Review: Amazing X-Men Vol. 3: Once and Future Juggernaut

The third and final collection of the troubled Amazing X-Men comic includes issues #13-#19, plus the 2014 annual. It also serves as a pretty good example of how confused and formless the book ended up being. It launched with some fanfare in 2014, with writer Jason Aaron and artist Ed McGuinness telling a story about the resurrection of Nightcrawler, then they moved on and Marvel had to scramble to fill pages until the advent of Secret Wars gave them a good excuse to cancel the book.

During its 19-issue run, Amazing X-Men had five different writers: Jason Aaron (six issues), Kathryn Immonen (one), Craig Kyle and Chris Yost (four as a team, with Yost writing six more solo) and James Tynion IV (one). The annual featured two short stories, by two different writers. In retrospect, the book contained three story arcs–"The Quest For Nightcrawler," "World War Wendigo" and "The Once and Future Juggernaut," with a couple of fill-in issues and an annual that functioned as another fill-in issue. Each collection therefore has a complete story arc in it, but these last two have also had a lot of filler.

Visually, the book had even more cooks in the kitchen. There were seven different artists in those 19 issues: McGuinness (six), Cameron Stewart (one), Paco Medina (one), Carlo Barberi (four), Iban Coello (two), Jorge Jimenez (one) and Jorge Fornes (five). And, again, the annual had two additional artists. You'll note that the math doesn't quite add up with the artists, of whom I'm only counting the pencil artists and/or artists who don't work with inkers, but that's because several issues had more than one artist drawing them.

This book is the most incoherent of the three collections, featuring as it does the work of four different writers, six different pencilers/primary artists, two inkers and three colorists (although Rachelle Rosenberg handles almost all of the coloring; only the two stories from the annual have different colorists).

Let's first dispense with the fill-in material–which, of course, translates to filler when the serially-published material is republished in trade format–bookending the title story.

The first is James Tynion and Jorge Jimenez's "Charm School," which features one of the Jean Grey School students who hasn't really appeared in the book at all previously, Anole (I had to look him up; he's the green guy on the cover, and he has lizard powers). He runs away from the school to the city, in order to go on a date with a boy he's been talking with online, but he chickens out, afraid he'll be rejected for his looks (a not unreasonable worry, given the fact that he's green and scaly and, as drawn by Jimenez, has a giant right arm that looks to be about eight times larger than his left arm).

Nightcrawler eventually prevails upon Northstar to go the city to look for Anole, and they find him. This being a superhero comic, they also find a supervillain to fight. Here one of Mastermind's daughters, who has a front-less costume that makes her look like she might be Emma Frost further experimenting with the color black.

Tynion apparently chose those two particular characters to send after Anole because they both relate to the young mutant in different ways: Northstar is also gay, Nightcrawler is also a mutant who can't hide his mutation to blend in with humans.

It's basically a decent Anole story, with an inspiring be yourself and love yourself message, but, as with Kahtryn Immonen's fill-in issue that kicked off the previous trade, it's a story that can seemingly have appeared almost anywhere (Wolverine & The X-Men, Nightcrawler, any random X-Men annual or one-shot). It's a nice, dynamic-looking comic, from an artist who would go on to draw DC's Earth-2: Society book (which I hate; it's even worse than the previous Earth-2 and I wish they'd cancel it and pretend that world and those characters don't exist).

That's followed by another nothing-to-do-with-anything one-issue story, an Axis tie-in by Yost, Barberi and Coello (two artists who previously shared duties on a chapter of "World War Wendigo"). While in the pages of Axis proper the X-Men "inverted" by the PC alignment switcheroo just all went genocidally insane and decided they needed to follow Genesis/Evan/Apocalypse and kill all humans, in their solo outings the inverted X-people at least take on more individual tasks.

Here it's Nightcrawler (the only member of the Amazing cast to appear in the issue/chapter), who has decided to return to Winzeldorf, Germany in order to exact his revenge on the humans who hated, feared and persecuted him before he became an X-Man. His inverted mother Mystique, who is now as good as Nighcrawler is bad, spends the issue trying to stop him; in particular, to stop him from killing anyone. She succeeds, and the book moves on without mentioning any of these events, as Yost and Amazing X-Men have fulfilled their crossover tie-in duties.

The collection closes out with the annual. This consists of a 20-page story entitled "Goddess" and a 10-pager called "Art History." The former is a straightforward X-Men-as-superhero team story, with Storm and Wolverine leading Firestar, Iceman, Nightcrawler and Beast against a super-villain targeting members of Storm's tribe over an affront she may or may not have committed when she was a child. That story's drawn by Salvador Larroca and written by Monty Nero.

The latter is a Firestar story written by Marguerite Bennett and drawn by Juan Doe. Unusual in format, it's a series of five, two-page spreads with a drawing of a character in the upper left-hand corner, and then imagery meant to be read as drawn or assembled by that character in various styles, while narration discusses Firestar, with Doe chameleonically aping a child's crayon drawings, Hellion's sketches, photos in her dad's scrapbook, and so on (I liked Hellion's observation that "She's like the only teacher you don't have to worry might murder you"...the only teacher at The Jean Grey school, that is).

That leaves the title story, then, the five-issue, Yost-written, Fornes-drawn "Once And Future Juggernaut."

As long-time readers now, I'm not much of an X-Men expert, despite the dozens of trade collections I've read at this point, and I don't really follow the goings-on of the entire franchise, which strikes me as something of an impossibility, really. But apparently at the time this story takes place, there is no Juggernaut; Cain Marko is no longer Juggernaut, nor is Colossus. The opening chapter seems to be a very in-progress one, as if picking up on scenes from other comics it's assumed we would have read, or at least been familiar with.

Colossus is suddenly living at the Jean Grey School, sneaking girlfriend Domino in (if I recall correctly, Colossus was on one of the several X-Force teams post-Avengers Vs. X-Men), Wolverine is had died between volumes 2 and three of this series of collections and the Amazing team is show doing some actual teaching of teenage mutants, here Pixie, as a way of introducing her, as she'll be involved later in the story.

Beyond the plot and character specifics, Yost has some clever ideas about the god Cyttorak, the patron deity of the magic gem that creates the Juggernaut, who is supposed to be his avatar on Earth. The Juggernaut is kind of a difficult villain for repeat business, even though he is one of the bigger, more recognizable X-Men villains. His whole deal is that he's supposed to be unstoppable, but seeing as how he's a villain and he only appears in superhero narratives, he always gets stopped. Hard to believe the character has lasted 50 years now given the fact that his central trait is disproved in pretty much every appearance, but then I suppose that explains why writers have tried various things with him over the years, including making him a good guy for a while and passing his mantle (and silly hat) on to Colossus for a while).

Essentially, Cyttorak wants humanity to worship him, and so he created this monster of destruction as a way of proving how fearsome and worthy of worship he is. Thing is, his avatar always loses, proving Cyttorak's ineffectuality as a god. Would be worshippers would be better off praying to Wolverine, Spider-Man or the 8th Century Iron Fist, shown defeating him an ancient avatar in a flashback.

Yost makes Cyttorak's motivation, and an epiphany about what he really wants, central to the story, reinventing the character of The Juggernaut in the process (admittedly a strange thing to do in the lame-duck final arc of a canceled title, especially given that neither Yost nor a new-and-improved Juggernaut seem to be scheduled to show up anywhere after Secret Wars and the X-Men line gets a massive overhaul (reduced to just two books, as discussed during our last look at Marvel's previews).

So: Cyttorak sends out a call of some sort through his cartoon gem, which is so big and perfectly cut it looks like something Scrooge McDuck might have in his money bin. According to a couple of narration boxes:

The call of Cyttorak goes out. Heard by the strong. Heard by those filled with rage. Those who Cyttorak felt could be controlled. Those who would show this world his power. As well as those who knew what to listen for.

In other words, it's heard by Cain Marko, Colossus (who alerts his new old teammates) and as random an assemblage of minor Marvel villains as you could imagine, three of whom were brand new to me: Crossbones, Man-Killer, Jinn and The Living Monolith. (Is this too meant to reflect Cyttorak's weakness? That these are his best candidates for an avatar from the Marvel Universe?) Oh, and Rockslide too, I guess, who wants to be the new Juggernaut, but he was along for the ride with the X-Men already.

Storm forbids Colossus from going to the South Asian temple where the gem is, on account of the fact that she doesn't exactly trust him, which is fair (Colossus is the only one of the five characters to have been possessed by the Phoenix Force to not throw in with Cyclops at the New Xavier school or be Namor), especially since he's been the Juggernaut before and also seems rather willing to get himself killed saving others (a trait that ties in to Yost's plotting).

She takes Nightcrawler, Northstar, Iceman, Rachel Grey, Firestar and Rockslide with her to the Temple of Cyttorak, where the various villains all arrive at the exact same time. Colossus manages to talk Pixie into teleporting him there. Most of the villains (and these weird red monsters that guard the temple) are dispatch pretty easily, but in the fray The Living Monolith gets the gem, and it powers him up to a giant-size stone Juggernaut, leaving only the de-powered, gun-toting Cain Marko and the X-people to deal with it.

In the arc's early climax, Storm deals with this new complication by...just sitting down and ignoring it. Reluctantly at first, they all join her, and spend about a half-dozen pages just sitting around talking, ignoring the giant monster-man rampaging away.

It's a pretty awesome scene, really, and a pretty great one for the final arc in a book that's about to end, as the various X-people reminisce and bust one another's chops (Northstar's filter-less conversation skills are especially appreciated here; he and Namor should get their own team-up book, that's just these two pointy-eared, dark-haired mutants being total dicks to everyone all the time).

Eventually, Colossus comes up with a plan to strip the Monolith of his power–the X-Men spend exactly nine panels fighting him–resulting in Marko once again becoming the Juggernaut, albeit a newly-designed, more powerful than ever version. His first act of business? Kill Cyclops for killing his brother Xavier, after killing all these X-Men for standing in his way. Despite the power upgrade, the unstoppable Juggernaut is, once again, stopped, although Yost and company at least portray it as a delay more than a defeat.

And then...the book ends. It's a pretty great Juggernaut story, and a great X-Men story (probably a little more so for those more familiar with the ins-and-outs of the franchise and its a history), it's just a little lost in this particular collection, and in this particular series.

*********************

Far be it for me to argue with another writer-about-comics or, more likely, whoever put that blurb on the cover of this trade, but I don't think this is a great jumping-on point for new readers. In fact, I think the last third of a canceled comic is probably the worst jumping-on point for new readers.

Review: Amazing X-Men Vol. 2: World War Wendigo

I can't help but wonder what Amazing X-Men might have been like had Jason Aaron remained onboard as its writer, instead of jumping ship for greener pastures (Star Wars, Thor). And if Marvel's X-Men plans didn't end up being so closely tied to Brian Michael Bendis' work. And if the board re-setting Secret Wars wasn't looming, building an expiration date into so many of the books in Marvel's line as it existed prior to their decision to rejigger their fictional universe.

That's a lot of ifs, I know; this second volume is just so very different from the first volume, and it certainly seems like Marvel's plans for the title changed pretty drastically at some point during Aaron's work on the initial story arc.

Aaron had, of course, been writing Wolverine for years by the time Amazing X-Men launched. For a while he wrote Wolverine: Weapon X, which was the "good" Wolverine title when there were multiple Wolverine titles. Then he wrote Wolverine. Then he wrote the excellent Wolverine and The X-Men. And, at that book's conclusion, this seemed to be the next step in Aaron's exploration of the X-Men through the prism of Wolverine, having gone from writing the character's solo adventures to writing about the X-Men's school, faculty and student body, to now focusing on the X-Men as an old-school, traditional superhero-team.

With the two A books in the franchise, the Bendis-written ones, focusing on two upstart squads of X-Men–Cyclops' outlaw, rebel faction and their New Xavier School and the time-lost original X-Men, who eventually transferred from Wolverine's school to Cyclops–Amazing X-Men really should have been the "real" X-Men book. Maybe it was techincally the (or a) B book in the franchise, but it would star the characters who both readers of the comics and the characters of the Marvel Universe would regard as the X-Men: Wolverine, Storm, Iceman and Beast...plus Northstar, Firestar (in for Kitty Pryde, who Bendis appropriated for All-New) and, at the end of the first story arc, "The Quest for Nightcrawler," Nightcrawler.

How odd, then, to open up the second collection of the relatively newly-launched title to find a fill-in story by a fill-in creative team, featuring Spider-Man teaming-up with just two of the Amazing X-Men for what reads a hell of a lot like an inventory story that could have run pretty much anywhere, but ended up in the pages of Amazing X-Men to...give Marvel an extra 30 days to find a new creative team, I guess.

That story is the one originally published in Amazing X-Men #7 and entitled "No Goats, No Glory," by writer Kathryn Immonen and the art team of Paco Medina and Juan Vlasco. It feels a little under-cooked, as if it's missing an element or two that might have improved it, but its major problem is that it just doesn't feel anything like an X-Men story at all, and doesn't seem to have anything to do with the storyline that preceded it or the one that will follow it (It's the sort of done-in-one that Marvel probably should have just not collected at all; I often wish the Big Two publishers would better curate their collections, and not just collect every single issue chronologically by default. Not doing so might actually encourage the purchasing and reading of the serially-published books–either in their comic book form or their digital form).

It's a Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends reunion story. Iceman and Firestar, in their civilian clothing, are at a Pik N Pay gorcery store right before closing (in the middle of the day, apparently), doing the shopping for a "game day" party. In the parking lot, they encounter a weird baby of unknown origin, and then Spider-Man, who is chasing the baby.

The baby has mutations and powers, and was left with Spider-Man as some sort of alien changeling when its owners/parents stole the goat Spider-Man was watching, the goat being the mascot of one of the teams playing the sport that is occurring on this particular day (Details are vague. Wait, Spidey mentions "kick off," so it's a football game of some kind). Why Spider-Man is watching a goat, why aliens might have stolen it and replaced it with their baby even though they want their baby back and why there is 21st century comic book plot about someone stealing the goat mascot of a sports teams is all left up to the reader to imagine possible explanations.

Immonen's scripting is often pretty funny, and as someone who used to watched the cartoon show that inspired this as a child, I enjoyed the reunion of these particular characters for purely nostalgic reasons, but what might work on the micro-level certainly doesn't work on the macro-level. This comic is just weird, not in its content, but in its existence, and not-finished quality.

The artwork, on the other hand, is fine, although there were details that bugged me (Like the position of the sun at closing time, or the fact that it took a raccoon two hands to hold an off-brand Oreo. Little stuff, really.)

That "intermission" of sorts between "The Quest For Nightcrawler" and the "World War Wendigo" storylines over, we have the return of artist Ed McGuinness inked by Mark Farmer for the first 1/5th of the title story, and the arrival of the new writers: Craig Kyle and Christ Yost. McGuniness and Farmer depart after that first issue, and Carlo Barberi and Iban Coello draw the rest of the storyline, with six additional inkers joining them (Barberi and Coello do some inking themselves, so there are eight inkers on the five-issue story altogether; maybe Marvel needed more than a one-issue fill-in inventory story to stall for the necessary time to put together an Amazing X-Men creative team).

Now, as many of you who have been reading EDILW for long know, I am not exactly expert in the Marvel Universe, having "only" read Marvel Comics for about 15 years now, and among my many, many, many blindspots is pre-Morrison X-Men history. So I don't have much in the way of background for a story in which The X-Men team up with Alpha Flight to fight Wendigos. And there were a couple of twists in this story arc where I was completely surprised by what occurred; it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, just surprising because I could tell that when certain new characters entered the narrative, I was meant to recognize them and perhaps have some sort of attachment to them. I didn't, and thus it just seemed like a random introduction of bizarrely random characters, but that actually contributed to my enjoyment to those twists.

Now, as far as I knew, Marvel's Wendigo was a big, cool, white furry monster that The Hulk fought in a comic that is probably worth a lot of money, as it was Wolverine's first appearance. I also know it's based on a legend of pre-European cultures in the North Americas. And I thought Marvel's Wendigo was a character, not a whole class of monsters, although I think Jeph Loeb is to blame for turning the Wendigo into Wendigos, in the pages of his Hulk run.

The rules of the Wendigo, as Kyle and Yost present them, is that any human being that consumes the flesh of another human being on Canadian soil turns into a Wendigo...rules so specific that it's actually kind of fun, as when the rampaging monsters cross over the U.S. border and immediately revert to human form. There seems to be some tinkering going on here though. An outbreak of Wendigo-ism is caused when a guy at a meat processing plant accidentally kills a co-worker, and attempts to hide his body by grinding it up with all the other meat.

And now Wendigos have the ability to infect others, turning them into Wendigos, by wounding them. So the threat is basically a zombie apocalypse sort of story, only without the zombies. Actually, maybe it's more of a werewolf or vampire apocalypse sort of story? The essential difference, beyond the visuals, is that Wendigo-ism, unlike zombie-ism, is reversible, so the X-Men and Alpha Fight (and The Avengers, guarding the U.S./Canada border) can face a potentially world-ending threat (more on how this is more than a Canadian problem in a bit) without having to kill scores or hundreds of civilians; even characters like Wolverine can become Wendigos but go back to normal at the end of the story, as superheroes inevitably must.

So Wolverine happens to visit an Alpha Flight lady (Vindicator) the day after her significant other with a matching outfit (Guardian), has gone missing. They investigate, and find a town overrun with Wendigos. Their teams come to attempt to bail them out. This X-Men squad includes Storm, Iceman, Northstar, Firestar and Nighcrawler from the previous story arc, and the newly added Colossus and Rachel Grey, apparently there because a few scenes call for a telepath to be there. Oh, and Rockslide, who stowed away in the locked bathroom of the Blackbird. His presence is also pretty random...until the climax. Alpha Flight includes Puck, Talisman, Aurora, Snowbird and Sasquatch, a character I've always liked the look of.

A few issues into the conflict, it's revealed that events are being manipulated by Tanarq, one of several god-like "Great Beasts," and apparently the bad one. These are the characters I was completely unfamiliar with. He's defeated the other spirit creatures in his realm and is growing stronger by Wendigo-izing Canadians; the more Wendigos that are made, the stronger the curse becomes, until they're capable of existing outside of the Canadian border, and thus threatening the rest of the world and, more importantly, the United States of America.

Some characters go to the spirit realm, free the Great Beasts, get temporarily turned into elemental gods (Rockslide was needed to be an Earth god, I guess) and fight a giant Tanaraq, who is ultimately killed (or "killed"...?) in a way that I swear I see some giant monster or other get killed in comics on at least a bi-monthly basis.

On a purely surface level, I enjoyed the storyline. I liked Kyle and Yost's dialogue, for the most part, and the way the various characters play off each other...at least among the X-Men. Aside from Aurora, none of the Alpha Flight characters have much of a personality (and even hers is a one-note mean girl characterization; like a cattier, Canadian Namor). The art is for the most part very strong, especially if you can forgive the hiccups in style (the one weird thing was the behavior of Storm's mohawk, which at one point gets flattened when she's plunged underwater, but when the next penciller takes over, it's standing straight up again; I guess she can probably control humidity, static electricity and heat enough to fix her own hair though, huh?).

That said, the story's not really about anything, despite gliding over various angles that could have been explored and exploited so that this storyline was something more than a superhero fight comic: The nature of the cannibal curse in the era of factory farming, the line between eating meat and eating human meat, anxiety regarding immigration, the xenophobia that X-Men comics have always looked to for dramatic tension given the new form of Canadians, conflict between the religious and secular world. There's a lot of stuff in here, but Kyle and Yost don't do anything with it. Even the denouement seems wasted, as we get a few pages assuring us that none of the mutants who were on the ropes died, and that Wolverine was successfully de-Wendigo-ized.

I suppose a cynical reader, or just a reader not terribly invested in the fictional lives of these Marvel characters, could level the same criticism at most super-comics: Hey, this isn't about anything, it's just a bunch of sexy people with superpowers fighting and exchanging snappy dialogue! But here it seems more obvious than it should.

Young Avengers Catch-Up: Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways (2006) and Secret Invasion: Runaways/Young Avengers (2008)

Marvel's big line-wide event/crossover stories generally provide the publisher with the opportunity to pump up their output for a few months, and a positive side effect of that is that it allows for book-less characters to appear. That was the case with the Young Avengers characters during both Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's super-successful Civil War (in which heroes fight heroes over 9/11 metaphors) and Brian Michael Bendis and Leinil Francis Yu's less-successful Secret Invasion (in which heroes fight Skrulls over gross, clumsily executed fear-of-Muslims metaphors). In both instances, the characters met up with Marvel's other team of young, created-this-century heroes, The Runaways.

Their very first meeting came during the so-called Civil War, during which Iron Man wanted every single super-powered person in the United States to register with the government and then be drafted/press-ganged into a huge superhero army to make sure Speedball never accidentally makes an explosion-powered supervillain blow-up near a school again. And he felt so strongly about it that he was willing to murder his former teammates and imprison them without trial in extra-dimensional concentration camps.

Captain America disagreed.

The Young Avengers sided with Captain America (although Stature would eventually come around to Iron Man's position, after the conclusion of this series), while The Runaways were essentially conscientious objectors, seeking to avoid this conflict as they generally seek to avoid all of the Marvel Universe's conflicts. Conflict finds them, of course, as it usually does—otherwise, Runaways wouldn't have been much of a Marvel comic.

So when a TV camera catches The Runaways being attacked by SHIELD agents and their android member Victor Mancha is badly injured, the Young Avengers track them down and try to recruit them to Cap's side. In the might Marvel manner, they fight before realizing there's been a misunderstanding, and they're all on the same side.

Meanwhile, a sinister SHIELD agent sics a brainwashed and reprogrammed Marvel Boy (the Grant Morrison/J.G. Jones version from 2000's Marvel Boy) on both teams, but instead of capturing them all, he's ordered to simply retrieve a handful of aliens for his controller to experiment upon.

Zeb Wells wrote this one, and Stefano Caselli drew it. Typically of Wells, it was very well-written (Or is that Wells-written..? Ha!), and organically funny. There are jokes in here, but they are jokes made by the characters—it's funny because the characters are being funny, not because the writer is manipulating them.

The story doesn't really go anywhere in terms of status quo, at least not in terms of the Civil War. The Young Avengers are still with Cap at the end of the story, and The Runaways remain determined to stay out of it. Wells does manage to come up with some interesting suggestions for relationships between some of the characters—most unexpected being the friendship between Speed and Molly—and to move a few emotional arcs forward. Similarly, Marvel Boy is put right back where Morrison left him at the end of Marvel Boy, but in a rather triumphant manner.

Caselli's art is excellent, and he handles the straight superhero designs of the Young Avengers and the street-clothes of the Runaways with equal aplomb. He does a fine job of juggling some dozen or so characters, and making each distinct. He also does remarkably strong work with his "acting" through the characters.

This was an odd one to re-read after reading Young Avengers #1, as Marvel Boy is apparently being added to the cast of the new, ongoing Young Avengers title, and, in fact, the book opens with Hawkeye Kate Bishop waking up in Marvel Boy's bed after having spending the night with him.

She casually refers to the events of this series—she apparently didn't recognize Marvel Boy until she sobered up the next morning with "Oh, yeah! You kicked all our asses that one time! Billy, Teddy, everyone!"

In fact, he beat the living hell out of both teams, killing one of the Runaways (who was a shape-shifting Skrull, and thus able to recover from a broken neck), capturing Billy, Teddy and Karolina and delivering them to his boss for a few hours of torture and he began strangling Kate until he was interrupted by Nico, and started strangling her instead.

In other words, whatever Kate was drinking the night before Young Avengers #1, it must have been some strong stuff.

In Secret Invasion: Runaways/Young Avengers, the two teams once again meet, this time on the Avengers' home turf of New York City (The Runaways were still visiting there after recently returning from the 19th century with a new member in tow).

The actual events of Secret Invasion are so nonsensical that I don't think I can recount them in a way that makes a whole lot of sense. Essentially, a bunch of religious fanatic Skrulls think their gods promised them Earth as their homeland, and want to take it over; they've been taking it over by secretly infiltrating it for years, and then they simultaneously try a PR push to convince the Earthlings to join their religion while also violently invading New York City with spaceships and an army of Super-Skrulls.

The two teen teams are there when the Super-Skrulls attack and, as it turns out, both teams have their own Super-Skrulls on their teams. Teddy/Hulkling of the Young Avengers is a half-Skrull, half-Kree who was prophesied as a savior meant to unite the various warring factions of Skrulls, while Xavin of the Runaways was a Skrull prince and Super-Skrull in training who ran away.

The plot of this series focuses on Xavin's efforts to infiltrate the infiltrators, providing cover for his superhero team to get safely out of New York City, and to try and rescue Hulkling. Both Xavin and Hulkling are targeted for special attention by the invading Skrulls, since the former betrayed them and the latter's existence could maybe sway some Skrulls from their Skrullegion.

Despite the prominent roles played by several characters from both teams—mainly Xavin, Hulkling, Wiccan and Speed—this isn't really much of a Young Avengers comic. Many of the team barely cameo, with Patriot and Hawkeye barely getting a line or three. The Runaways don't fare much better, but they are certainly more of the focus of this story, as their Xavin is the de facto star, and the story starts with their point of view.This one is written by Christopher Yost, and features art by Takeshi Miyazawa. It's Miyazawa's art that is probably the most noteworthy aspect of this collection. It's rare to see teenage superheroes actually look this young, but Miyazawa actually draws them all to resemble children, rather than shorter than usual adults.

That the Secret Invasion mini seems the weaker of the two in terms of its scripting may have something to do with how short it is (it's just three issues), and the fact that the premise of the story its tied to makes it more difficult to expand the focus too far from the Skrull-related characters.

Yost's effort isn't as all around strong as Wells', but there are some fun moments in this—Speed's rescue of Molly and the Runaways' newest recruit is particularly memorable—and Miyazawa's charming art goes a long way towards making this well worth a read.

Review: Fear Itself: Spider-Man

One of the strangest of the many Fear Itself collections I’ve read so far, Fear Itself: Spider-Man includes not only a three-issue Fear Itself: Spider-Man series, but a pair of Spider-Man-less one-shots as well: Fear Itself: FF #1, featuring the three then extant members of the Fantastic Four, and Fear Itself: The Worthy, a sort of half-anthology, half-guide book featuring short origin stories of the seven Marvels possessed by The Serpent’s evil magic hammers, each of which is preceded by a pin-up of sorts.

The latter fits in with pretty much any of the Fear Itself trades (though perhaps the collection of Fear Itself proper would have been the ideal place for it…?), the former seems particularly out of place here instead of, say a Fear Itself: Fantastic Four collection, which I don't actually think exists, but could probably be cobbled together out of series and one-shots prominently featuring FF characters).

The title series in the collection was written by Chris Yost and featured art by Mike McKone. It was set in the earlier parts of Fear Itself mega-plot, so the most significant moment of Spider-Man’s involvement in the storyline—the part where he is so overcome with hopelessness he gives up and swings home to Aunt May, hoping to spend the last moments before the apocalypse with her—isn’t covered.

Instead, the series focuses on Spidey being gripped by the unnatural fear—here referred to as “The Fear”, as in captions reading “Hour Six of The Fear”—and trying for several sleepless days to keep New York City from tearing itself apart with riots and craziness brought on by the fear.

It’s not until the third issue that he encounters a solid opponent directly related to the villains in Fear Itself—the hammer-possessed Ben Grimm, an encounter that involved impressively high odds, as I had previously seen the now-evil Thing take out the Red Hulk repeatedly in other comics.

There’s not a whole lot to the story that I haven’t seen done many, many times before—in fact, I think every event of similar size contains a story or two about a frantic hero struggle against the limits of endurances to persevere on the fringes of the event, don’t they?—but Yost and McKone do a perfectly decent job of it.

J. Jonah Jameson and some other supporting characters appear briefly, Spidey villain Vermin appears, there’s a kinda of squirmy scene where Spidey is being eaten alive by a swarm of rodents and Yost does a decent job of introducing random civilian characters to throw into various melodramatic wringers, to illustrate how “The Fear” is tearing average people apart.

McKone does a nice, super-atheletic, almost insect-like version of Spidey (there's a fine example of McKone's Spidey at the top of the post), with lots of creepy contortions and spinning acrobatics. The fight with the Thing is nicely executed and, as I’ve said before, the Thing’s design is the strongest of The Worthy, and McKone and colorist Jeromy Cox present him in a particularly effective way.

Naturally, the fight is rather artificially resolved—this simply being a tie-in, Ben can’t actually be defeated—but there’s nothing at all wrong with the comic, really.

It’s followed by Fear Itself: FF, which also follows Ben Grimm wrecking shit with his hammer, and therefore, I guess, has a bit of continuity with the Spider-Man arc.

It’s written by Cullen Bunn, and drawn by Tom Grummet, whose artwork I’ve always liked, although I’ve liked it a lot more the last few times I’ve seen it. (Colorist Rain Beredo doesn’t make the orange bits of Ben as glow-y here though, so he just looks like a black rock guy with yellow stripes, rather than a black rock guy with volcanic lava under his black rocks, waiting to blow him apart).

Thing fights Reed and Sue, then he fights Dragon Man, then he throws Alicia into a street lamp. Then he walks off. And that’s the whole comic, really.

Bunn’s major invention in this issue is to have the Sarlacc Pit-like mouths on the tentacles the Evil Thing wears like feather boas talk to him, convincing him to do evil shit whenever he wavers from evil shit doing.

I like the way Grummet draws Thing’s hammer, like a big-ass meat tenderizer.

(That's kind of what The Worthy are doing anyway, right? Preparing earth for The Serpent's invasion, the way one might prepare a steak for a dinner guest by hitting it with a spikey wooden hammer...?)

And that just leaves The Worthy, the cover of which features the tagline “The Secret Origins of the Hammer-Wielders Revealed…” (Can Marvel say “Secret Origins”…? DC doesn’t own that phrase…?)

These are all four-page stories from different creative teams, generally showing the origins of the characters and only sometimes involving the hammers; a pin-up opens each chapter, also showing the Worthy’s real/normal names and their new Worthy names, most of which I’ve forgotten.

These are: Sin/Red Skull by Christos Gage and Elena Bonetti (in a style quite reminiscent of the Brubaker-written era of Captain America comics), The Juggernaut by Jeff Parker and Declan Shalvey (which makes neat use of ben-day dots), Titania by Jen Van Meter and Clayton Henry, Grey Gargoyle by Frank Tieri and Eric Canete (probably the most visually interesting of this bunch of comics; G.G. seems like a real outlier among The Worthy too, in that he’s not a big strong guy like all but Sin), Hulk by Greg Pak and Lee Weeks (Eh…generic Hulk origin recap), Attuma by Tom DeFalco and Mario Alberti (nice art, generic story), Absorbing Man by Tom Peyer and Sergio Cariello and, finally, The Thing by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Javier Pulio.

That last one may be the very best one. Pulido’s art is pretty sensational, as always, and here quite heavily Kirby-influenced in design and staging—the flashback portions to the FF origin sequence look like cover songs of Kirby panels—while the modern day sequences are told in a more straight, Kirby-free style that contrasts quite nicely with the flashbacks.

The story is essentially a tense conversation between Ben and Sue, in which the former shares a terrible, troubling dream with the latter, in which he seems himself murdering his teammates with his bare hands.

This is definitely one of the stronger—and hell, it may be the strongest—of the collections of FI tie-ins I’ve read. But its seemingly random make-up, the lack of mention of the back-ups in the title also make it one of the weirder ones.

In retrospect, I wonder if Marvel wouldn’t have been better off numbering all of their Fear Itself tie-ins, so that the impression would be of one, big, interconnected epic storyline, and the titles wouldn’t come freighted with certain expectations beyond the fact that they have something to do with Fear Itself (which, as we’ve seen in the Hulk and Dracula volumes, wasn’t even really the case).

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PLEASE NOTE: 2011's Fear Itself: Spider-Man is not to be confused with 1992's Spider-Man: Fear Itself

or 2009's Spider-Man: Fear Itself

Comics editors just really like the sound of that phrase.