Last Week In Comics
Apologies for that brief period of silent running just then – I’ve been out of town, going to the pub and writing poetry (yeah, that’s right! POETRY! ROCK AND ROLL!) so comics blogging (and reading, in fact) has kind of taken a back seat. I’m two issues behind on Wednesday Comics, although I can confidently predict that Wonder Woman is unreadable, Superman complains, Deadman is gorgeous, Flash is clever and charming and Neil Gaiman is having just a little tiny bit more fun than his readers are. Am I right?
Anyway. I did get to read last week’s books while travelling the length and breadth of the country (well, a bit of the length, not much of the breadth. Well, a bit of the breadth. Edinburgh to York and back, whatever that is). It was a huge week of releases, and we’re not going to be able to cover all the bases on the podcast, so here are a few reviews of stuff that came out this week that I read.
(OH DEAR GOOD GRIEF. Catwoman is on TV. As is It Could Happen To You. And About a Boy. And The Princess Diaries. What are we going to have on in the background while I’m writing this?)
GHOST RIDERS: HEAVEN’S ON FIRE 1 – It’s a shame that this miniseries is coming out. I don’t mean that it’s a shame that it’s coming out at all, I just mean that it’s a shame that it has to come out so soon. I know that by the time it’s wrapped up, Jason Aaron will have done nearly two years on Ghost Rider, but to be quite honest I could read his Ghost Rider until the leather jackets that used to be cows come home. It’s partly because it’s an old-school Marvel horror book of the like which we haven’t seen since Ellis’s Hellstorm series, with which series it shares a number of characters such as Jaine Cutter and Damon himself. It’s also because it’s a flat-out slice of gonzo grindhouse lunacy with skull-headed dudes taking on a rogue angel and his army, trying to save the anti-christ with the help of a heavily armed ex-nun in the culmination of a run that has featured heavily tattooed giant religious maniacs, haunted stretches of highway, cannibal townsfolk, Ghost Riders of many nations including one who rides a shark, and an army of nunchuk-wielding nurses on motorbikes. This is the best Ghost Rider has been in years – possibly ever, in fact. It’s going to make a heck of an Omnibus at some point, but for the moment if you have the slightest interest in awesomeness then get this book.
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 601 – Mario Alberti, fresh from the Spider-Man/X-Men miniseries, (beautifully) draws this Mark-Waid-written prologue to this week’s big Chameleon story. It’s a fairly fluffy and light issue, which isn’t a bad thing given how poorly things have been going for Peter Parker lately – Pete gets drunk, (possibly) beds his new roommate, then manages to nearly miss a date with Mary Jane, who’s just swept back into his life. Waid’s one of the best of the current stable of Spider-writers, and Peter is at his quiptastic best in this issue. The only disappointment comes towards the end of the issue, with a last-page gag which ties itself in a knot trying to make itself work, but by that point all the readers are probably still fizzing in the brain over the implications of Mary Jane’s revelation a page or two earlier. The main story is followed by a Bendis/Quesada short, which is a little out of place to say the least, given that it sets up developments that are to be followed up in the pages of New Avengers. Why it’s in this issue is anyone’s guess, although if I had to take a stab at it I’d wager it was originally intended for issue 600 but ran late. Still, it’s extra content for free, so it’d be a little churlish to complain about it.
DETECTIVE COMICS 855 – The Bat-relaunch has been a mixed bag, to say the least. For every Batman & Robin there’s been a… well, any of the others, really. Thankfully, Rucka and Williams prove with this issue that their first Batwoman issue of Detective wasn’t a fluke by producing a second intriguing, action-fuelled, hugely gorgeous installment. Kate Kane is turning out to be just as interesting in her own way as Dick Grayson, and her ties to Satan’s Intergang or whatever they’re called is a story that pretty much demands the reader come back next month. If you’re a DC fan, an art fan, or an action fan, this book is pretty much essential at the moment. In the backup strip (sorry! Co-feature!), Kate’s ex Renee Montoya gets beaten up some more in the seedy crime drama Rucka and Cully Hamner have dropped this new Question into. It’s a great package all round, and it’s bizarre to think that this is coming out of the same office as things like the misfiring Red Robin series.
CHEW 3 – You know all the great things you keep hearing about this series? They’re all true, and they’re not exaggerations. This book really seriously is that good. Layman and Guillory lay on the grotesquerie with a heavy trowel but never tip the balance too far into self-parody. This is a book that is serious about what it does without taking itself seriously, and while I can’t go into all the immensely odd plot developments that this issue contains, I will say that Guillory manages to make a splash page of a thug projectile vomiting into Tony Chu’s face into one of the most sweetly romantic things I’ve seen in a comic for a good long time.
THE MARVELS PROJECT 1 – We had considered this for the podcast, but we did Captain America 600 recently and Marvel have the Ultimate relaunch books out this week so it didn’t make the cut. Anyway, this is the purportedly definitive Secret Origin of the Marvel Universe, as told by Brubaker and Epting, the architects of the Cap relaunch, and it starts off right at the beginning, with the beginning of the origin of the Golden Age Angel. It’s actually kind of cute – the revelation that the Angel’s mask and pistols were handed down to him from the dying-of-old-age Two-Gun Kid is the kind of touch that would only work in the Marvel or DC Universes, where that kind of history is so lacquered on to the firmament that these kinds of incidental details can be woven into the ongoing tapestry without anyone raising too much of an eyebrow. Using the Angel as a narrator to show us the emergence of Namor and the Human Torch works in a way that using one of the more prominent or well-developed characters wouldn’t – the Golden Age Big Three have all had their experiences of WWII fairly well documented, but Angel’s never been as fully explored and so Brubaker is able to build more of a character out of whole cloth for him. There’s not a huge amount of plot here yet, though, and given how enjoyable this first issue is it might be best to wait for the inevitable collection so you can have a nice edition for the shelf.
CITIZEN REX 1 – Mario Hernandez has never had the same cachet as Jaime and Beto, possibly because he’s never done anything on the scale of Palomar or Locas, but he’s quietly plugged away on an occasional basis throughout the history of Love & Rockets and occasionally beyond. His ‘Me For The Unknown’ in L&R v2 (drawn by Beto) was a slow-moving thriller, but Citizen Rex, which is also a Mario/Beto production, is tonally similar but in a fantastical science fiction setting rather than the grounded world of Me For The Unknown. This issue is an intriguing story of robots who don’t realise they’re robots, beaten-up society columnists and soup, and while it’s visually a typically accomplished affair, the story suffers from a lack of focus that makes it hard for the reader to latch on to any character as the protagonist. As with a lot of Hernandez Bros miniseries, it’s likely that this will read far better in a collected edition, but on the basis of the first issue Citizen Rex is a faintly puzzling and not terribly compelling curiosity, and far from the strongest work either Mario or Beto has produced.
So, yeah, that was this week’s books. Did you read anything interesting?
(It was The Princess Diaries in the end. What can I say, Anne Hathaway is charming.)
A quick recommendation
Now, I don’t want to say too much about this here, because we’re going to be talking about it on the next episode of the podcast in much greater detail (in all likelihood), but if anyone out there is a fan of Lenore by Roman Dirge and is wondering whether the first issue of the new series from Titan is any good, I would say run, don’t shamble, to your finest local funnybook emporium and grab yourself a copy, because it’s sterling stuff.
If you aren’t aware of Lenore, the cutest zombie in the universe, then this is the perfect time to acquaint yourself with something that’s equal parts Jhonen Vasquez and Edward Gorey, but with more subtlety than the former and more visceral gags than the latter. It’s cute and horrific at the same time and is well worth a few bucks of anyone’s money. Forego that holofoil Ultimate relaunch, and get to know the sweetest, deadest, most horrifically superb heroine in modern comic books.
Some random rambling about the best of the worst of the 1990s
I’ve been on a back-issue re-reading kick for the last few weeks, ever since I decided to tidy out the elephant’s graveyard of comics under the bed (goodbye, issues of Marvel Adventures Avengers, you were great at the time but space is limited and I may not need to revisit Batroc’s Dating Agency any time soon. Actually, scratch that, that one’s coming back out of the recycling pile). I’ve ploughed through all 109 issues of the original run on Thunderbolts (including the Avengers/Thunderbolts mini, but not including the Fightbolts… thing), and while it’s interesting to track the ups and downs of that title and the dips in quality that occur whenever there’s a creative regime change on the horizon, picking the run apart will take more than just one post.
Having finished that, I set about tackling the run of Cable & Deadpool trade paperbacks which I’d accumulated – and by the way, if you were considering buying that series in trade any time soon, I’d get on it pretty sharpish if I were you, because some of the individual volumes are going for a pretty penny on Amazon Marketplace – and it didn’t take me long to remember why I’d bought them in the first place.
Cable and Deadpool was always a weird book. I mean, just looking at the title, it was neither fish nor fowl from day one. It was launched in the wake of the cancelled Agent X and Soldier X, and reeked a little of Marvel wanting to keep the characters in circulation but not having any ideas on how to do that beyond shoving them together in a room and hoping they would somehow capture an audience by little more than the application of the equation “Cable readership + Deadpool readership = Cable and Deadpool readership”. It was not a particularly auspicious name for a book that nobody expected to last beyond its first year.
Quite aside from the fact that it was a meal made of leftovers, it was also a showcase for two characters who together symbolised the worst excesses of the 1990s. Cable was filed under ‘big guns’, ‘pouches’, ‘mysterious past’, ‘grim’ and ‘glowing eye’. Deadpool was filed under ‘anti-hero’, ‘mysterious past’, ‘pouches’, ‘kills a bit’ and ‘rip-off of another character’ (seriously, if Deathstroke the Terminator was Seth Brundle and Bugs Bunny was an unlucky insect of the order Diptera, then Deadpool was the shambling result of the teleporter accident). By all rights, they should have been consigned to the same 1990s graveyard as Century, Blackwulf and Nightwatch.
What went right with the characters, though, was that creators who weren’t interested in the low-rent origins of the pair got their hands on the characters. Joe Kelly turned Deadpool from ‘evil Spider-Man with guns’ to a rounded character who used his machine-gun quippery to mask his self-loathing, his fear of being a hero, and his fear of not being a hero. Guys like Robert Weinberg, David Tischman and Darko Macan took Cable’s basic premise of a man fighting a hopeless war across time all by himself and extrapolated a lonely, tired soldier’s story from that weak start point.
By the time Fabian Nicieza, himself the co-creator of Deadpool, got his hands on the characters with their joint title he was in a position to really do something with them, and he did. He turned Cable into a modern-day messiah, setting up an island haven for all who wanted to join him (and thus setting himself up on the watchlist of every country in the world) and Deadpool into his buddy-stroke-foil. Story after story played out with Cable as a chessmaster playing a long game, and Deadpool as his favourite pawn. Supporting characters from both of the principal players’ backgrounds (Domino, Weasel, Irene Merryweather) played key roles, as did fairly random guest stars from the four corners of the Marvel Universe (Diamondback, Commcast, the Cat).
Artist Patrick Zircher, a former collaborator of Nicieza’s on Thunderbolts, handled most of the first half of the series after a short initial run from Mark Brooks. Zircher’s angular style, miles away from the Deodatos and Finches so beloved of Marvel both at the time and since, gave the book an unusual look that helped to differentiate it from so many of the other titles on the stands at the time. After he left, the book went through a number of different fill-in and substitute pencillers before finally settling on Reilly Brown, who started with a fairly shaky couple of issues before growing into the role and finally taking on co-writing duties on the final few instalments.
Unfortunately, although Cable & Deadpool was rattling along quite happily in a wibbly wobbly world of its own, the dictates of the wider Marvel line (specifically Mike Carey’s X-Men run) brought down the hammer in the form of the death of Cable. As a book called Cable & Deadpool isn’t a whole heck of a lot of good without, y’know, Cable, the book was only able to limp on for another eight issues as a sort of ersatz Deadpool Team-Up book before being cancelled with issue 50.
While it lasted, though, it was a blast. Gag-a-minute, intrigue-heavy, and for the most part self-contained (well, sort of. It was a continuation of the Niciezaverse, which is the long, single story that Nicieza’s been telling in every Marvel book he’s written for the last ten years, so there were storylines that originated in issues of Citizen V and the V Battalion). It’s the kind of thing Marvel would do well to publish now, when the rest of the line is tied up in Secret Civil Initiative Reign War Hulk. What kind of weird, topsy-turvy world do we live in when the thought of a book starring two thrown-together examples of the nadir of the nineties is an attractive proposition?
The Welcome Mat
Hello all, and welcome to the new House to Astonish website/blog thing. We figured the Podomatic page was good an’ all, but we felt it was time to get our own place.
Paul already has a blog at If Destroyed, so this will primarlily be a place for Al to blog about comics although don’t be surprised if Paul chips in too from time to time. We’ll also keep you up to date with new episodes of the podcast and all the other shenanigans we know you crazy kids love.
Make yourselves at home – sorprenden a nuestra casa es su casa de asombrar. Or something.
