green_hornet_1_cover_rivera_2013Editor’s Note: While we might normally report on a piece or two of comics news this late in the evening, it is April Fool’s Day, and we don’t believe a single Goddamned thing we read on any news site today. And while I toyed with making up some bullshit story about us being acquired by Marvel Comics or something, I feared too many people would comment simply with, “Good.” So here’s a comic review.

Despite a misspent youth, adolescence, adulthood and middle age reading comic books, I don’t really have a lot of personal history with The Green Hornet. The radio show and the Bruce Lee TV series were before my time, and I missed the attempted comics reboot of the character in 1989 since I was just starting college and therefore needed to cut back on my comic budget to fund a newly-found Boone’s Farm habit. I became mildly interested in the first Green Hornet series from Dynamite Comics back in 2009 until I learned it was being written by Kevin Smith, and therefore there was an even chance that the second issue would be finished and released sometime next November. And then there was the 2011 movie starring Seth Rogan that was so abominably awful I felt ripped off seeing it for free on cable while so drunk I would have been entertained by almost anything airing on TruTV.

So, long story short, I really haven’t had much of a reason to follow The Green Hornet. I, however, have many reasons to follow Mark Waid. So I picked up his first issue of The Green Hornet purely based on Waid’s name, with my only preconception about the character being that Seth Rogan played him in a way that made Adam West look like he was starring in The Dark Knight Returns.

So was the fact that Mark Waid was the writer enough to make me give a damn about The Green Hornet for the first time ever? Well… kinda. There was some pretty good stuff here to be sure, but there were also a few leaps in logic that I didn’t believe, and a little too much time tying the character into Dynamite’s shared pulp universe that was interesting, but distracting. But on the plus side, it featured far fewer fart jokes than I remember from the movie.

logo_marvelAmanda reported earlier about Marvel’s new one-word teaser – part of what’s looking to be a new round for already-introduced comics from the Marvel Now relaunch (but not a reboot! Because Marvel doesn’t reboot! And Spider-Man has always had feet that looked like Mickey Mouse was crippled by polio!) – hinting that the Doc Ock version of Spider-Man is possibly going to lose his Avengers ID card and all associated rights, privileges, upgrade miles and punches toward a free six-inch sub.

That, however, wasn’t the only teaser up Marvel’s sleeve today. To wit: legendary The Mighty Thor artist Walt Simonson will be taking over art duties, at least temporarily, from Leinil Yu on Indestructible Hulk. And Marvel being Marvel, they had a teaser to go with the news…

Editor’s Note: Kingpin left me with ten spoilers in my pocket. I found a comics Web site that makes change.

Whether purposefully or accidentally, Marvel and writer Mark Waid have put themselves into a difficult position by putting the first chronological appearance of The Superior Spider-Man – that is, whoever Spider-Man will wind up being after the events of next week’s The Amazing Spider-Man #700 – into this week’s Daredevil #21.

Because with all the hype and anticipation surrounding what will happen with Spider-Man (as an example: once we published an article about the leak to the Internet of the ending to The Amazing Spider-Man #700, our Web traffic doubled… and we didn’t even publish the actual spoilers), what he does and how he acts in Daredevil #21 will be almost as important to readers as the story about Ol’ Hornhead. It’s kinda like casting the Octomom or John Wayne Bobbit in a porno flick; you’ll get a lot of rubberneckers not watching the thing for its intended purpose.

So even though Spider-Man’s appearance in Daredevil #21 makes complete and total sense with regards to the greater story – not only the story of some still unknown party trying to drive Matt nuts, but of Matt’s conscious decision to lighten up that goes back to Waid’s earliest issues – his appearance here, before the resolution of the current arc in Spider-Man’s home title, means the issue (not the story; there is a distinction there) has a massive, nearly crippling distraction that I doubt Waid originally intended. It makes the reading of this individual issue, during this particular point in pre-Amazing Spider-Man #700 time, an almost schizophrenic experience, where what Spider-Man does and says in two pages is almost, if not more, important to the comic reader than the actual Daredevil story in the preceding 18 pages.

So I’m gonna review it that way: in two parts.

One thing I have learned over 36 years of reading comic book is that, for a character who has been a linchpin of Marvel Comics and who has had some of the greatest crossover success of any comic book character, appearing in cartoons, a prime time television show and three major motion pictures just in my lifetime… nobody ever seems to like The Hulk all that much at any given time.

There is no other major comic character that I can think of that has been rebooted, retrofitted and overhauled more often than The Hulk. Just off the top of my head, Hulk has been green and stupid, grey and stupid, grey and smart, grey and smart and a mafia enforcer, green again and a genius, green and stupid again, green and a gladiator, green and a world conqueror, and one time, green in white clown makeup getting his ass kicked by Batman. And when it comes to Bruce Banner, he has been Bruce Banner, David Banner, a wimpy genius, a tactical master, an abused child, a mad scientist, an itinerant wandering hobo, and the leader of government agencies. If a creator came into, say, Superman and said, “You know what would make Superman better? If Clark Kent was a street hustler, and if Superman wore doilies and shit napalm,” there would be nerd riots in the streets around every comic store… but when it comes to The Hulk, the attitude seems to be, “Fuck it. Can’t be any worse than what the last guy did.”

It seems that every time a new creator gets his hands on The Hulk, his or her first action is to look at what came before, boldly state, “Nah, that ain’t right,” and start slapping together a new current status quo. Just a month or so ago, Jason Aaron finished a run where Banner had been separated from Hulk, Banner went nuts and spent a while doing fruitless genetic experiments, a reasonably intelligent Hulk boned Red She-Hulk, Banner and Hulk reunited to fight Dr. Doom, all in a storyline that was packed with big, goofy action and fun. But that was a month and a creator ago, which in Hulk terms means it might as well have never happened.

So yes, the new creative team on Indestructible Hulk #1 has, indeed, looked at Aaron’s run and seemingly said, “Nah, that ain’t right,” and is taking Banner and Hulk in a different direction. Normally, this would be so much the norm it almost wouldn’t register; just another case of a new guy fucking around until he gets bored or sales tank and the next guy comes into to fuck around. However, this time around the writer is Mark Waid – you know, the guy who looked at 25 years of noir stories in Daredevil and said, “Nah, that ain’t right,” and turned the book in a direction that has generally been as entertaining as any Daredevil story since Frank Miller made Daredevil a noir character.

So while this is yet another reboot for Hulk, whether we needed it or not, Waid gives us an interesting new start, with a fresh take on Banner and some of his motivations, a good take on the tension that being around Banner can cause straight out of the Avengers movie, and a fresh “relationship” between Banner and The Hulk… not that it doesn’t have some problems.

First of all, no matter how you feel about Daredevil #18, you’ve gotta admit: that is one hell of a cover. If the goal of a comic book cover is to get someone not already predisposed to the book to buy it (and that is the goal of a cover, no matter what the prevailing wisdom of “What can I get for the original art on the collector’s market” might say), then this one by Paolo Rivera  succeeds. If you’re in a comic store and you see this cover and you’re not interested? Just ask the guy at the counter if you can use his bathroom, because clearly you didn’t go into the comic store because you like comics.

Trouble is, you put a cover like that on a comic book, particularly when the cover is hyping that the creative team just won an Eisner Award for making Daredevil the best continuing series of the year, and you are writing a check that the book itself had better Goddamned cash. So does the story, by writer Mark Waid with interior art by Chris Samnee, deliver the goods?

In general, yes it does. This issue continues Waid’s examination of Matt Murdock’s long relationship with, shall we say, “stress-related personality issues.” It was a trait that dominated the character for so long that Waid has been almost required to address – if you’re gonna decide that a character has simply decided to be less intense and crazy, you almost have to put him in a situation where he would once, well, go bugfuck nuts to see if he can stay less intense and crazy. And Waid is doing that, in a methodical and well-built way… with a couple of nitpicks. Because Matt Murdock might have decided to be less apeshit crazy, but I have promised no such thing.

For the second time in as many days, I am opening a comic book and diving into a mythology I know absolutely nothing about. I’ve never seen the British TV show The Avengers, I never saw the movie with Ralph Fiennes and Sean Connery, and I never read the Grant Morrison Steed and Mrs. Peel miniseries from back in the 80s. All I know about the British Avengers is that it is about super spies in the 60s, and apparently Diana Rigg used to wear a leather catsuit that made men out of every straight male genre fan older than me who isn’t already dead. Which I can understand, but as a child of the 80s with access to Skinemax, I never felt the need hunt up reruns on PBS to dive in and see for myself.

So I can’t address whether or not Boom Studio’s Steed and Mrs. Peel, by writer Mark Waid and drawn by Steve Bryant, is true to the original TV series or the movie or some purely theoretical Stud and Mrs. Kneel porn parody or anything else. I can say that, having seen similar shows like The Prisoner and Department S (of all things), Waid and Bryant capture the general feel of British television shows from the 60s and 70s, including wildly optimistic visions of the future, cheapjack-looking “special effects”, and about 50 percent more Nehru jackets than a 21st century man should have to contemplate.

So it feels authentic enough… but is it any good? Well, that all depends on if you actually like that sort of thing.

I had mixed feelings about Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom going into it, because as much as I love the character, it really belonged almost totally to creator Dave Stevens. Sure, I’ve been enjoying the Rocketeer Adventures books over the past few months, but many of those stories took place around the Rocketeer universe, featuring other characters and how the presence of The Rocketeer affected them. These short stories felt like tributes to Stevens’s character and work, allowing the original to stand on its own without new creators jumping right into that sandbox.

Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom, however, is a full-length miniseries focused firmly on The Rocketeer and his friends themselves. This puts the creative team of writer Mark Waid and artist Chris Samnee right onto Stevens’s turf, and when it comes to Dave Stevens, we’re talking about a guy who was such a perfectionist that he only came out with two long form Rocketeer stories between 1982 and 1995. So for a long-time Rocketeer fan, who owns the original movie poster and who still carries his keys on a Rocketeer keyring, a poorly-done Rocketeer story would be a catastrophe; a rotten cash grab on the level of the worst of Before Watchmen, only with an added distasteful element of necrophilia thrown in to boot.

Thankfully, Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom is a generally worthy addition to the Rocketeer canon, that continues Stevens’s own addition of period-appropriate pulp canon to the original aviation-based story, with a healthy dose of flying action, a respect toward the vocation of pilot in the early days of flying, and the most dysfunctional relationship since Judd Winick said, “okay” to Catwoman. Of course, being a period pulp adventure story written after 1982, it also borrows some elements heavily from Raiders of The Lost Ark, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Daredevil has consistently been one of the best comics you can get since Mark Waid took over the writing last year, and it has been that way at least partially because Waid made a conscious choice to turn the character away from the noir darkness that has defined it since Frank Miller’s run in the 80s. There was a long run on this book where the writers seemed to make a conscious choice that God hated Matt Murdock, and Matt Murdock would respond to this divine hatred with the grace and aplomb of a gutshot bath salts addict with terminal neurologically-based vertigo.

In the last issue, Waid moved straight past the noir-influenced obstacles of bitchy, damaged hot girls and random betrayals straight into pulp: someone dug up his dad and put his remains in Murdock’s desk for Murdock’s partner Foggy to find. Foggy, predictably, flipped out and kicked Matt out of the law firm… which until recently would be the trigger mechanism for the writer to have Daredevil become homeless, or excessively violent, or to bang Typhoid Mary in Peter Parker’s house while Captain America pounds on the door to serve a subpoena.

In Daredevil #17, however, Waid zigs where everyone else would zag, delivering a flashback story that ultimately reinforces Daredevil’s new, more upbeat attitude and personality in a believable and organic way… albeit being kind of a goofy story with some real holes in it.

The tricky part about any digital-only comic when you’re not generally a devotee of that delivery system is remembering when the Goddamned thing comes out. I know when to go pick up Amazing Spider-Man and Batman because I have a subscription at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to remember that the definition of “digital comics” does not include “publicly giggling at cell phone porn.” And I remember that I need to go to the comic store on Wednesdays, because Wednesdays are “Look The Other Way While Rob Curses About Scott Lobdell And Simultaneously Dribbling IPA Onto His Shirt” night at the bar next door… or at least, that’s what they’ve become.

So despite my initial reserved – if not grudging – enthusiasm over the announcement of Mark Waid’s and John Rogers’s new Thrillbent Comics concern, I kinda, sorta forgot that it had even launched. Which is a hell of a thing to admit from a guy who co-runs a comics Web site – I mean, Mark Waid is one of the biggest names in comics, and if he produced a semi-solid dump that looked like a comic book, I should probably be paying attention – but it’s the truth. Hell, every Wednesday I get a hundred-dollar stack of glossy printed comics to read and review; you think I have time to go hunting for more stuff to read?

However, yesterday evening I got back to the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office to find co-editor Amanda hard at work on a review, meaning I had to find a way to kill some time before going to “Avoid Eye Contact While Rob Whimpers That If He Were A More Conscientious Comics Writer He Wouldn’t Need The Day Job And Simultaneously Maybe Soiling Himself A Little” night at the pub. So I took a quick look at the Thrillbent Web site to see if I’d missed anything, thinking if I had it was probably a Paypal wall to the books, or maybe a Kickstarter project looking to raise money for, I don’t know, professional quality pixels or some such shit at which I could turn up my nose.

Turns out, no such luck.

You may remember that I was very excited to review Fanboys Vs. Zombies #1 the other day. Unfortunately, my Local Comic Book Store, where the owner knows us by name and asks Rob wear his Gleek Underoos under his pants, did not have the book in stock. What to do? Take this as an opportunity to investigate the growing medium (sort of) of digital comics!

I downloaded Comixology onto my phone and an Asus Transformer Eee pad. From there, I was able to download a couple of books relatively easily to the app to read. I say “relatively” because, while the functionality is an easy “touch-the-button” user interface, it is a few long minutes before each book will appear on the device. So, there’s some wait time until gratification. And, while you can read any book you’ve purchased on any device on which you’ve installed Comixology, it appears you need to download books locally to the new devices. One digital comic book takes up 74 MB of space on the Eee pad.

Of course, once you have the books, how is the app overall for reading the books? That is the most important question after all.

Check out my video review of Comixology and the books I used it to purchase after the jump!