Digest: More X-Men, Adam Warlock, Wonder Woman

Uncanny X-Men #144 - #160

Uncanny X-Men continues to be great in this next run of issues. It also continues to be batshit fucking weird, and seems to be getting even weirder as it goes on.

There are lots of great stories from this stretch: Doctor Doom and Arcade taking on the X-Men; Storm and Emma Frost switching bodies, and having to learn to use the other’s powers; a battle against Magneto in a weird Cthulhu city in the Bermuda Triangle that ends with Magneto reassessing whether the ends really do justify the means; and a Shi’ar / Starjammers story where Cyclops finally finds out that his father is a space pirate with a 70’s porn star ’stache, and we finally find out how this happened. (Turns out it was a John Carter of Mars situation: his parents were abducted and ended up slaves on an alien planet, with his mother killed by a tyrannical alien lord. His father escaped and became a space pirate.) There are also some less great stories, mostly the single-issue fillers, like #153, where Kitty tells Colossus’s sister Illyana a bedtime story starring the X-Men, or #159, where Storm gets bitten by Dracula and nearly becomes a vampire, forcing the X-Men to tangle with the king of vampires, and also it turns out Kitty is Jewish.

Then there’s #160, which is so incredibly weird that I can’t even say if it’s good or bad. It comes straight out of left field with a bunch of time-bending magical pocket reality weirdness. It reminded me a lot of X-Men Annual #4, in which the X-Men team up with Dr. Strange and go through an illusory world based on the Hell of Dante’s Inferno, but even weirder. The story is kind of hard to follow, and it contains some distasteful material, but I have to give it credit for being so weird and ambitious, even if the scene of evil Nightcrawler feeling up Kitty was gross and creepy. (He’s evil, so it’s within his parameters to do something gross and creepy…but that might be a bridge too far for me.) I also love how well it immersed me in this weird world it had created, similar to Marvel Premiere #1 and #2 (discussed below), or the movie Labyrinth. It gets even weirder and more immersive in the Magik limited series, which is four issues showing us what happened to Illyana during the five seconds at the end of Uncanny X-Men #160 when Kitty lost her grip on her hand and then found it again and pulled out an Illyana that was seven years older than before. (I haven’t finished it yet, so I’m not discussing it here, but I love the art so far. Reminds me of George Perez’s Wonder Woman, also discussed below.)

The characters are what make Uncanny X-Men so great for me. Kitty and Storm are real standouts. Kitty keeps on maturing, learning, growing, and getting more able to help out the team, while still coming across like a real teenager. (One of the letters pages had a letter from a teenager complaining that she was too much of a good girl and asking for a story where she’s on drugs or knows someone who’s on drugs. This was a storytelling trend in late 70’s and early 80’s comics—Spider-Man and Green Arrow both had stories about teens on drugs, and people who actually know about comics can probably come up with a lot more—but not one I’m at all eager to see Uncanny X-Men get in on as I keep reading. I like Kitty as a good girl; to me that’s what makes her feel real.) As for Storm, we keep on finding new layers to her as she deals with being the new leader of the X-Men and a big sister for Kitty. She has doubts about herself as leader, but also a confidence in herself that Cyclops never quite nailed, which lets her command a respect that he didn’t always have, especially from Wolverine—he would bristle at Cyclops’s orders even when he followed them, but shows Storm a ton of respect and usually follows her without question. Speaking of Wolverine, the movies never got across his humanity the way the comics of this period do—they always focus on him as a bad-ass samurai warrior. Here we see him living a normal life, laughing and joking with the others, having fun, but also showing off how cool he is on missions. It’s surprising how well he fits in with this group if you’re used to him being the angry loner like he usually is in other media. It’s obvious that he likes and respects everyone on this team, and there’s been a lot less friction than there was before. The last big blowout was when Angel left the team because he couldn’t stand working with a loose cannon like Wolverine. I especially like Wolverine’s friendship with Nightcrawler. You wouldn’t think it would work; Nightcrawler is fun-loving, charming, and adventurous, while Wolverine is angry and snarly and abrasive. But their chemistry makes a lot of sense: Nightcrawler’s charm and sense of fun infect Wolverine and let him have more fun too, and they can go on adventures together and have friendly competitions without conflicting, thanks to Nightcrawler’s disarming personality. Colossus is the flattest of the main team, but he still has a bit of a hook: even as he’s going to weird Cthulhu cities and alien spaceships and fighting demons and evil magic mad scientists with metal faces, a part of him yearns to go back to the Soviet farm he grew up on and live a simpler life.

The characters and their relationships help ground Uncanny X-Men even when it gets extremely weird. I can deal with Storm being randomly bitten by Dracula because I like Storm so much as a character that I want to see that she comes out all right, even if the situation she’s coming out of is insane. This helped a lot when I was reading the Shi’ar / Starjammers story. I didn’t care about the politics of the Shi’ar empire or any of the other trappings of the plot, but seeing how Cyclops reacts to being reunited with his space pirate dad, and feeling bad for Kitty and Nightcrawler when they think Colossus is dead, and seeing an enraged Wolverine carve up the alien who injured Colossus, swept me through it.

Avengers Annual #10

I read this because it ties into the plot of Uncanny X-Men (and is written by Chris Claremont)—it shows how Carol Danvers, a.k.a Ms. Marvel, ends up living with the X-Men and taking part in some of their adventures. The Avengers are fighting the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, led by Mystique at this point. She’s recruited Rogue, who makes her first appearance here as a villain, to steal the powers of all the top-tier Avengers and break the rest of her gang (Avalanche, Pyro, Blob, and Destiny) out of the prison they were sent to at the end of Days of Future Past. Rogue screws up when she’s taking Ms. Marvel’s powers and holds on for too long, stealing Ms. Marvel’s powers permanently and also taking most of her memories. Jessica Drew contacts Professor X, who manages to recover them. The lower-tier Avengers on the team (Vision, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, Beast, and Wonder-Man) fight the Brotherhood, alongside Spider-Woman, who frees Iron Man. (Since Rogue can’t steal his powers, she stuck a device on him to immobilize him. She stole the powers from Captain America and Thor alongside Ms. Marvel, so they’re both out of commission for this fight.)

It’s a pretty good read, but the best part is the final few pages, where they retcon the widely detested Avengers #200. You can watch this video if you’re not familiar with it, to get an idea of why it’s so hated. I actually haven’t read it, so that’s not why I liked this. I just thought the scene where Carol describes how frightened and alone and powerless she felt during that time was really well written and visceral.

Marvel Premiere #1 and #2

Marvel and DC used to do anthology books, where they would introduce new characters to see how readers responded before they gave them their own series. This was how Spider-Man was introduced—in an issue of the anthology Amazing Fantasy, #15. Marvel Premiere is a Marvel anthology from the 70’s that introduced Iron Fist, among other characters. These two issues are the ones that introduce Adam Warlock as a hero (he’d previously appeared as a villain to the Fantastic Four and Thor). I’ve been getting curious about the Marvel Cosmic stuff since I enjoyed the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and Thor: Ragnarok so much, and I’ve been finding that, when it comes to the more traditional heroes (i.e. not Squirrel Girl or She-Hulk), I actually enjoy late 70’s and 80’s comics more than modern stuff. The continuity tends to be simpler; the stories tend to be easier to follow; the takes on the characters are more classic.

That said, I wasn’t expecting to like these issues as much as I did. They’re grandiose pulp sci-fi space opera weirdness, but they’re so good at being that. A highly evolved former human, appropriately called the High Evolutionary, finds Adam Warlock’s sarcophagus (which appeared in a post-credits scene of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2) in space and brings it inside his ship just as he begins an experiment. He creates a copy of Earth called Counter-Earth and tries to evolve it in such a way that it becomes an exact clone of regular Earth, except without war or suffering. A former creation of his, the Man-Beast, who is a space wolf-man in gold armor, manages to corrupt the process and introduce violence to Counter-Earth. Adam Warlock pops out of the cocoon and stops Man-Beast from hurting the High Evolutionary, but Man-Beast escapes down to Counter-Earth to wreak further havoc. The High Evolutionary is going to give up and wipe out Counter-Earth, but Warlock argues against it, saying he will go hunt down Man-Beast to protect the spark of goodness that exists in the humans there. The High Evolutionary gives him the Soul Gem and sends him down, which leads into his own series, Warlock, that I haven’t started reading yet but intend to.

As much as I enjoyed these issues, I can’t say I recommend Warlock for everyone. He’s a weird character. He looks like a Flash Gordon villain, his powers are indefinite, and I can’t say I have a good grasp on his personality or any really strong connection to him on a human level. For me, though, I found enough to enjoy in these two Marvel Premiere issues that I’m willing to keep going and hopefully learn more about his powers and personality.

Wonder Woman, Vol. 1

I’ve been wanting to read more DC for a while. I’ve always liked Marvel a bit more, but I do like DC as well, I just don’t read DC comics as much because of Marvel Unlimited. Comixology had a Memorial Day sale where most of the DC trades were down to $5, so I bought a bunch of them: some Flash, some Green Lantern, some Justice League Dark, All-Star Superman, and this, Volume 1 of the post-Crisis reboot of Wonder Woman, drawn and largely written by George Perez. I tried reading the New 52 run of Wonder Woman, but I had trouble getting into it, and as I said, I’ve noticed that 70’s and 80’s comics tend to be easier for me to get into when it comes to the traditional heroes, so I gave this a try.

I’ve only made it through four issues so far, but I’m really into it. The art is an especial standout for me. The lines are so clean, the figures so precise, and the coloring is more subdued, which seems to have become more common in the late 80’s and the 90’s. We get a detailed origin for the Amazons and for Wonder Woman herself before Diana leaves the island to come into the modern world and meets her allies, Harvard professor of classics Julia Kapatelis and Steve Trevor, who’s in the middle of a plot by Ares that slowly unfolds as we get further into the book. So far it feels like a Clash of the Titans-esque epic running up against a modern spy thriller. One other thing that stands out to me is the use of language: the language used for the Amazon sections feels legendary and exalted without going into cheese like comics so often do with this kind of material, and the language used for the modern day sections feels natural without being obnoxious or dated.

If I had any criticism of this, I’d say that it’s kind of a slow burn. After four issues, the story still hasn’t quite blossomed yet. Diana and Steve Trevor didn’t even meet until the end of #4. From what Wikipedia says there are only three issues left in this story arc, but it feels like a lot of it has been setup. I could see someone finding this a bit boring, although the art and the desire to learn more about the character and world has kept me interested so far.

A lot of DC fans seem to regard the post-Crisis era as the best era of DC, and so far I like this book a lot, so I might try going back to the post-Crisis reboots for other DC characters too.