A Month of Wednesdays: March 2022

BOUGHT:

Women of Marvel #1 (Marvel Entertainment) The Black Cat, The Scarlet Witch, Jessica Jones, Black Widow, Squirrel Girl, Shanna The She-Devil and Silver Sable are the female characters who star in this oversized one-shot special from the Marvel Voices line. 

As has come to be expected at this point in the line's life, the book is comprised of a series of short stories featuring characters all of a certain type (here, women) by up-and-coming creators of that same type, along with some text pieces (Here an introduction by Gail Simone, an interview with editor Bobbie Chase and a roundtable of 13 creators answering the same question,"What's a character or story that empowered you to create your own?").

While each of the five short comics is competently made, none really stood out to me as superior, must-read work. They are notable for their strange choices, however, like the decision to split up writer Preeti Chhibber's Black Cat story "Four Jobs That Felicia Hated and One She Didn't" into six one-page parts, each drawn by a different artist and inserted between other stories, almost like commercial breaks. 

The Mirka Andolfo-written, Sumeyye Kesgin-drawn Scarlet Witch story "Real Witches" was notable for starring a new, original character, and not featuring an appearance by the Marvel hero until the fifth page of an eight-page story, and even then she's very much the guest-star.

Pressed to pick a favorite, I'd probably be torn between the two team-up stories, the Black Widow/Squirrel Girl story by Charlie Jane Anders, Emma Kubert and Elisabetta D'Amico, in large part because I so miss Doreen, Tippy-Toes and Nancy so much, and the Shanna/Silver Sable story by Rhianna Pratchett and Alina Erofeeva, mostly because it remembered Shanna existed and had a nice, heavy-handed moral I can get behind (Scan your snacks ingredients to make sure they don't have any palm oil before you buy them!)

BORROWED:

Banana Fox and The Book-Eating Robot (Scholastic) I think villain Sour Grapes Jr. has some good ideas. 

For example, in this second volume of James Kochalka's new series about a bright yellow fox who is also a kinda sorta detective, Sour Grapes Jr., who now volunteers at a library, arrests Banana Fox for his excessive overdue fines and throws him in library jail.

"I'm pretty sure library jail isn't real," Banana Fox says from behind bars, and, when Sour Grapes Jr. insists that it is too real because he made it up himself, Banana Fox continues to argue "But...other libraries don't pub people in JAIL..." To which Sour Grapes Jr replies, "Well, maybe they SHOULD!"

As someone whose day job is in a public library, all I can think to say is ,"Right on, Sour Grapes Jr.! We should be able to arrest people and put them in jail!"

After a somewhat meandering, stream-of-conscious beginning involving Banana Fox, Flashlight, William and Tur-Tur, the action moves to the library, where Sour Grapes Jr. has enacted his weird plot that involves a book deposit  bin that transforms into a book-eating robot. As with the first volume, it is high-quality silliness for all-ages. 

Batman Vol. 5: Fear State (DC Comics) There's a moment in James Tynion IV's script for the fifth volume of his Batman run where the "anti-Oracle",  some sort of  apparently automated system blaring 24/7 misinformation about the state of Gotham City, states that Scarecrow's fear toxin is all over the city, and that one should disinfect everything until it shines in order to be sure they are safe.

That's the closest Tynion comes to a direct parallel between his story of a city gripped with fear and our own society in the time of Covid, a state of affairs no super-comics seem to have directly addressed at all yet. (Not that I've seen, anyway; has anyone in any superhero universe mentioned Covid yet? They seem to have skipped the shutdown and masking period completely.) 

Tynion seems to be dancing awfully closet to a statement of some kind, as Scarecrow's plans to drive the entire city crazy with fear involve misinformation, fear of a contagion, the scapegoating of activists and an overly militarized law enforcement. It's all nebulous and suggestive, unfortunately, and Tynion seems more focused on Batmanly concerns than making any kind of statement about the state of our own world. But he seems to be at least trying to say something, and that's not nothing; Batman's heroic vision of his world is one that can be translated to our own, although I don't think the parallels are made sharply enough. Superhero comics are not the place for subtlety, after all.

All that aside,  this is a rather familiar-feeling Gotham-faces-apocalyptic-ruin story akin to Tynion's own "Joker War" storyline, featuring some rather nice artwork from Jorge Jimenez. 

Batman: The Detective (DC) Okay, I have some questions. 

As you may recall, when this Tom Taylor-written, Andy Kubert-penciled six-issue miniseries was first solicited, it was called Batman: The Dark Knight, which I thought a terrible name, given how often that title has already been used (Not just in Frank Miller-related comics, one of which was actually even drawn by Kubert, or in the Dark Knight Detective collection series, but there was also a New 52 Batman ongoing called The Dark Knight for awhile as well that generated plenty of trades to mix this up with). 

DC later changed the title to the even more generic, but not as often used, The Detective. It's still not a great title, especially if the book isn't a traditional mystery or detective story, which it is not.

Having now read the book, it seems like it should pretty clearly be sub-titled Equilibrium, as that is the name of the villain of the piece, and the concept played with throughout. Equilibrium, to spoil it a bit, dresses in a white Batman costume, as do her hench-people, and they have devoted themselves to undoing what Batman has done by murdering everyone he's ever saved, thus achieving a balance to the world that his presence threatens.

Crazy, sure and perhaps a bit...much, but then, it's a Batman comic, and it is neither too crazy nor too a bit much for the villain in one of those. It's even exciting, given that Taylor and Kubert are introducing a new character with a new modus operandi, rather than throwing The Joker or Ra's al Ghul at us for the thousandth time. 

Aside from wondering how this thing got the title it did, and why the obvious one wasn't chosen by the writer or the editors, I was curious about the decision to change Batman's costume into what is essentially the outfit he was wearing in the desert freak-out dream scenes in Batman V. Superman and Justice League, a big coat and goggles rather than his traditional cape (He's also wearing regular pants instead of tights). 

Don't get me wrong, it's an okay look, and Kubert draws the hell out of it, it just seems...weird, as if since Batman is out-of-town throughout this book—after a brief four-page scene in Gotham at the beginning, the entirety of the adventure occurs in Europe—maybe those are his vacation clothes? (I briefly wondered if perhaps the book was out-of-continuity, given how old and burly and, well, how Dark Knight Kubert's Bruce Wayne looks in this, and the fact that Oracle appears in a wheel chair in a few panels.)

And then there's the obvious question, which just sort of buzzed around the back of my mind while I was reading this. Equilibrium's first attack in on a plane with 147 passengers, apparently all of whom had been saved by Batman at some point. Among them is Beryl Hutchinson, the former Squire, now The Knight, who will appear throughout the series, along with the new Squire, who is being introduced here for the first time. 

Equilibrium's other attacks will occur throughout Europe, and climax with an attack to wipe out all of London, given that, as we learn in a flashback, Batman once saved all of London by diffusing a nuclear bomb there.

So the question: If your goal was to kill everyone Batman ever saved, wouldn't you start with Gotham City? I mean he's saved the entire city multiple times now, and there are people living there he's probably saved multiple times, both individually, as victims of one crime or another, and collectively, from various plots to bomb, gas, drown, burn and poison the city, right? (I won't bring up his work with the Justice League, which resulted in the saving of all the world multiple times over).

It just seems strange to start in Europe, I guess, but then, maybe Equilibrium wants to start local, and work her way to Gotham City. I guess one shouldn't worry too much about the logic employed by murderous maniacs, huh? 

A couple of paragraphs of fannish questioning aside, I did really rather enjoy this story, which takes a newly lonelier Batman, still reeling from the loss of Alfred, out of Gotham and to England, where he meets up with the Squire and Knight, and then to France, where he reunites with one-time mentor Henri Ducard and, finally, to Belgium, in a "mobile Batcave." 

Taylor toys with some interesting ideas regarding Batman's role in the world, as well as reexamining some portions of his origin through Ducard flashbacks and, of course, the idea that all actions can have unforeseen consequences, even seemingly noble ones, like "saving" people. 

Additionally, it was nice to read a relatively "discreet" Batman story arc with a beginning, middle and end, given how many contemporary Batman books are devoted to altering the status quo of the character or his setting in some dramatic fashion. This wasn't a brand new era of Batman, it was just a really rather fun Batman comic.

Based on this and the handful of other times I've seen him write the character, I would not be at all adverse to Taylor taking over Batman or Detective some day or, better way, a new Batman Inc, where he could continue to write in this mode, with Batman working overseas with allies like Knight and Squire. 

Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 1: The Neighborhood (DC) The collection of writer Markio Tamaki's debut as Detective Comics writer serves her somewhat poorly, as the original, serially-published comic book issues all had back-up stories, and most of these were sorts of side stories related to the story arc that filled the bulk of each issue, a kinda sorta murder mystery entitled "The Neighborhood." Because of this, DC decided to collect all of the back-ups within the collection, somewhat awkwardly. So two chapters of "The Neighborhood" might pass, for example, and then there would be two chapters of a shorter-story starring The Huntress. Each of these have different artists, of course, and while some are written by Tamaki, some are not. 

One, a flashback to the earliest years of the Batman and Robin team by writer John Ridley and artist Dustin Nguyen, has nothing at all to do with "The Neighborhood", except in the absolute possible sense: It also features Batman in it. 

Visually then, the book is far from cohesive, something not entirely the fault of the back-ups, as the artist who started "The Neighborhood", the great Dan Mora, doesn't finish it, with Viktor Bogdanovic taking over midway...although it's hard to notice the shift at first, given the kaleidoscope of differing art styles and a degree of uncertainty about when one story begins and ends.

It's sort of too bad but, I'll be honest, I'm not sure a better way to handle it, either.  Basically DC could have opted to not collect the back-ups at all, a decent option complicated by the fact that so many of them tie so directly into the main story; they could have collected them as they appeared, so that each chapter of "The Neighborhood" would be followed by one, which would replicate the experience of reading the comic serially but break up the narratives in a way that's less-than-ideal; or they could have put all of the back-ups in the back of the collection, which wouldn't quite work, given the way most of them relate to the main story.

As for that story, it's a pretty good one. Bruce Wayne is getting used to living in a brownstone apartment in Gotham City now that his fortune has dwindled following the events of "The Joker War", which means he's getting used to having neighbors. When one of them disappears, both Bruce Wayne and Batman become suspects in the murder, a particularly perilous position to be in given that the woman's father is an insane old money giant—seriously, like Kingpin-sized—so set on vengeance that he's willing to take an RPG out onto the streets and blow up Wayne personally. 

The Huntress, Penguin and,m oddly, Lady Clayface are all also involved.

What starts as a compelling murder mystery with multiple suspects and no real motivations eventually deteriorates into a sort of sci-fi/horror monster story, but it's all fairly well-handled and still works within the Batman milieu.

Mao Vol.4 (Viz Media) This volume's most spectacular monster is a man made of water and filled with fish, various species forming parts of his face and acting as enforcers within his body when Mao is trapped there. It's a typically imaginative, slightly horrifying creation of Rumiko Takahashi's. That man made of water and fish is trying to abduct Mao and drag him back to Kyoto, and is, in fact, the second of three attempts to bring Mao to Kyoto that occur in this volume. Takahashi also delves deeper into the origins of her lead character and the demon cat Byoki, and we meet several other people from Mao's past. 

Marvel Meow (Viz) There's some great art and not much else to Nao Fuji's collection of short, gentle, quiet comic strips featuring Captain Marvel's pet cat Chewie (Actually, Chewie is an alien Flerkin that just looks like and, for the purposes of this book, acts like, a cat). It's essentially a well-produced gift book for Marvel fans who also happen to be cat people.

Most strips are just a single page long, featuring a perfectly square nine-panel grid in which one light joke or another occurs featuring a Marvel character.

 In the first, for example, Carol Danvers is lifting weights, Chewie jumps on her dumbbell and grows bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier until the weight is too much for even Danvers, and she awakes in her bed with Chewie to find it was only a dream. 

In the next, Iron Man returns to his workshop to find Chewie sitting on his keyboard when he goes to type, and moving to a stack of papers when Iron Man goes to look at them. And so on. 

The art is really quite lovely, realistic in style and leaning toward the Cinematic Universe depictions of the characters where possible, as in the Avengers section of the book, which features six strips, each broken up by a drawing, and then a nice group shot spread over two-pages and featuring all of the characters. And Chewie. 

All of the art is delicately colored in a two-tone style. Following a particular section, there's a sort of glossary of character profiles, listing who starred in each strip and a sentence or two about who they are ("Iron Man", for example, is "Tony Stark, a genius inventor and a billionaire who fights in armor he created", and so on).

There are occasionally longer stories, like one which seems to feature the entirety of the X-Men. The Phoenix, which is here presented as a fat little Pokemon-looking creature, possesses Chewie, and he freaks out, running through the halls of the X-Mansion, while one group of X-Men after another try and fail to stop him. It's a nice run-down of a huge cast of characters—27 are listed on the character profiles for this section of the book—and it too terminates in a giant group shot of the whole franchise at a part together, including some 30 characters, some of whom aren't profiled (like Doop, Strong Guy and so on). 

Also included are such a random assortment of characters as Moon Knight, Taskmaster, Galactus and Galacta, Venom and Carnage, Thanos, Ghost Rider (who uses his penance stare on Chewie) and more. 

I didn't find most of the gags particularly strong ones—Jeffrey Brown's Cats Are Weird is probably a better, funnier gift book for people who think cats are funny, I think—but it's a very nice book with great art, and an okay introduction to many Marvels who aren't yet as famous as the Avengers are. 

I'm eager to see more work from Fuji, and would like to see her drawing within the Marvel Comics Universe proper, as she has apparently done with a couple of Black Cat comics before. 

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead Vol. 5 (Viz Media) Akira and his friends come into open conflict with their evil opposites in the volume, a quartet of malcontents who also have an apocalyptic bucket list their working on, although there's is a more cynical, all around more negative list. Items, for  example, include "Turn everyone I hate into zombies" and "Fuck up society."

Unfortunately, the society they target is the idyllic, pastoral community of Akira's home village, where his parents and neighbors have managed to escape the zombie apocalypse affecting the rest of Japan by sealing off the only entrance. The bad guys, lead by an anti-Akira NEET, unseal the the only tunnel leading into or out of the village by moving the construction equipment that blocking it, and then ride around in it, elevated out of reach of the zombie horde they've unleashed.

There's something of the superhero comic about this particular volume, with how neatly the villains are presented as the opposite number of our heroes, and the way they split up into four individual one-on-one conflicts.  

I suppose if the series is to go on, something had to happen to the village, as otherwise our heroes would just stay there and live happily ever after, but this is such a drastic and sudden something, it ratchets up the suspense for the next volume quite a bit, especially given the cliffhanger, wherein Akira is given the choice to either sacrifice himself to the zombies or have his father fed to them. 

Zom 100 continues to be an exciting and unusual entry in a well-trod genre. 

REVIEWED: 

The Flower Garden (Amulet Books) Artist and illustrator Renee Kurilla turns to comics with this charming graphic novel about a pair of friends who share a fantastic adventure in their own backyard, one they react to quite differently. More here.