Ruse: The Victorian Guide To Murder

Ah, Crossgen comics. I was a pretty big fan back in the day when the company seemed to be really taking off. Come to think of it, Crossgen is probably a big reason for why I became so interested in comics from all kinds of different genres. Each of their books took on a different one.

Scion, Meridian, Sojourn, Way of the Rat...these were comics that I really enjoyed, and they each did their own thing while sharing the thread of "the sigils." It's really too bad that the company imploded like it did.

Probably my favorite Crossgen series was Ruse by Mark Waid and Butch Guice. Simon Archard was a great detective figure and his partner Emma Bishop also made the stories memorable. Wait a moment--why am I speaking of this comic in the past tense? Thanks to Disney's corporate takeover of Marvel, and Disney's preceding purchase of the rights to all things Crossgen, Ruse is still in existence!

Marvel seems to be "testing the water" on the viability of the Crossgen properties with miniseries. From what I can gather, it looks like other minis are taking a whole new approach to the Sigilverse, but I am very hapy to report that Ruse hasn't missed a beat. This is Ruse Volume Two as far as I can tell.

How did they do it? Well, having Mark Waid back to writing about Archard and Bishop is probably the most essential part of it. Guice is back as well, though sadly only on the four covers of the original comics reprinted in this book. Would the book have been a little better with more involvement from the other 50% of the creative team that made Ruse 1.0 a sight to see ten years ago? Yes.  Despite that, The Victorian Guide To Murder is a great continuation of a great comic that was an unfortunate casualty of an overly ambitious comic book company.

Just touching on Guice's replacements on art duties: Mirco Pierfederici handles the bulk of the work, and it's a little mysterious why the third issue has a different artist in Minck Oosterveer.  Mirco has a great art style for the book and Minck's is good but a little more cartoony. It's a little jarring to go between the different styles, but the quality on all four issues is very high.

As to the story, Waid packs an amazing amount of twists and turns into a collection that doesn't even hit the one hundred page mark. Lightbourne, one of Archard's greatest enemies, is unleashing his most ambitious plot for power ever, and Archard just barely solves everything in time. The stakes are high and losses are taken, but Simon Archard and Emma Bishop are still standing by the end of it.

Where it all started in 2001.

It's hard to decide which aspect of Waid's writing here is stronger. Is it the mystery/adventure plotline or the great characterization of Archard and Bishop? Their relationship is fresh; they are always arguing about how to go about their work while recognizing that they really do need to work as a team. There's no romance between them, and for all intents and purposes it appears that Simon Archard is not a man who has time for anything of that sort. They work together and Emma trusts him entirely, even when he sends her to be a fighter in an all-woman bloodsport. Archard's seemingly mad hunches do pay off, and by the way, Emma certainly holds her own in the ring.

After finishing the newest Ruse comics, I could only hope that there are more in the pipeline for 2012.

Avengers Volume One

A new team slapped together just before a major crisis comes blowing through town.

A time traveling journey in which everything is saved just before it can’t be put back together.

Yet another Avengers book written by Brian Michael Bendis.

It’s pretty strange putting my thoughts into words here. I really did enjoy reading this first volume of the relaunched Avengers title, but at the same time there’s no hiding the “been there, done that” factor behind it all.

If I might digress into a tangent, this collection really made me aware of how far off the bandwagon I’ve fallen with the Marvel universe of late. There is simply too much going on and I’m not attached to the storylines enough to try and make head or tail of it all. Marvel puts lists of other trade paperbacks to look into on the inside covers of this book, and this comic is merely one of four Avengers series that are running these days. It’s crazy. 

Avengers isn’t a bad comic by any means, but at the end of the day it’s really just another Avengers series.

Maybe I don’t always ramble on about this sort of thing, but I’m just painfully aware of it as I look through this book.

Kang appears before the Avengers to tell them that time is going crazy again. Some Avengers go into the future with the use of the Protector’s (formerly known as Marvel Boy in the Grant Morrison-penned miniseries) Kree technological prowess. The other team members stay behind in the current timestream as chaos unfolds throughout New York City. Even a version of Galactus shows up for the party.

Thor certainly gets a lot of the spotlight in this book. He seems to be constantly swinging Mjolnir at someone or something.

There’s certainly a lot of characters who appear throughout these six issues. Apocalypse, Galactus, Kang/Immortus, Ultron, the Maestro...that aspect of it is pretty fun. That was actually another thing that reminded me of the Kurt Busiek era of the Avengers. Villains and other characters coming and going at a breakneck pace. 

Time to be honest: I bought this book because John Romita Jr. is the artist. That’s why I don’t care about the New Avengers or the Secret Avengers, Dark Avengers, Mighty Avengers, what have you. I follow JRJR to see whatever he’s up to. He’s one of my favorites. And the Avengers #1-6 certainly show him pouring everything he’s got onto the pages! I couldn’t have been happier with the art. Bendis gave him plenty of things to put into his own signature style. Apocalypse and the horsemen looked great! Thor vs Galactus was epic! Ultron getting blown to smithereens was intense! End the fanboy gushing...

Random gripe time:

One problem I have with this team is that there’s only one woman on it, and she’s pretty stupid. Here’s the roster: Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man, Hawkeye, Captain America, Wolverine, the Protector, and Spider-Woman. I guess I don’t know her character all too well. I know Bendis loves her and I did read the beginning of New Avengers six years ago. I don’t remember her being so dumb back then. Maybe that’s because she was really a Skrull infiltrator? I don’t know. I just wish that this version of the Avengers wasn’t  a man party all the time, with a borderline obnoxious Spider-Woman tagging along.

Here’s a very minor gripe. I feel like John Cassaday designed a truly wonderful Wolverine costume when he started working on Astonishing X-Men. I was really a fan of the Morrison era where he was always wearing the leather jacket, and I remember feeling like Marvel was lame for suddenly reverting and putting everyone back in spandex. But I came to really love the new Wolverine costume. Anyway, there’s one little addition to the costume now that irritated me every time I saw it. He has a red “X” badge on the left side of his chest. What is this? Is this the return of the X-Men commbadge? Is it strictly ornamental? Is it so that his Avengers teammates know that they don’t own all of his time and realize that in any given month he has to appear in at least seven comic books? I’ll stop now...it just looks silly and I wish it wasn’t there.

The last issue is a bigger one. I can never really pinpoint what exactly the problem is, but I know for a fact that I’m just not a very big fan of Brian Michael Bendis’ writing. And I say this as a person who just blogged about how great Scarlet was just a short time ago. I guess I have to look at both books together right now. With Scarlet I was more a fan of the style and storytelling than I was of the actual plot, which I found to be fairly unbelievable. With the Avengers I thought it was a great tried and true big action superhero plot. The issues I was having mainly involved the way that people talked and the way that some characters never really contributed anything important. Kind of opposite problems. I might have to think some more about this and reread some other Bendis stories that I’ve read and really find out what’s going on here. Maybe there’s an answer and maybe there isn’t.

If you’re a fan of the Marvel universe as it is right now, with all of its huge scope, then I’m sure you’ve already read this. If you’re pretty far outside the loop like I am, you’re still guaranteed to have a good time with the Avengers Volume One.

Scarlet Book One

“Revolution!!”

“Rage against the machine.”

“The world is broken and no one will fix it.”

These are all quotes from Brian Michael Bendis’ script for the first issue of Scarlet, which is reprinted as a bonus feature at the end of the collection. The Scarlet Book One Hardcover collects the five comics that reunited Bendis with Alex Maleev for their first major project together since Daredevil. It is far from the typical comic book story, and it’s a kind of yarn that has been all too rare for Bendis since he “hit it big time” and became Marvel’s go-to writer. 

Scarlet Rue is a woman who has been through a lot. She has been victimized by a corrupt society. Sure, there’s plenty of people who have suffered injustice, but hardly anyone is actually able to turn around and say “I’m not going to take this any longer” like she does. Scarlet is going to have to be extreme, and she needs to get results so that she can prove that the world is a place with really huge problems that people seem not to ever notice.

What makes a modern day revolutionary like Scarlet? She once hung around with people in Portland, Oregon who just might have looked like derelicts. They were truly harmless, and Scarlet was in love with one of them, a punkish-looking guy named Gabriel Ocean. A police officer decides to start some trouble, demanding that they empty their pockets because “they must have drugs on them.” Actually, the cop has quite an addiction himself, so anything he finds will be seized for his own private stash. He’s done this kind of thing before. Scarlet and company really don’t have anything and the whole procedure is inappropriate. Gabriel punches the officer...and then a foot chase follows. The end results: Gabriel is shot and killed (and later an online headline falsely proclaims that one of Portland’s “most dangerous drug dealers” has been brought to justice), and Scarlet gets a bullet to the head that doesn’t kill her. She wakes up in the hospital, changed forever. Someone evil has ruined her life and is time for two things now: revenge first, and revolution second. 

Things seem to proceed pretty easily and quickly for Scarlet. She’s making full use of the things that we all use and hear about everyday. A video is posted online of her taking revenge on her boyfriend’s killer, and the following phone conversation between her and the Portland Chief of Police. Enthusiastic supporters participate in a flashmob that gathers hundreds of people in downtown Portland. Scarlet builds herself into a force that cannot be ignored, and Book One promises to show just the beginning of a new kind of revolutionary.

In his introductory notes in his script for Maleev, Bendis remarks that “You’ll also notice that I am using structure and narrative techniques that are anti-cinematic.” This was something that I absolutely loved about Scarlet. It seems like many people tend to think of comics as movies put down on paper. Sure, there is a common visual element, but one has audio and the other has text. And there are plenty of things that can be done in a comic that can’t be accomplished in film. 

Take for instance the way that Bendis and Maleev give nice and tidy recaps of what happened in a character’s life that brought them to where they are now. Plenty of details of Scarlet’s life are told in just three pages. A simple small image and a caption inform the reader of anything from “birth” (a screaming baby fresh from the womb) to “first job” (a teenaged Scarlet standing behind the counter at some kind of a fast food joint) to “first true love” (a dreamy picture of Gabriel).

Scarlet's backstory, told in a way that only comics can.

Another thing that adds to what makes this comic tick is the narrative style. Scarlet directly addresses the reader, breaking down the fourth wall and carefully explaining herself to anyone who wants to know her story. Scarlet actually isn’t the only character who does this: Detective Going also makes her points clearer by drawing the audience in personally. I’m wondering if when Book Two of Scarlet begins being published we will see more and more characters taking part in this kind of narrative device.

I guess that there are some implausible things that are difficult to ignore in Scarlet. I understand that Bendis loves Portland. But I found it kind of hard to believe that she could successfully remain in hiding in a city like that. She’s killed a police detective, she stands out in a crowd, and she never moves from Portland...it shouldn’t be too hard to find her, right? Scarlet makes me feel like the fictional Portland Police Department is pretty much useless, and I can only hope that their real-life counterparts are a little better at their jobs! 

Also in the “stretching credibility” department: Scarlet survives being shot in the head. Okay, this is fine, I guess. It spurs her on to become the person she never expected to be. And I guess an officer could mess up on a headshot. But by the book’s end Scarlet has survived yet another thing that really should have killed her. Let’s just say that a grenade is used and she somehow mysteriously escapes unharmed. It just seemed unlikely to me, that’s all.

Put those things aside and just sit back with a refreshing indie-feeling comic that just so happens to be put out by two of comics’ biggest stars. Both writer and artist are clearly challenging themselves in Scarlet and pushing themselves to do things in new and different ways. Now we can only hope that moving on to Scarlet Book Two remains a priority for Bendis and Maleev. We’ll see how that pans out...the team is already hard at work on a new Moon Knight series, and personally, I’d rather see more of Scarlet.

GI Joe Classic Volume One

I really missed the bandwagon on GI Joe. Well, that's not really true at all. I missed out on the kind of GI Joe that we're talking about here today, what I like to call the "superheroes in the military" GI Joe. See, when I was at the perfect age for collecting GI Joes they were only making the real-life 12 inch figures. I loved them and had a bunch: a Marine with swampland camos, a firefighter with a scruffy beard, and my first and favorite: the snow patrol Army soldier. 

But I realize that to a lot of people GI Joe is something entirely different. Something about the constant threat of Cobra, something about lots of crazy battles, something about a mysterious guy named Snake Eyes. For awhile I was curmudgeonly. When my beloved 12 inch figures with "real" cloth garments and meticulously crafted scale weapons got pushed off the shelves by Dukes and Destros I was pissed. I'll have to look up when exactly that happened. All of a sudden, after laying dormant for a long time, Hasbro brought back the old characters. This was all a threat to "my" GI Joe and I didn't like it.

Well, plenty of time has passed and I'm over it. Sure, I wouldn't mind if Hasbro started doing their military line again, but that's fine. No, I don't have any plans to watch that movie that came out a few years ago, but I'm getting to be a fan of the "Yo, Joe!" part of the franchise now.

And that's all because of IDW's reprint of the old Marvel GI Joe series. I just read volume one of the Classic GI Joe series, and yep, I'm starting to understand the appeal. This was really my first experience with these characters. Literally they were just the names of action figures to me before I read this. I have no experience with the 80's cartoon.

You have to just enjoy GI Joe for its simplicity. A bunch of cool people fight a never ending war against a freaky evil legion. They seem to fight every day of the week. Cobra always sets up some kind of scheme and it always winds up getting ruined by the good guys. In this book they fight everywhere: two issues feature Manhattan battles, they fight in snow, they fight underwater, and (my favorite) they fight in space when a Cobra missile is launched from undersea to blow up a space shuttle that is carrying GI Joe members.

I have a favorite character already: Scarlet. She proves over and over again that she's more than tough enough to hang out with the guys in GI Joe, and she's got plenty of smarts. And she does martial arts and wields a crossbow. Plus one and plus one there. 

Snake Eyes: well yeah, I see why he's so wildly popular now. I mean, just from the visuals he's pretty neat (and I remember how many accessories the figure came packaged with) but as the mystery unravelled I really did want to learn more about him. That was actually a really good issue...a guy named Dr. Venom had Snake Eyes tied up to a torture device from which he could extract a person's thoughts. The goal was to learn the location of the Joes' secret base. But Snake Eyes is so tough that he forces a bunch of other memories to be seen, and Dr. Venom is livid. It was a great way to provide backstory.

And that would be the cue to mention Larry Hama, whom I probably should have mentioned in this post's first paragraph. Hama is known as the architect behind the GI Joe comics. He wrote just about every issue of the comic and always made sure that it was an actual story rather than just an excuse to showcase the latest toys that 80’s generation kids could hope to find at K-Mart that month. What I saw in Classic GI Joe Volume One was the beginning of a saga. Things build up over the issues and most of the characters are pretty interesting. All due credit to Mr. Hama.

As a complete outsider to GI Joe, I was surprised to see that a lot of the characters I knew already weren't around at the inception of the GI Joe comic. There's no Duke or Destro yet, and I considered those guys to be pretty fundamental to the Joe mythology. Oh, and I always liked the way Heavy Duty and Storm Shadow looked too, but didn't get a chance to learn anything about them because they weren't around in issues #1-10. But I realized that these first ten issues were only the beginning of a comic that would go on to have a very long run, telling a very long story. So I guess I'll be glad to read some more and find out just when all of these characters were introduced.

Elektra: Assassin

This post might be even more scatterbrained than they usually are. That would be because I’m not yet exactly sure of how to react to Elektra: Assassin. First of all, I can’t believe that it’s taken me this long to get to reading it. My writing about it would probably greatly benefit from having the chance to reread it a couple of times, but this will serve as a document of my first time through with a really challenging, strange, and exciting comic.

It must have been great to be Frank Miller in 1986. Seriously, nobody could compete with him. He had recently done great work on Daredevil in the Marvel house style. He jumped ship to do Ronin for DC, a project which undeniably laid some groundwork for the one spotlighted here. Then there was the big one...The Dark Knight Returns. Oh, and I almost forgot Daredevil/Elektra: Love and War, the first Frank Miller/Bill Sienkiewicz collaboration. That’s one of those books that I know I read years ago, but you really can’t ask me for a plot summary. I’ll have to revisit that story soon. So with all of this success, Archie Goodwin at Epic Comics probably just figured “What the hell? Why not just let Frank run amok and do whatever he wants with that Elektra character.” And so we got this.

Elektra: Assassin is a comic that I’m surprised came out in 1986. Surprised and yet very, very glad. Epic Comics was a good place to take this, since they were A.) a Marvel imprint, with all of the rights and privileges which that entails, and B.) not held to the censorship of the Comics Code Authority. It let Miller unleash the madcap genius he usually had to be a little careful about. I suppose I could give a plot summary, but really, this is not a comic in which the plot is essential to its worth. Yes, there is a story being told here, but the most important feature of it is how it is being told. Stream of consciousness narration fills the book and leaves you unsettled and wondering. Elektra is a woman of complete mystery. 

Elektra: Assassin has to be looked at as a satire. There really isn’t anything that is sacred here...American politicians are buzz sawed, as are a host of other subjects: the portrayal of women in comics, nuclear war (remember this is a “Cold War comic”), robots, violence, sex, even the kind of narration that Miller made so popular with The Dark Knight. Oh yeah, and I always love how the guns that people use are so ridiculously huge that they would never be able to fire them.

Frank Miller’s writing might take a little patience. The narrative is fairly scattershot, rapidly taking you into TV news reports and different peoples’ minds. But once you acclimate yourself to the kind of storytelling that is going on, everything works out. You start “to get it.” Elektra isn’t often the main focus. Garret, a SHIELD agent who gets blown to bits by Elektra and then reassembled by the agency, seems more like the protagonist here. A lot of what can be understood about Elektra comes from his narrative, and he definitely fits into the everyman’s shoes in this story. It’s a story about a person’s journey with a mysterious and deadly woman.

The art of Bill Sienkiewicz is also challenging, but I would say it’s more immediately rewarding than Miller’s script. As a painted comic, it automatically stands apart from whatever anyone could expect as standard. Sienkiewicz wears so many different stylistic hats in these eight issues. It’s just amazing. His characters are cartoonish but seem undeniably real. His portrayals of the politicians say so much: Ken Wind’s face hardly ever changes and looks like a newspaper photo tacked onto the face of a real man. He is a facsimile of a real person and the visuals back this up. Likewise, The President is a hideous disfiguration of a political cartoon, but it makes sense: everything he says is ridiculous and he couldn’t run America no matter how hard he tried. Sienkiewicz also captures the spookiness of SHIELD’s robot technology, making it clear that this is some pretty crazy stuff. 

Apologies if this isn’t an especially in depth look at the series. As I mentioned it’s all still swirling around in my head. What I can say with certainty is that I liked Elektra: Assassin, even if it takes a couple more read-throughs to be able to explain exactly why.   It was a unique comic and I’m glad that Frank Miller got the green light to make it.

One thing that I simply can’t explain: why this story has been so hard to find and read. The most recent printing was in the Elektra Omnibus, which was a big and expensive hardcover that collected other stories along with it. I want to be able to walk into a comic store and just buy Elektra: Assassin on its own and not spend $75 like they are asking for the Omnibus. It looks like it’s been more than ten years since a standard trade paperback has come out, which in my book makes it older than Marvel’s trade paperback program itself. Doesn’t this seem like the perfect story to put into Marvel’s Premiere Hardcover format? It’s just a mystery to me why this isn’t readily available. 

Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago...Volume Two

Now this is a book from a long time ago, and sometimes when reading it the stories even seem like they might have come from a galaxy far, far away. These tales are from the very early days of Star Wars being the phenomenon that it eventually developed into, and the results are often pretty squarely on the goofy side. The Omnibus captures perfectly what Star Wars meant to fans in the late 70's and early 80's.

Archie Goodwin is "the man with the plan" throughout most of the stories reprinted in this book. He served not only as writer but he also edited the book, so it's safe to say that Star Wars was truly "his" book. The main artist is Carmine Infantino, who is joined by a host of inkers. But of course Al Williamson has to be mentioned for his really beautiful work on the six-part adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back. Other names that show up in more of a supporting cast role are Chris Claremont, Mike W. Barr, Walt Simonson, and Michael Golden. So there's a lot of significant talent in these stories.

Al Williamson's detailed work from the Empire adaptation.

The comics reprinted in this Omnibus were from the series put out by Marvel. Having a tie-in of this caliber probably saved Marvel from bankruptcy in the late 70's, so yeah, you might be able to say that these comics were pretty important! What's fun about these stories is how you can see that the whole idea of what Star Wars really could be about was just forming. Half of the comics were made before there was even a sequel to the 1977 original movie.

Take the character of Jabba the Hutt for instance. He makes a few appearances in these comics, but Lucas apparently hadn't really figured out exactly what he wanted to do with the character yet. He was, after all, only briefly mentioned in A New Hope. So Archie Goodwin wanted to make use of this interesting character from Han Solo's past, and when he shows up he is nothing like the fat, slimy Hutt we know and love from Return of the Jedi. Jabba in the old comics is a skinny humanoid with a really ugly and almost baboon-like face. You can either be unsatisfied by a "lack of continuity" or you can just accept the fact that Star Wars was still very much of a work in progress while this series was being put out.

That's Jabba Version 1.0 there in the background, not the GI Joe-looking guy in front.

There is still an ongoing saga narrative behind these stories. Goodwin invented some new villains who cause some problems not only for the heroes, but also for Darth Vader. The Tagge family are a bunch of Imperials, true, but they would just love nothing more than to seize power from Vader. The fights with the Tagges build up over several issues and take some unexpected turns along the way. That might have in fact been the storytelling highlight of the Omnibus.

Maybe not what you'd expect from a Star Wars villain: Baron Tagge.

There are different issues focusing on different characters and you really get the sense that there was an effort being made to show this exciting new universe from as many angles as possible. It might not quite be the Star Wars that we all recognize today, but it's a great history lesson filled with a bunch of solid stories and a lot of exemplary Bronze Age art.

X-Men in 2001

Disclosure: This post might wind up being a little different than previous ones. The reason is that there’s a high risk of this one turning into “Memoirs of an X-Men Reader.” But it should be fun regardless...

I had an idea that I didn’t want to forget about. At some point I realized that, while it is still the month of May and the year 2011, we are 10 whole years removed from the last really significant shakeup of the status quo for “Marvel’s Merry Mutants.” Well, okay, plenty has happened since, including Astonishing X-Men and several year’s worth of X-Books that I have altogether ignored, but I feel safe in saying that there hasn’t been any kind of a shift that has been as impactful as what Joe Quesada set up for the 2001 X-Revolution.

So what really happened when the X-Men and all of their related titles came out in May 2001? Well, it’s no exaggeration to say that everything about them changed drastically. Uncanny X-Men got a facelift from Joe Casey and Ian Churchill. X-Men morphed into New X-Men with Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. They found something good for Chris Claremont to do with X-Treme X-Men (do your best to ignore the cheesy title) with Salvador Larocca joining him. And X-Force....well, that book got shaken up so much it might as well have been a new title altogether, with Peter Milligan and Mike Allred turning it into something zany, violent, and unique.

I have a Wizard X-Men Special that was put out to coincide with the “New World Order” of the X-Books. It’s pretty much just a 64 page hype piece about how great the X-Men comics were about to become, which was gobbled right up by myself and many, many other fans, since the X-Men had been soooo terrible lately. Just a year previous, Chris Claremont had returned to make the X-Men comics so confusing and meaningless it wasn’t even funny. Oh yeah, and at this time when the storylines were so inaccessible, a certain big budget 20th Century Fox movie entitled “X-Men” came out. Anyone who might have caught the flick and said “Jeez, I wonder what the X-Men are like now?” would have run away screaming if he or she was brave enough to walk into a comic store to find out. 

So yes, any news of change for the X-Men in early 2001 was pretty much guaranteed to be good news. And, well, when they started announcing who would be doing what and art began to be released, it was pretty obvious to anyone that the powers that be were onto something that could certainly wind up being great. Joe Quesada, after becoming Marvel’s Editor in Chief late in 2000, knew that the X-Men needed a LOT of help. He did a quick and effective job in bringing people to the table who could shake things up in the best way possible. An interview with Morrison and Casey from the Wizard Special is peppered with ideas about things like chicken sentinels, secondary mutations, “super-consistency,” etc. New things all around. New costumes that while being clearly informed by the Hollywood X-Men retained some comic book style. New villains, new ideas. New X-Men = good.

The opening salvo in the 2001 X-Men reboot was Uncanny X-Men #394. It was a done-in-one story featuring a brand new antagonist and, besides that, Wolverine and Jean Grey kissed and didn’t even feel bad about it afterwards. There were no backstories in this issue, there were no extraneous characters carrying pointless subplots, it was just a nice, quick 22 pages. 

And then came New X-Men #114. Now this was the one that really broke the door off its hinges. But this kind of thing should be expected from Grant Morrison. This was a comic about evolution, about race issues in the 21st century, and about how a dream might have to adjust itself a little to fit into a new era. 

X-Force #116, in many ways the ugly stepsister of the New X-Books, featured a brand new team of superheroes. Before you even get to know them, almost all of them are mowed down in a grisly battle. Usually new mutant characters stick around for far too long, but not these guys. They were put into the comic to die and die quickly.

So if that’s what it was like in the beginning of the era, how did things finally end up? For the most part it’s pretty easy to say that it didn’t live up to the hype. I think that a considerable amount of the problem had to do with inconsistencies on the art side of things. The radical directions the writing was taking should have probably been balanced by some steady hands at the drawing table, but both Churchill and Quitely couldn’t keep up on the monthly grind. So fill-in artists galore killed the momentum of the creative teams. Joe Casey didn’t wind up lasting too long and I seem to remember a lot of fans saying they just didn’t like what he was up to, which is a claim that’s hard to understand. Casey’s successor, Chuck Austen, wasn’t really on the bandwagon with the whole 2001 reboot concept, and Uncanny returned to being a silly spandexy soap opera. 

We would definitely look back on Morrison’s New X-Men more favorably if it hadn’t been marred by (hate to say it) the rush job of Igor Kordey’s art. Kordey could be really good, but he was overtaxed with drawing two books a month and his issues are just murky. Morrison did a lot of good stuff and kept the book fresh until the tail end of his run, when he brought Magneto back. That just seemed really wrong, to have three years of “All New, All Different” X-Men stories and then just go back to a “Magneto’s about to take over the world again oh my god” type of story. The story that immediately preceded the 2001 reboot was one such story, so who knows, maybe Grant just wanted to take it all full circle. And the final story, Here Comes Tomorrow, was set in the future and kind of sort of made sense and seemed like a fitting conclusion to the work Morrison had set out to do but also felt like there was a lot of important story that had remained untold. 

Milligan and Allred seemed to have been able to tell the story they set out to tell with X-Force, which eventually morphed into X-Statix to further set itself apart from the other X-Books. The series was funny, morbid, and challenging, and rereading it today brings back a lot of social issues that were important at the time. So yes, it might be a little dated, but it might also be a nice little social history lesson. They wrapped the book up when it was time and before they ran out of steam.

I did pick up X-Treme X-Men for a good long while, and it wasn’t because I thought Chris Claremont’s stories were up to par with his early Cockrum/Byrne collaborations. X-Treme was good in what I call the “Image Comics of 1992” kind of good: if there was nothing else to be proud of, there sure was a lot of nice stuff to look at. Salvador Larocca’s art was colored straight from the pencils, so the book stood out on the shelf. It was a beautifully produced comic book that was strange because it was so disconnected from everything else that was going on with Uncanny and New X-Men. Larocca designed everything on his own without comparing notes with Quitely and Churchill and it was just weird that two X-Men teams would look all shiny and new while the X-Treme team was still kicking around in spandex suits. But it was its own thing and apparently it sold well enough.

With the departure of Grant Morrison in 2004, everything that had started in May 2001 had finished. Joe Quesada knew he needed to pull in something big to rejuvenate the X-Men yet again, and the Joss Whedon/ John Cassaday Astonishing X-Men started up right away and brought the mutants back into a more classic spandexy mode that they’ve been stuck in ever since. 

The 2001 reboot of the X-Men might be summed up as something that was a great experiment that just wasn’t built to last. Like a lot of things that Marvel was trying in the early days of Joe Quesada’s EIC tenure, the new ideas brought new life to the company, but the same old moneymaking tricks slowly but surely came back to make everything much “safer.” The 2001 X-Books were envelope pushing comics, and that doesn’t usually work for too long with a company’s hottest franchise. But now that it’s all in the past, the 2001 era of X-Books stands as a nice experiment that made a bunch of comics that still stand out today.

New Stan Lee Spider-Man

Putting Stan Lee together with Marcos Martin to do some Spider-Man stories was just a really, really good idea. Hats off to the person who made this happen. This comic (weighing in at 36 story pages) is a lot of fun from start to finish. If you might have thought that Stan the Man might have lost something in the last, oh, thirty years, this book might leave you thinking otherwise.

That is, if you give it a chance. The Amazing Spider-Man Spidey Sunday Spectacular (whew!) has a couple of things in it. Without checking out the indicia I wouldn’t have known that the contents are reprinted material of things that ran as backup stories throughout Amazing Spidey #634-645. So what we have here is not only the 12 part story the book was named after, but also another story entitled “Identity Crisis.” Stan Lee put together a couple of nice metafictional stories here, and if you can read them without getting upset about that kind of writing you’ll probably really enjoy it. Or you could just go the other route and ignore all of the words that are written on the pages. That would probably be pretty easy…comics art just doesn’t get much prettier than the work of Mr. Martin.

So the way that the first story works is that every installment is told across a two-page spread. So Marcos can go crazy with the layout and Stan can leave his witty banter all throughout. It must have been fun to read this episode-by-episode as it was originally published, but this way works great too. Just like they wanted, like the book is a reprint of a Sunday newspaper strip.

The story concerns a couple of dastardly villains named Brain and Bull. So yeah, we already know a lot about them: one’s the smart guy and the other is dumb and strong. As the narration reads, “Their nicknames are “Brain” and “Bull.” If you can’t tell why, you shouldn’t be reading comics!” The big plan that Brain comes up with to escape punishment for crimes he has committed in the “real world” is this crazy device called (rather obviously) a Digitized, Algorithmic Nano-Collider. Now what the hell can you do with one of those things? Well, Brain came up with the plan because it will allow him and his dimwitted assistant to “escape into the dimension of comics,” duh!

So of course they do so. The jump into comics land takes them to what appears to be early Marvel Universe New York City. Brain finds Spidey with the Fantastic Four and wants to follow him because he really, really wants to know the webbed guy’s secret identity. They watch him go into his apartment and see as Spider-Man enters the bedroom and Peter Parker walks out. “Look! Parker must be Spider-Man!” says Bull. Brain won’t hear any of that stupidity though, of course. There’s no way he could be onto anything at all with that observation…

Brain finds out that Pete is working on a time machine in his apartment. Hmm. This wacky device appears to be made out of a blender, a microwave, and a VCR, but let’s not ask too many questions. The story ends with Brain getting his hands on the device and traveling back in time to August 15, 1962 (no significance whatsoever to that date…). Apparently, as Peter explains it, when you travel back in time you get younger. So Brain is trapped in 1962 by story’s end, a goo-goo-ga-ga baby. The end.

The story is tailored at all times to give Marcos Martin wonderful things to draw. The Green Goblin, the Hulk, Doctor Octopus, and Mary Jane all show up to make for nice pictures, and really, why should anyone complain about that? Probably my favorite of the spreads was the cross-section of Peter’s apartment. Martin likes doing that kind of drawing, and it’s always fun in the sense of being able to say “Oh, so that’s how his house is set up! Looks like a decent place!”

Favorite meta moment in this story: Spidey gets into his apartment with the two bad guys and Mary Jane is waiting there, voluptuously laid out on the couch. Brain is perplexed by her; Bull is obviously smitten. “Okay, wall-crawler. Talk! Who is she?” asks Brain. “Beats me!” is Spidey’s response. “She’s either my girlfriend, my wife, or my ex-wife! It depends what issue this is!”

On to the second story, “Identity Crisis.” Dr. Gray Madder (oh is that old man writer crafty!) is a psychiatrist, and he’s the guy who Spider-Man decides to come to with a biiiiiiiigggg problem. The good doctor is a little greedy and thinks that helping Spidey will lead to a huge career boost and fame. He’s more than happy to take on this new patient. Well, the kinds of problems that Spider-Man has include things like growing four extra arms, being attached to a black alien costume, having an incident in which he got Hulked-up, another incident in which he shrunk down to Ant-Man size, becoming Spider-Ham, and plenty of other problems. Also, Spidey has a hard time figuring out how the Green Goblin died and came back to life, how he has been married to and unmarried to Mary Jane, how he was almost a dad once but then MJ just wasn’t pregnant anymore, and how his poor Aunt May has been dead or almost dead so many times. It’s all just too much: Dr. Madder winds up checking in to see another psychiatrist at the end of the story.

It’s plain to see that Stan Lee had a blast putting this story together. Kind of like he’s good old Grandpa Stan: “Well, I’ve known this guy since he was knee high to a grasshopper, and look at all of the crazy things he’s been through over the years!”

The Amazing Spider-Man Spidey Sunday Spectacular. Nothing else quite like it on the stands today… it will really make you appreciate Spidey’s history, the man who played a huge part in turning him into a character we all love today, and absolutely gorgeous art by a guy who still has a whole career ahead of him!

PunisherMAX: Kingpin

Once upon a time, there was a book called Preacher. Garth Ennis wrote it and Steve Dillon drew it. It was a series that featured violence, profanity and sex in quantities previously unseen in comics. Preacher was a book that was unlike many others that were published in its time: it was actually good, and the mid to late 90’s aren’t generally regarded as one of comics’ high points.

After Ennis and Dillon ended their 66-issue run on Preacher, they were recruited to do some work across the pond for Marvel. In no time, the Punisher had the E&D stamp on his head, although the Preacher formula had to be considerably watered down to make things appropriate according to guidelines of the Marvel Knights imprint. Dillon eventually left to go do other things (sadly, crappy things like Wolverine: Origins) and Ennis carried on, eventually having a long run on the Punisher with the MAX line. MAX is a good place for the Punisher to be hanging out, and the Vertigo-esque rulebook gave Ennis a way to tell whatever crazy Punisher stories he had kicking around in his head.

All of this introduction is pretty much a necessity when discussing the new book entitled PunisherMAX. It’s a road that sure seems awfully familiar, but there’s a good reason for staying the course. This is the way the Punisher should be.

So one half of the E&D formula is still working this machine. The new guy is Jason Aaron, and to be completely subjective, I love Scalped and I wish that his Ghost Rider run could have lasted longer. Aaron is tapping into the same kind of writing that Ennis does, and who can blame him? He does it well.

The title of this book is Kingpin. I don’t think there has ever been a story that fleshed Wilson Fisk out so well. It turns out he had a pretty rough childhood and hated his dad. He hated his dad so much that he wound up killing him when he was still just a disturbed little kid. Fisk also didn’t just start out as the Kingpin, as it turns out. He was originally just a bodyguard for this other criminal named Rigoletto who winds up really getting on Fisk’s bad side…

I just have to interject with a moment straight out of Preacher: the use of over-the-top violence that becomes comical because you just can’t figure out how else to react to it. I guess that’s as comical as eyeballs popping out of one’s head can get. That’s what happens to some random guy when he gets on Rigoletto’s nerves and he sends Fisk on him. I’ll spare you the pictures from that scene.

Now I hope that nobody reading this book actually thought for even a second that the Mennonite (a “strong guy” character who looks like a farmer from two hundred years ago) would be a real threat to the Punisher. He’s okay in a sideshow freak kind of way, but did he really even have to be in this book? Oh well, just add him to the list of funny Punisher villains, a la the Russian and Jigsaw.

Like any good Punisher story, by the time Frank Castle is done wrecking shop he’s taken quite a beating. You know, this kind of thing also happens in every Wolverine story that comes down the pipeline, but at least that guy has the mutant healing factor thing going for him. In this story the Punisher gets hit a lot with a mallet by that weird Mennonite guy. It results in a direct hit to the chest, smashed fingers, and then a smashed hand, profuse amounts of blood (you get the picture). Now to Wolverine that would all amount to nothing, but Frank is an old buck who has to heal for awhile. Makes you wonder how he does it.

And can we talk about the end? I wouldn’t consider it to be mean saying that Bullseye shows up on the last page. The next volume should be fun…