Everything Old Is Still Old: Joker’s Daughter / Batman: The Dark Knight 23.4 Review

Of just about any of DC’s VIllains’ Month titles, there has been an inordinate of interest in Joker’s Daughter – the thing came out the day before yesterday and copies with the 3D cover are going for $100 on eBay, for Christ’s sake. Even I couldn’t get a copy with the 3D cover at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me that if I insist upon screeching that I want to see crazy girls in 3D that I do it outside where the police can hear me.

So the obvious question is whether the comic book is actually worth the interest. Sure, a lot of the demand seems to be based on the fact that DC egregiously underestimated the number of people who wanted this book with the 3D cover, Which is fine, and a prime example of the free market and supply and demand in action, but in no way addresses whether the book is actually worth reading or not: after all, 20 years ago, Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 with the polybagged chromium cover was going for hundreds of dollars for the same reason, but a lack of supply still couldn’t make that book anything but a pile of shit by a writer who gave us a legitimate hint by repeatedly showing readers the word “doom” in big letters.

Well, having a regular old 2D copy means that I can actually open and read the book, and see what’s going on on the inside. And what’s going on in there is… weird. It is supervillain origin story as goth cautionary take by way of indictment of female body image via on-the-nose Greek tragedy. And it is a difficult book to review, because I am not 100 percent sure just how I feel about it; the book is certainly more ambitious a venture than I would have expected for a character spun off from a dude whose origin is being kicked into a vat of acid, even though I think it is a long yard away from sticking the landing. And it certainly goes in an direction and tries for a complexity that I would not have expected for a character joined at the name with a dude whose M.O. is to make people laugh themselves to death.

Oh: and Joker’s Daughter beats Jesus up. So there’s that.

Personal Experimentation: Sex Criminals #1 Review

Sex Criminals, the new limited series by writer Matt Fraction and artist Chip Zdarsky, is a book that asks a question about a circumstance that has never even occurred to me: what would happen if something happened to you after sex other than apologies, excuses and shame? You know: that terrible, terrible shame?

Okay, let me try this again. Sex Criminals is a comic book about two people with special superpowers that only manifest when they give each other orgasms. Hey, maybe I’m a superhero! I’m sure I’ll find out just as soon as I manage to give someone an orgasm! That must be why the ladies call me The Flash! I’m kidding, I’m kidding; they don’t think I’m a superhero. They think I’m a cop. That’s probably why they scream, “Help, police!” No? Okay.

Look, this is gonna be a weird book to review for me, because it’s a weird fucking book, okay? It’s a story about a little girl who learns that she comes unstuck in time when she comes, who tries to figure out if that’s normal through the minefield of junior high school, while dealing with her father’s murder and her mother’s alcoholism, combined with dirty jokes, dicks that glow in the dark, a list of sexual positions that look like a gymnastic routine if the Olympics Commissioner was Larry Flynt, and an armed bank robbery.

This book is all over the map. There is no “elevator pitch” for this comic, or at least not one that you could say on an elevator without being taken into custody within ten seconds of the doors opening. It’s a book with a lot of boning and jacking off, but one that isn’t about boning and jacking off. Instead, it’s about someone who grew up thinking everything they felt about sex was weird, dirty and odd, and who as an adult thinks that no one will ever really be compatible with her.

Which means that, for a comic book that includes glowing dicks and a sexual position known as “The Dutch Microwave,” it’s surprisingly relatable. Because my dick glows in the dark. Hey-yo!

Yeah, okay, I’ll stop. For now.

Circumstantial: Daredevil #31 Review

Editor’s Note: We find the defendant guilty on the charge of Premeditated Spoilers.

It would have been really easy for Mark Waid to have fucked up Daredevil #31.

This was the first comic book I remember seeing that in any way tackles the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman murder trial, and that is a subject that is just playing with dynamite. And it is playing with dynamite just because it is so Goddamned easy to pick one side or another, based on a few snippets of facts gleaned from various news accounts one might have half-paid attention to while working or drinking beer or surfing for porn. You write a book that takes the side of the shooter, and you’ve alienated everyone who knows that ACLU isn’t a lolspeak acronym. You take the side of the shootee, and you can experience your first mainstream media crossover attention by being mentioned on Sean Hannity’s show, possibly accompanied by your home address.

And yet if any comic book is the perfect one to reference the case, it’s Daredevil, what with its protagonist being an actual officer of the court. But still: it took a lof of balls for Waid to even consider making that case part of a mainstream comic book story… and he generally nails it. Because he’s smart enough to reference the case without the story being about the case. Instead, it’s about the people who made a snap decision about one side or another, based on a few snippets of facts gleaned from various news accounts one might have half-paid attention to while working or drinking beer or surfing for porn.

And that’s most of us, Bubba.

Chaotic Good: Kiss Me, Satan #1 Review

I would like to start off my review of Kiss Me, Satan by asking a question: why is every urban fantasy hero named like an urban fantasy hero?

Seriously: other than schlub-sounding Harry Dresden (and even his last name brings images of a massive firestorm to mind) and Anita Blake (who sounds like the female lead of a 70s Norman Lear sitcom), every urban fantasy hero sounds like Mom and Dad named them in a fashion that would make them unemployable in profession that didn’t end with a hyphenated “hunter.” There’s Anton Strout’s Simon Canderous, Mark Del Franco’s Connor Grey, and even Matt Wagner’s Kevin Matchstick all sound like the kind of English language music one normally only hears in the roll of 20-sided dice. Seriously: if someone handed you a job application with the name Calliope Reaper-Jones on it, you’d thank her for her interest and call the local bunco squad as soon as she cleared the front door.

Which brings us back to Kiss Me, Satan, and its protagonist: Barnabus Black. Seriously. I mean, that’s the kind of name that you come up with after you settle on an alignment of Chaotic Neutral. Just once I’d like to see a fearless vampire hunter with a stupid sounding name, you know what I mean?

What’s that? Buffy who? Oh. Okay, nevermind.

Laughter In The Face of Death: Thunderbolts #15 Review

I have clearly not been responding well to Marvel’s Infinity crossover, and I’m beginning to understand why that is, beyond a general orneriness that comes from covering something like five major crossover events in two years, with one of those events being Fear Itself.

Infinity is about a lot of things: interstellar war, tactics and strategy on a large scale, betrayal, and the lineage of kings and tyrants, with mass extinctions of a variety of races and alien species hanging in the balance… but i’s not so much about people. Sure, we have Captain America acting all inspiring and Captain America-ey, and we’ve got Namor acting all stoic in the face of apparently giving up to Thanos’s goons, and pretty soon we’ll have Doctor Strange being all bummed and guilty for leading the bad guys to Thanos’s son… but otherwise it’s all Skrull generals talking about the glory of battle and Krees calling humans upright apes and Builders talking like hippie douchebags with Classical Lit degrees and a suicide pact.

Ships and strategy and explosions are fun, but without the human element, a lot of Infinity has felt like watching dudes playing a tabletop game of Starfleet Battles: kinda interesting, but not the kind of spectator entertainment likely to convince me to turn off the Red Sox game. Which is probably why I’ve responded better to the extraneous crossover books that have dealt with the invasion on Earth. Sure, it’s hard to call an alien invasion of Earth a “small” story, but particularly with the way Jonathan Hickman has pulled all the heavy hitters off the planet, leaving only lower-powered heroes to deal with everything, crossovers like last week’s Mighty Avengers #1 feel more personal.

As does this week’s Thunderbolts #15. Which starts as a story about The Punisher dragging the team on a personal mission to wipe out one of New York’s crime families, only to be interrupted by the violent invasion of New York by the forces of Thanos.

And, as with Mighty Avengers last week, it’s one of the more relatable and entertaining chapters of Infinity so far.

Earth’s Mightiest Heroes: Mighty Avengers #1 Review

I’m having a hard time deciding if I like the first issue Marvel’s new Avengers title Mighty Avengers – and I do like it – purely on its own merits, or because of Jonathan Hickman’s work on the main Avengers titles.

It’s been about nine months since Hickman took those books over from Brian Michael Bendis, and in that time those books have been notable for their huge plots and cosmic scope, often, in my opinion, at the detriment to the characters. There have been issues of Avengers where the members of the team have acted like the worst kind of taser-happy, steroid-ridden, ex-high-school bully suburban cops, just because they needed to in order to advance Hickman’s master plot plans. We’ve spent months where we normally only see The Avengers competently analyzing a threat or competently meeting a threat, with their most human moments being only when they fuck up egregiously, causing them to return to the competent analysis phase of the story (see, for example, most of the Infinity event, on sale now!

So the first issue of Mighty Avengers, written by Al Ewing with art by Greg Land, is a comparative breath of fresh air. Sure, it is debuting smack in the middle of Infinity, but this is a book about, you know, The Mighty Avengers. Despite the cosmic nature of the threat to New York, we spend most of our time with the actual characters, watching them interact and bicker and try to get along. And we get a sense of many of their motivations for grouping together and acting as Avengers, beyond the simple expediency of “if they don’t, I can’t show off my nifty extinction-level plot I’ve designed” we’ve been getting much of the time in the core titles.

In short, Mighty Avengers #1 is about people, not spectacle. Which makes it a damn good read compared to a lot of the other Avengers books out there.

The Other Guy: Justice League / Lobo #23.2 Review

Editor’s Note: Mess with th’ Main Man any you buy yourself oceans of spoilers!

Well, that wasn’t as bad as the leaked design art made it look. Then again, it couldn’t possibly have been.

There was a lot of Internet nerd rage over Kenneth Rocafort’s new design of Lobo, and a lot of that rage included the terms, “Twilight,” “metrosexual,” and “Bieber only more effeminate and probably white due to liberal application of semen.” And I’m guessing that that was based on the fact that the dude is named “Lobo.” The world is full of wuss-looking swordsmen who fluidly chop apart all comers before moving on to woo the maidens fair. After all, Orlando Bloom doesn’t get more ‘tang than an astronaut because he is a credible-looking medieval warrior. If it takes you more than five seconds to realize that Genghis Khan could kill Orlando Bloom just by thinking about it really hard (if Khan wasn’t busy thinking about whether to make Bloom his woman), then you don’t need fantasy literature because you clearly are living in one.

The problem has been that name. If you’re gonna call that mincing pretty boy Lobo, you’re gonna piss off anyone who is a fan of The Main Man, even though writer Marguerite Bennett has tried to make it clear that this character is a completely different guy than the Lobo that we all know and love, and that that design was not a redesign of the traditional Lobo. But that is an easy thing to forget or to put aside when all you have is a drawing, labelled “Lobo”, of a dude who looks like he’s a sword away from being a regular at Tower of Power night at the Manhole Club.

Well, the story is now here, in Justice League #23.2, and having the whole package in front of you makes it clear that this dude is not Lobo. He’s got the same name, and he is gunning for Lobo, but it’s a different guy. And that went a long way toward taking some of the sting out of my initial reaction to that concept art.

What took a lot of the rest of that reaction out was the fact that Rocafort didn’t draw this issue. Which means that the “new” Lobo looks a lot less like a clown and leather fetishist’s fantasy about who’s on the other side of the glory hole.

And all things being equal, it’s actually not all that bad.

Anarchy In Lovecraft: Locke & Key: Alpha #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Cthulhu Fthagn! Ph’nglui spoilers Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

Basically, I see your crazy and raise. It’s the only way to live.

– Tyler Locke

And with that line, if nothing else, Locke & Key: Alpha #1 has finally settled the question as to what I want engraved on my tombstone.

I opened with that line because I’m finding it hard to review the actual comic book. First of all, this thing is a monster – 32 pages, not counting the “special features” toward the end of the issue – with battles and conflicts happening in about four different places with interchanging teams of characters fighting different threats at varying times.

Second, it’s a hard single issue to summarize. We jump back and forth between the characters, each of which is in a different form of mortal danger at least once, and many of them don’t make it through the issue. The nature of the threats to the characters changes from demons to torture to taunting to thrown rocks, so there’s no simple throughline to follow to keep track of everything so it can be described concisely for people who might be looking for reviews to decide if they want to try the book or not.

Further, this just doesn’t scan like your average superhero comic book. Throughout the issue, we see villain Dodge using a variety of escalating levels of magic to try to enforce his will. But instead of your normal comic, where the heroes meet that power with more power, they generally resist by simple human means of courage and love and persistence, leading to almost the opposite of a standard comic book climax, where the action grows smaller and simpler and more intimate toward the conclusion.

And finally, this issue doesn’t end like your normal superhero comic. Because for all the violence and power displayed, this issue concludes with a simple grapple between the villain and an ancillary character. And unlike in your standard comic, writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez give us a conclusion that makes a hard distinction between the bad guys losing and the good guys actually winning.

So I’ve struggled to decide how to write about this issue. So we’ll go with this to start: if you have been following Locke & Key, this is a spectacular ending (yeah, there’s one more issue, but based on this one, it looks like it’s gonna be a simple denouement) that pays off on just about tease and promise that has been made to the reader leading up to this moment. And if you have not been reading Locke & Key? Well, start with the trades and give this one a wide berth until you’re up to speed.

The (Bittersweet) End Of X-Factor #262 – Review

(Ed. Note – This review will be rife with spoilers starting with the very next line. Really. There’s no going back now, ok? Still here? All right then. You were warned.)

X-Factor Investigations is closed.

The long running title from writer Peter David closed up shop with issue #262, the end of a six part series of stand alone stories wrapping up the storylines of each of the main players. The finale focuses on the fate of group leader, Jamie Madrox, and his sometime wife, Layla Miller, “the girl who knows stuff”. In the aftermath of the “Hell On Earth” story, they’ve taken refuge on Jamie’s childhood home, a now abandoned farm. Jamie has been transformed into a demon by another demon named Mephisto with seemingly no way to be changed back. Layla, a mutant who’s power is “knowing stuff”, has been blindsided by the discovery that she is pregnant. Truly, the end times are upon us.

So, is it happily ever after for our crew?

Red-Headed Stepchild: The Star Wars #1 Review

Reading Dark Horse Comics’ The Star Wars, the adaptation of George Lucas’s first draft of the Star Wars screenplay from back in 1974, is, if nothing else, a strange experience.

And it is strange on a couple of levels; first, there’s the simple cognitive dissonance that occurs seeing an old dude with a white beard named Luke Skywalker, a dude with a greasy Guy Gardner haircut named Darth Vader, and small two-man fighter ships called Star Destroyers. Second, it is strange because this comic is coming out about 18 years into the Internet age, and any movie fan worth a damn has already long ago downloaded one of the early drafts of the Star Wars script from Drew’s Script-O-Rama (at one time or another, the first four drafts were out there for the taking), and already knows at least some of what’s coming in this comic.

And third, having glanced at those early drafts, we know that what is coming really isn’t all that great, at least compared to the real Star Wars. After all, this is a story originally written by George Lucas, who based on the prequels, clearly caught lightning in a bottle with that final revision of the shooting draft for Star Wars, and if this was a just universe, he then would have immediately had the language center of his brain scraped away in a lobotomy-like procedure.

And you will see a lot of elements of the prequels in this comic book, with some of Lucas’s worst instincts in Star Wars storytelling on display… including a little blond moppet shouting, “Yippee!”

But on the positive side, unlike in the prequels, you will also see that little blond moppet die like a pig in a chute.