as possible - too much talking plays to the idea that this is a game, or just another Hulk battle. When Hulk is taunting Emma as he's trapped her in diamond form under his foot, it doesn't work because it doesn't feel like this Hulk would bother to have that chat. Instead, he should just put his foot on her and let the force of that foot do all the talking.

The Wolverine fight works a bit better because of their history, but even this scene would've been stronger if Gage had told the story from Xavier's or Logan's POV. What other books have done better than WWH: X-Men 2 is to give a sense of how bad it is when the Hulk decides to get serious. The first issue of this series did that, but issue 2 doesn't.

Early in the fight, Hulk knocks Logan into the far woods and removes him from the battle for a few minutes. That would've been the perfect place to use Logan to get the seriousness of the fight across to the readers. If he's standing in the woods, watching as his wounds heal, having an internal dialogue on the action I think the whole issue would've gone up a few notches in its overall effectiveness.

It could have turned a very good, very enjoyable issue into a great one.

Countdown 40: The Broken Record Update

2007-07-29T14:22:00.000-04:00

Countdown 40: "Small Wonders" (Dini/Bedard & Giffen/Garcia).

There's just not enough momentum building up in Countdown to really recommend that anyone start reading it. If you've been reading it you might be willing to stick around and see how it ends. If you're not reading it, I don't know why you'd want to start. Every advancement of the story just feels like baby steps, at best, and wheel-spinning, at worst.

Here's how much space was devoted to not much advancement in issue 40:

1) 3 pages for a fight to break out in the Palmerverse,

2) 2 pages for us to find out Jimmy's running around town as Mister Action,

3) 2 pages depicting Mary Marvel sitting in the audience of a Zatanna magic show and thinking about killing one of the passengers,

4) 2 pages of Holly Robinson watching the ex-Harley Quinn turn a single mother and her son away from the Amazon shelter,

5) 3 pages on Apokolips, where we have a new plot introduced on the New Gods' spying on Darkseid to see if he's responsible for Lightray's death,

6) 3 pages back in the Palmerverse where the inhabitants decide to help Donna, Jason, and "Bob" after Jason threatens to slice one of their noses off. The P-verse inhabitants tell them Ray isn't around, but they can point them in a possible direction,

7) 4 pages of Trickster and Piper convincing the Penguin to let them spend the night in the basement of his club, with a last panel toss-in of Oracle sending the Question after Piper and Trickster.

In other words, nothing happens. A bunch of set-up for future pay-offs is done, but that's it. There's no sense of any of the plots moving to an actual "can't-wait-till-it-gets-here" pay-off, either. All of that would be okay if the waiting was worth it on its own, but it's not. There's so little time spent with anyone that there's little enjoyment, as touching base with all of the various plots feels forced.

The only scene that works on its own in the entire issue is the Trickster and Piper plot.

Disappointing, but not unexpected, unfortunately.

SDCC, Day Three: Spidey Creative Teams Announced

2007-07-28T22:44:00.000-04:00

The big news coming out of San Diego today was the announcement of the new Spider-Man creative teams to take effect this fall after the JMS/Quesada "One More Day" arc. Marvel is going to cancel the Sensational and Friendly Neighborhood Spidey titles and replace them with 3 monthly installments of Amazing. The idea behind the move is that there's going to be one place to get one main Spider-Man story instead of three divergent stories like we have now. I think it's a good move - Marvel consolidates the story without sacrificing the amount of content being published. Each successive arc will have a different artistic team, so each arc will be internally consistent in terms of creators. Spider-Man editor Steve Wacker will also rotate the artists, so it won't always be the same writer/artist combos.

The opening teams are as follows:

Dan Slott, Steve McNiven, Dexter Vines and Morry Hollowell
Marc Guggenheim, Salvador Larrocca and Jason Keith
Bob Gale, Phil Jimenez, Andy Lanning and Jeromy Cox
Zeb Wells, Chris Bachalo, Tim Townshend and Antonio Fabela

I think those are four pretty solid teams - no complaints from me on any of the artists or writers. Can't wait to see how this plays out.

Superman 665: Jimmy Olsen's Pal Superman

2007-07-28T13:08:00.000-04:00

Superman 665: "Jimmy" (Busiek & Leonardi).

Superman 665 is allegedly a Countdown tie-in, according to the cover, but on the inside it's something called a "Countdown Dossier Special."

I have no idea what that means, except that this issue features Jimmy Olsen and Countdown features Jimmy Olsen, but there's no apparent connection between the two stories. You'd think, because 665 is a tie-in that would speak ill of 665, but you'd be wrong. Instead of this seeming like an off-issue of Superman, 665 helps to illustrate why Countdown has turned so wrong, so quick.

Superman 665 tells the "secret origin" of how Jimmy and Superman became pals and Kurt Busiek does a great job of showing that the relationship isn't just "Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen," but "Jimmy Olsen's Pal Superman." Both characters get something out of the relationship - Jimmy, his parents having gone missing, gains a friend and not another father figure (that's more Perry's role), and Superman finds someone he can let his guard down with and just relax.

665 is the kind of issue that Busiek writes better than anyone - a personal, humanist story of an individual existing in a world where there just happens to be superheroes. In 665 that individual is Jimmy Olsen, but the introspection that normally accompanies that central character in a Busiek text is given to Superman instead, so we experience Jimmy through Superman's eyes.

It's not a deep, powerful story, but it is an engaging, fun tale that goes heavy on character examination without sacrificing story. If Countdown offered half of the depth that Busiek offers here the story would not fall so easily off the tracks.

Reacting to San Diego, Day One

2007-07-27T10:25:00.000-04:00

Pulled from various sources, here's some highlights from Day One of the San Diego Comic Con. News seems better out of Marvel than DC after one day, but the best news comes out of Jeff Smith's Cartoon Books, where he's announced his next project will be Rasl (pronounced "Rassle"), a sci-fi romp about an interdimensional thief that's aimed at an older audience than Bone and, according to Smith, is more "James Bond than Bugs Bunny."

Can't wait - first issue is hoping to ship in January.

Marvel

The Twelve: A year-long mini from JMS and Chris Weston that will focus on Marvel's pre-Marvel World War II characters: "The disappearance of The Twelve from Marvel history for so long is explained that these heroes were kidnapped during the final days of World War II by German Nazis. 'None of these characters has been seen since the fall of Berlin, so I picked that as the point to say that nobody's seen them because they were grabbed by the Nazis and put into cryonic suspension," explained Straczynski."

Captain Marvel: Since his somewhat odd (because he didn't do anything, really) re-appearance in Civil War, Captain Marvel has just sat in limbo (or the Negative Zone), but Marvel has announced a new Mar-Vell mini-seris. Brian Reed, who's doing an excellent job on Ms. Marvel, will write and Lee Weeks will pencil.

DC

- Countdown: Surprisingly, nothing of note came out of the Countdown panel, according to what I read in the Newsarama report. For the biggest series the company has right now to generate no real news ... strange and yet not surprising, unfortunately. Really the only new news is that the title Countdown is going to be changed to Countdown to Final Crisis as of issue 26.

I've ripped DC plenty here for building up the Rogues storyline in Countdown but then having the pay-off come in Flash and this was addressed when "DiDio said that what's important to the main characters of the weekly series will happen in Countdown, but things like the death of Bart Allen will happen in The Flash. He added that "comic books are built on history and continuity" and that a big thing about Countdown is featuring the interconnectivity and richness of the DC Universe."

The second half of that explanation doesn't jibe with the first half. Why does "comic books being built on history and continuity" apply to Flash but not Countdown?

The Spirit: Darwyn Cooke is leaving The Spirit after issue 12. Bummer.

Mighty Avengers 4: Punching!

2007-07-26T15:01:00.000-04:00

Mighty Avengers 4 (Bendis & Cho).

I've been looking at my monitor for about five minutes tying to think of something to say about Mighty Avengers 4 and there's not a lot coming. It's not a bad issue, at all, either; it's just that there's not a whole lot to mull over. It's an antithesis of New Avengers 32, and almost as good.

The Avengers continue to deal with the female Ultron, bringing in Hank Pym and dealing with an AI Iron Man armor Tony Stark created to activate in the case of his own death. The Avengers figure out the new Ultron is simply repeating things that have already been done and they come face-to-face with a fleet of Iron Man armor, showing that Ultron is using one of Stark's recent tricks. Femtron maybe kills the Sentry's wife in order to lure Bob into a trap.

It's a big, slick, solid, fast-paced, old school heroes vs. villain tale. Frank Cho's art is clear and easy to follow and Bendis stays out of his own way more often than not.

Atomic Alert: Buy this TPB: Jeff Smith's Shazam!

2007-07-25T15:55:00.000-04:00

Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil (Jeff Smith).

I'm not going to spoil anything major about this comic because I want everyone to experience as much of this series as fresh as can be, but I do want to encourage everyone to at least flip through TMSOE when it hits the shelves as a TPB. This is one of my favorite comics of the year - any genre, any company. Jeff Smith does as good a job matching his story with his pacing as anyone in comics.

The Los Angeles Times' Geoff Boucher has a blog entry up about the Shazam! movie currently in production, but they could do a heck of a lot worse than simply taking Smith's story and adapting it if they wanted to do a kids' movie. And why not? Kids movies can be franchises, too, and it'd be cool to have a superhero movie that walks that path.

The innocent-but-curious-almost-to-a-fault character type works really well in a story like TMSOE, and really makes me wish James Robinson and Paul Smith would get back together and give us more stories of Chance Falconer.

Checking In with Countdown

2007-07-24T15:57:00.000-04:00

Countdown 42 & 41 (Dini & Various).

I haven't posted on Countdown in a couple because, honestly, it's not living up to early returns. Too many characters, too many plot-lines. It's amazing to me that Dan Slott can juggle multiple plots/characters so well and Paul Dini and his writing partners are doing so poorly. I think some of the difference is that, with The Initiative, Slott's really got one story taking place in one main location while Dini is trying to tell a universe-wide story.

Countdown is suffering from the same problem that afflicted 52 - there's too many plots just spinning out on their own with no center to hold it together. The Monitor plot here is supposed to be the center, but we don't get enough of it to hold that center.

I'm still not sure why the Rogues are even in Countdown - after getting their plot's big pay-off in another book (still a dumb, dumb decision). Same goes for the Holly Robinson/Amazons plot.

So much of Countdown is about characters suffering an identity crisis (no pun intended) but Dini would be better, I think, pairing up some of these issues. Jimmy Olsen and Holly Robinson would make a solid pairing, I think; Jimmy is trying out a superhero identity, and Holly is sliding out of one. Mary Marvel and Piper & Trickster might work, too, as Mary is falling under the influence of Black Adam's power and Piper & Trickster have walked that morality line for years.

If those two plots were combined, Dini could work them around the center plot of the Monitor, Donna Troy, and Jason Todd searching for Ray Palmer.

There's just too little focus in the series for my liking.

BTW, Newsarama is reporting today that the total cost out of yours and my pocket for buying Countdown will come in at around $321.

Iron Man & Marvel Movie Cross-Promotion

2007-07-24T13:51:00.000-04:00

Comic Book Resources's cool "The Comic Reel" column has a link to MTV's Movie Blog site for an article about Hillary Swank and Samuel Jackson joining the Iron Man cast.

According to Avi Arad, Swank and Jackson are filming cameos, which would make sense since the film has already named Jeff Bridges, Terence Howard, and Gwyneth Paltrow to the big supporting roles.

What's most interesting about the Arad feature quotes is that these small, big-talent cameos will start to crop up more and more as Marvel starts to seriously cross-polinate their film franchises:

The existence of Jackson’s hard-boiled superspy reveals a newfound willingness by Marvel to begin mimicking the way its comics mix different characters into each other’s storylines on a regular basis.

“It’s because now we have control over the properties,” Arad explained, citing the new era of Marvel funding such upcoming flicks as “Iron Man,” “Nick Fury” and “Captain America,” after a decade of holding hands with studios like Sony for Spider-Man or Fox for The Fantastic Four. “Now you can mix and match. It used to be different studios having different characters. You try and get three major studios to sit together and cross [promote],” he laughed. It’s too tough.”

Based on Arad’s comments, fans might find it hard to not feel a bit speculative as to why a double-Oscar winning A-list actress would make a cameo in a superhero movie. Since “Iron Man” is laying the groundwork for the “Nick Fury” movie that Marvel hopes to begin filming relatively soon, one theory is that Swank will be a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent alongside Sam the man. But just as probable, it seems, is speculation that Swank might be setting herself up for a starring superhero flick down the line. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from her last award-winning performance, it’s that she certainly has the physique to pull it off.

So instead of doing what they've been doing, where one film might leap from another (Elektra from Daredevil, Wolverine and Magneto from the X-Men franchise), Marvel will start cross-polinating their characters thoughout the films it controls, giving the movies a greater sense of appearing in the same shared universe.

Pretty cool, I think.

WWH: Initiative Style

2007-07-23T15:06:00.000-04:00

Avengers: The Initiative 4: "Green Zone, Part One" (Slott & Caselli).

SMASH! LEVEL: We've Got Looters!

MAN EVENT: The Initiative vs. Looters!

Four issues in and I'm totally sold on The Initiative. Slott is spinning out one-plot-too-many perhaps, but he's been able to keep everything going without ignoring anything, so while I'd prefer he dump one sub-plot in order to give a few more pages of characterization elsewhere, The Initiative moves at such a rapid pace that I'm guessing Slott has a quiet issue built in somewhere before the end of the fist year's worth of stories just to let everyone catch their breath.

Contextually, Initiative 4 suffers a bit from covering ground we've seen a few times already, taking us back to the beginning of World War Hulk, with the Hulk's arrival and Stark's suiting up with his latest Hulkbuster armor. What saves this rerun is that Slott uses the Initiative's reaction to the Hulk's arrival to drive a wedge between Stark and Rhodey. It's Hank Pym that knows about Project: Achilles and the Hulk-specific SPIN tech, not Rhodes.

Rhodey gets into it with Stark, but Stark tells him, "I trusted you with the most important part: building my army."

So much for the Initiative as a police force, I guess.

Stark recognizes that the arrival of the Hulk could be the event that unites the pro- and anti-SRA forces, but Rhodey is more focused on making sure the recruits aren't sent against the Hulk or his forces. The Initiative crew goes out on side-duty, helping to evacuate the city. The rawer recruits (Hardball, Cloud 9, Komodo, Slapstick) are arguing about how involved they should get in the activities when Rage (who I'm not even sure should have to go through the Initiative training - he is a former Avenger, after all) jumps in at the first opportunity to take out some looters.

Rage has been one of those characters just floating through Initiative, so far, seemingly there just so Gauntlet can make his inevitable rip on the New Warriors as Rage scowls in the background, so it's nice to see him let his emotions out and cut loose a little. That it's looters they go after is even better as it brings an old-school vigilante flavor to the issue, setting off the difference between how things used to be (save the neighborhood) against how they are (train to serve in a superhero army).

After the Hulk and Iron Man knock Avengers Tower down, Rage rallies the troops to go join the main battle, and he not-so-delicately reminds Triathlon exactly who has the most seniority with the Avengers. It's a great moment and illustrates, I think, just how tapped in Slott is with this book. As much as it's cool to see all the background cameos, it doesn't appear they are just thrown it to be easter eggs to long-term fans. There's a reason why Rage has been sitting there, scowling and biting his tongue at Gauntlet's taunts, and Initiative 4 is that reason. This book, as much as anything, is Rage's moment to shine by not only letting his anger loose but to act as a hero instead of a soldier, and to show genuine (if perhaps unwise) leadership to the younger recruits.

Stefano Caselli's art has won me over, too. I was lukewarm on him at first, but he gets better with each issue.

Avengers: The Initiative is no longer "quickly becoming one of Marvel's best books." It is one of Marvel's best books.

WWH: Manifesto of Hate?

2007-07-23T13:09:00.000-04:00

World War Hulk: Front Line: 2 (of 6) (Jenkins & Bachs/Martinbrough).

SMASH! LEVEL: Collateral Damage.

MAIN EVENT: None.

WWH: Front Line 2 skirts around the events of WWH 2, depicting what's going on while the Avengers and FF are getting their asses handed to them. Jenkins has made a smart decision to separate the main FL story - Ben Urich and Sally Floyd's coverage of WWH - from the sub-plot of Danny Granville's search for the killer of Arch-E.

Jenkins does a very good job hitting on the issues that come up around the Hulk's return; in that sense, FL plays the role of fandom inside the Marvel Universe, asking the questions we're asking. Daredevil brings up the fact that, during the crisis, the Super Human Registration Act has disappeared, and Jenkins uses the rest of the to offer a social commentary on how the poor neighborhoods are affected differently than high-income areas.

For her part, however, Sally Floyd is unhinged. She wants to see a conspiracy theory everywhere she looks and she has an attitude of a columnist much more than a reporter. She off-handedly brands the Hulk's actions as a "Manifesto of Hate," which I don't think is supported by the facts. Makes me wonder just how much of he judgment is skewered by her end-of-Civil-War siding with Stark and Richards.

Front Line is a solid comic, but as Baloo pointed out about WWH: FL 1 in the comments section, Ben and Sally have a tendency to bury the big story, so as I'm reading I do wonder, "Now, will this story actually see print?"

World War Hulk 2: EPIC. TIMES 2.

2007-07-23T11:49:00.000-04:00

It's going to be World War Hulk Day around the Anxiety as I've got the afternoon off and several WWH books to work through (WWH 2, WWH: Front Line 1, WWH: X-Men 2, Ghost Rider 13, and Avengers: The Initiative 4) so I'm going to knock them off one at a time. For those not familiar with how we're handling WWH around these parts, we're looking at the books through the lens of how much action each books packs between its covers. I'll get through as many books as I can. On with the show ...

World War Hulk 2 (of 5) (Pak & JRJR).

SMASH! LEVEL: EPIC. TIMES 2.

MAIN EVENT: HULK & WARBOUND v. NEW & MIGHTY AVENGERS; HULK & WARBOUND v. FANTASTIC FOUR.

I don't know if it's possible for WWH to get any better than this issue.

You can describe the issue in about 10 words: Hulk kicks crap out of Avengers. Hulk kicks crap out of Fantastic Four (OK, 13 words), but that doesn't come close to accurately representing the all-out action awesomeness of the issue. It's hard to imagine that this is only the second issue - the two huge battles that take place between the Hulk and his Warbound and the Avengers and Fantastic Four are as befitting the final battle as whatever I could have hoped we'd see in WWH 5.

Pak & Romita build the action-upon-action sequences smartly, beginning with the relative quick throwdown between She-Hulk and her cousin, then moving through a beatdown of Avengers Team-Up, and ending with an absolutely classic Hulk v. Fantastic Four battle that has extended one-on-one bouts with both the Thing and Reed Richards.

Each round has someone trying to make peace with the Hulk, but he's just simply not buying it. Pak wisely keeps Hulk's dialogue to a minimum, allowing JRJR to get across Hulk's hurt and anger and determination.

Romita is really the star of the issue - battles are appropriately epic but also crystal clear to follow. There's no questioning what's happening in a given panel, something Leinil Yu (New Avengers) and Ed Benes (Justice League of America) would do well to learn. Romita also fills the book with plenty of smaller moments that elevate the book - from the Sentry's blank expression as he readies himself for the possibility of having to confront the Hulk to Jen's frightened look after the Hulk has planted her beneath the city street.

If you want SMASH! out of the World War Hulk Experience, then WWH 2 is the issue to get.

And if you like WWH, be sure to check out Marvel's World War Hulk Hub.

Captain America 28: Did the Red Skull Just Apply for the Position of Captain America?

2007-07-21T14:14:00.000-04:00

Captain America 28: "The Death of the Dream, Part Four" (Brubaker & Epting/Perkins).

It's hard being the best comic book on the shelf at a given time because the expectations are so high with each subsequent issue. Yet that's the burden Captain America is faced with and those are the expectations that Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, and Mike Perkins continue to meet month after month.

In Cap 28, Bru continues his masterful job of moving the story forward along several fronts. We've got: Nick Fury (who we finally see), Falcon, and Sharon Carter hunting Bucky; Bucky hunting Tony Stark and the Red Skull; Stark hunting the Red Skull; and the Red Skull's plan continuing to evolve through the working of Dr. Faustus and the new Serpent Squad.

Yeah, that's right, the Serpent Squad. How cool is that? The new Squad is led by Sin, the Red Skull's daughter, who's not wearing a snake get-up/persona. Of course, eels aren't snakes, either, so that means two members of the new Serpent Squad aren't snakes (Sin and Eel), and two are (Cobra and the new, male Viper). But, hey, whatever - it's just a name. I'm more concerned with what they add to the story and what they add is the terrorist muscle to the Red Skull's plan (the exact details of which we still don't know).

One of the things I really admire about Bru's writing in Captain America is that he treats everything straight - whether it's Cap's death or the Serpent Squad it's all imbued with a sense of realism that really enhances the story. Professor X shows up to help Stark interrogate Crossbones and it feels logical, not forced.

The big news that comes out of the issue is that Steve Rogers left a personal note with a lawyer for Stark during Civil War, to be delivered only if Steve died. We don't know what the note says, but it causes Stark some consternation. My guess is that the note tells Tony to put someone new in the Captain America costume, given the amount of attention that issue has received here, in Fallen Son, and all around fandom. Before the lawyer arrives in his office an agent of SHIELD is applying for the position of Captain America and Stark makes a big deal about how "No means no" on this issue.

Couple things on this. One, the name of the agent applying for the job is "Agent Hermann." Now, not all bad guys have German names, not everyone with a German name is a bad guy, and not all SHIELD agents with German names are spies. But "Hermann" just so happens to be the name of the Red Skull's father: Hermann Schmidt. And as Falcon and Sharon discuss elsewhere in the issue, whatever the Skull's plan is he needed Steve dead to accomplish it, because otherwise he would've enjoyed rubbing Steve's nose in a successful mission's completion.

Is Agent Hermann a Skull operative? A Faustus-brainwashed SHIELD agent? The Skull's son? Sin's boyfriend? The Red Skull himself?

Heck, for that matter, is the note from Steve even legit to begin with?

I don't think this is the last we'll see of Agent Hermann, though the great thing about a book like Captain America is that the suspicion level is so high that you start suspecting shadows and piecing together puzzles that aren't even there.

Second thing on a potential new Captain America: I bet if we see one it's Sharon Carter. Just a feeling, but she's at the center of this story and the person most in need of a new challenge right now. She's the only character in the story having personal identity issues, having just left SHIELD, and while she would be against the idea of putting on the costume - as would Bucky, Sam, Clint (no matter what that piece of garbage Fallen Son 3 tries to imply), and most everyone who knew Steve - if that note from Steve makes it clear that he wanted a new Captain America to replace him then the question becomes not whether there should be a Cap, but who should it be.

And if that note says Steve wants Sharon (or Sam or Bucky) to take over ... that "frees" Marvel to have a new Cap running around until Steve Rogers is fished back out of the North Atlantic ice.

I never get tired of writing about Captain America. Brubaker, Epting, and Perkins and the rest of creative continue to deliver one hell of a good comic.

Atomic Alert: Halo: Uprising

2007-07-21T12:41:00.000-04:00

Coming in August from Marvel is Halo: Uprising, a 4-issue LS from Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev. Set to take place between the events of Halo 2 & Halo 3, Uprising "begins the tale of the heroic Master Chief's struggle to reach Earth before the evil Covenant's engines of war get there first! Set in the time period between Halo 2 and Halo 3, Halo: Uprising answers all those questions that fans have been asking for years, and introduces new characters into the Halo mythos!"

The notion that I'm excited about Halo: Uprising would be wrong, but the inclusion of Maleev will certainly get me to read it. I like that Marvel is assigning two its top talents to a tie-in book instead of just relying on the built-in Halo audience to buy it no matter who was working on it.

JLofA 11: Where the Justice League is Defeated by a Building

2007-07-20T13:47:00.000-04:00

Justice League of America 11: "Walls" (Meltzer & Ha).

It's a weird ending for Brad Meltzer's Justice League run - after two big, complex story-arcs, Justice League of America 11 & 12 will be stand-alone issues (though 12 is reported to end with a cliffhanger to help set up the Dwayne McDuffie run). Meltzer's run has been hit-and-miss; there have been good moments, but he has seemed to be more interested in plot than character, which is fine - that decision doesn't cause a book to sink or swim on its own. With as huge a cast as Meltzer was dealing with, however, the decision to focus on plot robs the story of the natural cohesive unit that is a central character (or characters).

The good news is that of the two characters that Meltzer has seemed most interested in exploring (the poorly renamed Red Arrow and Red Tornado), one of them gets the show virtually to himself this issue - Red Arrow.

The plot is as simple as it gets - Roy and Mari are trapped inside a collapsed building. It's a nice coincidence that JLofA 11 comes out a week after New Avengers 32, where the Avengers "enemy" was a malfunctioning plane. Such "ordinary" conflicts help to ground the characters a bit and allows the writer to remind us that they're humans as much as they are superhumans.

Roy is the unquestioned star of the issue and JLofA 11 takes place mostly in the dark, cramped insides of a collapsed building. The sparse nature of the story contrasts effectively with the Jupiter-esque density of Meltzer's first 10 issues. I like Roy and I like Meltzer's take on Roy and if you gave me the choice to buy a Brad Meltzer-written Red Arrow series or Justice League series, I'll take the first option.

That said, JLofA 11 isn't a great issue. It's a solid issue, a nice catch-your-breath tale, but it's not overly memorable.

All-Flash, All-Better?

2007-07-19T16:34:00.000-04:00

All-Flash One-shot: "Justice, Like Lightning" (Waid & various).

Wally's back, Waid's back, Bart's gone ... but is the Flash title any better?

We've only got one issue down, but so far, so good. That's not going to come as a huge surprise to anyone who's read Waid's Flash before. Waid is the definitive Flash writer of this era and he slips effortlessly back into Wally's head right from the start of All-Flash 1.

Wally's internal monologue is a primary trait of Waid's approach to the character, so it is a potential cause for concern when, near the end of the issue, Iris Allen tells Wally to "stop living inside your own head all the time." I wonder if that's Waid dropping a stylistic forewarning on us that the internal monologue isn't coming back.

The plot of the issue has Wally chasing down Inertia to make him pay for his role in killing Bart. Wally catches him and, essentially, freezes him in time as punishment. It's ... odd. Not that I'm for having Wally kill Inertia, but this particular punishment - immobilizing and putting him on display at the Flash Museum - seems just as wrong. I know Wally thinks he's punishing Inertia, and certainly it's not pleasant for a speedster to watch history unfold before him, but putting him in the Museum also, in an odd way, celebrates Inertia's murder of Bart. It's one thing to have replicas of villains in a museum devoted to a hero, but to put a murderer - the actual, immobilized murderer - in the middle of the museum ...

Doesn't seem like the right thing to do to a murderer. Wally says he wants Inertia to have to look at a picture of Bart as punishment, but he could accomplish that in a jail cell or JLA cell or at S.T.A.R. Labs. I know Wally thinks he's so connected to the speed force that his immobilization of Inertia is non-reversible, but there's the practical matter that Wally just put an actual, living villain in the center of a museum where the public visits on a daily basis.

Not. Smart.

Villains, you know, tend to get out of these traps to cause more trouble.

The rest of the issue sets up the upcoming Flash series (reverting to the Wally numbering with issue 231) effectively. Wally drops the requisite vague statements about his "special" kids, Jai and Iris, and there's a memory/foreshadowing set of images from Iris about what's coming to pique our interest. Which is sort of accomplishes - it's not a surprise to anyone that Wally's kids will eventually put on costumes, is it? More intriguing is what looks to be a Batman costume coming out of a Flash ring.

Things look good for Flash, but I'm still irked that Guggenheim was removed from the book - I know he's said in interviews he knew it all along, but his run proved how valuable a character Bart Allen is and what a wretched thing the Dan Didio regime did to the character by making him a boring, angst-ridden twenty-something.

Didio commits the crime, Bart serves the punishment. Doesn't really seem fair, does it?

Atomic Alert: Final Crisis Teaser

2007-07-18T23:58:00.000-04:00

Newsarama was given the first teaser for DC's post-Countdown event, Final Crisis. As John Warren and others have pointed out, Final Crisis is TEN MONTHS AWAY. That's the entire NFL season, including Super Bowl, Pro Bowl, and Draft. More after the image ...

Not a lot to get excited about, really. It's a nice picture (done by JG Jones), but it's six heroes standing in front of some kind of lightning-spouting storm. I guess the biggest news is the presence of Hawkman alongside DC's Big Five instead of Aquaman or Green Arrow.

I'm sure I'll be buying Final Crisis when it comes out (especially if the rumors about Kurt Busiek writing it are true) but it's hard to get excited about yet another Crisis LS - especially when it's ten months away.

Spiders Rule the 2007 Box Office @ Intermission

2007-07-18T00:48:00.000-04:00

With almost half the year remaining but most of the blockbusters out in theaters now or even done with their runs, I thought I'd take a look at the 2007 U.S. box office returns through this past weekend (ending 7-1-07) to see how the sci-fi/fantasy offerings were faring.

Unsurprisingly, they're dominating. I'm using the stats from Box Office Mojo (which can be found here - but be warned that this link will show the updated 2007 box office returns and not the snapshot that I'm using as I write the post.) All-time figures are taken from IMDB, and represented in (parenthesis) below. Here's the current 2007 top 15:

1. Spider-Man 3: $335 million. King of the Year, so far, but it's been a trend of diminishing returns for the Spider Franchise. The first film took in $403 mil (7th all-time), the second $373 mil (10th), and the third (15th) isn't likely to match either of those numbers. It's still a lot of money for a movie that sucked the fun out of popcorn and sunshine.

2. Shrek the Third: $318 million. I enjoy the Shrek movies but they're always "wait for the DVD" films for me. Shrek 3 will wind up somewhere in between the final results for 2 ($436 mil, 3rd) and the original ($267 mil, 33rd).

3. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: $304 million. Top three spots are all "three-quels," but that won't last the year, I'm guessing. At World's End was another disappointment, though certainly not to the level of Spidey 3. Needs to make a paltry $1 million to match the total of the first PotC movie. PotC 2 is out of reach, having taken in $423 mil (6th).

4. Transformers: $224 million. Best summer movie of 2007. It's opening was less than half of Spidey 3's, but it hasn't suffered nearly the drop-off in ticket sales, either. It'll be interesting to see just how high this film climbs.

5. 300: $210 million. I'm surprised this film broke the $200 million mark. Sin City only took in $74 million, had more famous directors and cast, and a more popular set of Frank Miller books to adapt, yet Zach Snyder's stylish Greek epic struck a chord.

6. Wild Hogs: $167 million. What the fuck is wrong with you, America?

7. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: $150 million. Not bad for 5 days work. Or for the 5th movie in the franchise.

8. Ratatouille: $145 million. Movies about rats that cook always do box office magic.

9. Knocked Up: $138 million. The little movie that could. Or something.

10. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: $127 million. Is $127 million disappointing? The first FF movie did $154 million. Is $127 million enough to get a third movie made?

11. Blades of Glory: $118 million. Didn't bother to see it.

12. Ghost Rider: $115 million. I'm surprised this film did this well, because Ghost Rider has a hard enough time selling enough copies to keep a monthly comic going and, more importantly, the film was wretchedly bad. I bet Sony execs are happier with this film's box office than Fox is with FF 2. If Eva Mendes doesn't clean up at the Razzies this year, though, I'll never take that awards show seriously again.

13. Ocean's Thirteen: $113 million. Very enjoyable, but these Ocean's movies never really do as well as you'd figure they'd do.

14. Live Free or Die Hard: $104 million. Very good movie and will likely become the highest-grossing Die Hard film. Currently, that distinction is held by Die Hard 2, at $117 million.

15. Meet the Robinsons: $97 million. I'll catch it on DVD. The dinosaur was pretty funny in the commercials.

All-in-all, I'll say what I've been saying since Fellowship hit the theaters - we're living in a cinemaic golden age for the sci-fi/fantasy crowd. 2007 has given us less quality than in recent years, but the box office performances suggest these types of films are going to continue to get the bulk of the yearly budget from film studios.

This Week in Universal Annihilation

2007-07-17T16:08:00.000-04:00

Nova 4: "Alone" (Abnett/Laning & Chen/Denham) and Annihilation: Conquest - Wraith 1 (of 4): "Chapter One" (Grillo-Marxuach & Hotz).

Annihilation: Conquest gets up and running this week as the Wraith LS and the Nova tie-in get off the ground. It's a good, but not great week for Annihilation: Conquest as one book hammers the story forward and the other comes off a surface-oriented attempt at cool.

This issue is something of a do-over of Nova 1, which came out a loooooong three months ago. Like Nova 1, Nova 4 has Rich flying around space smashing things and talking to the Worldmind.

Unlike Nova 1, Nova 4 doesn't suck.

The difference is that there's a purpose here to all the running around. Rich is headed to Hala as the issue opens and ends up stuck inside the Phalanx's Cordon. (It's kind of neat that A&L keep having characters state that it's impossible to cordon off Kree space from the rest of the universe, only to have another character follow up on that, as the Worldmind says here with a "and yet it is so." Comic. Book. Science. If you're going to use it, you might as well have some fun with it.) The Phalanx send some Kree Sentry units after him so it's not just random go-go policing action on display in the book. There's a reason for Rich to go to Hala and a reason why he gets attacked. Simple, but it makes a world of difference in the book.

It helps, too, that Rich has a greater sense of who he is this time around.

Tossed in to the mix are two females playing bad cop/good cop on the issue. In the bad girl corner we've got Gamora, so-called "deadliest woman in the galaxy" and Rich's ex-lover who has been assimilated into the Phalanx. First she tries to kill/capture him by sending 100 Sentry robots after him, and then she decides to personally go after him. Should be fun.

In the good girl corner there's the introduction of Ko-Rel, a Kree medical officer, who's stranded on a Kree frontier planet where Rich happens to crash land. Ko-Rel investigates the crash and a burned-up Rich transfers his Nova power to her at issue's end. Makes you wonder if this is setting up the rebirth of the Nova Corps. Personally, I hope not. Let Rich be the one-and-only for a while longer.

A&L deliver a tight, action-packed issue that builds expertly off the change in the status-quoo brought about in Annihilation: Conquest - Prologue.

Over in Wraith, we're introduced to, well, Wraith, I guess. Wraith says he doesn't have a name, which is fitting since he seems to be a derivative of a handful of characters. Part Ghost Rider, part Lobo, mostly Man with No Name, Wraith is the mostly-silent and mostly-deadly type and he's not an uninteresting character, but more of a blank character, so far. The key to making a Man with No Name character work, however, is that his actions have to be interesting and Wraith's aren't.

He can hurt the Phalanx, but isn't all that interested in fighting them. He's Kree, he's not that interested in helping the Kree resistance (in a Matrix 2 derivative scene), but he does help them escape when the Phalanx arrive to bust things up. He escapes into space, but ends up getting captured and sent to a prison where his interrogator is revealed to be an assimilated Ronan.

Now that's interesting but nothing that came before it really has me intrigued to find out whatever information Ronan is potentially going to get out of him.

Wraith is a character that desperately wants to be cool, and while he's got a cool look and a potentially cool revenge kick going, it's hard to be cool tooling around space on the back of a freakin' space-cycle. It's only one issue and Wraith has potential (both as a character and as a series) but so far it's just all too derivative of other characters to work for me.

Lanterns and Arrows of Green

2007-07-16T16:16:00.000-04:00

Green Arrow: Year One 1 (of 6) (Diggle & Jock); Green Lantern 21: "Sinestro Corps, Chapter One: Fear & Loathing" (Johns & Reis).

I'm more down than up on DC these days, so it's good when two books come across my desk that really work. Lucky for me, Green Lantern and Arrow have long been two of my favorite DC characters.

Andy Diggle and Geoff Johns are coming at these tales from the opposite ends of their respective characters' careers. Diggle is taking Ollie back to his pre-Green Arrow days in a origin story for the Emerald Archer, while Johns is taking Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps into a new era of Ring on Ring crime.

In Green Arrow: Year One, Diggle quickly moves us through the spoiled rich kid bit, placing Oliver against a hardcore ex-British Special Forces operative whom Ollie has hired to shepherd him through all kinds of "extreme" activities. The guy betrays Ollie by issue's end, stealing $14 million from him and dumping his unconscious body into the ocean. It's a good set-up, it's well-paced, and Jock's art works well. Good stuff.

Over in Green Lantern, Johns gives us Part Two of the Sinestro Corps War, which promises to reveal secrets of the GLC and its power source. Johns is great at mining the past in order to push his pockets of the DCU forward - he's doing it with Justice Society and he's doing it here.

GL 21 picks up after the Sinestro Corps One-Shot, with Lanterns dead and dying as the SC continue their assault on the GLC all over the universe. The focus of the issue is on Jordan, of course, and Johns does a solid job setting up several battle fronts - the GLC vs the. SC, Jordan vs. Parallax/Kyle, Jordan and his allies vs. the Lost Lanterns, and the in-fighting amongst the Guardians.

That's a lot of plots to put in motion, so it's a good thing this storyline has two titles to run across.

Johns has a simple concept here - Hope vs. Fear - but one that can go down plenty of paths. Green Lantern is definitely a book to check out if you haven't been reading it.

Anxiety Attack: Justice Society of Kingdom Come?

2007-07-15T10:22:00.000-04:00

Newsarama has the October Solicitations for DC up at their site, and a couple of them caught my eye - there's a Countdown tie-in, a few Sinestro Corps One-Shots, but then there's the news that Alex Ross is going to co-write a JSA arc with Geoff Johns. Sounds cool. Then I read the solicits and found out that they're bringing the Kingdom Come Superman into regular DC continuity and making him a member of the JSA. Sounds ... I don't know how it sounds, really. The concept works and there's a lot of talent involved, but I'm pretty wary at the same time.

Here's the full solicitation:

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #10
Written by Geoff Johns & Alex Ross
Art by Dale Eaglesham & Ruy Jose
Cover by Alex Ross
Variant cover by Eaglesham & Jose
Alex Ross joins Geoff Johns as co-writer for Part 1 of “Thy Kingdom Come,” the epic story years in the making, springing from KINGDOM COME! Not a hoax! Not a dream! Not an imaginary story! Welcome the newest member to the Justice Society of America: the Kingdom Come Superman!
Coming from an Earth plagued by heroes-gone-extreme, how will this Superman react to an incarnation of the Justice Society he never knew? This Superman’s world needed better heroes.
So does ours.
Retailers please note: This issue will ship with two covers that may be ordered sparately. For every 10 copies of the Standard Edition (with a cover by Alex Ross), retailers may order 1 copy of the Variant Edition (with a cover by Dale Eaglesham & Ruy Jose). For more information, please see the Previews Order Form.
On sale October 3 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US

New Avengers 32: Where the Avengers Are Defeated by a Plane Crash

2007-07-13T15:51:00.000-04:00

New Avengers 32: "Trust, Part One" (Bendis & Yu).

I know some people are driven nearly insane by superheroes who spend entire issues sitting around and talking. Just take any glance through the boards at Newsarama and you'll see writers like Bendis chided for "nothing happening but people talking to each other." I really have no problem with reading a book that's little more than dialogue if that dialogue is good, just like I have no problem with books that are all-out action if they're done well.

New Avengers 32 is a story in two parts - Part One: Talking in a Plane. Part Two: Crashing in a Plane. The switch between the two is jarring, but then, it is a plane crash. (I do kinda laugh in a completely snobbish way when I hear/read people complaining about the shift for being jarring and the issue being unbalanced. I mean, it is a PLANE CRASH. They tend to unbalance things a bit.)

During the talking half, the New Avengers get a lecture from Logan on how any of them could be Skrulls, which leads to Spider-Woman wanting to take the deceased Elektra Skrull corpse to Tony Stark. Logan, Cage, and well, everyone, think that's a horrid idea. I know I'm in the minority, but I could have listened to the team talk about this possible Skrull invasion for an entire issue or two. Bendis uses Logan to provide a meta-commentary on how Marvel Creative handles the Marvel Universe, reflecting on all of his teammates as if he were on the external looking top-down at the MU. Logan even turns that commentary on himself: "And then there's me! Who is everywhere at once and all of a sudden knows exactly who he is."

There's a bit of faulty logic on display in the issue - why does one Skrull mean an invasion is coming? - but on the whole it's fun to listen to and will probably end up revealing more in hindsight. It's already doing it, after all, on just a second read-through after the issue's final reveal.

After the plane crash sequence (it is kinda weird to see superheroes freaking out about a plane going down, but then this team has only one flyer, Spider-Woman) Jessice Drew is revealed as a Skrull ally. I know, because the team is talking about her being a Skrull and given that she's doing the green-eye thing we're supposed to think she is a Skrull, and maybe she is, but maybe the Skrulls have something else up their sleeve. Maybe Jessica Drew isn't a Skrull at all - we don't see her doing anything particularly Skrullish. Maybe she's being mind-controlled. Or maybe she is a Skrull, which would explain why she didn't want to be tossed out of the falling plane. Of course, she somehow makes it down to the ground in one piece, so maybe she's still Jessica. We don't know yet, but I'm guessing on the fly that the Jessica Drew walking around with the New Avengers is the authentic Jessica Drew, but one who has been programmed by the Skrulls as a sleeper agent. Maybe she's even been programmed to think she is a Skrull (which would explain her not wanting to be tossed off the plane) but isn't (which would explain how she wound up on the ground).

What also know she takes out Logan post-crash and then grabs Skrull Elektra and walks (not flies) off, but we don't know where she's headed.

Going back to the first-half of the issue, the question then becomes: Why did Jessica Drew want to take Skrull Elektra to Tony Stark? The obvious inference is that Stark's a Skrull, but I don't buy it. I wouldn't be surprised if Drew didn't ever want to bring Skrull Elektra to Stark, but was just saying that in order to stall the team while whatever it was that was being done to Danny's plane was working its way through the system.

What I'm most interested in seeing play out over the "Trust" and subsequent storylines is what Bendis' plans are for the Skrulls. I think this is going to be more than just a Skrull Redux plot where they try to come to Earth and take it over and leave with the heads between their knees. I think (hope) that Bendis is going to give us something new and give them something new in their bag of tricks.

One note about the art - I'm usually a fan of Yu's work, but I wish they'd tighten up his line-work a bit. A couple pages here were tough to look at.

I really like what Bendis has done with New Avengers post-Civil War, and despite the claims that he's not writing Avengers stories in Avengers, the theme of trust that is all-over his post-CW material goes right back to the formation of the team in the Stan & Jack era.

So are shape shifting threats - anyone seen the Space Phantom around lately?

Atomic Alert: Annihilation: Conquest

2007-07-11T16:13:00.000-04:00

Annihilation: Conquest Prologue (Abnett/Lanning & Perkins).

The writing team of Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning is incredibly frustrating to me. When they're on, they provide high quality, engaging books, but when they're off I find then next to unreadable, and they seem to be on/off to me at about a 50/50 split.

It was with that typical A&L-patented reservation that I finally dug into Annihilation: Conquest Prologue this afternoon. The Annihilation: Conquest Wraith LS ships this week, starting the four-LS build-up to the Annihilation: Conquest event. I liked the first Annihilation go-round, but wasn't overwhelmed by it, so A:C Prologue was going to win me or lose me on what's coming.

It won me over. Big time.

A:C Prologue is just a good, solid story from start to finish. A&L focus on two characters: Phyla-Vell (the new Quasar) and Peter Quill (the once and future Star-Lord). Both characters will star in their own A:C LS so it's a good marketing decision, but having the focus on two characters gives A&L the space to really get into their respective issues and guide us through the post-Annihilation Wave.

The story here involves the attack on the Kree Empire by the Phalanx, who infect Spaceknight and Kree technology, and somehow shut the entire Kree empire off from the rest of the universe.

It all comes across as much more focused and coherent than the first Annihilation event, and it's nice to see the cosmic story pushed forward. I'm looking forward to checking out Wraith later this week, and the other LS as they come out, but I'm really looking forward to the Annihilation: Conquest LS that will drop in November.

Check out Marvel's Annihilation Hub. The four A:C LS are: Wraith, Quasar, Star-Lord, and Nova, though technically Nova won't be an LS, but issues 4-7 of the regular Nova monthly. Here's some preview pages for Wraith 1.

Anxiety Attack: DC Hires Jim Starlin to Kill the New Gods

2007-07-11T14:25:00.000-04:00

Newsarama has a story up at their site right now about the new Jim Starlin DC LS, Death of the New Gods.

While hiring Jim Starlin to do a cosmic series isn't a bad thing, the move is the latest in DC's year-plus dual-prong strategy of the answer to everything being either to put things back to where they were x number of years ago or killing yet another character.

Honestly, it's getting a bit old and tiring and kinda insulting.

By calling this latest LS Death of the New Gods, DC is also referencing one of Starlin's most famous works, Marvel's The Death of of Captain Marvel.

Hopefully this LS will push things forward for the New Gods and not simply result in pointless character killing. With Starlin involved I have some hope Death of the New Gods might be more creative than reductive, but given the Dan Didio Era at DC, I'm not very hopeful.

The Long National Nightmare that is Fallen Son is Finally, Mercifully Over

2007-07-10T19:18:00.000-04:00

Fallen Son, Chapter Five: "Acceptance" (Loeb & Cassaday).

So the title to this blog post is a bit harsh, given that Chapter 5 of Fallen Son is the best issue in the entire series, but as loyal readers of the Anxiety know, I've found this entire LS to be completely underwhelming. So, yeah, it's the best issue, but that's faint praise.

The problems with "Acceptance" are the same basic problems that plague the rest of the series - primarily that Jeph Loeb never gets beneath the surface of the characters. Fallen Son is all example and not enough (or any, really) examination of the issues raised, which keeps the series mired at the level of a gimmick.

What raises this issue up a notch is the Falcon's eulogy, which comes off as heartfelt despite the Hallmark Channel-inspired dialogue coming out of Sam's mouth.

There's a nice touch at the end with a private burial for Steve in the Arctic. Returning Steve's body to where it was discovered back in the day is fitting, and Stark has his best words of the entire series when he notes how many Avengers have fallen by the wayside in recent years. If Loeb's performance in this issue (and series) matched his reputation, it would have been a truly touching ending, but it never escapes the fact that Loeb's dialogue has just been off this entire series.

The end is fitting for another reason. Janet tells Tony that "we have to accept" that Steve is gone: "One era ends. And a new one begins." But Stark clearly doesn't accept this change. He never accepts anything he doesn't like (save for his own battle with alcoholism), which is one of the traits that makes Stark such an interesting character. You can see the wheels spinning in his head.

If we get to the end of the five stages of grief, however, and we don't see the acceptance of Cap's death, I do kinda wonder what the point of all this was. That we don't accept what we must? Doesn't that make the five stages a failure? If that's the point, it would have been nice to see that examined, but, again, there is no examination anywhere in this series at the level it should have been given who it was that died.

If this issue had been entitled Fallen Son: Falcon, like it probably should have been, then having Sam deliver those final words in the Arctic would have worked to bring a better sense of closure. As it is, the ending rings hollow. The fans don't accept Cap's death and Stark doesn't accept Cap's death, but we get no inkling about what his plans for the future are, really. Which means that Marvel has used this mini-series, basically, to sell some future story or stories down the road. Thanks.

And yes, once again the art is gorgeous, but the mini-series dealing with the aftershocks of Captain America's death should do more than look pretty.

Atomic Alert: Thor 2

2007-07-10T16:07:00.000-04:00

Marvel has a set of preview images up for Thor 2 at their website. We see Oliver Coipel's first interpretation of Asgard and, it appears the influence of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films extends beyond making Thor's speech sound like Aragorn. Provided that image above is Asgard and not some other locale, it looks like Coipel was taking design cues from LotR's Minas Tirith as much as Kirby or Simonson's Asgard.

Which is fine. I don't begrudge JMS wanting to drop the Shakespearean dialect or offering a new interpretation of Asgard, and Coipel's art continues to look gorgeous.

The 13-Day Late Movie Review: Live Free or Die Hard

2007-07-10T02:19:00.000-04:00

Live Free or Die Hard (Dir. Len Wiseman).

After my glowing review of Transformers, I was a little hesitant to hit the theaters again to see another big budget summer would-be blockbuster.

I'm glad I put that hesitancy aside.

Like Transformers, Live Free or Die Hard (the fourth installment in the John McClane series) delivers what it promises, giving you two hours of popcorn diversion that's just as smart as it needs to be, as funny as you'd want it to be, and as thrilling as you'd hope it would be.

Directed by Len Wiseman (the Underworld movies), DH4 has more in common with Die Hard 3 (With a Vengeance) than either of the first two films, which pioneered its own genre of action movies and helped make Steven Seagal rich. (Under Siege? Die Hard on a Boat. Under Siege 2? Die Hard on a Train. On Deadly Ground? Die Hard on an Oil Rig.)

One leftover from DH1 & 2 is that McClane gets involved in the day's craziness because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here, he's sent to pick up computer geek and circumstantial sidekick Matt Farrell (played by Justin Long) when the bad guys attempt to kill the kid to erase anyone who can link them to the shutdown of America's computer systems.

Bruce Willis and Long work very well together. Willis slips easily into the "blue collar cop trapped in a blockbuster" routine and the movie succeeds because he can pull off groan-inducing lines that other actors in his action-bracket can't. This is the kind of performance that won't win any Oscar consideration, but there's less actors out there who can pull this role off than whatever role ends up taking home the Best Actor Award.

Willis plays McClane as tired but determined, a guy who's been beat down by the job but still does it. Perhaps it's all the damage the job has inflicted on his family life that causes him to so readily jump back into the fray, but the movie doesn't dwell on anything that complex. The film's read on McClane? Something needs to be done, McClane is around to do it, so he does it. It's just that simple.

Wisely, the film doesn't make McClane the total burnout he was on the verge of becoming pre-Die Hard 3, either. Whatever family or job troubles McClane is having, he's got himself back together, which allows him to go out and do his job in DH4. Willis tones down McClane's antics - the crazy desperation from Die Hard 3 is thankfully gone.

Timothy Olyphant and Maggie Q provide just the right amount of wickedness for the bad guys, and Justin Long and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (playing McClane's daughter) provide just the right amount of comic relief to take some of the burden off of Willis. I could've done without Kevin Smith's loser-in-mom's-basement routine but he's not on-screen long enough to slow anything down.

Wiseman keeps a good deal of the visual palette from Underworld during the night scenes, and it wouldn't surprise me if the second-half of DH4 (when McClane and Farrell) leads to a James Bond film for Wiseman down the line. The action was quick paced, clever without being absurd, and delivered the right amount of things going boom.

Live Free or Die Hard is a very entertaining summer movie. Draped in patriotic imagery, the film clearly wants to offer up John McClane as an idealized American archetype, a modern Wyatt Earp who yearns for the stable family life his job won't let him have, but is unwilling to leave that job behind. McClane is about sacrificing the self in order to save the country and it's to Willis and Wiseman's combined credit that it doesn't come off as anything more than one guy doing one thing. It's not going to make you feel better about the system that is the American infrastructure, but it might make you feel reassured that no matter how screwed up our tech systems get there's still a guy who will go punch a bad guy in the face to set things right.

Thor 1: The Return of Thunder

2007-07-09T16:01:00.000-04:00

Thor 1 (JMS & Coipel).

Of all the comics I read as a kid, Thor was, by far, my favorite. I was lucky enough to start reading early in the Walt Simonson run and I was hooked instantly by the dual adventures of the God of Thunder on both Earth and Asgard. Simonson's art was perfect for the book, and his writing was highly influential on my own - he always seemed to have the right balance of intrigue and action, and I appreciated that he never seemed to oversell anything. His narration was typically low-key, which worked exceedingly well with the larger-than-life action. There was no need to populate the book with a thousand !!!!!!s to get the audience to feel like what they were witnessing was important.

It just was.

My disdain for an abundance of !!!!!!!s made the Tom DeFalco era of Thor unreadable to me and my favorite book was quickly left behind. I kept buying it as I had yet to rid myself of the collectors' habit, and in a pre-eBay world you couldn't very well wait and hope to buy the books later for quarters on the dollar, but instead of being invested in the story I simply flipped and hoped and moved on.

I enjoyed the beginnings of the Dan Jurgens Heroes Return era Thor, but budgetary concerns forced me to drop all monthly comics and I began to shift to reading TPBs and searching for deals on back issues on the net. When I came back a little over a year ago, Thor was gone, not just as a title but as a character. I was disappointed but not crushed - while he's one of my favorite characters, and while his supporting cast is my favorite in comics, most Thor stories I've read just aren't to my liking.

When news of the new Thor series was announced a few months back in the wake (or was it as a precursor?) of the appearance of the Thor Clone in Civil War, I was hopeful. JMS' Spider-Man work has been hot or miss, but the deep mythological aspect he added to the Spider-Mythos always seemed as if it would have been more at home in a book like Thor or Wonder Woman or even Green Lantern. I'm a huge fan, as well, of Oliver Coipel's crisp, clean art.

After reading Thor 1, my expectations remain high but unfulfilled. JMS has chosen to bring back Thor as a calm breeze instead of a raging storm. It works, but it's almost too soft, too quiet, too reserved. Much of issue 1 feels like a recap - a dangerous way to begin a new series hoping to attract readers in this marketplace. I might have favored a disconnected chronology; from various reports around the net hyping the series, JMS has let it be known that Asgard will eventually reappear over the Oklahoma plains. I might have started there, at that moment, and filled in the events of issue 1 as back story.

As a TPB, this will all probably read fine, but we're not in the TPB form, yet. As a single issue Thor 1 works because of its low-key subtlety and not any bombast. I'm fine with that, but I could understand someone telling me they were bored. If someone handed me this comic and the subject was Captain Marvel (Shazam version) and not Thor I might shrug, say it was okay, and then forget about it. As much as I like Coipel's art (and it is magnificent here), I'm not going to stick with a book just because the pictures are pretty.

I'll be honest - I could do without Donald Blake or any other Earthly secret identity. I don't think it adds much to the story beyond the origin to have Thor trapped or hidden in human form. I'd rather see Thor's "weakness" come from not being able to effect change in a situation where his power can't solve the problem instead of that weakness coming from the physicality of the mortal frame.

JMS brings back Donald Blake and I'm willing to give him a shot to make it work. JMS' take on the Thor/Blake split feels more symbiotic than previous identities and the idea that, in the Void, Blake is the person who convinces Thor to come back is intriguing. JMS' Thor/Blake dynamic suggests they are symbiotic echoes of one another ("I was a man dreaming I was a god. I was a god dreaming I was a man.") and I'll see where it goes. Thor's "mortal body" doesn't work for me if it operates solely as a secret identity, however, so I hope we don't get walked down that road, again.

JMS has also freed Thor of the trappings of Ragnarok. "The cycle of Ragnarok was what happened to you," Donald Blake explains. "It's not who you are. [...] The future is yours to write."

So here we have Thor, making a quiet re-entrance into the Marvel Universe. Personally, I hope he's given some time on his own, away from all of the post-Civil War issues that take up so much room elsewhere in the MU these days. If the book is going to be quiet, let it be quiet. I'll be around because if I'm reading comics, I'm reading Thor. Thor 1 doesn't stir the blood, but it does stir the mind.

Transformers: The Vindication of Michael Bay

2007-07-03T17:23:00.000-04:00

Transformers is the best big, slick, downright fun summer blockbuster since the first Pirates of the Caribbean opened across the Multiplex four summers ago.

Unlike the dreadful Spider-Man 3 and the disappointing PotC: At World's End, Transformers doesn't make the mistake of taking itself so seriously that it forgets you've probably gone to the theater for a good time.

I dig the heck out of Transformers. From the moment the excitement of the first teaser trailer hit the big screens last summer (before PotC: Dead Man's Chest) I've been in a slow burn descent of worry about this movie, with a ray of hope coming only in the past week (more on this below). It's not that I hate Michael Bay movies (they're always visually pleasing, at least), it's just that I figured he'd be the exact kind of director who wouldn't respect the source material. If he could get it right, the film could be awesome. If he got it wrong, however, it was going to be tragic and forgettable, and every ad I saw, every interview I read made me less excited. I just kept coming back to the fact that it didn't look like Michael Bay was smart enough to trust the material - Megatron looked like ass, Optimus Prime had stupid painted flames and a mouth, and there were too many damn people - Jon Voight, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese, Shia Lebouf, Anthony Anderson ... every ad brought another actor when what I wanted to see was another robot.

And not Bumblebee as a Camaro, but as a dorky V-Dub Beetle.

Perhaps it is a case of a film simply exceeding low expectations, but to say that isn't giving Bay and the cast and crew enough credit. There are too many people in the movie and not enough robots, yet the people work because Bay doesn't overburden us with mountains of melodrama. Duhamel's character is a Marine, serving in the US Forces in Iraq and he's got a wife and kid at home. He wants to see them. She thinks he's dead after the Decepticon attack on the base. Simply reading that is about all the time Bay devotes to that on-screen. It's enough for us to know that Duhamel wants to get home; he doesn't need to spend any time whining about it. He's still a soldier and his first thoughts are always of the mission. I respect that - constant reminders of his wife and child would drag this movie down, and this isn't Apollo 13 and Bay knows it. (Heck, the whiny-assing there dragged the movie down and there it's story appropriate.)

Bay plays to genre stereotypes about what his intended audience wants - a social "loser" who is really more than he appears is placed as the antagonist and surrounded with hot women, robots, cool machines, cooler tech, a plentitude of explosions, and a legitimate sense of right and wrong. Bay smartly realizes those elements are the candy and that to get them to really pop you've got to treat the source material seriously. You don't have to treat the material like it's a sacred text, but you've got to treat it straight. You've got to show the core audience that you're not doing to the audience what Bumblebee does to John Turturro's character - which is to say, pissing all over them. This is a movie about robots who transform into vehicles, yeah, but it's also about a Civil War where two factions of a society are waging war against one another.

It's the war that you've got to take seriously because "Protect" and "Destroy" are not just catchy marketing slogans.

Wired has an interesting cover story this month on Transformers. In the main article, Scott Brown discusses fandom's ire over Bay's choice to direct the film. Brown writes how Bay was, from a technical standpoint, seemed like exactly the right guy to direct this movie, but it wasn't the technical aspect that had fan's worried. Brown argues:

"Among a certain sect of geekdom, there's more at stake. Prime practically step-parented the latchkey kids of the mid-'80s. He was our Allfather at a time when flesh-and-blood role models were increasingly few and far between: Stallone had begun his long sag. Arnold was already more credible as machine than man. So when Prime declared, "One shall stand, one shall fall!" in that seismic, tear-down-this-wall timbre of his (or, more accurately, voice actor Peter Cullen), you believed him. Thus began the cyber-outsourcing of masculine heroism, a process that would eventually, inextricably, link Y chromosome to Xbox."

I'm not sure I fully buy Brown's argument, but I do believe Optimus Prime was going to make or break this film to many people. Myself included.

Optimus Prime was the moral center of the cartoon, the Transformer equivalent of Captain America or Superman (and not a Sly or Ah-nold character as Brown argues), and while every other Autobot got to be cool or gimmicky, Prime had to be the rock at the center who took the greatest burdens, made the tough decisions, and kept everyone's moral compass pointing straight.

Bay largely nails Prime. In the smartest decision he could've possibly made (and something I found out a week ago, which buoyed my spirits considerably and gave me hope that Bay would deliver), he brought in Peter Cullen to reprise his role as the vioce of Prime. It's amazing how the little things can change your opinion around so quickly. Noting that Bay had cast Cullen made me question all of the negative thoughts I had about his ability to bring this franchise to the screen because it showed, at some level, that he understood. Bay certainly could've dialed up some big Hollywood talent to come in and voice Prime - he did it with Megatron, after all, who's now voiced by Hugo Weaving (though Frank Welker will reprise his role in the video game). Casting Cullen, however, was like casting Prime to play himself. It's so simple that you'd figure Hollywood would get it wrong, and so right that you'd figure time would've robbed Cullen of his ability to bring back the voice of Prime you remembered.

The simple genius of Bay's treatment of Optimus Prime is that it literally looks like he pulled the Optimus Prime of the 80s cartoon series and plunked him down in the middle of a Michael Bay film. It's not just that Prime has the same voice, it's that he talks in the exact same tone and with the exact same dialogue. The importance of that moral, sacred center (to the core fans) can't be overstated in a movie like this - you can have all sorts of craziness happening but if you don't play the center straight you're going to have problems with the core audience. If you do that you better make sure the non-core crowd likes what you're doing enough to keep the box office returns high.

Michael Bay played the moral center straight. Yeah, the flames look stupid and yeah, the mouth looks stupid, but two seconds into hearing the initial Optimus Prime narration those concerns went away. When Prime announces in the film that "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" you believe him. Bay even managed to turn the latter negative into a positive when Prime's standard faceplate appears during fight sequences. (And, yeah, when I saw it finally appear I grinned like a kid who'd just gotten his favorite toy on Christmas morning, which in a certain year, was a whole lot of Transformers.)

A lot of my concerns about Bay going into the movie were with Executive Producer Steven Spielberg, whose made a very nice career for himself turning in the same movie over and over again. He just changes the costumes on his characters and, in his "serious" movies, takes out the jokes, but Jaws, ET, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Schindler's List, etc. all function in pretty much the same manner and tell pretty much the same story played with differing tones. It's not a stretch to see Indiana Jones or Alan Grant as possible adult versions of ET's Elliot (or vice versa) - Spielberg likes his heroes to be smart and boring without being geeky nerds. And yes, there are exceptions and yes, there are variables, but for all the criticism Bay gets for the "Michael Bay" genre of movies, there is most assuredly a "Steven Spielberg" genre, as well.

Transformers has some Spielberg touches, most notably in the main character of Sam Witwicky, who's nondescript enough not to be noticed by the hot bad-girl he obsesses over, yet not such a classic dork that he's noticed for being that, either. If you walked by the classic Spielberg Hero on the street you wouldn't give him a second notice. Like many of Spielberg's main characters, Sam's a bit of an awkward loner who still manages to get the girl by the end of the film.

Perhaps the influence of the "Spielberg" and "Bay" genres makes Transformers the success it is. Spielberg's movies are almost always anti-Government (not anti-American Government, necessarily, but anti-Some Government) while Bay's are almost always pro-American Government (usually evidenced as pro-Police or pro-Military). Here, there's a mix. American marines are attacked in the Middle East by a Decepticon attack marking them as Bay Heroes, yet another portion of the American military complex (the secretive S7 group) captures and tortures Bumblebee, marking them as Spielberg Villains.

The capture and torture of Bumblebee is one of the strongest sequences in the film. The Autobot is captured because he puts himself at risk to save Sam and Mikaela, and is then left in the hands of the humans as Prime makes the hard decision to continue on their main objective - finding the Allspark.

The friendship that develops between Bumblebee and Sam is done subtly - which for a Michael Bay movie means it mostly happens when they're getting shot at together. Still, it highlights the basic difference between the Autobots willingness to fight for humanity, who just happen to be the dominant life-form on the planet where the Allspark crashed. Prime says he's seen goodness in humanity, but it's Bumblebee's decision to ultimately risk his own life for Sam and Mikaela, and then decide to remain on Earth at the end of the film that proves humanity's worth. Bay's Bumblebee works as the Autobot version of a late teens, early twentysomething kid - he's not the youngster desperate to earn the respect of Optimus Prime that he used to be, but he's still the kid of the group. He's one step closer to manhood than Sam, a bit more experienced but still with a young heart.

I would have rather seen the movie told from the Transformers POV instead of humanity's but I can understand why they did it the way they did and since it works, I'm not complaining too loudly about it. The humans work as characters and their frailty makes the Transformers power even more awe-inspiring. The Autobots and Decepticons are fighting for victory, but every time one of them launches a rocket or casually tosses a car or blasts through a building you get the very real sense that the humans in the film are just trying to hang on, get through, survive.

And I would've liked to see more Transformers. Other than Prime, Bumblebee, and the hilarious Frenzy, they all sorta look the same. Bay drains their robot forms of color and in amidst all the explosions it can be tough to figure out if you're looking at Megatron or Starscream or Jazz or Ironhide. The Decepticons largely get the shaft, too. Megatron spends most of the movie frozen inside Hoover Dam, but he does recover nicely, killing Jazz by ripping him in half, and throwing his trademark, "You have disappointed me, Starscream" rant at his treacherous second-in-command.

Transformers is a highly enjoyable, skillfully crafted movie that just simply works. It gives you two-plus hours of big summer diversion that will make the kid in you smile without offending the sensibilities of Adult You.

The applause that broke out in the theater at the end of the film matched my feelings perfectly.

X-Men 200: "All The Things We Built Are Falling Down."

2007-07-02T17:10:00.000-04:00

X-Men 200: "Blinded By the Light 1 (of 4)" (Carey & Bachalo/Ramos/Eaton).

"Kill them all."

The final line of X-Men 200's main story serves as the perfect violent cherry on top of a vicious sundae.

After a disappointing recent run, Mike Carey (along with the always excellent Chris Bachalo and Humberto Ramos on art) hits every note perfectly in 200. The X-Men get blindsided by the Marauders both from without and within. Their attack is clinical, professional, and destructive. Gambit and Sunfire hit Cable in the ruins of Providence, Malice takes control of Omega Sentinel through a computer line, and Lady Mastermind and Mystique reveal themselves as sleeper agents, the former just before the Marauders all-out assault hits the X-Men and the latter in mid-battle.

It's great to see the Marauders played as a real threat and not simply x-fodder, though a lot of that danger comes not from the classic Marauders line-up but from the additions of x-traitors.

One of the aspects of the book that's most satisfying is that Carey shows there are consequences to having people around that have not earned your trust. Mystique and Mastermind played this team for fools, and while Omega Sentinel doesn't betray the team she did leave herself vulnerable to an outside attack.

X-Men 200 certainly isn't a deep issue, but it a great deal of fun. There's some left-over with Rogue about the 8 million souls she's absorbed (though not integrated) after last issue's battle with the Hecatomb, and the Mystique/Iceman relationship is consummated, but other than that this issue is all about the fireworks. Gambit and Sunfire's assault on Cable (handled by Bachalo) works incredibly well, as does Mystique shooting her daughter through the chest.

Actually, I guess the Mystique/Iceman thing is about fireworks, too ...

The back-up tale is the first chapter of the Endangered Species crossover. It's a big, long "What You Need to Know" segment, only significant for the final panel, where we see that Henry McCoy's desperation has caused him to make a Faustian offer to nine villains (including Doom, Sinister, MODOK, Mojo, and High Evolutionary) in the hopes that they can succeed in helping him undo the "No More Mutants" DNA-block Wanda Maximoff caused at the end of House of M. It's a finely told tale, but if I wasn't reading X-Men 200 anyway there'd be no real reason to buy the issue just for the back-up.

It's been a good week for violence and betrayal across the comics universe this week and X-Men 200 is a solid addition alongside World War Hulk 1 and the Sinestro Corps Special. It's not as epic as WWH 1, nor as smart as SC, but it is a great summer blockbuster.

Are You Afraid of the Color Yellow?

2007-07-02T11:02:00.000-04:00

Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special One-Shot: "The Second Rebirth" (Johns & Van Sciver).

There's a heck of a lot of wars going on in comics now and it was with some dread that I picked up the Sinestro Corps One-Shot. That's nothing against any of the creators or the characters - while I've found Green Lantern to be a bit of a let down in recent months, the Green Lantern Corps have always been my favorite DC characters and there was no way I wasn't going to read this book.

Flat out - this is the best DC book I've read all year.

Over the course of the issue, Sinestro rounds out his new Sinestro Corps (yeah, a better name could have been had, probably by a spoonful of Alpha Bits), launching his first major assault against the GLC in the process. There's plenty of carnage, plenty of Lantern-fightin' goodness, and plenty of twists and turns that propel the story forward at an ever-increasing pace.

Johns expertly builds the level of his gasp! moments, which center on the heavy hitters of the new Sinestro Corps: Cyborg, Superboy Prime (who DC is now calling Superman Prime due to litigation), Kyle Rayner as Parallax, and the Anti Monitor.

I like that Johns has gone out and brought in heavy hitters that are more than former members of the GLC or simply new characters. Turning Kyle into Parallax seems a bit of a cheap shot towards the CFG's fans but Johns has earned some trust that he's doing this for character reasons and that Kyle will pull through on the other side a better character for having gone through it.

The most important part of this story, of course, is Sinestro himself, and Johns' Sinestro is a twisted, determined visionary who wants to bring fear to the universe. Sinestro is a single-minded dreamer-turned-fascist, one who was given power and then took his mission to the nth degree, losing all sense of perspective the further down his path he ventured. He's a terrorist that imposes fear onto a society because that society has turned from the "correct" path.

It will be interesting to see how the power structure of the SC works - is the Anti Monitor the actual man-in-charge or is he just a superpowered benefactor? Will Superman Prime and Cyborg take orders? Challenge Sinestro? And most interestingly, what will be the role of Kyle Rayner? Will he resist Parallax or has his own mind been completely overridden by the creature? I'm most interested to see if Sinestro treats Kyle as a student, which seems to be the indication given the back-up tale that shows us Sinestro and Hal in a similar dynamic.

It's just a great, action-packed issue from start to finish that has me jazzed for what's coming in Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps.

Countdown 44: Wasting the Rogues

2007-07-01T18:30:00.000-04:00

Countdown 44: "Changes of Address" (Dini/Beechen & Magno).

I'm not going to write a review of Countdown this week - it's a good issue, on the whole, as I continue to like the Mary Marvel and Jimmy Olsen storylines - but I did want to make one, quick rant.

What the #$%#$# is up with the Rogues storyline?

After all of this build-up, after all of the pages they've taken up in the seven issues prior to Countdown 44, after me complaining their story needed to start paying off, we FINALLY get a pay off, except ...

It happens in Flash 13.

Not here. Not in Countdown. Nope. After all that build-up, the Rogues go ahead and kill the Flash in ANOTHER BOOK.

Countdown gets to do the build-up and the post-game show, but it doesn't get to cover the actual climax to the sub-plot?

That's dumb.

World War Hulk: Asking Questions

2007-07-01T11:26:00.000-04:00

I'm really enjoying World War Hulk. I wasn't sure I would - I thought it might be just some harmless summer fun, but not anything to grab me. Maybe as a result of so many of this summer's diversionary films being terrible, WWH's finely executed brand of revenge-action-blockbuster is playing even better. WWH has been smart enough not to offend, but wise enough to know that we're tuning in to see the Hulk go all SMASH! on the offending parties.

While there hasn't been as much SMASH! as desired in the tie-in books, so far, there has been a lot of shaking-in-boots to hold us over until the Green Scar and his Warbound cut loose.

World War Hulk: Front Line 1 (of 6) (Jenkins & Bachs).

SMASH! LEVEL: OFF-PANEL.

MAIN EVENT: NONE.

I was very wary about picking up WWH: Front Line 1 after the disaster that was Civil War: Front Line 11.

Luckily those fears were unfounded. Paul Jenkins turns in an outstanding issue focusing on the start-up operation that is Front Line, a new independent news organization run by Ben Urich and Sally Floyd. Jenkins deftly touches on the perils of a start-up news site (FL seems to be mostly an online news site at this point, with a slow expansion into actual printed copies), including the fact that it doesn't really matter how good your stories are unless you're making enough money to keep going. Enter one mysterious benefactor tossing major cake in Ben and Sally's direction and money problems go away. The identity of the benefactor isn't anything I'm going to worry about until it becomes an issue. Too much time was wasted in CW: FL figuring things out that came to unsatisfactory conclusions that I'd just rather not bother until I need to bother.

Jenkins is smart to make Urich the voice of the narrative because Ben is the sane, centered one between him and Sally. After the money issue is resolved, this issue focuses on the coming of the Hulk. Korg and Arch-E are the featured guest players from amongst the Warbound. They park a small spacecraft in Central Park in an attempt to get access to Earth for the refugees picked up when their planet exploded.

There's not a whole lot of action here - just a glimpse of Sally experiencing the Hulk v. Iron battle from World War Hulk 1 - but that's not the selling point of Front Line. Investigative journalism is what sells this book and Jenkins delivers. He does cheat a bit, giving the issue's big mystery to Sally's boyfriend Danny Granville, a NYPD Detective in the Costume Division, who has been placed with Korg to investigate the murder of Arch-E. Arch-E's murder takes place off-panel, so there's not much to say about it, yet.

One minor mystery is the dead dog that Sally and Kenny (her photographer) come across prior to the Iron Man/Hulk battle, if it is the dog that Ben saw Korg pat earlier in the issue. (It looks like the same dog, but the coloring is off, so we don't know for certain, yet, though I'm guessing it's supposed to be the same dog.)

The issue definitely recovers some of Front Line's rep after the Civil War debacle.

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World War Hulk: X-Men 1 (of 3): "Hard Questions" (Gage & DiVito).

SMASH! LEVEL: NEVER BEFORE SEEN.

MAIN EVENT: HULK v. NEW X-MEN.

Christos Gage is handling both the Iron Man and X-Men segments of World War Hulk, and doing a great job with both early-on in the event proceedings.

Professor Xavier was a member of Stark's Illuminati group, but wasn't present when the decision was made to send the Hulk into deep space, never to return. One of the central questions here is whether Xavier would have gone along with Namor's dissent or the others' acceptance of the plan. Stark asks Xavier that at the beginning of the issue, and Hulk comes calling to Westchester to ask Chuck in person.

One of the areas where writers across WWH have done a really good job is showing just how rattled one becomes when faced with the Hulk. Beast is putting the New X-Men through some practice paces and when they hear the TV report that the Hulk has arrived, Hellion wants to go to NYC to take the Hulk out. It's a good sign of ignorant, naive bravado that is immediately counted when the Hulk shows up and McCoy nearly soils himself.

Andre DiVito follows up Hank's shocked look with a beautiful one-page splash of the Hulk standing just inside the gated entrance to the school, demanding to see Xavier.

Hank sends the students away through the old Morlock Tunnels to buy time, but foolishly asks the New X-Men to stick around in order to facilitate the safe removal of the others. It's a silly move for Hank to make and desperate situation or not, it makes Hank look dumb to let the New X-Men stay right after he's told them how serious a threat the Hulk is right now. Hank's plan is to get Elixir (a mutant with healing powers) to touch the Hulk in order to shut down his healing factor.

Hulk confidently proclaims he doesn't need his healing factor and the battle escalates. It's a lot of fun watching the New X-Men take their shot at the Hulk and the Hulk almost casually dismantling them. Literally. Knowing (somehow) that Rockslide can control his rock-body when it's in pieces, Hulk rips off his arms and tosses them far, far away, wondering, "Can you still control them when they're in Connecticut?" Gage does an excellent job working in plenty of smart dialogue while DiVito illustrates the battle beautifully. It's fun to read, both in words and pictures.

Hulk's just about done wiping the floor with them when the Old X-Men arrive, followed immediately by Xavier, who tries to read the Hulk's mind and ends up tossing some feedback over everyone in attendance, giving them all a quick infodump on what happened to the Hulk during the Planet Hulk storyline.

The Hulk wants one simple answer - how would Xavier have voted? Which, of course, we have to wait until next issue to find out what Xavier says.

I'm fine with that. This was probably the best tie-in of all the WWH tie-ins and between this and Front Line 1, it was a heck of a great week for Marvel's 2007 Summer Event. I can't wait for the next issue of WWH: X-Men.

Legion of Jumping On

2007-06-30T23:11:00.000-04:00

Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes 31: "The Quest for Cosmic Boy: Prologue" (Bedard & Sharpe).

Confession time. I've never read an issue of Legion of Super-Heroes. I've read of them, sure, but an actual issue of an actual LSH comic? Not that I can remember.

Why?

When I was a kid the idea of a bunch of teenagers hanging out in the future didn't really seem all that appealing. Especially compared to the Green Lantern Corps, who were about a thousand times cooler, and when you're a kid (or when I was a kid, at least) everything was a competition and if you put two space books next to one another I was going to buy the cool one. I was mostly a Marvel kid and I only had so much money to spend on DC books. The portion I allotted to DC was never enough to include the LSH and by the time I was older the idea still didn't appeal to me all that much. Plus, by then I was talking to and hearing from Legion fans and they always made it seem like you were either all-in or all-out with the LSH and the last thing I needed was yet another set of several hundred back issues to track down.

But after my Supergirl post several months back where I accused DC of child exploitation, it was suggested I take a look at the Supergirl and the LSH title for a different take on the character. (That suggestion is in the comments section of the post as it appeared back on the old blog.)

Since the cover of S&LSH 31 looked like a convenient jumping on point, I figured it was time to give it a shot.

My reaction?

I'll admit I'm hopelessly lost when it comes to these characters. There seems to be a million of them but since they come off mostly as one-trick-types it's pretty easy to follow over the course of an issue. The plot is fairly simple - Cosmic Boy has disappeared and Supergirl has been voted the new leader of the Legion. No one seems thrilled about this, but they follow her commands, anyway, and nine are sent on three missions to find Cosmic Boy. There's nothing spectacular in characters or plot, but there's nothing disparaging, either.

What's here isn't enough to make me a fan or drive me away. I was pleasantly surprised enough to stick around for a few issues and see what I see.

World War Hulk: A Shellhead, A Bughead, and a Head on Fire

2007-06-30T10:34:00.000-04:00

World War Hulk is exceeding demand. This week's offerings: World War Hulk: Front Line 1 and World War Hulk: X-Men 1 have both sold out through Diamond. Marvel has announced they're going back to press on Hulk 106 (3rd print) & 107 (2nd), plus 2nd print runs on many of the books covered below: Ghost Rider 12, Heroes for Hire 11, and Iron Man 19. They're coming with new covers, of course (which you can see at the link above), but they just look to be panels taken from inside the book and slapped on the cover, which is kinda lame but probably cost effective.

Here's this week's rundown of WWH books I've managed to read, so far. (I'll get to the Front Line and X-Men tie-ins later.) If you're not familiar with how the Anxiety is handling World War Hulk, each book is rated based on how well it meets the selling point of the event - that is, how much Hulk-related ass-kicking it contains.

Invincible Iron Man 19 (Gage & Juice).

SMASH! LEVEL: CONTEXTUAL.

MAIN EVENT: HULK V. IRON MAN.

Iron Man 19 contextualizes the events of World War Hulk 1, giving you the perspective of Iron Man and SHIELD to the reappearance of the Hulk. It's a really strong issue that integrates itself well into the WWH storyline. We don't see the event pushed forward here, but we understand Stark's actions and SHIELD's response to a much higher degree, which enhances the event. Fill-in writer Christos Gage integrates the ongoing Iron Man story and the WWH story together effectively. Instead of this book feeling hijacked by the WWH event, it fits in seamlessly. The battle between the Hulk and Iron Man isn't as explosive here as it was in WWH 1, but Butch Juice's art is strong throughout the issue.

There's a cool double-page spread early in the issue showing various historical Iron Man suits working as a first response team to the cosmic arrival of Hulk's warship, but they're taken out rather easily and quickly. I was hoping to see a bit more of a space battle, and I don't think the book would have been hurt by having this be the issue's dominant battle instead of another take on the battle from WWH 1, but that's a small complaint in an excellent issue.

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Heroes for Hire 11: "World War Hulk, Part 1: Infestation" (Wells & Mann).

SMASH! LEVEL: BUG STOMP.

MAIN EVENT: HUMBUG V. WEIRD-ASS LITTLE BUGGY DUDE.

I have nothing against humorous superhero titles - I like my Spider-Man (mostly) humorous, I loved the classic Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League, I dig the Great Lakes Avengers (or whatever they're calling themselves these days) - but I don't think Heroes for Hire has the right cast to pull it off. When I think funny, I don't think of Misty Knight, Colleen Wing, Black Cat, Tarantula, and Shang-Chi. Humbug, sure. (At least pre-Savage Land Humbug.) Yet the latest HfH series has been infused with a silliness, or lack-of-seriousness, that hasn't really played. It's been more surface-oriented stories and though I've read most of the issues of this series (I dropped out a couple issues before Zeb Wells took over) I don't really feel like I know these characters all that much better.

Zeb Wells is definitely an improvement over the previous writers, however, and even if I'm not getting the kinds of stories I'd prefer to read with this group (which would be a mix of high-flying kung-fu and espionage instead of wacky assignments), Wells makes it fun to stick around and delivers more of the character building I'd like to see. Since Wells took over this is a good book, just not the book I'd prefer.

Tying books like Heroes for Hire and Ghost Rider into World War Hulk is a smart move because it gives the lower-selling books a chance to suck in some fans and show them what the book is like. I'd be surprised if HfH doesn't see their numbers raise after their time with WWH is done. Wells dialogue is sharp and his pacing smart. There's a lot of characters in this book, though, and none of them really step out front to take over, so we're left with a lot of Aaron Spelling soap storytelling, with quick hits of the various plots and a bit too much recap.

For a tie-in to WWH, Wells spends a bit too much time cleaning up after last issue, when the team extracted Moon Boy from his habitat with Devil Dinosaur in order to bring him back to a SHIELD science lab. They arrive in NYC to find that the Hulk has come back to Earth and everyone is clearing out of Manhattan. SHIELD enlists HfH for a "freebie" to save the day and the team ends up running into the colonizing efforts of Miek and Brood. Brood is pumping babies like mad and the new attuned-to-the-world-of-bugs Humbug is drawn to the baby pumping. After Black Cat tries to make nice with one of the little drones because he's sooooooo cute, Humbug pops its head off, then rips the body apart, splattering the team with buggy ooziness (and giving Clay Mann a chance to gratuitously show that ooze all over Misty and Colleen's breasts) which he claims will shield them from the bugs detecting them.

Humbug points to the mother ship, intimates that's where they're headed, and ... that's it for this issue. (There's a back-up featuring Scorpion and Paladin about what they're doing when all this is going on.) A good issue taken as it is, but for a tie-in it's all set-up. It's a lot better than the Ghost Rider next tie-in issue, however.

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Ghost Rider 12: "Apocalypse Soon, Part One" (Way & Saltares).

SMASH! LEVEL: NONEXISTENT.

MAIN EVENT: NONE.

Yeah, if you're looking for any part of the cool Ghost Rider vs. Hulk throwdown promised on teh cover, you'll have to come back next issue. This is a Ghost Rider issue with a Hulk appearance tossed in at the end, so if you're buying this just for the Hulk, don't bother. Marvel could've still delivered a kick-ass issue, using WWH to promote Ghost Rider, but they treated it like a jumping-on issue, instead. The story is painfully slow and we see some Ghost Rider vs. Lucifer action, but since Lucifer is in the body of a pilot, well, there's a reason the cover depicted GR vs. HULK and not GR vs. AIRLINE PILOT!

Two good books and a disappointment. As promised above, I'll hit World War Hulk: Front Line 1 and World War Hulk: X-Men 1 a little later on.

Iron Fist is Still the Coolest

2007-06-28T23:10:00.000-04:00

Immortal Iron Fist 6: "The Last Iron Fist Story, Part Six" (Brubaker/Fraction & Aja/Heath).

I bought a lot of Power Man and Iron Fist back issues back in the day for two reasons: because they could be had cheap and because, well, that's it, really. They were cheap. I always liked Cage and Fist, though, even if I wasn't a huge fan of their book. I always thought they were a lot cooler than the book portrayed them, and Iron Fist was always at the top of my list of characters that I wanted to see in the Avengers.

I was never big on adding Spider-Man or Wolverine, but my fanboy head spun into overdrive at the possibility of adding Iron Fist or Cage or Jack of Hearts or Ka-Zar to Earth's Mightiest.

Fist's treatment has never really improved over the years. While Cage was getting elevated under Bendis' pen, Danny just sorta sat out there, unused. He'd get pulled out every now and then to do the rich-guy-who-kicks thing but it was serviceable, unspectacular work.

Until now.

Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction have managed to deliver a story that blends K'un-Lun mysticism and street-level grittiness to spectacular effect. I love this book. Bru & Fraction have crafted a deep backstory of the Iron Fist, connecting Danny Rand to an historical web of mystical and political intrigue.

In IIF 6 the opening storyline comes to its conclusion as Danny and the previous Iron Fist, Orson Rand, face off against the Steel Serpent and a whole bunch of Hydra agents. Bru & Fraction have Danny walk us through the story in calm first-person narration that counters the frantic artistic action to great effect.

They also revel in the vintage 70's kung-fu-ness of Fist and K'un-Lun, and because they treat Danny seriously it comes off as cool and worthy of respect instead of goofy or awkward or out-dated. In the hands of someone like Quentin Tarantino all of this would come off as cool cheese, but here it's played mostly straight, which is the right move. Some of the dialogue spoken by Cage, Misty Knight, and Colleen Wing in issue 6 is trying a little too hard to be a little too stylish, but it provides a nice counter to Danny's calm rationality. It was almost like Iron Fist found himself in the middle of a Daredevil story and Cage, Misty, and Colleen were living in Smokin' Aces.

After Orson has died and transfered his power to Danny and the Steel Serpent has bugged out, Lei Kung the Thunderer and Yu-Ti, the August Personage in Jade (see wha I mean about 70's kung-fu-coolness?) show up and whisk Danny away to the Tournament of Heavenly Cities. I was wondering a bit why Cage, Misty, and Colleen were in the issue - not that it wasn't great to see them, but it seemed odd to include them in a story that seemed designed to build a Fist-centric background for the series. When Danny leaves them behind to attend the Tournament, however, it makes sense. Bru & Fraction acknowledge Danny's ties but then break him away from that support group to delve even deeper into all that goes into being the Iron Fist in the next arc.

A great issue and a great opening arc. Immortal Iron Fist isn't as good as Bru's Captain America, but it is my second favorite Marvel book at the moment, and the coolest superhero comic on the shelves.

Do The Thunderbolts Have to Punch People?

2007-06-27T20:17:00.000-04:00

Thunderbolts 115: "Faith in Monsters, Part Six" (Ellis & Deodato).

As we saw earlier this month in Brian Michael Bendis' New Avengers 31, no matter what kind of psychological-conspiratorial-mysterious drama you get cooking, if it's a superhero comic you've got to occasionally let the good guys get their punch on.

Enter Thunderbolts 115, a mostly boring, paint-by-numbers action romp that reveals Songbird and Radioactive Man as traitors (which ain't a bad thing to be with this crew) and finishes with a paralyzed Bullseye (which links this issue with New Avengers 31 in suckling from the homage teat of Frank Miller).

It's a superhero comic, so apparently there has to be punching, but this book is so much better without it. The strength of Ellis' six-issue run has been the machinations and examinations and not the field missions. Ending with an action climax is a mistake because that's not what the book is about. It'd be like reading a n Edith Wharton novel only to have Die Hard break out in the last fifty pages.

Well, okay, that's an exaggeration, but the point is if you sell something hard for 5/6 of a story and then deliver something else at the finish it can leave a bad taste in the mouths of readers and that's what happened here with me.

As much as I enjoyed the focus on Steel Spider, American Eagle, and Sepulchre leading up to this issue, and as much as I knew (and was looking forward to) their fight with the TBolts, I'd have preferred a bit more time with them post-battle. I was more interested in seeing Sepulchre and American Eagle's post-battle rendezvous then their actions in the fight. It's not that I dislike fighting; it's that fighting isn't what this book does best.

At least Songbird and Radioactive Man's actions will add more drama to the Osborn Stew that is Thunderbolts Mountain. Songbird is responsible for the death of the two men Bullseye killed and I hope that's not a point just swept aside. Thunderbolts is at its best under Ellis' pen when the psychological machinations are up front and issue 115 had very little of the mental chess game on display.

In total, "Faith in Monsters" was an uneven opening arc that had more good than bad until the final issue.

World War Hulk: "I Didn't Come Here for a Whisper"

2007-06-26T15:25:00.000-04:00

The opening rounds of Marvel's big summer 2007 event, World War Hulk, are now on the shelves. What's nice about WWH is that this is a storyline that's been brewing for well over a year. Marvel cleverly set this up even before Civil War took the MU over, as Tony Stark, Dr. Strange, Black Bolt, and Reed Richards (the Illuminati, minus Charles Xavier and Namor) conspired to send the Hulk hurtling into the far reaches of the galaxy. It was a jerk move that resulted in the solid Planet Hulk storyline, but now the Hulk is back on Earth, looking for revenge.

What's nice is that this event is set up to be a big, all-out, action-packed throwdown between the Hulk and pretty much everyone else. It's a nice change of pace from the seriousness of Civil War; Marvel has built-in a strong enough back-story to give WWH just the right amount of plot justification. The Hulk's got an ax to grind and a bit of moral high-ground to stand on, which is really all we need. The selling point here is the destruction, the chance to see the Hulk cut loose, and that's what my posts here about the World War Hulk event are going to focus on.

World War Hulk 1 (of 5) (Pak & JRJR).

SMASH! LEVEL: EPIC.

MAIN EVENT: HULK V. IRON MAN.

Here's all you really need to know: the Hulk beats the face off of Black Bolt, then tears up Manhattan in a classic Hulk v. Iron Man (in Hulkbuster armor) brawl. The Hulk is now an amalgamation of Intelligent Hulk and Smash! Hulk; he's Gladiator Hulk now, with all that entails (the brains, the experience, the viciousness). He thinks like a soldier and fights like a monster. Hulk doesn't just physically engage his targets, either. He wants the world to know why he's doing what he's doing, broadcasting to the world why the Illuminati blasted him into the far reaches of space. It's a powerful PR move, and even among Stark's biggest on-the-ground supporters in the Marvel Universe there has to be some concern about Stark's unchecked power.

We get to see the Hulk standing at the front of his starship, we get to see the Hulk tear across the moon in his battle with Black Bolt, and we get to see the Hulk and Iron Man treat Manhattan like their personal fighting ring, including an awesome sequence when they sever Avengers Tower in half with the Sentry's freaky penthouse thing. And here, unlike during Civil War, Manhattan is evacuated prior to the brawl so there's as little guilt as possible on anyone's part.

If you like John Romita Jr.'s art and you like watching the Hulk fight people, buy this issue. This is far from JRJR's best work, but it works here, where subtlety is not required. World War Hulk 1 is truly the comic equivalent of a summer action blockbuster. Lot of wham-bam and just enough brains to keep you from being insulted. A big, fun comic.

Incredible Hulk 107: "Warbound, Part II" (Pak & Frank).

SMASH! LEVEL: SKIRMISH.

MAIN EVENT: HULK V. HERCULES.

Incredible Hulk is apparently going to be the thinking segment of WWH, as Greg Pak focuses on Amadeus Cho's attempt to stop the Hulk from engaging in the world in battle. Cho wants to save the Hulk - from the world and from himself - and gathers a small support squad in two former Champions' teammates (Hercules and Angel) and Namora, after Namor blows him off. There's not a lot of action here, more like mini-skirmishes breaking out around the main action. It's a strong issue, though those looking for more of the main mini-series' brand of rampant destruction won't find it here. The Herc v. Hulk battle (rendered beautifully by Gary Frank) provides only a few pages of punch-throwing before Herc simply stops cold, letting the Hulk batter him bloody in an attempt to prove his loyalty to the Hulk's cause.

Cho provides the right mix of humor and empathy as he drives the plot forward. Pak keeps working in the idea that Cho is the seventh smartest person in the world, but he's also a kid, which blends a potentially dangerous portion of naiveté into his actions. He's smart enough to steal $1.2 billion from Warren Worthington's bank account a week before the government freezes his accounts, but naive enough to use $100 million of it to buy the land around the army base where the Hulk originated in an attempt to, as Angel derides, "build a wildlife park for the Hulk?"

It will be interesting to see how Cho's continued insistence that he can stop the Hulk because he'll help the Hulk plays out. It's already cost Hercules a major (though, admittedly, partially self-induced) ass-kicking, and with four months of this storyline to go, I'm guessing it's not the last time Cho's plan is frustrated.

Good comic. If you're only going to buy one of the WWH-related tie-ins, the action in the regular Hulk title might prove to be the best buy when it's all said and done.

Endangered Species: The X-Men Hijack a Funeral

2007-06-25T23:59:00.000-04:00

X-Men: Endangered Species One-Shot (Carey & Eaton).

Here's what's unique about the latest Mega-X Crossover Event: there's not supposed to be a lot of fighting and it's taking place over 17 chapters as back-up stories in your regular monthly X-Men-related comics. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that Marvel is relegating Endangered Species to back-up status. Depends on how you look at it, I suppose - not hijacking the main plot in the regular books is a good thing, but if all you're interested in is the Endangered Species story then you're forced to buy a book you might not want to buy just for an 8-page back-up feature.

Marvel kicks off the crossover with the Endangered Species one-shot, a full-issue story focusing on the funeral of one of the 198 remaining mutants. That the death is an "unknown," a kid not affiliated with the Xavier Academy nor killed in a mutant-related attack (he was hit by a car), is supposed to add to the sense of loss. (Supposed to.) With so few mutants left, the death of any one of them, even one of the few not running around in leather and spandex, hits them all hard.

One of the problems, however, is that the X-Men don't exactly come across as sympathetic this issue. When Cyclops and Emma Frost express their condolences to the kid's parents, the father flips out at them. Instead of the usual anti-mutant hate-speech spewed by parents in these situations, Mr. Landru's point is that the X-Men are really just here to pay their respects to their own dwindling numbers. It's a powerful point; the truth is, the father is right, and it makes the X-Men come off as disrespectful, at best, and incredibly self-centered, at worst. It would be one thing if the X-Men had sent a representative from Xavier's Academy (say, Scott, Emma, and perhaps Charles), but they send a huge contingent: Cyke, Emma, Logan, Cannonball, Nightcrawler, Charles, Beast, Bishop, Rahne, Mercury, etc. Forget about mutant/non-mutant political issues, how about the x-folk show a little bit of class and not overrun the kid's friends and family at his own funeral?

At least Sebastian Shaw had the decency to show up alone and in disguise.

The X-Men look bad throughout the issue and I can only hope that event-writer Mike Carey is doing this on purpose to help the X-Men transition from where they are to a more positive, less-insulated future.

When Charles confronts Shaw after the funeral, it's Shaw who comes off as the one most effected by the death of the Landru boy. Not that we should take Shaw at face value (because he's Sebastian Shaw) but it's Xavier who's brought an entire contingent to the funeral, not Shaw. It's Xavier who's searching around other people's thoughts, not Shaw. It's Xavier who angrily confronts Shaw after the funeral, and the other way around. And, finally, it's Shaw who delivers the issue's most powerful line, when he says: "Face it Charles. We were supposed to be the clever ones. The visionaries. You. Me. Eric. And all we've ever done is to fight each other until our knuckles bled."

As a result of all that, it's Shaw who seems the most effected by the kid's death, not Charles. An yeah, maybe Shaw is acting, but Charles isn't and Charles looks bad whether Shaw is there or not.

There is a sense of depression that runs through the issue that proves Mr. Landru's point that the X-Men are there more for themselves than the dead child. Cannonball harshly questions Bishop over why Bishop never told them the diminished numbers were coming. Mercury wishes the Landru child was alive so she could punch him for dying in an accident. Wolverine gets lost in his own haunted memories, then has a depressing heart-to-heart with Scott. It all comes off distasteful to me; this is not a funeral the X-Men would have gone to en-masse back before M-Day and for them to go now puts themselves at the center of a story (the death of a kid) they have little involvement in.

Except that the kid is a mutant and mutant numbers are way down and the X-Men feel the crunch of having one less "species member" like themselves running around.

Carey could have accomplished all of this from Xavier's Academy. He could have very easily sent Scott and Emma to the funeral and left everyone else back at the school to work through these emotions. It would have carried the same weight and not of the tackiness.

I'm interested in reading Endangered Species because the event is going to focus on the Beast. If it weren't for that, there's nothing in the one-shot that would draw me in. While I leave the issue sympathetic to the plight of the dwindling number of mutants, I don't leave it feeling sympathetic to the X-Men, who come across as funeral crashers.

Justice League of Good Endings

2007-06-24T11:42:00.000-04:00

Justice League of America 10: "The Lightning Saga, Final Chapter" (Meltzer & Benes).

I've been holding off posting this until the weekend to give everyone a chance to read Justice League of America 10, not wanting to spoil the ending. Time's up.

Wally West is back.

Serving as an unconnected companion to Flash: Fastest Man Alive 13, where Bart Allen gets physically beaten off this mortal coil, Wally, Linda and the kids return in JLA 10, an expertly written issue by Brad Meltzer that proves even if you know what's coming you can still enjoy the ride getting there.

Meltzer does his best job on JLA, yet, and shows that he can do more than just set up interesting stories - he can bring them home, too. In previous issues Meltzer has made sure to include plenty of small character bits, but here it's all story at the forefront. You can feel the momentum building; Meltzer adroitly jumps from character to character but it's always the story that rides out front, pushing, pushing towards Wally's inevitable return.

Or is it Wally's return?

Meltzer includes a dual-narrative in the middle of the book, with Batman and Hal Jordan having flashbacks of being exactly where they are now in earlier years and both of those scenes are of Barry, not Wally. Combine this with the final, last panel twist of Braniac 5 telling the LSH that all he cares about is that "we got who we wanted," as one of their lightning rods glows red and we see a nondescript face seemingly trapped inside, and Justice League 10 not only delivers the goods but sets up stories for other writers to pick up across the DC Universe.

The Legion, apparently, were after Barry; Wally's return is a happy accident. Wally was "riding the lightning," hanging on to life and used this as an opportunity to bring himself and his family back to this life.

I stand by my criticism of DC's decision to dump Guggenheim from Flash, and my continued statements here that DC cannot simply keep going back to the past in an attempt to move their universe forward. I think dumping Guggenheim was a mistake and I think a retro-strategy is doomed to feed on itself. In the end, however, all I want out of my comics are good stories and Justice League of America 10 is a darn good story. Meltzer succeeds, in part, because he's not just putting things back but pushing them forward, as well, by keeping the mystery of the Legion's true intentions and goals a mystery.

Meltzer's double-retro move worked. It's one thing to bring characters back, however, and another to do interesting things with them. That will be up to Mark Waid more than anyone, but Wally will have a role to play in the Justice League, as well. Meltzer only has two more issues on his run, so it will be interesting to see what kind of role, if any, Wally plays here the next two months.

Nova 3 Did Not Make Up My Mind

2007-06-23T16:00:00.000-04:00

Nova 3: "Home Truths" (Abnett/Lanning & Chen).

I really did not like Nova 1.

I really did like Nova 2. Silly of me to hope, perhaps, that Nova 3 would settle my mind one way or the other about committing to this title, but that's what I did.

To that end, then, Nova 3 was a failure.

As a comic, though, it sorta splits the difference; the first-half, featuring Nova vs. the Thunderbolts, wasn't very good, but the second-half, featuring some the emotional conflicts of Rich's conversations with Tony Stark, his parents, and Robbie Baldwin/Penance, was excellent. Halfway through the issue I thought I was done; by the end I was back in.

The ubiquitous Tony Stark shows up to continue to sell Nova on the idea of joining the Initiative, offering both an emotional (working with Justice, again) and a practical (rebuilding the Nova Corps from Earth) argument. Rich is tempted, but eventually declines for a wide variety of reasons having to do with the difference in Earth post-Civil War.

Abnett and Lanning do a good job situating Nova in between Civil War/The Initiative and Annihilation without making it seem like they're doing it just to draw in readers. If Nova is going to come back to Earth at this time these are the issues he's going to face and A&L handle them deftly.

The conversation with Robbie is what finally pushes Rich to leaving; as Penance Robbie is not the guy Rich knew and while it would've been nice to see Rich offer to help Robbie - maybe by taking him off-Earth where he'd have a chance to find redemption without the government controlling him - the almost religious plea that Robbie makes to Rich about joining the Initiative illustrates Robbie's unhinged state of mind even more than his costume.

Rich's argument with his parents should have worked better; the juxtaposition of the situation Rich finds himself in (from a galactic war to being lectured by his parents) is a strong one, but A&L make the parents too stereotypical for it to have any real impact.

What do you do with a comic like this that offers as much good as it does bad? I really dislike half of what we've read so far, but I really like the other half. Usually these books end up disappointing. After you've bought 8 or 10 or 12 issues you finally reach the breaking point and look at your stack in a very dissatisfied, "how much can I get for these on eBay" kinda way.

For now, through Annihilation: Conquest, I suppose, I'm cautiously on board.

Captain America 27: Hunting the Most Visible Man in America

2007-06-23T12:09:00.000-04:00

Captain America 27: "The Death of the Dream, Part Three" (Brubaker & Epting/Perkins).

One of the most impressive tricks in Ed Brubaker's considerable bag is the way he can almost instantly take any character and make them feel at home inside Captain America. It begins by selecting the right characters, but it's more than that. Brubaker has a keen ability to boil down characters to whatever particular essence works in the book at hand. In Captain America 27, Bru seamlessly blends Tony Stark and the Black Widow into the cast as Bucky begins his quest to kill Tony Stark.

While Bru gives a nod to Stark's immense responsibilities at the moment, he keeps Stark's narrative focused in on Cap's shield. Bucky wants to steal Cap's shield in order to guarantee that no one else will ever wield it, because even though Stark says publicly no one will do so, Bucky doesn't believe him: "Sure, they'll wait a year or two ... then they'll say the public is crying for a new Captain America. [...] As long as they have Steve's shield, they won't just be able to let it sit on a shelf. Not for long."

So Bucky goes after the shield, eventually discovering that Stark has trusted the Black Widow with delivering it from one secret, secure location to another. The fight between Bucky and Natalia is interspersed with a romantic history between the two from Natalia's pre-Black Widow days. Bru's Widow here is not the coldly professional Widow we typically see, as was in evidence in Mighty Avengers 3, and her encounter with Bucky brings her back to her pre-married, pre-Widow training days in the Soviet Union where Bucky was one of her trainers.

Smartly, Bru has Bucky refer to her as "Natalia," and Stark as "Natasha," her identities when each man knew her. It's a little thing, but it's the right thing and it helps open up the character to the uncharacteristic vulnerability she displays in the issue.

Bucky gets the shield but while he goes after Stark, the always present but never seen Nick Fury sends Falcon and Sharon Carter after him. Sharon is taking the death of Steve hard, especially given the images of Dr. Faustus popping into her head that taunt her with the knowledge that she actually killed Captain America (which I still don't believe). When Sam arrives and tells her what Fury wants them to do, she agrees. Without Steve, without SHIELD, wracked with guilt, Sharon is looking for a purpose and Fury provides one for her.

Bucky hunts Stark. Stark hunts Bucky. Falcon and Sharon hunt Bucky. Fury hunts Bucky. And they're all still hunting the ghost of Steve Rogers.

It's a solid issue, smart and engaging with plenty of political intrigue and twists to keep you involved. Captain America, even without Captain America, is still the best ongoing comic on the shelves right now.

Flash: All Good Things, Apparently, Are in the Past

2007-06-21T12:34:00.000-04:00

SPOILERS FOR FLASH: FMA 13

Flash: The Fastest Man Alive 13: "Full Throttle: Conclusion" (Guggenheim & Daniel).

There's not much to say about the events of Flash: FMA 13 except that, once again, DC's answer to correcting a mistake is to look backwards and not forwards. With the ending of FMA 13 and the death of Bart Allen, DC is handing the keys to the off-the-rails Flash franchise back over to Mark Waid.

Of course.

Whether we're getting the return of Wally West or Barry Allen, what seems likely is that we're not going to get someone new in the suit. Maybe we will, but recent DC history suggests otherwise. If anything is broken at DC, the answer is "retro." It seems likely that we'll see the return of Wally, given that DC is "relaunching" The Flash with All-Flash 1 and then following that with a new Flash monthly that reverts back to the pre-One Year Later numbering (Flash 231 will be the first issue) where Wally was the primary star and the other Flashes appeared quite regularly.

I don't object to DC making a change with the Flash. The current title pre-Marc Guggenheim was a god-awful, truly horrible, horrible comic. For starters, Wally had not run his course as a character and secondly, the idea of Bart Allen being promoted from Impulse to Flash was actually sound ... until they put him through the whole lame artificial aging process and turning him into a dour, miserable twentysomething.

When DC gave the title over to Marc Guggenheim a few issues back, things improved. Reading FMA 13, the problem clearly isn't with the character itself, but with the concept of a miserable Bart Allen and, most importantly, the bad writing of the previous regime (Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo).

I'm sorry to see Guggenheim get booted, but DC is in such a rut right now that the inevitable solution to bring back Waid was something we should've seen coming. Guggenheim is a very good writer, but he keeps getting bounced for "name" writers: Loeb on Wolverine, now Waid here. The result with Wolverine was that Guggenheim's strong run has been replaced by mindless drivel.

As much as I disliked the overall direction of the Flash franchise, none of that was Guggenheim's fault and I would have liked to see how he pulled the franchise back to solid ground.

Guggenheim deserves a long run on a title and I hope he gets it soon.

Moon Knight's Brutality

2007-06-21T09:16:00.000-04:00

Moon Knight 11: "Midnight Sun, Chapter Five: One Son Lost" (Huston & Suayan).

I really like the latest Moon Knight series but it's not a fun read.

Charlie Huston's basic take on the character is that he's a seriously messed up loser, both psychologically and physically, and the basic plot premise is designed around seeing how much punishment Moon Knight can take.

And it's good - the writing is typicallly sparse but pointed, and the art is dark and in your face. Frank D'Armata's colors lean more towards a realistic, painted approach than the typical comic book and it fits the tone well because I think that's the overall point of this series - being a superhero is real and it messes you up if you're not prepared to deal with it.

Marc Spector isn't the only one suffering here. Huston casts the net of brutality wide, showing how past associates of Moon Knight have suffered because of him. There are those who show a greater sign of physical suffering (Frenchie) or emotional suffering (Marlene), but no one who's had any real contact with Moon Knight comes out unscathed.

The difference between Marc and those formerly closest to him is that they were able to move on with their lives while Spector wallowed in self-pity and self-medication.

Then there are those who get totally obliterated by having had an association with Moon Knight. The current "Midnight Sun" arc focuses on the comeback of former sidekick Midnight, who is the son of former MK villain the Midnight Man, who now wants to be Moon Knight's greatest nemesis or some other similar delusion and he sets about achieving this by being a sick, twisted torturer. At the end of issue 11 he's set to carve up Moon Knight's spine.

Huston has done a really good job in this series, but he's on the verge of stepping over a line. You can be dark-n-dirty or grim-n-gritty or just generally abuse your hero and be fine so long as there's a story-driven reason for that darkness being there. Through the first ten issues I never felt like the brutality (either physical or emotional) existed just to exist; it was always born out of the story or to illustrate a deeper truth about a character. In issue 11, however, the brutality felt less like it was there to show us something and more to exist just make us squeamish.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe Huston wants us to know that in the costumed world complete psychopaths like Midnight would exist and they would do horrible, horrible things to people out of some grandiose sense of purpose or revenge or spitefulness or just because sometimes there are messed up people who do messed up things and we can't explain their behavior away.

We just need to stop it. And Moon Knight, for good or bad, is the one down in the trenches doing just that.

Overall, I really like this series. I'm not looking for Moon Knight to lighten up, but I don't want it to turn into a snuff film, either.

Amazing Spider-Man 541: You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry

2007-06-20T16:27:00.000-04:00

Amazing Spider-Man 541: "Back in Back, Part 3 (of 5)" (JMS & Garney).

The entire return of the black costume was designed, of course, to tie into the release of Spider-Man 3. Comic companies do this all the time and I think it's stupid, though I'm sure (absolutely positive) they have marketing research (official numbers and stuff) that shows that putting Spider-Man back in black in the comics does a better job increasing sales than not doing it. They must know that people who wander into a comics shop or look at Amazing Spider-Man on the comic rack in a bookstore and see him wearing red-and-blue and not black-and-white are either so confused or disheartened that they don't buy what they went into the store to buy.

It does make me wonder why the Free Comic Book Day Spider-Man book didn't have Spidey wearing the black-and-white, though ...

The black is back and Marvel has cleverly tied its return into the end of the Civil War storyline. By having Spider-Man's civilian identity outed his family is at risk and the Kingpin hires someone to take Peter out, but ends up shooting Aunt May instead, sending Peter on a rampage.

JMS seems to be taking an anger at Peter's revealed identity out in this storyline. Of all Marvel's writers JMS was hardest on Tony Stark before and during Civil War, and it's not too much of a stretch to think that behind this storyline in JMS' head somewhere is the idea, "You wanted Peter's identity known to the public? Here's what that means."

It means the Kingpin comes after you.

Kingpin is finely suited for JMS because when Wilson Fisk talks he's taken the time to craft his words carefully to achieve the highest possible effect.

Peter's anger explodes throughout this arc. Here, he pulls the man who shot the man who shot May down into the sewer and lets him know Spider-Man is not going to take kindly to people going after his family. It's not "heroic" in the traditional sense and it certainly offers a darker Spidey than I'd prefer seeing, but life isn't always sunshine and lollipops. Everyone has a breaking point and that's what JMS is exploring here. Fisk has pushed Peter past established boundaries. and right now is the perfect time for this story. Not because of the movie tie-in (and what a piece of garbage that movie was, in case you forgot), but because so much has come right after the other: joining the Avengers and getting a real support system and safety from living in Avengers Tower, then having it all taken away through Civil War, being an outlaw, May getting shot ... it's all too much, too close together.

I think Peter's also being driven by the possibility of what's coming: being a target of both sides of the law, Stark on the legal and his rogues on the illegal. There's not much room for him to operate and there will be less. He needs to carve out space to balance out what he loses. That's what he attempts to do in 541.

Looking forward to next issue's Spidey v. Kingpin throwdown.

Countdown 45: Momentum Weaving

2007-06-20T15:49:00.000-04:00

Countdown 45: "Monitor Duty" (Dini & Palmiotti/Gray and Calafiore).

Sometimes we get what we want. One of my biggest complaints about Countdown and its predecessor, 52, was that momentum was not sustained because the writers got lost in all of these different sub-plots they were running out there. Countdown 45 is a perfect example of how these universe-wide weeklies can be most effectively arranged.

There are two sub-plots that dominate the issue: Jimmy Olsen's investigation and the continuing rift with the Monitors. Dini & Co. integrate Jimmy's investigation with the Holly Robinson plot, and use the appearance of the Monitor's "weapon," Forerunner to tie in with the ongoing Jason Todd/Donna Troy plot. It presents a much more focused issue and works better than stringing plots along separately. With 52, you never really knew what you were going to get and it was painful waiting for separate plots to come together (as they did with the Black Adam and Question plots to great effect).

52 rarely felt like a story but Countdown does, especially in an issue like 45.

Jimmy tries to piece together all of the events he's witnessed, from his the blips of power to Lightray's death, and what I like about it is that we see him figuring it out as he goes. It's both a cleaver way for Dini & Co.to infodump/recap previous issues, and also provides a means of showing character growth.

About his powers - I'm starting to wonder if maybe Jimmy isn't somehow channeling the powers of dead superheroes. He mentions that he's had the powers of Plastic Man and Flash, but maybe it's not Plastic Man but Elongated Man. Perhaps Jimmy is some kind of conduit between planes of existence.

The most time is given to Forerunner and the Monitors. Forerunner is another one of these impossibly powerful cosmic characters with deep personal issues. She's content to act as the Monitors' weapon, killing whomever they order her to kill, but when Good Monitor (please, DC, give us an easier way to tell these characters apart) stops her from killing Donna and Jason, he removes that purpose. Her primary reaction to this is that she wonders why the Monitor didn't trust her, meaning that she's content to base her self-identity on what others choose for her to do, but left alone to think for herself is troubling. She's an interesting character and I hope she continues to weave her way through this series (which seems likely given the final page).

A strong issue of Countdown.

New Avengers 31: ACTION!

2007-06-18T15:52:00.000-04:00

New Avengers 31: "Revolution, Part 5" (Bendis & Yu).

After four issues of mostly stagnated or frustrated action, Bendis lets Leinil Yu cut loose this issue and we get a book 95% full of Avengers vs. Ninjas. I can't help but think these must be nearly impossible books for Bendis to write. He's not a Claremont, who often (especially at the initial waning of his run as the #1 writer in comics) seemed to take particular delight in putting as many words on the page as possible, choking away the effectiveness of the artistic presentation. No, Bendis is more than fair to his co-creators, giving them plenty of room to tell the story visually, but he likes to write, and he likes to write intrigue and mystery. He is, after all, first and foremost a crime writer. In a book like New Avengers, however, you've got to let all that tension out in big ways every now and then or you risk frustrating the audience too much to make your payoffs work like you want them to.

Such is the case with New Avengers 31. The Marvel Hype Machine promised "the most important last page of any Marvel comic this year!" It may turn out to be just that (especially since this is supposed to be the start of the 2008 Mega Event), but it wasn't a "blow your mind" moment. Elektra's a Skrull. I dunno - not exactly shocking, but then "important" doesn't mean "shocking." It's means, ironically, "important." But while many are focusing on this moment and while it's never a good idea to hold the Hype Machine to its words, the revelation that Elektra is a Skrull isn't the issue's last page. The last page is back at Strange's Sanctum Starbucksium, where the implication is that Luke and Jessica's daughter is a Skrull.

That'd be a Bendis move - hit everyone with the big Elektra reveal and then try to slide the most important moment in under the radar. Or maybe it doesn't mean anything. Either way, the implication is pretty clear - the Skrulls are attempting another invasion of Earth.

All told, New Avengers 31 wasn't the most satisfying read. Yu's pencils (which I like) are at their least effective during fight scenes where it often becomes difficult to clearly follow the action. The colors are way too murky, too.

"Revolution" was a solid story overall, but the weakest issue was the last issue and that doesn't leave a good taste in your mouth when then happens.

Countdown 46: Herald of the Monitors

2007-06-18T13:04:00.000-04:00

Countdown 46: "Weapon of War" (Dini & Palmiotti/Gray and Saiz).

Countdown 46 works in large part, I believe, because it is arranged much more effectively than issue 47. The issue is tightly focused, concentrating largely on the ongoing threads involving Jimmy Olsen and Mary Marvel. The issue gives them time to breathe and while P&G's opening narration by Mary Marvel (and her dialogue in general) is a touch too overblown, the rest of the issue moves quickly and satisfactorily.

Mary Marvel, flush with the powers granted to her by Black Adam, is instantly thrown into battle against a rather disgusting looking character called Pharyngula who is to stillborn infants what the Thing is to orange rocks. It's pretty disgusting, to be honest, especially when he fires off some dead babies at Mary. The problem I have with her dialogue is that it doesn't totally wash with the Mary we've seen previously in this series.

The Rogues sequences need to start doing something and fast. They're an enjoyable crew to hang with, but it seems they fill the same role and have the same arguments and fights every single time we see them. After last issue's exchange between Piper and Trickster issue 46 would've been the perfect launching point.

I'm really starting to like Jason Todd. He fills the position of Batman Representative in the book - as Jimmy does for Supes, Donna Troy for Wonder Woman, the Rogues for Flash, Mary for the Marvels, and apparently Kyle Rayner will for Green Lantern. I'm wondering if there isn't a plan in place to turn this into a new team at the end of Countdown. It wouldn't be a bad idea for DC to use Countdown to build fan interest in some of their secondary- (and below-) level characters.

I continue to be intrigued by DC's decision to give away the final scene on the cover of each issue of Countdown. I'm not sure it makes a whole lot of sense and it does tend to wreck what is clearly supposed to be a dramatic ending. This time it's the introduction of Forerunner, the Monitor's personal attack dog. We get nothing here but a visual and a quick demonstration of her powers and she looks like Blink's, if Blink was a hippie-speedster assassin.

I dunno - it's like almost every cover of this series should come one issue later than it does. Weird.

Avengers Reprint & Back-Up

2007-06-16T11:31:00.000-04:00

Avengers Classic 1 (Lee, McDuffie and Kirby, Oeming, Maguire).

There's no better sign of a property's hotness (real or perceived) than the expansion of the franchise. After years of having Avengers and Avengers only, the singular title no longer exists, but has been replaced by four books: New Avengers, Mighty Avengers, Avengers: The Initiative (which seems titled that way solely to cash in on the popularity of the Avengers franchise), and now Avengers Classic, which will offer a reprint of the earliest Avengers issues and brand new back-up features.

More than anything else, this is probably the best sign of a title's perceived popularity, that a company thinks fans will plunk down $3-$4 to read a 44-year old reprint and a new back-up feature or two. It's not like Avengers 1 is hard to find, being available in several different reprint packages over the years, and it's not like the style of the original has suddenly come back into fashion. Yet here it is, roughly half old material, half new material underneath a jazzy new Art Adams cover.

The original story speaks for itself, though I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of people buying Avengers Classic 1 have read the original. (Plug time - if you want to hear what Avengers fans think of not only the original Lee/Kirby run but the whole of Avengers from Lee/Kirby through to the present, check out the upcoming ASSEMBLED! anthology from White Rocket Books, edited by Van Allen Plexico of Avengers Assemble. All profits to George Perez's charity of choice!)

The back-up stories feature high-quality talent (Dwayne McDuffie, Michael Avon Oeming, Kevin Maguire, and Stan the Man himself) but none of them (with all due respect) really bring fandom along with them by name and reputation alone. High quality creators, but not known for producing blockbusters, so I wonder what percentage of people were drawn to the book just to get the back-up stories.

Both back-ups in Avengers Classic 1 take a humorous look at the early days of the team's history when the Hulk was still on board. In fact, it's a bit surprising to see the Hulk featured most prominently on the front cover. Adams does front the original line-up in his fifty-something-people cover image, so I wonder if that's by design to also visually tie into this month's World War Hulk event.

It might just be a happy coincidence, though, given how prominently the Hulk features into early issues of Avengers. Regardless, it's a pretty cover.

McDuffie's story focuses on the team's second monthly meeting and is basically an excuse to show the team fighting amongst themselves as they try to figure out who the team's chairman is. The two best lines are both from the Hulk. First, he replies to Ant-Man's half-finished threat by wondering what, exactly, Ant-Man could do to him: "Ruin my picnic?" And then a few pages later refers to Iron Man as a "glorified bodybuard" as the team fights over who should be Chairman.

Oeming's painted art (I haven't seen this from him before) is very nice, though it does strike me as if Oeming simply painted his regularly-drawn panels and not developed or attempted a new style of layout to go along with the new presentation. I could be completely wrong on that, though, because it's been a while since I've read a book Oeming penciled. (I like to read Powers in huge chunks.)

Lee's story is a "behind the scenes" feature that shows how he (injecting himself into the comic) got the team to band together: by offering them lots of money. Kevin Maguire's art is finely suited for a humorous tale like this and really punches up Lee's dialogue.

Both stories are fun and well-crafted and it's nice to see some fun in an Avengers book amidst all the post-Civil War struggles between pro- and anti-Registration heroes in New, Mighty, and The Initiative.

At the end of the issue, editors Mark Beazley and Andy Schmidt say tha the back-up feature will usually be character driven but they wanted these initial stories to be more tongue-in-cheek. McDuffie and Oeming (and his new painted style) will be the regular back-up team and I think that's a smart choice - both because these guys are extremely talented but also to give the back-up story a consistent approach.

Beazley and Schmidt also say they'll reprint the original letters page in the back and I'd rather they didn't do that. One, I hate lettercols. Unless said lettercol is done like Busiek does Astro City, Larsen does Savage Dragon, where you have multiple pages devoted to long letters and creator response (not editorial response) I'd rather not read a letters page. Honestly, here's 99% of all Marvel and DC lettercols ever: a handful of "I loved it!," a dash of "I hated it!," and the occasional List of Questions. Reading current versions of this predictable mix is bad enough, but to have to 44-year old comments included ... ugh. I'd rather see them turn that page over to one of the Handbook writers to write a one-page column about that issue's original tale. Or, if we have to have letters, split the difference, giving us half old letters and half new letters.

Just a thought.

Honestly, I don't know if I'll be picking up this book every month and I'm almost as interested to see how this title performs in the marketplace as I am about reading the back-up issue every month. I hope the title helps bring the gap between old school fans (introducing them to newer creators they may not be familiar with) and new school fans (who might not have read the originals). Avengers Classic isn't going to "must read" status with one issue on the shelf, but it is a book worth checking out.

New Warriors 1: An Unexpected Good Time

2007-06-14T21:11:00.000-04:00

New Warriors 1: "Defiant" (Grevioux & P. Medina).

Earlier, I posted that I wanted to like Omega Flight, but really didn't. The next book I read after Omega was the new New Warriors book, which I thought I wouldn't like, but do.

Even after reading and thinking about New Warriors 1 I don't think I should like it and yet Kevin Grevioux and Paco Medina produce such an excellent book of heroes trying to work the underground rebellion thing that I'm left completely hooked by the opening issue of this series.

On the surface, this is yet another Anti-Stark book. Stark has become the Marvel Universe whipping boy, which is fitting and deserved thanks to his role in Civil War, but at some point Marvel (maybe purposely) is going to hit overkill on this issue. It's not that Stark should be celebrated, or even left alone, but there's only so many times you can see Stark get chewed out from up-close (even the Pro-Reg heroes like Ms. Marvel are getting in on it) or ripped part from afar. If there's a balance it works better, but New Warriors 1 is so overwhelmingly ant-Stark that Grevioux might have been better off giving us a side-character who vociferously defended him as much as the side-character who bashes him, just so we felt that tension a little stronger.

And yet, I can't say it negatively effected me all that much because that's not the focus of the book. The issue spends so much time with Sofia, who's relatively well-adjusted to life without her mutant powers and seems content to not fall under the eye of the Registration Act. Grevioux does an excellent job taking an "on the ground" examination of Registration, setting up a binary between the rebellious (and largely unseen) Warriors and the regular cops who work the NYPD Costumed Division who have this new law to add to their duties.

Sofia is either a really great character waiting to break out or just the beneficiary of one really good story. Grevioux instantly hooked me into the character. After starting the issue with a 3-page pursuit of Grey Gargoyle by mysterious (to us) voices that takes place in the dark of night, we get hit with a big bright two page sequence of Sofia flying, then crashing to the Earth as another woman robs her of her wings and sends her crashing to Earth. It seems pretty obvious that the other woman is the Scarlet Witch and the dream to represent Wanda's "No More Mutants" decree from House of M that robbed all but 198 mutants of their powers, but Grevioux doesn't force all of that information on us.

And I should hate that. I have no idea who the character is that chases Grey Gargoyle, no idea who Sofia is, no idea who the cops are, and barely remember Beak. I should want some information about them, but I don't need it. Grevioux gives us what we need to understand this story alone, often doing the slow- or delayed-reveal thing to great effect. It's not so much that he creates mysteries that we have to wait for answers to as much as it is giving us what we need to know only when we really need to know it. It's pretty impressive and helps slow-build the rising tension.

After Sofia's dream, we see her wake up on the subway train with everyone looking at her like she's the crazy one, which instantly makes us feel empathetic towards her. The next page sees Sofia on the streets of NYC. In the first panel there appears to be a dude in black following her, then we get a panel of her looking at a display of Thunderbolts toys. In panel 3 we see her from the back, standing in front of an Iron Man "Registration, It's the Law!" poster, panel 4 gives us a close-up of her face where we see her looking resigned at the poster, then panel 5 has her walking away. It's a very strong sequence that owes it's power to Paco Medina's pencils. The issue's art (Medina on pencils, Juan Vlasco on inks, and colors by Marte Gracia) is bright, fresh, clean, and well-paced, perfectly matching Grevioux's script. New Warriors 1 is just a fun book to look at and flip through.

The plot involves Sofia's recruitment into the New Warriors, led by a customer named Barry who's been frequenting the place to check out Sofia for the Warriors. When he reveals himself to her she's angry but his offer (helped by his revealing himself as her former x-mate Beak) stubbornly draws her in, leading to the last page revelation of Night Thrasher (presumably a new one since the original Thrasher died) as the man behind the operation.

On the whole, New Warriors works as a companion piece to Avengers: The Initiative. Where that book shows us the state-sanctioned take on young heroes, New Warriors gives us the outsider's experience. I'd expected this to be a one-issue check-in with New Warriors, but if issue 1 is indicative of the overall quality of this book I'm going to be around for the long haul.

The First and Last Flight Omegan?

2007-06-14T21:06:00.001-04:00

Omega Flight 1-3 (of 5) (Oeming & Kolins).

Omega Flight was supposed to be an ongoing series, but then right around the time Marvel decided to switch Avengers: The Initiative to ongoing from an LS, it reversed that course with Omega Flight. And while the Initiative is rolling along with no seeming ill effects, Omega Flight, unfortunately, is not fairing nearly as well.

It's hard, of course, to know how the series would play different without that little "of 5" on the cover. There's something to be said for a good story being a good story regardless of whether it's published as an ongoing or LS or stand-alone graphic novel, but format can make a difference, and with Omega Flight that difference is to the detriment of the series.

I want to like this LS because I like Oeming, I was a fan of the earliest incarnations of Alpha Flight and its characters, I like this particular group of characters, and I like the set-up of Canada having to deal with spill-over problems originating in the United States.

I want to like it, but I just don't, and I really think a big part of the problem is that Oeming wrote this opening story for a long, slow build. Instead of instantly giving us a newly formed Omega Flight doing its thing, Oeming is slowly creating the team, bringing in one character at a time and explaining why they're a part of OF. In the latest issue, then, he's still introducing characters to the book, but even though Beta Ray Bill (always a favorite) is finally brought into the book he hasn't yet met up with, let alone joined, the rest of the team.

For a 5-issue LS, there's way too much time devoted to the Wrecking Crew. If this was an ongoing they'd eventually be phased out and the extra time spent with them wouldn't feel like it does, which is to say it feels like the Wrecking Crew are forcing OF out of OF's own title.

The introduction of Michael Pointer to the storyline - the guy who killed the original Alpha Flight when he was being controlled by the Collective over in one of the X-Men books - hurts more than enhances the book, too, because there doesn't seem to be any hope that his character gets any kind of resolution as one member of a big cast in a 5-issue series. The Canadian government puts Pointer into a Guardian costume because his powers are out of control and Elizabeth Twoyoungmen is, rightly, furious at them for doing it. She spends much of her time in issue 3 yelling at them and yelling at him - so much time and so much anger, however, makes it difficult to think there's going to be a satisfactory ending after 5 issues between them. With an LS you've only got so much time to get stories introduced and resolved, and the Pointer/Talisman conflict needs much more time and space than it's been given, or will have a chance to get, in this LS.

Maybe when the five issues are done and, presumably, we get that last shot of a wholly formed Omega Flight ready for action the story will have come together, but for right now - with more issues gone than still to come, I'm just not feeling it. I wish I was; I think Marvel did a disservice to the book and to Oeming switching gears on him like they did. I'd like to see Oeming get a shot at writing this as a monthly, so I hope the sales justify it.

101 Reasons Why Nightwing Should Not Be Offed

2007-06-12T19:31:00.000-04:00

Nightwing 133: "321 Days, Part One" (Wolfman & Igle).

As most everyone knows by now, Nightwing was slated for death during Infinite Crisis because Dan Didio didn't get the character. Smarter heads prevailed, Dick Grayson was saved, and he goes on going on. The book struggled, however, never really finding a satisfying voice.

Until now. Marv Wolfman has entered as Nightwing's new writer and steered the character back to readability. Wolfman does one thing really well in this book and that's write Dick Grayson.

In fact, Wolfman's entire storytelling technique in Nightwing seems designed to illuminate the character of Grayson, as if this is his best evidence to Didio that, see, not only is this character unique and worth having running around, but those old stories have a value to them to and if you missed their significance that's on you, not Grayson.

Wolfman uses the supporting characters in the book to help craft our impression of Dick - so much so that they aren't really individualized characters at all. They wander in and out of the book. When they're in, it's to give us something for Dick. When they're out, they are pretty much ignored. Think of someone like Aunt May or Flash Thompson; while they are there, undoubtedly, to help further Peter's character, they usually also have their own stuff going on and sometimes the things Peter/Spidey do float back to May or Flash or MJ to illuminate those characters.

Wolfman hasn't done that, yet. Which is fine; I'm not saying his method here is better or worse than any other method because it comes down to execution and Wolfman executes very strongly.

Initiative 3 & the Joys of Being Third-Rate

2007-06-09T14:42:00.000-04:00

Avengers: The Initiative 3: "Bug Hunt" (Slott & Caselli)

Here's the difference between The Initiative and Countdown that I find most striking: The Initiative revels in the general third-rateness of its characters while Countdown seems determined to get rid of them.

That's a generalization, and I think The Initiative's pro-minor character stance says more about Dan Slott than Marvel editorial, while Countdown's ongoing "get rid of the anomalies" plot stinks of Dan Didio more than Paul Dini. After reading through this week's two books, however, it's rather striking that the majority of Monitors rally around the Rogue Monitor's (please, for the love of sanity, give them names or numbers so we can tell them apart) hawkish plan to eradicate reality-hopping anomalies while the Initiative is repurposing lesser-known characters (Gargoyle is this book's equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock - I bet Slott has ordered Caselli to work in Gargoyle at least one panel an issue) and giving them a purpose beyond sitting around waiting for some writer to pick them up to kill them off.

One of the big rumors running around fandom these days is that Slott is about to be tapped to take over Amazing Spider-Man when editorial reshuffles the Spidey creative teams later this year. Spider-Man's appearance in Initiative 3, then, also serves as a trial run, of sorts. Without meaning to overreact to such a brief use of the character, Slott's depiction of Spidey rings true and enjoyable. Spidey lets loose his standard array of quips and jokes, but it's underscored with a serious sense of what's going on in his life - not the least of which is being hounded by the Initiative.

The plot focuses around the central thread of War Machine and Komodo going after Spider-Man and one-half of the Sinister Syndicate (Boomerang, Shocker, Hydro-Man). The plan is to nail Spidey with "SPIN tech," which will allegedly permanently remove his super powers. Slott does his usual masterful job of working multiple angles off this core concept: Komodo's promotion to field agent status, the official introduction of SPIN tech, Komodo's nervousness in the field, Spider-Man's admonition of the Initiative for going after him instead of the Syndicate, a heated exchange between Rhodey and Parker (an example, I think, is exactly what Quesada was looking to do with Civil War), Spidey's confident verbal dismantling of Komodo, and the introduction of the new Scarlet Spiders.

Yeah, Scarlet Spiders.

Not the dorky Ben Reilly-era Scarlet Spider, but the dorky Civil War era Iron Spider armor repurposed as an Initiative strike team.

It actually comes off as pretty cool and creepy to see three of the Scarlet Spiders descend on the Syndicate after they thought they'd gotten away, which is a credit to how well effectively Slott and Caselli build that sequence. I'm still not overly crazy about the overall look of Caselli's art, but he draws fantastic actions sequences and he's a perfect fit for Slott's writing. This could turn out to be a career-defining moment for both writer and artist as it's not going to be too many more issues until it's going to look odd to see anyone but these two working on the book. That speaks very highly of the quality of work they're putting in on Initiative.

Slott never forgets, too, that the very existence of the Initiative program and Camp Hammond shouldn't simply be accepted as a good thing. He works in an appearance by Curt Connors (the Lizard) to ask him about Komodo, one of Connors' former students who stole and perfected his lizard-formula. (Isn't it great that Connors' formula is just "lizard-formula?" If the Lizard was invented today, it would have some catchy acronym for a name.) Connors tells Pym he's got no concerns about Melati's ability to control her powers, but he's more concerned about the "military application of a science that I had a hand in creating." When he asks Pym if he'd approve of Melati's field mission, Pym won't tell him. It's a small but powerful reminder that not everyone is fully behind the Initiative program, even a registered "hero" like Dr. Connors.

I continue to be impressed with how many different ideas Slott manages to work in without the book becoming overburdened (like the otherwise solid New X-Men) or choppy (as occasionally derails Countdown). Adding Dani Moonstar to the staff makes me happy (she's long been a favorite character), as does the brief dip into the town of Stamford, where residents are none-too-thrilled to see a military camp pop up after the incident that kicked off Civil War.

One question I do have, though, is why is Komodo being sent after Spider-Man? If the Initiative and/or Stark is serious about bringing Peter in, or eliminating his powers, why send a rookie? Send War Machine, Justice, and Pym. Send the Thunderbolts. Heck, send Stark himself. I hope Slott picks up on this in future issues.

The Initiative is a fun book that stays grounded in the political and social implications of the post-Civil War Marvel Universe. It's definitely among my favorite books at the moment.

Countdown 47: Here a Plot, There a Plot, Everywhere a Plot-Plot

2007-06-08T10:28:00.000-04:00

Countdown 47: "Bricks in the Wall" (Dini/McKeever & Derenick).

For the second issue in a row, Countdown has chosen to spoil its ending on its cover. It's a curious decision - on the one hand it clearly signals the main event of the issue, but by giving the ending away up front it can make some of the interior reading anti-climactic. One look at the above cover and you know what's going to happen to Mary Marvel, just like last issue you knew what was going to happen to Lightray. It's harder to build tension when the audience knows how the story is going to end - the journey to that ending can still be enjoyable but it's harder to pull off.

Countdown 47 suffers from the same malady that afflicted Countdown 49 - too many sub-plots that simply plod along on their own and not enough overall cohesion. There's no real center-line to Countdown 47 and the result is that the impact of Black Adam's decision to give his powers to Mary Marvel don't carry the impact they would have if that sequence had been given more space to develop.

While the individual components are solid, the issue felt mostly flat to me. It felt mostly like "set-up" and not "pay-off," and it shouldn't have felt that way because Dini & Co. do finally pay off the "which way will the Monitors go" angle, the Mary and Black Adam angle, and the "what are Piper and Trickster" up to angle. Odd, then, that the issue just didn't feel satisfying.

I don't think it's McKeever's fault, as the dialogue is mostly solid, but rather a structural problem. The issue breaks down on the following outline:

Pages 1-4: Jimmy Olsen
Pages 5-6: Holly Robinson
Pages 7-9: Mary and Adam
Pages 10-12: Monitors
Pages 13-15: Piper and Trickster
Pages 16-19: Mary and Adam
Page 20: Amazons Attack
Pages 21-24: History of Multiverse back-up

Space-wise, the Mary Marvel and Black Adam sub-plot does get 1/3 of the space devoted to the front feature, but it's not properly arranged to give it impact. We don't get into their story until page 7, and it's an odd choice to intro a new sub-plot on pages 5 & 6, especially coming on the heels of the Jimmy Olsen opening, which does give us the interesting image of Jimmy as part of the Source Wall (I think that's what it is), but isn't picked up on again this issue.

The Monitor and Rogues sequence in the middle of the book are the two most dense sequences, as the Jimmy, Holly, and Amazon sequences basically just tease future stories.

Maybe if they had arranged the issue segments as: Jimmy / Mary / Monitors / Holly / Rogues / Mary the issue would have flowed better. There's no real reason to include the Amazons Attack plug that I see, other than to fill the promise that Countdown would touch upon all the major stories happening in the DCU during Countdown's run. If those moments are used here just to plug something else than it's not going to work - it's up to Dini & Co. to make those moments feel a part of this story. They could have easily combined the Holly and Amazons sequences together to give a more cohesive feel.

To steal a phrase from the President, Dini & Co. need to be uniters and not dividers. There are bound to be issues during the series that will read tenfold better in TPB form than single-issue variety and Countdown 47 is one of those issues. It's not an issue that will turn me off from the series, but neither is it one that's going to get my juices flowing. The issue isn't bad, but it's not all that good, either.

The Dini Detective

2007-06-07T19:56:00.000-04:00

Detective Comics 833: "Trust" (Dini & Kramer).

Note - I am NOT going to spoil the ending of Detective Comics 833 in this post, but if it comes up in the comments I'm not going to delete them. Reader beware.

Comics fans love to bemoan and decry crossover events but then a whole heck of a lot of comics fans go out and buy those crossovers like crazy. Crossovers always kept me away from the Batman and Superman titles. It seemed like when I was at the height of my comics buying Batman and Superman still didn't make the cut because I couldn't just buy Batman or Detective or Superman or Action Comics but I had to buy both of them plus Steel and Robin and Azrael and Catwoman and Man of Steel and whatever else DC could slap a Bat or "S" logo on. You either had to be all-in or all-out with Bats and Supes and I chose to be all-out. They were always appearing other books anyway so it was no big loss.

DC has come off of the mega-crossover of the Bats and Supes titles; doing so has to hurt sales but it has made them easier to follow. (Except for the fill-ins plaguing Action at the moment.) The best of all of DC's "big two" books is Paul Dini's Detective Comics.*

Dini tends to write stand-alone tales that simply give us entertaining Batman stories. They are not grandiose, they do not rely on hype, they aren't promising to "change everything you know about Batman." They're just good stories and good comics. For everyone who whines about the TPB-style of writing or decompressed storytelling, Dini's Detective is for you.

In Detective 833, Dini loosens the reigns a bit, giving us the first part of a multi-part storyline, but Detective 833 is a fully-realized comic in its own right. You will not feel ripped off after reading it and instead of forcing you to come back next month to get the rest of the story like so many titles do these days, you will actually want to come back because you don't feel cheated.

The issue opens with Batman helping to rescue some performers from a magic show gone wrong. Bats is drawn to the theatre by the presence of the magician, Ivar Loxias, who's had a run of tragic accidents at recent shows. This night is no different, as Laxias' assistant, Katy Michaels, dies when failing to escape through a sliding panel during a "cremation illusion."

Katy was previously professionally involved with Zatanna, allowing for Bats to call on her expertise. The team-up is tense, given Zatanna's mindwipe of Batman during Identity Crisis. In the issue's strongest line, Zatanna asks Bats: "Tell me one thing, Bruce. Did you call me here to solve my friend's murder or to reopen old wounds? I'd really like to know before you force me to apologize again for the worst mistake of my life." Instead of a verbal answer, we get a two-panel follow-up showing each of the characters looking at one another. Batman's lack of answer (he eventually breaks the silence by telling her to get in the car) works effectively with the Dini-inserted backstory of Bruce and Zatanna interacting as children.

It makes for a full and strong issue even before we get to the twist ending, which Dini builds incredibly well. I hadn't seen it coming until Batman starts to explain it and it's one of those adrenaline-inducing moments you get from really good thrillers.

There's more flash and bang over in Grant Morrison's Batman, but Dini has been delivering far superior stories.

*Wonder Woman is "big three" in name only. As important as she is inside the DCU, she has nowhere near the same effect on fandom.

Requiem for a Surfer

2007-06-06T16:01:00.000-04:00

Silver Surfer: Requiem 1 (of 4) (JMS & Ribic).

I'm not really sure if Requiem is supposed to be in-continuity, out-of-continuity, a future continuity, a past continuity, a painted version of "The End" line ... I just don't know and after reading the first issue of the new Marvel Knights mini from JMS and Esad Ribic I don't really care.

This is a good comic.

In part, this is because it plays to the strengths of the creators and the character. JMS and the Silver Surfer are finely suited for one another - JMS likes to write "big issues" stories with a lot of pronouncement-styled dialogue and those techniques work well with the aloof and almost-all-powerful Surfer. The Surfer stands somewhere between Jeffrey Sinclair and John Sheridan - he's got Sinclair's stiff seriousness and Sheridan's love of hearing himself talk, though the Surfer, at least, keeps most of his monologues internal.

Maybe this makes Norrin a grown-up Lennier ...

The plot of Requiem is straightforward - the Surfer has health concerns, comes to Earth to get tested by Reed Richards, and finds out he's dying. The plot is secondary at best in a story like this, however, where the focus isn't on action as much as it is a specific theme.

If there's a complaint here, it's that the story is ponderously slow. There's too much time spent with the FF as opposed to the Surfer and JMS "hides" Norrin's impending death from the reader for far too many pages, but both moves help set the pace and the approach, so while they are less-than-stellar, they are, perhaps, necessary.

It also feels right. Having the Surfer come to Earth and then be hidden behind the doors to Reed's lab while Ben and Johnny take us through that part of the issue reinforces both the Surfer's aloofness and how little we know of him. For such a unique and interesting character, there are few great Silver Surfer stories out there. People (including me) like to point to Green Lantern as an example of how poor a writer Ron Marz is, but his Silver Surfer was even worse, though not as harmful to the long-term health of the character.

I've had this theory for a while that action sells more comics in the ongoing sense while thoughtfulness rules the mini/limited route, but I've never given it any deep thought. Requiem 1, however, is all about the thoughtful. JMS lays it on a bit thick, at times, but on the whole his handling of the Surfer (combined with some beautiful painted art from Ribic) makes this a comic worth flipping through on the shelf. Save your coins, though, and get the collected edition of this story if issues 2-4 are of the quality of issue 1.

Countdown 48: Feeling Like It Means Something

2007-06-05T18:37:00.000-04:00

Countdown 48: "Death From Above" (Dini/Beechen & Lopez).

There's nothing wrong with out of the way stories, but when you're attempting to build a major weekly series out of them it can be a problem. See 52. Luckily, DC isn't making the same mistake with Countdown as Dini and Company deliver another solid issue that feels like the center of the DC Universe. For all of the bluster about how important 52 was, it rarely felt like this is where the mainline of the DCU is taking place.

Such is not the case with Countdown. The difference might be as minute as having the various plots in Countdown intertwine, but I think it's more than that. Having the overall thematic of anomalies helps give Dini a subject to explore over various threads: the Monitors, Jason Todd, Jimmy Olsen, and Karate Kid are all centered around the idea of time/space anomalies. so while their individual stories may advance at their own rate, the cumulative effect is of a far greater speed of advancement.

I'm really digging this series, to the point where I'm going to stop saying things like, "even though it's early and I liked 52 early on, as well" and just enjoy the ride until it stops being enjoyable.

Countdown 48 did two things really well - one involving Jimmy Olsen and the other Mary Marvel. Dini & Co. advanced the Jimmy Olsen sub-plot, giving him yet another set of powers (speed, this time, to go along with his previous elasticity) to build mystery but also making Jimmy the centerpoint of the cover's promised "death of a New God," as Lightray ate a batch of pavement after falling from a storm cloud.

Mary was used to set up next issue's apparently big developments (as guessed by the cover image to Countdown 47) but her chat with Black Adam (while predictable) still had a sense of high energy to it, thanks to Adam Beechen's spot-on dialogue.

Beechen does a great job throughout the issue, especially with Jimmy and Jason Todd.

Another solid issue on a series that seems to know where it's going.

Keep Your Distance: Marvel's Dark Tower

2007-05-29T19:29:00.000-04:00

Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born 1-4 (of 7) (PAD/Furth & Jae Lee/Richard Isanove).

Being a writer and not an artist, I'm usually primarily concerned with the writing part of comics here at the Anxiety, but there are times when the art overpowers (in my mind) the writing. Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born is one of those times.

It is no surprise that the art of Jae Lee and Richard Isanove is gorgeous, but it makes Gunslinger Born feel less like a comic book and more like a theatre experience. Instead of drawing us into King's world, Lee's art keeps us at arm's length, like watching players act on a sparse stage instead of in a fully-realized world.

Peter David's narration enhances this effect, and between writing and art I feel very much like one does when one is told a fairy tale by a storyteller - the actual story is layered behind the act of telling the story. As performed by PAD and Lee, Gunslinger Born has characters that always feel cold and controlled. I get the sense that this is what it's like to watch chess being played if you're standing down amongst the pieces and can't see the large hands moving them around above you.

An example. In Gunslinger Born 4 Susan Delgado rides her horse (a rosillio named Pylon), galloping north and the narrator admits he is far from omniscient: "Whether she's riding hell-bent for leather toward something or away from something, no one could say, and I won't venture it, neither ... save to let events ... and the young woman ... speak for themselves." Her dialogue gives no indication, simply imploring Pylon to "move faster" though her downturned head gives us some indication of sadness, of running away instead of running towards.

Her flight is interrupted by Roland (the Gunslinger Born of the title) and the young would-be lovers meet in a rock-strewn field. Roland apologizes for his insulting words towards her from the previous night's function (where he learns that Susan "belongs" to the town's Mayor in order to procreate) and after she accepts, the narrator tells us: "I cannot tell you for sure if Roland hears the tremble in her voice ... or notices the slight shaking of her hand as he helps her dismount." Lee's art adds nothing to the context here, giving us a close-up of the bottom-left-quarter of Roland's emotionless face, followed by a close-up of their hands about to touch as Roland offers Susan a hand down.

It makes me wonder if the answers to the narrator's unknown are even important to this story; perhaps action must always take precedence over thought in this world.

In other hands, or with a different combination of hands, the level of staged presentation could fall apart or spin out of control, but it hasn't. Writer and artist work together to create a comic that looks, sounds, and feels unique. There isn't anything else on the shelves (that I've read) reminiscent of Gunslinger Born and that's a good thing - both for this series and for the comic shelf as a whole.

I haven't read Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I own the first four books, mostly because Stephen King always seems to connect with people who buy me Christmas presents, but when I tried reading the first book as a teenager it just didn't connect with me. This isn't a rip on King, who I generally enjoy very much, but rather to make clear that I have no emotional connection or great knowledge of the novels. King's novels are simply four books that sit there on my shelves, waiting to be read like so many other texts accumulated over the years. I don't know how the comic compares in any way to the novel - my only in is the comic itself, which I recommend. Gunslinger Born is not an all-time classic, but it is an enjoyable change of pace from the norm of the pile.

Staged, controlled, restrained, cold ... but well worth a look.

Once More Around the Onslaught

2007-05-28T14:14:00.000-04:00

Onslaught Reborn 1-3 (of 5) (Loeb & Liefeld).

For the tenth anniversary of the Heroes Reborn event (and to benefit the Sam Loeb Scholarship Fund), Marvel has teamed up Jeph Loeb and Rob Liefeld to celebrate the occasion with a new five-issue mini-series that may well end up taking a year to complete as the release of issue 4 was pushed back, apparently so that it wouldn't have to compete with a ton of Civil War product.

Onslaught Reborn is a likely leading candidate to be the most hated book of the year, or the "sequel no one wanted to see," but it's not half-bad. That is to say it meets, and yeah, even succeeds, its sub-basement-level expectations. Reading it is like seeing a movie you know you're going to hate and then not hating it; or like when you expected to get a "D" on an exam and then you find out you actually receive a "C+" - you can't help but feel good about it ... even though you still got a C+.

Part of me is convinced Heroes Reborn was the main reason Wizard Magazine became as successful as it did; Heroes Reborn hit at the sore spot between new skool fans and old school fans, between the "Image way" and the "Marvel way" as it took some of Marvel's most classic characters and farmed them over to two Image guys: Rob Liefeld (who controlled Captain America, the Avengers) and Jim Lee (Fantastic Four, Iron Man). The success or failure of the year-long event, which sprung from the Marvel-controlled Onslaught event, is up for debate.

Artistically, I only remeber the Jim Lee-drawn Fantastic Four really working for me, though the second half of Avengers (written by Walt Simonson after a failed contract renegotiation with Liefeld resulted in his books being given over to Lee). Financially, the Heroes Reborn boosted sales of all four titles and probably helped pave the way to some degree for Marvel's hugely successful Ultimate line of comics.

Heroes Reborn doesn't exactly bring up fond memories for a large number of fans, however, though no one should be surprised when a comic company tries to ring a few more dollars out of a once-successful event. At least Marvel is donating some of the proceeds to charity.

Is Onslaught Reborn any good? It's not horrible, which may be damning with faint praise, but it is what it is - a summertime B-movie action extravaganza. Given Liefeld's participation it almost works as a nostalgia piece for the worst of early Image Comics.

The story revolves around the return of Onslaught. Loeb ties it into modern Marvel continuity by placing the origin moment of the return with the Scarlet Witch's House of M "No more mutants" declaration. Onslaught comes back and wants to kill Franklin Richards, heading immediately over to FF's headquarters, where he proceeds to take control of both the Human Torch and Reed Richards.

Franklin jumps inside his little black ball, escaping over to the Heroes Reborn universe, and Onslaught joins him.

Much destruction follows.

And that's really what Onslaught Reborn is all about - heroes punching other heroes. Over the first three issues Onslaught takes control of Johnny, Reed, Thor, Hulk, and Iron Man and they all attempt to kill one another. It's a lame concept given that we just lived through Civil War - but maybe Loeb/Liefeld figure that 5 issues of various heroes punching Onslaught would get old. Still, I'd rather see more of the Cap v. Onslaught battle than yet another Thor/Hulk battle.
Part of the problem stems from just how lame Onslaught is as a villain. At one point, Onslaught was the merged consciousness of Charles Xavier and Magneto - or rather, the repressed part of Xavier's mind mixed with, um, something something from Magneto. (My head is starting to hurt ...) Onslaught them became his own entity where he could do pretty much everything, and now I guess he prefers jumping into other people's heads and taking over their bodies to do all his dirty work.

Onslaught has potential - the idea that he's trying to create a "hive-mind" that he can control gives him something as a character for writers to build on. I can see Onslaught exploring all kinds of characters and beings in an attempt to create a more perfect hive, hijacking, say, a couple Spider-Man villains to commit a small-level crime, or hijacking the Brood for a massive assault on Earth, but here it's just kick-punch stuff.

If you never try making a character be more than a lame-ass, he's not going to do it on his own.

Liefeld's art is what it is, though I have to say he has gotten a little better. There are several sequences through the first three issues that work rather effectively. In issue one the Torch/Thing fight has good energy to it and Liefeld uses a splash page as he should, for high dramatic impact and not just so he has to draw less. When Torch pushes Thing out the window there's a really nice splash of the two of them exploding out of the building with the whole city beneath them. Liefeld or not, the sequence works. Issue 2 has a nice sequence involving Franklin and Ricki Barnes being attacked by Onslaught atop a bridge, but then saved by Captain America dropping in from above. Again, Liefeld or not, the sequence works - it has life, it has energy, and it has impact. If you don't like Liefeld's depiction of characters (and I'm not a fan, but far from his biggest critic), that's another matter, but in terms of layout and pacing, he's gotten better.

Loeb uses Rikki Barnes to narrate the story and it provides a simple, clear (if overwritten) thread through the mini-series. (Loeb would have done wise to replicate this technique in Fallen Son.) There's a semblance of a plot in that the characters in the Heroes Reborn universe (or a new Heroes Reborn universe, it's hard to tell if these are suppsoed to be the old characters or a new invention given that I haven't read those original stories since they came out a decade ago) attempt to figure out who Franklin is and what that means to them, and there's a end-of-issue-3 inclusion of Loki, the Enchantress, Skurge, Scarlet Witch, and Ultron into the mix, but really it's all about punch-kick.

None of which really makes it worth buying, except that a "significant portion" (whatever that means) of the proceeds go to the Sam Loeb College Scholarship Fund, and that's no small thing.

Uncanny Mediocrity

2007-05-25T12:10:00.000-04:00

It's not the best time to be an X-Fan. The two best X-Books are more outside than inside the X-Franchise: X-Factor and Cable & Deadpool. Astonishing X-Men has been more mediocre than good. Wolverine was solid under Marc Guggenheim, but the current Jeph Loeb arc is horrid. New X-Men is entertaining but unfocused, with a cast too large for much character development to take place.

And the two flagships, Uncanny X-Men and X-Men?

They're both a mess, struggling to find an identity and some direction.

X-Men 199: "Condition Critical, Part 3 (of 3)" (Carey & Bachalo). If you were only going to buy one "main" x-title, go buy Astonishing. It has the best roster of characters and Joss Whedon's dialogue, which is usually good even when his plots are not. But between the two older main X-titles, Adjectiveless X-Men gets the slight nod because of Chris Bachalo's art. If you don't like Chris Bachalo's art, there's not a whole lot here to recommend.

A few months back this book looked promising. Mike Carey set the book up as a strike team, gave them a fifth-rate Helicarrier, and ... well ... they've wrecked Cable & Deadpool by shoehorning Cable into this book. Carey put Rogue in charge (good move) but then rounded out the cast with Cable, Cannonball, Mystique, Iceman, Mastermind, and Sentinel. And Sabretooth.

There's all kinds of problems with that line-up, starting with having homicidal nut-job Sabretooth (who no one trusts - because he might, you know, kill them) and the untrustworthy Mystique hanging around. Sabretooth doesn't want to be there, but Rogue does want him around, and Mystique wants to be there, but Rogue just sort of tolerates her. Such conflict can be good for a book, of course, but Carey hasn't done anything interesting with either Creed or Mystique since they jumped on board. Mystique, at least, seems willing to repent, but the budding romance between her and Iceman seems born out of a need for their to be some romance on the team and not because these two would be drawn towards one another.

Then there's Cable. Who in their right mind is going to follow Rogue when Cable is standing in the room? Again, this could be an interesting internal conflict for the team to deal with, but during the current "Condition Critical" arc that takes place in Cable's attempt-at-utopia Providence, Rogue is waylaid by a virus that keeps her largely out of action. It would have been the perfect time for a difference of opinion between the two but Carey just takes this opportunity out of play for some reason.

Mastermind and Sentinel are the youngsters on the team but in the handful of issues I've read all I get from them is that Mastermind is a bitch and Sentinel is well-meaning.

On the whole, it's just not a very good book. The art is typical Bachalo goodness, but the writing is very paint-by-numbers. The characters are pretty interchangeable and the plots are formulaic and stale.

Uncanny X-Men 486: "Rise and Fall of the Shi'Ar Empire, Part 12 (of 12)" (Brubaker & Tan). Ed Brubaker's attempt at an X-Epic falls flat. For one thing, there's far too many characters involved - the Shi'ar, the X-Men, the Starjammers, Vulcan and Deathbird ... and Bru doesn't give us even one character to really connect with. Sort of like the way the Bush Administration keeps changing the story about why the United States went to war with Iraq, Brubaker's story goes from being about Lilandra to being about Vulcan to being about ... well, I'm not sure. It's about a lot of things but none of them are very satisfactory.

The one idea with the most traction moving forward is Havok taking control of the Starjammers. Now, that's not as good as it could have been because for Havok to take the team over his father, Corsair, apparently had to die. As great a job as Bru did with Captain America's death, his handling of Corsair's passing is equally lame. It just sort of happens and while Corsair gets a heroic death it falls flat. If Bru had built in a sub-plot of Corsair and Havok and doing the father/son thing with Corsair talking about Havok or Cyclops taking over the 'Jammers one day then that series of events that ends with Corsair dying and Havok taking over would have a real emortional impact. Instead, it just feels like the only reason Havok agreed to take command was that he (along with Lorna and Rachel) are stranded out there in Shi'Ar space with no real chance to get back to Earth. Havok wants to go after his brother, Vulcan, of course, but it comes off as more Alex not wanting to go back to Earth.

In exchange for the Starjammers gaining Alex, Lorna, and Rachel, they lose Hepzibah, who ends up back on Earth with the X-Men. It'll be neat to see Hepzibah running around with the Uncanny for a but without her (and Corsair) on the Starjammers there's little doubt the 'Jammers will feel more like an x-team instead of what they were, which is a shame. The force of Hepzibah's personality at least would have kept a more significant classic Starjammers feel to the team, but that's gone.

Unfortunately, the "Rise and Fall" arc comes off as an empty blockbuster - there's a lot of bang and bluster but it's not as filling as the bucket of corn in your lap.

In all, both of these books need some work to be worth your time and money. They X-office appears to be dragging out the Morlocks (Uncanny) and Marauders (Adjectiveless), so let's hope they do something new with them. The X-Books need direction and hopefully we won't have to wait until this fall's "Endangered Species" event for that direction to get here.

Captain America 26: The Non-Gimmick Version of Fallen Son

2007-05-24T13:15:00.000-04:00

Captain America 26: "The Death of the Dream, Part Two" (Brubaker & Epting).

With Civil War: Confession and the Fallen Son mini-series grabbing most of the post-death publicity (and sales), it was both strange and refreshing to see Captain America 26 arrive this week.

Strange because it seems forever ago that Cap 25 was generating mainstream media buzz, and refreshing because the writer who wrote Cap's death finally gets his crack at following up on the death.

Captain America 26 covers the same thematic ground as Fallen Son. The difference between the two books is that, as shallow as Fallen Son has been, Captain America 26 strikes the right tone and level of depth. In part this is due to the characters chosen by the respective authors, Jeph Loeb and Ed Brubaker. In Fallen Son, Loeb is using characters like Wolverine, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Spider-Man, and the New Avengers to fill most of his story and these characters largely know Captain America more than they know Steve Rogers, and even at that they know Cap mostly tangentially. Loeb does somewhat balance this out with the inclusion of characters who do know him better (such as Iron Man and Clint Barton), but Brubaker chooses to focus on Sharon Carter, Falcon, and the Winter Soldier, who know both Captain America and Steve Rogers intimately.

It's not just a difference in characters, however. Where Loeb sticks on the surface, resulting in emotions that ring largely hollow, Brubaker digs a little deeper into the emotional reaction of the characters.

Wisely, too, Bru creates a triptych over the backbone of Captain America's wake. The issue opens with Sharon Carter going to see Steve's body aboard the Helicarrier. It gives her a chance to vent at Tony Stark for removing the body, but when Tony shows her Steve's corpse she sees that it has undergone a shocking transformation. Stark theorizes that once dead, the effects of the Super Soldier Serum have reversed themselves, leaving Steve's corpse as the scrawny, sickly man he would have been sans serum. Sharon quits SHIELD so that she can get out from under Tony's command, but also, I believe, because she knows that she is the one who delieverd the final killshot into Cap's stomach and doesn't want Stark to find out. (Of course, as I argued when Captain America 25 was released, I think the artistic layout of those final moments exonerates Sharon as the actual killer.) Sharon goes to the wake, where the focus of the issue blends from Sharon to Sam Wilson. Sharon touches base with Sam and Rick Jones, but she ends up crying in the bathroom, overcome with guilt at her role in Cap's death.

Sam Wilson bugs out of the wake after seeing Sharon, taking to the air above the city to clear his head, then heading to the "secret wake," where the New Avengers have gathered to pay their respects. We learn that Sam has signed the Registration Act, a compromise that allowed him to attend and speak at the funeral, so that Cap "wouldn't get buried alone." Bru does an excellent job working in the simmering anger of Sam and Luke Cage at the Registration Act, which feeds into the Soldier's section of the book where the simmering anger erupts.

Bucky is at a bar, watching the replay of the funeral on TV and hearing all sides of the public's reaction to Cap's death - the bartender thinks it's a tragedy, the person next to him thinks there's a conspiracy to cover up the fact that Cap is still alive, and a big dude playing pool calls Cap a traitor. Bru does a great job balancing the internal monologue with the external action. Soldier knows he should debate the guy because that's what Cap would do, but he realzies he's not Cap and ends up beating the hell out of everyone in the bar before Sam comes in to extract him.

In the come-down from the fight, Bucky's attention is turned back to the television where Tony Stark is breaking down at the funeral: "And then, just like that, it all clicks into place. I see Tony Stark trying to speak at Steve's funeral. It's the third time they've shown it and I still can't believe it. He breaks. Starts crying and walks away." Stark says "it wasn't supposed to be like this" and Bucky makes up his mind what he's going to do. Since he can't be the person Steve woul want him to be, he decides he can do something else: "I can kill Tony Stark."

It's a chilling moment robbed of impact only by the fact that we know he's not likely to be successful. What's nice, especially in contrast to his appearance in Fallen Son 1, is that Bucky has decided to take a pro-active approach to dealing with his issues over Cap's death. Not that deciding to kill Stark is necessarily a healty means of dealing with grief but it gives the character a purpose and a goal and that gives the book direction.

A word on Stark - it seems every character in comics is lining up to take a shot at him these days (and rightly so) but it gets lost that Stark, for the most part, takes the verbal lashings as part of his penance.

Brubaker and Epting's Captain America is simply one of the best comics on the market right now, and Captain America 26 is another outstanding issue. If you've been let down by Fallen Son, this is the issue you should check out.

Call it a Comeback: LOST Buries the Past

2007-05-23T23:47:00.000-04:00

LOST Season 3 Finale. Written by Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse.

Television shows are a lot like milk - once they start to go bad they keep on getting more and more rank. It is rare that once a show stumbles it ever regains the footing that caught the public's imagination. It's not a matter of the audience coming back, but of the show's original force coming back.

Yet that's what LOST has done.

The first half of LOST's Season Three (not the artifical breaking up of the season that ABC engineered, but roughly half of this season's episodes) was, well, the obvious word is lost. The show was dragging out Kate/Sawyer/Jack and seemed to be giving us more "Others" than "Survivors." Yet somewhere along the line the show got back to doing what it does best - exploring the characters and the island. (I think the break came between the amazingly bad Jack/Bai Ling episode and the thoroughly enjoyable Meteor-Destroys-Chicken-Shack ep that focused on Hurley.)

For all the obvious splitting of this series between the past and present (ofen to the detriment of the present), there's also the dual focus of exploring the characters and exploring the island itself. And yeah, the characters would too-often go into the jungle, experience something crazy (like a polar bear) and then come back and not talk about it, but the weirdness of the island has always been one of the show's biggest appeals.

The Season 3 finale delivered better than either of the earlier season-enders because it answered more than it obfuscated - or at least moved us dramtically forward instead of stalling us in place.

And the nicest twist was that the show's flashback was, in fact, a flashforward, showing us a despondent Jack post-island on the verge of suicide. The flashforward sequence opens with Jack on a place, there's turbulence, he wants to get drunk but the stewardess hands him a newspaper instead and Jack spies something in the paper that shakes him badly. We see him next in his Jeep squinting at the paper, then crumbling it, then moving to stand atop a bridge railing, contemplating jumping.

I'll admit I didn't pick up that this was a flashforward when they were on the plane. It wasn't until Jack was in his car, on the bridge, and the show refused to show us the newsclipping that I figured out what we were seeing was the future rather than the past. Jack ends up saving a woman's life (who crashed because she saw him on the bridge) but his downward spiral continues.

The only time I wavered during the show that this was the future and not the past was when Jack threatened a new doctor at his hospital (James Lesure from LAS VEGAS, meaning the show has added two LAS VEGAS cast members in the past few weeks) to "Get my father down here. If I'm more drunk than him you can fire me." (Paraphrashing.) Unless I heard that wrong, I'm not sure what it means since Jack's dad is supposedly dead. I chalked it up to Jack being that far gone on drugs and booze, but I'd love to hear other ideas. Or be told that I imagined what I thought I heard. (The curse of not having TiVo, I suppose.)

The island sequences were strong with plenty of resolutions and step-forwards. Here's a quick rundown:

Jack made the painful decision to sacrifice Sayid, Jin, and Bernard in his fateful stand against Ben, then beat the crap out of Ben when the sounds of three gun shots came ringing across the walkie-talkie. (Jack doesn't have TV so he didn't know that we didn't see the bodies - no bodies, no death, after all.) He also finally told Kate he loved her, but only after kissing Juliet good-bye in front of her.

Kate & Sawyer mostly hung in the background; there was a bit with Sawyer's hostility towards Kate and his inability to tell her what happened at the Black Rock when he killed the guy who was both Locke's dad and the conman who stole his mother's money. Kate wants to go back to the beach to check on Sayid, Jin, and Bernard but Sawyer says No, then tells Jack he's going back, and Kate that it wasn't that he didn't want to go back and check, he just didn't want to go with her to do it. Neither really had a lot to do this ep, but they received so much of the focus this season that it was a wide decision to spread the wealth.

Locke's not dead, which surprises no one, but Walt returned for a brief second to tell John to get up and that he could, in fact, still move his legs, which was a minor surprise. (Not that Walt came back, but that he appeared just then.) Locke also made a dramatic return to the group by killing Naomi before she could contact her ship that's just off-coast somewhere. Ben also told Jack not to let her make contact and given Jack's end-of-ep appeal to Kate that they made a mistake leaving the island it appears perhaps Ben was telling the truth. Or not. Ben's at his best as a character when we don't know if he's telling the truth or not.

Hurley saves the day back at the beach when he storms in with the vehicle he found earlier in the season, saving Sayid, Jin, and Bernard. Fun sequence though it's a shame Sawyer killed Tom, if only because he was the most interesting non-Ben Other.

And it appears we saw the last of Charlie, who did in fact die as Desmond told him he would. The whole "Looking Glass" underwater station is the best evidence that the show is back on track - instead of dragging this out for a half-season or more, this was a nice, quick, two-ep sequence. It was a blast to watch Charlie and his two kidnappers go back-and-forth with one another, and even better to watch the Others fall apart when Mikhail joined them. One of the complaints I and many others had about LOST earlier this season was that it was dragging everything out - for the first time you could make the case that they sped things up way too quickly. The sequence was well done and after Charlie punched in the code he made contact with Penelope (Desmond's ex-love) who revealed that she wasn't on the ship that Namoi is planning on calling. Charlie then noted Mikhail (who appeared to escape death for the second time) outside the window with a grenade. Charlie locked the door to save Desmond and sacrificed himself.

I'm not really sure why he did it - there should've been time to get out - especially since Des was putting the diving equipment together. But even without that it would take less time to swim up to the surface than it did to come down into the station. Maybe he was worried that he had to fill Des' vision down to the letter, or that Des would have ended up killing himself trying to re-establish contact with Penelope.

Regardless, it was a strong way to go out in the season finale. Two new mysteries - whose wake was Jack attending (and no one else) and who was the "he" Kate needed to get back to at the end of the episode. There's no way of knowing, of course - my immediate thought was that it was Locke's wake and Sawyer that Kate had to get back to, but it may very well have been Sawyer's wake and someone new that Kate is involved with post-island.

Whoever the mystery people are, the twist of having the flashforward worked well enough to make those mysteries interesting as opposed to frustrating. Jack's assertions that they "need to go back" and that they made a mistake leaving the island might be a one-off or it might be the writers' new storytelling technique. Either way, I give them credit for adding a fresh twist in the season finale, a satisfying end to a disjointed season.

Countdown 49: More Ebb Than Flow

2007-05-23T16:33:00.000-04:00

Countdown 49: "Stretching the Truth" (Dini, Bedard & Magno).

The fist real misstep in Countdown comes with the third issue, as Dini & Bedard attempt to jam too many sub-plots into one issue. Where last issue wisely focused on one main plot and worked others in around it, Countdown 49 has no main plot, just a series of separate, unconnected scenes. Ideally, of course, these individual plots will intertwine and/or pay-off in future weeks, but as a stand-alone issue Countdown 49 isn't very satisfying.

The issue opens with 5 pages of Jimmy Olsen at Arkham, surviving a Killer Croc attack by doing an apparent Plastic Man impersonation. Unfortunately, it's a padded sequence that reverts to 52's basic square/rectangular-panelled layout with a two-page splash tossed in. Either condense the dialogue to get more bang per panel or vary up the layout to avoid a monotonous progression. Other than Jimmy's apparent stretch-action, there's nothing of consequence in the five pages.

Up next is one of the two most-compelling set-pieces in the issue as we witness the Monitors having a discussion with the Vigilante Monitor who offed the Joker's daughter, Duela, back in Countdown 51. The sequence offers both a recap of Duela's death, a debate between the Monitors as to the actions of Vigilante Monitor, and a glimpse of his next intended targets: Jason Todd, Kyle Rayner, and Donna Troy. Vigilante Monitor's argument is that even the small anomalies in the multiverse can lead to Crisis events and he charges his fellow Monitors are bothered less by what he does than that he breaks protocol in doing it: "You real complaint," he accuses, "is that I didn't ask permission." I'm still not 100% where the Monitor angle is going (is this guy being set up to be the new Anti-Monitor?) but I'm enjoying it because it gives a top-down look at the events of the series.

The strong Monitor sequence is followed by a 2-page bit between Red Arrow and Karate Kid that adds nothing substantive, but does provide some of the best dialogue of the issue as the two try to get under the other's skin.

A five-page check-in with the Rogues is next, as Piper and Trickster attempt to prove their loyalty to Mirror Master by having a multi-millionaire transfer 100 million dollars to Mirror Master's account and then jumping into the water and kill himself. The key to the Rogues plot throughout Countdown so far is whether Piper and Trickster are fully back on the bad-guy side of the morality-line. It's a clumsy sequence that continues to give evidence on both sides and along with the Jimmy Olsen portion of the book is the weakest part of the issue.

The issue finishes with it's second strongest sub-plot as Mary Marvel runs into a building in Gotham to escape some thugs only to find Black Adam hiding out inside. The appearance of Black Adam at least ends the issue on an up-note, as the character was the one breakout star from 52.

On the whole, however, this was a down issue because it's just five separate sub-plot s placed one after another. If the writers had taken one of the plots and used it as the backbone of the issue (like last week) then at least there would have been a sense of real progression instead of five mini-steps forward.

Countdown 50: Joker's Pal Jimmy Olsen

2007-05-21T14:36:00.000-04:00

Countdown 50: "Last Laugh" (Dini, Palmiotti/Grey & Calafiore).

I'm tempted to write, "Here we go again," after reading the second issue of DC's new weekly series, Countdown. Like last year's 52, I'm already hooked into the story, intrigued by how this might all play out, but after being burned by the lackluster second-half of 52 I wonder if I should hedge my bets and keep my enthusiasm in check this time around.

I don't want to suggest that Countdown is off to a blistering pace, but rather that two issues in I'm definitely hooked into the story. Wisely, Head Writer Paul Dini and issue writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray keep things relatively simply and straight-forward. Part of having a huge cast that spans the DCU is giving the audience an anchor that we can latch onto; otherwise there's no real difference between Countdown and an anthology.

So far, so good. There's four basic plots moving right now: Jason Todd, the Rogues, Mary Marvel's loss of powers, and this issue's inclusion of Jimmy Olsen, Daily Planet Reporter. There's already a good sense of momentum in Countdown, something that 52 struggled to maintain.

But again, we're only two issues in.

What I like about this issue and the reason why I have high hopes for this series, however, is that Dini & Co. don't have a group of separate, unconnected plots moving along at their own pace. Last issue's Jason Todd/Duela/Monitor plot morphs nicely into this issue's Jimmy Olsen attempt to report on Duela's murder. He starts by visiting Jason Todd (with a nice assist from Supes), then move on to visit the Joker at Arkham Asylum. Olsen is a competent reporter but he doesn't have all the pieces figured out and while Jimmy isn't a moron, he's not Batman, either, which makes him a compelling character in that we're likely going to be able to figure this out with Jimmy step-by-step. It's a strong sequence and the focus of the issue, with brief asides to check in on Mary Marvel, a repeat of the Val Armorr v. Batman throwdown from the ongoing JLA/JSA crossover (we didn't really need 4 pages of this), and the Rogues.

As long as Dini & Co. continually work these plots around one another the overall story will keep moving forward and it will be easier to keep momentum rolling and reader interest high.

I think it's interesting that the primary focus of Countdown, so far, have largely been characters without superpowers: Jimmy, Jason, Mary, Trickster. That can't be unintentional, can it? I wonder if this will become an issue or if it's just a coincidence.

Fallen Son, Chapter 3: Pretty Pictures, Stupid Words

2007-05-20T23:30:00.000-04:00

Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America 3 (of 5): "Bargaining" (Loeb & Romita, Jr.)

I'm not going to beat this into the ground, but Fallen Son 3 continues the trend of the opening two issues - weak writing, great art. Unlike previous issues, however, this is the first one to actually get me kinda upset.

The whole idea of this series is allegedly to show how people react to the death of Captain America, but the actual series seems less interested in examining Cap's death as it does simply touching base with a bunch of different characters. I hate to say it, but the whole series is really starting to feel like a market grab, more gimmick than high concept, and it's a shame that such beautiful art is being wasted on Loeb's half-assed attempt to actually tell a story that moves beyond surface-oriented melodrama.

"Bargaining" revolves around Clint Barton's attempt to get answers from Tony Stark about Cap's death, and Loeb and Bill Roseman (the book's editor) come off as not having read New Avengers 30. Now, given how close the two books are to one another that's not surprising, of course, but it doesn't appear they got the memo that the Bendis-controlled Clint Barton of today is not the Hawkeye of 20 years ago. That's bad in-house editing by Roseman to either not be aware of how Bendis was going to handle Clint or not understand it.

Clint wants answers ... fine. Clint goes after Stark ... fine. Clint gets convinced by Stark to run around in Cap's costume ... stupid. Clearly there's a time gap between what happened in New Avengers 30 last week and whenever this issue slides into continuity because Stark is aware that Clint is hanging with the New Avengers, but where did all of Clint's detached anger go? They're like two different characters.

And if it's revealed that this book fits into a continuity spot where Bendis' Clint has become this declawed, well-adjusted, willing-to-be-seduced-by-Stark version of New Avengers 30, I'll take all that back. But even if that becomes the correct version of the character, the story itself never rises to the occasion.

Loeb compounds the error in judgment over the costume by having him get a talking-to from Patriot and the Katie Bishop Hawkeye from the Young Avengers. Clint doesn't need a lesson in what it means to be Captain America or why it's wrong for anyone else to put the costume on - Bendis' Clint was all about "No way will I ever work for Stark's corporate muppet puppets" and then this week we see him flirting with doing just that.

I'm not the kind of guy who's a slave to continuity - I spend no time trying to figure out how Spider-Man can be everywhere he is - but I do like character consistency, especially when it's week-to-week.

I can't say Fallen Son 3 is a bad issue because John Romita, Jr.'s art is typical JRJR Goodness, but Loeb's writing here is incredibly weak. The only part of the issue that works is the last few pages when Clint rejects the idea of being the new Captain America. Even then it's based on the faulty set-up that Clint could be seduced by Stark's appeal, but at least by the end Clint is on the aggressive. The problem, however, is that Bendis' Clint wanted to "shove the Registration Act up Tony Stark's ass" and Loeb's Clint is content to do a little amateur psychoanalysis. Bendis' Clint is a man who has been seriously affected by having been killed by a long-time friend and teammate and Loeb's Clint has been snatched out of some distant past.

When you screw up a character this bad - not isn't this Bendis' Clint, it's not Thunderbolts Clint or West Coast Avengers Clint, either - it means you've really got to nail the story and Loeb doesn't do that, either. Loeb's Clint Barton feels like it's based on a memory and not from any first-hand experience with what the character has been doing for the last decade.

Or two.

Mighty Avengers 3: Old School Throwdown

2007-05-20T22:38:00.000-04:00

Mighty Avengers 3 (Bendis & Cho).

It's turning out to be a good month for Avengers.

After Bendis delivered his best single issue of Avengers to date with New Avengers 30 last week, he follows up with this week's strong Mighty Avengers 3.

While it might be too simple to say Bendis writes New Avengers to indulge himself and Mighty Avengers to placate old school fans, there's no doubting the clear differences between the two books that go beyond New being anti-SHRA outlaws and Mighty being a more traditionally set-up and executed superhero comic.

Mighty Avengers 3 continues the series' opening arc, centered around the appearance of a new Female Ultron emerging from the disappearance of Iron Man. Not a lot happens on the Femtron front in terms of figuring out who she is, where she's from, or what exactly happened to Tony, but there is plenty of smart action and solid character bits.

On the action front there's a killer bout between Sentry and Femtron that works both on a visceral level but also on a character level. It's good fun to see the two smashing each other across the city, but it also serves to show Sentry getting angrier and angrier as Femtron works him over both physically and mentally.It's fun to see Sentry finally cut loose, but there's never a feeling Femtron is in any danger. In fact, the fight comes across as Femtron probing and studying Sentry. Before they throw down, Femtron asks, "Robert Reynolds. With 'the power of a thousand exploding suns.' What will it take to kill someone like you?"

The hovering SHIELD Helicarrier gets in on the fun, too. There's a cool sequence of the energy getting lost and the Helicarrier plunging towards the ground where Sentry stops in, then with the help of other Avengers rights it and places it safely on the ground. In the process, however, Agent Hill (now in charge with Stark's disappearance) gets knocked cold. There's a bit of back and forth with the SHIELD troops on who exactly is in charge which plays a bit false (it doesn't seem like a tight chain-of-command wouldn't be in place aboard the Helicarrier) but ends with Black Widow taking charge when she reveals she's a "Level 10" SHIELD agent, making her the highest ranking agent aboard.

It's great to see Natasha back in charge; in terms of who's most qualified and most ideal for an Avengers leader, Natasha doesn't rank far behind Captain America. Trained by both KGB and SHIELD, she's got more field experience leading operations than probably anyone in the Marvel Universe, which is only enhanced by having worked both sides of the Cold War political fence.

The juxtaposition of Black Widow's confident leadership skills and Ms. Marvel's self-doubt works effectively. Ms. Marvel's opening day as team leader ("Worst first day as Avengers leader ... EVER," she muses late in the issue) continues to spiral downhill, as she's outshined by both the Widow and the Wasp, another former team leader. Jan falls somewhere between the other two women - like Carol she inwardly struggles with what to do, but like Natasha she's primarily outwardly cool. Word balloons help get this across to the reader.

Much has been made of Bendis' decision to bring back the thought balloon and up to now it's been more flash than sizzle, as Bendis has used the thought balloon basically for funny asides. In issue 3, however, he picks up his game, using the thought balloon to raise the tension the team is feeling standing face-to-face with Femtron. It's a credit to Bendis and Ultron's history that this team of heavyweights is as concerned as they are with a new Ultron - long-standing Avengers Ms. Marvel, Wasp, Wonder Man, and Black Widow move through the issue with grim determination and frayed nerves. The word balloons help get the point across - when everyone appears to be telling Jan what to say or do, Jan keeps her cool but her internal monologue snaps and snips at them. Jan's a pro so she doesn't waste mission time by reminding everyone she's not a moron, but because of the thought balloons we see that she's not letting those comments go by unnoticed. Hopefully when the team gets some downtime those comments by her teammates won't remain unchallenged.

Bendis also works Hank Pym - Jan's ex-husband and Ultron's creator - into the mix. Jan calls Hank for help/information but Hank is busy almost-getting-busy with Tigra in his Camp Hammond quarters. While the scene primarily seems included so that Frank Cho can draw Tigra, Bendis also uses it to reinforce Hank and Jan's separation. It's also a nice nod to Hank and Tigra's time together in the West Coast Avengers, though that connection isn't made explicit.

One note on Femtron that I found particularly interesting here. While we don't learn a whole lot about her and she primarily spends her page time in the issue fighting Sentry, when she shuts the energy down aboard the Helicarrier she "signs" her act by having her face appear on all the Helicarrier's monitors. Except, it's not her face, but a classic Ultron face, probably from the Busiek/Perez Era Avengers given the proliferation of Kirby Energy Dots at play in Ultron's mouth.

The issue ends with what looks like an original version Iron Man armor arriving, telling the team, "If you are receiving this message, Tony Stark is dead," which is sorta lame given that we all know he's not really dead. But hey, any excuse to see the old steel grey suit (or at least a modified version of it) works for me, though if Bendis was interested in building some Avengers street-cred he'd have used the Layton Armor.

A really fun, solid comic - plenty of fighting action and character interaction. The team dynamic is working so well I hope that when Stark comes back his time spent with the Mighty Avengers is less rather than more.

Thunderbolts 114: What Happened to All the Words?

2007-05-20T22:21:00.001-04:00

Thunderbolts 114: "Faith in Monsters, Part 5" (Ellis & Deodato).

This week's comic that took 42 seconds to read is Thunderbolts 114. It's a classic bridge comic, needed to get all the pieces from the interesting set-up in 113 to the big fight in 115 without adding much of anything, really.

Here's what happens: the Thunderbolts go after the Steel Spider in downtown Phoenix to arrest him, while at the same time American Eagle goes after the Steel Spider in downtown Phoenix to have a chat with him, while at the same time Sepulchre just so happens to be walking down the street of downtown Phoenix.

Yaaaaaaaaaaawn.

There are 12 pages in the issue with no significant words - some are splash pages, some employ silent panels, and some have words that don't add anything to the story: identifying tags on the characters, or dialogue like, "AUFFF," "NNAAAAA!," and one three-panelled page that includes one word balloon in each in which Moonstone says, "AAOW!," "AAAAAA," and "AAAAIIIII."

There's nothing that says a writer has to use words, of course, but the way the TBolts interact with one another has been one of the positives of Ellis' run, so to have an issue where he gives us nothing makes this issue feel like a way to pad the TPB. I know creators must get sick of that complaint from fans, but that's what Thunderbolts 114 feels like - other than a brief conversation between American Eagle and Steel Spider where the former is trying to reason with the latter, who's too concerned with the approaching TBolts to really get into it, and an even shorter exchange later between Songbird and Radiocative Man about how they'll handle this "like we used to" there's really no words in the entire text that add anything to Mike Deodato's pretty pictures.

Thunderbolts 114 would've been a perfect place to hear from Swordsman or Norman Osborn about their thoughts on the team or the mission that would work over the top of the action. With a book jammed with this many characters, it's a shame Ellis let this opportunity to explore one of them pass on by in favor of putting pieces in place is a shame.

A down issue after four solid episodes in the "Faith in Monsters" arc.

Um, Wow, Nova Got Good Real Quick Like

2007-05-20T22:21:00.000-04:00

Nova 2: "Alienation" (Abnett/Lanning & Chen).

The first issue of the latest Nova series was pretty lame.

The second issue is pretty great.

I've been racking my brain since I finished reading the issue ten minutes ago trying to remember the last time I was so disappointed in issue one of a series and so hopeful after reading the second issue and I'm having a hard time thinking of anything that comes close to the dramatic upswing Nova just took.

The first issue was all wham! bang! action with too much self-doubt and the Richard Rider there didn't resemble the Richard Rider from Annihilation we'd just read. The second issue, however, gives us a confident Rich that has his act together, and Rich feels like the guy who just led the United Front during Annihilation.

Here, Rich comes to Earth for some R&R and immediately heads to his parents' home in Long Island; other than a ridiculously melodramatic father, Abnett & Lanning don't force everything down our throats - that alone makes this issue significantly better than last issue. The Riders start to fill in Rich on what has happened during Civil War when Iron Man and SHIELD stop by to investigate the energy readings he gave off when entering Earth's atmosphere. Both Tony and Rich are surprised to see each other and they head back to a SHIELD Helicarrier to chat.

Nova 2, then, serves as the crossing point of the Civil War and Annihilation Wave events. Rich and Tony's conversation entails a bit of "my war was bigger than your war" posturing, but it doesn't spin out of control. Both men feel comfortable in their respective suits of armor and Abnett & Lanning do a good job of getting both sides across here; it's not that Tony and Rich are on opposite sides of an argument, but rather that they are both (rightly) absorbed in their own recent histories. In shared universes there's often little acknowledgment of the activities of other characters and here that lack of knowledge is dealt with instead of washed over. I always take it as a sign of good writing when a writer can create story moments from situations others would likely skate right past, and A&L do that here.

A&L also hit the right notes elsewhere; they take the opportunity to have Stark make a pitch for Rich to join the Initiative, and Stark recognizes that the training methodology Rich has experienced in the Nova Corps is exactly what he wants to employ with the Initiative.

Rich has a conversation with Justice about the New Warriors, and Justice tries to sell Rich on joining up with the Initiative, too. I was thrilled to see the two of them have a conversation (because it seems natural they would), though I thought Justice tried to sell Rich on the Initiative a little too hard given that Rich was just learning of the deaths of two of his ex-teammates, Namorita and Night Thrasher, in the Stamford Incident that started the Civil War. That small complaint aside, however, it was a well-conceived and executed scene by both A&L and artist Sean Chen, taking place on the deck of the Helicarrier which helped to set the tone for just how much things have changed.

By issue's end Diamondhead shows up to throw down and Rich takes him out, then brings him to a police precinct for booking, only to have the cops as less than grateful for his assistance, ending the interview by asking for his registration papers. Rich bugs out but finds the Thunderbolts waiting for him outside. The ending rings false for a couple reasons - one, A&L used the "step outside" bit earlier with Stark arriving at his parent's house, and two, I'm not really sure why the Thunderbolts are being deployed for a disturbance in NYC when they're based in Colorado, though maybe continuity-wise it takes place pre-move to Colorado.

Weakness of the TBolts arrival aside, it does set up a meeting between Rich and another of his ex-teammates, the once happy-go-annoying Speedball who has become the self-mutilating Penance.

Nova 1 had me thinking of Nova 2 as an afterthought, but Nova 2 has me looking forward to Nova 3 with much anticipation. After last issue I thought the only thing worth checking into Nova for was Sean Chen's gorgeous art, but now I'm interested in the story, as well.

I'm pleasantly stunned Nova got this good, this quick.

New Avengers 30: Bendis Recenters the Marvel Universe

2007-05-20T22:10:00.000-04:00

New Avengers 30: "Revolution: Part Four" (Bendis & Yu).

New Avengers 30 is the single-best issue of Avengers that Brian Bendis has written and the issue stakes a claim to the New Avengers being the unquestioned center of the story that is the Marvel Universe.

Part of this is due to all sorts of rumors and hype floating around that the Summer 2008 Mega Event really starts here, but it's more than simple hype. In New Avengers 30 Bendis writes with energy, with a purpose, with anger and frustration boiling through the characters as the impact of the New Avengers' decision to not sign the Superhuman Registration Act finally sinks in on them. They're cut off from everyone else, on their own, without outside support and Bendis makes it clear here that it's not just an empty protest by the team or an empty idea by him.

Tony Stark and Spider-Man finally ask the question fans have been asking: What do the New Avengers hope to accomplish? Stark pleads with the team that he can't see but knows is there to tell him what ending they envision: "What do you think the end of this story is? Because if you know an ending better than the one I can think of ... please tell me. Please let me in on it." And Bendis, through Luke Cage, has an answer that gives the book real direction; Cage lays out all that's happened since the New Avengers formed: that someone let the villains out of the Raft, that there's something severely rotten inside SHIELD, that there's something rotten in HYDRA, that Nick Fury has gone underground, and that the government turned the heroes against one another with the Civil War that led to Captain America's death: "And all of a sudden it all went backwards on us real fast. [...] I'm steaming because I think there's a lot more going on here. I feel manipulated. I feel someone pulling my strings. SHIELD, HYDRA, our Secret War, the Civil War ... I think they're connected. Do you? And does that idea scare the holy crap out of you?"

In two panels and one monologue Bendis basically says to fans, "You want to know the story of the Marvel Universe? Here's where it's going to happen."

To Bendis' credit, too, Cage's passionate plea isn't immediately embraced by the rest of the team. Iron Fist and Spidey both question what they're doing and what they will do and it's Wolverine who breaks it up by reminding them the Maya Lopez situation is still lingering in Japan. It finally feels like Bendis has the team dynamic down; he can write snappy dialogue coming out of anyone's mouth but here there is finally the feeling that he gets each character as individuals and how those individuals relate to one another. This is an incredibly tense situation and that effects everyone differently and the characters here come across as real individuals.

And then, in the middle of all this, a stranger walks out of the darkness and up to the door of Strange's residence and just like that Clint Barton returns to the Avengers.

Clint was handled perfectly in a quick but dense sequence. There was a sense of calm and weariness to him that just flat-out worked for me. Clint's been dead and he's back and he is still a little freaked by it, but it doesn't manifest itself through anger but rather through the calmness of a man who's gotten answers that he didn't want but is living with. And yet, while he's changed he still felt like Clint to me, and he had the best lines in the book. His arrival causes a disruption in the team - Cage wants no part of him, thinking he's a Stark spy, and Wolverine clearly wants a fight when Clint arrives, asking him if he found the Scarlet Witch. Clint says no, Wolvie does his "I can smell a lie bit" and Clint tells them, "What I found isn't going to do anyone any good" and then adds, "Do I really have to hash through all that House of M crap now? [...] I'd rather look forward, you know?"

Despite how world-weary he's feeling, Clint's humor comes through, saying to Spider-Man, "Saw you on TV $%#@ing up your whole life, Peter," and asking the team, "So what are you guys? The New Defenders?" Cage gets in his face, calling him out as an "old school Avenger" and asking why he isn't with the rest of them on Stark's side of the conflict. Clint's answer is calm but forceful, the voice of someone who watched his friends tearing each other apart from the outside: "With Tony Stark and his corporate puppet muppet babies? Yeah? No." Cage get more in his face and his anger starts to boil over; he thinks Clint is lying and Clint, instead of getting back in Cage's face as he would've in his younger days, simply steps aside, telling them he'll leave and they can get back to doing whatever they were doing.

Strange wants him to stay, but Clint has his own agenda: "I'm going to do whatever the hell I can to honor Captain America's worldview. The guy meant everything to me, and if I was here to stop the war, I would have. With a bullet if I had to." When Peter tells him they were Cap's team, Clint's answer is subdued but as righteous as Cage's earlier monologue: "Yeah?" Clint asks the team. "And what are you doing about it? Why aren't you storming that Avengers "Tower" and shoving the Superhuman Registration Act up Tony Stark's @#$?"

Peter tells him, "We're doing that on Saturday," and Wolverine adds, "Tonight we're going to Japan." The beauty of this sequence isn't just Bendis' quick-hitting dialogue, but the way Yu lays this all out with his pencils. When Peter and Logan do the Saturday/Japan bit Yu's got the back of Clint's head silhouetted in the foreground and the entire New Avengers lined up looking at him in the background, so it carries the weight of the entire team. For the first time post-Civil War this really feels like a team and not just a collection of individuals. Cage still wants no part of letting Clint in, but now he's got Strange, Peter, and Logan against him and Clint's interest is piqued. Cage still wants him gone and Clint is cool with leaving, not wanting to cause waves, but then Jessica Drew joins the chorus and Strange casts the Spell of Tartashi on everyone to prove that they are all in this together.

Cage finally relents and tells Clint to "Get your Hawkeye on and come with," but Clint tells him simply, "I'm not Hawkeye anymore." And with that the mystery of the new Ronin is solved.

I really like how Bendis handled Clint and I think he really could be the missing piece to make this team click. Having one "old school Avenger," as Cage put it, gives the team a link to the past that they need for balance if not credibility. Part of what separates the New and Mighty Avengers is the question of what makes an Avenger, and Clint, being old school but hanging with the new crowd should provide an important insight into that question. And yes, I'd rather see him back in the purple than in the black, slinging arrows instead of wielding a sword, but his whole "I'm not Hawkeye anymore" makes sense to me given everything that's happened to him, and I'm less concerned with the exterior costume than I am with the interior person and I like what little I've seen here.

The stuff that follows in Japan is almost anti-climatic but there is finally the sense that Bendis has this cannon loaded, aimed, and ready to fire. New Avengers now feels like the center of the Marvel Universe. The happy face that gets put on the Initiative is going to get called out here. I no longer question why Spider-Man or Wolverine are on this team; their anti-SHRA stance makes them perfect teammates to take on the status-quo. I can't wait to see where Bendis takes this gathering storm of momentum. I hope he can deliver bcause this is a team ready to get some answers.

New Avengers 30 is a dense book jammed with a range of issues and it is a great, great issue.

Countdown: Continuing DC's Fascination with the Multiverse

2007-05-20T22:09:00.000-04:00

Countdown Week 51: "Look to the Skies" (Dini & Saiz).

Countdown begins DC's second year-long weekly series in a row, following up the once-promising but ultimately disappointing 52. It remains to be seen if Countdown will benefit from lessons learned from 52, of course, but initial indications are promising.

For starters, where 52 had a host of writers and one main artist (Keith Giffen doing breakdowns and a new penciller each will doing the finishes), Countdown has one clearly defined head writer (Paul Dini) and a rotation of artists. I think is the better move - better to have writing consistency than artistic consistency.

Dini sets a different tone for Countdown right at the start of the issue; where the tagline for 52 was "a year without Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman," it was also a year without major villainous threats. Luthor provided some early villainy and there was the Island of Mad Scientists but there was never a real sense of a major active threat. Dini lets everyone know that's not the case here, opening with Desaad and Darkseid, but the remainder of the issue touches base with a new batch of second-and-lower tier characters: Duela (Joker's daughter from an alternate universe), Jason Todd (Robin from an alternate universe), Mary Batson, Trickster, and Pied Piper.

I don't have a problem with non-A-listers, at all; in fact, I think using them often opens up stories in ways the superstars don't. The main cast of the series will supposedly include the above (minus Duela, who's killed in issue 51) plus Donna Troy, Jimmy Olsen, Kyle Rayner, and Karate Kid. Note that while Supes, Bats, and WW are still not main players in the weekly series, Dini has included one character from each of the Big Three's extended family: Jimmy Olsen (Superman), Jason Todd (Batman), and Donna Troy (Wonder Woman). Plus, there's the tie to Green Lantern (Rayner), Flash (Trickster and Piper) and the Marvels (Mary), so DC appears to be hedging their bets in terms of which lower tier characters they choose to use. If the characters employed here really take off then they'll get a shot at their own series, I'm sure, but if they only bump up a little (if there are no breakout stars) then the core titles of the DCU will benefit from their higher profiles.

I wonder, too, if this is the last ride of Kyle Rayner. Or at least the last chance. After serving as the one and only Green Lantern for a few years, Kyle was dumped in favor of the return of Hal Jordan and now while Hal's got the Green Lantern book and the returned Corps has the GL Corps book, Kyle calls himself Ion and, well, I have no idea what he's been up to lately. When a character has had a few years in the spotlight and then is demoted like this, they enter that weird state of Creative Purgatory where maybe they get used here or there but they cease to become a player in their universe. It's not really Kyle's fault that Ron Marz can't write but if Kyle fails to spark the imagination of DC readers during the next year ... you know that editorial are always looking for deaths for events like this and it wouldn't surprise me if Kyle is sacrificed for sales towards the end of this series (or shortly thereafter) if he doesn't step up and resonate during Countdown.

The plot of Countdown appears more focused, as well; instead of the "52 ... 52 ... 52" weirdness where there were all these separate plots rolling along at their own speed and no real cohesion between them, Countdown offers a more cohesive threat. At the Source Wall, Monitors (sort of Multiverse Policemen) are receiving messages like a "Great Disaster" is coming and "Ray Palmer" is the solution. One of the Monitors (perhaps a rogue) kills Duela because she's in a reality that was not her original home. So he's got it in for the alts, which puts all other alternate-universe characters at risk.

All of which brings up a question for me, though - Why is DC so damn obsessed with the Multiverse? They shrink it, they expand it, they make it vague, they clarify it ... I said last week that the idea that there's only 52 realities is the height of silliness. At this point ... I guess I'd be happy to read a story without any multiverse implications. But maybe they can pull me in.

I haven't said yet if I liked the issue or not and to be honest it's too soon to tell. The issue, as a stand-alone piece of literature, is more good than bad. Some of the sub-plots work (Mary Batson, Jason Todd), some don't (Trickster, Pied Piper), and some it's too soon to tell (Darkseid, the Monitors). We haven't even sniffed half of the main actors in this drama, yet. I'm happy to say that all the production values here are first-rate and while this is a weekly series, DC has dumped the too-gimmicky-for-52-issues "real time" style of storytelling in favor of traditional concurrent storytelling.

One last note - I don't know Dan Didio much at all, but his "DC Nation" columns are an embarrassment. It's okay to be constantly upbeat and it's okay to sell your comics, but he comes across as a QVC salesman trying to convince you that Wolfgang Puck's kitchen equipment is the most amazing invention in the history of the world.

At some point all of that hype just sounds empty. "Now that you've picked your jaw off the floor after reading COUNTDOWN 51," he screeches through black-on-gold print, "don't hesitate to tell your friends and enemies to go buy the comic." He's one exclamation point short of being Tom DeFalco, and there's no need for that high-level sell job - even if you were super-thrilled by the issue, there's nothing "jaw dropping" about it. It looks like you've got a winner here, Dan, so do the soft sell and let the book sell itself. You'll sell more comics and turn less fans against you.

The Initiative 2: Guilt & Motivation

2007-05-19T00:04:00.000-04:00

Avengers: The Initiative 2: "Hero Moment." (Slott & Caselli).

Avengers: The Initiative is quickly becoming a favorite. While the idea of creating a mass superhuman army still creeps me out, Dan Slott is doing an excellent job showing the good and bad of having a superhuman boot camp. With everyone still reeling from last issue's death of MVP, Hydra attacks the President's ranch in Crawford, Texas.

There are four individual groups at play in The Initiative: recruits, trainers, scientists, and administrators, and Slott manages to give them all a bit of page time. The focus of this issue, however, is Henry Pym.

Pym is the one character in The Initiative who bounces between roles - as a scientist he's creating clones, but he's also part of the Camp Hammond administration, and he's out in the field training the new recruits. In Initiative 2, Pym gets too close to Trauma, whose powers work on other people's fear. Trauma has trouble controlling his powers, which leads to him first siphoning off Cloud 9's fear of being the cause of MVP's death, and then morphing into a beaten version of Hank's ex-wife Janet. It's interesting that Janet's roughed-up appearance is closer to the truth of Ultimate Janet than Marvel Janet, but Trauma's powers don't necessarily depict the truth of a person's history but rather the truth of a person's fear. Not to excuse Hank from slapping Janet, of course, but there is a physical difference in the result of being slapped once or repeatedly punched. We see that Hank's fear of losing control and slapping Janet manifests itself as physically much worse than what happened.

Initiative 2 serves as the 894th attempt to redeem Hank and, honestly, if the previous work of Englehart and Busiek aren't going to stop people from thinking of the slap when they think of Hank then there's no reason that Pym's redemptive act here - saving the President by crashing the Hydra Carrier - is going to be any different. And it probably shouldn't since Hank seems to be motivated here less out of altruism than by changing people's minds about himself. He wants people to think him a hero and not the guy who slapped Jan or created Ultron, but what damns Hank is that his motivation here is similar to the motivation to create Ultron in the first place - the recovery of his own reputation. The only difference, really, is that this time it worked.

Hank's demons, his inferiority complex, his mood swings, his neediness, his desire to have a golden reputation all help make him such a powerful, interesting character and Slott takes advantage of the full range of Pym's character.

There are several other issues moving through issue 2:

Justice just might end up being the star of this series, caught as he is between the adults and the kids. While technically in administration (he's the recruits counselor), Vance isn't in the inner circle of Stark, Gauntlet, Pym, and Gyrich. He's not told about MVP's death and only learns about it when Trauma morphs into MVP's accusatory corpse. His continued anger at Gauntlet's use of "New Warriors" as a put-down has got to pay-off at some point and it may eventually be a breaking point between the adults and the recruits. Instead of rushing a new New Warriors series out to press, Marvel would probably have been better off if they'd let Slott develop the new New Warriors from the recruits here, eventually breaking away from the Initiative and Camp Hammond to be led by Vance. Such a path would've given the Warriors a good launching point and would have made a good deal of sense.

Trauma believes he's the next washout from the program, but instead of dumping him, Gyrich has hired a secret new tutor to help mentor him. Slott doesn't reveal who it is (saving that surprise for next issue) but it is a female mutant who lost her powers during M-Day. The shadow makes me think it's Dani Moonstar, which would rock, but it could be a whole host of characters. Nice guest appearance by the Beast, too, serving as bodyguard to Trauma's tutor, that's a throwback to McCoy's time on the Avengers when Gyrich was theit government liaison.

Slott also does a good job with making this book feel even more important in the Marvel Universe through all of the extra characters that pop in. We get the Texas Rangers here with speaking parts, but we also see characters like Gargoyle, Ms. Marvel, Wonder Man, and Ultragirl moving through the background of the story. Slott doesn't feel a need to give everyone who appears a speaking role and that's smart.

Strong issue in what it quickly becoming an excellent series.