Robin # 168
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Freddie Williams II and Andy Kubert
Published by DC Comics
Is it time for a bit of cautious optimism, now that Peter Milligan is beginning his run on Robin? Milligan's work often gets unfavorably compared to Morrison's, as both have operated on Vertigo series that can be pretty out there and he's also spent some time on some of mainstream super-hero titles. It's not really a fair comparison, most of the time, but it wouldn't be surprising if it starts rearing it's head again. Whether he's destined to stay with the title after the Ra's Al Ghul cross-over story that begins here is probably something that can be found by looking around DC Comics fansites--but then, of course, you'd have to look around fansites and remember who you're sharing your hobby with. Either way, Milligan's here for now, and it looks like it might be the Milligan who did the immensely enjoyable Skreemer series, and not the one who's also churning out Infinity Inc. As cross-over super-hero books go, this wasn't too bad. (It's an issue of Robin, so admittedly, expectations are low.) It's clear that now is the time where Grant Morrison and company are going to begin the major push for Damian, Batman's biological son, to join the cast of Bat-characters, and the only thing up in the air is whether he'll end up on the lawful side of the equation by the end of this story. Not a whole lot happens in the issue--a reminder of who the bad guy is, in case "The Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul" didn't make clear, a rough skirmish between Robin and Damian and a closing page of ninjas, ninjas and ninjas. For what it is, it's decent: the ability to get aroused by the prospect of a comic-book cross-over is always going to be the province of action figure collectors, fan-fic writers, and small children, and none of those are this readers bag--we'd much prefer a return to the tennis storyline, which seems to be totally gone now. Freddie Williams II rejoins the book, and he does his regular "little cartoon version of Erik Larsen" thing--deal with that as you will.
The Exterminators # 23
Written by Simon Oliver
Art by Darick Robertson & John Lucas
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics
The conclusion to the biggest fight scene this comic has had is exactly like the conclusion to every big action movie where the protagonists are surrounded by insurmountable odds. People who hate each other team up, people let their emotions get the best of them (and then die), and a deus ex machina saves everybody in the story who really matters. Then on the last page, there's a horror movie "worst is yet to come" moment, and you're out. It's Exterminators, so the insurmountable odds is defined as "lots and lots of insects, and some crazy people that worship insects," and the protagonists are made up of a Taoist/Buddhist/whatever Eastern-mythology-you-need cowboy, an ex-con named after a dead writer, a particularly vicious gangland drug dealer, and a random assortment of side characters. As always with the Exterminators, it skirts on wheels of black comedy, veers close to parody, and yet keeps ending up on the side of angels. We've resigned ourselves to consistently expecting the next issue to be the last as no one seems to care about this comic, so our enjoyment of each issue is tainted with a bit of anger.
Y: The Last Man # 59
Written by Brian K. Vaughan
Art by Pia Guerra & Jose Marzan, Jr.
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics
Regardless of what the cover implies, the monkey survives the issue. Here we are, with one issue to go. Hopefully, the next issue will take place far in the future, and be some kind of epilogue to the entire series. Otherwise, it's going to be some kind of cry-heavy emoticon festival, where Pia Guerra draws all the remaining characters standing around in various states of shock and sadness. We realize we stand among the few who are reading Y: The Last Man, who, having been with the title since the first issue experienced the following reaction:
"Why the fuck did I read this comic for the past five years?"
Astonishing X-Men # 23
Written by Joss Whedon
Art by John Cassady
Published by Marvel Comics
Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men comic, a title that exists solely because Joss Whedon and John Cassady have enough of a grip on the nerd festival that they could get Marvel to publish a comic where USAgent spent 22 pages making out with Fin Fang Foom, is pretty much the holy archetype comic of all time. Every issue has clever dialog and big booming fights, and it's pretty comprehensible even though it only comes out every three months or so. That means it's supposed to be really good, right? Yet it still seems to lack a bit of the soul and imagination that shows up in lesser books. It might have something to do with it being about the X-Men, a family of characters that's about as unwelcoming to an uninformed reader as a watching untranslated French soap operas would be to a confused Dallas Cowboys fan. Or maybe it's just that Joss Whedon and John Cassady are both a little better than this kind of stale tripe, and their lack of ability to disguise their condescension comes across to aggressively. Either way, Astonishing X-Men is probably the best regular team book being published by either company--but it's still a pretty good example of why team comics are pretty tiring to keep up with.
Criminal # 10
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips
Published by Icon/Marvel Comics
If all the major publishing companies were doing crime comics, would Brubaker's Criminal still seem like such a fresh and exciting read? As it is, like the Factual always says during weeks when Hellblazer comes out, here is a comic that is unpredictable and reliable in tone and content, which, when put along the stacks of books that arrive each week, makes it painfully unique. Even when something like Astonishing X-Men is clever, or Robin is surprisingly not terrible, they are still super-hero titles featuring mainstream super-heroes. Nothing is ever going to occur in those books that can match up to the surprise of a sober Mcnulty or a dead Stringer Bell. That's the landscape that comics have to operate in, outside of their main audience. As anyone can plainly tell from any cursory survey of comics reviews and websites, the main audience relies on them for that--most comics buyers want Superman to always win, they want Batman to always struggle with not murdering the Joker, and they want Hal Jordan to be a Green Lantern. If you're somebody who reads comics on a regular basis, but you also ingest Cormac McCarthy, The Wire, or any other random pop example of genre work that doesn't play by the genre-specific norm, then super-hero comics don't take that long to get boring. Then, when something like Criminal comes along, or Grant Morrison's Seaguy, or any of the other 3rd tier books that operate without explicit editorial control, all the overblown horses of complimentary phrases come out.
Why all this blathering? Because this issue of Criminal was merely okay, and anybody with sense figured out the chick killed Tracy's brother when she was first introduced, yet on the back of the comic there's a quote claiming that "There was only one book that caused me to hold my breath for the final 11 pages...that book was Criminal."
The fuck?
The Immortal Iron Fist # 10
Written by Matt Fraction & Ed Brubaker
Art by David Aja & Kano
Published by Marvel Comics
Isn't Kano a character from the Mortal Kombat video game? That must be irritating, to have that name, and work in the one field where you can bet that everyone of your coworkers probably knows that game really well. Immortal Iron Fist comes back to what makes it work the best: going balls-out and having ridiculous shit like somebody named Dog-Brother # 1 attack using the "RAZOR DERVISH ATTACK-ULTIMATE" while fighting a crazy chick named The Bride of Nine Spiders. And yet he still loses, even after claiming that he's "a pack of nine thousand strong!" Brubaker & Fraction are onto something with this title, and with this issue, we think we might have guessed what it is: a complete lack of angst. None of the characters in this title ever complain or whine about their situation--unlike Batman, Superman & basically the entire Marvel universe excepting Iron Fist, this is a comic about people who really enjoy battling each other to the death while wearing donkey-ass spandex. These are freaks in love with the fetish, and it's a pleasure to read something with this little shame, and this little ambition. The Bride of Nine Spiders ain't looking to prove shit: she's a bad-ass bitch and she's totally in love with herself about it. Seriously, like writing late-night diary entries about her new pants, and what she ate this morning. Why doesn't everybody read this book? Do people really care that much about Skrull invasions?
New Avengers: Illuminati # 5
Written by Brian Michael Bendis & Brian Reed
Art by Jim Cheung & Mark Morales
Published by Marvel Comics
It's kind of fascinating how Marvel keeps being so successful at selling these big-event books. Here we are, the fifth issue of this mini-series (which you don't need to have read issues 1-4 to understand, as no one at the Factual did, and we got this one fine) and Marvel is gearing up for another big "this changes everything moment." Meanwhile, DC's big events don't seem to catch fire, all the new books they put out are dwindling in sales, and the most successful thing they have going is a pretty niche-specific cross-over about Green Lanterns and the Justice League, which is (after all the screaming and boob-socks) pretty much exactly like every Justice League comic ever. Marvel, on the other hand, is on their fifth or 70th 'big event' comic in a row, and while all of them have just been long definitions of catchphrases, each of them has worked out pretty well for the house that Stan Lee plastered his name all over. We're moving away from "Who's side are you on?" and "No more mutants" to "Who can you trust?" and in the back of the book, you're graced with the question "Who would you sleep with?" Hopefully, "Who's father would you peg with your tongue?" is right around the corner.
Oh, and Black Bolt is a Skrull, or was. Maybe Thor and Colossus as well, but that's more than likely just a fake-out. Try to make yourself care, you'll be blowing rent money on it next summer. Illuminati # 5 wasn't a very good comic. It was, however, a pretty well constructed advertisement for what will probably be Marvel's next best-selling title, which is apparently called "Secret Experiment." Didn't they used to give these teaser things away for free?
Omega The Unknown # 2
Written by Jonathan Lethem & Karl Rusnak
Art by Farel Darymple & Paul Hornschemeier
Published by Marvel Comics
What the fuck, Lethem? The Factual is firmly in support of Motherless Brooklyn, The Disappointment Artist, Men & Cartoons, This Shape We're In & even Fortress of Solitude, and yet we're sitting here, reading Omega The Unknown and still only digging the art. This shit is double-B boring, and while it "makes sense" it "makes sense" in the totally abstract kind of dipshit spandex manner. The only appealing thing about Omega the Unknown, besides the looks-like-this-comic-should-be-about-dating art, is that Lethem's name is on the cover, which gets the imagination rolling. But when read, it's just...stupid. Robots fighting? A kind old black man who looks after the goofball hero? An obnoxious protagonist, coupled with an even more obnoxious nurse? Stilted dialog? Maybe this thing will start working as the issues come in, and we'll be glad to eat our words, but gaging this on it's lonesome, this is just a pile of boring ass phoning-it-in. We get enough of that on anything Geoff Johns does.
Fearless # 1
Written by Mark Sable & David Roth
Art by P.J. Holden
Published by Image Comics
Each week, The Factual sends it's intern to the local comic shop, and said intern is under orders to return with a random 1st issue of something. The hope is that it might turn out to be a diamond, a diamond in the rough, or just merely pretty in the light. Fearless is one of those experiments, a comic published by Image, from a group of creators who are all relatively new to the business. Artistically, it's in that vein of comics that looks a lot like it's storyboards for an animated television series on the WB network, and it's various violence and language are all tame enough to mesh into that environment as well. Plotwise, it is so standard as to seem like it comes from a book about how to write mainstream comic books: super-hero with dorky past fighting the corruption and drug dealers that haunt his nondescript urban metropolis. The requisite "this is what makes this different from Batman" twist is that the hero suffers from a pretty severe case of whatever disease it is that makes someone incredibly terrified of absolutely everything. (Which we're not sure is an actual disease.) There's nothing here to recommend this book, unless you're sitting around wondering how to take your crappy role-playing game sketchpad into story format. If that's the case, buy it, cut out the pictures of the good guy and replace him with Danger Globe, the Mightiest Mortal Man, or whatever it is you're calling that guy.
Lobster Johnson: The Iron Promethus # 3
Written by Mike Mignola
Art by Jason Armstrong
Published by Dark Horse Comics
This is the issue where Mignola amps the pulpiness, specifically by including a talking brain in a jar. Talking brains in jars have a long history in comics, one that predates the version of a talking brainlike object in David Lynch's Dune, and there's a reason for that: there is nothing ever wrong with a talking brain in a jar. One of the finest moments in comics history is the famous "talking brain in a jar" brain-fight in Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. Here, Mignola and Armstrong's brain merely reveals that he believes the greater adversary in the current battle to be the devil himself, and then the brain gets shot multiple times. While the brain is wrong, the adversary is clearly Fu Manchu, or someone who dresses like Fu Manchu, no one corrects the brain. That's a pretty consistent caveat too, that agreeable attitude that listeners adopt during conversations with brains in jars. They are, after all, only capable of speech, and it's a bit nasty to contradict them--how would they know any better? They can't SEE. They're just a BRAIN in a JAR. Also, this comic incorporates a classic fight tactic of throwing a magic scorpion at ones foe. These two things are why Mignola's comics consistently sell. He may not do it every time he shows up, but eventually, Mignola will give you what you want. As long as what you want are things that sit on dusty shelves, being tended by people who still wear snap-brims.
-Tucker Stone, 2007
It's funny you praise Iron Fist to the moon after lambasting Criminal for being genre drivel, and then wonder why people aren't reading IRon Fist. I don't read Iron Fist because it's approximately one million times more boring than any of the Chinese wuxia films it's ripping off. If you think Iron Fist is so great, find a good place that rents Asian cinema and start watching HK flicks, or even weird Japanese movies. You'll see shit that Brube and Fraction could never come up with themselves, only imitate colorlessly with spandex jackasses.
Posted by: | 2007.11.13 at 02:15
I do watch HK flicks, and weird Japanese movies. I even review them here. I'm also only coming down on Criminal because, unlike every other time i've reviewed Criminal, this was the first time that I didn't care so much for an issue, and I'm tired of Criminal getting a free pass just because it's "different" when it's really only "different" from the comics that surround it.
You're right to claim that there are far better examples of the martial arts genre in film--but that's an argument that would also apply to just about every single comic that comes out on a weekly basis. Adventure films, action films, drama, espionage, thrillers, noir--if you're going to make the argument that renting old movies would be preferable to the comics that imitate the genre and include "shit" that is only "imitated colorlessly with spandex jackasses" than there's no reason to read mainstream comics at all. There's nothing that super-hero comics do as well (currently) as the entire library of film.
Besides that, part of the reason I'm going to hold Criminal to a higher standard than Iron Fist is because Criminal isn't a corporate property being written under editorial control. It's a comic book that hits the stands the same time as Blue Beetle, yes, but it's a creator-owned book that exists because Brubaker and Phillips are working to write something that matters to them. At it's most basic, I'll always love something like that more, solely because I feel like there's more at stake. In the little world of super-hero comics, something like Iron Fist is getting compared to the other stupid super-hero books--and it comes off as magic. Criminal is operating on a different playing field, and I felt like kicking it's taint this time around.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2007.11.13 at 07:46