BOUGHT:
One would be wrong, though. The trade paperback collection is rated T+, for readers 13 and up. As for the toys—I just checked—and they're recommended for kids ages four and up. As for 5-12-year-olds, I don't know. Go check on IDW's Marvel Action line, I guess? (That actually might have been a better place for this series to be produced, come to think of it).
MacKay seems to blend the current line-up of the ongoing Avengers comic with a few more popular, more-likely-to-be-in-movies Avengers to come up with an eight-hero roster: Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther, Thor, Captain Marvel, Black Widow, The Hulk and Spider-Man. They go into action against some kind of giant, weird, maybe too-scary monster they decide on calling a "Biomechanoid" (and which Spidey refers to as "Cronenberg Godzilla"; you know kids today, they go wild for the films of David Cronenberg!)
The Biomechanoid is in the process of attacking the city of Cleveland—hey, that's my neighborhood!—when the Avengers intervene. Nothing they throw at it seems to work, it just keeps consuming everything in sight and growing larger and more powerful by doing so, until Black Panther jumps into its jaws to test a hypothesis.
He's spit out of the destroyed creature being proven right: It can't digest vibranium. When it becomes clear that there are more such creatures on the horizon, Iron Man builds the Avengers all "Biomechanoid Response Units...each customized to interface with your individual power sets and clad in vibranium plating, which should keep the biomechanoids from eating them."
And as to what those look like, well, just look at the cover; the vibranium weakness is essentially an excuse to get all of the Avengers, even The Hulk, into Avengers-themed mechs, which have robotic-like versions of all their weapons and powers. So, for example, The Captain America one has a giant shield, the Thor one has a giant hammer for a hand, the Spider-Man one shoots steel-cable webs from its wrists and so on.
That seems to be the main thing MacKay takes from the toy line...well that and the presence of Thanos, who also gets a mech suit when he teams up with the Avengers against the series' even bigger bad, which I will now spoil for you, because this series came out a while ago anyway: It's Kang The Conqueror. The Biomechanoids were part of his plot to do the sort of thing he's always doing, which here involves taking over Avengers Mountain and using its Celestial tech to help him conquer all of time at once.
It's up to the Avengers, their new toy-inspired mech suits and, somewhat briefly, Thanos to stop Kang and save the day.
I found MacKay's approach to the material sort of fascinating, particularly the pains that seemed to be taken to keep it in continuity, or something awfully close to Avengers continuity (MIA teammates Ghost Rider, Blade and She-Hulk aren't ever mentioned, and it's hard to see the Immortal Hulk's Hulk in this version of the big, green guy, but it wouldn't be too hard for an imaginative kid to square the proceedings with what they might be reading in the pages of Jason Aaron and company's Avengers series, which is advertised on the inside front and back covers).
If kids will read this, well, I don't know. It was a little less sharp than Aaron's Avengers, and the broader strokes were of course dictated by the needs of the toy tie-ins, but it was basically of apiece with the regular series, and I could enjoy it as something that might occur between the collections of that.
Carlos Magno's art is hyper-detailed and particularly realistic, even, ironically, far more so than that which usually appears in the regular, for-adults Avengers comics. He does a fine job, but, stylistically, he might not have been the best choice for a book that little kids might conceivably have been intended to maybe read somehow, given how scary some of the art is (Not just the Biomechanoids; near the climax, Kang pulls nightmarish, monstrous Avengers from alternate timelines to fight their normal counter-parts, and most of these are scary as heck, including humanoid spider versions of Spider-Man and Black Widow, an axe-wielding Hulk with multiple faces all over his body and a faceless Iron Man).
As to why it's rated T+ rather than T or—can you even imagine?—All Ages, I would guess it's because of the monster content. That, or maybe the death. Black Panther appears to be disintegrated, turning into a broken skeleton after being hit by an energy blast, early in the series, and later Thanos is similarly killed by Kang, but, other than those elements, I'm not sure why, say, a 12-year-old might have trouble with the book.
I am genuinely surprised that it wasn't written and drawn for an all-ages audience in the first place, though. It really makes me want to revisit 2005's Marvel Mega Morphs series, which was a similarly based-on-a-toy line comic that put various Avengers in giant robot battle suits, although the cast included Ghost Rider, Wolverine and, I think, Doctor Doom.
These include Harley Quinn in an unlikely team-up with the title character to take down the mirror-dwelling Bloody Mary (here a former Female Fury), Batman, Green Lantern John Stewart, The Phantom Stranger, Aquaman and Aqualad, Wonder Woman and Vixen and Superman and Lois Lane.
It's a good premise, and the various creative teams mostly make creative use of it, although none of the stories really struck me as buy-the-book-for must-reads.
I thought writer Calvin Kalsulke and Rob Guillory's Batman story made good use of a couple of urban legend staples, while also presenting some pretty great Batman/Alfred banter (the lead-in, in which Norton draws Crush making a great "UGH" face at the thought of Damian telling a story about his dad Batman, is pretty great too).
I liked that Ed Brisson and Christopher Mitten's Aquaman and -lad story featured a "real" monster in Ogopogo, the Canadian lake monster that may or may not (and probably doesn't) actually exist; there just isn't enough intersection of the worlds of superheroes and cryptozoology for my tastes. (I still want to read a Batman vs. Batsquatch story, for example.)
Terry Blas and Garry Brown's Wonder Woman and Vixen story is pretty strong, even if the pairing is pretty random and randomly accomplished, as is Jeremy Haun, Tony Akins and Moritat's Superman and Lois story, although I feel like it could have used a panel or two's explanation as to the mechanics of the threat.
They must have decided to pull the plug pretty quickly, and without giving Rowell much of a warning, as this sixth volume of her run could have been spent on wrapping things up and providing an ending of sorts, the fifth volume's rather traumatic arc certainly could have served as a climax to the run. Instead, after an issue or two of taking a narrative breath over those events, Rowell plunged ahead, continuing long-simmering sub-plots and introducing some unexpected, dramatic new twists, like, for example, the one teased on the cover: The Gert from the future coming back in time and trying to whisk Chase away from the others, something he's reluctant to do (but he is fine with secretly dating Future Gert).
The final issue in the collection, #38, was technically the 100th issue of Runaways ever published, if you added up the various volumes of the series, and in addition to the appearance of guest artists like Kris Anka and Runaways co-creator Adrian Alphona, it introduced even more cliffhangers, like Karolina deciding to go off with some of her own people, Alex deciding to revive the "J-Team" for his own mysterious purposes and the unexpected return of Xavin.
Whoever is tasked with writing the next Runaways revival is going to have a lot to work out, unless Marvel gives Rowell a future miniseries or something to resolve all her ongoing plot lines.
The $9.99 prestige format collection includes nine short stories set in various eras and continuities, plus nine pin-ups.
The lead story seems to be the one set in the current, most relevant DC continuity, and is the work of regular Wonder Woman writers Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad with artists Jim Cheung. Wonder Woman is presumed dead at the moment, and her mourning ex Steve Trevor has made a documentary film about her, which he shows to Etta; the story thus takes the form of his film, offering a sort of overview of the character.
My favorite story by far was writer/artist Amy Reeder and colorist Marissa Louises' "Fresh Catch," which is set in the 1940s continuity, and features Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls rescuing Wonder Woman from some villainous fishermen.
I was also rather fond of Mark Waid, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Joe Prado's "Dear Diana...", detailing her role as the go-to person to talk to your problems about in the Satellite Era Justice League, which is full of fun hero interactions and, of course, predictably gorgeous Garcia-Lopez art of DC's biggest heroes.
I was also somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed writer Tom King's collaboration with artist Evan "Doc" Shaner, "Dated," set in 1969 and featuring a blind date between Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Light on super-heroics and heavy on the awkward juxtaposition of late sixties Wonder Woman (during her brief, powerless, "mod" era) and Superman, it is a lot of fun, but then, most of King's most fun writing has been when he puts superheroes like Superman into awkward social settings for the length of an issue or so.
None of the other contributions are bad, per se—although the timeline of Steve Orlando's story about an "annual" threat Artemis and Hippolyta faced as Wonder Woman but Diana hasn't doesn't make a lick of sense—but those were my favorites.
Overall it's a pretty fine examination of the various aspects of the character and different eras and interpretations, many of which can still be explored through DC's backlist of graphic novels and trade paperbacks (and, indeed, the book is heavy on house ads detailing where to go if you, for example, are particularly interested in, say, Jordie Bellaire and Paulina Ganucheau's take on Young Diana, or just other, different takes on the character and franchise).
There were eight different covers available. The one I ended up with was the "Bronze Age Variant Cover" by Travis Moore and Adriano Lucas that pays tribute to George Perez's run on the character...although they seem to have somewhat disconcertingly used the likenesses of Chris Pine and Lucy Davis for models for Steve Trevor and Etta Candy, rather than sticking to Perez's designs.
BORROWED:
I think. I didn't read any of the "Future State" comics, but I recall them all mentioning something called "The Magistrate" and a near-future Gotham City where vigilantes were illegal—well, illegal-er, I guess, since vigilantism is, by definition, illegal—and the latest volume of James Tynion IV's Batman features the implementation of tech billionaire Simon Saint's Magistrate program, consisting of a group of Robocops to replace Batmen, something he's help selling to Gotham City's new, anti-vigilante mayor with the help of The Scarecrow, who is, as ever, stoking fears.
The core of the plot is, of course, ridiculously, Saint's argument is to basically replace the old Batman system of extraordinary law enforcement with a new Batman system with different branding, these new Batman replacements having guns and armor and explosives and being part-cyborg, as if no one in this comic book has ever seen a movie before.
That said, Tynion's plotting around that basically dumb idea is quite solid and effective.
This story arc picks up directly after the events of Infinite Frontier #0, and, somewhat awkwardly, it actually contains the relevant portions of that one-shot special. However, because that comic was premised on Wonder Woman, ascended to a state of advanced godhood and discussing the events of the entire DCU with another cosmic being, there are a few lines of dialogue that appear over the Batman action that make no sense in the context of this book, if you aren't re-reading it, of course. They don't render the proceedings incomprehensible, of course, but they do stick out as odd, record-scratching inclusions, and one wonders if it wouldn't have been worth it for DC to remove the occasional box of text from Wonder Woman or The Spectre.
The major event in that one-shot, at least as far as Gotham City was concerned, was that The Joker attacked Arkham—off-panel—with a gas attack, seemingly killing Bane and a whole bunch of other people, and making something of a hero of an Arkham guard, who will go on to become one of Saint's Peacekeepers before this volume is over.
Because there was just seemingly a major Joker attack, right on the heels of the events of "The Joker War", the city is on edge, and, interestingly, The Scarecrow is able to further terrorize the city using all-natural, low-fi methods...like simply breaking into places he shouldn't be able to get into and erecting a simple, old-fashioned scarecrow. In other words, just by making his presence known, he implies a big, terrorist attack is coming, and he's able to wring terror out of that fact alone, without actually having to deploy any gas or anything.
It's an interesting riff on the character's M.O., and a reflection of our own, post-9/11, paranoid times, when we, as a society, can scare ourselves silly over the possibility of an attack, whether or not one ever actually materializes.
Artist Jorge Jimenez has rather radically redesigned The Scarecrow for this story, and while his design includes elements borrowed from the recent-ish Arkham videogames that I am personally not a fan of—a gas mask, finger-mounted syringes—it's an overall cool design, one that looks almost nothing like any Scarecrow costume that's come before, from the large-brimmed, Asian-style straw hat and Jonathan Crane's long, flowing black hair to patch-filled poncho and rope-wrapped boots he wears.
It's an incredibly impractical design, as his "claws" should make it impossible to do pretty much everything he does in this volume, like climbing around on buildings, but it's nevertheless striking and, as I said, different from all the others. That's one of the reasons that The Scarecrow remains one of my favorite superhero comic characters—almost every artist feels free to reinvent him in a way that makes him their own, and all of those designs somehow work, in the same way that all the different designs of Batman tend to work as Batman, no matter the small or huge differences in the way artists draw him.
The Scarecrow is technically the villain of this arc—or, at least, one of the villains—but Tynion keeps him mostly in the corners and out-of-sight. Each issue begins at some point in the future, wherein The Scarecrow has captured Batman, and then flashes back to the events leading up to that point, as we learn about something called The Unsanity Collective, Saint's Magistrate program and the various symptoms of the city being on edge...more so than usual, of course.
I'm not a huge fan of Bermejo's art, and I particularly dislike his version of the Batman costume, which is basically a jumpsuit with a cape and cowl, but this is a nice showcase for his art. After the eye-rolling first page, in which an image of the earth transforms into one of the pearls from Batman's mom's necklace, it's basically a series of pin-ups of Batman fighting his various rogues (I liked the robot penguin fighting alongside The Penguin).
From there, we see Batman's dalliances with other cities in other countries, each of the 13 stories produced by a different creative team from a different country, none of whom I had ever heard of before, which was actually quite exciting.
Anthology rules apply, of course, and so the stories vary in tone and style quite a bit and even, unfortunately, in quality, although not radically so (none of the stories are terrible, for example, and I only had trouble making it through one of them).
Interestingly, there are a lot of new villains introduced: Italy's creepy Ianus, Turkey's Dawn and Dusk and South Korea's Saba being among the most notable and supervillain-ous ones, characters it's not hard to imagine turning up in other Batman comics in the future. Of Batman's regular rogues, only Catwoman and The Joker turn up; the former appears in a pretty great entry in the Batman-and-Catwoman-are-secretly-in-love body of stories by Mathieu Gabella and Thierry Martin (the French story), the latter in a thought-provoking story by Benjamin von Eckartsberg and Thomas von Kummant (the German story).
I would have a hard time picking a favorite. There's a lot of fantastic art throughout, including from the previously mentioned Martin and Von Kummant, but also from Paco Roca, Michal Suchanek, Jaekwang Park and Junggi Kim, and Okadaya Yuichi.
I found Paco Roca's of Spain's "Closed For The Holidays" story particularly fun, as it depicts a Bruce Wayne on holiday, struggling to enjoy himself across a series of 12-panel-grid pages until he ultimately gives in to the temptation to suit up.
Kirill Kutuzov, Egor Prutov and Natalia Zaidova of Russia's "My Bat-Man" is a lot of fun too. Told from the perspective of an artist who grew up with the idea of Batman, starting from a pen he was given with the 1960s Batman atop it, and then following the Dark Knight on the news from afar, as he changed and evolved over the years. I particularly love the section where the protagonist relates what his various childhood friends though Batman must be like:
 |
| Zaidova |
I...I think I could read a whole series of Batman as a veterinarian in Australia.
Yuichi of Japan's "Batman Unchained"" is interesting too. Not only does it look like manga, but it is set...damn, I don't remember the name of the period. Let's say the 1930s, back when kamishibai/paper theater was a thing, and an artist gets in trouble with the law for his fantastical drawings of the outlaw hero Batman...and eventually meets Batman.
 |
| Yuichi |
It's one of several stories in which Batman appears in country-specific garb, the other being "Batman and Panda Girl" from Xu Xiaodong and Lu Xiaotong of China, where where he dons Chinese armor for their team-up.
 |
| Suchanek |
It's an all-around pretty great Batman comic book, and I hope DC sees fit to publish future collections featuring Batman or perhaps other heroes like Superman. I also sure as hell wouldn't mind seeing some of these creators working on the regular Batman comics (Michal Suchanek in particular looks like his work could fill the pages of Batman or Detective at any time).
Denji is an interesting by in many ways familiar protagonist for a manga like this, his desires and motivations being all completely base. At first all he wants is a bed to sleep in and food given to him on a regular basis, a drastic change from what he experienced growing up in crippling poverty, but eventually he gets other motivations, like the desire to touch a woman's breasts and, after that, to have sex with a woman.
His efforts are unfortunately rather tragic, as terrible things happen the two times he kisses a woman in these volumes, the results being gross, once in a nauseating way, the other time in a gory kind of way. Deeper, more noble motivations are given to other supporting characters, some of whom are swirled with a sense of mystery, but our hero is an open book, and not one with much writing in it.
His alter-ego is seemingly unstoppable, even when put up against some spectacularly insidious devils, like one that traps him and his team in an insidious time loop, or a female equivalent to himself, but he takes the odds are generally presented as insurmountable before he somehow finds a way to surmount them, making for a palpable sense of tension in the series' many action scenes.
Filled with sometimes scary imagery and the sort of violence you might expect from a comic whose hero turns himself into a human/chainsaw hybrid, it's definitely not for everybody, but it does have a lot to offer super-comic fans (The latest volume, for example, had one of the most amazing and unique depictions of super-speed, spread across many pages, that I've ever seen before).
In truth, Taylor only includes a few seeds of what will follow here, as it involves Joker (and sometimes Harley Quinn) versus The Justice League, with some attention paid to Lois and Superman trying to decide if they can even safely have kids (which Dr. Mid-Nite Charles McNider assures them they can, after he performs vague, off-panel tests one can only guess at) and The Joker deciding to consider the fact that Superman is incorruptible as a challenge to explore in the future. (On, and Taylor re-riffs on his joke about the genius of the boxing glove arrow.)
The rest of the book is basically a JLA/JSA team-up, with Taylor's slightly different version of the JLA interacting with a similarly slightly different version of the JSA.
This JSA is a version of the original, Golden Age team, and it is still active and operating alongside the JLA, and Taylor stretches to make a much more diverse roster than any version of the team not heavily dependent on legacy characters; he does this in part by plucking some characters from the old All-Star Squadron and making them Society members.
So in addition to all the expected straight, white dudes, Taylor includes multiple women (Hawkgirl, Black Canary, Liberty Belle, a Wonder Woman* and Inza Nelson as Dr. Fate), a person of color in Roy Thomas and Jerry Ordway's retroactive Golden Age character Amazing-Man (a nice, smart addition I'd love to see future takes on the JSA follow) and here Green Lantern Alan Scott isn't just gay, but completely sure of himself and out, with a spouse in the form of a man named Jimmy, presented as the equivalent of Jay Garrick's Joan or Superman's Lois (Jimmy and Lois get a nice scene together near the end where they compare notes of being with a caped superhero).
The two teams are hanging out together on the Justice League satellite when the Joker and Harley break an old, dying prisoner out of Blackgate Penitentiary. The prisoner had promised god-like power to anyone who could free him, and that power eventually lands in The Joker's hands: An ancient amulet once discovered by the archaeologists Carter and Shiera Hall that contained a Lord of Chaos, and gave whoever wore it the ability to control the minds of others.
Discovering almost by chance how much the JLA members look up to the JSA members—and, specifically, the look in Batman's eye when he regards his one-time mentor Wildcat—The Joker decides to use the JSA to destroy the JLA. He does this first by possessing Alan Scott, and, as the story progresses, he ends up "driving" several different JSA members before the climactic battle at the Hall of Justice, wherein The Joker has the full powers of the chaos lord at his command.
Having not read much of Injustice—just the first volume and an issue here and there—I'm ill-suited to speak to how well this functions as a prequel. The first page seems set in the time when Superman had become a dictator, and has Batman ruminating on whether or not this all would have happened "If they were still here", referring to the JSA. And, to get the JSA out of the way, The Joker sends a handful of them "away" with his chaos powers, and the rest of the surviving JSA members join The Spectre in searching various dimensions for the lost heroes (there's potential, then, for a sequel of sorts to this, or at least a story to branch out from it, chronicling that multiversal quest; I'd read it).
In the last panels, Alan Scott turns to Superman and Batman, and says over his shoulder, "No pressure, but loo after the world for us while we're gone," to which Superman responds, "We will," all of which seems much more dramatic with the knowledge of what will follow.
As a DC superhero comic, this is quite good. While I didn't care for the plot of the earlier Injustice series, Taylor is very good at writing the various heroes and villains as characters, and there are some great passages in what I did read of Injustice, even if the overall milieu is a deeply dark, cynical, anti-heroic one. (It's a particularly bleak portrait of Superman, but then, Elseworlds featuring the character so often are.)
His skill is quite evident here as well. There aren't really any characters he doesn't write well, and there are lots of fun moments throughout. I really rather liked his version of the JSA and how he wrote them all.
When DC eventually revives the JSA for a title of their own again, they could do a lot worse than having Taylor helm the series.
...
That said, I didn't care for Injustice Wildcat's costume, which had a more simple, less dopey-looking cat mask. I think the sheer ridiculous of Wildcat's mask is part of what make the character so damn endearing, personally.
That's the first chapter of writer Wataru Hinekure and artist Aruko's My Love Mix-Up. The tension ramps up because it turns out that Ida is such a nice guy, so kind and considerate, that he feels bad for turning Aoki down—again, because he's not gay either—and insists that he wants to be Aoki's friend and get to know him better, even though Aoki is fine letting the matter drop.
As things progress, however, Aoki finds that Ida actually seems to be winning him over, and that maybe he actually is falling for Ida who, after all, possesses the very same qualities that attracted Aoki to Hashimoto. Though Aoki tells Hashimoto he's rooting for her, it gradually dons on him that they may actually be becoming rivals—at least until the shocking twist ending, that upends everything.
I have no idea where the story is going, which makes it awfully fun. I'm quite eager for volume two, just to find out what happens next.
REVEIWS:
 |
INTERVIEW:
*It's not entirely clear if the Wonder Woman of the JSA is the same one or a different one than the one in the JLA; it appears to be the former, from the one context clue I could find. Maybe I'd already know the answer to this if I had read more of Injustice, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment