March
15,
2009
And the final batch of comics is those that aren’t in the Marvel universe at all. (Well, technically, two of them say they’re in the Marvel Universe, but they’re so far outside of continuity, it’s irrelevant.) Let’s do this one as a good ol-fashioned list:
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Ed Brubaker’s Criminal: Bad Night
is the third of his Criminal volumes, which follow some kind of loser around on seedy activities. They’re well-written, and if you like sordid crime fiction, you’ll love them. I find sordidness off-putting, so don’t care for them that much, but I do keep reading them despite that, so they must be good, right?
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J. Michael Straczynski’s The Twelve
follows twelve WW2-era Golden Age “superheroes” (most of them have no powers to speak of) as they are awoken in the modern world. This would feel substantially fresher if it weren’t the plot of like half the Captain America issues in existence, but even so, it’s well-done and interesting. Recommended for people who just finished Kavalier and Clay.
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C. B. Cebulski’s Loners: The Secret Lives of Super Heroes
is about a group of teen heroes who are trying to stay away from superheroing and are meeting in a support group. Predictably, they end up back in action. Not bad, but definitely forgettable.
- Finally, the star of the lot, Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle
, which tells a self-contained Dresden story in a way that feels surprisingly like the novels. In the introduction, Butcher says that he always pictures the Dresden books as comics, which makes complete sense — I’ve remarked before on what a visual writer he is, and at the time I described it as “cinematic.” But Butcher’s completely right, and his novels are actually prose translations of comic books. So anyway, this is a comic book version of a Dresden story, and it’s excellent, fully reflecting Butcher’s many virtues as a writer. Recommended to any Dresden fan.
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March
15,
2009
Leaving the regular Marvel Universe behind, we move now to the Ultimate Universe, which was intended to be a clean reboot free of pesky continuity and awkward years of confusing history, but is quickly building up its own continuity and confusing history. Most notably now, it’s starting to tie titles together and gearing up for a big crossover event.
And yeah, the title of
Ultimatum: March on Ultimatum
(which collects a bunch of annuals, and is enhy) was sort of a giveaway that an event’s coming up, but so was Brian Bendis’ Ultimate Origins
, which goes right ahead and retcons the origin stories that they just reinvented not that long ago. The urge to retcon is apparently ineradicable among comic writers.
Leaving the world of crossovers temporarily behind, though, let’s take a look at the individual titles, starting with Brian Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man, vols. 20 and 21. Bendis’ work on Ultimate Spider-Man has been an extraordinary sustained feat, with some 128 issues to his credit, which generally range from above average to near-excellent. He continues here to deliver on his excellent mixture of teen and superhero lifestyles, though perhaps falling a bit too much on the superhero side, as Peter Parker starts to hang out with Iceman and the Torch in a kind of super-clique (not to mention talking to Nick Fury a lot). I’m hoping Bendis will bring the story back to the ground soon, though that incipient crossover thing makes that look unlikely.
Next up is Mike Carey’s Ultimate Fantastic Four, vols. 10 and 11. Carey is writing the kind of traditionally cosmic stories we associate with the Fantastic Four at their best and doing a solid job of it. Maybe his work lacks Bendis’ sparkle, but it’s still solid.
Then there’s Robert Kirkman and Aron E. Coleite’s Ultimate X-Men, vols. 16-19, which I’m substantially less enthusiastic about. The series seems mired down in its own complicated continuity already, with lots of time traveling and alternate histories and secret societies and reversals of reversals and retcons. I can’t read the regular X-Men (outside of self-contained runs like those by Whedon or Morrison) because their own continuity is too convoluted and confusing for me. Disturbingly, the Ultimate version is starting to reach that same point.
Finally, there are two disappointments for me, Jeph Loeb’s Ultimates 3: Who Killed the Scarlet Witch?
and Orson Scott Card’s Ultimate Iron Man II
. Earlier installments of the Ultimates were excellent, and I enjoyed the first Ultimate Iron Man volume, but both of these were subpar and uninteresting. I wouldn’t recommend either, though for all I know the Ultimates will be key in whatever the hell this “Ultimatum” thing is.
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March
15,
2009
The theme of this batch o’ comics is “random Marvel comics that don’t fit into another category.” Not the world’s most cohesive theme, but hey.
So we’ll start off with Spider-Man. We’ve got here collections of
The Amazing Spider-Man by Dan Slott, Marc Guggenheim, and Joe Kelly. Slott and Guggenheim continue to tell the generally entertaining, though fluffy and inconsequential, tales of Peter Parker. Kelly tells an awful story about Hammerhead that is graced by hideous anime-style art, and feels like filler that they put in when the real writers got behind on their work.
As a side note, I keep getting “real” Spider-Man confused with Ultimate Spider-Man these days. I mean, when the “real” comic has retconned the hell out of everything, and they have these reimaginings of classic characters (like a female Kraven), it’s pretty easy to think you’re reading the Ultimate version.
Next up is Iron Man, particularly Daniel and Charlie Knauf’s Invincible Iron-Man
volumes (though also a bit by Matt Fraction and Stuart Moore). These are phenomenally disappointing. Iron Man continues to be the most ridiculously underserved character in Marvel’s roster. He’s such a great character, but gets such shitty comics.
Then there’s Matt Fraction’s Immortal Iron Fist: The Book of the Iron Fist
, which continues the mystical retcon of Danny Rand’s origin story. I’m probably a bigger Iron Fist fan than most people (this turns out to be a low bar to clear), but I’ve been lost in the minutia of this one from the beginning. I feel like one of those people who walks out of The Lord of the Rings going, “Okay, so is Argon Boromir’s father?” So, I don’t really love it, but that may be because I’m failing as a reader.
Finally, we’ve got Peter David’s She-Hulk: Jaded
. She-Hulk, as revived by Dan Slott, was a witty, clever, and occasionally way too meta title. As continued by David, it’s... pretty decent. I’ve got nothing particularly bad to say (other than that comic book artists really need to take a lesson in female anatomy before they graft party balloons onto women’s chests), but it’s not particularly memorable, either.
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March
15,
2009
Okay, so, about a month ago, I was working on writing up the comics I read over the holidays, and had just finished talking about the World War Hulk event comics. Next up on the list of Marvel Events is therefore Brian Bendis’ Secret Invasion
. Yeah, I’m crediting it to Bendis, because if World War Hulk was Greg Pak’s baby, this one is Bendis’. He writes the main comic, and the primary tie-ins are to the two Avengers titles, both of which he writes. The upshot is that nearly all of the plot-significant stuff happens in a Bendis book.
Unlike World War Hulk — and like Civil War — this is the sort of crossover where the main plot isn’t contained within just the main book; and as in Civil War, Marvel does a terrible job of collecting it. Pretty much the only thing you can do is to read through the main book, then through the four Avengers books, and sort of get the story told to you in fits and starts. It’s an awkward way to read a story and significantly detracts from some big moments (and confuses the hell out of some other ones), and Marvel really needs to figure out a better way of collecting crossovers.
That said, the story here — of Skrull infiltrators secretly replacing various heroes, and now finally having their big invasion — actually is pretty good, and manages to tie together a lot of recent Marvel events in a way that doesn’t smell too badly of the retcon. It’s nothing brilliant or revelatory, but it’s perfectly competent superhero fun.
So that’s the main line story. What about the peripheral ones (which are all listed in the archive for this entry; I don’t see a reason to type them all in here)? Well, honestly, if I’d written this up three months ago, or even two months ago, I probably could have gone into a lot of detail. At this point, though, the only one that sticks in my memory is Greg Pak’s The Incredible Hercules: Secret Invasion
, which goes in a very different direction, and takes Hercules into the realm of the mythic to do battle with Skrull gods. It’s treading a fine line between over-the-top silliness and classic myth-inspired superheroism, and it remains to be seen which way it’ll eventually fall, but Pak has been a reliable writer up to now, so I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt.
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