Ultimates 3 #1

This is the very first page of Ultimates 3 #1, and things go very wrong immediately:
The very first part of the book, the dateline box in the upper left corner of the very first panel is pointless and confusing, setting the tone for the next 100 pages or so.

The place is Tony Stark’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, and the time is “last night.” What does that mean, “Last night?” The night before when? Right now? When you’re reading it? This isn’t a flashback, it’s the very first panel. You can’t start with a flashback; you have to be at a point in time ahead of the flashback in order to flash back to something.

I suppose a story could start “last night” if it were to jump around in time, but this one doesn’t. Rather than moving from last night to today and back and forth, it simply starts last night, then progresses to today, and remains in today, without ever going back to last night.

So, despite the caption, this scene is actually taking place now, and the scenes later in the book will also be taking place now, although at a time in the future of when this scene is taking place, because that’s the way time works. The default mode for a comic book (or novel or movie or TV show or play) is to progress through time in a linear fashion, and if that is to be deviated from, then there should be some indication of the deviation.

The presence of this dateline is, frankly, completely insane, and we haven’t even finished the first panel yet.

According to the title page in the hardcover trade, this miniseries had three assistant editors plus an editor. That’s at least four people who could have at least tried to stop this book from existing. They are all complicit.

The Ultimates—Hawkeye, Black Panther, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, The Wasp and Tony “Iron Man” Stark—are having a meeting, which so far consists of watching a sex tape of Stark and his former lover, The Black Widow (a former member of the team that betrayed them in Ultimates 2).

It’s not just all over the Internet, but it’s also on CNN and ABC The Wasp says, “NBC at least had the decency to blur out the more graphic parts.”

That’s right, both CNN and ABC are showing an unedited sex tape. They are actually airing hardcore pornography. This information is included in the second panel of the first page. Already Loeb’s Ultimates has become completely disconnected from reality. (Fun fact: Loeb has worked as a producer for several television shows, so should be in a better position to know that ABC airing an unedited sex tape—with close-ups!—is even less realistic than a room full of super-powered mutants having drinks served to them by robots.

Also of note in this panel is that much of the background from panel two is repeated in panel four, with only image on the screen and the characters in different positions. There’s nothing wrong with an artist taking the occasional shortcut, of course, but this particular shortcut draws attention to itself as a shortcut, since despite the fact that some of the characters have moved, the robot servants remained rooted to the spot. Get to work you lazy robots!

Turn the page and hey, it’s time for a two-page splash panel already.

Thor comes flying through the room, saying "NNNGGNN," apparently thrown or punched through the wall by Venom, who is in the process of climbing through a hole in the wall, seven-foot-long serrated tongue first.

“Where is she?” he shouts in his own special Venom font (white letters on black bubbles, Morpheus-style). “Tell me where she is or I’ll KILL every last one of you!”

“Nice. And now a word from our sponsor…” Hawkeye says, his pistols drawn. This is actually the most clever bit of dialogue any character utters in the course of a fight scene throughout the entire series. You may not believe me, but just you wait.

This page also introduces the characters, with a little red-ish/orange-ish/coral-ish box appearing next to each of the Ultimates bearing their names. Along the bottom of the spread is the name of this story, “Sex, Lies and DVD,” followed by “The Ultimates 3.1: Improbably Cause.”

Hey, wait a minute… No, none of the other issues have a title.

Is “Sex, Lies and DVD” the name of the story arc, not the individual chapter? If that’s the case, I wonder why they changed the name of the trade to the more spoiler-iffic “Who Killed The Scarlet Witch?” Other than the fact that it’s a less dumb name than “Sex, Lies and DVD,” of course, which has very little to do with the story, and is a reference to the title of a 1989 independent movie. (This was the first time while reading the story that I would wonder who the intended audience is. It would not be the last).

Next up is page four, which may just be the worst-designed page in comic book history:

Man, just look at that thing. (Seriously. Look at it. Click on it to make it bigger; same as the rest of the images). Madureira has the characters breaking the frames of the panels because it’s exciting looking, a trick he learned from reading manga. He apparently didn’t digest the manga very well though, as this isn’t exactly how you do it.

Hawkeye running straight out of the first panel? That’s pretty awesome, really. He’s such an action hero that he just ran right out of the comic! But then the next panel, butted right up against it, ruins the effect, and it looks like Hawkeye might be running past a little Venom, or something?

This is just a terrible, terrible page. It took me seconds to figure out what order to read the dialogue and images in which, okay, is just seconds, but that’s an awful lot of time to spend trying to figure out how to read something that should be completely intuitive.

While I was reading this, I was reminded of those little “how to read” features you often see in the beginning of manga collections, which are there to inform kids reading their first non-flipped manga reading a comic right to left instead of left to right might work.

Here’s one from The Big Adventures of Majokao Vol. 1, an Udon Entertainment kids manga suggested for ages seven and up:

You really need some kind of chart like that to read this page, but the arrows on it would be pretty erratic, and would have to circle around whole figures here and there.

Man, this page…Madureira got paid money to draw it. And Marvel published it. And then they asked people to give them money to read a comic containing it. My God.

And hey, we’re only four pages in!

As for what exactly’s happening on the page, even after spending all this time on it, the final panel is a little unclear to me. I’m guessing Venom shoots some kind of goo darts out of his body at Hawkeye?

It may be worth noting that this Venom appears to be the Marvel Universe or “616” version of the character, not the Ultimate Venom that had previously appeared in a few story arcs in Ultimate Spider-Man. That discrepancy will eventually be explained though.

Next The Wasp and the silent Black Panther join the fray, but they are no match for Venom. Hawkeye attacks again, and we get some just sterling dialogue.

Hawkeye: “Wasp. Go! I’ll deal with butt-ugly.”

Venom: “Eat. This.”

Time for another two-page splash panel! Ultimate Valkyrie dives off the back of a black Pegasus, a broadsword bearing vaguely Nordic ruins drawn back behind her head, shouting “Nobody hits my thunder god!” (Remember, Venom threw Thor through a wall five pages ago).

I remember this image getting a lot of attention and commentary when this comic was first released, so I’ll post the relevant portion here:

Guess what it was that was so widely commented on? Yeah, you can see the outline of Valkyrie’s nipples through her top.

That’s actually a pretty good thing; in fact, it’s one of the two or three times during this entire story where I sort of admired something the creators had done.

See, when people where super-tight clothes, so tight you can see every single muscle straining against them? You really ought to be able to see their nipples. But you never, ever, ever seen women’s nipples in comics. Why is that? Because DC and Marvel basically suck, is why.

Horrible violence, even horrible sexual violence is A-OK in their books, even (in DC’s case) Comics Code Authority-approved books or those that don’t need a “mature readers” stamp of some sort, but the outline of a nipple through clothing? Saints preserve us!

Like so many writers’ difficult relationship with swearing in super-comics, the hang-up with sexual content, which I’m defining extremely broadly to include the admission that breasts may in fact have nipples—just contributes to the immaturity and juvenility of the comics.

There’s an admission that certain parts of the human body are naughty and are, in fact, so naughty that they must not be included in any story, whereas no act of violence is considered beyond the pale (in the very next panel, Valkyrie’s sword plunges through Venom’s shoulder and halfway down his torso, a bright read gusher of blood emanating from the top of the wound).

Are comics really for grown-ups? Is this really an adult comic? Then go ahead and show some naked people you big babies; otherwise just admit this is stuff for teenage boys and quit trying to convince us all how mature you are.

This panel is, unfortunately, the last time the existence of nipples will be hinted at in the rest of Ultimates 3 (Perhaps Marvel got gun shy after the first issue?) There will be several other sex scenes, many of them gross, but no actually nudity.

Anyway, back to the violence: Despite a gaping chest wound that spurts blood all over Valkyrie’s face, Venom grabs her sword and raises it to strike her—“You’re a very silly girl-- --who’ll look much sillier without a head!”—when all of a sudden “KARAKKAKATHOOM” Thor re-enters the fray.

Yes, KARAKKAKATHOOM, with the THOOM being about four times larger than the k’s, a’s and r’s. This is another one of the admirable points in the series.

Thor’s lighting is enough to melt Venom into a very large sticky black puddle, and he and Valkyrie embrace. Thor is talking in the faux Shakespearean sort of dialogue that Stan Lee used to write for him, which Millar’s Thor never did. Will this be significant? No, not really. It’s just an example of something about the series that’s changed to make it more like the Marvel Universe.

Also of note, the dialogue is always in all-caps now. In the first two volumes, all of the dialogue was written with upper and lower-case letters, just like non-comic book writing. That was something that was rather unusual and noteworthy about the original Ultimate comics.

Why the change? I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like it could be accidental. In the Superman/Batman story arc Loeb wrote that I mentioned yesterday, the one where the heroes encountered analogues of the Ultimates, Loeb had the Ultimate analogues’ dialogue appear in both capitals and lower-case letters, while Superman, Batman and everyone from their dimension spoke in standard all-caps).

Hawkeye, who happens to be pretty insane, starts shooting at the puddle of Venom, to make sure it’s dead. Wasp tells him to holster his weapon, calling him Clint, and she puts his gun in her face and says, “You call me that name in public one more time and I’ll drop you right here in the street.”

Yes, Clint “Hawkeye” Barton would rather publicly murder his teammate than have his real name spoken aloud in public. Hawkeye wouldn’t last one second on Brad Meltzer’s Justice League.

On the next page we see an exterior shot of the team’s building, with robots repairing the hole that Venom and Thor made. There is a box there that says “Today.”

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, who sat out the whole fight with Venom, are leaving to go Christmas shopping, when Captain America, who also missed out on the Venom fight (or did he?), stops them to ask the Witch to maybe not go out in public wearing just a loin cloth and spandex bustier.

When Cap touches her arm and says “Be reasonable, Wanda…” Quicksilver pulls Cap’s hand away and says, “You come near my sister again and I’ll kill you.”

This team is so extreme that they don’t just argue and threaten one another with physical violence, they literally threaten one another with death over disagreements.

Then comes another notorious page:

In the Marvel Universe, it’s always been my understanding that Pietro “Quicksilver” Maximoff was always a little over-protective and kinda weird around his sister, Wanda/The Scarlet Witch. In Ultiamtes, Mark Millar played up that weirdness to the point where one’s meant to think that they’re maybe too affectionate to one another, like maybe there’s some kinda creepy, unspoken sibling lust between them. Loeb tries to one-up Millar with disastrous results in this Look, they are actually, no bones about it, totally fucking each other scene.

While the admission that the Maximoffs were indeed doing it is fucked up enough, Loeb’s handling of it makes it seem even weirder, as The Wasp seems to indicating that there’s nothing that weird or wrong about it, and it’s only Captain America’s “1944 brain” that can’t process anything in the 21st century, like incestuous relationships.

I do like Hawkeye’s last line there, where he seems to be indicating that for the sake of PR, they must put down one of the Maximoffs. I can’t tell if Loeb’s Hawkeye is supposed to be a hilarious parody of a shitty bad-ass superhero or not, but most of the scenes involving Hawkeye strike me as funny. The fact that all of the characters are written as shitty superheroes makes me think that the humor I find in how ridiculous Hawkeye is can’t be anything other than accidental.

With that, Hawkeye takes his leave, announcing that he’s going to look for Black Panther, who hasn’t been seen since the Venom fight, as he’ll need his help tracking down Spider-Man, who might know something about the Venom attack, since that’s his villain.

There’s a tight close-up of Captain America looking intense and not saying anything, at which point I figured out the “secret” about the Black Panther and his relationship with Cap. Have you figured it out yet? No? You will.

Wasp, who used to be Captain America’s lover, is feeling kind of sad that he’s shutting her out, so she goes to a dark room where her abusive ex-husband Hank Pym is hunched over a microscope, and complains about things to him. He doesn’t seem to be listening because—what this?—he’s dead or unconscious or something, drool hardened over his mouth, his eyes open but vacant, and a bottle of pills spilled next to him.

Outside, it’s snowing, and those crazy incest-having heroes the Maximoffs are enjoying the it, despite poor Wanda being dressed in a loin cloth and bustier, with only a long, open fur coat to keep her warm.

Then, suddenly, there’s a full-panel BANG sound effect, and Pietro pushes Wanda down at super-speed and starts chasing the bullet, all the while trying to reach the Wasp via some kind of communication device, and getting angry that she’s not answering him, despite the fact that his few dialogue bubble’s worth of dialogue would have to be spoken so fast that Wasp couldn’t possibly get the message, let alone respond.

The bullet, Pietro discovers while trying to catch it, is apparently a Wanda-seeking bullet, as it dodges him and flies back towards Wanda.

And here, for at least the third time in these first 19 pages, I saw something completely unrealistic, even by superhero comic standards:

Now, I’m no physicist, and I never even made it through the copy of James Kakalios’ The Physics of Super Heroes someone gave me as a Christmas present one year, but if Pietro was moving faster, or even just as fast as the bullet, wouldn’t he have been able to catch it without it piercing his hand?

I’m not basing this on any scientific understanding of velocity or kinetic energy, but on the simple fact that other superhero speedsters in other comics I’ve read are always harmlessly snatching speeding bullets out of the air, by virtue of their speed relative of the bullet making it as if the bullet were simply lying on the ground.

Perhaps Pietro is really, really slow for a speedster, though, and was able to catch-up to the bullet, but then dropped his speed as soon as he wrapped his fist around it, and it therefore tore through his now normal velocity-having hand?

I don’t know exactly, but this seemed all wrong to me.

As Wanda lay dying on the street, a blonde, bespectacled doctor with an oddly carved wooden cane appears. He seems to be Donald Blake, 616 Thor’s one-time human alter-ego, but here he’s just some doctor who looks like Blake; it’s just an Easter egg I guess. He tries CPR, but it’s no use.

“She’s dead,” he says.

And that is Ultimates 3 #1, definitely the worst issue of what is probably the worst comic book ever created.


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Tomorrow night: It gets worse! (Not really. How could it? But it don’t get a whole hell of a lot better, either).

Ultimates 3: The worst comic book ever?

This summer Marvel Comics is in the process of ending their Ultimate line of comics, with the intention of relaunching the line as Ultimate Comics.

At the moment, the Ultimate Universe is being wound down. Of the three ongoing series, Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate X-Men have already ended, and Ultimate Spider-Man’s last issue shipped last Wednesday. Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, the six-issue miniseries with a notorious three-year-long hiatus between two of its issues, just wrapped up, and the crossover event comic that’s supposed to serve as an official end of the line, Jeph Loeb and David Finch’s Ultimatum miniseries, is slowly but surely reaching it’s final issue (the fourth issue just shipped last week, and there’s one more left to go).

After that, there’s just a couple of special with the word “Requiem” in the title, and then in August Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man and Ultimate Comics: The Avengers will launch, although whether or not this will be a brand-new start to the Ultimate Universe or simply a re-branded continuation with a couple of new #1’s remains to be seen.

But either way, it will mark an end of sorts of Marvel’s Ultimate experiment.

When the line launched in 2000, the concept was simple enough: Start over for new readers, with modern comic book storytelling techniques, a fresh 21st century aesthetic, and 40-years worth of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.

While I don’t think anyone at Marvel was ever impolitic enough to say so, the Ultimate line was essentially the opportunity to do Marvel Comic right; excising that which dated the original stories in favor of something fresher, approaching the properties the way Hollywood was just then preparing to approach them (If I’m remembering correctly, the X-Men film had just come out, and Spider-Man was about to).

Without repeating myself too much, I think the Ultimate line worked extremely well at the beginning, with Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar each helming a pair of titles (Ultimate Spider-Man andUltimate Marvel Team-Up for Bendis, Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates for Millar).

Unfortunately, the concept couldn’t quite last a decade, for a variety of reasons. Bendis as his collaborators, Mark Bagley and Stuart Immonen, did incredibly admirable work on Ultimate Spider-Man, but Millar left both of his titles much more quickly.

Those who followed him on Ultimate X-Men seemed far too intent to introduce too much of the things that made the moribund Marvel X-Men franchise moribund, sucking the specialness out of it. Ultimate Fantastic Four was a mess from the start, with different creative teams every six-to-twelve issues. Too many artists of too many styles and levels of ability were drawing Ultimate books, diluting the brand’s association with quality.

And then Jeph Loeb came, and destroyed the Ultimate Universe.

Well, that was actually his stated goal with Ultimatum, but before Ultimatum #1 even shipped, it seemed Loeb was breaking the line, and probably not on purpose.

Loeb is, of course, a very popular writer whose written some pretty great comics and some pretty terrible ones; a writer who is either smart or lucky enough to have worked with some of the best super-comics artists in the business.

When he attacked the Marvel universe, he was coming off a particularly bad stretch of comics-writing for DC, a time in which he was one of the four writers for the Superman line, and then Superman/Batman and Supergirl. In fact, his last Superman/Batman story arc was about the two title characters fighting barely veiled analogues of Marvel’s Ultimates characters. In retrospect, it almost seems like his “Vengeance” story arc was simply a try-out for a gig writing for Marvel’s Ultimate Universe.

Once there, it was announced that Loeb would be writing the next two volumes of The Ultimates, volume three with the once super-popular deadline-challenged artist Joe Madureira, who had left comics for video games, and volume four with his Superman/Batman collaborator Ed McGunness.

At some point, plans changed, as Ultimates 3 became simply a five-part miniseries (the first two volumes were each 12 issues, with a 13the added to the second volume), and the fourth volume cancelled, as apparently the Ultimate Universe’s days were numbered.

Having just recently read a trade collection of Ultimates 3 that I borrowed from the library (which is really the only safe way to read it), I think it’s clear that, once Marvel published Ultimates 3 #1, they had no choice but to destroy the Ultimate Universe and either scrap the line and start over, or at least re-brand and re-number it in an effort to pretend the story never existed. It is that bad.

In fact, I think it may be the worst comic I have ever read.

I’ve been giving this some thought and, while I can think of some really, really bad comic books, all of them seem to fall short of the extent of Ultimates 3’s badness.

For example, 1993’s Darker Image #1 featured the most appalling, creatively bankrupt story I’ve ever encountered: Rob Liefeld’s “Bloodwulf” short story, which was nothing more than a blatant Lobo rip-off story, more poorly drawn and more poorly written than any Lobo story ever produced. But then, it was just a short story, only a few pages long. It was just a repulsive, soul-destroying black hole of a comics story, but, at the end of the day, it was just one-third of a comic book, and amounted to no more than one more embarrassment in Liefeld’s very embarrassing bibliography.

Or Death’s Head II, did any of you read that? Holy shit was that a terrible thing. But it was an early ‘90s comic book, and was terrible in many of the ways it was stylish to be terrible and, again, it was just a few issues, a blip of abysmal comics.

In the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, there’s no excuse to publish comics as terrible as Ultimates 3, certainly not comics that are part of the Ultimate line, which was premised on not being as shitty as the worst Marvel comics.

(Those are the only two comics I can think of that were perhaps worse than Ultimates 3; I’m sure there are many more, but I do try not to read godawful comics, so I don’t have any other candidates. If you have any suggestions for The Worst Comic Ever, please feel free to let me know in the comments).

The environment in which Ultimates 3 was released really accentuates it’s complete lack of quality. It was written by Jeph Loeb at the height of his popularity, wooed away from DC Comics. It was drawn by Joe Madureira who, okay, may not have actually ever been all that great an artist, but if this was enough to bring him back, it must have been pretty special right?

And, of course, it was the follow-up to Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s 25 issue of The Ultimates which, despite it’s sizable and numerous flaws, just may have been the most influential and oft-imitated comic of the decade. Following Millar and Hitch on their signature work was an unenviable task, and looked at from a certain angle, the fact that Loeb and Madureira were chosen to follow the pair makes a certain kind of sense.

If Marvel would have just found a writer capable of writing superheroes as if they were the stars of big, dumb Hollywood movies, and make them a little more edgy than their “616” counterparts (and maybe throw in some pop culture references), and an artist who could do hyper-detailed, photorealistic art, then the new team would likely have just seemed like a watered-down version of Millar and Hitch. Whether they were actually worse, or just as good or even better, the perception would have been that they were paler imitations, simply by virtue of coming second.

So Marvel chose a writer who writes nothing like Millar, and an artist whose style is diametrically opposite of Hitch’s. That I can understand.

Unfortunately, it didn’t really work out very well.

Loeb ditched the attempts at relevance. There were no politics, no pop culture, not even realism; in fact, Ultiamtes 3 is even less realistic than your average Marvel Universe story. He likewise abandoned Millar’s attempts to think of new conflicts, or at least new spins on age-old ones, retreating to old stand-by Marvel villains and plots (And like Ultimate X-Men’s Robert Kirkman, Loeb seemed to be trying to pack in elements from the Marvel Universe version, so in this series we get the same old Ultron and his same old relationship to the Pyms, we get the Yellowjacket costume, and the return of the superhero costumes over ribbed, leather work clothes, the Ultimates aren’t with the government but are back to being freelance superheroes living in a mansion, and so on).

The one aspect of Millar’s Ultimates run that Loeb did keep was the edginess, and he exploded it, trying to out-outrageous Millar, and while he does provide a lot of outrageous stuff (Incest on page 14!), it’s not grounded to anything serious, grown-up or real, and thus comes across as a juvenile attempt to be “mature.” Some aspects of the book read like a 14-year-old’s attempt to write a really cool comic book for the 1993 comics market.

As for Madureira, I haven’t followed his career as closely as I’ve followed Loeb’s, and I honestly don’t know if the work he does here is better or worse than the comics work he’s done before. It’s not very good though. In fact, it’s fairly awful, and there are some pages of this book that must be among the worst lay-outs in comics history.

But if you want the opposite of Hitch, you’ve got it with Madueira. I like his style and character design just fine as static images. He’s probably a pretty good cover or pin-up artist, and he’s certainly an artist I’d love to get sketches from. But he’s not much of a storyteller, and seems completely bewildered with what to do with a comics page, but we’ll get to that later.

See, I know I’m throwing around some pretty sweeping pronouncements here, which is why I want to devote a great deal more attention to Ultimates 3. It is a really, really, really rather bad comic book, but I think it’s a significant one, and so I want to try to back up those sweeping pronouncements.

But so as not to make this post ten million words long, or to bore you to tears (You’re not actually reading every word of this are you? You’re skimming my post right? I’d skim me if I were you; I talk waaaaayyyyyy too much for a blogger, if you ask me), I’m going to divide the series up.

So this week is Ultimates 3 week on Every Day Is Like Wednesday. We’ll be taking a look at one issue of the series each day, from Monday through Friday.

Two more things before we call it a night.

First, the trade collection, published as Ultimates 3: Who Killed The Scarlet Witch? (Er, spoiler altert! Someone kills the Scarlet Witch!), opens with a rather curious two paragraph synopsis:

Iron Man.Thor. Captain America. The Wasp. Hawkeye. The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes assembled together to handle situations no other team could. Once kept under the thumb of the United States government, billionaire playboy Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man) decided to take the team on t heir own, housing them in his private Manhattan mansion on Fifth Avenue.

That’s all stuff you’d probably know from reading the first two volumes of the series, and seems like legitimate catch-up, re-cap material. But then there’s this second paragraph:

Joined now by the Black Panther, Valkyrie, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, the team deals with conflicts that are both internal and external. Until six weeks ago, Valkyrie was an ordinary 19-year-old groupie, dreaming of being a super hero, yet she now possesses the powers of a goddess. The ever-silent Black Panther keeps to himself, with the exception of a yet unexplained bond with Captain America.

And that’s just the beginning.

None of that is anything you’d know from reading previous volumes of The Ultimates, and in fact deals with some storytelling issues. Valkyrie and Black Panther are new to the team, appearing as members in this issue with no explanation to their appearance there. Which is, of course, fine; stories often start out in the middle of the action or a new status quo, and then gradually explain things as they unfold. But Ultimates 3 never really gets to that, at least not in any satisfying way, and its inclusion in this prose introduction seems like an admission by the collection itself, a sort of “Oh yeah, you’ll need to know this stuff, because it’s not in any of the comics.”

And finally for tonight, I wanted to show a few examples of how Madureira’s style and design contrasts with Hitch’s. The latter is a far better draftsman, storyteller and “actor” than the former, but I like the former’s style better. At any rate, he’s clearly a very, very different artist, as his takes on the Hitch-designed characters clearly shows.



Here are the two Ultimates artist's versions of Thor. Hitch draws Thor as the biggest, broadest-shouldered, widest-chested of the characters (except for the Hulk), but he's still more or less just a big, strong, pretty cut human being.

Madureira's Thor, meanwhile, is built like a bodybuilder, or, more accurately, a post-1990's superhero or video game character. Are the muscles in his right arm real muscles that would appear on a real human being? I have no idea. Obviously, my arm doesn't look like that, and I don't read body builder magazines, so maybe they are, but if the arm looks familiar or "right" to me, it's because it resembles other superhero art, not something I've seen seen in real life.

Note also that the leg muscles, abs and neck muscles show through Thor's costume, so that whatever he's wearing, it's tight enough to wrap around individual muscles. That, or it's merely an artistic flourish on Maduriera's part, a way of showing how muscular the character is even if it's unrealistic to do so. Such exaggeration and artistic license is perfectly valid, of course, but, obviously, it's a very different tactic than Hitch employed during his run.

Madureira keeps the costume in tact, and his Thor is basically the same person, only drawn differently; perhaps Madureira's Thor has longer hair and a fuller beard. Also of note is the hammer; Madureira draws the standard Marvel Universe version, whereas Hitch's was some kinda of big battle axe/war hammer combo.




Here are the two Hawkeyes. The Ultiamtes 3 one looks dramatically different than the original, but then Hawkeye is a dramatically different person, having lost his family and apparently his will to livee between his first appearance and the beginning of the third volume. So he's grown his hair out and changed costumes.

The new costume is pretty stupid—the bullseye on the forehead, the weird, stylized H—but it's in fitting with the character, who is presented as pretty stupid in the story, and it's not as awful a costume as his Marvel Universe one, which would have looked crazy out of place in the Ultimate Marvel Universe.

I'm not sure why he has a mask now though. Is he protecting his secret identity? Or is it an intentional nod to the lead character in Millar and Jones' Wanted?



Here's Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch. What I found most notable about their designs is that Madureira completely retreated from the Hitch designs, which barely even qualify as costumes (Witch's particularly; you could probably put that together visiting your average mall), and put them in variations of their Marvel Universe costumes.

I thought that kind of significant because neither of these characters actually have decent costumes in the Marvel Universe. Why doesn't Quicksilver have silver on? Why does he wear green? What's up with the Witch's little tiara/hood/hat/face frame thing? How does it attach to her head? Why does she wear it? These are the questions I wonder about the Marvel Universe versions, and now the Ultimate versions are dressing like them.

Witch's clothes are suppose to be inappropriately skimpy I guess, as a few panels after that Captain America's all like, "Er, why are you wearing lingerie outside like a whore yo?" This scene is kind of funny in that the siblings are about to go Christmas shopping in New York in December, so they decide to wear superhero costumes, and Scarlet Witch is more scantily clad then most people are when they go to the beach.


Finally, here's the Wasp. Um, to the upper right of Cap's face in the Hitch cover; that's the best cover image of her in her slightly more superhero looking costume from Ultimates 2. As you can see, Hitch obviously didn't have a lot of imagination when it came to the costume designs; there's very little difference between what Wasp wears and what Scarlet Witch wears.

Madureira gave Wasp a more colorful costume and added a mask, an odd choice since she has no secret identity.

It's also worth noting that Madureira's Wasp no longer looks Asian, and has longer, lighter hair to boot, but I don't think this was a conscious choice on Madureira's part to obscure her ethnicity. Because his character design is so influenced by anime and manga, if she were supposed to be Asian, she wouldn't necessarily look any more Asian than any of the other characters. And, as this is set sometime after Ultimates 2, there's no reason she couldn't have grown her hair out and dyed it. Hawkeye grew his out, after all.

Thus concludes are preliminaries. Tomorrow, Ultimates 3 #1!

Some reviews of a bunch of recent comics, mostly from Boom

Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead #3 (Radical Comics) I’m afraid I don’t have anything to say about this third issue of the four-part series that I haven’t already said, so I’ll just note that the plot for this one involves Alice Hotwire finding a nest of illegally weaponized ghosts and fighting them. One of these is a monster made entirely out of shuriken, and that’s just as cool as it sounds.


Irredeemable #2 and #3 (Boom Studios) I didn’t much care for the first issue of this new ongoing series by Mark Waid, admittedly in large because of Grant Morrison’s depressingly petty afterward, which reframed the comic story I had just got done reading as a response to Waid (and Morrison’s) fans and critics, for type-casting him (them) and sniping at him (them).

Given that the comic was little more than a What If…Superman Became Evil? story, with the first hints of why the world’s greatest hero would turn into its’ greatest villain being when his super-hearing picks up on people nitpicking him, the story became rather gross. Was Morrison saying that he and Mark Waid are like Superman, and wouldn’t it be cool if they just killed the hell out of everyone who didn’t love them enough? Superheroes are all about wish fulfillment, of course, even wishes the wisher knows are wrong and taboo and don’t actually wish for, but wouldn’t mind experiencing vicariously through fiction. But usually the target audience is quite a bit larger than superhero comics writers.

As much as I disliked that first issue, I have a lot of faith in Mark Waid’s abilities, and I assumed the series would get better. But if it will get better at some point, it hasn’t as of the third issue.

In the second issue, the Not The Justice League continues to try and figure out why Not Superman went crazy and turned evil, which entails one of the heroes tracking down Not Lois Lane, and the readers learning through flashback a bit about their relationship. As with Lois Lane, Not Lois Lane was one point in a romantic triangle involving the world’s greatest superhero and her bespectacled co-worker at her media institution.

Not Clark Kent pulls her into a closet at work one day, takes off his glasses and unbuttons his shirt and reveals that he’s actually also Not Superman. She reacts more realistically than Lois did: Being pretty damn pissed that the guy though so little of her that he pretended to be two different people and lied to her for years. She immediately shares the information with the rest of their media institution.

In the third issue, the Not Justice League continue to unravel the mystery of Not Superman’s sudden bout of evil-ness, and follow a villain who isn’t The Prankster and a group of other villains who the secret underground cave base of a character who isn’t Batman, but Not Superman is there to make sure that the weapon Not Batman has developed to stop him doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. (Although there’s a twist, it’s not as simple as the off-brand Batman having an off-brand kryptonite to use on the off-brand Superman).

You’ve probably detected a pattern by now, and that’s the book’s real problem. It is entirely, completely dependent on a reader’s familiarity with other comic books, and, because we know so little of the characters at this point, any drama that comes from their conflicts with one another is buoyed by that knowledge. Three issues in, it still reads like a rejected Superman Elseworld’s pitch, with the names changed and the characters redesigned.

I should note again that at least Waid and artist Peter Krause have developed some new characters. Superma—er, The Plutonian’s peers in the Jus—um, The Paradigm are, if not completely unique characters, aren’t simple one-for-one analogues with DC heroes. That is, Waid and Krause have actually created some new superheroes to fill out The Plutonian’s team; it’s not simply The Fast, Red Lamp, Falcon Man, Blue Arrow and so on.

The comic it most reminds me of at this point is Mark Millar and J.G. Jones’ Wanted, which did use a one-for-one analogue approach, filling the book with clearly recognizable Superman and Batman villains that were just slightly tweaked. And while I’d hardly hold Wanted up as a paragon of comics storytelling, Millar and Jones did do a decent job of defining their protagonist’s character before introducing us to all the analogues and the couple of high concepts Millar had come up with for the series.

Here, the high concept isn’t terribly high, and the none of the characters have been too terribly defined beyond their names, costumes and actions. We’re meeting them and learning a bit about them through flashback, but the situations and settings we’re flashing back too seem just as analogous to those form other DC super-comics as the altered-present does.

Three issues in, the comic book still reads like an idea for a comic book, rather than a series.

Now, it’s quite possible that Waid is taking a long view with the project, and that at some point it will all come together in a way that transforms these first few issues. If that’s the case, here’s hoping he does so by the end of the first trade’s worth of stories. I’m not sure you can—or at least should—write a comic that way, particularly if it’s being released serially like this, as it’s asking an awful lot of your readers to read five and a half poor issues to get to the part that will make sense of them.

But then, I’m just speculating, based on the fact that Waid’s past work proves he’s a better, smarter writer than this particular work evidences.

I should note that Krause has been doing a fairly great job with the art, particularly when it comes to “acting” through the characters. I admire the character design not reflecting too obviously on DC and Marvel characters (the way Jones’ did in Wanted) but, at the same time, I haven’t really been impressed with these particular designs.

But Krause sure knows his way around a page, and can pull off some impressive scenes. I particularly liked the bit in #3 where the villains and a hero suddenly realize that The Plutonian is already in the same place as them, and The Plutonian silently walks about, doing his business, completely ignoring all the characters, as they’re that far beneath his contempt.

Krause and Waid really did a pretty stellar job of communicating just what a scary motherfucker Evil Superman would be, and it was easy to see why everyone would be so freaked out about him.

That scene was another example of how good Waid and Krause are, and that they’re capable of more, and thus perhaps deserve the benefit of the doubt.

But then, I’m reading review copies. If I was handing over $4 for each of these installments, I probably wouldn’t have even made it to #2; certainly not to #3.


Muppet Robin Hood #1 (Boom Kids) I would not envy the task of writer Tim Beedle and artist Armand Villavert Jr., the first creative team to tackle a Muppet comic book since Roger Langridge set the bar so incredibly high. Given how universally adored Langridge’s Muppet Show comic was, how could Beedle and Villavert help but disappoint?

And disappoint they do, but not too terribly badly. I wouldn’t say this is on par with the Muppet Show comic, but the creators have a pretty decent excuse: The Muppet movies, even the best ones, were never really on par with The Muppet Show TV show, particularly not the sort of movies which this comic aims to replicate, wherein the Muppets fill out the cast in a classic, public domain story (Think Muppet Christmas Carol or Muppet Treasure Island).

The story here is, of course, that of Robin Hood, with Kermit playing the title role (Isn’t his nephew already named Robin? Yes, and that’s addressed within). He’s just returned to Loxley Swamp to find that it’s been transformed into a miniature golf course, and he runs afoul of the sheriff of Nottingham (Sam the Eagle) and his lackey, played by Gonzo.

After besting the pair, he and his nephew journey to Sherwood Forest, where they join up with the Merry Men (Sweetums as Little John, plus Rolf, Scooter, Rizzo, The Swedish Chef, that fish guy and a few others).

Villavert does an excellent Kermit, and a pretty good job on the rest of the Muppet characters, although his Sam The Eagle leaves a bit to be desired, looking a little too fat and round. The bigger problem I had was with the horses; are they supposed to be real horses or Muppet horses? They’re scaled to the characters as if they were Muppet horses, but they mostly look like real horses (I’m just nitpicking now, I know, but I think it’s important to a certain degree; if this were a movie, than puppet Kermit flailing around on the back of a real horse would be a lot funnier than puppet Kermit on a puppet horse, you know? One of the things I admired most about Langridge’s comic was that the Muppets retain their essential puppet-hood, even though they need not do so).

There are a couple of covers on this one since, you know, it is impossible to publish comic books without variants in today’s market. There’s a “Retailer variant cover” by a David Alvarez, which I didn’t see, and two others, one by Mouse Guard’s David Petersen featuring Kermit vs. Sweetums (that’s it above), and the other by a Shelli Paroline, which I like quite a bit more:




The Muppet Show #3 (Boom Kids) I think this may be the strongest of Roger Langridge's Muppet Show comics to date; if I'm less effusive in my praise for this one than I was for the first, it owes more to the fact that at this point I'm expecting a certain level of quality, whereas the quality of the first issue was such a surprise (Before reading it, I wasn't sure if a TV puppet show premised as a Vaudeville stage show could be adapted into a comic book successfully).

This issue is a Gonzo-centric one. In between the show's various skits—Bear on Patrol, Pigs In Space, a ballet sketch, a climactic Extravagonzo, etc.—Scooter is attempting to determine what species Gonzo is exactly on behalf of an insurance adjuster, and he's not having a whole lot of luck. (I seem to remember learning at some point--maybe on Muppet Babies--that Gonzo's particular species was a "weirdo," and I believe one of the movies was about his being an alien). The final determinations, the species Scooter ultimately gives the insurance guy and what Gonzo self-identifies as, are actually rather touching.

Two things regarding the Muppet characters occurred to me that I never much thought about before.

First is just how weird Gonzo is; Langridge's more idiosyncratic take on teh character and the way he presents him really underlines this, particularly near the end where his weirdness is used to directly menace the insurance agent. And the second is that Gonzo fucks chickens, doesn't he? I didn't think about that as a kid for the obvious reasons, although I was always kinda weirded out by the Kermit/Miss Piggy inter-species relationship (Frogs and pigs aren't even, like, compatible in the way a frog and lizard or a pig and goat might have seemed to young Caleb). Gonzo is more anthropomorphic than that chicken though, who can't even speak English. Regardless of appearance or daredevil stunts, chicken-fucking is about as weird as you can get.

And, secondly, what species is Scooter supposed to be? I always assumed he was a human, but he lacks a nose, which most (if not all) of the human Muppets have, and is head is shaped somewhat similarly to Kermit’s, and Kermit is, of course, a frog.


Unthinkable #1 (Boom) As premises go, this new series has a pretty rock solid one, and it’s executed fairly well, although it’s pacing makes it difficult to get a handle on where it might be going in future issues (This issue spans eleven years, two years passing between the turn of two pages, and then almost the entire Bush administration passing in the space of four panels).

That’s one of the reasons I’m not sure I have my mind made up about it enough to really weigh in on its quality; the other being the politics of it. Unthinkable wrestles with some pretty big subjects—which takes a courage that’s to be applauded—although I haven’t seen enough to know the positions it’s taking on some of these big issues. I think this is a comic I’m going to probably have to ignore in single issues, and then come back to in trade, when I can sink my teeth (well, my eyes) into a large potion of it, and give it some thought.

And hey, there’s another thing to applaud about this comic–it encourages one to think about it!

So it’s 1999, and Alan Ripley is a successful airport novelist of the Tom Clancy-ish variety, who also produces movies based on his books. His brother is an ex-Navy Seal, and consults with him; he’s also founded a Blackwater-like private security/mercenary firm.

Then it’s September 11, 2001, and the brother is killed in the attack on the Pentagon. A government official recruits Ripley and a bunch of other specialists into something called the Think Tank; they’re assigned with thinking of crazy terrorist attack ideas so the U.S. can plan to prevent them and, in a sense, be ready for anything. There, they’re each given little G.I. Joe-like codenames (Ripley is Hollywood, a conspiracy theorist is Peak Oil, a microbiologist Outbreak, and so on).

Flash forward nine years, and some of the very attacks the Think Tank conceived of start coming true!

Like I said, it’s hard to see where writer Mark Sable might be going with this. The Think Tank itself seemed to be a good enough premise to base a story around, but then when the attacks start coming true in the present, the narrative threatens that it may end up being the sort of big, dumb action narrative that Ripley would write a book or produce a movie about. It’s too early to tell, really.

Artist Julian Totino Tedesco does a nice job of providing a realistic, grounded-looking world full of real-looking people, and he acts through them all quite well. The artwork’s not showy or stylized, but it is well constructed and easy to read, the kind of art that best serves a concept-driven story like this.

In which I'm reminded about not judging books by their covers

How's that old saying go, regarding books, their covers and judging them? That's supposed to be something you avoid doing, right? I was recently reminded specifically why you're supposed to avoid doing so when I finally got around to reading two graphic novels I had originally dismissed and relegated to a "I'll get to it when I get to it" pile.

You're not supposed to judge books by their covers necessarily because it's unfair to the books (or whatever the book is a metaphor for), but because you might miss out on a great book (or whatever the book is a metaphor for) if you dismiss it too quickly.

In the case of Jill Thompson's Magic Trixie (Harper Collins; 2008), I didn't have any doubts that it was probably a pretty good book. I've long enjoyed Thompson's work, and greatly admired the flexibility in her style, and the way she seems to be able to effortlessly recalibrate it to fit the project she's working on. From the fairly straight, dramatic style she employed in her Sandman work (along with Vince Locke, Thompson is my favorite of the many great Sandman artists), to the looser style used in comedy work like Finals and Scary Godmother, to the manga-style she developed for the Death: At Death's Door and Dead Boy Detectives digests, Thompson's work is almost always recognizably hers, but can look different enough to almost trick one into thinking there are a half-dozen different Jill Thompsons who all share a studio.

I've enjoyed Thompson's Scary Godmother work (at least the comics end of it; I haven't read any of the story books or seen the stage version I understand was developed, and the animation I've seen was pretty poor), which, if you haven't read any of it, is about a normal little girl named Hannah-Marie who meets a witchy fairy godmother like character who looks a little like Jill Thompson. The little girl befriends the title character and her friends and neighbors, including a family of vampires, a slacker werewolf and big, cuddly boogeyman type monster. It's a pretty light-hearted, all-ages series of stories, with humor based around the culture and mores of the friendly horror characters (a lot of Addams Family TV show style puns, riffs on old horror movies). Also, there are a lot of fun recipes to try.

When I first saw Magic Trixie, it was on Matthew Brady's blog (although I didn't read his review until recently as I try not to read reviews of comics until I've read them; go check out his review though, he's got several nice scans of the art) and, honestly, that's the only place I saw anyone writing about it. I guess like a lot of graphic novels published by publishers newer to comics, the comics press and online community may have treated it more like a children's book and ignored it more than they should have...?).

It was by Thompson, it looked like it was about a witch with a punny name, and she had kinky hair like Thompson and Scary Godmother, so I just assumed it was more of the same; or at least a slight variation of the that same.

And then I read it and realized how wrong I was.

There is a witch character, as well as a lot of other variations of monster characters, some of them the same sorts of monsters that appeared in the Scary Godmother works, but they're substantially different; if Thompson is starting with some of the same monsters, she goes in different places with them. Magic Trixie is, of course, a witch, but she's a little girl first, and one that just happens to be a witch. She lives with a whole family of witches—mom, (rather cool and sexy looking) dad, grandparents, baby sister, and older sister or cousin, who is totally hot (there's something for everyone in here!)—and she goes to school with a variety of other monster kids.

It's set in the real world too; this isn't a fantasy, alternate dimension full of monsters or anything, the monster kids just happen to go to a different school than you do. Kinda like a private school, only for mummies and vampires instead of Catholic kids.

The book is quite kid-friendly, although I think it falls rather safely into all-ages category. There's a lot for those of us not in school anymore to glom on to, aside from Thompson's art which, I was happy to note, seems to be again re-calibrated into a different style. Here characters still look like Thompson characters, and the settings are full of her severe lines, sharp corners and ever present curlicues, but the whole thing is rounder, looser and softer. Just look at the cover; the title characters' limbs are boneless, and her talking pet/friend/familiar Scratches looks more like a toy-brought-to-life than a cat. Scratches may be the most abstracted character I've ever seen Thompson draw.

The artwork is all fully-painted, and richly detailed. Magic Trixie's house seems real enough that one could walk around it. If I were to somehow find myself lost in it, I'd be relatively confident I'd be able to find my way out form having read it.

The plot involves Magic Trixie dealing with two conflicts that converge near the climax: She feels she needs to do something dramatic for show and tell at the end of the week to compete with her schoolmates, particularly the mean werewolf girl Loupie Garou and is having trouble thinking of something special enough, while at home she feels her family is getting her new little sister do everything Magic Trixie herself is not allowed to do. The latter is particularly familiar, but Thompson lets the reader into Magic Trixie's point of view of the problem quite well—it does seem unfair.

If you have or know any little kids old enough to read, I imagine this will be right up their alley. And or/if you like fun, imaginative comics and beautiful art, then this will probably be right up yours. Don't make the same mistake I did!

I assume the original book was successful, as a second book, Magic Trixie Sleeps Over was released last October, and a third, Magic Trixie and the Dragon, is due for release at the end of this month.

As for Three Shadows (First Second; 2008), I'm not quite sure why I dismissed it the first time I ran across a copy, floating around a library (Er, the book was floating around the library. I wasn't floating. Actually, the book wasn't floating-floating; I think it was just sitting on a bookshelf). I was unfamiliar with the work of Cyril Pedrosa, but that shouldn't have been a turn off, as even if he was the worst artist in the world, I hadn't seen anything of his to know he was.

I don't think I was aware it was a First Second book either, or I would have been more likely to pick it up; I haven't read everything First Second has published, but I've read a lot of it, and I don't think I've read a single book of theirs that I didn't think was somewhere pretty damn good and great.

I did not care for that cover at all though.

I didn't even notice the two little figures in the background of it until just now actually. Originally all I noticed was a bunch of trees and the dark atmosphere. It certainly conveys the mood of the book, but it didn't really convey the look of it; Pedrosa is an amazing artist, and while covers often can't convey the degree of skill comics artists have, as the medium depends on repeated, sequential images, they can show how good an artist is at drawing and/or designing, and this cover does not do that.

So, while I hate to throw negative words at a publisher whose output I like as much as First Second's, it's got to be done: Lame cover guys, lame cover.

I was in a library I don't normally visit the other day though, and, while checking out their selection of graphic novels, I checked out a bunch of things I hadn't read before, including Three Shadows.

And hell's bells was it good! It definitely would have been a candidate on my best-of list for 2008, if not one of the top-ten.

The plot is a little difficult to talk about without spoiling too much of it, however. There's a small family consisting of a man, his wife and their little son, who live an idyllic life together alone in the woods, secluded from most of the world. One night they're visited by three silent riders who watch them from very far away before disappearing. The three shadows encroach more and more on them, until the parents learn that they are there for their son, and there's nothing they can do to stop them.

The father takes his son and runs, and much of the book involves his attempts save his son from the death the riders represent, asking and engaging questions like how far he'll go to save his son, how far is too far, and how (or if) one can ever recover the loss of a loved one. It's dramatic stuff, and Pedrosa presents it quite dramatically.

Apparently his background is in animation, and it shows; the book reads like extremely elegant storyboards, which have been inked to perfection instead of left loose and scratchy. Some strange turns are taken near the climax, and the point of view shifts from the father to the riders in a way that was somewhat jarring on my first read, but if this is less than a perfect book, it's about as close to a perfect one as anything I've read lately.

So I finally finished Y: The Last Man...

I was reading Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's excellent Vertigo series Y: The Last Man in trade, and by the time I got to the sixth volume or so, I decided I'd quit reading it until it was totally finished and all the trades were out, so I could finish it all at once. It was just so suspenseful, I couldn't take the wait between volumes, particularly as it got closer to the conclusion.

Well, after a few years wait—in which I kind of forgot about Y, figuring I'll get to it eventually—I finally finished the series, reading the last two volumes just last night.

It was a fairly satisfying ending, particularly considering how badly it could have ended (the cover of the last issue really had me fearing the worst), and the fact that after so much suspense and build up, there wasn't really an explanation for the "gendercide" and a way out of it that would have lived it up to the mystery the first two-thirds or so of the series suggested (I would have liked a better explanation for the death than we got, honestly, but it wasn't a terrible explanation or anything).

And God, what a climax to the book. I—and everyone who read it—saw an aspect of the climax coming, but certainly not the exact way it played out. I'll admit, part way through the tenth volume, I was pretty emotionally devastated, and felt close to tears.

Specifically, when I read this panel:


Say it ain't so Agent 355! Please, say it ain't so!

I know this is just a prose book, but it's still a pretty cool looking one

I'm not sure why exactly I'm interested in Bigfoot, a so-called cryptid animal that I don't believe in (surely the advent of the cellphone camera signals the end of all belief in him, doesn't it?) and yet I love reading about him. In his new book Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (University of Chicago Press; 2009), author Joshua Blu Buhs talks about why the creature has proven so attractive to so many people over the years, and I don't really meet any of those criteria.

I do know why I picked this particular book up, though: It's fantastic looking. A Matt Avery is responsible for the overall design of the book and the jacket, and the illustrations are credited to a Lauren Nassef, whose work is quite nice in general (Check it out).

Here's the front cover of it:

I love that image. It's a great standalone image, and one that not only catches the eye, but actually captures the contents of the book remarkably well.

Buhs isn't a believer either, and explains he was originally drawn to the subject because in his previous work on fire ants he found that he greatly enjoyed writing about an animal subject's interaction with human culture, but was rather frustrated with all of the deep science involved with learning about the animal's actual behavior. An animal that didn't actually exist then seemed to suit his needs perfectly.

The hoaxing involved in the legend of Bigfoot, from people making fake tracks to at least one fake suit, is suggested by Nassef's cover, as is the the concept of people projecting themselves inside Bigfoot, something Buhs talks about quite a bit.

Here's the back cover:

The fur extends to the spine of the book as well, and thus this thing looks cool from whatever angle—face front on a coffee table or nightstand, shelved spine out or even absently left laying on its cover.

You can't really tell from the scan, but the front cover also has a faux wooden look, seeming as if the front cover was actually made out of wood. The inside covers and the first and last pages are also wooden looking, although darker, and with a palpable, groove-filled texture. I'm not generally one to fetishize book design, but damn, this is one nice looking book.

In addition to that nice cover image and the field of fur pattern, Nassef also provides an illustration that appears at the very end of the book, after the notes and bibliography, a parting sighting of the subject matter:

My scan's rather poor, owing to not wanting to badly mangle a library book, which accounts for the shadow there, but you get a pretty good idea of what a nice drawing of Bigfoot Nassef has made. (Especially if you click it. Clicking the images makes 'em bigger; you knew that, right?)

The book itself, by the way, is really great, maybe the best Bigfoot book I've read, replacing Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle, which addressed the same subject—the cultural history of Bigfoot divorced from the is he or isn't he real debate—from the perspective of a nature writer and environmentalist who was hiking through Bigfoot country. If someone asked me to suggest a book about Bigfoot to them two weeks ago, I would have suggest Pyle's; if you asked me today, I'd suggest Buhs'. Not only is it a good book, but it's a beautiful object as well.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas...

I have a short review of Fantagraphics' jaw-dropping collection The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley's Cartoons from 1913-1940 in today's Las Vegas Weekly, which you can read here. It was a rather challenging review to write, as the most perfect and appropriate review of the book is the one mentioned on Fanta's site as "a verbatim office reaction to seeing the book for the first time"—"Holy motherfucker!" Seriously, that about covers it in just two words. You can download a preview of the book here, and think of your own appropriately profane exclamations.

Weekly Haul: June 3rd

Agents of Atlas #6 (Marvel Comics) So here we’ve got one of those two great tastes that go great together types of situations. The Agents, wanting to get to the bottom of all this “Dark Reign” business, visit Namor, who is a bit of a prick to them, and there is also some fighting.

Not as big of a prick nor as much fighting as there’d be in, say, an ideal Namor comic, but then, my ideal Namor comic would be like the old Marvel Team-Up, only instead of The Thing it would star Namor, and instead of Team-Up it would be called Punch-Up.

Writer Jeff Parker does an awfully good job with the Atlantis stuff, in the sort of “I thought hard about what I’m writing and have some neat, logical ideas about the subject which I will now share with you” way that can make superhero comics so appealing when it’s done well.

The art this month is by Gabriel Hardman, which is a totally badass name, and it’s quite good. I haven’t cared for the visual side of this book a whole lot thus far, but Jana Schirmer’s colors work out okay on Hardman’s art, perhaps owing to the unearthly setting and strange light sources in it making such textured coloring seem more appropriate than that of other issues have on the surface.


Batman and Robin #1 (DC Comics) Experienced in a vacuum, this is a really rather good superhero comic book, perhaps even a remarkably good one. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, or prove a valentine to the wheel the way that the Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely creative team’s previous book did, but then, this is an entirely different beast—an in-continuity Batman comic beholden to the DCU comics line in a way All-Star Superman was excepted from.

Following Morrison’s own run on Batman, it seems like a masterpiece, as not only does it have Morrison at his sharpest on one of the easiest characters and concepts he’s ever tackled, but he’s finally paired with a real comics artist. Not only can Quitely draw very well and not only is he an incredible designer, but, unlike Morrison’s previous collaborator on the character, Quitely also knows the first thing about drawing comic books, a rather important bit of knowledge you’d expect a comic artist hired to work with Grant Morrison on Batman to have.

I wonder how this reads following Battle For the Cowl and its sundry tie-ins, though. DC has spent hundreds of pages on explaining things like what Commissioner Gordon thinks about Batman disappearing and what Man-Bat is up to and how long it would take the most obvious candidate to finally replace Batman, and Morrison and Quitely just answer all your questions either directly or through implication with a half a line of dialogue here or there (Well, all of your reasonable questions; no mention of what Man-Bat thinks about all this in the issue). Batman an Robin #1 mainly renders everything that happened since Final Crisis in the Bat-books (with the possible exception of the Neil Gaiman two-parter) superfluous and meaningless; if anything, all those tie-ins probably hurt this book, as it makes the characters all seem more inconsistent (The Dick Grayson and Damian al Ghul in this book may seem like the one’s from “Batman R.I.P.,” but they don’t’ seem at all like the ones in Battle For the Cowl, for example). (That, by the way, held true for “Batman R.I.P.” as well. The various tie-ins only contradicted each other and muddied the waters).

So what have we here? A new Batman, a new Robin, a new Batmoblie, a new (old) Batcave, new villains and a new dynamic between the new dynamic duo, and it’s all written sharply and economically, and it’s all expertly designed and rendered.

It’s basically a perfect Batman comic book, which is something of a feat given the fact that neither Bruce Wayne nor any of the regular Bat-villains.


Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Vampires (Dark Horse Comics) You want to know a deep, dark secret that might cost me some nerd cred in your eyes? I’ve never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV show* (I did watch the movie though, because it had Luke Perry in it). I’m not ignorant of the show, and am actually fairly conversant in it, on account of one of my old roommates having gone through a phase where he watched the whole damn thing on FX in a matter of months, but I could never get into it enough to, like, ever actually watch it.

In theory it seems like a show I would dig—I like high school drama, melodrama and comedy, and I liked a lot of the actors from their film roles and/or previous television shows—but there was an air of artificiality to it that repelled me (like Gilmore Girls, everyone talked in the same, unnatural voice) and the cosmology was a bit of a turn-off (like, these particular vampire “rules,” and the way they looked and so on).

I tried some of the comics a while back, long before this “Season 8” stuff started, and those were just dreadful, although I received a review copy of Wolves at the Gate, the Slayers vs. Dracula and Japanese vampires arc, and I really rather dug that.

So, long story long, I’m something of a Buffy virgin. Maybe a Buffy technical virgin? Or just not all that experienced?

So I don’t know if this is “important” or how to rate it against the usual Buffy fare, although it seems to me that it’s perfectly accessible as a standalone read, and didn’t seem to have anything at all to do with Buffy shows or comics to me, beyond two prose paragraphs on the inside front cover saying it has something to do with Harmony, a reality TV show and the fact that Slayers are the new vampires in American culture, I guess…?

As to why I even bothered with this one-shot, it’s written by Becky Cloonan, drawn by Vasilis Lolos and featured a cover by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, so, you know, that’s a creative team well worth following around.

The contents were A-OK. Nothing terribly revolutionary, or even anything I haven’t seen (repeatedly) before, but there’s nothing particularly wrong or weak about it either.

A highschooler named Jacob lives in a terrible small town where the only place open after 9 p.m. is an arcade. His only thrill, beyond playing videogames there, is letting local vampires suck blood from him (Why do vampires hang around a town with no nightlife at all? I don’t know). Then a new vampire girl moves to town, and things get more complicated for Jacob.

And that’s about it. It’s a decent enough teen vampire comic book, a perfectly okay story with nothing wrong with it. You need not know a damn thing about Buffy to appreciate it, although I suppose the downside for people who are only interested in this because it’s a Buffy comic might find that fact disappointing. That is, if you’re only eagerly following along with the Season 8 book to see what Joss Whedon had planned for his characters, I imagine you might find this book completely inessential.


Justice Society of America #27 (DC) How unimportant are the issues of a comic book that fall between the end of one writer’s run and the beginning of the next writers’ run? Apparently unimportant enough that I totally forgot to even pick this up last week, when it was originally released.

It’s written and illustrated by Jerry Ordway, and inked by Bob Wiacek, so obviously it looks great. The story is pretty well done too. There’s an awful lot of talking, plenty of call-backs to old DC stories (it opens with an Infinity Inc. splash page, and features various Ininitors talking to one another), some good old-fashioned suspense, and poor under-used Obsidian actually gets a lot of panel-time.

I kinda wish Ordway was the new creative team, as I have a lot more faith in his abilities than those of the new writing team he’s just kinda marking time for at the moment.


Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye #3 (DC/Vertigo) The same day Batman and Robin launches, signaling Grant Morrison’s return to the superhero salt mines, the last issue of his Seaguy sequel series ships. It’s a sweet and rather romantic ending, although I wonder if that undercuts the previous mediations on the desire for happiness and the way people ravage themselves, each other and their world to get it. But I honestly didn’t think too hard about it, simply enjoying Cameron Stewart’s art and lines like “Autoraptor! Death-eye engage!”


Secret Six #10 (DC) After a pair of quite light-hearted, done-in-one issues, writer Gail Simone launches a new, darker, heavier arc dealing with…slavery (Also: Drug addiction. And sooo much wanton slaughter). And that’s all well and good; Simone can write darker and heavier okay, Nicola Scott can certainly draw it, and these characters work well in such a milieu.

Of special note may be the fact that Deadshot may have been a Viking with the same mustache in a past life, and that former replacement Wonder Woman Artemis shows up, in some sort of mind-control and/or power dampening bondage rig.

Can I make a special request here? Next time we get to see a Bane dream sequence, can we get an Osito cameo? Because that would be fantastic.

(Confidential to whoever did this month’s cover: I think you forgot, like, a third of Deadshot’s arm there.)


Ultimate Spider-Man #133 (Marvel) Wow, fuck you Marvel Comics.

This is the very last issue of Ultimate Spider-Man, the ongoing series that launched in late 2000 and has run for almost nine years now, with all 133 of those issues being written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by just two pencil artists, Mark Bagley (who drew the first six years or so) and then Stuart Immonen.

Anyway you look at it, the longevity of the title, and the longevity of the creators on the title, is a remarkable achievement in modern comics.

With the series ending, one might expect a sense of closure, given that Bendis invested a decade of his life into it, and fans a decade of theirs, plus three dollars every month (or more, considering the book often shipped more than monthly, and then there were annuals and spin-offs).

One might be extremely disappointed to find nothing of the sort here. Neither Peter Parker or Spider-Man even appear in this issue. At the end of #132, the Hulk was trying to smash a glowing orb of pink energy in which Dr. Strange stored supernatural menaces, in the ruins of New York City, which was destroyed in another comic (the unreadable miniseries Ultimatum). Spider-Man (and Bendis and Immonen) have been dealing with the disaster being explained in that other series for the last few issues, and apparently decided to end the series doing so.

This issue offers 22 silent, dialogue-free pages (making it probably the quickest read of the series since that one mostly silent issue of the Black Cat arc), in which the following occurs: There’s a pink mushroom cloud of magic energy, the Hulk chases Spider-Woman around, the Hulk fights some helicopters, Kitty Pryde and Spider-Woman rescue some survivors and find a ripped up Spider-Man mask, they bring the mask to Aunt May and Mary Jane at May’s house, everyone cries, and there’s a “Fin” in bottom right-hand corner of the last page.

Wow, awesome accomplishment guys! Nine years of character development and serial story-telling leads up to a crossover with a Jeph Loeb comic, and Spider-Man dying off-panel? (I don’t really care if he’s actually dead or not; according to this he is, and this is the last issue of the series).

But to really kick fans in the teeth, Marvel decided to jack the price of this standard-sized issue up a whole $1.00, so you pay 33% more than usual for the same amount of comic (or less comic really, given the wordless issue takes much less time to read). For nine years and 132 issues, they charged $2.99, and then they jack the price up by a dollar for the very last issue.

To soften the blow, Marvel does add a seven-page interview with Bendis about his tenure on the book, if you’re a reader who wants to hear what Bendis has to say about writing Spider-Man, but lack the ability to get on the Internet, I suppose.

Now, I know there’s a two-issue Requiem series which will likely be where some sort of ending to the series might actually be, but there’s no indication of that fact here in the book itself. Likewise, I know that Bendis is going to be writing a new book called Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, so maybe this isn’t actually the final “fin,” but it would have been nice to maybe get a damn ending after all this build-up. Or, at the very least, not get tricked into paying extra for a goddam stupid “bonus feature.”


Warlord #3 (DC) This is only the third monthly issue of this series, and apparently regular pencil artist Joe Prado already needed an issue off, as Chad Hardin steps in to draw this issue. The work he turns in is just fine, but Jesus, can’t pencillers last even a whole story arc anymore?

And if DC was going to hire a guy who can’t draw 22 pages a month or thereabouts, maybe they should have stockpiled some issues before launching his series? It’s not like there was any reason that the world had to have a new Warlord series in April of 2009 or anything.

On the plus side, this issue has a splash page in which a dinosaur attacks a unicorn, making me realize that not only have I never seen a dinosaur vs. unicorn fight, but that I never even knew how much I wanted to see a dinosaur vs. unicorn fight.



*And I’ve never watched a single episode of any Star Trek series, nor have I seen any of the movies (I kinda wanna see the new one though). And I’ve never watched Smallville, the new Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, Heroes, or Lost.

You can only lift Mjolnir to your lips if Odin deems you worthy; otherwise, you'll have to leave it on the bar and drink it through a straw

You may recall last month I posted a flier for a local event, the Bourbon Street Comic Swap. The other day one of the organizers, who recalled a post I had done a while back about drinks that share their names with superheroes, sent me the drink menu that was used at the event, and I thought I'd share it with you guys here.

What sounds good to you?


Shots

Green Lantern...creme de menthe, Irish cream

Kryptonite...Apple Pucker, vodka, triple sec

The Flash...Red Fuel, vodka, grenadine

Alpha Flight...Canadian Club whiskey

Mjolnir...Absolut, grenadine


Cocktails

Dark Knight...Black Russian

Cloak & Dagger...White Russian

Tony Stark...Single Barrel Jack Daniels, rocks or straight

Red Skull...vodka, cranberry

Fantastic Four...Long Island Iced Tea

League of Extraordinary Gentleman...gin martini

The Shadow...rum and coke

Flaming Carrot...spicy Bloody Mary


Virgin Drinks

Archie Andrews...cherry Coke

Veronica Lodge...Shirley Temple