Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 4

Unfortunately, after all the praise I gave Part 3 for working out its story structure problems, Part 4 starts to fall back. It’s not quite the mess Part 1 was, but because there’s so much going on it’s even more confusing and hard to follow. There was so much packed into these thirteen episodes that I keep being amazed that things that happened early in Part 4 weren’t in Part 3, or maybe even Part 2. Things just keep on happening. Part 4 throws a million plot threads at you and then only follows up on maybe half of them. It sends characters off on pointless side quests in order to set things up ten episodes later. It’s so packed with plot and yet so loosely connected that it’s really hard to keep track of what’s going on. I had to start writing notes. Then my notes weren’t enough, so I had to go to the FMA wikia, which has excellent full synopses for every episode, to fill in my notes. And there are still things that I missed. Since I never read the manga that covers this part of the story, and none of this was in the 2003 anime, I’m pretty sure this is how people who aren’t familiar with Full Metal Alchemist would feel when watching Part 1.

Part 4 begins by showing us where Father came from and how Hohenheim became immortal. He used to be an inexplicably blonde slave without a name in Xerxes, the FMA counterpart to Persia. Father was a black blob in a flask who talked him into a plan that used all the people of Xerxes to create a Philosopher’s Stone, which in fact was Hohenheim. He is a Philosopher’s Stone. That’s one of those insane late-series reveals that I expect from anime. Father also created a body for himself, which is a copy of Hohenheim’s, and set about creating the Homunculi and enacting his plan to do the same thing with Amestris, founding it and then using all its people to create a Philosopher’s Stone again.

Back in the present, Al manages to reach Winry and Scar’s group, but he blacks out as his original body tugs on his soul. They find him half-buried in snow and he’s able to warn them that Briggs isn’t safe anymore. May and Marcoh discover a secret message hidden in Scar’s brother’s journal that shows the nationwide transmutation circle Father is building, but also reveals a second, similar circle that uses alkahestry.

Meanwhile, Ed and Major Miles are arguing about whether to kill Kimblee and the men he has with him. They try to snipe him, but Ed goes up to him to try to talk to him on purpose so they can’t take the shot. Kimblee figures out they’re trying to snipe him, and he and Ed fight. Ed also fights his two chimera buddies, Darius and Heinkel, a gorilla man and a lion man. These two are still cheesy, but they’re not as bad as Bebop and Rocksteady. Their designs are more restrained—they look like a guy who’s part gorilla and a guy who’s part lion, but not in the same over-the-top Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles way. They don’t have insane weapons like gooey spit and quills that shoot out like darts, which are perfect for replicating on action figures that no one buys because they want Raphael, and when he runs out they’ll settle for Michelangelo. Plus, lions and gorillas are just cooler animals than weird spitty frogs and porcupine rhinos. Kimblee defeats Ed and escapes, putting his chimera buddies in danger in the process, so Ed saves them and convinces them to help him so he can heal his injuries.

Kimblee escapes and meets Pride in the tunnel that Sloth was digging. This seems like as good a time as any to warn you that a lot of things in Part 4 don’t make sense. Or at least, the weight they’re given doesn’t make sense. Among these is the next major event, when Pride sends Kimblee north to Drachma to lead an army to attack the wall at Briggs. He tells them there are traitors inside that will let them in, but it’s a lie and they just get obliterated. I assume the purpose of this was more lives for the transmutation circle. We see wars going on in the south and east too. But the show gives it so much weight by showing Kimblee, who’s been built up as a major character, going off to effect this attack. Then it comes to nothing, narratively.

Scar and Winry’s group lure out Envy by having one of Kimblee’s chimeras call in a tip to Central that Dr. Marcoh is there. They set a trap and Marcoh uses a new technique he developed to destroy Philosopher’s Stones to reduce Envy into a weird gross lizard embryo thing, which they put in a jar and give to May so she can return to Xing and use it to find the secret to immortality. Envy tells them that Ed is missing and Al decides to move on, heading for Lior, since he thinks there will be a tunnel there like the one at Briggs that he can destroy to impede Father’s plan. They meet Rose and Hohenheim there, and Al hears the whole story from his father about what they’re fighting against. Hohenheim tells Al not to go into the tunnel because Pride is guarding it, and they still have time before the Promised Day when it all goes down. Envy convinces May to turn around and go back to help the people of Amestris.

The Gecko man who worked for the original Greed way back in Part 1 and whose only role was to lure Al into the alley where he was captured is still alive and he sees some soldiers show up at Izumi’s house to look for her. She and her husband are on vacation. They ran into Hohenheim earlier, who rearranged some of Izumi’s guts so she would have less trouble with coughing up blood. Hohenheim told them about the Promised Day. After that, they went to Briggs and attacked it so they could relay the message about the Promised Day to Major Miles and Captain Buccaneer. The Gecko man ends up finding the sewer entrance to Father’s lair, where is killed by new Greed / Ling, which triggers some of old Greed’s memories and makes him go crazy. He tears off and attacks Bradley at the Führer’s mansion, then runs off, where he runs into Ed and his two chimera buddies outside of town at the house where Lan Fan was treated after they captured Gluttony back in Part 2. They team up.

Olivier Armstrong fights her brother for control of the Armstrong family and somehow wins, even though we see later that Alex Louis Armstrong can fight Sloth, a being capable of taking a blast from a tank, hand to hand. They smash up the mansion during their fight. Olivier later uses the repairs as a pretext to smuggle in a bunch of weapons along with the building supplies.

Mustang and Olivier are both gathering forces for the Promised Day. Mustang has coordinated with his buddy General Grumman, who it turns out is a sexual harasser when he grabs his adjutant Rebecca’s ass. Rebecca is a stereotypical working woman who can’t land a man, except in a fascist country’s military. Rebecca and Hawkeye are friends, so they relay messages by having Rebecca go to Central, where the two of them shop up a storm, because that’s just what women do, even when they’re military sharpshooters, amirite? Hawkeye was earlier able to slip a note to Mustang about Selim Bradley being a homunculus, so he’s all in on that too.

Several months later, a train arrives at Resembool with Winry, Al, and the Briggs men on it. Winry finds Ed and his buddies staying at her house and after a “hilarious” scene where he almost sees her naked, they have a little reunion and then part again as Ed leaves. The Briggs troops end up in the east, where they team up with General Grumman’s troops and betray Bradley, who came to watch the joint military exercises. He gets a fake call back to Central and they blow up his train on a bridge. Al somehow (I can’t remember how, and the wikia is not enlightening me) ends up going on to Central, where he’s taken captive by Pride and Gluttony.

Ed’s group arrives in Kanama, a slum outside Central, and meets Hohenheim, who explains everything to him. They meet Al outside the city and Pride and Gluttony attack. There’s a protracted battle during which Fu and Lan Fan show up to help fight the two Homunculi. They realize they can neuter Pride’s shadow powers either by making it completely dark or by setting off flash bombs that make too much light. Ultimately, they rescue Al from Pride’s grasp. Pride eats Gluttony to gain extra power, and Al and Hohenheim trap him in a giant dome that looks like an orange, where it’s dark so that he can’t use his powers. Al gets himself trapped inside with Pride for some reason. He says it has to be him because he doesn’t eat or get tired, but I didn’t catch why it had to be anyone since Pride stood there yakking with Hohenheim for like five minutes, during which Hohenheim could have easily created the dome without anyone needing to be inside with him. Greed runs away sometime in the middle of the fight and heads for Central, figuring that Father is now only guarded by Sloth and this is his chance to kill them off and take over the country for himself.

Mustang meets up with his flunkies again through an elaborate series of events involving his foster mother, Chris Mustang, the madame of the brothel that Mustang has been visiting for information for a while now. In the end, he’s in the sewers with Hawkeye, Breda, and Fuery ready for action. They kidnap Bradley’s wife, Mrs. Bradley, who we found out earlier Bradley actually loves. We’ll also find out later that Pride actually loves her. A group of soldiers surround them and show no regard for her life at all, their leader saying they can shoot everyone except Mustang. The eastern soldiers come in and save them, and with the arrival of the united eastern and Briggs forces there’s a full-out battle in the streets. A bunch of characters I didn’t really care about, including Rebecca, Maria Ross, Havoc, and Sergeant Brosh, return to be involved in this.

Scar, Marcoh, and Bebop and Rocksteady meet up with Ed, Darius, and Heinkel at the battlefield where Pride is trapped. The four chimeras have a little powwow about their choice to work with Ed, saying they knew they were expendable to Kimblee and respect Ed for his regard for their lives even when they were enemies. I’m pretty sure this is going to set up a big “Ed was right about not killing” moment, which I am not looking forward to because this series is already stuffed with so many moral questions that it had to start just dropping them and deciding not to address them. The group heads off for Central to try and reach Father and stop the Promised Day. They go down through the entrance in the Third Laboratory that Al and Mustang found back in Part 2 when they fought Lust. Hohenheim and Lan Fan split off from the group, and Hohenheim tells Lan Fan to go look for Ling on her own like she wanted, while he does something or other that we don’t see in Part 4. Meanwhile, Olivier Armstrong makes her move and kills off the last few generals on the council, except for one who goes down into the secret chamber and unleashes the alchemy zombies, which surge out to attack Ed, Scar, and the chimeras.

Heinkel the lion man, who stayed behind in the slums due to his injuries, goes to the dome to talk to Al. He hears Pride beating on Al’s head with a stick and realizes that it’s Morse code. Somehow, Kimblee was able to hear this from wherever he got to in the many months of the timeskip, and he shows up and frees Pride. Al fights Pride and Kimblee with a Philosopher’s Stone that Heinkel apparently picked up when Kimblee dropped it back when he first joined Ed. He and Pride fight to a standstill. Kimblee still has one Philosopher’s Stone, but Heinkel is able to get the drop on him and rip his throat out. Marcoh and Yoki, who also remained behind, drive up in a car and cart out Al and Heinkel. Pride gloats over the dying Kimblee for a minute and then eats him.

Olivier Armstrong teams up with her brother to fight Sloth. Just when they think he’s dead, he comes back to life.

May has reached Central and is in the sewers going to Father’s lair. She runs into the alchemy zombies. Envy escapes its jar when one of the zombies inexplicably eats it, and is able to take over that body and absorb all the other bodies to reform its original body, a gigantic green Cocker Spaniel with ugly faces coming out of its back, which we first saw back in Part 2 when Envy was trapped inside Gluttony’s stomach with Ed and Ling.

Mustang and his group drive a truck around Central for a while and then they send Ross off with Mrs. Bradley to go to a secret hiding spot. Mustang then busts in to help Ed, Scar, and the chimeras fight the alchemic zombies.

A State of Confusion

My synopsis above might have looked like a strange, disjointed series of events. That’s because Part 4 is indeed a strange, disjointed series of events. My synopsis might have instead looked fairly coherent. That’s because I did a surprising amount of work to glob up each individual event following a group of characters into scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends. In the actual show, most of these events are cut up into five minute slices and then alternate with slices from other storylines across four or five episodes. The fight with Pride and Gluttony that ends with Pride and Al trapped in a dome, which I summarized in like one paragraph, actually took place over three episodes. It was sliced up into five-minute segments and then a few were sprinkled into each episode alongside five-minute segments showing us what Mustang and Olivier Armstrong were up to. It would have been so much less confusing if each episode just dealt with one group’s storyline and left it off at the point where they were about to meet up with another group.

It’s also confusing to keep track of all these characters, where they are, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. As I was watching the episodes, I kept forgetting which group Marcoh was with. I kept forgetting why Edward was doing what he was doing. I kept forgetting what Scar’s plan was. I’m still not sure what Mustang’s plan was. (Maybe they’ll explain it in Part 5?) I couldn’t be bothered to keep track of the tag-along characters like the chimeras and Yoki; from my perspective, they would just show up somewhere and do the thing when the plot required it. I don’t know which parts of the story we haven’t been told yet and which parts were slipped into some five-minute scene that immediately left my mind once the next five-minute scene, involving entirely different characters, started assaulting me with information and noise and philosophical questions. The months-long timeskip exacerbated this problem early on; it completely reset where everyone was and what they were doing and why, and the show was very unclear about reestablishing it. Even with the help of a blow-by-blow plot synopsis from the wikia, I couldn’t remember what happened to Al after the train left Resembool that led to him being captured by Pride.

The protracted action scenes in Part 4 didn’t help any of this. Part 4 had a lot of confusing plot dumps, but when it wasn’t dumping plot, it was all action. It’s easy to lose the thread of the plot during a long action scene, especially when that plot is confusing and boring to begin with. If an action scene spanned multiple episodes, I was done; good luck remembering anything that happened in the plot last time.

In the end, I don’t believe all this confusing plot spew advanced the actual story in a significant way. The first part just summarily wraps up the Briggs storyline so we can be done with that. Then Hohenheim tells everyone that the Promised Day is coming and they’d better all get ready. The entire rest of it is just setting up all the action figures so they can knock each other down in Part 5. There’s no character advancement. Ed and Al haven’t had their views challenged. Scar magically decided last time that he’s going to try to pursue peace between the races and stop murdering people, so he’s lost his character arc. Everyone else is also just continuing with whatever they were doing at the end of Part 3. Finding out that Bradley and Selim actually care about Mrs. Bradley is the only thing close to character advancement we get here, but it’s just more setup for Part 5—maybe. They might just never go anywhere with that. They’ve done it before.

I’m Not Laughing

The humor continues to be a sore spot. Most of it just isn’t funny. The show has made me laugh on rare occasions, but it’s like a 1:50 ratio of hits to misses. It still has a terrible habit of shoving in slapstick at serious moments. It was such an anticlimax when the huge battle against Envy, where Marcoh unexpectedly got to be awesome, basically ended with Fozzy Bear popping up and going “Wakka wakka wakka!” Envy’s real body looks ridiculous. I made jokes about it above. But Envy was treated as a serious threat up to this point. You can’t just ruin that by turning it into an object of slapstick humor. Especially if you’re planning to bring it back as a real threat later on, as the show does in the final episode of Part 4. And now the humor has gotten even worse, adding tired jokes about lovable sexual harassing bosses and their stereotypical working woman who can’t get a man subordinates. Not that many, thank goodness, but they were so bad that they stuck out to me even though they only occupied about three minutes of total screentime.

This sort of humor is par for the course in anime, and in my opinion it’s one of the worst legacies left to us by the massively overrated Rumiko Takahashi. Not all anime use this kind of dumb humor. The humor in Bakemonogatari is infinitely more clever. The humor in One Punch Man is infinitely more clever. Hell, the humor in Yuru Yuri is infinitely more clever. The characters in Full Metal Alchemist are so well developed that there are definitely opportunities for real character-based humor. Ed being insecure about his height is a good basis for jokes, but having him constantly yell and throw things at people who call him short wasn’t the way to capitalize on it. And I refuse to believe that there was no way to make funny character-based jokes about a character as dark and tormented as Scar, once he joined the heroes’ side. Adam West’s Batman is even more hilarious today because we have Christian Bale’s Batman and Ben Affleck’s Batman. Taking a tortured antihero down a peg can be hilarious, but the show never even attempts it.

Wasted Opportunities, Pointless Scenes

Last time I complained that the Winry / Ed romance is uninteresting, and it would have been a lot more interesting if Winry were in love with Al. I think this was a big wasted opportunity, but at least I understand why they went the way they did: Ed is the actual hero, the one who does all the cool things and drives the plot. Al ranges from damsel in distress to a good excuse not to draw backgrounds, since he fills up the entire backdrop when he’s standing behind Ed and the camera is positioned to get both of them in frame. I wish it weren’t this way—I kept waiting for him to get his chance to be awesome, and he never did. (Though the fight scene where Al uses the Philosopher’s Stone against Pride and Kimblee is amazingly cool. That’s one of my few compliments for Part 4. If that becomes a pattern, maybe I’ll rescind those words. But one fight scene where he’s dependent on a glowing red rock isn’t enough at this point.) Why would the damsel in distress cum background extra get the girl? That’s just silly. Of course Winry is in love with Ed. Of course Al only gets the joke romance with May that can’t go anywhere because she’s a child.

In Part 4 there are three character arcs that the show went out of its way to set up earlier on which we can now say are not going to go anywhere and were entirely pointless: Scar’s crusade against alchemy; Kimblee’s entire history and personality; and the tension that comes from innocent little boy Selim being the Elrics’ biggest fan in the world when he’s also the son of the Führer who’s also a homunculus, their most deadly enemy.

I’ve already ranted about Scar. It makes practical sense for him to team up with Ed and Al the way he does, and the end of Part 3 really sold me on it. But Scar in earlier stories was a zealot, and possibly not right in the head. He strongly believed that alchemy was evil, and he was willing to murder for that belief. I can buy him teaming up with alchemists as a practical matter, and to stick it to the people who initiated the Ishval massacre, but there were still alchemists on the ground in Ishval slaughtering people, and his enemies are still using alchemy to kill and torture the innocent, so I can’t believe he would just decide after one five-minute conversation that his entire way of looking at the world was wrong and he needs to work peacefully to overcome racism. And that’s pretty much where his character sits during Part 4; he says as much to a group of people he meets in the forest on his way to Kanama, who react with alarm to the news that Ishvalans are massing in Central.

I was interested in Kimblee after Part 3. He had a different way of looking at the Ishval massacre, a way that maybe is closer to what a soldier in that situation would actually think than the moral hand-wringing of Mustang, Hawkeye, and Armstrong. He seemed genuinely horrified by what happened to Winry’s parents. We never get any sign that he was lying when he told her that story, and she already trusted him completely so he had no good reason to make up a lie anyway. He was a great villain for about five episodes. He was powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with Scar, and smart enough to outmaneuver the heroes, and he looked cool and was a snappy dresser. Then he disappeared, did a few things that didn’t make sense, and died. We never find out anything about Kimblee. We never find out why he was in prison other than some vague hints that he killed some officers. We never find out why he would have done that, given that he doesn’t seem to be a psychotic killer in this version like he was in the 2003 series. When he’s first freed from prison he gets the mandate from the Führer to hunt down Scar, who at that time is a fugitive, murderer, and terrorist. At some point he just kind of slips without any trouble into this new world where everyone is a homunculus and the plan is to vaporize all of Amestris into a Philosopher’s Stone. He goes and leads the Drachma army to its death, and then he drives around the country for several months until he hears Pride knocking on Al’s head with a stick in Morse code and shows up to save him. Then he dies, and Pride eats him. I have a feeling some sort of ghost Kimblee is going to come out of Pride later, but you can’t develop someone’s character when they only exist as a ghost that comes out of another character who’s a villain.

And then there’s Selim. We spent half an episode seeing Ed and Al meet him in a library, go to his house, learn that he’s their biggest fan and the Führer’s son. I assumed this was leading to some scene where he finds out that the Elrics and his father are actually enemies, and is torn apart because his beloved father and his beloved idols hate each other. Nope! He’s a homunculus, and that whole setup was completely pointless. It pretty much only existed so that when Hawkeye passes Mustang a note that says “SELIM BRADLEY IS HOMUNCULUS”, we know who the hell Selim Bradley is.

My hypothetical Winry / Al romance was fan-fiction; I looked at the show and said “This would be more interesting and daring than what you’re doing”. These stories are things the show actually went out of its way to set up, and then just threw away. With how little actually happened in Part 4, I’m positive some of these things could have been developed more. Scar pretty much does nothing and Kimblee is MIA, so there was room for a Scar / Kimblee story that could have told us more about both of them while also driving forward the main plot.

Other Random Complaints

• When Al and Winry’s group reaches Lior, Rose offers Winry a bath. Winry gets in the bath, and the camera pans lovingly over her breasts and thighs while she gets jealous about the way Rose talks about Edward. If I wanted to see this stuff, I’d be watching To-Love-Ru, guys.
• During the Briggs / East City joint military exercises, General Grumman has a long inner monologue about how he’ll withhold help from Mustang and Olivier Armstrong so he can let them die, then sweep in with his forces and take over, becoming Führer himself. It ends with Major Miles looking at him and thinking, “That’s probably what he’s thinking.” So was he thinking that or not? And given that Briggs and East City forces do show up to help Mustang in Central, what was the point of ever casting doubt on Grumman’s intentions in the first place?
• Gluttony has gotten really fucking annoying. Something about his voice and the fact that he only has three different lines of dialogue (“Can I eat them?”, “Lust!”, and “Otousama!”) just grates on me. He was creepy at first, but he’s been overused. I was surprised that they brought him back after his death in Part 3, and glad when Pride chomped him down and got rid of him.
• Fu has chi-based kung fu homunculus detection. I accepted this weird mixture of magic, technology, religion, and martial arts in Negima because that world was incoherent anyway. Full Metal Alchemist has such a cohesive world that it takes me out of it when they reveal the existence of kung fu-based homunculus detection methods.
• Finding out that the brothel madam is Mustang’s foster mother added nothing to anything. It already made sense that Mustang would be gathering information from a brothel madam; he’s interested in stuff going on in the military, and soldiers like brothels, so of course she would hear a lot of stuff going on in the military.
• The eyecatches where they show a picture of a character and some random dude says “Full Metal Alchemist!” are weird and annoying. They’ve been that way since Part 1, it was just especially annoying this time.
• Bebop and Rocksteady are still lame.
• The music is, in my opinion, terrible. I’m qualifying with “In my opinion” even though this entire rant is in my opinion because music is even more subjective than things like story and character and even humor. I’m sure a lot of people love the music in this show. But I don’t enjoy it. The background music sounds like it’s from the most generic Playstation 1 JRPG ever, but the openings and endings are really the worst part. The openings all sound like mediocre boy band music. Whenever I listen to them, I imagine five Japanese guys with perfectly tousled hair thick with product, on stage in white leather pants gyrating their hips, while hordes of schoolgirls scream in the audience below. The endings are a little bit better but sound a bit like hip hop dance mixes of the most generic J-Pop songs ever. I wish they could just steal the soundtrack from Last Exile and transplant it onto Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. That was a good soundtrack. (I wouldn’t complain if they wanted to steal Range Murata’s art, either; the art style in Full Metal Alchemist isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty uninspiring. The manga had a bit more character, but translating its style directly to the screen probably would have created the wrong tone.)

Actual Compliments

• Al with the Philosopher’s Stone vs. Pride and Kimblee was awesome. Too bad the budget ran out.
• Olivier and Alex Armstrong vs. Sloth was also pretty cool, but the budget had already run out so we didn’t get as much dynamic combat.
• The scene in Resembool where Ed almost sees Winry naked was terrible (again, I’d be watching To-Love-Ru if I wanted to see that, guys), but the part afterwards where they talk was pretty good. It was the usual “I want you to leave so you won’t be in danger” / “No, I’m not letting you face that alone” sort of thing, but it felt in-character for both of them, and they came sort of close to acknowledging their feelings for each other without having to make a big deal about it. Plus, I liked that we see Ed is taller than Winry now. Back in Part 1, we found out that when they were kids, Winry said she couldn’t marry Al because she didn’t want to marry a man who was shorter than her. Now that Ed isn’t shorter than her anymore, she’s free to be with him. (I still think it would’ve been more fun if she were in love with Al, and it was pointed out that he’s now taller than her.)
• Last time I complained about how stupid it was that Bebop and Rocksteady are all emo about getting their original bodies back so they can see their families, since they can turn back into human form whenever they want. This time Heinkel and Darius say they don’t care that much about getting their original bodies back, which makes more sense. Sure, if you’re single and trying to date, it might be a problem that you can turn into a lion. But if you’ve already got a wife and children who thought you were dead, they’d probably be glad to see you, even if you can turn into a lion now. (Or even a frog with gooey spit powers. Maybe. Some women might divorce a man, yelling at him that he couldn’t even get the lion powers. But I think most would be glad to see him.)
• The black coat and white shirt that Ed wears for most of this part looks cool. I don’t think he should have gone back to his weird red hoodie coat with the caduceus on the back.
• This show has tons of bad-ass female characters—Hawkeye, Olivier, Izumi. Even Winry; not every chick can whip you up a robot arm or come up with an amazing plan to trick a dangerous guy like Kimblee. And despite all the crap going on in Part 4, we got to see a little of each of them. Olivier was probably the standout. She’s ruthless, terrifying, and brutally effective. There’s no way that woman hasn’t spent a tour in the world of Attack on Titan. There was a great joke (one of the ones that did make me laugh) back in Part 3 where she pretended she was just a soft woman who loves children and whose biological clock was ticking to get General Raven to open up to her, and Ed couldn’t stop cracking up as he listened to her lay it on. Sadly, Part 4 can lay no claim to it. That joke belongs to Part 3.
• Rose didn’t get raped, have a rape baby, and become a cult leader. Brotherhood overall has been a lot less dark than the 2003 series, and I thought it was nice to see her and Lior recovering and doing well. One of the (many, many, many) themes of Brotherhood has been the resilience of the people of Amestris, even in the face of homunculus plots to keep them at war all the time, and Lior getting past its troubles and rebuilding was a great way to illustrate that theme.

Am I dropping the show?

No. I might take a break before Part 5, but I do want to finish this show.

Unlike Last Exile, I care about the characters in Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Maybe I don’t care that much what’s happening with Denny Broush or Captain Buccaneer or May Chang, but I do care about Ed and Al and Mustang and Hawkeye and Winry. I do want to see Father’s plans defeated. Until their stories were cut off in Part 4, I was interested to see what would happen with Scar and Kimblee.

Also, Last Exile felt confusing for no reason. To my knowledge it was anime-original, so there was no source material they were trying to condense. They did an unspeakably bad job of teaching us enough about the world and the characters that we would care when things happened to them. There was no apparent aim to the story.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is more a victim of source material distillation. The manga was very long and had like fifty characters. They’ve tried to squeeze the entire story into one anime series. That would be challenging just due to sheer length, but adapting a manga to an anime is always structurally dicey. The rhythms of the story are so different between the two media. If it’s badly done, you can see the seams where they stitched together multiple manga chapters to make one anime episode. There isn’t time to do justice to like fifty characters unless you adapt the manga frame by frame, and making anime is expensive, so even for one like this that was popular and brought in good returns, there weren’t enough resources to do that. Even though I complain a lot about the story structure and pacing, I understand all of that, and I do cut the show some slack. The adaptation has a lot of problems, but the story being adapted is a good one, with a creative and original concept; well-developed, likeable characters; and a world that feels real. Those good qualities do still shine through, even when the thread of the plot is totally buried under confusing noise and information overload like it was for me through most of Part 4.

So no, I’m not going to drop it. I want to finish this.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 3

By this point, the story structure of Brotherhood is pretty unimpeachable. It’s not perfect—nothing is—but it’s not the major problem it was back in Part 1, or the continuing minor problem it was in Part 2. The show has also gotten a lot better about not putting in “I’m not short!” jokes at inappropriate times.

We finish out the story from Part 2 with Ed and Al fighting against Envy, Gluttony, and Father. Gluttony dies, but the fight goes against them when Ling decides that Father has the path to immortality he wants and agrees to become the new Greed, taking in the Philosopher’s Stone that the original Greed was boiled down into. Scar and May crash in and help them, but Father has a way of disabling alchemy inside his lair that he uses to take away their ability to fight. Ed and Al notice that May’s Xingese alkahestry isn’t affected by this, however, May is injured and Al gives her to Scar to get away.

Meanwhile, up on the surface, Mustang trusts the wrong person—General Raven—and ends up dragged before a council of corrupt generals and the Fuhrer himself. After Ed and Al’s capture, they too are brought before the Fuhrer and hear from Mustang what’s happened. The Fuhrer doesn’t kill them since they’re valuable sacrifices, but he does tell them they’d better behave themselves and not try to recruit anyone else to their cause, because he’s got men watching Winry, ready to kill her if the brothers go against him.

Edward goes to visit Hawkeye and return the gun she gave him way back in the forest before he was sucked into Greed’s belly. He didn’t end up using it due to his aversion to killing. She tells him about what happened during the Ishvalan massacre, where she was a sniper. We also see how she and Mustang met—her father was Mustang’s alchemy instructor, and asked him to look after her when he died. They happen to meet up coincidentally later on during the war. Hawkeye also casually mentions that it looks like Ed has feelings for Winry, which he denies, even though he’s starting to think he might (and Winry has also been thinking that she has feelings for Ed).

Ed and Al decide to start looking for May, since her alkahestry still worked inside Father’s alchemy cancelling field, and also because alkahestry might be useful for restoring their bodies. May has headed north with Scar and Dr. Marcoh, whom Scar found in a holding cell in the sewers when he was escaping from Father’s lair. He wants Marcoh’s help deciphering his brother’s research notes. Armstrong gives the Elrics a letter of recommendation to his sister, Olivier. (Which is a man’s name. Whatever.) Before Ed and Al leave, they run into the Führer’s son, Selim Bradley, who idolizes them as well as his father and wants to be an alchemist when he gets older. After this, they head north.

The Führer releases Solf Kimblee, the Crimson Alchemist, from prison to hunt Scar. I barely remember anything about Kimblee from the 2003 show, except that he was a crazed serial murderer. In Brotherhood, as we’ll see going forward, he’s a brutal and ruthless adversary, but nothing about him strikes me as unhinged. Mustang and Hawkeye had a run-in with him during the Ishvalan war when he criticized them for their moral hand-wringing, but interestingly, he kind of had a point; he tells them that ultimately a soldier’s job is to kill, and asks Hawkeye if there isn’t some small part of her that feels satisfied with her skill when she makes a kill, and wonders why they became soldiers in the first place if they had such a problem with the carnage of a battlefield. Brotherhood’s Kimblee so far reminds me of Watchmen’s Comedian: as a soldier, he’s a killer, and he knows it; he doesn’t particularly enjoy it, but it’s part of the job, and he’s good at it. This makes him a good foil to Scar, who’s also an unflinching murderer, but where Kimblee is pragmatic about it, Scar is passionately ideological. With Ed and Al now unable to directly fight the Homunculi, Kimblee was exactly the villain we needed to move the story along.

The Elric brothers go the wall at Fort Briggs and meet General Olivier Armstrong, a hard-ass commander charged with securing Amestris’s northern border against Drachma, the large nation bordering them. Her men are equally hardcore and include Buccaneer, who’s like eight feet tall and has a chainsaw for a hand, and Major Miles, her adjutant and an Ishvalan. (There’s some convoluted story about him being a quarter Ishvalan, but he looks exactly like all the other Ishvalans, so he’s basically just Ishvalan.) After Sloth bursts through a tunnel in the ground and has to be covered in tank fuel and frozen, General Armstrong claps them in irons and throws them in the brig until they tell her the truth about why they’re there. They end up telling her everything, so that she’s in the know when General Raven shows up, accompanied by Kimblee, freshly healed after a battle with Scar on a train, and wielding a philosopher’s stone. General Raven orders them to unfreeze Sloth and put him back in the hole, then seal the hole with concrete. General Armstrong tricks him into telling her about the Homunculi and offering her an army of immortal soldiers and eternal life herself; she then cuts him open and throws his body in the concrete.

The Elrics are horrified to find that Kimblee brought Winry with him, under the guise of replacing Ed’s automail with a special alloy that won’t give him frostbite where it touches the skin, like Buccaneer’s chainsaw hand. Kimblee gained Winry’s trust on the car ride over by telling her that he knew her parents in Ishval, how much he respected them, and that he was the one who found their bodies after Scar killed them. (Edward discovered this all the way back in the beginning of Part 2 when he ran into a group of Ishvalans in the ruins of Xerxes. Winry happened to stumble on their battle with Scar during the plan to capture one of the Homunculi, and in a moment of panic, Ed spilled the beans. Winry pointed a gun at Scar and tried to get herself to kill him, but she couldn’t, and Ed stopped her.) Winry is horrified to find out that Kimblee is keeping her to threaten Ed and Al. She helps them come up with a plan to get out of it: Ed will pretend to help Kimblee hunt Scar and look for an opening to get her away. They also need to find Scar because they now know that May is with him. In the ruined mining town of Baschool, they manage to slip away from Kimblee’s men and find Scar and Marcoh.

After rescuing Scar from Bebop and Rocksteady from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a pair of chimeras that Kimblee brought with him), they decide to team up. Winry isn’t quite able to forgive Scar, but she does get over her desire for revenge and comes up with an ingenious plan: she’ll pretend that Scar broke free and abducted her so that she can run off with his group and get free of Kimblee, while Ed and Al will act furious and pretend to help Kimblee hunt Scar down. Scar’s group will head through the mines back to Fort Briggs, where General Armstrong will protect them. However, after they leave, Major Miles gets a call that General Armstrong has been called to Central, and the base is no longer under her command. With a snowstorm rising, there’s no way they can reach Winry and Scar’s group to get the message to them—unless Al, who doesn’t feel cold, goes alone. Part 3 ends here.

“Interlude Party”

Part 3 is, for the most part, great. I was absorbed in the story and fascinated with everything we learned about the characters. There were only two blights on Part 3 that came to mind, and one of them was “Interlude Party”.

“Interlude Party”, which is the first episode of Part 3, is a crappy recap episode interspersed with footage of Hohenheim drinking by a bonfire with a younger Pinako Rockbell (Winry’s grandmother). It’s even crappier than your standard clip show because they don’t even recap the story, they just show tiny clips from Parts 1 and 2 with no context. Then Hohenheim and Pinako will come on for two minutes, and it’s pretty clear this is in Hohenheim’s head since young Pinako knows about things that are going on in the present. They have some nonsensical pseudo-philosophical back and forth, and then it’s more clips.

I used to watch clip shows because I was so eager to see anime that I would even sit through crappy supercuts of everything that had happened already. I skip them nowadays, mostly. I didn’t skip “Interlude Party”, but I didn’t watch it either; I fast-forwarded all the clips and watched the scenes with Hohenheim and young Pinako. Which were shit. Don’t do that. Just skip this episode. I watch this show in the morning, before I go to work, because doing something I enjoy early in the morning helps set up a good tempo for the rest of the day. Except when the episode is a crappy clip show that I have to fast-forward most of, and which is crappy even when it’s not clips. Then it sets up a day where I do things I’ve already done in the past again, interspersed with some really nonsensical new things.

Heroes in a Half-Shell

Nothing in Part 3 broke the mood like all those out-of-place short jokes and hatcheted-together stories in Part 1, but Bebop and Rocksteady sure came close. (I can’t be bothered to find out what their real names are.) The fight against them was cheesy and way too comedic for this point in the series. It wasn’t as bad as the “turn into chibis and beat up everyone offscreen” fight from the Lior story, but it was very slapstick, as it must be when you’re fighting a guy whose power is gooey spit. Scar is a bad-ass antihero; for a serious fight, he needs a bad-ass anti-villain like Kimblee, not these rejected Skeletor minions.

After they’re defeated, everyone lets them hear Winry’s entire plan to let herself be taken captive by Scar so they can go back and tell Kimblee what’s really going on. Major Miles wants to kill them to prevent this, but Ed won’t let him. Conveniently, they decide they never liked Kimblee anyway and they want to switch sides so they can get their old bodies back and see their families again. The kicker, the thing that makes this really dumb and not just a lazy way of letting Edward be right without any consequences, is that they can transform back and forth at will between Bebop and Rocksteady and human forms. So what the hell do they need their original bodies for anyway? It’s not like Al, who can’t even eat or touch someone in his current state. They can just turn into humans and go home to their families.

This is lazily repeated early in Part 4 when Edward saves two more of Kimblee’s chimera henchmen, who also decide that they never liked Kimblee anyway and they’re on Ed’s side now. What is this, Yu-gi-oh?

The Question of Race

Edward wants you to know that he doesn’t see color. Everyone’s blood is red just the same as his.

Seriously, the way Edward addresses race when he finds out Major Miles is Ishvalan is way too naive. I know he means well, but it felt like the show was saying that solving racism is really quite simple: we all just have to stop seeing race and get along. It makes sense that Edward would think this way—he’s not Ishvalan, he wasn’t in the war, and no one he knows died in it. But Major Miles, whose grandfather died in the massacre, acts like this is some profound truth that he never thought of before, even telling Scar later that Edward drastically changed his opinion on the whole matter.

I hope this isn’t just the show’s way of shoving aside the whole ethnically-motivated genocide thing so everyone on the “good” side can team up to fight the evil Homunculi.

Winry’s Heart

I have no particular feelings either way on Winry and Edward’s budding romance. It doesn’t annoy me, but it doesn’t interest me at all either. I don’t think they really have any chemistry, and their occasional Rumiko Takahashi-esque screaming matches neither amuse nor anger me; I just kind of tune out until it’s over.

There is someone Winry could have fallen in love with that would have made me interested: Scar. That would be insane, though. But there’s also Al. She’s known Al just as long as Ed. She and Al are always the ones worrying together when Ed pushes himself too hard and gets hurt. There was some actual drama between them back in Part 1 when Al was worried that he might be a fabricated personality and Winry got angry at him. There’s no reason why she couldn’t have loved Al instead of Ed. Then the romance would’ve had real pathos, since Al doesn’t have a body and may never. They wouldn’t be able to touch or kiss until his body was restored. Al keeps on mentioning that Winry’s apple pie is the first thing he wants to eat when he gets his body back; that would have even more meaning if they were in love. Falling in love fits Al’s gentle personality more than Edward’s. I like Al, and I don’t think he gets enough to do to get out of Edward’s shadow; a romance with Winry would be a big step towards that.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part 2

I realized that I didn’t explain last time what I meant by “Part 1”, “Part 2”, etc. Netflix (where I’m watching this show) has it split up by cour, but calls them “parts”. So “Part 1” is the first cour, or thirteen episodes. Part 2 is the next thirteen, and so on until the show ends. I decided to cover them this way because thirteen episodes is a good unit; you can cover some major story threads in that amount of time, and it’s nowhere near as exhausting as single episode reviews where you have to come up with something interesting to say about episodes like “Envoy from the East” where nothing important to the plot happens and everything is just setup for the next storyline, but it’s also a lot easier to cover usefully than the entire series in one go, at least for a show this long.

Part 2 is where Brotherhood works out the last of its problems from its perfunctory coverage of the early material. There are still a few story beats that feel poorly motivated or don’t land well because of how much of the early manga stories was cut, but the plot flows a lot better than in Part 1, and is easy to follow, exciting, and emotional—except in the wrap-up to the Greed story, which begins Part 2. The show acts like we’re supposed to care when the Führer unceremoniously dispatches Greed’s henchmen, but all we’ve seen of them aside from fight scenes is a few lame jokes that just made them look unthreatening, so they’re neither good villains nor sympathetic characters.

After wrapping up the Greed story with uncomfortable abruptness, Part 2 introduces the Xing characters–Prince Ling Yao and his ninja-like attendants, cute young girl Lan Fan and grizzled old soldier Fu, as well as May Chang, a little girl who comes separately from Ling and his group and ends up traveling with Scar. Where Amestris is the fantasy counterpart German Empire circa the rise of Nazism, Xing is basically Imperial China. It has its own version of alchemy, alkahestry, which is focused on medical uses. The Xing characters and alkahestry end up being important in a few different ways later on, but since they need to be established, an episode, “Envoy from the East”, clumsily shoves them onto the scene by having Ed and Al fight Ling, Lan Fan, and Fu for dubious reasons that ultimately don’t mean anything or further the story at all. I don’t know if this was better handled in the manga, as I never got to this point, but “Envoy from the East” is a pretty pointless episode and definitely counts as filler in every way except for its introduction of Xing.

After this we get four episodes about Mustang and his crew unraveling the mystery of Hughes’s death, and this is where I started to enjoy Brotherhood more than the 2003 series. In the 2003 series, it takes forever for Mustang to get any closure on Hughes’s death, and if I recall rightly, he only finds out what happens because Ed and Al tell him. Other than that he has nothing to do for the entire series—other than his awesome final battle against the Führer—which was disappointing, because he was my favorite character. (Honestly, mostly because it’s so much fun to snap your fingers and make a whooshing sound as if a giant ball of fire had just appeared. But favorite characters have been chosen for pettier reasons.) In Brotherhood, he pulls off a scheme that puts his squad of soldiers, Barry the Chopper, Ling Yao and his retainers, and Ed and Al into a fight against the Homunculi, who are forced to come into the open and reveal themselves. Then he gets an awesome battle against Lust, managing to kill her and prove that the Homunculi aren’t invincible after all. (Hawkeye, another character I always liked who didn’t get a chance to shine in the 2003 series, also gets some badass moments here, as does Alphonse, who only got to be cool towards the end of the 2003 series.) Mustang also gets to say my favorite line of the series so far. When he’s making the meat mannequin that he burns to fake Maria Ross’s death, one of his men (I forget which one) questions whether he’ll be able to burn the meat mannequin enough that no one will be able to tell it’s a fake, and Mustang replies, “Making charred corpses is my specialty”. It packs so many things we know about his character—his confidence, his wit, his guilt over the Ishvalan massacre—all into one line.

As much as I liked this story for its overall plot and the development it gives us for Mustang, it really suffers from how little time we got to get to know his squad during Part 1. For example, Jean Havoc is crippled after being attacked by Lust, and loses the use of his legs. If this had happened in the 2003 series, it would have been shocking; Havoc was a comic relief character, and seeing him so badly injured would have driven in how high the stakes are now that Mustang has chosen to oppose the Homunculi. In Brotherhood, though, he’s just one of those four guys that work for Mustang.

I also have to wonder how much I would have cared about Hawkeye if I hadn’t seen the 2003 series already, though she at least has the advantage of being a character who stands out—an awesome lady sharpshooter isn’t the sort of character you can just forget about, even if you don’t know anything about her. A lot of the jokier moments early on when she first meets Barry the Chopper didn’t work as well here as they did in the manga and 2003 show because we’d gotten such little time to know her. There was a tiny little attempt at a character moment where she loses her will to live in the face of the Homunculi’s overwhelming power and Mustang has to convince her to snap out of it, but it was so badly constructed that I didn’t even realize that’s what had happened until she explained it to Havoc later, trying to make him feel better. We can still sort of get a picture of who Hawkeye is if we think a lot about what’s happened in her few scenes so far. We know she’s brave and awesome because there was a moment back in the fight against Scar in Part 1 where Hughes says that as a normal human, he’s not getting involved in a battle of freaks; Hawkeye, on the other hand, runs right into that battle of freaks with two guns blazing. We also know she’s kind because of how she came to Ed and Al’s side when they were sitting injured after the battle was over, and because of how she tries to make Havoc feel better after he’s injured. Still, from a relatively straightforward show like this, I don’t know if I would have picked up on that if I hadn’t known it already.

For the next half of Part 2, Ed and Al get to prove they’re no idiots themselves when they realize that Lust’s unwillingness to kill them or Mustang, since they’re “sacrifices”, means it’s also likely the Homunculi would come out to fight against Scar if he were threatening them. They come up with a plan to lure Scar out, and enlist Ling and Lan Fan to capture one of the Homunculi for questioning. Lan Fan is injured and loses an arm in the battle against Gluttony and Führer Bradley, but the plan succeeds and they manage to capture Gluttony. In a battle between Ling, Ed, Al, Gluttony, and Envy, Gluttony flies into a rage trying to avenge Lust and runs off into the forest after Mustang, who comes in to assist mid-plan. Gluttony opens his stomach up, revealing there’s a black hole portal inside, and sucks in Ed, Ling, and Envy, who briefly fight but decide to make peace since they’re stuck there. Envy reveals that the Homunculi started the Ishvalan massacre so they would have raw materials for making Philosopher’s Stones, and explains that the inside of Gluttony’s stomach is a failed attempt at creating a Gateway to Truth. Ed realizes that this means he can probably get them out by attempting human transmutation again.

Meanwhile, with Mustang, Hawkeye, and Lan Fan safely away, Alphonse convinces Gluttony to bring him to Father, the Homunculi’s leader. Scar, on the trail of May Chang’s mini panda bear friend Shao Mei, follows them down into the sewer. When Alphonse and Gluttony meet Father, Edward, Ling, and Envy suddenly pop out of Gluttony’s stomach after a brief moment in the Gate where Ed sees Al’s body, still intact, and swears to come back for him. At the same time, Mustang, who is now aware that Bradley is a Homunculus, finds that his faithful underlings have all been dispersed to the four corners of Amestris, and Hawkeye has been assigned as the assistant to the Führer himself.

This storyline concludes in Part 3, so I won’t talk about that here, but what we get in Part 2 is extremely satisfying all on its own. It’s dense with plot and worldbuilding. We start to learn more about Ling, the Homunculi, the Ishvalan massacre, and Scar, and move forward on some of the mysteries that have been building up since the beginning. This is the first story in the show that I can honestly say is without flaws. It’s more plot-based, so for me it doesn’t have the same emotional impact as the previous story (even when you factor in the conclusion that comes in Part 3), but it unfolds its own story flawlessly and isn’t affected by any of the flaws of earlier stories.

Part 2 is a big improvement over Part 1. It still has some problems coming from just how compressed and warped the story in Part 1 was, but it got me a lot more invested in the story and characters than Part 1 did, and now I want to keep watching the show, instead of forcing myself to do it in the hopes it will get better.

I just wish they hadn’t begun Part 3 with a filler episode so shitty, it almost made me drop the show all over again.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood Part I

A lot of people love Brotherhood because it’s closer to the manga than the 2003 series. There’s a lot to like in Brotherhood, but compared to the 2003 series, it’s really oddly paced, and the story isn’t as well constructed, especially early on. I’ve found that every time I try to watch it, I struggle with how disjointed the early episodes feel and how badly motivated and based on coincidence a lot of the plot is. It definitely feels like they were just trying to cram in all the early parts of the manga so they could get to the juicy stuff. A tacked-on anime original first episode that introduces all the major characters (the Elric brothers, Mustang and Hawkeye and their group, Hughes, Armstrong, even Kimblee) by showing them tracking down and fighting a rogue State Alchemist, Isaac the Freezing Alchemist. (By the way, Isaac’s ability to control water should make him so overpowered—like Magneto levels of overpowered—which I guess was necessary for him to be a credible threat to nearly every heavy hitter in the FMA world, but then he just goes down like a punk when the half hour is up, and is never mentioned again.) Then we spend 13 episodes trundling through chopped together clipshows of the early stories: the battle with Cornello in Lior, Shou Tucker turning his daughter into a chimera, the first encounter with Scar, meeting with Dr. Marcoh and deciphering his notes, the visit to Izumi, the battle with Greed.

The only story I felt got real justice in the first thirteen was the Fifth Laboratory and the following death of Hughes. I give the writers credit for realizing that they had to get this right for the emotional punch to land later on when Ed and Al and Winry find out that Hughes is dead and how he died. I was almost ready to drop the show again until I got to that first Fifth Laboratory episode and the exciting and fluidly animated fights against the armor suits guarding it. The Izumi visit and following battle with Greed were also pretty well handled until their abrupt end (but that falls into Part 2, so I’ll complain about it there instead.)

The Lior story is the worst adapted by far, and sort of sums up all the problems I’ve had with the writing throughout Brotherhood, but especially in the earlier episodes. In the 2003 series it was spread over two episodes, and served as a great introduction to the series and the world. We found out what alchemy is and how it works; we got an exciting battle against Cornello and his chimeras; we got to understand Rose’s character and the position she was in; and later on, Lior was used to make the point that fanaticism outlives any single demagogue, since throwing out Cornello didn’t actually change anyone’s mind. In Brotherhood it’s all squeezed into one episode, so there’s no time to let any of these concepts play out. Rose is a poorly defined character. The fight between Edward and Cornello is decent, but in a later fight where there should be tension, Ed and Al just turn into chibis and stomp on over all the bad guys. (Brotherhood has a terrible habit of turning everyone into chibis or throwing in a “Don’t call me short!” joke at the absolute worst times, like when we’re in the middle of reeling from a series of startling revelations about the nature of the Amestrian government.) There are also some scenes that were important world- or character-building in the 2003 series, like Al introducing the concept of alchemy by fixing a radio or Ed having a complete list of physical ingredients in a human body and knowing they can be bought on a child’s budget, that become pointless in Brotherhood because we already know about alchemy and we already know about their past. On the other hand, Ed’s final speech to Rose carries more meaning in Brotherhood than it did in the 2003 series. Some of this might be a difference in how Vic Mignogna and Romi Park interpreted the speech; in the dub of the 2003 series, Mignogna delivers the speech like it’s supposed to be inspirational, whereas Park’s delivery in the Japanese version of Brotherhood comes off as if Ed is saying it’s just a grim reality of the world that can’t be escaped from. Either way, the speech has more weight because we already know that Ed and Al have been through significant hardship themselves; it’s not the naive blather of a hero who’s never faced a setback, but the hard-won wisdom of someone who’s been through hell himself.

That sums up my two biggest problems with Brotherhood so far, even where I am now 28 episodes in: the story has been squeezed and squished and chopped and rearranged so much that plot developments feel rushed or poorly motivated; and the series seems to think there’s a mandated quota of “I’m not short!” jokes per episode, and it’s not too concerned about where they fall. The humor in general isn’t good. It’s definitely from the old school of anime humor, where the height of hilarity is guys and girls with secret crushes on each other yelling at each other, ending with the guy getting bonked on the head. The manga had some much better character-based jokes, especially involving Mustang and Hawkeye, but none of those made it in. Unfortunately, the lack of downtime to get to know Mustang, Hawkeye, and the rest of the crew affects a lot of the plot in Part 2—as we’ll see.

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.