I’ve been reading a lot of comics recently, mostly good, some not so much. This post is a quick overview on my impressions of some of the ones that stuck out more.
Uncanny X-Men #125 - #143
Uncanny X-Men really clicked for me starting from issue 125, with the Proteus story. It has pathos; character development; a creepy, psychotic villain; and great battles. The following Hellfire Club story was also great, and after that we go into the legendary Dark Phoenix saga, which isn’t as shocking as it would’ve been back in 1980 when it first came out, but still has a surprising emotional impact and really good character development for Cyclops. These issues develop the other characters a lot too; we get to see Nightcrawler find out Wolverine’s name for the first time, and Storm assume the mantle of leadership after Cyclops leaves the group, and Xavier try to come to terms with being in charge of a new, older, grittier X-Men team. The Hellfire Club story also introduces Kitty Pryde, and now I finally understand why everyone who read these comics likes her so much. She gives the book a big shot of cuteness, spunk, and fun. Her stories somehow manage to avoid all the usual pitfalls of stories about kid characters who work alongside adults; she’s not a useless whiner who the adults constantly have to rescue, but she’s also not a perfect prodigy who somehow operates on the same level as the older X-Men at thirteen years old. Her first big story is the also legendary “Days of Future Past”. Kitty does fight alongside the older X-Men here, but she can do it because her dystopian future self’s mind, with all her adult training and experience, is inhabiting her thirteen-year-old body. Issue #143 shows her fight an alien monster called an N’Garai when she’s alone in the mansion on Christmas Eve, and just come out on top by the skin of her teeth.
The narration can still be overly melodramatic, and the art still has that garishly colored late 70’s look, but the writing on Uncanny X-Men became a lot more interesting once we hit the 1980’s, and I’m glad I trudged through from issue 100 to get to this point.
She-Hulk (2004)
I started reading this because I wanted to try reading World War Hulk. As usual with Big Two event stories, reading World War Hulk requires me to read Planet Hulk, which requires me to read two to four issues of five other comics series including Fantastic Four, Incredible Hulk, She-Hulk, and probably also Howard the Duck. Luckily, She-Hulk is awesome. Similar to the case with Kitty Pryde, I finally get why everyone online thinks this character is so great.
She-Hulk is Jennifer Walters, a top-shelf lawyer who gains the ability to turn into a female version of Hulk. Unlike the version of Hulk we see in the movies, She-Hulk keeps her ability to think and speak when she transforms, but she is an over-the-top party girl with super strength, whereas Jen Walters is mousy and small. I haven’t figured out yet if her personality actually changes or if Jen just takes advantage of her alter ego to cut loose. In the first issue, She-Hulk loses her job at a DA’s office because she parties too much, and is also asked to leave Avengers Mansion because she parties too much, but gets a job for a law firm that specializes in superhuman law on the condition that she does the job as Jen Walters, not as She-Hulk. She accepts and takes on weird cases like a man who fell into a vat of atomic water at his workplace and became a superhero, and now wants to sue his employers. She even helps Spider-Man sue J. Jonah Jameson for libel.
Sometimes the meta humor regarding the “legal text” comics and the federal agency the Comics Code Authority gets a little too silly and unbelievable, but otherwise this is an awesome book with hilarious, weird storylines and fun characters. Jen / She-Hulk is funny, but also smart and competent enough to cheer for, and she bounces well off snooty senior lawyer Mallory Book, lovestruck superhero-loving fellow lawyer Augustus Pugliese, and her boss’s obnoxious supervillain granddaughter Southpaw.
I’ve seen a few people suggest bringing She-Hulk into the Netflix universe since she’s a lawyer. Honestly, I think that’s a terrible idea. She doesn’t fit the tone of the Netflix universe at all; there’s no way I can imagine her hanging around with Daredevil and Jessica Jones and the Punisher being a fun-loving party girl in jokey, weird superhero lawyer scenarios. She does deserve to be on screen, though. In a fantasy world where I ruled the MCU, I’d probably sneak Jen Walters into the next MCU Spider-Man movie somehow, then I’d do solo movies for She-Hulk, Squirrel Girl, and Kate Bishop, then do an A-Force movie where they come together with Captain Marvel, Black Widow, and the Wasp.
Robin: Year One
Robin is a lame character. I’ve always thought so. Half the reason I never got into the Teen Titans animated series back when it was on was that making Robin the leader of a superhero team seemed like such a dumb idea. I know that wasn’t fair and that any character can be good with the right writers, and Robin: Year One goes to prove it. It’s not lame at all. For the first time, I actually appreciated Robin.
You need some gritty realism to make a modern Batman story work–as a reader in 2018 who’s seen The Dark Knight and grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series, I’m not going to accept some cheesy all-American Adam West portrayal. At the same time, if you’re going to write about a twelve-year-old boy fighting psychopathic murderers, you’ve gotta handle it with a little humor and optimism, otherwise it becomes Madoka. Robin: Year One does a great job skating the line between these two things. Robin fights some nasty villains, and he goes through some real trauma and sees some horrific things, but he doesn’t break or crumble; he finds a reason to keep fighting.
Robin: Year One also has a great portrayal of Two-Face as a frightening killer, not at all the antihero or tragic fallen angel he sort of was in The Dark Knight and some of The Animated Series. The book goes just far enough that feels like a real psychopath and a big threat without coming across as just out for shock value. It’s a good reminder that Batman has lots of great villains, not just the Joker.
Batgirl Vol. 1: Batgirl of Burnside
This is a trade of issues 35 - 40 of the New 52 Batgirl series, after Brendan Fletcher and Cameron Stewart took over as writers and Babs Tarr as artist.
Since I really just got into this comic stuff myself, that sentence deserves some explanation. DC Comics rebooted their entire universe in 2011 with the Flashpoint event comic, where the Flash went back in time to try and stop his mom’s murder, changed the universe, fixed it, but kinda not really. Since history had been changed, that allowed DC to relaunch all their titles and restart from the beginning with all their famous heroes. This was called the New 52, I think because they started with 52 new series beginning at issue #1.
One of those was Batgirl, who was Barbara Gordon again. Barbara was shot by the Joker in The Killing Joke back in the late 80’s and had been Batman’s “girl in the chair” (a wheelchair) up to this point. One of the weird things about the New 52 was that history didn’t restart from the beginning of time, it restarted from some vague point in the recent past, so the writers could keep whatever they wanted to from the previous DC universe, and they decided that Barbara had still been shot and had been in a wheelchair, but her spine somehow healed and she was able to be Batgirl again. The first run of the New 52 Batgirl was written by a famous DC writer named Gail Simone, whose work is widely praised, but I haven’t read any of it because I do more Marvel than DC because of Marvel Unlimited. The reactions I’ve heard to Gail Simone’s Batgirl are mixed, and starting from issue 35 they basically did a soft reboot on the book with a new creative team.
I checked out the first issue of the Simone run, and it’s a lot like the Scott Snyder Batman stuff. The art is really similar, and the story is dark, dour, and in my opinion, a little bit dull. (That’s kind of a pattern for the New 52; now I know where the DC movies got that unfortunate creative direction from.) This run, on the other hand, is colorful and a lot more fun. It’s got a hip, youthful tone with lots of “college kids living in small apartments and hooking up on dating apps” stuff going on. It reminds me a lot of Scott Pilgrim without the video game and anime references. (Actually, there is one anime reference.) The story is pretty convoluted, but it’s enjoyably strange, with Batgirl fighting a crazed Insta-glam Batgirl impersonator and other hipster-tinged villains, and it concludes in a satisfying way. I love the art–it’s more realistic than Scott Pilgrim, with character designs that are still stylized but not quite as cartoony, and the color palette is less primary and more nightclub chic. I liked looking at it so much that kept me going even at a few points where the story got a bit slow.
Snotgirl
Speaking of Scott Pilgrim, this new series from Brian Lee O’Malley was almost worth the $25 I paid for the Image Comics Humble Bundle all on its own. Lottie Person, a fashion blogger who conceals the secret that she has horrible allergies and her nose is constantly running between shots, meets a younger up-and-coming fashion blogger who she dubs “Coolgirl”, and gets involved in a strange mystery when Coolgirl apparently dies before her eyes but then shows up just fine at a party a few nights later. Lottie also goes through a series of confusing emotions involving her ex-boyfriend and her ex-intern who he’s now dating. Lottie wants to hate his new girlfriend and tries to pull queen bee mean girl shenanigans on her, but keeps on getting confronted with evidence that his new girlfriend is a good person and feeling like the asshole in the situation.
Snotgirl is possibly even weirder than Scott Pilgrim. Like Batgirl, I love the colorful, stylish artwork, the strange plot, and the over-the-top characters. It would be easy to hate Lottie with how conceited and petty she is, but her paranoia about someone discovering her allergies and her numerous personality flaws, conveyed by a constantly running neurotic inner monologue, humanize her enough that I could feel sympathy for her even with all her flaws.
The Wicked + The Divine
On the other hand, you have The Wicked + The Divine, which focuses on a pantheon of twelve teenagers who’ve become living avatars for various ancient gods in an event that recurs every 90 years or so. The gods are treated like pop stars—they have fans, and hold concerts where they bestow their blessings on people in huge displays of mystical power. They wear outlandish clothes, act out, and are followed by groupies as they engage in feuds and romances and every kind of indulgence during the two years of life they’re allowed before being a god kills them.
Again, great artwork. I’m consistently impressed with the art in modern comics, whether Marvel, DC, or indie. It’s obvious that artist Jamie McKelvie was deeply influenced by big over-the-top musical acts of the Lady Gaga school when doing the art and designs for this series. And writer Kieron Gillen was obviously influenced just as much by the self-indulgent, self-important lifestyle of big over-the-top musical acts of any time period since the 1950s. And that’s sort of the problem: I had a hard time liking any of the characters, but I also didn’t dislike them in a really compelling way. They’re all hip and haughty and self-important and vain, except for Laura, the main character, who’s a slavish fan of the gods and worships the ground they walk on. (Appropriate for gods, I guess, but hard to sympathize with when they spend most of their time sniping at each other and talking about how great they are.)
After I was done reading the volume (I think the edition I have is actually an omnibus of the first two volumes), I found out that Gillen and McKelvie also created Phonogram, which Linkara reviewed, and he had the same complaint as I did about The Wicked + The Divine: the characters are hard to like because they’re so smug, vain, and self-important. So I guess it’s something they do on purpose. I don’t always need to like a character to enjoy their story. I maintain that Shinji Ikari is one of the best written characters in anime history, but he’s not exactly likeable. Frank Castle is another one; he has some admirable qualities, but I definitely wouldn’t want to grab a beer with him. But those characters are unlikeable because it serves the themes and plots of their stories. And with those characters, and all the other ones I can think of that I didn’t like but still considered well written, there was some hook you grab on to, where you could understand how someone could become like that either by taking a good quality too far or succumbing to a recognizable human weakness. I didn’t see any of those hooks for the characters in The Wicked + The Divine so far, and it made it hard for me to care what was going on.
I also couldn’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen ideas like this done better. American Gods, for instance, which I just read for the first time about six months ago. Or Sandman. Even Top Ten had a story about the Norse gods in a modern day setting that was along similar lines.
So yeah, this one wasn’t for me. But between the art, a pretty well realized world, and a decent mystery story, I still found more to admire here than our next entry.
X-tinction Agenda
This is an X-Men event comic that happened across three books—Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, and The New Mutants—over late 1990 and early 1991. It follows the three teams fighting against a plot by the mutant enslaving island nation Genosha to get revenge for what the X-Men did to them in an earlier Uncanny X-Men story.
From what I’ve been able to gather, the X-Men were patient zero for the Dark Age of Comics, when Rob Liefeld and his x-treme style took over and suddenly everyone was putting out books about brutal psychic cyborg mercenaries with gigantic muscles and names like Bloodblystr and Dethmaxx, who gunned down villains with gigantic weapons while protecting their shoulders with massive shoulder pads and carrying ammunition in dozens of pouches all over their bodies. (Incidentally, Liefeld was drawing The New Mutants while X-tinction Agenda was taking place.) As dumb as that aesthetic is, I actually don’t hate it. I kind of enjoy the insanely stupid thirteen-year-old boyness of it. Yeah, characters like Cable and the kind of ludicrously convoluted sci-fi soap opera antics that comprise their stories are ridiculous, but they’re kind of awesome too. I enjoy Kinoko Nasu’s work for a lot of the same reasons. X-tinction Agenda isn’t quite full-on 90’s x-treme yet, but it’s more than halfway there. It’s unfortunate that it only rarely lives up to the qualities I enjoy in that kind of story.
Part of the reason I haven’t enjoyed this very much is entirely my own fault. There’s a ton of backstory in the X-Men comics between Uncanny X-Men #143 and this that I didn’t bother to go read up on. I don’t know exactly what happened the first time the X-Men went to Genosha. I don’t know what happened between Archangel and X-tinction Agenda’s villain, murderous mercenary commander Cameron Hodge. I don’t know why the X-Men are split into two teams, the illegal X-Men and the government sanctioned X-Factor, or why Jean Grey is alive again, or why Storm is in a child’s body. (Maybe she’s a Deviluke and she used her ultimate attack?) I don’t know how Cable came into the picture or who any of the New Mutants are, which is pretty important for the emotional impact of some of the earlier issues.
I don’t blame the story for any of that. Of course, this is part of an ongoing story and it’s entirely my fault that I dove in at this point without getting the surrounding context. I do blame X-tinction Agenda for just how little actually happens, though, and how much time it spends spinning its wheels—it takes six issues for Storm and the New Mutants to get captured and for the X-Men and X-Factor to mount a poorly thought-out rescue mission and get captured. I blame it for failing to convince me that the villains are dangerous and that the X-Men shouldn’t be able to just knock them all down like bowling pins and rescue their teammates. I blame it for assembling a huge team of all-stars, so many that I have trouble even remembering who’s on the team, and then giving none of them anything to do except get beat up and captured by Hodge with no trouble. I blame it for an annoying subplot where Jubilee and two members of the New Mutants, Rictor and Boom-Boom, sneak around the back alleys of Genosha sniping at each other and whining about who’s the leader until they just happen to bust in at exactly the moment when it’s all going down so they can get their powers back. I blame it for putting all the X-Men and New Mutants except aforementioned annoying Jubilee, Boom-Boom, and Rictor in captivity and then letting their escape hinge on the motives of the Genegineer, the Genoshan responsible for turning mutants into mindless slaves, without ever properly explaining what those motives are. (Here I will blame the event for not explaining this, even if it was in the backstory. I know they didn’t have time to explain everything again, but the Genegineer’s motives are a crucial part of the plot, and it would’ve only taken a couple lines in the overstuffed dialogue balloons, where lines of dialogue are packed in so densely that they’re constantly winding around each other and slanting at weird angles, to remind us what they were. Plus, the first Genosha story took place like 40 issues before this, which is about three and a half years of real time if we assume 12 issues a year, and since the Genegineer isn’t a major character we wouldn’t have heard anything about him since then, so it would seem appropriate to give us a little hint.) I blame it for the ugly art that’s so scrawly and garishly colored that I take back the mean things I said about the art in the early Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four comics, to say nothing of the comparatively beautiful artwork of the early 80’s Uncanny X-Men that I was complaining about above. I mean, look at this:
What the hell is even going on in the top half of this cover?
I do have one compliment for this story, for the one place where it lived up to the dumb insanity that all such work should aspire to: Hodge the main villain. He’s such a mustache twirling avatar of evil, that irredeemable, divinely ludicrous combination of Skeletor and Jeffery Dahmer that you need as a villain in a story like this. Plus, Hodge’s idiotic cyborg body, a giant mechanical spider crab thing with tentacles and a long neck that has his head on the end of it. It looks gloriously ridiculous. But the story was hurt a lot by his lack of formidable henchmen. The Genoshan Magistrates are all either regular people or no-name mutants that the heroes plow through without much trouble, but the story hinges so much on the X-Men being totally outmatched that in the end, Hodge himself had to come fight them whenever there was a fight with actual stakes, and to be able to beat a team of such powerful heroes, he had to be so overpowered that it defies belief. He’s somehow immune not only to all physical attack, he’s also immune to psychic attack, immune to adamantium, and able to phase through matter.
One final annoyance: the trade paperback collection and Marvel Unlimited have the issues in the wrong order. This is the real order:
- Uncanny X-Men #270
- New Mutants #95
- X-Factor #60
- Uncanny X-Men #271
- New Mutants #96
- X-Factor #61
- Uncanny X-Men #272
- New Mutants #97
- X-Factor #62
The trade and Marvel Unlimited say to read the X-Factor issues before the New Mutants issues, but this is wrong. How do I know? Well, I first noticed because X-Factor #60 talks about things that happened in New Mutants #95 as if they’d already happened, but also, if you look at the covers, they all say “X-tinction Agenda Part X” across the very top, and New Mutants #95 is the one that says Part 2, not X-Factor #60.
