Post-Foreplay, Pre-Climax: The Superior Spider-Man #7 Review

The Superior Spider-Man is not sustainable. It has never been sustainable. We have known this from the beginning.

Let’s face it: The Superior Spider-Man only works for as long as you accept that there’s a megamaniacal supervillain who talks like Ming The Merciless on a coke bender and kills more people as Spider-Man than he did with his pre-body switch Death Satellites pretending to be Peter Parker… without anyone noticing. Including the readers. I have been able to suspend my disbelief on my that plot point for a while, but the entire time I have been reading this book, I have known in the back of my mind that if I called someone a “dolt” more than three times in a month, my friends would demand to know what was wrong… and if I used the term “pilfering parasite” more than once in, well, ever, my own parents would hold me at pitchfork-point until the DNA results came back clean.

The cracks in this whole Doc-Ock-As-Spider-Man conceit are already beginning to show. In the current Marvel crossover event Age of Ultron, which was written by Brian Michael Bendis months ago, Spider-Man is pretty clearly Peter Parker… which caused writer Dan Slott to have to produce last week’s The Superior Spider-Man #6AU (AU for “Age of Ultron”), which tried valiantly to shoehorn Ock’s version of Spider-Man into the event… even though only a reader who uses the cover of an issue of Age of Ultron to roll a fat one would believe that Otto Octavius has a wisecrack in him that doesn’t include the word “pusillanimous.”

Thankfully, Slott seems to know the limitations of the body-switching gag. Because just over three months into the whole deal, he is simultaneously showing Peter beginning to show a modicum of control over his Otto-infested body, and Spider-Man’s teammates on The Avengers are finally convinced that something isn’t right with the guy. And while all this is happening with what feels like a fairly contrived situation just to show the extent of Doc Ock’s newly-found moral relativism, it’s good to finally see the noose tightening on this whole gimmick.

The Fackin Line Has Been Drawn: Locke & Key: Omega #4 Review

As often happens with recent individual issues of Locke & Key, I am of varying minds about recommending issue 4 of Locke & Key: Omega. On one hand, I want to tell you that, if you’re already reading Locke & Key, you’ll want to pick up this issue because it’s packed with action, suspense, violence, and a couple of damn satisfying – if small – triumphs on the part of the Locke kids’ mom, Tyler and disembodied Bode… but I also know that if you’re already reading Locke & Key, you’re gonna buy this issue come hell or high water, because that’s what this title does to you if you even like horror at all.

On the other hand, I want to tell you that, if you’ve never read Locke & Key, that the issue is packed with action, suspense, violence, and a couple of damn satisfying – if small – triumphs on the part of some shitfaced lady, a foulmouthed teenager, and a ghost… none of whom you will know. And therefore, unlike a recent issue of Locke & Key: Omega, it is not a particularly good place to jump in if you want to have any real understanding of what the hell is going on.

If you are not a regular reader, it is, however, an excellent place to jump in if you want to see, completely without context, giant monkeys attacking and murdering teenagers. And if you’re a bloated, drunken, 42-year-old suburbanite like me, maybe that’ll be enough for you.

Stinger: The Green Hornet #1 Review

Editor’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.

Very Krutacking Decent: Guardians of The Galaxy #1 Review

Let’s stop for a second and remember that, back before the turn of the century, Guardians of The Galaxy writer Brian Michael Bendis got his start writing small-scale indie crime comics. There was Jinx, about a small-time bounty hunter, and Goldfish, about a small-time grifter, and Torso, about a real small-time serial killer (yeah, his victims would probably argue the “small-time” point, but let’s face it: “The Cleveland Torso Murderer” ain’t no Jack The Ripper. That name sounds dangerously close to “The San Diego Goofball”). When he moved into superheroes, it was Powers – more about a couple of street-level detectives than about superheroes – and then Alias and Daredevil for Marvel – again, street-level, crime-based superheroics.

It’s easy to forget now how nervous many of us were when Bendis took over Avengers back in 2004, because there was just no indication that the guy could really handle anything beyond street scumbags bullshitting each other, or maybe a mildly depressed former superhero taking it in the corn chute from a 70’s B-Lister. But if you take a step back and really look at Avengers Disasssembled, part of why it works is that, at it’s lowest level, it’s about a depressed woman who is lying to and betraying everyone in sight to hide her most personal shame. That’s a noir femme fatale story right there… sure, one that includes Hulks and exploding arrows, but a femme fatale story nonetheless. Bendis found the street-level story in the superhero epic, and made it pretty damned good.

So it has been a long ride for Bendis to go from giving us stories about no-hope dickheads running the Three Card Monty scheme in Portland to a story about the son of a planetary king and his alien buddies trying to defend the Earth from alien invasion. But the good news is, it generally works. If you’re a fan of Star Wars or the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, you’ll find some good stuff to like in Guardians of The Galaxy #1.

You’ll find those things because they are really damn reminiscent of those properties, but still: they are there.

Doog Yrev Ton: Action Comics #18 Review

Grant Morrison is done with Action Comics now. And I am okay with that.

I am okay with that because, with the benefit of  hindsight over the entire run, his story was meant for Superman fans. By which I mean, real, hardcore, longtime Superman fans. The kind of Superman fan who thinks Superman will never look right again now that Curt Swan is dead. The kind of Superman fan who knows, without consulting Wikipedia, that Silver Kryptonite makes Superman PCP-level paranoid, while Red Kryptonite makes him grow four dicks in each armpit. The kind of Superman fan who calls his penis “Beppo.”

Morrison’s run started with Superman fighting corrupt businessmen, as he did in the early issues of the original Action Comics, and ended with a battle with Mr. Mxyzpltk, effectively “modernizing” Superman for the New 52 by bringing him from 1938 all the way to 1965, via a mescaline bender. Sure, there was the odd stop to examine what Superman might mean to the modern world, but all in all, this series started out, and ended, as a celebration of the earlier, more out-there elements of the Superman mythos.

So, as I’ve said in other reviews of Morrison’s Action Comics issues, how you feel about Action Comics #18 will largely depend on how nostalgic you are for Fifth Dimensional imps, multi-colored Kryptonite, super-powered animals, the Legion of Super Heroes, and yet another bold statement about how important Superman is to the DC Universe and to America. You know, bold statements like Morrison made in All-Star Superman and DC One Million.

Personally? I can take them or leave them.

Heckblazer: Constantine #1 Review

Editor’s Note: I’m the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the spoilers.

Let’s start by talking about that cover. It is terrible.

It’s not terrible in a visual sense; it is a perfectly serviceable Ivan Reis cover with a sense of dynamism, and enough flashy lights to attract the casual browser’s eye as he or she wanders through the comic store. So from a pure advertising standpoint, the cover does its job. The problem with the cover is that, for a Hellblazer fan trying Constantine #1 in the hopes that this new title will deliver something even close to what they loved for about a quarter century in the earlier series, it delivers the worst message in the world.

Hellblazer’s John Constantine was a dude who worked in the shadows, mostly by reputation, braggadocio and ruthless cynicism, who used the traditional magics of sigils and binding when he needed to use it at all. The cover to Constantine #1 advertises Constantine as a refugee magic user from Diablo III, chucking force bolts around like there’s some pimply teenager driving him with a joystick while mashing the A button.

The cover promises John Constantine as fantasy action hero, throwing around “magic” ways that Gandalf would find ostentatious and flamboyant. It hints at the polar opposite of what Hellblazer fans like, and it gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach… particularly since I know that it wasn’t the first cover planned for the book. The original cover featured Constantine in a graveyard surrounded by monsters, before it was replaced by this monstrosity… and even then, someone made the decision to airbrush the cigarette out of Constantine’s mouth, further emasculating the character. Hell, based on that carefully-placed force bolt, for all I know they actually took John’s balls as well.

This was the wrong cover if anyone at DC editorial wanted to attract Hellblazer readers in the wake of that book’s cancellation. It is the equivalent of a bar pulling all the single malt scotch off their shelves and replacing it with Four Loco; sure, scotch isn’t a taste for everybody, but you ain’t attracting Islay aficionados with cans of Teenager-Punches-Cops juice.

And finally, this cover is a huge misfire because it commits the cardinal sin of comic covers: it in no way reflects what’s happening in the actual comic book. Constantine #1 has no force bolt slinging action hero in it. Sure, there’s some more straight-up action in the book than you’d find in Hellblazer, including more ostentatious magic of the force bolt variety than you’d find in the original title. But none of it comes from John Constantine, who writers Jeff Lemire and Ray Fawkes seem to have a pretty decent handle on.

My point is, for an old Hellblazer fan, there is enough good character stuff in this book to make it worth checking out, despite that Godawful “Pew! Pew! Pew!” cover.

A Lot Of Talk And A Badge: Avengers #8 Review

Editor’s Note: A White Event creates / alters heralds to spoil this ascension.

Since taking over Avengers back in December, writer Jonathan Hickman has clearly been pushing toward some kind of huge, extinction-level event that is meant to go down in legend – he all but comes out and says it in his movie trailer-like first issue. And since that time, Hickman has marched Avengers through ever-increasing threats, cosmic and not, moving inexorably to whatever massive event he has in mind. And all that has occurred in the series has been used in subservience of that plot, including little things like consistency of characterization or focus on anybody in particular.

Which means that, in Avengers #8, Hickman has given us an portrayal of The Avengers where Captain America is ignored by several members, three members of the team actively try to kill or demand that someone kill a teenaged boy, and all in all lead with their fists against a confused kid who doesn’t know what’s happened to him and in no way acts as an aggressor until several of The Avengers big guns take a poke at him. All to allow Hickman to put a bunch of power in front the Ex Nihilo guy he introduced back in the first issue.

In short: yeah, I’m pretty close to giving up on Avengers entirely.

I’m A Superhero: Wolverine #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Many years ago, a secret government organization abducted the man called Logan, a mutant possessing razor-sharp spoilers and the ability to heal from any bad comic…

I don’t know about you, but I really didn’t feel like I needed another Wolverine book. We got the debut of The Savage Wolverine just two months ago, we’ve had Wolverine & The X-Men going since the end of the Schism event about a year and a half ago, and then there’s that good old Wolverine comic that, until recently, had been running since Logan put on an eyepatch and started acting like it would make people without massive traumatic brain injuries think he was a completely different dude with fucked-up hair and adamantium claws back in 1988. Even forgetting the recent Wolverine: The Best There Is series, throw on top of those books Wolverine’s appearances in X-Men, Avengers, New Avengers, and even fucking X-Babies, I wasn’t exactly waiting with bated breath to bring my monthly Wolverine expenditures into the three figures.

But still, I picked up the first issue of writer Paul Cornell’s and artist Alan Davis’s new Wolverine, partially because I generally dug Cornell’s recent work on DC’s Demon Knights, partially because I’ve liked Davis’s work since Captain Britain and more importantly (to me, anyway) Miracleman, and partially because I co-run a comics Web site and part of my job is to read stuff that I don’t necessarily give a damn about and write about it.

And it turns out that that’s not a bad thing, because Wolverine #1 is good. Really fucking good. Better than the opening to about any solo Wolverine story in recent memory.

Particularly that first page, which is one hell of a cool shot across the bow.

Silent Lucidity: Batman & Robin #18 Review

When DC leaked the news last month that Grant Morrison would be killing Damian Wayne in Batman Incorporated #8, the company claimed that the character’s death would resonate across the main Batman Family titles, despite Batman Incorporated existing, since the New 52 reboot, in some strange continuity bubble that seems to lie outside of the New 52, and based on some weird editorial philosophy where all major decisions are tagged with the phrase, “…but keep Grant Morrison happy.” In that spirit, one would think that, compared to the maintenance of continuity spreadsheets, last-minute story changes and line editorial late nights and headaches, it would be cheaper and simpler to just dump a truckload of peyote on Morrison’s driveway, but whatever.

My big question at the time of the reveal was: how exactly were the other Batman Family creators going to handle this event? After all, Batman and Robin’s battle against Leviathan from Batman Incorporated wasn’t exactly something that had been addressed in the other books, and it seemed like those other writers already had plans for upcoming story lines. Hell, before Robin’s death, Scott Snyder had announced he was embarking on a Riddler story in Batman before more recently announcing that instead he was gonna do a long-form Batman: Zero Year story focusing on Batman’s early years, and while Riddler might be a part of it, it at least seems like a change of plans.

But my biggest question, that I couldn’t address at the time without riddling the story with spoilers, was how this would affect Peter Tomasi’s Batman & Robin, what with the tiny detail that Robin’s name appears in the fucking title. And while other Batman Family titles have clearly just shoehorned Robin’s death into previously-planned storylines as an afterthought (last week’s Detective Comics simply mentioned it in a panel or two while Batman then went on his merry way attacking Penguin and Emperor Penguin as previously planned, and in this week’s Batgirl the death gets a page and a half before going back to Barbara’s fight with James Gordon, Jr), it’s gotta be hard to move forward with any previously-existing plans when one of the title characters is taking a dirtnap. You know, until someone kicks his carcass into a Lazarus Pit (and you know this will happen).

So given the early efforts of the Batman Family titles to apparently simply slot the fact that Robin is dead into existing story plans (Please note that I don’t know that this is the case. For all I know, Grant Morrison called a staff meeting with the Batman editors and creators a year ago and announced his plans over absinthe and some form of ritually sacrificed beast of burden, and it’s just the half-assed executions that make it look shoehorned in), I was half-expecting for Batman & Robin #18 to be a standard Batman story with maybe some weird-looking camouflage art to cover where Robin was supposed to be, and a headset quickly pencilled onto Batman’s head so it wouldn’t look like he was talking to himself like an insane person.

I was wrong about that. Instead, Batman & Robin #18 takes Damian’s death head-on, with the focus solely on Batman and how he is handling the event (short answer: badly), and makes use of a bold storytelling choice to make the reader empathize with Batman by almost forcing us to try to think about what we’re seeing in his reactions. Suffice it to say that, if Robin’s death in Morrison’s playground was a forced afterthought in some of Batman’s titles, it most definitely was not here.

…Isn’t Even Past: All-New X-Men #8 Review

I have a recurring dream where I wander into a keg party at my college in 1991, grab a Natural Light, and wander around until I find myself, at 20 years old, in a corner somewhere. And I say, “Rob: for the love of God, don’t stick your dick in Lynn Mansfield. She will make you into a whinier, more irritating moron than usual for at least a couple of years. Now for Christ’s sake, give me a fucking cigarette. You don’t smoke yet? Well c’mon, let’s get you a pack. You like Marlboros… no, trust me: you like Marlboros.”

Because that’s the fantasy, isn’t it? If we could just go back in time and spend a few minutes with out younger selves, we could impart the wisdom that we wish we had when we were younger, and maybe avoid pain, heartache and perhaps an embarrassing social disease. And in this fantasy, we always assume that we will be grateful for these pronouncements from on high… even though, if you stop and think about it for a second, these pronouncements are largely the same as the ones that came from your father at the time. And not only did you ignore those bits of wisdom at the time, now you look like your father, meaning that the response to your benevolence would likely only be, “Um, when did we decide that lard was part of the food pyramid, fat man? And no, you can’t have any of my cigarettes! They’re, like, a buck-eighty a pack!” And then you will kill your younger self in a fit of rage, and then where will you be? But I digress.

The point is that All New X-Men has, for eight issues now, been an excuse to address that fantastical question: if you could talk to yourself 20 years ago, what would you say? And would it make any difference? Which is not particularly new ground for a science fiction story – hell, Van Damme did it in Timecop, and attempting to follow in the footsteps of Van Damme-age has never been a good long-term plan for anybody. But here, writer Brian Michael Bendis addresses the situation in s slightly different way: what if meeting yourself when you are older corrupts you? What if seeing that things didn’t turn out the way you planned when you were 20, rather than inspiring you to try harder to achieve your plan, instead hardens you, and makes you more cynical and ruthless? Or maybe it just fucking horrifies you, to the point where you’ll do anything to avoid whatever makes you into whatever you become?

It’s an interesting take on your standard Travel-Into-Your-Own-Past (or Future) story… but the question is: with five different original X-Men to follow, along with a bunch of new X-Men, is there enough of a focus to really make any particular point?