Review: Midnighter Vol. 2: Hard

First of all, get your mind out of the gutter, or at least out of Midnighter's tight-fitting leather pants. The sub-title of the second and final volume of writer Steve Orlando's Midnighter ongoing, the last vestige of the 2011 merging of the WildStorm "universe" with the DC Universe, refers not to the title character's sexual excitement, but how tough he is. "You think you're something? Think you're hard?" Deadshot taunts a temporarily captured Midnighter at one point. Which is rather silly, really, given that this is Midnighter we're talking about. Of course he's something. Of course he's hard.

One has to imagine the double meaning of that sub-title is intentional, however, given that Orlando's Midnighter is one of the few DC superheroes we ever see in a sex scene...and one of still fewer that it doesn't seem weird and gross to see in a sex scene. Like, whenever I saw New 52 Superman and Wonder Woman in bed together, it felt a little like walking in on my parents or something. Midnighter was a superhero character created for grown-ups from the start though.

Hard is actually sort of a mixed bag of a trade collection, including as it does the final five issues of Orlando's Midnighter, and then what could charitably referred to as filler material...albeit high-quality filler. These are the first two issues that followed Garth Ennis' six-issue run on the 2007 Midnighter series, back in simpler times when the character was merely an artificially created Batman analogue, part of a madman's designer Justice League that eventually joined up with some similarly morally uncomplicated superheroes and formed The Authority, a team of super-bastards intent on protecting the world their way, and fuck you if you didn't like it.

The first is a semi-clever issue by Brian K. Vaughan and Darick Robertson that riffs on Midnighter's ability to see into the future by telling the story backwards; it's a pretty straightforward 22-page story, only with the pages re-ordered so it reads 22-1, rather than 1-22. That's followed by a Christos Gage/John Paul Leon issue in which Hawksmoor challenges Midnighter to do something simple and traditionally superheroic, rather than horrifically violent. They settle on helping a little girl find her lost cat, but, luckily for Midnighter, it involves fighting over-the-top cyborgs.

These are both great, even though they don't really line up with the preceding issues of the new series, and really only underscore that Midnighter doesn't really fit into the DCU (surely the Justice League would have gone after him, power rings and eye beams blazing, in an attempt to shut him down by this point), and how needlessly complicated he and his fellows are at this point. For the life of me, I can't imagine why DC decided to launch a StormWatch book starring a mixture of Authority characters, DC characters and all-new characters at the outset of the New 52 rather than an Authority book, given how much more popular that latter concept was in the recent-ish past.

The final bit of filler is the Midnighter and Apollo short from the 2013 Young Romance: A New 52 Valentine's Day Special, which, if I recall, was the highlight of that anthology. It's by Peter Milligan and Simon Bisley, and features the characters in their initial New 52 redesigns, which, in the case of Midnighter, meant the loss of his signature trench coat and the addition of a bunch of spikes, for some reason.

As for Orlando's story, the lead-in is something of a team-up with Freedom Beast–although he's never called by that name, nor by B'wanna Beast, which might be weird given the color of skin. He simply introduces himself as "Dominic Mndawe." When weird hybrid animals start rampaging through Rochester, New York, Midnighter encounters Mdnawe, who tells him he's on the trail of twisted big game hunters using a formula similar to that he uses to create the exotic animals, which they hunt for sport. Not a bad idea, but I'm uncertain why they are doing so in a city, rather than somewhere more remote, like their own personal island, where they might conceivably get away with it.

The rest of Orlando's run concerns itself with a Suicide Squad story. Midnighter allies himself with Spyral to deal with something missing from "The God Garden," which brings the wrath of Amanda Waller and her Squad–Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Parasite, Captain Boomerang and new character Afterthought–on Midnighter. Then Waller allies herself with Henry Bendix and his latest superhuman creation and Apollo gets involved.

It's a pretty big, crazy action/espionage story, and it was kind of fun to see Midnighter trading blows and barbs with the Squad, but I would have preferred clearer, less-detailed artwork...something driven home by the bigger, bolder and brighter artwork that Robertson provides in his issue in the back. Aco remains the top credited artist, and had at least a hand in most of the issues from the current series, but he also usually has several different artists help finish the issues. Given the tendency to break scenes into many little panels, artfully littered across the ones telling the thrust of the story, as a way to visualize Midnighter's powers, the pages generally look crowded, and all those lines and realistic coloring effects don't help any.

Leon's art looks similar to that Aco and company's, but is crisper, while Robertson's looks like very well-drawn superhero comics, which suits the character best, I think, as it draws a greater contrast between Midnighter and other, similar heroes.

The character is already back with Orlando writing him, in a six-issue miniseries entitled Midnighter and Apollo. That's a good thing. Orlando seems to get the character and have a lot of fun with him, and there's certainly a great deal of potential to Midnighter and Orlando's particular take, it just isn't always apparent on the page.

Meanwhile...

Hello, and welcome to This Week In Caleb In Writing About Comics On The Internet That Aren't EDILW!

First up, I reviewed Philippe Coudray's Benjamin Bear in Bright Ideas on Good Comics For Kids (There's a badly-scanned images of one of my, like, ten favorite strips in the book at the top of this post).

Also at GC4K this week, I participated in the roundtable discussion of Faith Erin Hicks' Friends With Boys.

Those are two really great comic books. I'd recommend Benjamin Bear (both this volume and the previous one), to anyone on the planet, whether they can read words yet or not. I'd recommend Friends With Boys to just about anyone—it's a really winning coming-of-age story about a girl with some big problems, featuring some really great art from a really great (and getting greater!) comics artist.

Finally, I wrote a bit about Saga #12, a comic you might have already read something about this week, at Robot 6 today.

Wondering where last night's "Comic shop comics" post is...?

I actually put it on Robot 6 today. So go there for some short reviews of the seven new comics I bought and read last night, including the comic the above panel is from.

Review: Wolverine: Logan

Bryan K. Vaughan and Eduardo Risso’s 2008 miniseries Logan was I think the very first Marvel Comic I decided not to buy based solely on its price. It was one of the earlier $3.99-for-22-pages books, and the only difference between it and all the other 22-page Wolverine comics on the shelves was that it had a heavier cover stock.

I figured that I would just wait a couple months and get the trade—the miniseries was only three issues long, so it’s not like there would even be much of a wait.

Of course, I read reviews of the individuals issues as they came out, and I ended up hearing a detail about the plot withheld from the original solicitation, a detail that made me realize this book probably wasn’t something I wanted to read anyway, no matter how much I may have enjoyed past Vaughan works, or how eager I was to see what Risso might do with Wolverine (that image on the cover sure looks pretty cool).

Apparently, Logan wasn’t just a story set in World War II era Japan, but it was set specifically on the day that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Yes, this is the story about how Wolverine’s healing factor is so awesome that it allowed him to survive one of the most horrific things that human beings ever did to one another. The only less appropriate setting I can think of for a Wolverine story might be a World War II concentration camp, but Mark Millar beat Vaughan to it.

Thank God for public libraries then, the curious but cautious comics reader’s very best friends. Logan was retitled Wolverine: Logan for the trade collection, which makes a certain amount of sense when it comes to shelving and selling it, but also makes the bland, meaningless title seem even blander and more meaningless. But perhaps Vaughan and/or Marvel were just trying to be careful about tipping readers off regarding the content, and thus shied away from calling it Wolverine: Hiroshima or Wolverine: Logan in the Grave of the Fireflies.

I suppose I should point out that I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with using superhero characters in stories dealing with extremely grave, serious and real settings, but publishers, editors, writers and artists need to be extremely careful about doing so.

But if you’re going to use one of these guys in your story about one of the most horrific events of World War II, it better be a really, really, really good story. By using a cartoon character like Wolverine at all, you’re already fighting an uphill battle when it comes to gravitas, and putting him at ground zero runs the risk of making light of the event (and making you look like a bunch of assholes).

Suffice it to say that Vaughan didn’t exactly bring his A game to this one.

The tale opens with these two lines of narration:

When you rip a guy’s heart out, the blood inside stinks of hot iron and dead blossoms. After all these years, that’s still what Japan smells like to me.

That’s what Wolverine is thinking about as he trudges through a snowy woods towards a Japanese temple, his goofy blue and yellow superhero costume half-obscured by a trench coat. He walks into the courtyard, takes off his trench coat, puts on his cowl shaped to mimic his peculiar haircut and fights some kind of flaming skeleton ghost.

The title appears at the bottom of a panel revealing his antagonist:

Logan
Act One of Three

Oh shit, this is one of those stories. One so important that it can’t consist of something as prosaic as “parts” or “chapters,” but of “acts.” Logan, it would appear, is going to be, like, the Shakespeare of Wolverine stories.

The scene shifts to a tiny prison cell in Japan, where an American prisoner in dogtags is demanding a password from Logan, who was there as a Candadian paratrooper, and was apparently also captured by the Japanese.

Using his mutant powers, Logan busts them both out of the prison, and they escape into the countryside. Meeting a Japanese woman on the road, the American soldier wants to kill her to keep her from reporting them. Our hero refuses and tells the American he’ll kill him if he tries to hurt her, and so they part ways.

The woman, Atsuko, takes Logan back to her place with her, feeds him, strips off her kimono, and then deflowers him (“Guys back in the barracks called me badger, ferret, skunk. Said a real woman would never make time with someone who’s all hair and stink like me.”)

As they collapse into one another on the floor, Logan asks, “What is this place? Where am I?”

Atsuko replies, “Hiroshima,” as we see a V-formation of bombers flying above her shack.

“It was just about the most beautiful word I’d ever heard,” Logan narrates.

Okay Vaughan, points for a great “Oh no you didn’t!” surprise ending for your first issue (or “act,” whatever), but it’s all downhill from there.

“Act Two” opens in the present, with Wolverine fighting the flaming skeleton ghost monster, and still narrating embarrassingly, with lines like “A Little Boy scattered a hundred thousand men, women and children into a hundred billion fireflies…but the next morning, they were back again. Least, their shadows were, still clinging to this rotten world, not quite ready to let go.”

Then it’s back to the past, where Logan and Atsuko are intruded upon by the American soldier, who shoots and seemingly kills Wolvie, fights with and ultimately kills Atsuko, and then, what’s this?, must fight with Wolverine again, because it turns out Wolverine is a mutant with a healing factor!

But wait, there’s more! The American soldier is also a mutant with a healing factor! And so they’re still fighting when the bomb is dropped. You can put the rest of it together for yourself, and from this point on there’s no real surprise or suspense to the story. Logan survived the bomb, obviously, and so did his adversary, who became the flaming atomic skeleton ghost monster Wolverine is fighting in the present.

With his lost memories restored, Wolverine has returned to Japan to put down this ghost. They fight, Wolverine wins.

While a sense of tastelessness hovers around the story, Vaughan is a talented writer, and he chose his words carefully throughout, choosing symbols and parallels that at first don’t seem quite apparent, which makes it all the more frustrating that he’s delivered such a generic, run-of-the-mill Wolverine story.

There are only three characters, Wolverine, his enemy, and the woman, and the bombing is treated only as an interruption in Wolverine’s conflict with his enemy, something that breaks them up in the 1945 and necessitates a 2008 rematch.

Why go to the trouble of putting Wolverine there at that time, and then simply tell one more story about a woman Wolverine loved, a villain he fought, and how incredible his mutant powers are?

Risso draws a nice double-spread splash of a mushroom cloud, with panels detailing effects of the blast on our scene around it, then there are two pages of Wolverine wandering through deserted Hiroshima large parts of his flesh melted off of his skeleton.

Where did he go? What did he do next? How did the bomb affect his body, his brain, his mind? Did he stick around to help the victims? Did he seek vengeance for them? Did he scramble away in fear of another bomb?

Who knows?

That’s the end of the issue, and the third one deals with the fight in the present, the only flashback being to a conversation between Logan and Atsuko.

Vaughan took the risk of interjecting Wolverine into the very real, very terrible events of Hiroshima, but he retreats from the subject matter as soon as he broaches it.

Because the series was a mere three issues long—adding up to less than 70 pages—the trade includes another 50 pages worth of behind-the-scenes type content. There’s Vaughan’s proposal for the series, the entire script for the first issue, and then some sketches and sample pencil pages of Risso’s.

In the proposal, Vaughan writes, “There are three things I’d like to accomplish with our three-issue miniseries,” and the first is to “Create a story what will showcase the considerable talents of Eduardo Risso…There are countless Marvel readers who have yet to be exposed to Risso’s artwork, and I hope Logan will give fans a chance to see what he does best (sophisticated storytelling, visceral action and beautiful women), while also giving Eduardo an opportunity to stretch his muscles…(costumed heroes, misshapen mutants and period drama)."

The other two goals were to tell an a “classic, ‘evergreen’ adventure” that would go on the shelf next to Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s original Wolverine miniseries, and to show the importance of Japan and World War II in a less cartoonish and “more realistic, relevant” version of events than usual.

The book unquestionably fails on that third goal, and I suppose it will be up to readers over the course of the coming years to determine whether this becomes a classic Wolverine story or not, but Vaughan certainly achieved his first goal: Spotlighting Risso’s talents.

And Marvel was certainly on board with meeting that goal. At least the first individual issue of the series was sold in a regular, colored format (and colorist Dean White does a hell of a job, it should be noted) and in a black-and-white variant format, in which there’s no colorist to get between Risso’s line work and the readers’ eyes. Likewise, Marvel published a hardcover version of this story in which the entire contents of the book were in black and white.

Risso’s definitely out of the comfort zone readers likely associate as his—big city urban crime—but he proves to be not only comfortable but quite capable in the snows of rural Japan. His occasionally quite sparse panels reflect the minimalist aesthetic often associated with that country uncannily, and Risso’s a master of getting a lot out of few lines.

It’s just unfortunate that while Vaughan’s heart may have been in the right place, the story he gave to Risso to draw isn’t a very good one, and is, in fact, fairly impossible to recommend.

Flipping back through it one more time, I see that Risso’s storytelling and acting are so strong that the images tell the basic story all by themselves. So if Marvel really wanted to highlight Risso’s work to their fans, perhaps they would have been better off publishing a wordless version of this instead of a color-less version.

That would have kept all of the book’s virtues, and only cost it its flaws.

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!