An Overview of the early Adam Warlock stories

The Roy Thomas Era

The early years of Adam Warlock, in Marvel Premiere #1 and #2 and Warlock #1 - #8, were mostly written by Roy Thomas.

This run covers Warlock’s adventures on Counter-Earth, attempting to introduce enough good to parry the evil introduced by Man-Beast and his Beast-Men. Warlock makes friends with a group of children who use all kinds of groovy, far-out 70’s slang, meets Counter-Dr. Doom and Reed Richards, and fights Rex Carpenter, the president of the United States who is actually the Man-Beast in disguise. He gets in philosophical arguments about good and evil with Man-Beast, Triax the Warthog, and the High Evolutionary, the creator of Counter-Earth who wants to just wipe it out and start over.
About four issues into Warlock, after one of these arguments with the High Evolutionary, I slapped myself on the forehead and went, “Oh, he’s Jesus.” The High Evolutionary represents God the father; Beast-Man is Satan, who rebelled against his creator and took a bunch of his fellows along to try to wreak evil on his creator’s later works; and Warlock is Jesus, who walks among the flawed humans trying to convince them to be good. It’s painfully obvious by the time we get to the conclusion of this arc, in issues #176 - 178 of Incredible Hulk, where Warlock takes on disciples, gets crucified, and then rises from the dead after three days.

After this, Warlock leaves Counter-Earth behind and flies off into space to get into new adventures, which is where Starlin picks him up in Strange Tales #181.

Roy Thomas’s material is grandiose pulp space opera nonsense: often ridiculous, a little bit pretentious, rather self-serious, yet oddly moving. I especially liked the mini-arc in the middle where we meet the Counter-Earth Dr. Doom, who sacrifices his life to save Warlock and the groovy kids, and Reed Richards, who turns into a Hulk-like monster called the Brute. The more down-to-earth beginning of the arc, when Warlock saves Los Angeles from a bunch of automated killer drones that try to blow up innocent people due to screwy programming, was surprisingly satisfying. I actually didn’t mind the Jesus metaphor until we got to the end in Incredible Hulk and it really started to beat us over the head with it; before that, it was just a little spice to give some weight to the story.

The early material reminds me a lot of the original Star Trek series in its look and themes. It’s very brightly colored, very concerned with good and evil and morality, and at times comical in its lack of subtlety. I enjoyed it for the same reason I enjoyed G Gundam and Kill la Kill: it was so over the top, so ridiculous, yet it took itself so seriously that I both laughed and became genuinely invested in the story. From a storytelling standpoint, its main weakness is Warlock himself. He’s not that well defined of a character. I didn’t really get an idea of what kind of person he is from the early stories, other than “good” and “moral” in some vague sense. It’s also very unclear what his powers actually are. He can fly and has some measure of super strength; beyond that, the Soul Gem seems to just do whatever the plot requires. The groovy kids also don’t add anything to the story. I had trouble remembering what their names were, and when one of them died in a battle with Triax the Warthog-Man, it didn’t really affect me at all. Plus they seemed to turn on Adam Warlock on a dime; one minute they thought he was great, the next he was the worst.

The 1970’s Jim Starlin Warlock

 

Warlock was cancelled after issue 8 and carelessly concluded in the pages of Incredible Hulk, but about a year later, a four-issue arc in issues #178 - #181 of the anthology Strange Tales, written by Jim Starlin, led into the next phase of Adam Warlock.

The Starlin material is still grandiose pulp space opera nonsense, but it goes so weird that you just have to appreciate how much its twisting itself in knots to do something original, and it fills in a lot of the simplistic Silver Age blank spaces that the older material left open. Warlock leaves Counter-Earth and goes off into the universe to search for new adventures, quickly declaring war on a tyrannical godlike being called the Magus, whom he soon discovers is a version of himself from a future where he was pulled into some kind of dimension of crazy, lost his mind, and fell out 5,000 years in the past, where he promptly started building a church around himself as a god. On one of the Magus’s slave ships he meets Pip the Troll, a troll who loves smoking, drinking, and whores, and who becomes one of Warlock’s most constant companions. He also meets Gamora, in her first appearance as a mysterious assassin who we later discover works for Thanos. The Strange Tales issues go straight into Warlock #9 - #15, which show Warlock’s battle against the Magus and the Matriarch, the corporeal leader of his church, alongside Thanos, who considers the Magus a threat and teams up with Warlock to end it. After the Magus threat is dealt with, there is a short arc on Warlock fighting the Starkiller, a human on Earth who’s in a coma but has somehow gained incredible powers in his vegetative state. The 1970’s Starlin era concludes with a fight against Thanos alongside the Avengers, Captain Marvel (Mar-vell, not Carol Danvers), the Thing, and Spider-Man in Avengers Annual #7 and Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2.

This run of stories is probably my favorite of the Adam Warlock stuff I’ve read. It’s deeper, more exciting, and more creative than the earlier stuff, and the characters are easier to connect with and care about. The Magus is such a weird villain, yet perfect for Warlock, given his constant concern with his own morality, and Thanos makes for a great confounding factor in the early parts of the story and a suitably threatening villain later on. The supporting cast becomes a lot more memorable, with Pip and Gamora instead of a bunch of interchangeable groovy kids. Warlock himself starts to take on a more definite personality, his ponderous, grandiloquent style mirroring that of the comic itself. I think the best way to describe him, starting from here and even more so during Infinity Gauntlet, is “Romantic hero”. He exists outside of any society or structure, wandering the universe on his own and trying to do good, falling into fits of melancholy over his perceived failures, wondering what his purpose actually is, never finding anywhere to belong. The Magus is again a fascinating contrast, because instead of isolating himself and living outside society, he created his own society with himself at the center, and expanded it ruthlessly.

The Infinity Gauntlet and the very beginning of Warlock and the Infinity Watch

 

Infinity Gauntlet, like most modern comics events, has prelude stories spread across like three different books and a ton of tie-in issues from other series. I read the prelude stories in Silver Surfer #34 - #38, the two issues of Thanos Quest that show how Thanos actually got his hands on the Infinity Gems, the six issues of the main Infinity Gauntlet story, and the Dr. Strange: Sorcerer Supreme tie-ins in issues #31 - #36.

While Infinity Gauntlet itself was amazing, some of the tie-in material was really hard to get through. Silver Surfer had some great Thanos material, but it took way too long for it to do what it needed to. I wasn’t that invested in the Silver Surfer as a character, and he doesn’t seem to really have any kind of supporting cast to speak of. I also read Incredible Hulk #383 - #384, which tie in somehow to Infinity Gauntlet, though I couldn’t really figure out how since they seem to just be Hulk stories. Between these issues and the ones that concluded the Roy Thomas era, I might never pick up an Incredible Hulk comic again. Not utterly awful, but just boring and hard to read.

Thanos Quest is pretty great, though. Unlike the Infinity War movie (which is pretty tenuously based on the comics, but insofar as it’s based on any comics, it’s based Infinity Gauntlet, not the later Infinity War), the Infinity Gems in the comics aren’t in the hands of sympathetic characters, but of a bunch of asshole cosmic beings who don’t know what they’ve got. It’s fun to see Thanos outwit each of them and take their gem. The only one who’s a little bit sympathetic is the Gardener, who’s a space gardener who uses the Time Gem to keep his garden looking its nicest eternally. The rest of them suck. The Reality Gem, like in the movie, is in the hands of the Collector, who’s possibly even more of a jerk than he was in the movie. He’s willing to trade Thanos the gem in return for a guy that Thanos shrank down into a baby with the Time Gem. The Mind Gem, instead of being in Vision’s head like in the movie, is in possession of the comics version of the Grandmaster, who loves games and only loosely resembles Jeff Goldblum.

A lot of people who commentate on movies and comics made it sound like Thanos was just stalking Mistress Death, the female personification of Death in the Marvel Universe, and doing stupid stuff to try and get her attention, but in actuality she brought him back to life to be her slave because she wanted half the universe wiped out and he seemed like the man to do it. Thanos does have a crush on her, so he goes out and steals the Infinity Gems, hoping that she’ll accept his love once he’s powerful enough to sit beside her. Death starts giving him the cold shoulder after this, saying that he’s now her superior and they’re still not on the same level. Even though she says that, she keeps on acting like she’s better than him, and since he’s evil and not very in touch with his emotions, he does start doing stupid stuff to impress her, eventually (in Infinity Gauntlet) wiping out half the universe’s people with a finger snap. Personally, though, I think Death was just pouting that Thanos became more powerful than her and wasn’t her slave anymore. She thought she was too good for him. When he got all the gems, she had to admit he was more powerful than her, but she still turned her nose up at him and acted all snooty. She just wouldn’t give him a straight rejection because she was afraid he would zap her with his infinite power. He even gave her what she wanted before when he wiped out half the universe, but she still wouldn’t talk to him even though she got exactly what she brought him back to life for. Thanos definitely does a bunch of evil stuff in Infinity Gauntlet, his torture of Nebula and Eros being simultaneously the most petty and the most horrifying, but Lady Death is at least partially responsible for this situation by bringing him back to life and putting the idea in his head that she wanted to wipe out half the universe, which is why I felt like the ending of Infinity Gauntlet was still fair even though Thanos mostly escapes punishment.

I was also surprised by how much I enjoyed the tie-in issues of Dr. Strange, Sorcerer Supreme. I’ve always liked the DC magic stuff—Constantine, Zatanna, Dr. Fate—and in these issues I saw that the Marvel magic stuff can be pretty interesting too. I actually liked #36 the most: Pip and Gamora summon Dr. Strange to convince Adam Warlock to rein it in a little now that he’s the holder of the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s mostly conversation, but it’s classic tortured ponderous Adam Warlock like we saw in the 1970’s Starlin material. We didn’t get much of that in Infinity Gauntlet, because Adam Warlock himself is barely a factor in that story. He’s the catalyst who sets it in motion, but he spends most of it sitting back and waiting for events to play out the way he knows they will, watching the Avengers and other heroes throw themselves futilely at the invincible Thanos. Infinity Gauntlet is ultimately not a Warlock story; it’s a followup to Thanos Quest, where Thanos is the main driving force behind the story and the end comes about more due to his flaws and his mistakes than anything the heroes actually do.

Warlock and the Infinity Watch, on the other hand, is definitely a Warlock story, and I’ve enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to. I took a short break to check out some other comics before I came back to it, but I’m glad I’m back in it. After five issues, the callbacks to older Warlock stories don’t always make sense, and the art is a definite step down from the George Perez art of Infinity Gauntlet (the same guy behind the art of the post-Crisis Wonder Woman that I praised so much before), but the character interplay is better than it’s ever been. After wielding infinite power for a while, Warlock is more alienated and conflicted than he’s ever been. He spends the first few issues trying to find his way back into the habit of being around other people, and I think this is possibly the most character-driven Warlock material yet. There’s a scene in issue #2 that really struck a chord with me: Warlock forms the Infinity Watch, hands each member one of the gems for safekeeping, and then they all pose together and a big word balloon has Warlock declaring them the Infinity Watch. Smash cut to the next panel, and he’s walking away, saying he must be going, because he’s “in dire need of solitude” in order to regenerate his spirit and strength. At this moment, I understood what I’ve always found compelling about his character: he’s a mopey, emo, self-serious introvert who’s obsessed with doing the right thing, but due to his isolation from society, he’s never quite sure what conventional morality would dictate and he’s always going it alone. At the same time, he can’t or won’t integrate himself into society; on some level he prefers to stay isolated. I relate to that. Like most emo, self-serious introverts, his greatest enemy is himself, and he has a small group of friends who may not quite understand him, but do care about him, that he never properly appreciates. I relate to that too.

 

Conclusion

I still can’t say I recommend trying to read the Adam Warlock saga to everyone, especially if you can’t stand older comics, and I definitely had trouble getting through some of the material around Infinity Gauntlet, like the Hulk and Silver Surfer issues. Overall I enjoyed it a lot, though. This was my first serious attempt to follow a long-running story that hops across several books and a bunch of tie-ins, and in this case it was worth it, even if I don’t like having to constantly check Comic Book Herald’s Adam Warlock reading order (which is awesome and thank all goodness that it exists) to know which book to read next. I’m looking forward to seeing Adam Warlock in the MCU with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. With how serious he is, I think he’ll make a great foil for the Guardians, just like Thor did in the Infinity War movie.

X-Men Movie Rewatch: X-Men, X2, and X3

I decided to re-watch the 20th Century Fox X-Men movies. Since I’m old, I saw most of them as they came out and remember liking most of them, but it had been a while since I’d seen the first few, so with how much I’ve been enjoying the X-Men comics, it seemed like the time to revisit those movies.

X-Men

Unfortunately, to my surprise, X-Men actually isn’t a very good movie.

It’s also far from a terrible movie. The two I remember hating are X3: The Last Stand (because the story was a complete hash) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which was sort of mediocre until the last 15 minutes, when you see their version of Deadpool, which even I knew was horrible despite having never read a Deadpool comic), and nothing I saw rewatching X-Men brought it to the level of those two. But in a world where Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers, Captain America: Civil War, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther, Wonder Woman, Logan, and both Deadpools exist, it’s easy to see the cracks in the first X-Men movie.

One of the weird things I wasn’t expecting to notice is how uncool the powers actually are as presented in this movie. Compared to the modern comic book movies, a lot of this movie is done with practical effects—stunts, wire work, physical stage combat—probably because CG was so much more expensive in 2000 than it is now. Normally I really like practical effects, but in this movie the limitations of the practical effects made a lot of the characters seem weaker and lamer than they are in the comics or the animated series, or even in later movies where the effects budget was bigger. Magneto’s big show of power in this movie is stealing everyone’s guns and pointing them back at their owners. Professor Xavier’s is taking over the minds of Magneto’s henchmen and making them talk to him. Storm struggles to defeat Toad, one of the lamest X-Men villains. (Jean also does, but Jean in the comics was weak and lame until she became Phoenix, so at least it’s in character. Storm in the comics would wipe the floor with Toad.) The fact that Toad is in this movie at all is probably a result of effects limitations; you can get the guys in the makeup shop to whip up some gooey spit, and a CG tongue is cheap enough compared to what you’d need to do someone like Pyro or Avalanche. But setting that aside, even the effects-light fights, like Wolverine vs. Mystique, seem boring and low-impact for some reason. There’s something about the way they shoot and stage the combat. No one ever seems to land a solid hit—they’re always grabbing each other and throwing each other across the room on wires. This might also have to do with the effects budget; they can’t really smash up an environment like the fights in newer comic book movies can because it’s mostly practical, so they would have to build and set up destructible environments, and they would have to do it again every time they need a new take for whatever reason.

Another weird thing I noticed: the color scheme is super dark, and everybody’s dialogue sounds ominous and weighty and a little bit emo. There are a few jokes, but they’re not very good; there were things I enjoyed in this movie, but I definitely never laughed while watching it. There really is a big difference between the “grounded” look and tone that it was felt comic book movies needed to have in 2000, and the more fantastical feel they’re allowed to have nowadays. From what I remember, even X-Men: First Class is a lot brighter and more lighthearted compared to these first two movies. Of course, this was only three years after Batman and Robin, and that was both a critical and financial failure, so it makes some sense that everyone involved would think that getting as far away from that as possible was wise.

The story feels rushed. Magneto’s plot is poorly developed and makes very little sense—he’s either risking death in the machine or risking death touching Rogue, so why bother touching Rogue?—and the mid-movie reveal that he’s after Rogue, not Wolverine, is only shocking because it makes no sense. Rogue traveled, probably via hitchhiking, all the way from Louisiana or wherever it was she lived up to northernmost Canada. If Sabretooth was able to find her so easily even though she was riding in a camper with a hobo, he must have known where she was. So why did he wait to grab her until she was with Wolverine? Why not grab her when she was alone in a dive bar in the middle of South Dakota? Or even as she slipped out of the dive bar in northernmost Canada to stow away in Wolverine’s trailer, before they’d met and he was there to defend her? The twist also led to a painful dialogue exchange between Sabretooth and Magneto in which both of them speak in clipped, vague, awkwardly worded sentences solely because wording them more naturally would have given away the twist. This is most obvious when Magneto asks, “Where is the mutant now?”, solely because he can’t say “Where is she now?” because that would reveal that he was after Rogue, not Wolverine.

We get almost no character development for anyone except Wolverine, Rogue, Xavier, and Magneto, plus some tiny bits for Jean and Mystique. Cyclops and Storm are just there; they have no backstory, play next to no part in the plot, and do almost nothing of consequence. During the final battle they and Jean pretty much just get beat up until Wolverine comes in and saves them. The two villainous henchmen, Toad and Sabretooth, have no personality at all and don’t seem threatening, so the X-Men just seem pathetic for not being able to beat them. Now that I’ve watched this movie again, I understand why modern superhero movies are all three hours long: even for a solo movie, you need all that time to fit in the story, character development, and action scenes without compromising any of them.

The casting is a mixed bag. Hugh Jackman is of course brilliant as Wolverine, as are Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Ian McKellen as Magneto. Anna Paquin’s teenage Rogue is pretty good too, and I think she could’ve been great if they’d done more with her character. Rebecca Romijn as Mystique is surprisingly good too. I always thought she looked the part more than Jennifer Lawrence, but she also acts it well, getting across the simple emotions she needs to with facial expressions and sparse dialogue. James Marsden’s Cyclops is disappointing. He doesn’t have the presence to stand up to Hugh Jackman, so Cyclops and Wolverine’s arguments always seem one-sided. He also gets essentially zero character development, which doesn’t help anything. Same deal for Storm, except I feel like Halle Berry is even less invested in her role than James Marsden is in his, based on how she delivers her lines. Also, movie Storm is a lot more jumpy and screamy than comics Storm. There’s a scene where she’s standing in the infirmary by Senator Kelly’s bedside as he’s dying, and he asks to hold her hand. She takes his hand, and then he turns into water and dissolves, and Storm screams and flips out and runs out of the room, which I don’t see comics Storm doing in the same situation. Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey is okay, but we don’t get much backstory on her either, and she and Cyclops don’t really have any chemistry. (Neither do she and Wolverine, though, so both sides of that love triangle are duds.)

Despite all the marks against it, there are still some pretty great things in this movie. The performances of Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen, of course. The movie does do a good job introducing their three characters and letting us know what they’re all about. I also liked the dynamic between Rogue and Wolverine a lot, and I would’ve liked to see more of them paired up in the second movie. The score was surprisingly good, too: it’s grand and orchestral in the style of John Williams, but there’s a bit of a modern edge to it, which not only fits the tone of the movie very well but also fits the X-Men themselves, who are a classic superhero team in a lot of ways but also innovated in others.

X2: X-Men United

Unlike the first movie, I found X2 to hold up very well. It has its flaws: Cyclops and Storm still do almost nothing and get no further development; they throw in two-minute cameos of lamer versions of several classic X-Men for no reason; the final battle drags on for too long; the way they introduce Phoenix is clumsy. But on balance I thought X2 had more good stuff and less bad stuff than the first movie did.

X2 makes up for all the good action scenes the first movie didn’t have by being stuffed with good action scenes: Nightcrawler attacking the White House; Wolverine cutting through a squad of commandos to defend the mansion; Magneto breaking out of his prison and later holding up the entire Blackbird; Pyro blowing up police cars with his fire powers. It also has good character development. Wolverine learns more about his past. Iceman admits to his family that he’s a mutant, and while they try to be tolerant, they certainly aren’t happy about it. Stryker, the villain, whose son was a mutant that Xavier tried to help, sinks to depths that shake even the optimistic Professor X. While I wouldn’t trade the sunny, fun-loving comics version of Nightcrawler for this movie’s version, he fits in to the dark, miserable, grave world these movies have established while still feeling like Nightcrawler, and the way he uses his powers is interesting and works well with the practical effects that this movie still mostly uses. Alongside Wolverine and Magneto, he’s one of the more successful translations of an X-Men character to the screen that these two movies have pulled off.

Speaking of the practical effects, while there’s still something off about some of the fight scenes—particularly the Wolverine and Lady Deathstrike battle—most of them work a lot better than they did in the first movie. The Nightcrawler fight at the beginning of the movie, for instance, and another scene during the final battle where Mystique fights off a bunch of guards, both have impact, speed, and a lack of cheesy wire work. The Wolverine fight in the mansion was so visceral and brutal that if you threw some blood in it, it could have been in Logan. This movie also uses more CGI than the first movie did, to good effect: the scene outside Bobby Drake’s parents’ house where Pyro blows up a bunch of police cars uses a great blend of CGI to depict the fireballs and practical effects to show the cars exploding. Some of the action scenes in this movie even start to surpass the MCU, because the practical effects make them feel more grounded and real.

I don’t have a lot to say about this one; it’s a good movie, and even though some of the social commentary is stupidly on the nose (like the famous line “Have you tried not being a mutant?” that Iceman’s mom says to him), it makes its point without being too annoying about it.

X3: The Last Stand

I remember thinking this was the worst thing ever put on film the first time I saw it, but rewatching it, it’s actually not as bad as I remembered. It’s still terrible, but not as bad as I remembered; the plot is full of holes, there are a bunch of unnecessary deaths, several things that I just found dumb, a lot of comics references shoehorned in badly, and the pacing is weird, but at least the characters seem mostly in character with the previous movies, and I could always follow what was going on in the plot, which for me put it above Suicide Squad. I liked some of the new characters and actors it introduced, like Kelsey Grammer’s Beast and Ellen Page’s Kitty Pryde. Some of the action scenes were pretty cool, although there was nothing as visceral as Wolverine trashing those soldiers in the mansion from X2.

Broadly, the major problems with this movie come from trying to do too much in too little running time. They’re trying to do a version of the Dark Phoenix Saga, with Jean coming back to life, killing Scott and the professor, trying to hump Logan, and going over to Magneto’s side. They’re also trying to do a version of the mutant cure storyline. I haven’t read this story in the comics but in the animated series the mutant cure was a plot by Apocalypse to prey on desperate mutants. Weirdly, it being a plot by an evil blue immortal being who was worshiped as a god in ancient Egypt feels more realistic than what this movie does with it: in this movie, it really works and you can just shoot a mutant with a dart and they’ll lose their powers. They’re also trying to introduce a new team of X-Men and a bunch of new villains, while explaining why the old X-Men and old villains aren’t around anymore, and have enough action scenes to keep everyone satisfied. They do all of these things poorly; for the most part, the plot mechanics make sense and fit together, but because it’s all squeezed together so much, none of it really has emotional impact or meaning. They’re just checking boxes.

It reminds me a little of The Dark Knight Rises. That movie was also too ambitious, large scale, and grandiose with its plot. In that movie, this also introduced various plot holes and things that did not seem to be given their proper due as major events. Some of the ones that people complain about in The Dark Knight Rises, I actually don’t care about. (How did Batman get from the middle of the Gobi Desert back to Gotham after he climbed out of the pit? Who cares, he’s the goddamn Batman!) But there are definitely some plot threads in that movie, like every cop in Gotham being locked in the sewer for six months, that feel weird, cursory, and not well enough explored or set up. And a lot of X3 feels similar.

The specific things I disliked about this movie mostly come in two flavors. There are plot holes, continuity breaks with previous movies, and things I just thought were stupid—things that make this movie bad even if you’ve only watched X-Men, X2, and this, and know nothing about the comics. Then there are things that were changed from the comics, in my opinion for the worse.

In column A we have the following offenses:

• Mystique: “I don’t respond to my slave name”. For anyone who thought “Have you tried not being a mutant?” was too subtle.
• I get why Phoenix killed Professor X—he was the one keeping her sealed away. Why did she kill Scott? Given that she killed Scott, why did she try to have sex with Logan instead of kill him too? (Out of universe, the reason is that James Marsden left the movie in the middle to be in Superman Returns as some guy who’s not Superman or Lex Luthor, and is therefore not important. Not that Cyclops was ever that important to these movies.)
• Making the mutant cure a dart gun that you can just shoot someone with and it immediately rewrites their DNA to take away their powers with no ill effect breaks even my suspension of disbelief.
• There was no reason for Angel to be in the movie. He doesn’t do anything. He only talks to the X-Men once. He goes to live at the mansion, but he doesn’t actually join the team; he just shows up at the final battle to save his father.
• Magneto shows up at a community meeting of mutants and just recruits them all to be soldiers. One of these mutants conveniently has the power of detecting mutants and their power levels from a distance, and also super speed.
• They introduce a class system for mutant power levels with no explanation. Its only purpose is telling us how powerful Phoenix is. We don’t need this; we can see how powerful Phoenix is. If the reveal of Phoenix’s power were going to be pushed to the end of the movie, I can see why this foreshadowing would be useful, but we’ve already seen a small demonstration from when she was a child by this point, and we see a bigger one about 15 minutes after this when she kills Professor X and raises her house into the air.
• Personally, I hate it when a character is a “good girl” and then develops a split “bad girl” personality. It’s hard to explain why I hate it in general, I just find it boring. It’s akin to the “all girls want to date bad boys” maxim, which denies the complexity of real people’s tastes and motives, ignores the variety of relationship dynamics that exist in real life, and has been done to death in fiction. In this specific case, I hate that it implies Jean had complete contempt for everything and everyone in her old life except for “bad boy” Wolverine, who spoke to her “bad girl” side, and was just suppressing a gag reflex as she went along with Professor X’s and Cyclops’s dumb square life of science and teaching and trying to help mutants until Professor X’s mental manipulation wore off and she was able to go have sex with Wolverine and join up with Magneto’s evil crusade. It makes her look like a terrible person in retrospect, and it invalidates every emotional scene we had between Jean and Scott, including the ones where Scott was mourning her earlier in this movie.
• There’s a subplot about Iceman cheating on Rogue with Kitty Pryde. It comes straight out of nowhere. Rogue acts like the hysterical woman characters from 1950’s TV who only care about holding on to their man and keeping his eyes off that hussy down the street. Kitty just goes along with it, even though the whole school knows Rogue and Iceman are together. In the end it’s entirely meaningless because Rogue gets the cure and she and Iceman get back together. It does lead to one good scene: Rogue decides to sneak out and get the mutant cure, and runs into Wolverine as she’s leaving. Wolverine gives her a little speech about responsibility and being able to make her own choices, and tells her to make sure that whatever she does, she does for herself, and not for some guy. Unfortunately the conclusion of the subplot undercuts this scene, because it looks like Rogue really did just do it for some guy who was going to cheat on her if she couldn’t have sex with him, and as soon as they could have sex he immediately ran back to her. It also makes Iceman look like an asshole; he was going to ditch her unless they could have sex and go shack up with Kitty, but as soon as she caves to his desires and gets the cure so they can have sex, he’s right back with her.
• Magneto abandoning Mystique after she got shot with the cure dart felt out of character. Mystique betraying Magneto after that felt even more out of character. The president actually says “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” when we find out she betrayed him.
• So the cure is a dart that you can inject into mutants, but it also comes from this kid who’s a mutant that can cancel the powers of other mutants (kind of like Mikan from Gakuen Alice or Touma from A Certain Scientific Railgun). It wasn’t clear what the connection between these two is. In the final battle, Magneto is trying to kill the kid. (At least, I assume he’s trying to kill him, since he sends Juggernaut to plow through the walls to get at him.) I don’t understand why. Would killing the kid magically make the cure darts stop working? Was he just planning to take the kid and do research on him to try and figure out how to reverse the cure? Where did he think he would be able to do that after declaring war on humanity on national television and tearing the Golden Gate Bridge in half so he could transport his army to Alcatraz?
• They have a mostly new X-Men team for the final battle—Wolverine (who is the leader, of course), Storm, Beast, Iceman, Colossus, and Kitty Pryde. They didn’t really set them up at all except for a single sequence in the Danger Room at the beginning. Colossus only has one line in the entire movie and does nothing of consequence in the final battle.
• After Jean goes full evil and joins Magneto, she spends the entire final battle just standing there next to him and doing nothing while the other mutants on their side get shot with cure darts, even though she’s powerful enough to wipe out the entire force defending the island, tear apart their plastic cure dart guns, tear open the prison, and take or kill the kid all by herself. At the very end, she decides for no reason to start fighting, and then Wolverine kills her.
• What happened to Nightcrawler? He’s just not here anymore.

In the much shorter column B:

• Storm sucks. The scene where Professor X tells her that she’s going to be his successor is the only time she does anything that doesn’t suck. It’s undercut when you realize that Jean is dead and Xavier has decided Scott was too broken by her death to take over, making Storm the only choice left. As in the previous two movies, she hardly does anything, has no character building moments, no backstory, and gets beat up in every fight without achieving anything. Unlike the comics, Wolverine has zero respect for her, ignores her orders in the Danger Room at the beginning, and just assumes leadership of the new X-Men team before the final battle, even making the inspirational speech.
• Juggernaut looks ridiculous and we never see him do anything cool or intimidating. The sequence where Kitty runs ahead of him in the Alcatraz lab is pretty cool, but it would have been better if I actually felt like he was dangerous and not just some idiot who says “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”
• Kitty has no personality. She cries over Professor X’s death, but that’s about it.
• Colossus isn’t Russian. What’s up with that?

Even though I didn’t like X-Men nearly as much on rewatch as I thought I would, this was by far the worst of the original three movies.

Conclusion

These three movies were important steps for bringing comic books movies to where they are today, but they achieved it by giving up a lot of what makes the comics fun. They made a habit of suppressing or drastically re-envisioning anything from the comics that felt too colorful or not grounded enough. The black leather costumes and the “yellow spandex” joke are the most obvious examples, but there are a lot of other changes in the movies that I attribute to this attitude. This is probably why Colossus isn’t Russian (Deadpool, which had a comedic tone, was allowed to go back on that), and it probably contributed to us losing Storm’s and Cyclops’s backstories, which are very comic booky and weird, but work because of how they help us understand them as characters. It’s definitely why the movies’ main plotlines could never go outside the “mutants as metaphor for oppressed groups” narrative.

Looking back, it seems like the semi-grounded, semi-dark tone this Fox X-Men trilogy established was adopted by other studios as the generic “superhero movie” feel. The Sony Spider-Man movies are a little more colorful, but they have a similar tone and similar mopey plot points. The Ang Lee Hulk movie, aside from its weird habit of splitting the screen into panels, also adopts this kind of ponderous tone. Even Iron Man feels like it’s transitioning between this tone and what the MCU would become; it’s a lot more colorful and fun and less mopey than any of these X-Men movies, but it’s still more grounded than what we would get even a few movies later with Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. The trailer for Sony’s Venom movie was interesting because the tone looks less like the MCU or the DCEU and more like this generic early 2000’s grounded feel. That could turn out good, like X2, or not so good, like the other two, but it’s definitely different from what Marvel and DC are doing nowadays. (Personally I’m a bit of an optimist on Venom. It’s not something I’m hugely looking forward to, but it doesn’t look terrible so far.)

There is, however, one corner of the MCU that I’ve realized has a tone much closer to these early X-Men movies: the Netflix shows. Luke Cage is a little more stylish and colorful, but Daredevil and Jessica Jones feel like these movies with better dialogue, and Iron Fist could practically have been directed by Bryan Singer. That’s part of its problem, I think: like Captain America and Thor, there’s nothing about the character of Iron Fist that lends itself to being grounded. The show was constantly dancing around essential parts of Iron Fist’s backstory, like how he received his powers in a wrestling match with a dragon, that didn’t seem grounded enough. It was trying so hard to be Daredevil that it ignored the kind of gonzo grindhouse kung fu movie feel that could have made an Iron Fist show fun to watch, the way Luke Cage plays on blaxploitation film tropes.

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.

Comics Digest: She-Hulk, Batgirl and Robin, X-Men and X-tinction Agenda

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:

1. Uncanny X-Men #270
2. New Mutants #95
3. X-Factor #60
4. Uncanny X-Men #271
5. New Mutants #96
6. X-Factor #61
7. Uncanny X-Men #272
8. New Mutants #97
9. 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.

Marvel Unlimited Personal Highlights

I’ve never been a big reader of Marvel or DC comics. Even when I did get into Western comics a while back, I mostly stuck to Vertigo and indies. It wasn’t out of any kind of principle, it was just because the formats of the big two confused the hell out of me and I could never figure out what to buy and where to jump in to these runs. I did some of the Batman standalone graphic novels, and I did read Alias shortly after the Jessica Jones TV series, but otherwise I stuck with books that were published and structured more simply than the sprawling universes and baroque jargon-filled formats of Marvel and DC.

After getting into the movies from Marvel and DC last year (yes, I was like the last person on the planet to get in on the MCU, which is a trend with me), and also going back and revisiting the DC Animated Universe with Justice League and Justice League Unlimited and now Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, I decided to finally try out some of their comics. I’ve done a little DC, but I’ve done mostly Marvel, because it has one huge advantage over DC: Marvel Unlimited, a subscription service where you can read digital versions of, like, all the Marvel comics. Like seriously, all of them.

Okay, not quite all of them. Alias is too hardcore for Marvel Unlimited, and some of the more obscure stuff is missing. But they have an insane number of comics available.

When I started, I thought I was going to go back to the roots of all these well-known characters and read them from the beginning. Yeah. That didn’t work out. I made it through about five issues of Amazing Spider-Man before the cheese and crude artwork got to me. Similar with Fantastic Four, and even Iron Fist’s early stuff in Marvel Premiere, which I started reading after I watched the Netflix series to see what a better interpretation of the character might have been like. I’ve managed to stick with X-Men by starting from the celebrated Claremont run, about a hundred issues into Uncanny X-Men, and leaving long gaps in between reading the story arcs so the cheese doesn’t have time to overwhelm me. For the most part, these older comics just haven’t aged well, but the best stuff from about 1980 onward is still good enough that I can enjoy it.

The modern stuff from the mainstream characters is, in a lot of ways, even harder to get into than the older stuff, because it all ties into whatever giant universe-spanning event that will change everything they’re building up to at the time. Spider-Gwen, for instance: I wanted to like it, but it was just too bound up with continuity references to other Spider-books. But I did manage to find a few titles, based on recommendations from various places, that I really enjoy. Some of them are mercifully taking place in enough of a backwater of the Marvel universe that the giant events don’t touch them. Others will have four issue arcs that I just skip, or read having resigned myself to having no idea what’s going on, where the characters suddenly drop out of their own lives to contribute to some tiny corner of a giant event story that was developing at this time. And very occasionally the writers do a good enough job incorporating the event tie-in into the main plot of the book that I can still enjoy those issues (e.g. Ms. Marvel). These are the books I’ve most enjoyed during my time on Marvel Unlimited.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

This is by far my favorite of the titles on Marvel Unlimited. I love the silly humor, weird characters, bizarre stories, and computer science-related jokes.

The series I’m talking about is actually two series. There was a 2015 series that broke off in the middle and continued from issue #1 in a second 2015 series that is still running today. Sigh.

Squirrel Girl, aka Doreen Green, is a great character, especially if you’ve had enough of angst-ridden anti-heroes. She’s upbeat, down-to-earth, and spunky. Many of her battles actually end with her talking it out with the villain after showing she understands their point of view, which is both hilarious and very positive. Her supporting cast is great too: her sarcastic friend Nancy and fellow animal-themed superheroes Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boi have really fun interplay with Doreen. There are also lots of references to other comics, which are fun when you get them, but incidental enough that you can enjoy the story even if you don’t. I loved all the parodies in issue #5. (The first issue #5, from the 2015 series.) Based on the letters column, a lot of kids read Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which probably explains why I liked it if you’ve read anything else on this blog.

One note: if you’re looking in Marvel Unlimited, you need to choose “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (2015)” to get the first series. The second series is “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (2015 - Present)”. Sigh.

Cable and Deadpool

Basically all I knew about Deadpool was from the 2016 movie, and all I knew about Cable was what I remembered from the 1990’s X-Men series, which pretty much amounted to “he’s a time traveler”. I still enjoyed this, but not quite as much as some of the other newer books like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl or Hawkeye.

Since it’s Deadpool, the humor in this series can get crude sometimes, but unlike the 2016 movie, which was mostly Deadpool being crazy in an otherwise serious world, the world of Cable and Deadpool is seriously weird. It starts with a cult that believes turning yourself blue and shaving your head is the only way to achieve world peace, and keeps escalating from there. It has actual character arcs for Cable and Deadpool as the one tries to guide the world down a better path and the other just keeps doing his weird thing (guess which does which), but I didn’t pay attention to a lot of that since it required at least something of a grounding in these characters’ previous adventures, which I didn’t have. I still enjoyed it just for the action and for being so weird. Plus, Cable raises some questions about the world and politics that I found genuinely interesting.

Moon Knight

One of the few older comics I’ve been able to get into is the 1980 Moon Knight series. I started with the 2016 one, but I felt like I was missing too much backstory, so I went backwards until I reached the source.

Moon Knight is a pretty obscure character, and also kind of a confusing one. He was originally a mercenary named Marc Spector who became the avatar of an Egyptian god called Khonshu and started fighting crime. He has two other identities, rich entrepreneur Steven Grant, and cab driver Jake Lockley, which he uses to interact with the high society and low society respectively when he needs to fight some crime. Superficially, Moon Knight’s a bit like Batman; he fights street crime and themed psychopaths with boomerangs, truncheons, grappling hooks, and other throwing weapons, as well as his fists, and he has a fancy moon-copter piloted by his old mercenary partner Frenchie. He also has a wife, Marlene, who’s in on the whole Moon Knight thing from the beginning, and several friends from the street from whom he gets his information about what’s going on down there. This was what confused me about the 2016 series: it brings in all of these characters within the first few issues, and I had no idea who any of them were.

The tone of the book is also reminiscent of what little I’ve read of early 80’s Batman: surprisingly dark, willing to take on real-life issues, interested in issues like the psychology of crime and what makes a criminal, and willing to question its own hero’s sanity and motives. (I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that Doug Moench, the writer on the first Moon Knight series, has also been a Batman writer.) In the first few issues it doesn’t go all in as much as the later Moon Knight stuff, but it’s still pretty damn good for a pre-2000 comic.

If the art of older comics really bothers you, you probably won’t be able to read this as it’s pretty firmly of its time in that aspect. I’m not that into the art style in older comics, but I can tolerate it if the story’s good enough, and the storytelling conventions had become less obvious and clumsy by this point compared to what they were at the time of Amazing Spider-Man.

I discovered Moon Knight because people in the know kept saying what an amazing Netflix series he would make, and I have to agree, he’d be perfect. Unlike the Punisher (or Blade, who’s also been talked about for a Netflix series), I could even see Moon Knight becoming the fifth Defender, or at least interacting with the other Defenders. It probably won’t happen, but it would be amazing. If you’re interested in Moon Knight, you can definitely start from one of the later series (not the 2016 one, but the 2006 one is supposed to be a good starting point), but I’ve found the 1980 series good enough that you can start there too if you want.

Hawkeye

In the movies and the 1990’s Avengers cartoon, Hawkeye is the lamest Avenger. He’s a guy with a bow who wears a lot of purple. But in this 2012 series written by Matt Fraction and drawn by David Aja, he’s a lovable, dorky, hotshot nice guy. This version of Clint Barton reminds me a bit of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man from Spider-Man: Homecoming: a lot of his adventures are small-scale and involve him helping out people in the community with little problems (or problems that seem little when you habitually face planet-ending alien monsters, like Russian mob heavies with baseball bats). Of course, Clint has a grounded maturity that that version of Spider-Man doesn’t have, and he’s not afraid to look stupid if it means helping someone.

The books have a roguish tone, a bit like the more lighthearted parts of Cowboy Bebop or Firefly, which makes Clint feel like a modern Robin Hood. His sidekick / sometime replacement, Kate Bishop, is also a fun and cool character who gets to play the straight woman and point out when Clint is being a dork. Fraction wrote an independent series called Sex Criminals of which I read the first trade, and his mark is recognizable between the two as far as tone and style. Really fun series, and mercifully free of references to giant event comics. My main criticism is that the plot gets pretty muddled, especially towards the middle and end, but the fun of the characters carried me through. There’s a sequel series focusing on Kate Bishop that started in 2016 that I’ve just started. It’s a lot like Kate’s solo stories in Los Angeles towards the end of the 2012 Hawkeye series. Kate is a rich spoiled brat, skating by on audacity and calculatedly cutesy behavior. I enjoyed her LA solo stories, and the new series is good so far, but I could see wanting a break from Kate after a while.

The Pulse

I like this one in theory more than execution. Basically, after some stuff that happens between J. Jonah Jameson and Jessica Jones in Alias, she’s the one superhero that he can a little bit stand to associate with (even though when they first met, she conned him into paying her a bunch of money to go work at soup kitchens and read to sick children–which, by the way, is the perfect illustration of the difference between comics Jessica and TV Jessica. TV Jessica may be good at heart, but I can’t see her doing or even thinking of this). Jameson decides to hire Jessica as a special consultant to work with his reporting staff on a superhero-oriented column called the Pulse. At this point, Jessica is married to Luke Cage and pregnant with his child, so she needs a steady job and health insurance and accepts under those terms.

Some of the early stories are interesting, but later on the series gets embroiled in the Civil War event that was going on at the time and loses its way. I liked the idea of a comic focused on superhero journalism–it could’ve been really interesting to compare it with war journalism and investigative journalism, and delve into the everyday lives of people who follow around weird vigilantes. There were a few stories that did this well–the D-Man subplot, for instance–but it just really lost its way towards the end and became all about setting up Jessica and Luke to join the New Avengers, which I didn’t really care about. (Though Squirrel Girl becomes their nanny after the baby is born–that’s pretty cool.)

Jessica Jones (2016)

This series picks up with Jessica after the New Avengers era with the same creative team as Alias. The writing is awesome. So many times writers don’t know what to do with a character anymore after they have a baby, but Jessica still feels like her old self, and she handles being a mom exactly how you’d expect Jessica to handle it: she’s still a human wreck, but she does her best to do well by her daughter. Jessica’s now even deeper in the seamy underbelly of the Marvel universe, taking on SHIELD black ops and deep cover jobs, so the stories are larger scale and more focused on action than the stories in Alias, but Jessica keeps them grounded and human all the same.

I read Alias and The Pulse and mostly skipped over the New Avengers stuff, but I was able to follow the story in this series, so it’s a good place to go if you want to keep following Jessica Jones after those two series.

Ms. Marvel (2014)

Marvel has had a big push in the past few years to make their lineup of heroes more diverse in terms of race, sex, and sexual orientation. I found out about this when Ms. Marvel, which stars sixteen-year-old Pakistani-American Kamala Khan, made headlines in the mainstream media back when it came out. The letters pages of the Ms. Marvel books are stacked to the rafters with letters from people of all sorts who passionately identified with Kamala and loved seeing someone as non-white, non-male as her as the hero of Marvel comic.

That’s all cool, but it wouldn’t have nearly the impact if Ms. Marvel sucked. Happily, it does not; it’s a fun, sweet, earnest story, and Kamala is surpassingly lovable. It wouldn’t surprise me if the tone had inspired Spider-Man: Homecoming. Kamala is just as geeky and superhero-loving as Peter, just as blessed with quirky friends and family who support her, and just as determined to make a difference and do good any way she can. But being a Pakistani Muslim in Jersey City makes her story unique and different. She faces different challenges than Peter or any other hero, with her parents walking a tightrope between their conservatism and the reality of raising children in America. Yet even though her challenges growing up are different, their shape is still recognizable; her parents don’t want her going to parties and aren’t comfortable with her dating, and Kamala knows they would worry endlessly if they knew she was running around the city being a superhero.

Ms. Marvel is a great palate cleanser if you need a break from the heavy, dark flavor of the Marvel event comics. It’s still a superhero adventure book, unlike the mainly comedic Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, but it’s lighthearted and fun while also having real stakes and serious character growth. It’s a great coming of age story that you can enjoy even if you’re not a Pakistani Muslim from New Jersey.

Note that Ms. Marvel has the same deal as Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: there are two Ms. Marvel series on Marvel Unlimited, a 2014 one and a 2015 one. The 2014 one begins with her origin story. Since Kamala’s a recent addition to the Marvel universe, you can pretty much get the whole picture on her just by reading the 2014 series.