Come For The Hex; Stay For The Ghost – Review Of All Star Western #4

When Rob reviewed All Star Western #1 back in October, his summation that the book was neither “all star” nor “western”, beyond the fact that it includes the character of Jonah Hex, was pretty accurate, even despite the entire fifth of Jack Daniels I personally watched him put down his head shortly before he wrote that review. The man is a fucking machine, I tell you. However, what Rob may have overlooked is that All Star Western is not just about the saga of Jonah Hex as some kind of ass kicking fish out of water in an 1800’s Gotham City. The books also have been including an 8 page mini-story in each issue that fleshes out some of the other Western characters in the historical DCU. Issues #1-3 followed a neat little arc centering around El Diablo. Issue #4 begins the story of a newly created character called The Barbary Ghost. More on her later. Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti seem to be using these issues to tell not only Jonah Hex’s story, but to develop a detailed past history for the DCnU. Maybe All Star History Lesson was a less compelling title than All Star Western? Either way, in an interview with Newsarama, both Gray and Palmiotti express their desire to use All Star Western as a platform to explore the past and plant seeds that will have a bearing on DCU’s future – particularly in the Batman titles:

Jimmy Palmiotti: We are always researching and talking to the editors and other writers of the Batman books to see what’s going on and how we can interact and plant seeds in the past to make the whole picture make more sense. Currently, you’ll be seeing things in All-Star that have everything to do with what’s happening in the Batman titles right now.

Justin Gray: The good thing about it is that we’re working with the idea that Gotham existed long before Batman and it has a rich history to be developed and explored. Like Jimmy said, we’ve been working with Mike Marts and Scott on making sure there are elements from the past that tie directly into Batman’s time.

So, now that we’re four issues in, has this direction positively or negatively affected their stories?

Answers, with spoilers, after the jump!

The Final Countdown: Secret Avengers #20 Review

Unlike every other comics Web site in the world, we here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are not putting together any lists of the best and worst comics of 2011. This is partially because we only came into existence in September, partially because when we review books we try to tell you what we think in a little more depth than a star rating or an idiotic list of weekly winners and losers, and partially because before we started this site we read many, if not all, of our comics on Wednesday nights while shitfaced at the bar next to our local comic store.

But if I were compiling a list of my favorite comics of 2011, Warren Ellis’s Secret Avengers would have a rock solid place on it. It has been a series of big idea, one-and-done issues with rotating, top-shelf artists, and an overriding concept – missions to stop extinction-level events that no one can ever know about – that cheerfully lends itself to big stories that can flip the bird to ongoing continuity. And this week’s #20 continues the solid run… although I readily admit that more than once, the stories have felt a little, shall we say, recycled.

A couple months ago when I reviewed Secret Avengers #18, I reveled in the fact that Ellis acknowledged that the problem with time travel is that if you just move through time, the planet would have moved, and you would pop out of your time tunnel or your hot tub or your DeLorean in the empty vacuum of space to die with blood boiling in your brain and leaving Elizabeth Shue available for Karate Kid II after all.

Quick Hits – Wolverine And The X-Men #3, Green Lantern Corps #4, And Ghost Rider #7

Call this post “The Good, The Bad, and WTF”. Here are some books we’ve talked about before. Let’s check in to see how they’re doing now.

The Good

Wolverine And The X-Men written by Jason Aaron with pencils by Chris Bachalo, Duncan Rouleau and Matteo Scalera wraps up the opening story arc of Wolverine’s first day trying to run a school for young mutants. I enjoyed the first issue. Aaron continues to bring humor to this tale, now up to issue #3. He pens an engaging story that reminds the reader that your typical teen can be an obnoxious handful who believes deeply that they are the hero of not only their own story but everyone else’s. Still, all the kids want to do is fit in somehow, in his or her own way.

More goodness, badness and wtf-ness after the jump…and spoilers.

Down And Outside The 616 – X-Factor #229 Review

Ed. Note: Look, I’m just going to warn you up front that there’s spoilers in this. Starting immediately. Merry fucking Christmas!

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
-T. Heads

Madrox, The Multiple Man, is dead. Long live Madrox, The Multiple Man.

And, if you’re Madrox, you may find yourself in a parallel universe. With a beautiful rented tux. And a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here”? Especially if said wife is dead and you seem to be standing over your own corpse as well. Cue “MY GOD!…WHAT HAVE I DONE?”

More on what Madrox did or didn’t do after the jump. Also, there’s water at the bottom of the ocean.

Where’s Waldo: Amazing Spider-Man #676 Review

Dear Dan Slott: when I spend four dollars on an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, I have only one expectation. It’s not that the art is always exemplary, or that it end on the finest of pants-shitting cliffhangers, or that it even showcase a member of the supporting cast in an entertaining fashion… which is a good thing since this book contains none of those things.

No Dan; I’m a reasonable man. All I want from an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man is that somewhere, somewhere in the issue there is at least one appearance of The Amazing Fucking Spider-Man.

That’s right – the only appearance of Spider-Man in this issue is on the cover. The only places the word  “Spider-Man” appears are on the cover, the letter column and the in house ad for next month’s Daredevil… where Spider-Man apparently appears more often than he does in this issue of The Amazing Spider-Man.

Instead of a Spider-Man story, what we have here is a battle between the Sinister Six – which I’m sure was a bitchin’ name back in 1964, but which in 2011 sounds like a moniker you adopt when you find out that someone’s already trademarked “Democracy of Douchebags” – and the Intelligencia (The name you grab when you discover even “Sinister Six” has been sponged off the bottom of the barrel).

Basic Cable: Avengers: X-Sanction #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: And one last very quick review before the comic store open… and one that contains spoilers to boot. You are warned.

Okay, let’s start with the fact that The Falcon isn’t an active member of The Avengers. Not active, not honorary, not a Secret Avenger, not a West Coast Avengers… nope, not an Avenger. Which means that there is no reason for Cable to think that he would make an appearance in battle with The Avengers. Which means that the first step of his “master plan” against The Avengers is based purely on wishful thinking and the needs of Jeph Loeb’s plot.

But let’s assume that Falcon was a member of the Avengers, and that Cable’s plan therefore makes some sense on it’s face. Cable takes Falcon out with a sniper rifle during a battle that includes not only Falcon, but Captain America, Iron Man, the Red Hulk, Spider-Man and Wolverine, but which proves that Cable’s master, time-spanning plan was based on every science fiction movie ever made.

You Sometimes Get A Second Chance: Batman & Robin #4 Review

Batman & Robin is a textbook case of the dangers inherent in telling a decompressed comics story. The first issue read to me as a wretched Goddamned mishmash of elements from Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and the old 60s TV show: big, silly action – including riding Batpoles, and not in that good superhero porno parody way – combined with the introduction of some darker elements, like a new villain who dissolves his enemies in acid. It was a frustrating experience in cognitive dissonance, like watching Cesar Romero tie Adam West to a giant roman candle and then chop Burt Ward’s foot off with a rusty machete.

The first issue was so dissatisfying that I was prepared to drop the book from my pulls, except I didn’t want to risk accidentally losing Scott Snyder’s Batman by accident. And I am glad that I didn’t, because the subsequent three issues, which tie up the opening story arc, have proven that Batman & Robin deserves to stand with Snyder’s Batman and Tony Daniel’s Detective Comics as some of the most rock-solid, entertaining Batman comics in years. Sometimes I’m glad to be wrong.

Let’s get some of the prejudicial facts out of the way up front: I have never particularly liked Damian Wayne. Since his introduction he has often been written as a bitchy little brat, to the point where Amanda has sometimes gotten the both of us laughing by reading Damian’s dialogue in the voice of Stewie from Family Guy. Try it yourself, it’s fun: “Now look here, Pennyworth…”

SSDDR: New Avengers #19 Review

I had a moment reading The New Avengers #19 where I just about completely and totally checked out. I just suddenly had had enough of Norman Osborn and the Dark Avengers and different made up villains in Avengers costumes and doing the mental clean and jerk required to buy into a story where a man who is known to have killed a woman in cold blood in broad daylight follows a master plan of winning over public opinion to prove he leadership material when in reality we demonize leaders for taking pictures of their junk.

That moment was at the end of the book, when Norman and his Dark Avengers are standing in front of a crowd and announcing that they were here to make the world a better place, and I realized it was the same Goddamned moment as when he introduced the Dark Avengers back in Dark Reign. And my enthusiasm for this story, as precarious as it was to begin with, just vanished.

Seriously, I know what I said last month, but I don’t think I have it in me to climb back on board the Norman Osborn PR gladhanding and the Dick Avengers train again. I stuck with it for what felt like forever in Dark Reign and I just don’t care anymore. This doesn’t feel like anything interesting or new or that I didn’t read a dozen times over in the earlier story, which I didn’t like the first time around. The whole thing was like watching your uncle use his AA chip to crack open a Bud before Thanksgiving dinner: you know what’s coming, you’ve seen it before, and you know it’s not gonna be fun.

Assuming you don’t have an innate and visceral weariness and mistrust of Dark Reign and it’s ilk, on an individual issue level, there’s nothing wrong with this comic book. Bendis continues to write excellent dialogue and character moments. Seeing Daredevil wandering by Avengers Mansion and being hit on by Squirrel Girl – while being overwhelmed by the stench of baby shit and squirrel funk – is a nice little moment showing that sometimes superpowers aren’t all they’re all cracked up to be… while knowing all the while that yeah: he’s gonna hit that. Daredevil’s already fucked every woman that’s walked, moved or crawled; why wouldn’t he add “skittered up a tree?”

Forced Spectrum: The Ray #1 Review

Let’s get the good part of the review out of the way up front: Jimmy Palmiotti’s, Justin Gray’s and Jamal Igle’s The Ray is a fun comic that I intend to keep buying, at least for the time being. It has a likable protagonist, a stack of interesting supporting characters, and an old-school, “Wrong place, wrong time, boom! Dude gets superpowers” attitude toward it’s origin story that reminds me of comics like Nova and Firestorm when I was a kid back in the 70s.

The bad part of the review is that The Ray feels like the obligatory “black best friend” that DC Comics will trot out at SDCC 2012 to prove to extremists in Batgirl costumes that they’re not racists. But we’ll come back to that.

Our hero is Lucien, a lifeguard in San Diego who gets blasted by something called the Sun Gun – probably because if it was the actual Large Hadron Collider that it’s clearly meant to be aping it would imply that he got his powers from something called a God Particle, which would draw out a whole different kind of extremist to SDCC – and gets the power to control light. All of this happens in three pages, and one of them is the opening splash page. Compare that to, say Ultimate Spider-Man, where we’ve gone four issues without even putting Miles Morales in his own costume, and you can tell we’re looking at a fast-paced origin book like, say, the original Spider-Man.

Of course, it takes a little longer than for Lucien to get his costume on because gaining the control of light apparently means losing the ability to wear pants. Everything he touches burns, which means that The Ray will be the first superhero to die of a backup of semen to the brain stem. In fact, a large part of this issue revolves around Lucien’s pants problem, meaning that we spend a lot of time in the company of a naked young man, and that there is a particular demographic who can use the book to make sure they are in no danger of death by semen accumulation.

Not Getting Older, Just Getting Better…Right? – Review Of Deathstroke #4

Ed. Note – This review is in no way influenced by the fact that I’m turning 40 tomorrow. Condolences, whiskey and Lipitor can be sent to the usual place.

Being Slade Wilson has never been easy. Given super strength, agility and healing factors through military experiments, you’d think Wilson would’ve had a bright future ahead of him as a metahuman super soldier. But, as so often happens, government bestowed super powers only come with more headaches than they’re worth. Am I right, Captain Atom? That guy knows what I’m talking about. In Slade’s case he ended up going mercenary to protect a friend, getting one of his sons kidnapped and grievously injured, getting shot at and partially blinded by his wife, and going on to become the punching bag for a group of teen superheroes, the Teen Titans. Oh, and engage in what can best be described as an “inappropriate” relationship with a 15 year old girl in the process. Slade Wilson – making the good choices! Serious, it’s all in The New Teen Titans: The Judas Contract. Go on. Read it and come back. I’ll wait.

Ok, so, now that the DC Universe has been rebooted, where does Slade Wilson find himself? Still a sad adversary to meta-powered children or did The Powers That Be give him a shot at a better life this time around?

Spoilery goodness and knife play after the jump!