Sunday, May 17, 2009

Comic Reviews Week of 5/13/09

Now the time is here, for bad comics to feel fear.


Black Panther (v5) #4
Written By Reginald Hudlin
Art By Ken Lashley

Okay, so if you're going to plaster images of the new female Black Panther in pretty much every Marvel book, and have her on every cover of this series, then maybe, just maybe, she should be established by issue four. A crazy notion, I know, but it's worth a shot.

And that's not even the worst of the book's problems. First of all, Morlun was a shitty villain in the Spider-Man books, and the day has yet to come when his appearance elicits a reaction other than dread from most comic book readers. So, to bring him into what is already a pretty crappy book? Not a great idea.

This issue also includes T'Challa fighting against Death to...well...not die, it's not very exciting or particularly well-written. If you really like Hudlin's writing, you'll probably like it, but the remaining 99% of comics fans will probably wonder why this series gets to live while other, better comics go to an early grave.



Green Lantern Corps #36
Written By Peter J. Tomasi
Art By Patrick Gleason

I can sum up the main action of this issue thusly:

Sinestro: Soranik, I am your father!
Soranik: NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
Sinestro: Search your feelings, you know it to be true!
Soranik: NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! So, I assume you want me to turn evil?
Sinestro: What? No, I just wanted to give some exposition.
Soranik: Um....okay?
Sinestro: Outstanding. Well then, I must be on my way.
-Exit Sinestro-

Also, Sinestro at one point busts out an old Latin maxim, which he then translates into English that makes no sense seeing as he's an alien talking to another alien. Yeah, it's kind of nitpicking, but still, it kind of seems like lazy writing combined with pretentiousness. I mean, it's a maxim native to earth, which neither participant in the conversation is from, so why would Sinestro feel the need to say that. Especially since English probably isn't spoken on Korugar, so what we have here is basically a linguistic non-sequitur.

Anyway, the riot featured on the cover is featured for all of two splash pages. On the one hand, it's kind of false advertising, but on the other, this issue is mainly exposition, and not even exciting exposition, and it's hard to make a cover of that.





Ultimate Spider-Man #132
Written By Brian Michael Bendis
Art By Stuart Immonen

Wow, I didn't realize this comic was still around. But here it is, at issue #132, the series that taught us all the true meaning of the word 'decompression.'

At any rate, there's really no reason for Ultimate Spider-Man to exist anymore. I mean, back in the day, Spider-Man had a wife and a fancy job and he wasn't the lovable loser that Marvel assumed everyone wanted him to be. But since One More Day hit, Ultimate Spider-Man is not the unique view of the character it once was, and even though it's been a consistently decent, if not great, title, the rest of the Ultimate line has been deteriorating at an incredible rate. And because of that, Marvel's decided to basically blow the whole thing up and restart a bunch of series. It's not a strategy that seems likely to work, but I suppose it's worth a shot.

But I digress, this state of affairs leaves this issue with the task of selling the idea that there's a world-changing event happening without actually making any forward progress on that story. Given that mandate, this issue is really just marking time, though it's not the creative team's fault, really.

Nano-Micro-Mini-Reviews, so I don't have to think as hard:

Savage She-Hulk #2 (of 4): Considering that the remit for this series was to have two She-Hulks in a cat fight, it's not bad.

Secret Warriors #4: A Bendis comic where nothing happens? No, I simply won't believe it.

Dark Reign: Young Avengers #1 (0f 6): Any comic that only features the titular Young Avengers on the last page of the comic has to be the greatest Young Avengers comic of all-time.

And, because I have too much time on my hands, I would like to present

A Very Special Retraux Revieux



Adventures of the Outsiders #35
Written By Mike W. Barr
Art By Alan Davis and Paul Neary
Cover Date July 1986

Just looking at that cover, you know there's going to be problems.

Anyway, you're probably wondering how this issue came to be, after all, as a side character said in the issue previous to this one:


It turns out that this isn't the real Hitler, but instead a clone, made possible by the scientific efforts of a character that Mike Barr feels compelled to name 'Madame Ovary.' You might accuse him of hacky writing, but after 'The Nuclear Family', 'The Duke of Oil'. and 'The Force of July' it's clear that he was suffering from some sort of undisclosed mental illness that most likely played a role in the creation of this story.

But anyway, the evil Baron Bedlam has managed to clone Hitler, but it's soon become clear that the ol' Fuhrer isn't quite all there. So, the Baron comes up with a cunning plan, to restore Hitler to full strength all he needs to do is put Adolf in his element. How, you might ask? Oh, it's exactly as bad as you think:



But you see, this story isn't really about Hitler coming back from the dead for vengeance, it's really a story about redemption....Hitler's redemption...no, I'm not kidding:



Yes, that's right, cloned Hitler, overcome at the guilt of killing millions of Jews decides to kill himself, which is bad enough, but then Mike Barr tries to twist it into something about there being hope even for the worst of us.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Comic Reviews Week of 5/6/09

Well, it's time for another week of reviews, or is it?

Yes, it is. And we start this week with...oh, fuck...



Flash - Rebirth #2 (of 6)
Written By Geoff Johns
Art By Ethan Van Sciver
Suffering By Me

Okay, well, this is issue two of Barry Allen's return to being THE Flash, which I still think is kind of a bad idea, but hell, what are you going to do.

Geoff Johns seems to think that the best way to characterize Barry Allen is to give him some angst. He's wrong, though. As a practical matter, the last thing anyone wants to read about is another emo super-hero with a tragic past. One of the few things that was good about Barry Allen back in the day was that he was largely free of that bullshit. He didn't brood, he didn't have dark secrets, and that was okay.

Anyway, the Johns version of Barry Allen is that he's a cop (which doesn't seem that faithful to earlier depictions of him which emphasized the scientist part a bit more, but whatever) and that he believes his father to be falsely convicted of murder. I assume that part is a straight-up retcon, because I can't remember anything like that before hand. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that his father was really guilty, and that Barry will have to reconcile his black and white morality (as seen in issue #1) with his father's sins.

That or Barry Allen finally finds the evidence that his father was innocent and must confront the inadequacies of the criminal justice system of which he is a part. I can't say I care much either way.

But hey, if you ever said to yourself, 'Man, I'd really like Barry Allen to come back, except instead of being a boring nice guy, I want him to be a boring stand-offish guy, with a dark past...also, I want him to make sure everyone knows that he's a cop by dropping cop slang like 'perps' and 'contain the scene' every other sentence.' Well, then you're Geoff Johns and I can only imagine that this is some sort of punishment for not liking Superboy Prime enough.



Irredeemable #2
Written By Mark Waid
Art By Peter Krause

Iredeemable seems to a miniseries designed to answer the question, "What if a Superman-like character lived in the real world, with all of its attendant problems of celebrity and the like?" I suppose that's a fair question, but well, I'm not sure that's where this is headed.

Actually, I think I want to reserve judgment until it's over, although so far it really hasn't been that good. This issue seems to be showing us, "What would happen if you had a Lois Lane/Clark Kent/Superman love triangle sort of situation in the real world," and it works out badly, as you might expect.

It's average, which kind of makes it somewhat uninteresting to talk about.



Power Girl #1
Written By Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti
Art By Amanda Conner

I've been wracking my brain to come up with the reason for why people like Power Girl. I mean, her ever-changing origin story has gone from "obscure" to "faintly moronic" to "utter confusing" and finally stopped at "too convoluted for it's own good." And the character, more often than not, has showcased some rather unfortunate stereotypes of female behavior. At the end of the day, I am forced, with some reluctance, to conclude, that the only reason anyone has ever like Power Girl is because of her tits.

There, I said it. The sooner we all come to terms with that, the easier the rest of this review will be. (You can tell that this is a top-flight review blog, because I didn't make the rest/breast pun in the last sentence)

But before I begin, I'd like to showcase part of the book, which kind of makes my point for me better than I ever could:



First of all, if Power Girl doesn't want people to look at her boobs, why would she dress like that? Second of all, someone should do a running count on the number of boob jokes in this series. By the time it gets cancelled at about issue fifteen, I'm willing to bet that they've made over twenty of them.

Anyway, the premise of the series is that Power Girl is trying to start her life over and so has decided to become a corporate executive in order to help the world. I'd give them a pass for the lag between pitching a comic and it coming out, but even before the recession the superhero as a good-hearted executive was trite and not terribly believable. Then she fights the Ultra-Humanite, because Power Girl has no rogues' gallery, and they needed someone to fight her.

The art's good, the writing not-so-much, and it's kind of built on a foundation of sand anyway. But it's worth a shot, I suppose.


New Mutants (v4) #1
Written By Zeb Wells
Art By Diogenes Neyes

Well, here we go again!

In 1983, Marvel launched a companion series to the then super-popular Uncanny X-Men called New Mutants. For a time, it was really popular, then it kind of fell apart, then Rob Liefeld showed up, then the '90s happened.

I suppose the best way to explain why this comic exists is that Marvel figured that at some point New Mutants was a smash hit. For the last few years, they've been operating under the assumption that it was the concept of young mutants hanging out and occasionally fighting crime that made the book a success rather than the specific characters. After trying three times in a row to replicate even a fraction of the success of the original New Mutants, and failing each time, Marvel has decided to try something else.

So, now they're working from the other angle, figuring that it was the specific character that made the first incarnation of the New Mutants so successful. So, they've brought back as many of the characters as they could scare up, seemingly brought back on of their more notable villains and are hoping that it recaptures the magic, or at least puts up respectable sales numbers.

I'm in my early twenties, so when I was growing up, most of these characters had either fallen off the grid of were in X-Force, so I don't have particularly fond memories of any of them. And if you premise doesn't even appeal to people as old as me, what the fuck are you doing, anyway?

That said, it's fine.

Mini-micro-reviews: For when thought is too much to ask

X-Men: First Class: Finals #4 (0f 4): You could do much worse.

Marvel Zombies 4 #2: If you're bringing in the Midnight Sons, you've drained the idea well dry, and it's time to give it a rest. Incidentally, that lesson is more applicable to every day life than you might think.

Final Crisis Aftermath - Run! #1: On the one hand, it's not bad, on the other hand, propagation of crossover series must end, or all will be lost.

Warlord #2: In the savage world of Skartaris, no one has yet invented pants. Actually, this one isn't bad either, and it is written by Mike Grell, so I can only assume this is an official apology for the Bruce Jones miniseries.

Trinity #49: So...this is still going, huh? How about that. This issue, the earth explodes...I can only assume this means the end of the DC line.

Amazing Spider-Man #593: Hey, here's a funny story. in 1995, there was a crossover called "Underworld Unleashed" in the DC universe. The goal of the crossover was to reinvigorate villains via demonic grants of power. It was fine crossover, but the consensus is that it probably wasn't a very good idea. Even the writer of the crossover said as much in his afterword in the collected edition. That writer's name was Mark Waid, and seeing as what he does to the Vulture in this issue...

Dollhouse (The TV show): Here me people of geekdom, simply because a show was created by Joss Whedon does not make it worthy of being revered. This show isn't good, and for a show which essentially stars a tabula rasa and a bunch of villains, it always seems to take the easy way out. Case in point, an unstable guy who killed a bunch of people to escape from the Dollhouse is an good idea. Making him a cartoonish villain is not. Also, having the guy who spent the entire season trying to take down the Dollhouse decide in the span of one episode, "Well, I went to incredible lengths to take this evil organization down and rescue the girl, but I suppose doing the exact opposite couldn't hurt," is not good no matter how fucking clever you think you are.

Star Trek (The Movie): J.J. Abrams, you can either work in the existing continuity or you can start over, but having your cake and eating it too....man....

Anyway, I didn't like this movie, but it's not because it fucked around with continuity, it's mainly because...I don't know, it was a bit too slick for its own good.

I mean, here's the thing, the movie is basically a caricature of Star Trek with some high-end special effects and action sequences tacked on. They basically went through Trek, found out the distinguishing marks of each character and jammed them all in one film. So you've got McCoy with his, "I'm a doctor, not a...." line and Sulu fencing, and Chekov with the inability to pronounce the letter 'v'. And if your goal is to make Star Trek appeal to the broadest possible audience, this is exactly how you'd do it.

So while I can appreciate the technical skill with which the movie was made, I just can't bring myself to say I liked it,

Also, by my count Kirk received a sextuple-promotion at the end from cadet to captain. That's probably a bit excessive, especially since most of the members of Starfleet academy were on all those ships that Nero blew up before the Enterprise showed at Vulcan.