Review: Avenging Spider-Man: The Good, The Green and The Ugly

This trade collects five issues of what is essentially Marvel's current version of the old Marvel Team-Up, which paired Spider-Man with a different co-star each issue, now given a title that makes sense only in that it's meant to suggest an association with Marvel's most popular branding device at the moment, "Avengers."

After all, Spider-Man does nothing in the way of avenging in these issues, which are quite light-hearted adventures that play up the character's fun and funny side, and, of the three Marvel heroes he teams up with in the three stories within, one of them doesn't even have any association with The Avengers.

The first of the stories collected is an all-Immonen one-issue She-Hulk team-up, a Spidey/Shulkie comic from the creative team behind 2010 Top Shelf graphic novel Moving Pictures, which was about a pair of people making tough choices during World War II, while the Nazis were pillaging the art of the continent.

Oddly enough, this one is also set in and around a museum!

I find that one of the best ways to judge whether a Spider-Man comic is any good or not is whether it manages to make me laugh at all, and this made me laugh:

(The art really sells that joke; not sure if it's the speedlines or the figure work that do the heavy lifting, or simply the combination of the two, but that's a joke that would very easily not be very funny if drawn differently).

In this story, She-Hulk's team-up with Spidey lasts a lot longer than she would have liked, as the wall-crawler tags along to a museum function she has to attend for work. There some cultists attempt to steal some ancient Egytpian maguffin, and the cat goddess Bast arises.

It's full of the same sharp wit Kathryn Immonen's scripts usually are, and the super-short length (just 20 pages) keeps her sometimes overly wild plotting (see Hellcat, Herald, X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back for examples) in a nicely constructed, easily digestible package. It's great fun to see Stuart Immonen—a great, and greatly undervalued artist—drawing something light and fun like this, rather than the sorts of epic angst-fests we've seen him doing for Marvel lately (Fear Itself, Bendis-written Avengers comics).

That's followed by a slightly flabbier two-parter teaming Spidey with another super-strong superheroine, Marvel's current Captain Marvel Carol Danvers. This one's written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, penciled by Terry Dodson and inked by Rachel Dodson, making for another extraordinarily high-caliber art team for what is essentially something of a trifle of a comic.

In this one, Danvers offers Peter Parker a free flight to Boston to visit his aunt, in Danvers' own personal airplane, but the pair get pulled into superhero action against a spunky, jet-packing 99-percenter and an overzealous independent security contractor in a mechanized suit of super-armor. It's incredibly predictable—I've seen this almost exact same twist used in half the page-count by Grant Morrison in the late '90s—but DeConnick writes fun banter, and the art is super-slick.

I hadn't noticed previously, when I'd seen the cover image online before, but Danvers is actually wagging her index finger at whoever is shooting at her and Spidey on the cover. From a distance—the distance at which the image is visible as a little jpeg on a computer monitor, for example—it looked more like she was holding up her first two fingers.

The image makes a lot more sense now, although it's still kinda weird; it's such a frozen image, confined to a particular split-second—we can see where the bullets hit and are arcing away from her invulnerable skin—that allowing for motion in it like that seems pretty off.

The final story is another two-parter, featuring Deadpool, who must be "the Ugly" being referred to in the title). It's written by Kevin Schinick (whose name I'm not familiar with) and drawn by Aaron Kuder. It's a pretty Deadpool story, which means it's kind of in your face and annoying, but it has some pretty decent moments.

The first half features Deadpool in Spider-Man's subconsciousness, trying to guide him through his dreams in order to rescue him from a villain purportedly attacking him through his dreams. And then there's a reveal in the second issue, in which the incredibly unlikely (anywhere other than a story featuring Deadpool, anyway) villain: The Hypno-Hustler.

I really liked Kuder's style, which reminded me quite a bit of Frank Quitely's and Chris Burnham's in many panels (mostly in character design and in the way he draws his lines), and he has a pretty swell version of the Green Goblin (who appears in hallucinatory form only). Take away that guy's pupils, and he looks pretty damn horrifying, doesn't he?

So in The Good, The Green and The Ugly we get stories that are pretty great, pretty good and pretty decent, all of which adds up to not bad at all.

DC's September previews reviewed (After "Forever Evil" is discussed at some length)

There's already been quite a bit of discussion of DC Comics' plans for September of 2013, as it's a particularly big month with a particularly ambitious gimmick promotion.

First, it's the launch of Forever Evil, a seven-issue miniseries by the publisher's top writer Geoff Johns and artist David Finch, who only managed two or three issues as the artist on JLoA before abandoning the project—perhaps to get to work on this book (And, if that's the case, then apparently this wasn't planned out all that far in advance). It will be the first line-wide crossover/event series of The New 52, which is curious, as DC has been teasing and hyping this summer's "Trinity War" almost since the launch of The New 52, and that ended up being only a six-part crossover between three different titles, not a Blackest Night or Final Crisis style project. The premise seems to be something about the Justice League "dying" or being removed, and the villains getting the run of the joint (a premise that might be more effective were these heroes or this League one that was older than three years or so).

Second, each New 52 book will go on semi-hiatus, with many of them getting special between-issues issues with decimal points in the numbering, each highlighting a particular villain and each bearing a matching enhanced cover, a portrait of a villain with some sort of goofy limited-motion lenticular effect.

This apparently means DC will go back on two things they've said rather publicly before. First and foremost, there was that whole "holding the line at $2.99" campaign, which they've wiggled around variously in the past (chopping story pages per book from 22 to 20 pages, and publishing more over-sized books with back-up stories). Each of these books is priced at $3.99, but their page-counts remain 32 pages (20 pages of story, 10 pages of ads, 2 pages of advertorial "Channel 52" features, if this month's pattern holds into September). The extra dollar goes to pay for the cover technology, I guess.

The other thing is a quote Robot 6's Kevin Melrose caught DC's John Rood saying in a passive-aggressive swipe at Marvel,saying DC doesn't do decimal point issues.

Just as noteworthy, however, is the way in which DC is publishing those decimal-point issues, or at least the titles. They're not restricting themselves to one issue of each book, as popular book like Justice League and JLoA getting four issues this month, while less-popular books like Vibe and Katana are taking the month off. Heck, even books like Supergirl and Superboy are missing, while there are instead multiple issues of the higher-selling Action Comics and Superman (The new Scott Snyder/Jim Lee series Superman Unchained is absent; apparently some creative teams or book's get the month off so as to avoid participating).

It's a way for DC to publish four issues of a more popular title and avoid selling any issues of a less-popular one without actually going to the trouble of canceling it, and it has the effect of rack-crowding to an almost unprecedented degree (there's ten books with the words "Justice League" in them alone, and I'm afraid to even count up the Batman books, which, as with the Superman family, published more issues under the more popular titles like Batman, while not publishing issues of, say, Nightwing or Batgirl.

I'm sure it will give DC a huge market share, something they always protest they're not interested in, given that they are selling more books with more popular titles for more money that month, but I can't imagine it will work as well as they want, however.

For example, look at the four issues of Justice League. Of them, only one of them is co-written by Geoff Johns (#23.4: Secret Society), while another is quite explicitly the final issue of the canceled Dial H series under a different name ("In a special VILLAINS MONTH coda to the fan-favorite DIAL H series," says the solicit for #23.3: Dial E), another is written by Greg Pak and is just as likely tied to the Greg Pak-written Superman/Batman as to Justice League (#23.1: Darkseid) and the other is a Lobo one-shot.

If you look closely at creators—well, writers, anyway—you can see what villains month book replaces what regular book—Batgirl writer Gail Simone is writing Batman: The Dark Knight #23.1: The Ventriloquist, starring a villain she's been using in Batgirl, for example—and while that's not that hard for readers to puzzle out, I bet it's gonna suck to be ordering these things as a retailer (Like, obviously you can order the Johns issue of Justice League as if it were a regular issue of Justice League, plus whatever you think the promotion itself will add, and the "Dial E" issue as if it were an issue of Dial H plus whatever you think the promotion will add, but then you have to factor in for whether readers will be fooled into wanting it because of the "Justice League" in the title or...Urrgh. This looks like one of those month's where I look at the solicitations and all I can think is "Those poor bastards" when I think of our friends in the comics retailing business).

DCWKA already broke down the creative teams by gender, and noted that while there are four times as many women writing for The New 52 than in September of 2011 (when there was only one), now there's one fewer artist—there are no female artists involved. Of greater interest to me (increasingly I think the Big Two need women more than the women need the Big Two; I can't imagine Prudence Shen, Faith Erin Hicks and Lucy Knisley aren't getting much more money and recognition for their First Second-published OGNs Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong and Relish than they'd get and make were they working on Earth-2 or Hawkman or whatever) is how few new creators of any kind are involved: Once more, it looks like a bunch of the same old creators, with new blood consisting of the likes of old hands without monthly assignments, like Tom DeFalco, John Ostrander, Dan Jurgens, Frank Tieri and, most surprisingly, Graham Nolan.

(I am glad to see some talented name creators getting some no doubt lucrative gigs in The New 52 though, like Francis Portella, Tim Seely, Jeremy Haun and Aaron Kuder.)

At any rate, let's take a closer look at a few of the publisher's offerings of special note this month. As always, for the full solicits, you can head on over to Comic Book Resources...

ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #5
Written by NATHAN EDMONDSON and KYLE KILLEN
Art by YILDIRAY CINAR and PIA
Cover by YILDIRAY CINAR
On sale SEPTEMBER 25 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T • DIGITAL FIRST
When an alien baby crashes on Earth, Superman must protect the screaming infant from her pursuers both human and extraterrestrial! Plus: a Lex Luthor tale like you’ve never seen before, written by Kyle Killen, creator of Awake, and drawn by Y: THE LAST MAN’s Pia Guerra!

Weird. I was just wondering whatever happened to Guerra after reading this must-read (well, should-read) piece on The Beat (which quotes me, and misplaces my J). She's a great artist, and one whose work I'd like to see on a regular basis again somewhere.

Ha ha ha! Remember, Black Manta is a very serious character now! You can tell because of all the blood swirling around him. That's from one of the two issues of Aquaman being published in September (please note: Aquaman is one of DC's titles that is so successful that it's not only being published during a month when only the most successful books are being published under their own title, it's being published twice! Both issues are being co-written by the very, very busy Johns (he's writing one comic in September, but co-writing four more); the other issue features Ocean Master.


BATMAN #23.4: BANE
Written by PETER J. TOMASI
Art by GRAHAM NOLAN
3-D motion cover by GUILLEM MARCH
On sale SEPTEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Batman is gone, and the inmates of Arkham Asylum are running wild in the streets! Bane is in Gotham City with one goal…to take it over no matter who he has to break!


BATMAN AND ROBIN #23.1: TWO-FACE
Written by PETER J. TOMASI
Art by GUILLEM MARCH
3-D motion cover by CHRIS BURNHAM
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Two-Face is approached to join the Secret Society! Which side will his coin land on?

So if I were to buy any of these issues—and at $4 for 20-pages, I won't, but maybe there are actually 32 story pages in these things—these would be the two I'd buy. I think of the villains' month special issues, these are the ones where I like the work of the writer, love the work of the artists and have some interest in the characters.

BATMAN BLACK AND WHITE #1
Written by CHIP KIDD, NEAL ADAMS, JOE QUINONES, MARIS WICKS, JOHN ARCUDI and HOWARD MACKIE
Art by MICHAEL CHO, NEAL ADAMS, JOE QUINONES, SEAN MURPHY and CHRIS SAMNEE
...
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 48 pg, 1 of 6, B&W, $4.99 US • RATED T
...
The legendary, Eisner Award-winning series BATMAN BLACK AND WHITE returns in a brand-new six-issue miniseries featuring tales of The Dark Knight by some of comics’ greatest writers and artists! This first issue kicks off with stories by Chip Kidd and Michael Cho, Neal Adams, Joe Quinones and Maris Wicks, John Arcudi and Sean Murphy, and Howard Mackie and Chris Samnee!

Probably the biggest, most exciting release of the month, a new version of DC's 1996 miniseries that featured black-and-white Legends of the Dark Knight style stories from some of the best comics creators in the world (and which later lead to back-up strips in Batman: Gotham Knights). This one doesn't sound quite as awesome—that original series had a cover by Alex Toth and a contribution from Katsuhiro Otomo, for example) but Chip Kidd and Neal Adams are pretty big names, and I like the work of just about everyone mentioned there. I'm especially eager to see what Samnee and Quinones can do with Batman.

BATMAN: ODYSSEY TP
Written by NEAL ADAMS
Art by NEAL ADAMS and others
Cover by NEAL ADAMS
On sale OCTOBER 2 • 368 pg, FC, $19.99 US
Legendary Batman artist and comics pioneer Neal Adams returns to Gotham City with an electrifying new story that pits The Dark Knight against villains and allies old and new! Now, all thirteen issues of BATMAN: ODYSSEY are collected in trade paperback!

Wow, $20 for 368-pages seems like a pretty good value, doesn't it? And I really like that they decided to put an image of Batman riding a pterodactyl on the cover, just to make it clear how insane the contents of the book actually are.

DEADSHOT: BEGINNINGS TP
Written by JOHN OSTRANDER, KIM YALE, STEVE ENGLEHART, DOUG MOENCH, GERRY CONWAY and PAUL LEVITZ
Art by LUKE McDONNELL, MARSHALL ROGERS, TERRY AUSTIN, DON NEWTON and others
Cover by LUKE McDONNELL
On sale OCTOBER 30 • 160 pg, FC, $14.99 US
In these bullet-ridden 1980s tales, Deadshot goes on a solo mission to kill a crime boss known as El Jefe, only to learn that the men who sent him on this mission have ulterior motives. Collects DEADSHOT #1-4, BATMAN #369 and DETECTIVE COMICS #474.

Sure, I'll take one of these.

That bit about Suicide Squad on the cover only reminds me that we're way past due for the next volume of the Ostrander-written Suicide Squad to come out in collection.

Woah, woah, woah, what's this?! In The New 52, the green in Mirror Master's costume has been replaced by mirror-color...? That's...that's actually kinda cool. I don't think mirror and orange are the greatest color combination in the world, but it's not any worse than orange and green.

Say, is this the first New 52 design I prefer to the original...? I think it just might be. Usually they're much, much worse (see Captain Cold and Heatwave on the same image, for example), but that Mirror Master may be an honest to-to-God improvement. Huh.

That's regular Flash artist Francis Manapul's cover to The Flash #23.3: The Rogues, by the way. There are three issues of The Flash in September, each of 'em by either Brian Buccellato, Manapul or Buccellato and Manapul, so unlike, say, the various Justice League books, it looks like all of these "count" as being issues of the Flash series.

Kinda sucks to be a Flash reader then, as your Flash comics line item for the month will have jumped from $3 to $12...

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #23.1: THE CREEPER
Written by ANN NOCENTI
Art by CHRISCROSS
3-D motion cover by MIKEL JANIN
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Freed from his mystical prison, The Creeper walks a path littered with gore and misery—and there may be no way to stop him! Many will be caught in his web, including the Justice League of America’s Katana and Jack Ryder, The Creeper’s unwitting human host. Where will The Creeper strike next?

Despite the title and the Dark Justice Leaguers on the cover, I have to assume this is actually the stealth September issue of Katana, given that it's written by Katana writer Ann Nocenti and mentions Katana in the solicit copy.

That is one...not very interesting looking version of The Creepr, and "littered with gore and misery" sure doesn't make it sound like one that will be very interesting to read about, does it?

FOREVER EVIL #1
Written by GEOFF JOHNS
Art and cover by DAVID FINCH and RICHARD FRIEND
1:25 Villain A cover by TBD
1:25 Villain B cover by TBD
1:25 Villain C cover by TBD
3-D motion variant cover by IVAN REIS and JOE PRADO
1:200 B&W variant cover by IVAN REIS and JOE PRADO
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 48 pg, 1 of 7, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Combo pack edition: $4.99 US
Retailers: This issue will ship with seven covers. Please see the order form for more information.
The first universe-wide event of The New 52 begins as FOREVER EVIL launches! The Justice League is DEAD! And the villains shall INHERIT the Earth! An epic tale of the world’s greatest super-villains starts here!

Nothing reminds me that making comic books at this particular corporate level is little different than making sprockets or widgets than seeing that many TBDs for variant covers announced. Someone decided that this book will need seven different covers, but they hadn't yet decided what seven artists should draw them.

Sigh...

I suppose this is on the artist who drew that particular cover more than some kind of statement on the state of the DCU at the moment (the artist being Finch, I assume, although it doesn't look all that Finchy), but all but ten of those villains are Batman villains.

Well, I hope this is a good comic book series, and easy to follow for someone not reading much of the New 52 on a monthly basis, as it's most likely the only comic book-comic I'll buy this month, given the 33% price increase in the entire line (and even then I'm not sure; while I love Johns' writing of DC super-comics, I'm not a fan of Finch's artwork at all).


JUSTICE LEAGUE #23.2: LOBO
Written by MARGUERITE BENNETT
Art by BEN OLIVER
3-D motion cover by AARON KUDER
On sale SEPTEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Deep in the dark corridors of space lives a black-hearted being of unimaginable power. He’s witnessed horrors beyond description and committed unparalleled evils. In all of history, no being has ever been capable of as much chaos and terror as this lone individual. This is the story of the man called Lobo. He’s coming. And he’s bringing all of hell with him.

I thought Lobo already made his New 52 debut in Stormwatch...?

Anyway, I thought this noteworthy for the darkness of its tone—Lobo sounds far, far from his dark humor heyday—and the absence of Lobo creator and DC workhorse Keith Giffen, who is MIA from the villain specials (His only September credits are on a pair of Masters of the Universe books).

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #7.1: DEADSHOT
Written by MATT KINDT
Art by PASQUAL FERRY
3-D motion cover by TONY S. DANIEL and MATT BANNING
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Is it a death wish that makes Floyd Lawton put on the mask of Deadshot? Or is something more sinister pulling at Floyd when he becomes a relentless assassin who feels nothing for his victims? Discover the truth behind Deadshot’s secret history in this issue!

Reading Red Handed: The Fine Art of Strange Crimes and Super Spy, I think a Matt Kindt Deadshot comic would be pretty much the best thing ever. Seeing that cover, and reading that solicit, I think otherwise.

If only Kindt drew his own scripts for DC...

SUPERMAN #23.1: BIZARRO
Written by SHOLLY FISCH
Art by JEFF JOHNSON and ANDY SMITH
3-D motion cover by AARON KUDER
On sale SEPTEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Lex Luthors’ sinister plan to manipulate Superman’s genetic material to create a mindless soldier under his control results in the monster known as Bizarro: opposite of Superman in every way, with no compassion, no remorse and no mercy!

Woof, I do not care for that Bizarro re-design, which mixes elements of both of Superman's bad New 52 costumes, and, somewhat perplexingly, have the exact same shades of blue and red that Superman's costumes, instead of being a few shades off, as per Bizarro tradition.

Normally I'd be really excited about a Bizarro one-shot, especially one written by Sholly Fisch, but man, that solicitation copy sounds no fun at all, and it looks like we're back to the post-Crisis origin for Bizarro as a botched clone, rather than an entity from Bizarro World, as the pre-New 52 version gradually evolved back into.

That's not a bad Parasite design—I'm not crazy about the physique, but the face is cool. That's from Superman #23.4, written and drawn by Aaron Kuder. Oddly enough, I literally just heard of Kuder the other day, when I read a few issues of Avenging Spider-Man he illustrated. He is a good artist.

Not entirely sure what's going on in this Batman/Superman cover—it's drawn by Tony Daniel, so no real surprise—but it sure looks like Doomsday is totally missing Superman there, isn't it?

I do kinda dig the horns, though.


WONDER WOMAN #23.2: FIRST BORN
Written by BRIAN AZZARELLO
Art by ACO
3-D motion cover by VICTOR IBANEZ
On sale SEPTEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
The First Born son of Zeus—Wonder Woman’s oldest brother—has returned to claim the throne of Olympus! But it’s been a long and bloody road to reach his destiny…and you won’t believe the horror when you meet the rest of Wonder Woman’s extended “family”!

There are two issues of Wonder Woman this month, but this seems to be the one that "counts," as its written by regular Wonder Woman writer Brian Azzarello and features the villain of his latest story arc. The other issue features The Cheetah, who appeared in Justice League, not Wonder Woman, in the The New 52. That one's written by John Ostrander.

Review: Wolverine: Wolverine Goes To Hell

Despite how exactly the title of this collection describes the premise of the story within, it seemed to be missing rather large chunks of likely valuable information: I felt like I walked in on a movie already in progress, and or that pages were removed from the book almost at random.

Naturally, there were no volume numbers on the spine to indicate when this book should be read in relation to any other Wolverine comics so that it might make more sense, despite the fact that it stars Wolverine and is written by Jason Aaron who, at the time this originally came out, had been writing Wolverine for years (The fine print says these comics came from Wolverine #1-#5 though, so I guess this is technically the start of a new series, or just the renumbering and retitling of Aaron's ongoing Wolverine: Weapon X title).

Part of that may have to do with the way Aaron chose to tell the story, beginning with a scene from a special (Wolverine: Road to Hell) in which a naked Wolverine is falling down to hell like Alice falling to Wonderland, then flashing back to a point before that and the action on Earth, never dramatizing why or how exactly Wolverine's soul was sent to hell or why his possessed-by-demons body is still on earth, except in explanations delivered later in the game.

And part of it may have to do with the way I'm reading this story—in collected form—rather than the way it was originally published in serial form. Apparently, the original issues it appeared in contained back-up stories, so they would lead with a chapter of "Wolverine Goes To Hell" by Aaron and pencil artist Renato Guedes, and then there would be a shorter chapter of a back-up story entitled "Scorched Earth" by Aaron and a variety of quirkier, more stylized artists (Jason Latour, Steven Sanders, Michael Gaydos, Jamie McKelvie, etc) following Wolvie's possessed body on Earth. The two occur simultaneously, and the former refers at points to the latter, although someone reading the collection won't understand the references until the whole book is read. (One unfortunate side-effect of this collection strategy is that, unfortunately, if you're not aware of the back-up material, "Goes To Hell" seems to end quite suddenly, with a good 30 story pages left in the collection (which also includes a variant cover gallery, some design sketches and an 11-page "All-New Wolverine Saga" feature, in which Wolverine recaps his adventures in prose, while illustrations pulled from the comics those adventures occurred in liberally stud the paragraphs.

At any rate, in this story entitled "Wolverine Goes to Hell," Wolverine goes to hell; we eventually learn that he gets there via a trap involving a cabal of civilians who seem to really, really hate hm, a black magic ritual of some kind, and Mystique masquerading as his girlfriend Melita serving as bait.

While Wolvie's in hell, someone that speaks in yellow speech bubbles and refers to itself in the plural is in control of his body; he/she/it dress him up funny, change clothes a lot, and go about attacking and killing his friends and loved ones (In addition to Wolverine claws, the soul-less, possessed Wolvie body has Dark Side of the Force powers like air-choking and the ability to, like, summon insects and stuff like that).

Most of the loved one hunting occurs in the back-ups, but he also fights some X-Men (mostly Colossus) and two Ghost Riders and The Son of Satan, who Mystique has gathered together, apparently regretting her role in all this.

Wolverine's time in hell is...well, it's kinda weird. The devil isn't really ever referred to as the devil or Satan or Lucifer, and he doesn't look like any Marvel devils like Mephisto or Satannish. Rather, he's a kind of generic looking horror movie demon, with horns the size of Legend's Tim Curry, a mouth full of fangs and tusks, and purple skin, plus the traditional cloven hooves, batwings and a tail.

He's intent on "breaking" wolverine, who is intent on not being broken, and the punishment the devil has for Wolverine consists mainly of having Wolverine fight a bunch of dudes. He does so without the benefit of his healing factor (but he can't die, so he still kinda sorta has a healing factor, right?) or his adamantium, but isn't that also basically Wolverine's every waking day and, I imagine, his purgatory and his heaven? Fighting a bunch of ninjas, thugs and evil mutants, including one's he's killed before?

The devil has the most luck torturing Wolvie by having his old love Mariko flail him until he screams, which takes 12 blows depicted in 15 grueling panels.

I don't think it's much of a spoiler to reveal that Wolverine eventually escapes hell, thanks to some unlikely assistance from two unexpected allies in hell and a plan that seems so familiar I know I've seen it before, but I'll be damned if I can remember which movie or comic I've seen it in know, and an exorcism performed by Mystique and her leather boys up on earth.

Of all of the Wolverine material of Aaron's I've read, this was by far the worst. Not only is it not funny—there aren't many, or any, really, opportunities for humor—even dark humor—in the scenarios being set up here, but the big, huge, epic mythological scale and setting of the story seems brief, small and unimaginative. The hell Aaron gives us here is a pretty generic one, and so far removed from the other visions of hell other Marvel comics have shown us over the decades that it seems a poor replacement for them.

Check this out:

A full page of Aaron conjuring highly imaginative imagery of a horrible hellscape and its denizens, but we don't get to see any of it drawn, nor did we see Wolverine see any of these things he's now narrating that he saw. The actual hell in the comic book is just one big room full of standard, generic demons and devils.

It's disappointing, and that's all on Aaron: So much of his Wolverine material to date has been so great, that a merely decent story like this seems terrible by comparison.

Guedes isn't my favorite of Aaron's Wolverine collaborators—I prefer Garney—but he does a pretty find job. The demons are generic, but they're well-drawn generic, and his human characters are all rather finely detailed. I dug how he rendered Damion Hellstrom, as someone who looks like he should be hanging out with skull-faced bikers from hell, even if he's not rocking his original design (and my favorite look of his).

Melita's clothes seem to have a hard time staying on, though.

The artwork in the back-ups is mostly much more interesting, but it also comes in shorter bursts, and as much as I enjoyed, say, Latour's artwork, I don't think it would have worked quite as well in the main story.

Review: Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine

This fairly nutty 2010 six-issue miniseries came out during the rather brief period during which Marvel seemed to be trying to establish something of an "Astonishing" line of books or, at the very least, to have the adjective's appearances in titles suggest a certain level of quality.

The word has a long history at Marvel, from the 1950s Astonishing comic to the Marvel Age Tales to Astonish, but it gained a new, more prestigious meaning in 2004, when Marvel launched a new X-Men book entitled Astonishing X-Men to house the stories of the Joss Whedon/John Cassaday creative team (The title was itself taken from the mid-90's, when one of the "Age of Apocalypse" X-teams used the moniker).

After Whedon, Astonishing X-Men became first a showcase title for continuity-lite stories by Warren Ellis and various A-List artists, but has since become just another X-Men ongoing, and had rather long ago relinquished its flagship status (I'm no X-expert, but Uncanny and All-New seem to be the X-Men A-titles at the moment, yes...?).

Nevertheless, in 2010, Marvel attached the adjective to this Jason Aaron-written, Adam Kubert-drawn miniseries teaming their two most popular characters (and, not long after, launched Rob Rodi and Mike Choi Astonishing Thor five-part miniseries, before seemingly retiring the adjective for use anywhere outside of one of the half-dozen X-team books).

Aaron's plot for his Spider-Man & Wolverine story is a tough one to describe without spoiling much of anything, as it features Aaron at his most excessive, with a Morrisonian technique of throwing big, huge, imaginative ideas at the reader and barely developing them before moving on. It also features Aaron working in what I've heard some refer to as a Silver Age-like method, where insane comic book things happen, often seemingly at random, and the characters, who are written as their modern-age "selves" rather than 1960s pastiches, essentially play straight-men to the plot.

The plot here is, in one way, a bunch of crazy, random things happening, so it' shard to discuss without simply pointing at scenes and sequences and saying, "And then this awesome thing happened! And then this awesome thing happened!"

Suffice it to say that Spider-Man and Wolverine, two characters who don't generally share a lot in common within the Marvel Universe save for their recent time on multiple Avengers line-ups together (a fact dictated by what they do share in the real world: Popularity), find themselves being literally knocked around time together, landing in the prehistoric past, one another's adolescent years and a post-apocalyptic future.

There's a scene set in the future where Doctor Doom has transformed himself into Doom, The Living Planet and is set to devour earth until Wolverine shoots him with a Phoenix Gun, which, like it sounds, is a gun that shoots the Phoenix Force in bullet-form (Wolvie approaching the planet packing that particular heat is revealed in a three-page fold-out splash).

And as big and crazy and cosmic as that sounds, it's only issue #2, not a climactic moment.

The villain of the piece is a drug-dealer named Czar who has gotten his hands on "time diamonds," with which he has studded his teeth and encrusted a baseball bat he calls his "timestick" (when he whacks Wolverine with it, for example, he literally knocks him into a different time period). He is aided and assisted by Big Murder, a dwarf. The pair are black dudes, and while Aaron depicts what, exactly, they use their fantastic powers for in his typically clever, witty, funny way, the portrayals veer so close to stereotype and parody (Big M, for example, functions as a sort of hip hop hypeman to Czar, and wears Flava Flav like accessories).

When a character refers to Czar as a "buck," it sure made me flinch—even if the context was "young buck" and the person saying it was an old man version of Czar himself from the future.

They are actually working at the behest of another villain, a familiar face that certainly makes sense within this context (and explains why Spider-Man and Wolvie are together in this), but he's also such a lazy, predictable stand-in for comic book writers that Aaron might as well have written himself into the story as the Big Bad; that, at least, would have been a more original twist.

It's not Logan's big brother Dog, who appears in this and, apparently, in issues of Wolverine and The X-Men that are the stands now, making this book a bit more relevant to readers of the ongoing X-Men saga, I suppose. Nor is it The Orb, one of my favorite of Marvel's oddball villains (I still have a very distinct memory of picking up a copy of Ghost Rider as a child from a drugstore rack and being fairly bewildered by the site of a guy on a motorcycle with a giant eyball for a head), although he's in this too.

It's a hell of a showcase for Kubert (inked here by first Mark Morales and Dexter Vines, and then by Mark Roslan), and the ideal sort of project for an artist of his talent and particular relationship with deadlines—a continuity-lite miniseries in which no other books depend on the narrative's timely completion, full of wildly different settings, characters, opportunities for designs and style-switching (In one section, for example, Wolverine finds himself in Spidey's teen years, during the brief period between the spider bite and the Uncle murder that he tried being a professional wrestler, while Spidey finds himself in Wolvie's teen years, which Kubert renders in the style of Origin).

It's not a perfect comic, and it's not all that astonishing a comic either, but a few uncomfortable bits aside, it easily was one of the most fun superhero comics I've read in a while (Probably since the last Jason Aaron-written Wolverine story I read, actually, and Aaron writes Spidey just as well as he does Wolvie).

But I can see while they called it Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine; Most Fun Spider-Man & Wolverine just doesn't sound quite as marketable.

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

Writer Matt Fraction had the Fantastic Four travel back in time "2.66 million years ago" in in the first issue of his rebooted Marvel NOW! Fantastic Four, where they were attacked by a dinosaur...despite the fact that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago (and it wasn't just a typo, as it was repeated again the very next issue).

In the opening issue of this series, our heroes are marooned in the prehistoric past, where multiple species of homindis (The homosapien-looking "Small Folk," and the more bestial, ape-like "Kill Folk") live side by side with dinosaurs, some of which they've managed to domesticate. We can probably date this pretty closely to 65 million years, as Peter Parker sees the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs as it comes speeding out of the night sky.

So that's two Marvel comics I've read lately that has humans and dinosaurs co-existing; is the modern Marvel bullpen full of creationists, or is it just a function of the Earth-616 having a very different natural history than us, what with the Savage Land and that meteor that killed the dinosaurs off being encrusted with time diamonds...?

Meanwhile, at Good Comics For Kids...

This week I reviewed Sabrina The Teenage Witch: The Magic Within Vol. 1, the first digest-sized black-and-white collection of Tania del Rio's reinvention of Archie's witch as a manga style heroine, for Good Comics For Kids.

I liked it an awful lot, but by far my favorite story was the final one in the collection, "Model Behavior," in which Sabrina's one-time love interest, Japanese pretty-boy warlock Shinji, is discovered and becomes a model...right about the time that Josie and The Pussycats are coming to town.

If you ever wondered what Josie and The Pussycats might look like manga style and/or as drawn by Del Rio, this comic answers that question (see above). Alan, Alexander and Alexandra are all absent, denying readers a Salem and Sebastian meeting.

The title page shows the cats and Shinji chibi style, while the giant heads of Sabrina (right) and her best friend (and Shinji's girlfriend) Llandra look on:

And here's a montage from Shinji and the Pussycats' photo session:

Please note that while Josie is hanging on Shinji in the first image, it's just a shoot, and she has no romantic interest in Shinji. Melody, on the other hand, does, and even asks him out on a date, but he declines, much to the relief of Sabrina and Llandra, who were jealously spying on Shinji the whole time.

If you want to see Del Rio's version of The Pussycats in color, though, you'll have to look at the cover of Sabrina #67, from which the story is taken (but which doesn't actually appear in the collection):

Speaking of color, the other thing that I wrote for a place on the Internet that is not Every Day Is Like Wednesday? A short-ish piece on the new The Smurfs Anthology Vol. 1, Papercutz's bigger hardcover collection of Peyo's Smurfs material seemingly geared toward adults, for Robot 6.

It's a nicely designed package of some great comics, presented in a very eyeball-friendly format, but is noteworthy for keeping the Purple Smurfs purple instead of turning them back to black.

The Black Smurfs had as much to do with black people as the Black Lanterns in Blackest Night had to with black people, so keeping 'em kid-friendly purple in this volume seems an odd choice to me, but whatever; some Peyo always trumps no Peyo.

This week's ads of note

What? A reality show?! No Mr. The Rock! Don't do a reality show! You're better than that!

Why are you doing this? Surely there are sequels to Journey 2 The Mysterious Island and G.I. Joe: Retalliation and a Fast and the Furious 7 to make, right? Or hey, I have a script for a comic book miniseries about a dinosaur-fighting barbarian that could be retooled into a script for a The Rock vehicle pretty easily...! Just don't do reality television! Surely it hasn't come to this already, has it...?

I'm pretty curious about this title for three reasons.

1.) Greg Pak is a writer who has done a lot of work for Marvel Comics, making his debut at DC Comics (as far as I know) at a time when DC Comics seems to be somewhere between dismissive and monstrously hostile towards its creative talent, perhaps especially its writers (based on what at least a half-dozen or so writers have said about their time there in the last year or so, and based on what one can see from the vantage point of not being within the company, but watching its moves from outside.

2.) The series is being pitched as a Greg Pak-written, Jae Lee-drawn one, but it's hard to imagine Lee staying on a monthly schedule for too long. The previous iteration of this series changed artists every story arc, and, after the first few arcs, even the writer changed every arc.

3.) It should be interesting to see how Pak handles New 52 continuity. Even the scant info given in this ad seems suspect, based on the first arc of Justice League, in which Batman and Superman meet an team-up for the first time.

The individual continuity of those two characters seem pretty messed-up and out-of-synch, so a series devoted to their relationship seems to be handicapping itself right at the conceptual level.

Here's a bad scan of the two-page ad they're running for the upcoming tertiary Superman title, the bafflingly entitled Superman Unchained by Scott Snyder and Jim Lee.

I found it interesting that they devoted only two pages to hyping this new series, versus the six pages devoted to hyping the new Action Comics creative team of writer Andy Diggle and artist Tony Daniel, which ended up only lasting a single issue.

I wonder if it's simply a matter of a Snyder and Lee collaboration selling itself in a way that a Diggle and Daiel one doesn't, or if their ad department got skittish with the results of that last effort to sell Superman comics, I figured if they only used two pages to advertise this one, it'd last at least three issue...

Comics shop comics: May 29-June 5

Adventures of Superman #1 (DC Comics) This much-discussed new anthology series seems to be a late-to-the-party companion book to Legends of the Dark Knight (which is already up to issue #9. Like LDK, it's a $4, 30-page print collection of digital-first short stories featuring the publisher's biggest heroes in continuity-lite standalone stories (As to the reason it was so discussed, that was, of course, due to the announced inclusion of an Orson Scott Card-written story in the first issue; a lot of readers and retailers reacted quite negatively to the idea of supporting a book written by such an outspoken critic of gay people and gay rights, perhaps especially when it came to his writing a character known for standing up for Truth, Justice and the American Way).

This first issue is front-loaded with star power, in much the same way the earlier issues of LDK were.

The first story is written by Jeff Parker, best known for his fun, funny and occasionally heartfelt Marvel scripts (Most recently on Thunderbolts, Dark Avengers, Hulk and Red She-Hulk), and is drawn by Chris Samnee, also best known for his excellent work for Marvel (Daredevil, Thor: The Mighty Avenger). There's not a whole heck of a lot to this story, really: Superman encounters a potentially deadly problem, a character with such devastating power that even he is threatened, and yet our hero tries to help the guy causing all the problem, realizing he's as much of a victim as anyone. Both creators "get" Superman and do a nice job with him; I'd certainly like to see more of their work on the character, as a team or separately, although I can't imagine why either creator would want to work at DC at this particular point in time as the environment there seems...less than ideal.

The second is both written and drawn by Jeff Lemire, and is kind of a generic one, in that I'm fairly certain I've read a half-dozen variations on the same story before, although it's given a bit of a twist at the end, and it's a kick to see Lemire's highly quirky style applied to a straight take on a DC superhero (I don't think I've seen Superman look that quirky since Teddy Kristiansen drew him for Steven T. Seagle's It's a Bird), and the writer Lemire devises a nice excuse for the artist Lemire to get to draw a pretty large swathe of Superman's rouge's gallery.

The final story is written by Justin ordan and drawn by Riley Rossmo, with Rossmo working a style that seems to blend those of Samnee and Lemire—that is, it's a straight superhero style as filtered through something a bit more idiosyncratic and illustrative. It too feels awfully familiar, being one more story in which Superman learns to solve a conflict with Bizarro by aping Bizarro's backwards talk.

All three are written and drawn so that it doesn't much matter where or when they fit into any particular continuity. Based on the costuming, this is not The New 52 Superman (even on the blurry-looking Brian Hitch cover, he's wearing his spandex and shorts), but that's pretty much all there is to narrow it down.

I suppose whether or not this will remain the case for long will depend on how Superman Unchained turns out, but, as of right this very second, this seems to be the Superman comic on the stands best-suited to handing to a Superman-curious reader.

Classic Popeye #10 (IDW) Another reprint of super old-school Bud Sagendorf Popeye comics, this batch from 1950. Popeye and his gang solve a sleeping plague in king Blozo's nation of Spinachova, Popeye tries to win a prize fight without throwing a punch, a would-be pirate tries to best Popeye in a duel and Wimpy pursues Swee'pea in order to mooch a bite of his apple. Good clean fun for the whole family, full of punching and mispronunciation.


Empowered: Animal Style (Dark Horse Comics) This is one of those occasional comic book-comics that Adam Warren puts out with collaborators to keep his Empowered, one of the best superhero comics of the decade, present in the minds of readers (and, I imagine, retailers) between volumes, as he's been producing the main series as a series of original graphic novels.

In this one, he's working with artist John Staton, who draws the majority of the artwork for the issue in a style that rather closely apes the designs of Warren (which is here colored by Guru EFX), and drawing flashback pages in the same black-and-white style that the regular series appears in.

Like all of Warren's work, but perhaps especially these shorter comics, it's smart, funny and very, very dense, reading as if it were many pages longer than it actually is. Emp has taken what's supposed to be the cake job of nightwatchman-ing an "Alternate Timeline Superhero Auto Show", which no one ever attempts to rob, because it is physically—as in "pertaining to the laws of physics"—impossible to take anything from the show.

That doesn't stop the Animal Style gang though, a group of villains in animal-shaped and animal-powered mecha suits, from trying, and it's up to Emp to stop them, falling back on the advice of her own college-aged self (seen speechifying in the Warren-drawn black-and-white sections) on a better way for super-people to fight each other with cars rather than the traditional use of them as projectiles.

As is the case on almost any Wednesday that Warren has a new comic out, this was the smartest, funniest and best-looking book I read today.


Green Lantern #21 (DC) I bought this one on accident. I fully intended to drop Green Lantern after Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke left the title (with the previous issue), but I don't go to the shop every week anymore, and by the time I did make it in, there was already an issue by the new creative team in my pull-file, and I didn't wanna stick my shop with it, so, long story long, I ended up trying the first issue of poor Robert Venditti's run on GL (I think pencil artist Billy Tan and inker Richard Friend have an uphill climb ahead of them as well, following a long, productive run by the Mahnke-lead art team, but at least Mahnke was one of many artists to define the look of the franchise; Venditti's following a guy who not only turned the title into a popular one, but turned it into a franchise, and DC's second-most-popular at that).

Having read this, I wonder if it wouldn't have been better if they retired Hal Jordan from the lead of this particular title for awhile, letting Johns write him in Justice League and giving GL to Simon Baz or John Stewart for a while, just so Venditti (or whoever followed Johns) wasn't thrust into the position of continuing to do what Geoff Johns did.

There were a few signs that Venditti would at least be taking a new old direction with the book, when Hal arrives on Earth and meets briefly with Carol Ferris, and she complains about him being in space all the time, never working at his actual job or even having his own apartment yet. But the discussion is interrupted by a call back to space.

Venditti is apparently doubling-down on the whole cosmic army premise, as the new Guardians decide to spend some time traveling the universe and learning about it, and they appoint Hal Jordan boss of the Corps in their absence. Then Oa is immediately attacked by Larfleeze and his "Orange Lanter" Corps. So! Still set primarily in space, still all cosmic-y, still one-colored Corps fighting another (Kyle Rayner, who is still a White Lantern for whatever reason, and John Stewart, briefly appear).

The script is structured rather strangely, with the big moment coming on a two-page splash that serves as the title page, and the cliffhanger splash page ending simply repeating a point made on the first page of the comic. That is, the big suspenseful surprise comes at the beginning rather than the end, and after that beginning the story backtracks to work its way up to a previously-revealed story point.

The artwork by Tan and Friend is serviceable. I'm not a fan of Tan's work at all, and nothing in this issue made me any more of a fan, but it's not necessarily bad or weak art. It certainly doesn't pop like Mahnke's though, and I have a feeling this book is going to need all the help it can to slow what's sure to be a drastic drop down the sales charts.


Legends of the Dark Knight #9 (DC) This issue has two stories, each of which features Batman vs. one of his major rogues, and each of which are pretty perfectly-scripted stories for this sort of continuity-lite, standalone story anthology.

The first is by Christos Gage and Jheremy Raapack, and features Batman battling one of my favorite characters, The Scarecrow. Gage comes up with a neat little story within a story within a story conflict, as Bruce Wayne wakes up to find himself badly damaged in body and mind, the result of the incredible strain his war on crime has had on his mind and body ("You've taken more punches than Muhammad Ali," Commissioner Gordon tells him, "Been doesed with more drugs than Timothy Leary. What's more likely? That you took all that punishment and can still perform at the level of an Olympic athlete...or that your mind owould rather escape into fantasy than face what you've done to yourself?")

Well, we know the answer of what's really going on—even as we know which is actually more likely in the real world—but it takes Batman much of the story to figure it out. Intereting to see the lengths that Gage and Raapack go to keep their story out of a particular continuity; Batman's wearing a pre-New 52 costume and Gordon has white hair instead of red, and while there's talk of a deceased Robin, it's never revealed which Robin—when his grave is shown, a heavy fog obscures the name on the monument.

I like what Raapack's done with the Scarecrow, giving us a version that incorporates elements from several different versions, and even throws in some new, original elements (dig the little Batman voodoo doll hanging from his scythe):

As an aficionado of Scarecrow designs, I do like Raapack's quite a bit.

The story ends with the quote about the dude who didn't know if he was a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly that dreamt he was a man, which I really think Gage should have altered, replacing the word "butterfly" with "bat."

The other story is by Ray Fawkes and Stephane Roux and is a rather typical but eloquent exploration of the Batman and Catwoman frenemies relationship, with maybe a little more emphasis on "enemies" than more recent explorations. Catwoman is breaking into a mansion highly defended by various lethal, high-tech traps, and Batman is on her trail; they evade the various traps using a bunch of different high-tech gadgets and come into conflict with one another, even though their interests intersect in wanting to see an evil person suffer.


X-Men #1 (Marvel Entertainment) I'm actually going to review this at a bit more length elsewhere in the near future, but for now suffice it to say that it was a bit disappointing to find that the new X-Men book that has been defined, marketed and discussed primarily by and for its all-female character line-up (the creators, of course, are men) kicks off with a story arc in which our heroes...take care of a baby...?

I'm not sure how new X-Men books usually start off (I generally try to avoid them, myself), but there didn't seem to be anything along the lines of a team or sub-team forming; the characters on the cover just so happened to be the characters who were on-panel the most in the book (Logan and Beast are mentioned, for example, and the book is set in and around Wolverine's school). Are new X-Men teams just imaginary constructions in the minds of the writers and readers, a sort of selective cropping and editing of the massive 200-mutant X-army of characters into storylines...?

The art was great (really—top notch), but the writing left a lot to be desired. I only know who some of the characters are from press and reviews (Rachel Summers, Psylocke), one of the primary antagonists is a minor character from Grant Morrison's millennial run on the franchise and the other is named on the second-to-last page as if I should recognize her name, but I don't. So it really reads like a very well-drawn X-Men comic for X-Men fans, rather than a comic for potentials not already hip deep in the franchise's ins and outs.

It's fairly well-made, especially on the visual side of things, but it doesn't seem to be ready for the beyond-comics attention it's getting, and could thus become a real missed-opportunity for Marvel.

Another way to tell that the person DC appeared to kill off at the end of JLoA #4 isn't really dead?

In addition to the points Don MacPherson raised in his review of the book, there's this: DC didn't coordinate with any media outlets to do a story about the death of the character (one of the characters so well-known by the mainstream, beyond-comics crowd that it would rate a story if they were pretending it was real), and/or no media outlets seem to have been taking it seriously enough that there was any kind of major article about the death.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6 ...

Is it me, or does everything sound so much more dramatic in Spanish? I mean, I really enjoyed Invincible Iron Man, but I imagine El Invencible Hombre de Hierro would have been much, much more dramatic.

So as you may have noticed, the presence of new content on EDILW the last week or so has been far from daily-ish (which is, of course, my goal), and the reason why is that I've been contributing a series of articles about Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca's five-year, 60-issue run on Invincible Iron Man to Robot 6.

If that's something you're interested in reading, and for some reason you've missed it (You do know you really should read Robot 6 every day if you're interested in comics at all, right?), here are all of the entries:

*Re-reading 'Invincible Iron Man,' Part 1: What's so great about 'Invincible Iron Man'?

*Part 2: 'Five Nightmares' to 'Stark: Disassembled'

*Part 3: 'Stark Resilient' and 'My Monsters'

*Part 4: 'Unfixable' and 'Fear Itself'

*Part 5: 'Demon' to 'The Future'

You tell 'em, Uncle Scrooge!

(Another panel scanned from Fantagraphics' latest Carl Barks collection,  Walt Disney's Donald Duck: The Old Castle's Secret)

Review: Gambit Vol. 1: Once a Thief...

I didn't think the 2012-launched Gambit ongoing series had all that much in common with the critically-acclaimed Hawkeye series, at least not from afar (Aside from the obvious similarities that both are heroes better known as team-members than solo stars, and they are both a lot more comfortable wearing purple than many men are). When I recently saw the trade collections for the first volumes of each series sitting side by side in my library, however, I reconsidered: The trade dress as seen on the spine made the books look nearly identical; the words were different, of course, but the font, color, style and so forth made them look like two book in the same line (Which, I guess, they are, but there are like 70 books in the Marvel universe line of comics).

Obviously Marvel Entertainment, or at least whomever's in charge of designing the spine for their trade collections, think these two books have a lot in common, so I picked up Gambit Vol. 1: Once a Thief....

Great job, whoever designed this trade!

Another, perhaps more salient similarity between Hawkeye and Gambit was almost immediately apparent: Both books feature characters from super-heroes on their off or down time. If Hawkeye is, as its recap page states monthly, about what Hawkeye does when he's not being an Avenger, then Gambit is about what Gambit does when he's not being an X-Man. No other X-people or mutants ever even show up (save for a brief appearance by a minor mutant character whose being-a-mutant is completely incidental to his part in the story), and the X-folks are barely even mentioned in passing bits of narration.

Another similarity? This is a pretty good, certainly way-above-average superhero comic; a nice, accessible comic with a fairly strong premise and little-to-no requirement of continuity. Oh, and I was surprised to like it as much as I did as Gambit, like Hawkeye, is a character I have no real interest in, let alone affection for (Except for the fact that I found the character unbelievably hilarious on that shitty '90s cartoon. Now, almost all of the characters were hilarious, but his completely bizarre costume, weird-ass superpower—the ability to make playing cards glow pink and then blow up—and over-the-top accent made him a special stand-out).

Feeling an itch to steal something again—as the collection's title, recap page and Gambit's narration reveal, he used to be a thief before he was an X-Guy—he decides to break into the super-secret vault of one Borya Cich, a collector of superhero and supervillain accessories, weapons and sundry. Helping justify the B and E, he's also rumored to be a supervillain financial backer.

During the heist in the first issue, Gambit meets a beautiful, mysterious woman, and accidentally destroys most of Cich's collection, while simultaneously becoming infected with an alien parasite (Which looks an awful lot like an eye-less Starro).

So he and the mysterious woman team-up to discover a treasure of sorts that will get the parasite out of him.

After that adventure, Cich and his men kidnap Gambit and force him to steal for them, in revenge for his destruction of the vault. This leads to a couple of heists in Europe, involving the Queen of England, Captain Britain and MI13's Dr. Faiza Hussain and Pete Wisdom (and The Black Knight in a couple panels).

Writer James Asmus plays up the clever, charming, sexy, swashbuckling aspects of Gambit, while simultaneously playing down the superheroic side of him. He uses his powers, sure, but not as much as he uses his wits and good old fashioned jumping around. There's a great deal of emphasis on the craziness of the Marvel Universe (the starfish leads Gambit to a ancient alien astronaut temple with a gate to a Ditko-esque dimension populated by what look like the inspiration for Quetzalcoatl, for example), but Gambit seems to go the first seven issue of his series without ever putting on his costume, even the more stream-lined, less insane-ly stupid-looking one he's shown wearing on the cover. In general, he just wears tight-fitting black spandex-thieving clothes, although he wears a smart tuxedo with gloves and sunglasses to a party.

He's also naked an awful lot for a superhero. That's nice. Like, you don't see all that much beefcake in super-comics, certainly not in comparison to cheesecake, and while I'm a vegetarian, I appreciate balance. (Gambit and the mysterious lady go to a Guatemalan jungle at one point, and she wears gloves, boots, a jog bra and whatever you call those tiny shorts that look like underwear that the school girls in manga wear during gym class; it looks like a lot of skin to expose to jungle bugs, but, perhaps to make up for it, the artists do have Gambit tear most of his clothes off by the end of the arc, as if he shopped for adventure-wear at the same place Doc Savage does.

The art too downplays the Gambit At Superhero Member of Superhero Team The X-Men angle, and most of it has a highly realistic, but slightly washed-out look, like that of the bulk of the art during Ed Brubaker's tenure on the Captain America comics. But the art varies. A lot. And not even in the Hawkeye way, where when primary artist David Aja isn't drawing Fraction's scripts, they get extremely high-quality guest artists to draw them, and there's some logic put into the employing of various artists, so a guest artist will get to draw a whole issue, rather than five pages in the middle of an Aja story or whatever.

Clay Mann was the artist that was originally solicited for the title, but he only pencils portions of the first four issues, some of which are also penciled by Leonard Kirk (and inked by Seth Mann, Jay Leisten and Kirk). Diogenes Neves seems to pencil all of issue five by himself, and parts of six and seven with Al Barrionuevo. Three inkers work on those last three issues, over-lapping one another.

Much of the art is quite strong but, then again, much of it looks like it was hastily drawn by a whole bunch of guys chosen not because their styles were at all compatible, but because they happened to be around and have the time to get this puppy drawn by deadline. Some of the pages look awful.

I don't like to tell comics publishers how to publish their comics (Actually, I don't really mind doing so all that much), but maybe—just maybe—publishing a monthly comic more often than monthly in order to sell more issues more often to the same people isn't as good an idea as publishing a monthly comic once a month, with a high-quality, consistent artist or art team.

The book is apparently canceled with September's issue #17, so they managed to pump out 16 issues in 12 months, and while I'm sure the accelerated schedule didn't help the book at all, I don't think that's the main reason it was canceled.

To be honest, I'm not sure why the market rejected this particular Marvel book. Surely it's a very minor X-book, but, at the same time, it's so minor an X-book that it's not really an X-book at all. Rather, like a Wolverine or Deadpool series, it's more of a Marvel superhero series that features a character who just so happens to be a member of the X-Men. (Although perhaps the series was only really appealing to X-Men fans, to whom it was a less urgent read, due to its distance from the core X-books...?

Perhaps it is simply that the book didn't get a "Marvel NOW!" relaunch (although I see now a "Marvel NOW!" logo is on the trade cover), like a handful of other Marvel titles (Daredevil, Hawkeye), some of which are now facing cancellation (Red She-Hulk, which mysteriously adopted Hulk's numbering rather than getting rebooted with a new #1, Journey Into Mystery). With the relaunches sucking up all the oxygen, perhaps Gambit just fell through the cracks of its target audience.

It was timing, more than anything else, that killed Gambit. That's my guess anyway.

Ah well. I'll surely check out the rest of the series in trade, although I can't say I'll personally feel its absence from the new comics racks or anything, but it's always nice to know there are some good comics out there in addition to all the bad ones, whether or not you're reading those good ones.

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

Just to give you a shape of Marvel's current X-Men line of books, here are the they're publishing in August of this year: All-New X-Men, A+X Astonishing X-Men (2 issues), Cable and X-Force (2), Deadpool (2), Deadpool Kills Deadpool, Gambit, Savage Wolverine, Uncanny Avengers, Uncanny X-Force, Uncanny X-Men (2), Wolverine, Wolverine and The X-Men (2), Wolverine Max, X-Factor (2), X-Men and X-Men Legacy.

That's a lot of X-Men comics, and, as you can see, Wolvie and Deadpool seem to be the only ones capable of carrying a monthly (or two, or four).

With the flagship titles of All-New and Uncanny X-Men (and maybe Uncanny Avengers), that's already a pretty significant number of comics for a fan who wants to follow the continuing adventures of Marvel's merry mutants to invest in. And then there are all those other books featuring particular groupings of characters, or teams within teams...if sold as part of the X-Men line, I don't think a solo series like Gambit really had much of a chance.

In retrospect, it woulda been better served if it waited until the "Marvel NOW!" relaunches and found a consistent art team and maybe tried to sell itself as the X-Men's answer to Hawkeye.

But I don't know; would a book like this benefit or suffer from association with the X-Men line in 2013...?

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This isn't/wasn't Gambit's first series, of course. He had one that launched in 1999, back when he was still wore an incredibly idiotic costume, that lasted a full 25 issues. I am confused by the trench coat over spandex look in part because they don't really go together, but also because trench coats are traditionally what super-folks wear to disguise their undisguise-able, monstrous qualities—Think Ben Grimm or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in trench coats and wide-brimmed hats. It was as if, subconsciously, Gambit knew how hideous his costume was, and was trying to hide it.

I never really understood why he had part of a catcher's uniform on, either.

But the worst part was that weird head gear. Like a cowl with a the top cut off to show off his hair, and ear holes in the sides...? It doesn't look cool, so he couldn't have worn it just for looks, and I'll be damned if I can think of a functional reason for its existence.

Anyway, that series—written by Fabian Nicieza and drawn by Steve Skroce and Rob Hunter—lasted eight issues longer than this series.

I wonder if the fact that that series lasted longer had anything to do with the quality, or if it managed to last another three-fourths of a year because it was so much closer to the big sales hey-day of the X-Men, and had a bigger audience to sell to.

Oh, and according to Comics.org, he also starred in a 2004 series by John Layman and Georges Jeanty that only lasted 12 issues, which is apparently so few issues that I didn't even note its existence among all the other X titles.

His costume was a little less hideous then than it was in the '90s, but the fact that Greg Land drew it on that cover and gave him that hair means it doesn't even really matter, does it...?

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I was talking to the librarian who orders the graphic novels for our library one day and she had this open on her lap, so I asked what she thought of it (She's a voracious reader of manga, but tries to read everything she adds to the collection).

She said it was okay, but she was thrown by the fact that Gambit didn't talk in his accent, which she was familiar with from the same shitty '90s X-Men cartoon that introduced me to the character of Gambit (and most of the X-Men, really; my only real previous exposure was their guest-appearance on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.

Gambit does more narrating than talking, and it wouldn't make sense for him to narrate in his accent—unless the premise was that he was telling us this story himself, I guess—but yeah, he just talks like a "normal" person; there's no attempts to render his accent phonetically.

Would that have helped or hurt the book...? I don't know, but after she said it, I kinda wanted to read it that way.

I suppose, at the very least, it would have made the series funnier. And, in all likelihood, would have lead to me reading Gambit's dialogue out loud as I read this trade (Which, I suppose, would have to be re-titled Gambit Vol. 1: Once a Teef....

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So here's a picture of Rogue and Gambit walking down a hallway wearing bathing suits from that X-Men cartoon, no doubt speaking to one another in outrageous accents:

He's all like, "Hoh hoh cher, Gambit likes da way dat suit fits you," and she's all like, "Pshaw GAM-bit, I oughta throw you through that there wall jus' fer lookin' at me da way you do; don't ya realize one touch an' y'all could end up in da HOS-pital," and then he's all like, "Hoh hoh mon ami, maybe Gambit tink it be worth it ta touch you just da once," and...

Say wait a minute, what am I doing wasting my time blogging about comics when I could be writing fan-fiction based on that '90s X-Men cartoon?