Spoiler Reviews for Comics from May 23, 2012

ASTONISHING X-MEN #50. The gimmick of the week is here...

***

Ignoramuses are likely none too pleased with this turn of events, but Marvel Comics is making a bold and timely move with the gay interracial marriage of Northstar in the next issue of Astonishing X-Men.  The lead-up to it (oddly out of synch with "regular continuity" but understandably so) involves the corruption and eventual murder(?) of long-standing X-person and mind-dominator Karma, and the fifteenth death of The Marauders.  Overall, plot pacing is standard and the art is at times oddly discomfiting, but this series, kicked off by Joss Whedon and John Cassady, then carried by Warren Ellis for a time, is now in the hands of writer Marjorie Liu and artist Mike Perkins, who seem more than capable of handling this hodge-podge stable of mutants.  This issue stands out because Jean Paul proposes.  Interesting that the choice to make the subplot of Northstar's lovelife brings it to issue 51 rather than the more milestone-ish 50th issue.  Whatever happened to the days of silver foil fold out 50th issues? Ah, budget cuts.

PROPHET #25 - Hints indicating an interesting new take on an Image throwback.

****

Remember the early days of Image Comics?  It's possible you don't recall the first appearance in Youngblood #2 of a certain John Prophet, headgear-sporting quasi-religious fanatic with strangely disproportionate physical features, who went on to carry his own series for a time.  Well, he's back.  And with new issues, it would seem that the direction, in terms of storyline as much as art, has gone in the proper direction.  Issue 25 is part two of the new reboot, apparently being co-written by Brandon Graham, Giannis Milonogiannis and Simon Roy, with Giannis Milonogiannis taking a hand at the art, bearing hints of Barry Windsor Smith's good old days thrown in with something entirely new and different.  I'd long since written off Prophet as a goofy junket from the days when Stephen Platt's art was raging and crashing in useless storylines that involved no substance whatsoever. The story here is still a lot of scenery chewing and Heavy Metal type fantasy tech, but it has a surprising depth, intriguing enough for what it is.

THE MIGHTY THOR #14. Why is it that this happens EVERY time Enchantress makes you breakfast in bed?

****

When you see a writer in mainstream comic books working with characters that he loves, you have to wonder where he will head with the next step, and when he will run out of steam.  Matt Fraction, who spanked the whole planet with FEAR ITSELF, seems most invested in Iron Man (his run with Invincible Iron Man stands as one of the best Marvel's had for old shellhead) and Thor.  The Mighty Thor has been for some time running as the sidequest of Thor returning from death.  With the official return cleared up, we can see that he's exploring Donald Blake's character, apparently a construct by Odin to house the essence of Thor.  Bereft of these godly energies, he's gone in league with long-standing villainess Enchantress to regain his deity status.  As with every single bloody time that someone falls under the sway of Enchantress, he's going to suffer dire consequences.  Meanwhile, Thor is trapped in a dream by nightmare creatures that might take the world tree Yggdrasil by force.  Matt Fraction writes these characters with a steadfast love, and that lends the stories a strong sense of presence.

BATMAN INCORPORATED #1 : Sometimes, Grant Morrison's humor bleeds out all over the floor.

****

You would think that eventually Grant Morrison would run out of ideas for the dark knight. But here, years after reintroducing his son Damian as the new Robin, overseeing Batman's death and Nightwing's attempt at the mantle, and ongoing hints of a world-wide "Batman Incorporated"... we have, at last, Batman Incorporated. It's not immediately clear if it runs in pure current continuity on the "New" Batman comics (it doesn't tie into the Court of Owls), but that doesn't matter. Leviathan, a villain fit for a board room full of nervous supervillains, has set his/her/its sights on Gotham, and that means, in classic Morrison style, a lot of detective work, dramatic battle sequences, and dramatic cliff-hangers.  Keep this series going for as long as Morrison has the ability to write it. 

TEEN TITANS #9: Blah blah blah blah.

**

I swear to God, I'm not sure why I keep picking Teen Titans up.  Nostalgia? False hope? Stupidity? If you developed a drinking game for the comic where every time someone said "Culling", "Harvest", or "Ravagers" you took a drink, you'd be drunk in two pages.  I get that there are divergent writing styles and even divergent readers (perhaps the main audience for this title are teenagers who need plot points repeated ad nauseum), but the storyline in this new run of Teen Titans is abysmal (and the art, while flashy, is uninspiring).  Somehow a government agency has been co-opted by Harvest, a megalomania-flavored supervillain with zero common sense or character-depth, and superpowered teens are being collected and pitted against one another in "the Culling" to create a team called The Ravagers (coming soon).  There are few, if any consequences to actions in the comic, not counting the introduction and pointless death of Artemis.  A brief hint at certain elements of Vertigo's Doom Patrol (remember the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E.?) lured me in, but this exposition-addled constant slugfest (drawing in the conversely more interesting Legion Lost into its mess) has lost me for good.  I feel nothing for any character or action in the series, and the break-neck pacing and unnatural dialogue hardly gives a reader time to.

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #9: Don't say the s-word.

****

This issue does a fine job of old-school comic book pacing mixed with the hard edge one should expect from Justice League Dark.  Steve Trevor enlists the aid of John Constantine and his occult friends in undoing the mystic dowager Jack Faust's schemes.  This issue also introduces Black Orchid to the team (last seen being brutally murdered in the pages of Swamp Thing long long ago), and reintroduces the Books of Magic to the DC Universe.  Jeff Lemire's script gives each character a distinct voice, and Mikel Janin's artwork lures us into re-evaluating each page over and over.  Still a solid comic book, despite a brief bump in the cross-over of previous issues, it seems like this title could outstrip many others in the universe in terms of captivating audiences with unexpected twists. Just don't call it "a superhero book" to its face.

IRREDEEMABLE #37: The final issue and a metaredemption.

*****

Mark Waid is evil. He said so himself. He plastered a comic book convention with the words.  The final issue of his interesting twist on heroes and villains, Irredeemable, was unpredictable but not in an upsetting way.  The villain of the story, once the world's mightiest hero The Plutonian, saves the day with assistance from his supergenius friend Qubit (now modified with Modeus), and in the end, after brutalizing the planet for issue upon issue, is somehow redeemed.  The manner in which this happens is reminiscent of the series penchant for metanarrative and lo-cal social commentary.  So far as superhero genre-busters go, this was a fine run for Waid, who when he finally got to the point (destroying city after city along the way), proved why he's an industry heavyweight who can stand apart from the mainstream and still genuinely love and invest in its tropes.

Remember when Grant Morrison had a similar scene in All Star Superman?

15 hour Avengers Party.

The idea was simple.  For twenty American dollars plus tax apiece, Mr. So and I would partake of fifteen hours of comic book movies.  The offer stood as Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and finally, at midnight, the long-anticipated Avengers (in 3D), written and directed by this summer's cinema success story, Joss Whedon.

I got this swag.

When the first film (Iron Man) ends, a sweaty female attendant with a broken voice informs the theater that parking will only be validated for four hours.  A mild panic rises in the crowd when a rumor passes around that the show is going to exclude The Avengers itself. A quick check on the cell phone confirms the film is indeed playing.  Calm returns.

The crowd consists of much as you might expect: largely male population, with standard skinny bespectacled nerds, geeks that choose to wear their Captain America hoodies or thrift-store condition Avengers t-shirts (thus being the guy at the concert that's wearing the t-shirt of the band that's playing at the concert), a handful of stoner stereotypes, dorks that bred and brought their precocious children, and of course, samples of America's grossly obese, providing the sour milk fat flesh fold smell that over the course of the day sinks into the theater like scared-skunk stink.  Swag in the form of buttons and posters are passed out.

We're all sold on it.

What's not to like?

Admittedly, the only movies of the bunch that I go into the event having already seen are the Iron Man films, due in one part due to an odd affection for Jon Favreau, in another part because of an active attempt to avoid the genre of superheroes as much as humanly possible.  So often one gets burned. Ask anyone that has ever seen Spider Man 3.  In the cocaine-fueled executive rage for commercial success, many comic book adaptations could easily be viewed as escapism done wrong, a less refined, mostly immature attempt at pandering to the lowest common denominator, resulting in critical flip-floppers.

Most of all what I never enjoyed was the preening sense of inevitability concerning militarism that the Marvel franchise seems to endorse in each film it makes, while simultaneously (and only sometimes) pretending it does the opposite.

The Edward Norton version of Hulk doubles down on the concept of military run amok to the point of absurdity, blowing up a college campus with no accountability, while the Thor movie mythologizes it with a sanitized and shiny Asgard run by Anthony Hopkin's master Kenneth Branaugh (and in this you could extrapolate Thor being the brutish America proxy, Loki being the snotty British Gog, and the entire Middle East as a frosted mirror-glass land of the Frost Giants).

This uneasy feeling of being sold a toy of the military industrial complex is reinforced as we are treated to the same opening sequence of commercials six times at the event.  An ad for the Navy, an ad for the Navy-sponsored boardgame-turned-film Battleship, an ad for the same film, this time sponsored by Coke Zero, an ad for the Marines, an ad for the Hatfields vs. the McCoys on TNT (Kevin Costner in a bloodfeud), an ad for the new remake of Dallas (the words BLOOD and FEUD and BATTLEGROUND flash on the screen, almost subliminal), then a review of each preview, plus an oddly racist Ultrabook ad.  All of that, six times over.

Imagine an army of Purple Hulks.

So the twelve hours and five movies pass, with twenty minute breaks between films, and we devour the food we snuck in, sip on caffeinated beverages loaded with vitamin B and Guarna and Taurine, and I can feel myself becoming accustomed to the changing eye-patches of Nick Fury in each post-credits teaser, and I can see that the people involved are attempting to make something more than a two hour long advertisement for the military industrial complex, but at the end of the day, they're stuck in a system they never named, but were made by, much as in the Captain America movie, where after being dosed as a super-soldier, he spends the first stretch of his career spinning propaganda on the newsies.

When a true subliminal flashes after the word "compassion" at a certain point (Thor, I believe), I recall the recent Star Trek remake, where James T. Kirk's older father-proxy tries to convince him to join Star Fleet after a bar fight. I flash across the crass, commercialized, and crypto-fascist overtones of 300 and the Transformers franchise.  Michael Bay conditioning pods.  Though certain elements of Captain America call to mind the best elements of Star Wars as well as the quality of film making from the era it depicts.  Captain America is the best, most refined of the Marvel movies leading into The Avengers.

About midway through The Avengers, when the S.H.I.E.L.D Hellicarrier raises out of the ocean, I find myself compelled to join the Navy, for some reason.

I also find myself cheering with the crowd around me.

The Avengers, it should be said, calls forth all the elements of a comic book superhero team, and paces them in an order that should be just complex enough to satisfy critics and just simplistic enough to appease brohams.  It's a crowd pleaser. It will break box-office barriers.  I love comics. I know comics.  My conscious attempts at avoiding comic book movies came after a dissatisfaction borne out of constant disappointment.

The Avengers gets it right, in a big way.

[Perhaps that lengthy an exposure to such materials was never intended for public consumption. Perhaps I have overdosed.  I need to start a blood feud, right after I join the Navy.]

I'll admit, all of my resistances were worn down to some degree in the twelve hours leading up to The Avengers, but this is a first rate A+ film for being a comedy, an action movie, and a superhero movie that puts all others to shame.

The Tesseract (which sounds better than Cosmic Cube, perhaps) is our movie's objective correlative, first introduced in Captain America, a limitless power source, and a source of interest for the villain Loki and his unnamed benefactor Thanos (who we only see in the first of two post-credits scenes).

The entire film, I wanted Samuel L. Jackson, playing Nick Fury, to start screaming a litany of curse words, out of nowhere.  SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson (calling to mind Charles Colson) played by Clark Gregg, is the thread running from Iron Man through the rest of the films and on up into The Avengers, where he plays the part of Captain America's biggest fan and, later on, "the avenged".  Scarlett Johansson manages to explain why Black Widow is essential to the team dynamic by being the world's best interrogator.  Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye gets only a few spots to shine in the film, but he uses them effectively.  Bruce Banner is played for the first time by Mark Ruffalo, who does a bang-up job playing the eccentric gamma-irradiated scientist.  Better by far than any previous actor that filled the role, if you want to come down to it.  Tom Hiddleston is the core of the movie as Loki, and in the final analysis is one of the best actors in the film.  Something about Chris Hemsworth as Thor strikes me as a little too simple. Maybe that's the point. He has a good laugh for Thor, it's just that he walks with just the wrong degree of swagger to pull off "god of thunder", in my humble opinion.  Chris Evans, on the other hand, manages to sell Captain America's soldier boy appeal effortlessly, and of course, Robert Downey Jr. embodies Tony Stark to the extent that at certain points it doesn't feel like he's bothered to read the script, he's just channeling a genius billionaire philanthropist from a parallel reality.

Part of what can tell you how good a band is is how well the audience responds to their performance. By that measure, and given that the entire theater withstood fifteen hours of cinema for The Avengers, the movie is a rousing success. Big laughs from the audience.  Spontaneous applause. Bigger action.

Joss Whedon has proven something great about himself this summer.  He's the current nerd king of Hollywood, and we shall all bask in his light until the cycle of cinema degenerates again, in a new flashier more gimmicky Tour de France.

I want to give him a firm handshake for a job well done, right after I sign up for basic training.