Weekly Haul: November 18th

So, do I have any readers left? If so, sorry for the dearth of posting over the last few days.

As you've no doubt guessed as soon as you saw that there is a new post, my computer is back from the computer hospital, and is now healed, rested and in better shape than ever.

Just in time to help me complain about this week’s new super-comics! So let's get to it right away...I've got days worth of Internet reading to catch up on.


Batman: Unseen #4 (DC Comics) Here’s a panel of Batman entering a room after blowing the locked door open with a little Bat-bomb:

Every panel in this issue looks like this.


The Brave and the Bold #29 (DC) You can say a lot about writer J. Michael Straczynski, but you can’t accuse the guy of a lack of ambition. This is his third issue on DC’s troubled team-up title, and it’s by far his most complex one.

It unearths perhaps DC’s single weirdest and most obscure character, Brother Power, The Geek, star of two 1968 issues of his own title and a 1993 Vertigo one-shot by Rachel Pollack and Michael Allred. In addition to having an awesome-sounding name and origin (he’s a living tailor’s dummy, basically), he was originally presented as some sort of hero to the hippies (or DC Comics versions of hippies, anyway) and later as a “puppet elemental.”

JMS earns tremendous good will from me for simply thinking of the character and deciding to use him in the book, and pairing him with DC’s most recognizable and bankable star Batman is certainly a pretty good idea.

As cool as that is, and as ambitious a story as JMS attempts here, there’s no escaping the fact that it is not a very good comic book. Like last issue’s Barry Allen-fights-and-kills-in-World War II story, there’s a whole lot going on in this story, good and bad, and it would certainly be best served by a critic taking a few days to think about it and spending a few hours writing about it.

I’m not going to do that though. Instead, here are some bullet point observations:

—With this issue, the logo gets a little tinkering. Just above “The Brave and the Bold” is a little strip of text reading “Lost Stories of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (I couldn’t find a scan of it yet online, but if you wanna see the cover for some reason, you can download the preview of it here). Both the title and that sub-title appear inside the book as well, where the name of the story usually does. Apparently DC wanted to be super-extra clear that these stories weren’t happening “today” in the DC Universe, but at some other time, just in case anyone read this issue and had a nervous break down when they noticed Dick Grayson is Batman in most of the Batman books, but here Bruce Wayne is still Batman.

—JMS lost me with the Universal movies version of Frankenstein’s monster/Brother Power, The Geek comparisons here. Obviously they are both man-like things that are not quite men and have an aura of tragedy about them, but they’re so far removed from one another that it seems a curious basis for a comic book story.

—At one point, Batman narrates that the movie Frankenstein always returned from the dead in sequels “Because he was a creature of his time. And that’s what such creatures DO. They come back. They ALWAYS come back.” What the fuck does that have to do with Brother Power, who returns to life as well? Do creatures of their times always come back? Is the Victorian Age—or Golden Age Hollywood—somehow parallel to the 1960s…or is it merely that they are time periods, and characters meant to embody those time periods always come back? Aren’t superheroes a better point of reference for Batman when it comes to characters coming back to life?

—Artist Jesus Saiz really disappointed me here. His art is solid but unremarkable, and I thought it was quite a let down last issue, when he completly wasted a splash page. The wasted opportunity here is that JMS continuously cites the first two Universal Frankenstein films, and Saiz provides art to depict scenes from them, and they just look like black and white versions of Saiz’s own designs and works, as if he was simply working from JMS’ descriptions instead of actually referencing the images, some of which are among the more iconic in American film history. There may be a legal reason for this or something, but it struck me as lazy and weird. If there is a reason not to draw Boris Karloff’s monster or to visually quote scenes from the film, then maybe the script should be written to avoid doing so, rather than forcing the issue?

—Batman’s mom is blond here. I hate when that happens.

—This is another one of those stories driven by Batman’s memories of his short childhood with his parents. Dude sure had a hell of a lot of very meaningful memories of his parents that would happen to parallel the strangest cases considering he only co-existed with them for about six to eight years.

—In addition to being about how Brother Power, The Geek is a lot like Frankenstein, this comic is also about how the 1960’s were so much better than right now, driven home with some embarrassingly blunt panels. In the sixties, everyone hung out in coffee shops, now they hang out in bars; you used to be able to pick up hitchhikers, now everyone drives right past people in need; college kids used to read books and enjoy one another’s company, now they all listen to those goldanged iPods and look at their laptops in solitude.

—I’ve read a lot of Batman comics in my lifetime, but I can’t say I’ve ever read a Batman who talks quite like JMS’s Batman. He doesn’t sound a thing like the post-Crisis Batman of the last twenty-some years, and he doesn’t quite sound like the Bob Haney Batman, or the wise-cracking Golden Age Batman either. For example…

The kids of that age called him—get this—Brother Power. The Geek.

or

What can I say?…It was the sixties.

or

Sometimes I get so caught up in the world of mega-crime and super-powered nutbars…

“Nutbars”…?! Batman called his villains nutbars? Man.


The Flash: Rebirth #5 (DC) Two thing about the cover of this issue jumped out at me. First, it wasn’t the one solicited; on that one, the figure running from the other side of the wall to deck Barry Allen was The Black Flash, here it’s the real villain of the piece, who was revealed last issue (You can download the real cover as part of the preview here if you’re dying to know but didn’t read #4).

Secondly, in the upper-right corner is this little round blurb:
Congratulations to Johns for the win, and I’m sure it’s almost always better to win a prize than not win a prize, but is it really something to trumpet on the cover of the fifth issue of your six-part series? Is it cool to be so proud of a prize…particularly one of dubious stature? I mean, winning a Spike TV Scream Award isn’t like winning one of these, you know?
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this issue of the series that doesn’t apply to the four that preceded it. The story is fairly well done and probably as good a Barry-Allen-comes-back-to-life-for-no-reason story as anyone could have written at this point, the event seems strangely small and disconnected from the rest of the DC Universe, it’s irritating to see this level of darkness and faux-seriousness retconned onto the origin of a comic book character that embodies the Silver Age of comics, artist Ethan Van Sciver does extremely solid work and occasionally pulls off an extremely admirable “special effect” depiction of speed powers, et cetera.

A couple of noteworthy-ish things happen this issue, including a new character taking on a retired code name from the Flash family and a couple of Flashes getting different costumes (I sure hope Jesse’s is temporary though…), but maybe that’s the sort of stuff better discussed elsewhere (Like say, Blog@…tomorrow).

In the mean time, I’d just like to point out this line of dialogue that Geoff Johns wrote, and remind you that the year this line of dialogue was published is 2009:
Van Sciver sure drew a nice splash page of Liberty Belle kicking the Reverse-Flash in the grill though…


Superman/Batman #66 (DC) This is part one of a story called “Night of the Cure,” a two-part arc in the Superman/Batman team-up title by Scot Kolins. In actuality, it’s part nine of Scott Kolins’ Solomon Grundy comic, which launched with a special before turning into a seven-part miniseries.

This issue doesn’t exactly demand you know what the hell went on in that series, and does a decent enough job of letting you know things like Bizarro was friends with Grundy, and that Frankenstein killed Grundy with a magic sword or whatever, and even the origins of Man-Bat and Grundy, but it still feels like a story in progress.

I like the idea of Bizarro and Man-Bat as a villain version of the Superman and Batman team, but exploring that idea isn’t the focus of this story. Instead, it’s a Blackest Night tie-in, which means a dead character gets a Black Lantern ring, a Black Lantern costume, and then acts like an asshole to a superhero before attempting to eat his or her heart.

Here, the dead-again Solomon Grundy gets a ring, and attacks Bizarro, who just failed in an attempt to befriend Man-Bat, who was just hunted down by Frankenstein, The Bride, and his scientist wife Francine Langstrom.

It’s a quick, light read without a whole lot to recommend, but Kolins’ art is pretty nice here and there, and I really liked some of his images of an upside-down, silhouetted Man-Bat and Frankenstein making eyes at The Bride.


Thunderbolts #138 (Marvel Comics) This is one of two comics I picked up in the shops and thought about setting right back down after seeing the art. The other was Batman Confidential, which I did put right back down. I brought this one back home with me, however, as it was written by Jeff Parker, whom you may have noticed I’m rather fond of.

The art is just awful.

It’s Marvel “house” style, which means the panels look photo-refrenced and lazy, it’s hard to see the work of human hands in its creation, and the coloring makes everything look soft, murky and unreal.

The character designs are uniformly boring as well, with the team leader Scourge resembling Jason Voorhees in a big coat and the one character with a genuinely neat look—The Ant-Man of the canceled Irredeemable Ant-Man—given a new, worse look. I can’t blame that on the artist here though, as I assume these characters existed prior to this issue, and maybe someone else is to blame for their overall generic-ness.

As for the story, it’s fairly accessible. This is the first time in memory that I’ve used Marvel’s re-cap page, and it worked fine for me (I coulda used one of these in Superman/Batman, actually). It’s a 22-page introduction to the team, which consists of a half-dozen superpowered assholes, some of whom may be insane, doing a great deal of killing. It reminded me a bit of Gail Simone’s Secret Six, albeit with less colorful characters and less humor (Thank God for Ant-Man!).

As I neard the end of the issue, I was thinking it would probably be my last (check out the third-to-last panel if you’ve got a copy handy…that’s such an ugly, lazy panel the book woulda been better served with an all-black one), until I got to the very last panel and saw that the Thunderbolts are going to be taking on Parker’s Agents of Atlas next issue.

Damn it. Okay, so I guess I’ll try one more issue of Thunderbolts, Parker. I can’t resist the charms of your talking gorilla and mute killer robot…


Tiny Titans #22 (DC) How can you not love a comic book that includes panels like this one?
Also, this issue introduces a few more new characters into the fold. There’s the “Elastic Four” above, including new Sidekick Elementary student Offspring, and then there’s the newest member of the Bird Scouts, Golden Eagle:
Tiny Titans is so adorable sometimes I can barely stand it.

Oh @#$%.

A piece of my computer died this morning, and it's going to be in the shop until at least Thursday. Apparently, the computer-fixer people don't supply you with a loaner while they're doing their fixing, the way auto mechanics do. So Every Day Is Like Wednesday is going to unfortunately have go un-updated for a while.

I'm going to try to keep my posting schedule up at Blog@Newsarama from other people's computers, and I might manage to get a Weekly Haul up on Wednesday afternoon, but otherwise I won't have anything new here.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Ryan Dunlavey's Golden Age Daredevil

Among the many cameos in this week's Comic Book Comics #4 is our old friend the Golden Age Daredevil.

The above panel is how writer Fred Van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey introduce and depict him (He appears in only one other panel, standing shoulder to shoulder with, I believe, Lenin and Stalin. God, I love this book).

What did the aborigines who raised him get him for his birthday? I'm betting it's a boomerang.

Just a couple of links.

EDILW favorite J. Chris Campbell recently posted a big, huge gallery of monster images he created, and you can take a gander at it here. It's really great stuff, and if you're wondering how great, well, I stole the above two images from there, as they happen to be of a few subjects I like—scarecrows and people with pumpkins for heads. Do check it out if you haven't already (Link via The Comics Reporter).


—Here's your occasional reminder to read Tucker Stone's weekly "Comics of the Weak" column of reviews at The Factual Opinion. Here's Stone on Vampirella: The Second Coming #3:

Vampirella comics aren't bad, in and of themselves. They just make everything else around them look bad, because really, this sleazy hot girl horror comic is pretty much indistinguishable from a healthy crop of Big Two super-hero comics and most of the non-crime stuff Vertigo publishes. It's the same mediocre shit. The only difference is that Vampirella freely admits it, right on the cover. You're supposed to yell at it for that?

As per usual, Stone also tackles a bunch of the previous Wednesday's releases that I have neither the money nor the courage to read.


—Also always worth a read? Jog.


—I didn't mention it in my little review of Marvel's Assault on New Olympus last week, but reading Don MacPherson's excellent review of the same reminded me—aren't the plots of this Hercules mini-event and Marvel's upcoming Siege event awfully similar? In "Assault," Hercules apparently assembles a whole bunch of heroes to attack the bad guy Greek gods' home base of New Olympus. In Siege, Norman Osborn apparently leads his bunch of villains to attack the good guy Norse gods' home base in Asgard. Is "Assault" purposely foreshadowing Siege's plot, or is this just a weird coincidence no one at Marvel noticed until that Hercules one-shot hit shop shelves?

I may just be completely misreading what Siege is supposed to be about, of course. I just watched this stupid trailer, for example, and learned absolutely nothing about it. Aside from the fact that Dave at Living Between Wednesdays is totally right about the logo, that is.


—Todd Klein, the world's greatest comic book letterer in my humble opinion, also runs a swell blog, and his posts on logo history are always great reads. This latest is something of a must-read, though. Klein talks to Batman artist Jerry Robinson and determines that Robinson designed the Batman logo in which Batman's head and cape/wings form the backdrop of the word "Batman."

Why is this so important? Well obviously the logo stuck around a while—Klein said it was around until 1965—and it was the basis for many different updated versions ever since. The current flagship Batman title Batman and Robin, for example, boasts a version of it.

When I heard this though, my mind immediately jumped back to Paul Pope giving his lecture at the Wexner Center last year and explaining how he determined just who and what Batman was at his core: Batman is, in a sense, a logo and advertisement for himself.

While that might seem like a very artist point-of-view with which to approach a comic book character, I've been struck with how writer Grant Morrison's whole run on Batman/Batman and Robin has been something of a meditation on Batman as a living logo...a trademarked image being fought over and pirated...a powerful sigil. Yesterday's issue of Batman and Robin was, looked at from one angle, simply a conflict between Dick Grayson and Jason Todd over the appropriate use of that Batman logo.

Weekly Haul: November 11th

Batman and Robin #6 (DC Comics) Grant Morrison continues to do that thing Grant Morrison tends to do on low-pressure superhero comic books like this. Mainly, turning out perfectly serviceable genre stories that cover all of the expected bases, while also being exceedingly clever, addressing the audience both as readers of comics and people who like to know and think about comics in a general sense.

In this issue, the climax of the three-part “Revenge of the The Red Hood,” the late Bruce Wayne’s two protégés battle, but find their rivalry interrupted by a villain who renders their disagreements on crime-figthing philosophy moot, while simultaneously proving an example on which to test their philosophies.

It’s also the best Jason Todd story I’ve read since DC made the silly decision to bring him back to life. I don’t know that it justifies that decision, or makes all of those terrible Jason Todd stories between his fake-out return in “Hush” and this very issue worth while, but I’ll be damned if Morrison didn’t find ways to turn the character’s significant baggage into something appealing. (For example, Dick Grayson sums up Todd’s post resurrection Countdown career thusly: “…Jason’s fought aliens and been to parallel worlds. He’s died and been brought back to life. Don’t ever underestimate him.” It’s just the set-up for Damian to act arrogant and dismiss Todd while escaping from his bonds: “Well, he’s useless at tying knots.”

Also cool? Someone finally wrote a story about the grown-ups in Gotham City treating Jason Todd like the murderous villain he’s been written as, rather than as an annoyance on the peripheray of Batman and company’s radar.

Like the previous two issues, Philip Tan handles the art, and it is a credit to Morrison’s abilities that the art doesn’t destroy the book, given the gulf in quality.

Tan’s art is a bit different here, although stronger than it was. There’s still no real sense of setting or place, and some action scenes are handled poorly—the death blow administered to the bad guy, for example, or a character being shot five times being revealed in dialogue a few pages later, not when it was supposed to be occurring right before the readers eyes.

Jonathan Glapion is creidte as inker and Alex Sinclair as colorist, but I’m not sure what is going on with the art, really.

The Batman and Robin scenes seem to be color effects applied directly to pencils with no inks, whereas the the Red Hood and Scarlet scenes look penciled, inked and colored in the same way previous issues were.
When all of the characters start interacting, everything takes on the gauzy, soft, ink-less look of the Batman scenes.

It’s better, but it’s still bad work, and of a confoundingly amateur quality, given this is one of the American comic industry’s biggest publisher’s biggest books.

It’s not all Tan’s fault, of course. Someone hired the guy, approved his work, and put this issue together so that it looks half like a late ‘90s Wildstorm Universe book and half like a couple photo-referenced characters jumping around fields of color effects.

Batman says it himself in this panel…
…but note the writing in the “background.” What’s that say? “*colors flames in left bg”…? I don’t know. I tlooks like Tan penciled Batman and left instructions for the colorist to finish it up…?

And then there’s the very last page of the book:
I think it’s supposed to be a big, climactic splash panel, revealing original Batman Bruce Wayne’s body, which Dick Grayson has hidden away. But in addition to the lack of visual context leading up to the reveal, the way the page is laid out, it simply looks like it may be a piece of the next issue ad, which is just as big as the splash panel.

(And to get all nerdy for a second, if Dick Grayson has Batman’s body, whose buried in Batman’s grave (and whose skull is The Black Hand toting around in Blackest Night? The mystery of the multiple Batman bodies deepens!)


Booster Gold #26 (DC) One of the things that buggd me about all the wanton character death in the DCU starting around the time of Identity Crisis and Countdown to Infinite Crisis was how realatively little was actually being done with the deaths.

Like, if DC was going to start killing off characters, why not explore the dramatic possibilities of those deaths? Why not have some character development result or, at the very least, some special funeral issues? Instead, the deaths tended to be events leading to particular actions, but never any real stories or consequences. It felt like the editors and writers were swatting flies, not killing characters.

Well, writer/artist Dan Jurgens finally gives us the funeral of Ted “Blue Beetle II” Kord, so this issue of Booster Gold has that going for it. The time-travelling Booster was apparently so upset and so angry with everyone at his best friend’s superhero funeral that he couldn’t give a eulogy, and he goes back in time to try again.

It ain’t exactly great literature or anything, but it’s at least character-focused. It makes an effort, dammit, and I appreciate someone making an effort every now and then.

This is the Blackest Night tie-in issue of Booster Gold, which should come with a plastic ring of some sort (I got an orange). It will therefore probably be the best-selling issue of Booster Gold…perhaps of its entire run.

I’m not sure how great a job it does of showing off the specific virtues of the title in a way that might keep ring-hunting, Blakest Night completist readers, but it struck me as fairly reader-friendly.

The Blue Beetle back-up is done away with for the issue, with the character and page-count being absorbed by the lead feature, as Jaime Reyes joins Skeets, Booster and Supernova against Black Lantern Blue Beetle (Regular Beetle back-up artist Mike Norton provides some of the art).

Like last week’s Doom Patrol, the issue opens with a info dump of exposition narrated by Ted Kord, excused as the character’s memories being downloaded into the Black Lantern form of his corpse.

From there, Rip Hunter and Skeets search for the missing Booster, who is attending/re-attending Beetle’s funeral. Perhaps fighting a zombie douchebag version of his friend in the present will help give him closure?

I dug it.

(Hey, did you guys read the five-page preview of JSA All-Stars #1, the new series featuring all of the unpopular JSA characters in their own book, that was included in the back? What’d you think? It sure made me not want to read that series at all. I was pretty surprised by the artwork too. I liked it well enough, but it didn’t really look like the previous Freddie Williams III art I’ve seen at all).


Comic Book Comics #4 (Evil Twin Comics) Another excellent issue of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s brilliant idea of presenting the history of comic books as a comic book.

This issue is chockfull of short pieces, including one on crime comics, another on Marvel Comics’ golden era, another on the career of R. Crumb and finally a piece on European comics.

The history of comics, like all history, can be boiled down to a series of conflicts, and this issue has plenty behind its cover of Crumb, Ditko, Kirby and Tintin and Snowy versus a gigantic Stan Lee monster. Mr. Crime vs. Mr. Coffee Nerves! Stan Lee vs. the State of New York! Ayn Rand vs. The Marvel Method! Galactus vs. God! Spider-Man vs. The Comics Code Authority seal! Crumb vs. himself!

This issue has pretty much everything you’d want, including things you never knew you wanted, like seeing the dozen different ways Dunlavey can add Stan Lee’s moustache, smile and glasses on to different types of people to make them completely disturbing, and the Le Soir Vole headline “Hitler = Awesome” (next to picture of Der Fuherer surfing).

This is one of those books where I could probably have spent the entire night just scanning random panels and typing, “Ha ha, look at this it’s so great!”

I limited myself to two.

First, here’s a friendly reminder that while comics may be more accepted and cool then they’ve ever been before in America, no one really reads the damn things anymore:
Yes, the very best-selling comics in North America today would have been abysmal, embarrassing failures and canceled immediately, back when comics were a real business.

And here’s Van Lente and Dunlavey boiling the entirety of Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams and company’s classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics down into just a portion of a single panel:
That entire run was exactly like that, for two whole trade paperbacks.

Anyway, if you like comics, you’ll love Comic Book Comics.
today's creators



....


...Wait, one more nerdy detail thing and I'll shut up about this week's comics. What color of the emotional spectrum is racism? Because the Racist Lanterns would destroy the Green Lantern Corps handily.

Another weird thing about that Hulk Vol. 2 trade?

It's rated "A," which Marvel indicates is material, "Appropriate for ages 9 and up."






I think their ratings system is sort of silly in general, but I was sort of surprised to see that "A" on the back of the back cover, instead of a "T+" ("Appropriate for most readers 13 and up, parents are advised that they may want to read before or with younger children") or "Parental Advisory" ("15+ years old similar to T+ but featuring more mature themes and/or more graphic imagery. Recommended for teen and adult readers").

I can't imagine Loeb and Cho were thinking about nine-year-old readers when doing that locker room scene at the top of this post, for example. (And man, what the fuck is up with Spider-Woman's gesture in that last panel? Is she stifling a laugh, or eating an invisible banana, or...?)

Hulk Vol. 2: Red and Green is a very strange collection.

I didn’t exactly have high hopes for Hulk Vol. 2: Red and Green. Jeph Loeb wrote it, and his entire bibliography tends to range from fair on the high end to The Worst Comics Ever Written on the low end. I had read the previous volume, and it wasn’t very good (Though not terrible either; I was actually sort of pleasantly surprised that it seemed to be Loeb writing in his Superman/Batman cameo-and-splash pages mode, instead of Mark Millar-but-even-dumber Ultimates mode).

So I didn’t expect Red and Green to be a good comic, but I was completely unprepared for how strange a comics work it is.

It make very little sense, and not merely in the usual this doesn’t obey the rules of good fiction or narrative structure or “Holy shit, they are paying this guy real actual American money for this?” sorts of ways, but even at the most basic, structural level, I was confused by the book.

The fine print on the title page says the trade collection I borrowed from the library “contains material originally published in magazine form as Hulk #7-9 and King-Size Hulk #1.” I only went back and checked that because the book seemed composed entirely of 8 to 11-page mini-stories, each set apart by a new cover image and brief introduction or title and ending with a cliffhanger or climactic event.

I thought that perhaps the chapters only seemed short given Loeb’s tendency to put as few panels as possible in his scripts, but when I went back and counted the pages of the segments, they did indeed turn out to be the length of back-ups, rather than 22-page feature stories.

I’m not sure how this book was put together exactly, or what its source material—those comics “originally published in magazine form”—actually looked like, and that ended up being just one more thing for me to puzzle over why wading through Red and Green’s 120 ponderous pages.

The volume opens with Loeb’s usual Chris Claremont-style first-person narration, from a character telling us, “My name is Bruce Banner. I am THE HULK.” He spends a few panels telling us all about the extraordinary security measures SHIELD has taken to keep him calm and unable to turn into the Hulk and/or escape his cell. He will narrate the first mini-story of the book, despite not being present during it (which he at least notes; his narration is his attempt to reconstruct the events).

I was shaking my head by the second page, during the course of which Loeb has Banner say: “THIS Hulk does things I never did. Like using a GUN. Which I’ve done.”

How can those three sentences be strung together like that by a grown-up? How can an editor or six read it, and a letter put it on the page? My mind was boggled and I was sputtering to myself on page two. I still had 118 to go.

In this story, the Red Hulk makes camp somewhere in the frozen north (despite a bunch of place name-dropping, Banner never tells us where “there” actually is), and is attacked by The Wendigo, a Marvel monster probably most famous for being in the issue of The Incredible Hulk in which Wolverine was first introduced.

Actually, Banner notes, this is a Wendigo, not The Wendigo. (This will be important later on). Where do they come from? Dr. Banner explains that they are: “Mystical creatures born out of humans who feast on…human flesh. CANNIBALISM.” (Yes, he actually, redundantly adds the all-caps “CANNIBALISM” there. The narration, by the way, is being written on a yellow legal pad by Banner, and appears in little narration boxes that look like squares of yellow legal pad paper with handwriting on them. That means Banner occasionally writes words in all-caps like that. And that he actually wrote out “…” before writing the words “human flesh” in the above sentence. This is only page three, and Red and Green has already become awesomely terrible. That is the secret of Loeb’s success, I guess).

The Red Hulk butchers the Wendigo with his Hulk-sized hunting knife and jumps away, leaving the pieces of his foe’s body to be devoured by a pack of Wendigos. In the last panel, the unidentified General Ross—who won’t appear again in this volume—sits at his desk looking grim, and the word “Soon…” appears before him. That is the end of the story.

And you know what’s weird? It’s drawn by Arthur fucking Adams, so it looks great. Adams is a nee plus ultra of monster drawing, and his Wendigos are incredibly detailed, scary and fluid. It’s kind of shocking that Marvel would hire Adams to draw one of their books, and then give him a script that everyone involved should be embarrassed to have their names attached to, and that he’d accept it. And then he’d proceed to draw the hell out of it.

The next story opens with Bruce Banner in Las Vegas suddenly, his escape or release from the prison in the last story not only unexplained but unmentioned, on the trail of the Red Hulk. He hears screams, and heads into a mythology-themed casino, and Adams draws this splash page:
Jesus, look at that. Look at the detail there…the differing expressions on the faces of the Cyclops statues, the care with which Adam lined up the slot machines, the little details like the arms of the dead hanging over the edges of the fountain, the number of panicked extras, the way the Wendigo on the far right casually tosses a slot machine with his right claw while reaching toward a terrified victim with his left.

This is a really nice splash page, made even nice still by the fact that too few artists even bother to draw enough to fill-up splash pages anymore. Later in the book, Frank Cho will squander double-page spreads on nothing more than a half-dozen characters posing in front of a blank background.

The entire Wendigos going ape-shit in Vegas storyline looks this great, by the way. The story isn’t just an insult to its readers, it’s a punch in their faces, but hell, Adams just about redeems it with his work.

How did this pack of Wendigos get to Vegas, which is, after all, quite a ways away from the frozen wastes of Canada? That goes unexplained too. Somehow they are in a Vegas casino, apparently passing Wendigo-ism on to their victims, and Bruce Banner, who is also somehow there, must stop them…which he attempts to do by randomly turning into the gray “Joe Fixit” version of the Hulk for some reason.

Then New York-based superhero Moon Knight randomly appears and starts fighting The Hulk. Then The Sentry and Ms. Marvel appear. Then the gray Hulk turns into the green hulk. Then he turns into this: It’s all completely random and aggressively, insultingly stupid, right up until the one and a half page appearance by Brother Voodoo, who simply magics everything back to normal, ending the storyline.

I did snicker at that Wendihulk splash, and, as I read it, I could kind of see what some people must find appealing about Loeb, beyond the fact that the brand of stupidity he writes is often so very funny. There’s certainly an appealing craziness to the Hulk just randomly becoming a Wendigo for a few pages, and calling himself the Wendihulk.

But were all these other pages really worth that one, single-image burst of zaniness? The rest of the story didn’t really have anything to offer aside from Adams’ always appealing line work.

More representative are pages like this—
—in which Loeb writes Moon Knight, Marvel’s off-brand Batman, and The Sentry, Marvel’s off-brand Superman, as if they were Batman and Superman, and even titled the story “World’s Finest,” just in case the gag weren’t obvious enough.

That’s the end of that storyline, and Arthur Adams’ involvement with the book. He’s replaced by another exceedingly talented artist, Frank Cho, and Loeb seems to have written a storyline specifically for Cho—it consists of nothing more than random Marvel superheroines fighting the Red Hulk, giving Cho the opportunity to draw just pages and pages of asses.

There’s an eight-page segment that recounts the Red Hulk vs. She-Hulk scene from the previous volume, this time from Shulkie’s point-of-view. It ends with the words “The Beginning…”

The next chapter finds She-Hulk calling superheroines from a list and trying to recruit them for an all-girl assault on the Red Hulk. Why is she only calling women? Well, because Cho likes drawing women. There’s no in-story reason given, because it’s not really a story…it’s just Cho drawing women, with Loeb writing terrible dialogue over the pictures.

The only two she can successfully recruit are Valkyrie and Thundra, shown here with SHIELD Deputy Director Maria Hill, who, it turns out, is actually a hobbit: After She-Hulk declares “Let’s go spank some red ass…” on a full-page splash, the trio track down the Red Hulk and engage in a violent battle full of gross dialogue. Then, just as the Hulk has them on the ropes, all the random heroines that all turned She-Hulk down earlier all appear.

Spider-Woman! Invisible Woman! She-Hulk! Tigra! Even Hellcat and Black Widow, who can’t possibly add anything! Why did Invisible Woman leave the rest of her rather powerful teammates to come alone? Because they’re boys, duh!

Here is some more actual dialogue that Jeph Loeb was paid to write:

"A waffle house of witches. Which one of you puts on the waitress uniform-- --and serves me? GOOD THING I BROUGHT MY APPETITE!"

They defeat the Hulk, and proceed to spend the night waiting for him to revert back to whoever he is when he’s not the Red Hulk. He never does, and eventually wakes up, grabs Thundra, jumps away with her, recruits her for something, and then the story ends.

It’s followed by one more, much shorter piece, “The Death and Life of The Abomination,” which is a recap of the Abomination’s fictional history, presented as a report from an unseen General Ross and illustrated by the great Herb Trimpe.

So the creative roster for this book? Jeph Loeb. Arthur Adams. Frank Cho. Herb Trimpe. One of those guys doesn’t seem to belong on that list, and the reason why isn’t simply that he’s not an artist.



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


RELATED: Here’s a typical “look at all those asses” panel from Cho’s story:
I like the fact that Storm says she lost her phone. No wonder! Where would she put a cell phone? Did she try putting it in her pocket, forgetting that she wasn’t even wearing pants, and thus it just fell to the ground before she flew away?

Oh yeah, in this week's issue of Batman: Unseen, Batman totally

grabs a naked, greased dude's penis.

No, of course I'm not making that up. Okay, so the villain in Unseen is a new mad scientist type character who has developed a serum that makes him invisible.

The chemical doesn't affect clothing, however, so obviously he needs to be naked in order to sneak up on victims, right?

And he needs to be greased because...well, he probably doesn't need to be greased. He may just be worried about chafing. But being greasy sure comes in handy when someone tries to grab him.

In the climax of Unseen #3, Batman stops the invisible killer while he's attempting to claim another victim, and the two fight. At one point, Batman takes a flying tackle at him, and the pair tumble down the stairs:
And Batman notices that he's naked. How does Batman, master detective that he is, know that the invisible man is naked? Batman's wearing gloves and is covered ear point to cape tip in his own clothing (save for a bit around the mouth). So, clearly, Batman must have inadvertently touched his enemy in a way that made it clear that the invisible man was indeed naked.

Therefore, Batman totally grabbed a naked, greased dude's penis.

I can't decide—

Is Namor's X-Men costume completely awesome, or is it actually just awesomely terrible?

I think he always looks good in black and/or blue, and the fish-scale looking material is nice, although I'm having some trouble with the fact that the pans make it look as if he's wearing leather chaps.

The crux of my inability to figure out if I actually love or hate the new costume are the little X-shapes at the ankles of his chaps—on the one hand, it seems like crass over-marketing, but on the other hand, it's totally sweet how the bottom of the X forms a little space from which his little ankle wings can protrude from.

I hope you guys like linkblogging because that's all you get tonight:

I have a short review of Drunk, an anthology of stories about drinking and bars by Las Vegas creators. You can read it here (And if you're in Vegas, you can check out a bunch of the art from the book here).

The above is from "A Vulgar Display of Power" written by Alex Getchell and drawn by Laurenn McCubbin, in which a young man gets in a fight with "this big townie asshole." The above is my favorite sequence; he's trying to do a martial arts maneuver in which he grabs the big townie asshole by the shirt and throws him over his hip to the floor, but, instead, something rather awkward occurs.

This is the very next panel on the next page:
I really like the way McCubbin mixes photo-referenced art with more traditional cartoon vocabulary, like the ear steam.


—I really enjoyed Andrew Weiss' "Nobody's Favorite" entry on Crucifer, a vampire character from John Byrne and Chris Claremont's "Tenth Circle" arc of JLA. I think I bowed out of that storyline before they even got around to introducing Crucifer that story was so bad, but I kind of regret it—I don't get to enjoy making-fun-of-Crucifer jokes as much I might have if I had read the whole "Tenth Circle" all the way through.

That storyline still strikes me as sort of significant though, as it was the first time I realized that my then-favorite DC super-title could, in fact, be so bad I wouldn't even want to read it anymore, and that this John Byre and this Chris Claremont character may not in fact be the comic book super-geniuses their reputations within comics fandom might lead one to believe (I hadn't read any of their classic Marvel work at that point, and knew their reputations better than their work).

Anyway, Crucifer! Go read that post! And tell me, how is it that there hasn't been a band named Crucifer before Byrne used that name for a vampire with a funny haircut?


—You know how much I like Kelley Jones, right? Well I enjoyed reading Ken Parille's write-up of the many virtues of Jones' Batman: Unseen. I think he explains Jones' awesomeness quite well, with lots of examples, and he makes special note of the coloring, something I think I've appreciated without even really noticing (if that makes any sense). Parille later had another post on the subject of Unseen, this one focusing on #3's cover.


—Check out this gorgeously illustrated version of an old traditional murder ballad, "On the Banks of the Ohio." It's not often I see the name of my home state used in relation to murder ballads. (Via Tom Spurgeon).

(Later-than-usual) Weekly Haul: November 4th

Assault on New Olympus #1 (Marvel Comics) Hey, it’s an issue of Incredible Hercules, but instead of just calling it Incredible Hercules, Marvel gave it its own weird, hard to read title, with “Assault On New” across the top in small font, and “OLYMPUS” running top to bottom all gigantic-like down the right side of the page.

There’s a 32-page story by the regular Inc Herc writing team, continuing plot threads from their title, as Hera prepares to unleash an extinction event foreshadowed previously, and Hercules finds kinda-sorta-but-not-really-married Peter Parker dating his wife Hebe, leading to Hercules and Spider-Man fighting for about 20 pages (which is pretty awesome, by the way).

There’s also a six-page Agents of Atlas back-up story by Jeff Parker and Gabriel Hardman that flows directly out of the two-part X-Men Vs. Agents of Atlas miniseries so, um, good luck keeping track of the Agents, I guess.

It all seems needlessly complex to me, like whatever sales boost comes form putting a “#1” on the cover of a comic book isn’t really worth making the story so hard to follow around the comics rack. Presumably it will be a little easier to keep track of in trade form.

Oh, by the way, Hardman’s version of Greek octopus god Phorcys? Awesome.


Batman: Unseen #3 (DC Comics) You know, if Batman just used the heat-vision lenses in his cowl, fighting an invisible man really wouldn’t give him much trouble. Of course, then we would have been denied artist Kelley Jones’ depiction of Batman getting kicked around by an unseen foe for about eight pages. You know what to expect by the half-way point of this miniseries, right? A good-old fashioned Batman story with plenty of opportunities for Jones to demonstrate his skills, including a bravura page during which a pair of black leather gloves breaks into a couple’s house and murders a woman.


Deadpool Team-Up #899 (Marvel) The Merc with the Mouth and the Herc who also has a mouth are shown hoisting mugs of beer while lounging atop their fallen rivals Wolverine and Thor on Humberto Ramos’ cover, but their actual adversaries within are Arcade, the assassin with the most overhead in the Marvel Universe, and Nightmare, who has just got done reading one of those Starman omnibi and though The Shade dressed super-cool.

It’s written by Fred Van Lente, who co-writes The Incredible Hercules (and had a short story in Deadpool #900, and it’s therefore pretty good stuff—Van Lente can do superhero action comedy with the best of ‘em at this point, and he proves it writing a Herc book month-in and month-out.

It’s about a standard a formula for a done-in-one Marvel superhero team-up as you could imagine, with the pair meeting up, fighting, realizing they’re the pawns of their two foes, and then defeating them by working together.

Deadpool’s antics and pool of gags have gotten a tad tiring for me personally—on account of having spent so much time with Deadpool comics recently—but Van Lente has some pretty inventive riffs on them, particularly the two dueling voices in ‘pool’s head.

Artist Dalibor Talajic draws a huge, beefy, fuzzy Hercules with a very classic, very Greek looking face—most of the panels with the big guy in them just sing. Talajic’s art is actually all around very nice. The characters have a lot of detail and lean toward realism, but retain a hand-drawn look and move through comic book environments, and thus avoid the slick, sickly “house” look of too many Marvel comics. (You can see five unlettered pages of the book here for a better idea of what Talajic’s art looks like than my poor description of same).


Doom Patrol #4 (DC) The latest attempt at a Doom Patrol revival lasted a whole three issues before needing a fill-in artist and crossing over into a company-wide event (To be fair to the regular at team, however, the two may be related).

Is this a bad thing? Well, I’m pretty sure it won’t be from where DC’s sitting, once they tally up the sales. The copy I bought was the last one on the rack at my local shop (although they did have more by the register and a stack to refill the rack with), and my purchase of it got me a big, fat yellow plastic ring—just like the one Sinestro wears!—which oughta help drive sales (Mine will be something my grand-nieces and nephews get left to them in my will, and be very disappointed in the rest of their lives—“Why did Uncle Caleb have all this weird plastic jewelry? And why did he think it would be valuable?”)

I can’t imagine it will still be a good thing in a couple more issues though, as you’re going to either have to be a reader of a certain age (or a certain attraction to your shop’s back-issue bins) to find the contents all that interesting. The plot here isn’t exactly something that seems likely to appeal to new readers, which is presumably the sort of reader issue #4 of a brand-new series wants.

If you’ve read any of the “Blackest Night” branded books, then you know the drill here. Dead characters return to life as zombies in Black Lantern uniforms and start making fun of the heroes in an attempt to stir their emotions. Here the dead characters are from a previous incarnation of the Doom Patrol (the second, I think), all of whom were killed off around the time of DC’s 1988-1989 Invasion! line-wide cross-over story.

Writer Keith Giffen kicks off the issue with a three-page illustrated Wikipedia entry on the Doom Patrol of the eighties to prep readers for the next 18 or so pages, but if the point of the exercise is to work up the emotions of the readers, the story might have benefited from a different approach (Me, I just read a long thinking, “Oh Niles Caulder’s had a wife I never heard of who was also a superhero, and I guess she has some powers? Hey, there was another guy named Tempest before Aqualad used that codename, apparently.”)

The pencil art Justiniano, and it’s pretty decent, although less detailed and inventively arranged on the page than most of his early work. The art seemed to have a little more life than it’s had in previous issues, but I think this is probably where I get off. I’ll just hope they collect the (still) excellent Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Metal Men back-ups in trade eventually.


Secret Six #15 (DC) I like this title because I like pencil artist Nicola Scott, I like writer Gail Simone and I like a couple of the half-dozen characters ensemble cast. This fifteenth issue of the series has a different artist, a different writer and only features a single member of the cast.

As an issue Secret Six therefore, it’s fairly awful, and fails to meet some of the basic requirements of being an issue of Secret Six. As a Deadshot one-shot, however, it’s not bad at all.

That’s due mostly to the presence of John Ostrander, the long-time DC who probably knows the character better than anyone, on account of having written him for so long on Suicide Squad. If you want a Deadshot character piece, which folds his origin into his current status quo, then you’re going to want Ostrander writing it.

The art is by Jim Calafiore, whose work I can’t appreciate it. He knows how to design a comics page and move a reader’s eyes, so I realize that alone puts him a step or two ahead of some of DC’s worst artists, but I just don’t like looking at his work at all. I don’t like his character design (particularly the weird things he does with limbs), and I generally try to avoid his work. (Which isn’t to say he’s a bad artist, just that he’s an artist I don’t like).

I tried pondering what others see in his work that I might be missing, given that how much work DC gives him (including at least a couple issues of an upcoming Secret Six storyline), and the best I can come up with is that he must work very fast (which explains why editors call on him so often) and that there’s a weirdness to his art that perhaps reflects the intended tone of comics like this (in which a killer struggles with his urges to shoot everyone he sees to death).

To end on a positive note, I think this is the best of Dan LuVisi’s covers so far. It’s his sixth, and too often he seems to simply pick a single character to spotlight, and then render in a really odd way. Here, the one-character spotlight is appropriate, since the comic is all about this one character to the exclusion of the rest of the cast, and his Deadshot is rendered perfectly well. I’m not a fan of this sort of digital work, but it’s nice enough looking, and I could certainly see kids thinking it looks totally badass.


X-Men Vs. Agents of Atlas #2 (Marvel) Wow, what a completely lousy cover this book has. Adi Granov has drawn six fairly random characters engaged in some form of combat with one another. If you read AoA already, you can probably figure out the guy in the background is supposed to be Jimmy Woo (by process of elimination anyway), and you can probably figure out the rest of the characters, although I’m not sure why you’d even be tempted to pick up and flip through a book with such a boring, prosaic cover—Namora looks bored while fighting the X-Men, and if actually fighting the X-Men is so goddam boring, what’s reading about fighting the X-Men going to be like? Will you actually fall asleep, as Colossus has here?

The weakness of Granov’s reader-repelling cover was made all the more apparent when I got to pages two and three, which are a double-page spread in which—let’s see—about a dozen X-Men, including the ones from the movies and cartoons, rush into battle against a killer robot, a gorilla with a jetpack, a bunch of warrior monks, and a lady who looks like Namor with big tits.

It’s a very exciting image, one with enough information in it that I stopped reading just to look more closely at all the X-Men rushing into it from the left and pick them out. Why on earth is Marvel trying to sell this book with some lazy pin-up art on the cover instead of hinting at how exciting the interiors are?

It used to be that the covers were always more exciting than the contents of the comics, that publisher’s went out of their way to hype up the comics by giving them bold, mind-blowing cover images that demanded you stop and look at them, if not pick them up and buy them.

I wouldn’t have even seen this comic on the rack; luckily I have a pull-list at my shop, so someone physically handed it to me. (The X-Men also fight a dragon in this issue. Doesn’t “The X-Men fighting a fucking dragon!” sound like the sort of thing that might move a couple extra comics? (If it sounds like I’m being too hard on Granov, I should note Humberto Ramos’ variant cover is just as bad, if not worse. His characters look a little more enthusiastic to be on the cover, but he doesn’t even bother to put Wolverine on it, which is, like, step #1 on an X-Men cover, isn’t it?)

The interiors are pretty predictable, as writer Jeff Parker continues with the fight and then make-up portions of the Marvel team-up formula, but there are some fun moments in the specifics of the fighting (I particularly liked Gorilla Man’s assessment of Wolverine’s strength, for example).

After all the X-Men fighting, there’s an eight-page prologue to the story that continues in the back-up of Assault On New Olympus #1, and artist Gabriel Hardman does a hell of a job on it. I loved his giant statue of Aphrodite as an avatar of the real thing.

Another Ghotsbusters comics project

I recently took a look at Tokyopop’s efforts to bring The Ghostbusters to comics, via the so-so 2008 anthology Ghost Busted, so I thought I’d see if other publishers had fared any better.

IDW Publishing took their turn with Ghostbusters: The Other Side, a four-issue miniseries that launch late last year and was collected into a trade paperback back in May.

It’s a more organized, accessible and straightforward effort than Tokyopop’s—rather than a multi-team anthology, it’s a single story by a single creative team. It’s story and art are far weaker than the strongest stories in Ghost Busted, but they’re also far stronger than the weakest story in Ghost Busted. So if Tokyopop’s effort was a mixed bag, IDW’s is at least consistently mediocre.

Artist Tom Nguyen, who is somewhat unevenly assisted on inks by Drew Geraci and John Alderink, does a pretty fine job on the character design of the principals though. Here are the four main characters:
As with the various Tokyopop artists, Nguyen seems to be avoiding using either the likenesses of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and the other actors from the movies or the character designs form the cartoon series.

The designs seem to be of the movie characters, but not the actors, if that makes sense.

The above panel may not be the best example of each, but it was the best one of all four (and I didn’t wanna waste too much time scanning). Ray, Peter and Egon are all easy to distinguish from one another, despite their similarities.

Ray has big ears, slightly puffy cheeks, mussed, fikle hair and a goofy, boyish look, reflecting his often over-eager attitude.

Peter’s hair is longer and pushed back, he’s either starting to bald or has a dramatic widow’s peak, and he often has the half-sleepy expression of Bill Murray, if not Bill Murray’s actual facial features.

Egon’s got glasses to distinguish him, but beyond that Nguyen gives him spiky hair and thing, pointed facial features.

His art may lack some of the personality of Maximo V. Lorenzo or Chrissy Delk in general, but his main character designs have personality to spare.

The rest of the characters that appear in the book are infinitely more blandly designed, but none are really given any personalities by the story anyway—they’re merely props for the Ghostbusters to interact with.

Writer Keith Champagne draws on the well-established characters from the films to power his narrative—Peter’s sarcastic, Ray’s enthusiastic, Egon’s smart, Winston is personality-free—and the story seems positioned as a third movie, although the specifics of the plot seem more like one of the one-off little adventures the team was always having on the cartoon show.

Apparently a life of crime can lead to an afterlife of crime, and some of America’s most notorious gangsters have continued to devote themselves to organized crime now that they’re ghosts.

Their new racket is smuggling souls from Purgatory back to the land of the living, and when the Ghostbusters try to bust them, they all end up dead and on the, um, other side (hence the title). Teamed up with some equally famous crime-fighters, they have to bust ghosts while themselves little more than ghosts.

It’s not bad work at all, and definitely has its moments, but it’s certainly not great comics, and seems sub-par compared to the films it’s based on…and even many of the cartoons that were based on those films.

Part of the problem may simply be that it’s going to take either an extremely skilled cartoonist or creative team to be able to replicate the particular charms of the half-dozen or so actors who originally brought the characters to life in addition to continuing the premise and extending it into a horror/comedy/adventure of equal size and shape. But spending so much attention on various dead historical figures instead of the protagonists certainly didn’t help any, nor did IDW’s presentation.

The Other Side is thoroughly decent, cheap, time-wasting entertainment, but the painted, off-model covers on $4, 22-page books or, in this particular case, on an $18 trade with a fancy raised logo tries telegraphs a better, more important work. It’s probably not fair to single The Other Side and IDW out for this here, as it’s a problem among a lot of comics and publishers these days—presenting mediocre entertainment as respectable art often ill-serves the material, making it seem all the more disappointing.

In other words, a $12, pulpy, paper-paper stock trade is probably what The Other Side deserves; the glossy paper and “art gallery” of shitty covers and black and white versions of certain unimpressive pages just makes the trade collection seem arrogant. That would be fine…provided it had a reason to be arrogant. It doesn’t.


…


Yes, I know I am projecting human emotions into an inanimate trade paperback collection. Shut up.

Ivan Reis' Scarecrow

Last Wednesday's Blackest Night #4 featured a five-panel appearance by one of my favorite comic book characters, The Scarecrow:
Geoff Johns must be rather fond of the character too, as he gave him a similar cameo in his last big ring-related cross-over story, "The Sinestro Corps War" as well. I discussed my affection for the Scarecrow at probably way-too great length at the beginning of 2007's Scarecrow Week, but if you weren't reading back then, I'll simply restate that one of the things I like so much about the character is how visually versatile he is.

Like Batman himself, The Scarecrow can look completely different from artist to artist, and yet still look "right." Because his costume is simply a homemade scarecrow costume, there's virtually no wrong way to draw him, and artists therefore have a pretty free hand when it comes to putting this classic Batman villain down on paper.

Anyway, that's Reis' version above.

What do you guys think? I'm not terribly fond of it, myself. It looks a little too much like a realistic version of the the later Batman: The Animated Series costume...and are those tennis shoes on his feet? That's the least scary type of footwear of all!

I do like seeing Black Lantern Azrael trying to scare him by saying "Rraarrrr!" like a little kid making a dinosaur roar, though. And the "Aiiieee" scream in the last panel. Does anyone ever scream "Aiiieee" outside of a comic book...?

One more Deadpool story arc...

While I was putting together that really long post about Deadpool a couple weeks ago, the one in which I was trying read my way towards an explanation as to why the character was so incredibly popular all of a sudden, I looked to see what Deadpool trades were available at the library.

None, it turned out.

Oh, they had three trades featuring Deadpool in some capacity, but no collections of the series, which seemed rather odd. A quick search on Amazon reveals plenty of trades to choose from, with more coming up in the next few months. Maybe Columbus just doesn’t have many Deadpool fans around? At least not any that bug their local libraries to order trades for them?

Of the three they had, there was Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 16: Deadpool, in which Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley introduced the Ultimate Deadpool in a not-very-interesting story pitting him against Spider-Man and the X-Men, Wolverine/Deadpool: Weapon X, Frank Tieri and Sean Chen’s comics featuring the pair, and, finally, Wolverine Origins: Deadpool.

That’s the one I remember Tucker Stone speaking fairly highly of at the time it was being released in serial comic book format, so I took it out to give it a looksee.

It’s actually two story arcs. The first, “The Deep End,” is by Daniel Way and Steve Dillon, and it is fantastic. It’s followed by a two-issue story arc entitled “Son of an X” by Way and artist Stephen Segovia and tells the origin of Daken, Wolverine’s son with bad hair and worse tattoos.

The second story is no damn good, and its presence kind of ruins the whole book. But that first story? The first issue/chapter begins with Wolverine finding a bomb stuffed into a roast duck in the Chinese restaurant he’s eating at, and ends with someone dropping a piano on the ol’ Canucklehead’s head.

Deadpool’s attempts to kill Wolverine seesaw between typical for such comics high-tech, sci fi weaponry and things he saw in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Way’s not the first writer to play Deadpool as some sort of Loony Tunes character—Buddy Scalera put him in the position of Wile E. Coyote in Deadpool #56—but Way certainly does a good job of it.

Both Deadpool and Wolverine have healing factors that make them impervious to any mortal harm, so, not unlike cartoon characters, they heal after each explosion they’re caught in, and come back for more punishment.

Way also frequently lets us inside Deadpool’s head, and it’s clear he sees the conflict as something out of a cartoon, with Wolverine appearing in his mind’s eyes as a skinny guy in a baggy costume with sporks for claws and, later, as a rabbit in a Wolverine costume.

Then there’s the simple fact that the story is, like a Roadrunner or Tom and Jerry cartoon, almost completely devoted to traps and combat. What little story there is doesn’t intrude into the narrative until about halfway through the fourth issue of a five-issue story arc.

The rest of the story? It’s just Deadpool subjecting Wolverine to one deadly trap after another, forcing him to run a gauntlet of meticulously orchestrated violence until he finally “kills” him and takes the already-healing body to a place that will keep him dead (I’m a little lost on the science of killing Wolverine at this point, but Deadpool’s plan is to keep him chained underwater indefinitely—if you left Wolverine underwater like that for ten years, would he come back to life once he could breathe again?)

That probably doesn’t sound all that appealing, and I would have been horribly frustrated with the story if I was reading it in 22-page installments over the course of five months, but it’s enormous fun in one big, chunk like this—a perfectly accessible, super-straightforward action comic that plays to both of its leads’ strengths with just enough eleventh hour plot revelation to justify all the slapstick violence that precedes it as a necessary part of the story.

That story? Well, it’s more of whatever the hell’s going on in Wolverine: Origins, a title that at least in theory sounds interesting, but seems to deal with Wolverine chasing around his three-clawed, mohawk-ed son and an always off-panel wolf man. Characters that hadn’t appeared in the first eighty-some pages of the story simply walk onto the scene at the climax of “Deep End,” and I’m not sure how one even makes sense of them without having read previous collected volumes (I read enough Marvel promotional material that I have a general sense of what’s going on in the title and who’s who, but if I didn’t I imagine I’d be pretty frustrated with the way it plays out).

The reason the story works as well as it does comes down to the simple fact that Steve Dillon draws it. Dillon draws absolutely perfect comics, and you could take almost all the words out of this thing and still be able to follow the action perfectly well. In fact, most of the good parts come from the drawings, from the perfect clarity with which Dillon renders a character’s expression or stages a transition between two panels.

How good is Steve Dillon? Let’s put it this way. He makes Daken look cool. That is no easy task, since Daken looks like this:

Once “The Deep End” ends, this is the next thing that confronts a reader:
It’s a terrible Greg Land image, in which Wolverine doesn’t look like the Wolverine in the preceding 100 pages, Daken doesn’t look anything like the Daken of the preceding 100 pages and he seems to be missing his third claw.

That’s the awful cover of the first issue of a two-part story drawn by Stephen Segovia, whose art looks so much like Leinil Yu’s I had to check and make certain it wasn’t.

“Son of an X” follows Wolverine as he carries his now-in-a-coma son Daken to a secret military compound only he knows exists, and there he finds some monsters created by mad medical science who want revenge on him. The story flashes back to both Wolverine being a total cock during WWII, when he guarded the compound and made sure none of the interred Japanese human guinea pigs escaped, and to Daken’s secret origin. Apparently, he was born with his haircut, as he had it even as a baby.

As I mentioned, it’s not very good, and it is particularly jarring following “The Deep End.” The shift in art style is so drastic that the characters don’t even look like the same people, making it harder still to care about what these two monstrously unlikable guys with claws were up to in their flashbacks. I was sort of rooting for the monsters, but our hero Wolverine kills them all, out of mercy.

If you’re curious about what so many people seem to see in this Deadpool character, this Wolverine: Origins trade isn’t a bad way to go. At $20, it’s probably a pretty expensive curiosity satiate-er—Deadpool #900 is a more economical choice—but it’s definitely worth a borrow from your local library.