Watch as The Batlord Descends Into Comic Book Nerd Oblivion
 

As anyone who reads the Comic Book/Graphic Novel thread might know, I've recently been reading a lot of comic books. A lot of them. It's getting pretty bad honestly, and whatever chance I could have at a real life is quickly slipping away. Not that I care of course, cause... ****ing comic books, dude. Hell yeah. And seeing as how I'm reading so many of them, am too lazy to join another forum, and really want to talk about what I've been reading, I'm setting up yet another journal so I don't keep spamming the other thread. This will usually take the form of longish reviews. I'll try to keep spoilers to newer titles in spoiler tags, but if it's an older comic that one might expect a nerd to be more familiar with, then I won't be as cautious. If you don't know that the Green Goblin killed Gwen Stacy *spoiler alert* then you're in the wrong thread. But I may also do something on an artist or writer that I'm digging, or bitch/praise some new development in the comic book world (expect my thoughts on the new female Thor when that finally happens in October). The sky's the limit. Unless you're Superman.

Oh yeah, I checked out the first issue of the New 52 relaunch of Superman the other day. Not particularly impressed. I don't want to read captions of a newspaper article narrating a battle while I'm watching it. I thought we'd left behind the overuse of narrated exposition in comic books years ago. If I wasn't trying to get to Superman/Wonder Woman for some cheesy love stuff then I'd probably set that aside for a good while. I hear Action Comics, another Superman title just like how Detective Comics is a Batman title, is cool though, so we'll see.

Anyways, join me as I create the nerdiest, most girl-repellent thread on this forum since Urban's Doctor Who thread...




Just read this about a half hour ago and it seems like an excellent place to start. For anyone not familiar with this particular issue, it's probably one of the most important in X-Men history, not to mention the comic book industry in general, as it started the run that pushed X-Men and Marvel comics to the top of the heap. It was also important because before this, the series had been out of print for five years due to bad sales. So it wasn't just a change in creative direction or an attempt to end a sales slump, it was a Hail Mary to resurrect a title that would have otherwise been forgotten in the sands of time. And since it was the first X-Men movie that kicked-started the comic book movie craze that goes strong to this day... Heavy ****. But does it stand the test of time? Kinda, sorta, not really.

I'm just going to get this out of the way first so we can move on. Now, I understand that the writing of comic books has become much more sophisticated since the mid-seventies, but certain basic elements of comic book writing from back in the day are still kind of goofy these days. Like I mentioned earlier, the overuse of narration throughout an issue, especially in battle scenes, can take you out of the story. It certainly builds a pulpy, "comic book atmosphere", but if one weren't already culturally conditioned to accept these tropes they would be very jarring. Still, when the writer or a character explains something with far too much cheesy dialogue it does have a certain charm that taps your childhood on the shoulder.

But there's no excuse for a character to use alliteration out loud. At one point Cyclops actually says, "Quickly, Bobby-- throw an air-tight ice-dome over this raft! It's our only chance to survive this miserable maelstrom!" I lol'ed, but I definitely wasn't lol'ing with the comic book.

Alright, finally onto the meat of this review. This issue must have been pretty bold for its time. To bring the series back from the dead they obviously went all out in trying to draw people in. The X-Men had previously been a collection of pretty, white people who, though they may not have been fascists, would otherwise have been Hitler-approved. New team members include an African woman, a Russian, a German, a Native American, and a Japanese guy. I don't imagine there were many of those kinds of people in comic books at the time, at least not in anything other than villain or bit parts. Why a series about people battling discrimination had previously avoided this kind of diversity I don't know. White people are tricksy like that. It's kind of funny though. They were obviously trying their best to be inclusive, and it's commendable, but they make more than a few faux pas.

One of the new members, John Proudstar, aka Thunderbird, is Native American. Apache specifically. The mere fact that he's not shooting arrows at cowboys while beating his hand against his mouth and whooping in All-American Western is already a pretty revolutionary thing. He's also not too fond of white Americans for obvious reasons, and isn't afraid of saying it out loud, which is even more bold. They could have taken the easy way out and made him proudly stoic, with a dash of mysterious, letting any anti-Manifest Destiny sentiment be subtextual at best. Good for them. But does he really need to wrestle buffalo and wear a feathered head band with his costume? That also has cowboy tassels? I suppose that's a minor complaint though, considering this is the seventies we're talking about. There are other gaffs, such as Sunfire, the Japanese guy, living in a rice paper house and wearing a kimono, or Storm being a topless,rain-making goddess for superstitious, animal-sacrificing, loin cloth-wearing African tribesman, but all in all, this is probably about as decisive a blow for diversity as one could hope for.

But who really cares about a bit of unintentional offensiveness when this book has the first appearances of Colossus, Storm, Nightcrawler, and Wolverine? Okay, technically Wolverine had previously made a cameo in The Incredible Hulk, but this was his first real introduction. How ****ing cool is that? There aren't many issues that make this much comic book history in their first fifteen pages.

Unfortunately this is also a part of one of this book's two big problems. This is a single issue that tries to introduce seven new main characters, setup their issues and interpersonal dynamics, and then tell an actual story, all while trying to make like Jesus and raise this series from the dead. Granted, it's a double-size issue, but in a perfect world this kind of storytelling would preferably take place over an entire, multi-issue story arc. They attempt to keep this thing organized by dividing it into four "chapters", but it only partially works, although given the circumstances I don't suppose there was much they could do about that. So the mere fact that this is actually readable is a triumph.

The first "chapter" shows Professor X meeting each of the newcomers, Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, Wolverine, Banshee, Thunderbird, and Sunfire, and convincing them to join the X-Men for an unspecified mission. Due to the short amount of time they can afford to spend on each character this usually comes across as...

"Hey, I need you to join the X-Men."

"I don't know, man."

"Pretty please?"

"Okay, why not."

Understandable that they would have to rush this section of the book, but when Storm, who was introduced as she was ending a drought for her worshipers, seems to decide on a whim to follow some bald guy and leave her followers to fend for themselves without a backward glance, it's kind of odd.

The other big issue is that with all of this (thin) character stuff going on, the actual story itself is pretty much entirely pulp. When the new team gets to the mansion they find the only remaining member of the original X-Men, Cyclops, who informs them that the others, Jean Grey, Iceman, Havoc, Angel, and Lorna Dane (Polaris), have all been kidnapped. They had traveled to a supposedly deserted tropical island to search for a mutant whose power level had lit Cerebro up like a Christmas tree on the Fourth of July (a cookie to the person who gets that reference), where they were attacked by an unknown assailant. Cyclops awoke on the "strato-jet" alone, with the plane on auto-pilot back the mansion. Unable to turn it around he returned and now here we are.

Long story short, the island was the mutant. Atom bomb tests, yadda yadda yadda, big monster with sharp teeth, feeds off mutant energy, cue screaming Japanese civilians. Not that there are any Japanese people on the island, you know, except for Sunfire, but you get my point. As I've said over and over, this was a book that was supposed to revitalize this series, and yet it consists of the X-Men going to a tropical island, fighting giant birds and crabs, exploring a mysterious temple, and then battling a cliched monster. I don't know whether that's Conan or Godzilla-type ****. Either way, as this was obviously supposed to get people interested in the X-Men again, why was the main story not about the X-Men dealing with anti-mutant prejudice? Or, you know, absolutely anything that might actually be relevant to the series as a whole? Nightcrawler almost got burned at the stake in the first few pages of the book, but other than that there was almost no mention of any kind of greater mutant struggle. Just pulp. Fun pulp, but not exactly what should have been called for. I have to give them a pass though. This thing was over-stuffed as it is, and a more fleshed out story would have been impossible. Whaddaya gonna do?

The story is sort of saved at the end with some inventive use of teamwork and mutant powers. Storm uses lightning to charge up Polaris (who shares her father Magneto's control over magnetism), who then uses her powers to separate the island from the Earth's magnetic field (or something), sending it flying off into space (shut up, it makes sense). It also gives us one of the greatest panels in comic book history.




There's no way Dave Cockrum wasn't sitting over this after drawing it and chuckling like a cretin. I know I was.

So yeah, all things considered, storywise, this is mediocre, but as a historical document, it's priceless. And considering that the next issue would bring on Chris Claremont, who would go on to write the Pheonix Saga about twenty issues later, things were certainly looking up in the world of the X-Men. Yeah, and I'm totally gonna do the Phoenix Saga when I get to it.

Excelsior sayeth The Batlord!

Suicide Squad

There have been a few Suicide Squad series, most notably in the eighties, but I haven't gotten around to those yet. This is about the newest series. The basic concept is that the US government is using a team of incarcerated supervillains to perform missions so dangerous that they don't want to risk the lives of non-douchebags. For this iteration this team consists of a rotating (and routinely dying) series of B, C, and D level villains, with the only mainstays being Deadshot, Harley Quinn, and King Shark (who looks exactly like the hammerhead dude from Street Sharks). Also popping up here and there, Captain Boomerang (smh), James Gordon Jr. (Commissioner Gordon's serial killer son), Unknown Soldier, and a few other nobodies. On the plus side though, the team has just added Deathstroke and Black Manta. All led by a ruthless government agent by the name of Amanda Waller, who controls her not-even-anti-heroes with "nano bombs" implanted in their necks.

I hear a lot of criticism about this series, and I can understand why. The characters aren't really developed all that much. Deadshot, who's sort of the main character of the series, doesn't ever really come across as much more than an amoral, grumpy guy who tends to shoot his comrades in the back at seemingly random times. Amanda Waller, I suppose the other main character, gets as much personality as anybody, but she's still just a notable version of the cold, calculating secret agent trope. Even Harley Quinn is generally just a two-dimensional, homicidal maniac whose main purpose is to be unsettlingly chipper as she crushes some poor guy's brains into pulp with her giant sledgehammer.

And the stories aren't much more than excuses for long scenes of graphic violence. Occasionally they inexplicably unfold into some kind of story arc that's just an excuse for long scenes of graphic violence. This violence usually comes in three forms: Deadshot shooting things, Harley Quinn hitting someone with a hammer, or King Shark eating people. NGL, it's pretty awesome when King Shark eats somebody. There's plenty of other people shooting things, burning things, electrifying things, boomeranging things, and... stretching people to death, but those three are the main focus.

The series also have a tendency to drop things, like characters and even a subplot or two, without so much as an explanation. If you're somebody who is infuriated by such things then Suicide Squad will likely have you pulling your hair out at times. Even characterizations sometimes change with little to no warning. But on the plus side, you probably won't care enough about the characters, subplots, or characterizations to really be too bothered.

That being said, I tore through the first thirty issues, two (boring) Amanda Waller one shots, and two issues of New Suicide Squad (no idea why they've decided to re-relaunch it). It's a "rollicking" good time, with more than enough blood, guts, and juvenile exploitation to satisfy even the most jaded of action movie fans. What can I say? I'm a whore for dumb action movies. Die Hard? **** yeah. Crank 2? Masterpiece. Expendables? Terrible, but the second one was pretty cool. So, this series is perfect for someone like me who's long on "Bitchin'!" but short on taste. I mean, how can you not love this...

God damn it! I really tried to find the panel from issue #17 where King Shark yells "DIM SUM!!!" before devouring a Chinese girl with an over-size flail, who was not at all a ripoff of the Japanese girl with the over-size flail from Kill Bill, but I have failed. Instead, have these NSFW pics of King Shark devouring other people...




And I couldn't leave without a more in-depth look at Harley Quinn. I'm sure without her this series wouldn't exist. DC obviously didn't feel inspired to resurrect it with some grand vision and they certainly didn't give it some great writing team who could knock an offbeat title like this out of the park. They just seem to have wanted to give her a vehicle. They kinda succeeded, but her depiction is seriously lacking. I understand that they wanted to make her grittier, to fit with the new tone of DC, and that keeping her original character intact at the same time would have been a very tough job for anyone, but the guy they gave her to, Adam Glass, just flubbed it. Gone is the adorable maniac that actually made me dislike the Joker at times for how he treated her. Now she's just crazy. But at the same time she's still enjoyable. She gives the series a zany, unpredictable sense of dark fun that it wouldn't have otherwise. What can I say? I'm a whore for Harley Quinn. (call me, baby)

The one good thing they did though, was give her back her brain. That really bothered me about the Arkham games. Harley had been ditsy in Batman: The Animated Series sure, but whenever she had her own episode, she always managed to get out of a jam with an unconventional resourcefulness. In the games though, she was just a ditz, and it took away a lot of her likability. Now, or at least partway through the series (inconsistent characterization, remember), you get to see her become more competent again. She still isn't the same lovable goofball she once was, but she gets to be a bit devious. Unstable, but devious.

So, Suicide Squad, dumb fun for only certain members of the family. I certainly can't recommend it for everyone, but for the violence lovers who don't need to take their comic books too seriously then I say give it a shot.

Excelsior, mother****ers!

This journal looks great and I've got absolutely loads of these Marvel and DC stories to read, problem is I never get the time to as there are just so many of them. Even if you lived two lifetimes you'd probably never get through the whole Marvel and DC comic's list.

I know that Giant-Size X-Men so well and yer it did kick start the whole X-Men saga as the original was a flop (even though I loved most of those 60s issues) X-Men got to its best as Uncanny when Claremont teamed up with Byrne, used to love that whole Hellfire Club story from that time. In the late 70s to early 80 X-Men may have been the best comic around with Master of Kung-Fu and Thor was pretty great as well. But Amazing Spider-Man probably was consistently the best, based on what I've read. Probably only Batman ever rivalled Spider-Man when it came to brilliant super-villains.

Interested to see what you think about the Incredible Hulk as one of my best friends who must be one of the biggest comic nuts on the planet (he'd sell his soul for any hard to get stories) always swears that the Peter David run in Hulk is one of the best ever in Marveldom. I've hardly read any of those and the few I did never really impressed me.

By seeing this, you've woken my desire to delve back into these comics.

I'm currently plowing through from Giant-Size all the way through to the eighties with X-Men. I'm around #100 atm, and will keep on till the end of the Phoenix Saga at least. I'll probably be talking about story arcs on this journal as I go along too. I'm rather impressed that they're bringing in the Shi'ar this early in the run. They were obviously laying the groundwork for some seriously long-term storytelling

Haven't checked any Hulk stuff out yet, although the current She-Hulk series has piqued my interest. Just never been that interested honestly. And if you dig Thor then you totally need to check out the current Thor: God of Thunder series. It's easily one of the best things I've come across yet. The first eleven issues are first-rate epic fantasy.

To paraphrase those wise philosophers, Manowar, if you're not into Harley Quinn, you are not my friend. Seriously, you have to hate fun if you don't have any love for her, and her new series is everything I was hoping for her character but didn't receive from Suicide Squad. Where in SS there was a disconnect between the character she was and the character DC wanted her to be, they've now managed to bridge the gap between homicidal and adorable by meeting in the middle at bizarre, black humor. Not that either trait suffers for it, she just manages to do both at the same time.

Now, the one bad thing about this series is that I doubt her characterization could transfer to the rest of the New 52 DC universe. Where DC Comics has created a more gritty world, full of anti-heroes and conflicted actual heroes, Harley Quinn ignores all of that, even paying little to no attention to current continuity in order to place Harley in her own little zany bubble. I'd be sad if this series just wasn't all that is good in life.

To give you an idea of the tone, at one point in issue... something or other, Poison Ivy is visiting her friend, and they are attacked by bounty hunters/ninjas (this happens often, though not so much with actual ninjas). Harley hurls one of them out of a window to land on her back on a barbed-wire fence, and Harley and Ivy then make a $20 bet on which side of the fence the ninja will fall. Fortunately they both end up winning when the poor unfortunate tears in half with a "RRRRIIIIPPPP!!!!". It's kept from being too gruesome by concentrating on Harley and Ivy's faces, which go from expectant fascination, to covering their eyes in moderate disgust, and finally to jubilation that both of them get to win. I also seem to remember that at least two people get eaten by a group of cute little dogs that Harley saves from an animal shelter. I think this book might actually be even more gruesome than Suicide Squad in all honesty, even to the point of exploitative depravity, lack of Street Shark-related human-feasting aside. It just balances it out with a morbidly off-the-wall sense of humor. Sugar with vinegar, you know. The real accomplishment though, is that Harley is never anything less than charming no matter who, how, or why she is murdering somebody.

The storyline, though it's so purposefully random that "storyline" is a bit misleading as it implies reason, is relatively simple: one of her former Arkham patients has just died and left her with a large property in Statton Island, New York. It consists of a ground floor with a freak show and a wax museum dedicated to famous murderers, including her "puddin'", a second floor that houses the various carny folk who sort of adopt Harley, a third floor that eventually houses her horde of friendly-though-occasionally-man-eating pets, along with a veritable forest courtesy of Ivy, and a top floor all to Harley. Unfortunately she has no money to pay the taxes and bills, so the majority of the series is dedicated to her search for honest employment, which she eventually finds as a psychologist for an old folk's home and joining a roller derby team (who overlook her tendency for extreme violence that violates even league rules).

A large part of the charm of this series is in the familial atmosphere of the tenants of the building. There's her new best friend (aside from Ivy and her imaginary friend/stuffed beaver), a fishnet-shirt-wearing midget by the name of Big Tony, his large girlfriend, a goat-person, and a menagerie of other misfits. One might expect even carny folk might be nervous around such a lunatic, but no, they provide a support system that she's never had, while Tony provides the odd bullet to the head of any assassin foolish enough to mess with Harley. I suppose one could call this situation slightly disturbing, but it's far too heart-warming for such cynicism. Eventually, she even befriends an elderly man with a cybernetic arm and leg that look more steampunk than robot. Sy Borgman, or "Syborg", is an ex-secret agent who enlists Harley's help in hunting down a retired group of former Soviet spies now secretly living in New York. It's not made clear at first whether these are actual spies or Mr. Borgman is just senile, but Harley doesn't seem to mind either way.

One final thing I'd like to mention is that this book sort of answers the question as to whether or not Harley and Poison Ivy have a sexual relationship. It's implied to the point of being blatant. One of my favorite parts of this series is Harley introducing her friend to her beaver...

"You wanna meet my beaver?"

"Um... okay... why not?"

"Bernie, meet Poison Ivy. Ivy, Bernie."

"Oh. It's an actual... beaver."

God I love this series.

Ex-****ing-celsior!


Oh, and just cause, here's the full-spread cover of Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con.

Fair warning, this is gonna be long as ****, but in order to do these issues justice for their historical significance I don't want to do just the bare minimum.

First thing to notice about this run, which picks up exactly where Giant-Size X-Men left off, is that the writer, Chris Claremont, is already laying the groundwork for big things in the future of the X-Men that will unfold over the course of years, and whose aftershocks are still being felt to this day. "Ambitious" is as appropriate a word as any. I haven't dived into the Phoenix Saga, which begins with #101, so I can't yet gauge its quality, but the fact that it's one of, if not the most famous storylines in comic book history probably speaks for itself. Claremont obviously wants to take his time with this. Elements of what is to come are dropped without much explanation a few issues in, leaving us to wonder just what the frak is about to happen, and this foreshadowing is generally dramatic enough that you want to keep reading. Having the benefit of hindsight, and having watched the 90s cartoon series, which by all accounts is supposed to be relatively faithful to the comics, these events are not quite as mysterious as they could be, but they're still cool nonetheless.

Way back in issue #94 a subplot of a government-funded scientist out to destroy all of mutantkind is introduced, though not explored fully until later. Not exactly the most original of plots, but it reestablishes the idea of mutant persecution into the series, and also sets the scene for some very heavy **** that will happen later...

The most obvious sign of what is to come though is the first appearance of Lilandra and the Shi'ar in issue #97. It's in the form of a confusing dream sequence in Professor Xavier's mind of a space battle and someone in a helmet that looks like a bug that provides little answers, and with artwork that is simply spectacular. Even though I already know what is going on I was still fascinated. This was no throwaway pulp silliness. Even if I were reading this for the first time in 1976 I probably would have realized I was about to delve into something special.

Cyclops is likewise being set up for the okie doke. First, his friends are kidnapped in Giant-Size X-Men, which I'm sure does nothing for his confidence as a leader, then in the very next issue the entire rest of the original team, people who he had fought and laughed with since he was in his teens, quits the X-Men, leaving him alone with an entirely new team of strangers. It also further eats at him that while his teammates can easily live among humans (I guess Angel can retract his wings into his body), his eyes mean that he must remain isolated from humanity. Things quickly escalate even further when Thunderbird is killed on a mission, partly because of an order he gives. And did I mention that his brother is currently under the mind control of some goofball who calls himself Eric the Red? But with issue #100, Jean seemingly chooses to sacrifice herself to save the rest of the team, which must be the blow of all yet. Oh ****, and with all this space stuff going on his dad is probably gonna show up at some point in the near future too. Then of course there's the whole Phoenix thing. Ten bucks says he is cutting himself off-panel during this period. Much of this is covered in the 90s cartoon, but not in the way that ****ty bull**** is piled on top of ****ty bull**** right on his head. His characterization is definitely more ambitious in the long-term in this run. If I'm not careful I might actually start to see Cyclops as more than just a boring boy scout.

While this might not seem as important as other things that are about to hit, consider this... in the current run of Uncanny X-Men, Scott Summers has become disillusioned with Professor Xavier's dream of peace between mutants and humans, and so has split with the X-Men to become a terrorist agitating for mutant rights. He's also working with Magneto, so that should give you an idea of where he's at right now. I've not read the original original X-Men comics, so I can't say for sure, but I imagine this is where his idealism first starts to erode (though the original team will be addressed later in this journal when I cover the new All-New X-Men series ;)). How his character evolves between 1976 and 2014 I'm not really sure, but for this character arc to still be having repercussions almost forty years later, then this is probably stuff you should be paying attention to.

However there are problems with this arc. I guess with all of Claremont's big plans the actual issue-to-issue plots that aren't necessarily connected to what is coming are kind of phoned in. The mission where Thunderbird is killed is about stopping some guy who is actually called "Count Nefaria", who has the audacity to wear a ****ing monocle. I won't even dignify his douchey goatee and Dracula cape with a proper insult. He also has henchmen that are a frog guy, a gorilla guy, a cat guy, and a dragonfly chick. If I'm forgetting any of them it's because I don't give enough of a **** to go and look them up. They're called the "Animen". I believe that derides itself. And aside from its affect on Cyclops, Thunderbird's death is pretty shrug-worthy. He'd been in exactly three issues, and for the most part his sole character trait was regularly telling Scott to go **** himself. I'm paraphrasing of course. So, who really cares that they killed the guy who wore feathers in his hair? We have Wolverine to give Cyclops a hard time anyway. Then in the next issue they fight some Cthulhu-lite demon who isn't exactly the most inspiring villain.

Even the mad scientist out to destroy all mutants is kind of half-assed, and really just there for the purpose of having a space base. And the base's sole purpose is to give Jean a reason to fly a space shuttle back to Earth through a solar flare, where she of course picks up the Phoenix. A plot line involving resurgent sentinels that are just sort of there, evil X-Men-doppleganger robots, and a villain who is forgotten as quickly as it takes for him to fly his goofy hover craft into a giant TV aren't exactly the stuff of legend.

Characterization is kind of thin as well. With six new characters this is understandable, but it doesn't make Colossus or Banshee anymore interesting at this point. They're really just there to say Russian and Irish things like "comrade" and "me boyo". While it is humorous to hear Nightcrawler referred to as a "davarish", I can't say I am enthralled by it. I'm sure Colossus will be developed much more soon though, as I'm assuming one of the most beloved X-Men in history can't be summed up as merely a shiny, Russian stereotype.

I would be totally happy if Banshee had been replaced by Sunfire though (the Japanese guy from Giant-Size X-Men). Sunfire is just an *******, and I respect that. He seems to have gone along with the team merely as a favor to Xavier, and proceeded to spend the entirety of the issue mocking his teammates and being an arrogant douche who made sure that everyone knew just how little he cared about them or the plight of mutantkind in general. To drive this point home, he leaves the team in the first few pages of the next issue, #94, and all but gives them all the finger on his way out the door. His only loyalty is to his Emperor after all. (I'm just going to pretend that that, his implied xenophobia and isolationism, and one of the X-Men casually referring to him as a Jap aren't racist.) I suppose Wolverine already has "Resident Team Asshat" covered, but everyone knows that while he may be hard on the outside he has a creamy filling. Sunfire is just a cunt. I like that.

Nightcrawler receives a bit more of a personality, likely due to his being so ****ing cool looking. How could you not concentrate on him? One might expect someone who has to have had such a hard time as him to be tormented and withdrawn, but in fact he is rather colorful and flamboyant, playing the circus performer working a crowd in battle, and pointing out a nice pair of legs to a Colossus who is a bit uncomfortable with these Western women and their immodesty.

Storm definitely has the most panel time of any X-Man besides Cyclops and Professor X though. Not surprising, as between a strong personality gained from her years assuming the role of a benevolent goddess, the most visually impressive powers of the entire comic, and being a beautiful black woman with white hair she is obviously a star in the making. Much old school comic book dialogue can be seriously cheesy at times, but with Storm's flair for the dramatic she manages to make it sound appropriate. Likewise, action scenes tended to lack the dynamic quality of modern comics, with panels tending to look more jumbled and two-dimensional the more things are going on at any one time, and X-Men being a team-based series, this can be an issue. But no matter these problems it's still bad-to-the-ass when Storm forms a hurricane over the buildings of New York city to destroy a sentinel. And I'm sure many a comic book nerd around this time was diagnosed with a previously dormant case of Jungle Fever.

In contrast, for such an iconic character, Wolverine starts out as pretty much just a grumpy guy with a few funny lines. But Claremont is obviously taking his time with Logan as well. Around the end of this arc he gets a few tasty moments of character building that show his potential. The most obvious would be during the battle with the doppleganger X-Men (aka the X-Sentinels) aboard the space base in issue #100. All of the other new X-Men are under the illusion that their predecessors are being mind-controlled. Havoc and Polaris have previously been shown to be under the control of Eric the Red after all, so this is a reasonable assumption. Using his sense of smell however, Wolverine realizes that these are in fact machines, and in a berserker rage seemingly eviscerates Jean Grey, to the horror of his teammates. Having seen his violent, unpredictable nature in previous issues they assume that he has just murdered her. Obviously this isn't the case, but the other X-Men's reactions are telling.

It's also interesting to see the seeds of Wolverine's relationships with Cyclops and Jean. For the most part he doesn't say much to Scott, but when he does it's usually rather unfriendly, such as "critiquing" Cyclops for refusing to cut down his mind-controlled brother in issue #97. For the most part nothing so blatantly insulting as Thunderbird, but I'm sure their dynamic will soon deteriorate even further. Having quit the X-Men, Jean doesn't feature much in earlier issues, but is still apparently in a relationship with Scott, so she has a cameo or two. She is a major player in the mad scientist/sentinel/space base arc though, for obvious reasons. Most of the team seems to let Wolverine get away with his standoffish attitude, but Jean is the one person who's willing to get in his face and tell him to **** off. I'm paraphrasing of course. At any rate, she certainly doesn't think much of him at this point. This culminates in a brief, but intense argument just before Jean pilots the space shuttle through the solar flare. He doesn't say much, but the look he gives her over his shoulder immediately afterward seems to be the first hint of the Scott-Jean-Logan love triangle. It's subtle though, and in 1976 I probably wouldn't have thought it anything more than him being butthurt.

Speaking of the space shuttle, though Claremont had up to this point shown promising but occasionally mixed results with building emotional tension, he really tops himself with this scene at the end of #100. Basically, the space shuttle that the X-Men used to go into space had been damaged in a previous battle, and so the auto-pilot is now no longer functional. But the largest solar flare in recent history means that any human pilot will be exposed to lethal levels of radiation. While a few of the X-Men may be able to survive outside of a shielded "life cell", the only qualified pilot is a human. The only solution is for Jean Grey to use her psychic powers to extract the knowledge to pilot the shuttle directly from his brain, and then use her telekinetic powers to shield herself from the solar radiation. This being a comic book, it's pretty hard to sell that a character is about to die, but Claremont manages this. Thunderbird's death was pretty anti-climactic, but Jean Grey is a main ****ing character, so the stakes are obviously much higher. Claremont keeps this scene from being overblown however. It would be easy for Scott and Jean's farewell to be eye-rollingly cheesy, but Jean knocking him out with a mental blast in order to prevent him from stopping her after only a panel of Scott nearly panicking over Jean's safety keeps this exchange from becoming too melodramatic, while building tension at the same time. They could have spent a few more panels on this, but space limitations probably played a part. The inevitability of Jean's death is brought home even further when, after a tearful farewell, she asks Storm to tell Scott that she "loved him". A understated little line, but it's still powerful. The issue then ends with Jean, alone in the cockpit of the shuttle, about to set out for Earth, supposedly to her death...

While this batch of issues may have some hiccups, the potential they show is obvious, and knowing what is about to happen gives me an appreciation that I might not have had at the time, even if it comes at the expense of suspense. I'm pretty stoked to start the first half of the Pheonix saga with issues #101-108, so stayed tuned for that review pretty frakking soon. Not that this journal will be all X-men, all the time, but for the foreseeable future they'll definitely be featuring pretty prominently.

X-celsior!

This is fucking awesome my man, especially the Harley Quinn post. I've been reading that series too and it's absolutely fantastic and just made me love Quinn even more.

Hell yeah. The Harley episodes of B:tAS were always some of the best, but there were only a few of them. This series let's you get a much more in-depth look at her that's just pure fun.

Nice knowing you!

Well, I'd originally intended to do the whole arc in one post, but I imagine trying to do eight issues, let alone these eight issues, would make my previous post look like a Post-It note. So, I'm doing this issue by issue.

Right from page one this issue goes big rather than going home. A shot of the space shuttle screaming through the Earth's atmosphere is set over a larger than life portrait of a terrified yet determined Jean Grey in vibrant shades of orange, yellow and red. Above her face is a caption that reads simply, "Welcome to the last moment's of a young woman's life." I wish I could find the entire page, but the only version I can find only shows about half of it. Good enough.




This is actually a reproduction based on the last page of the previous issue. Obviously the second pic has been... remastered or whatever, but even so, and even though the first is missing the top half I still think the page from #101 is the more dramatically compelling.



She proceeds to pilot the shuttle to a crash landing at Kennedy Airport, and then into the ocean, where it sinks. At no point do we actually see Jean, so her fate is unknown until she rises from the sea in the green version of her Phoenix costume, and declares to her astonished friends, bobbing up and down in the waves, "I am fire! And life incarnate! Now and forever -- I am PHOENIX!" So yeah, by page four the X-Men universe has pretty much been forever altered. I'd have flipped my **** in 1976. I wouldn't have known what the **** was going on, but I'd know it was about to get even more epic.

After a moment she collapses, and the X-Men take her to shore and make good an escape before the authorities show up to start asking uncomfortable questions. For the rest of the issue she is off-panel and unconscious in a hospital, though we're eventually informed that she will recover.

The first half of this issue is easily the most character intensive group of pages in the run so far. From the uncertainty of Jean's fate in the beginning, to the shock and mystery of her rising from the sea and calling herself Phoenix, and the strain her unknown condition has on her friends, it's an emotional roller coaster with real depth and maturity. Scott's reaction is what you'd expect. Shocked and miserable at his inability to do anything useful, followed by relieved sobbing in an empty hospital room when he learns that Jean will recover, revealing just how close he was to a nervous breakdown.

And we finally learn that Wolverine indeed has developed feelings for Jean as he spends an entire dollar on a bouquet of flowers to bring to Jean at the hospital. Unfortunately he didn't count on the entire X-Men team being there as well. So he does what any emotionally mature person would do; he throws the flowers in the trash and pretends that nothing ever happened.

The second half of the comic isn't quite so dramatic unfortunately. Apart from Professor X and Cyclops, the X-Men are ordered to go on a vacation to keep them out of the way of Jean's recovery. It's not exactly the most believable pretext to send them on an adventure, but let's just go with it anyway. It's a nice way to keep you guessing about what's going on off-panel, but I'd like it if Claremont didn't feel the need to put a bit of pulp in the middle of all of this to keep those fans who might not have the longest attention spans for this kind of drama from dozing off (i.e. dumb kids).

Apparently Banshee has just inherited a castle in Ireland, because who doesn't inherit a castle or two in their lifetime? So, the team heads off to Ireland to get their medieval on, but of course a pulp villain is waiting for them. On the bad side, he's some guy called "Black Tom Cassidy" who is also Banshee's cousin or brother or uncle or roommate's gay boyfriend or something, so he says Irish things that make it a tad hard to take him seriously. He's not so ridiculously Irish as Banshee, but he also has a shillelagh. Honestly, I'm too amused to take much offense at the shillelagh, but Black Tom still sucks balls. He's kidnapped the castle steward's family to get him to betray Banshee and pretend like everything is hunky dory, so the X-Men proceed to hang out in a castle.

The reason that this subplot isn't completely retarded is that it gives us some much needed character development. We've seen hints of Storm's claustrophobia, but being in a cramped stone castle really bugs her, so of course she strips naked in her room and starts a rainstorm. Sounds goofy, but it's also an interesting look into her psychology, as it shows her as an almost ethereal free spirit who really only feels at home among the elements.

To bring us back down to Earth, Nightcrawler then shows up to take her down to dinner. Colossus previously had shown interest in Ororo, and now Kurt is throwing his hat into the ring, setting the stage for yet another love triangle. Nightcrawler was already shown to be a bit of a ham, but he takes it to another level by trying to flirt with Storm with some cheesy impressions of Clark Gable, Groucho Marx, and some guy with a top hat, all with the aid of his holographic image inducer which allows him to appear like a normal human. It actually kind of works too. Get it, Nightcrawler.

Soon they all head off to dinner dressed in formal wear (which for Wolverine of course includes a cowboy hat), and being a comic book this also means that they all fall down a trap door into some dingy catacombs. For some odd reason Black Tom has a throne right next to where the X-Men fall. I mean, who doesn't have a throne in a dingy catacomb? The only thing not awful about all of this is that apparently Tommy has enlisted the help of the Juggernaut. That's sounds promising at least.

So, excellent first half, mediocre second half, but with good character moments to bring up some slack, and a hint of badassness at the very end. Oh yeah, and the castle was pretty cool too. Claremont is brilliant when he's trying, but I just don't know why he falls back on goofy pulp so often, as it just doesn't at all fit with the tone of what he's trying to do.

XXX-celsior!


And if you need evidence that Black Tom sucks then here is Exhibit A. Note the shillelagh.

Well, thankfully with this issue the pulp, place-holder subplot is concerned with a rather bitchin' battle between Juggernaut and the X-Men that starts at the very first page with a panel depicting Colossus being lifted off of his feet by a punch from Juggernaut whose fist is about the size of the Russian's chest. Wolverine is in the process of falling on his head, and Nightcrawler is... jumping. But the real tension in this panel comes from Storm, who's cowering in the foreground at the far right bottom corner of the page having a claustrophobic breakdown due to being in a dingy catacomb. So from the word "Go!" we are in crisis mode. I notice that writer Chris Claremont and artist Dave Cockrum are great at really grabbing your attention with the very first page. Not a bad talent to have.




Speaking of that lamewad, seeing as his mutant superpower seems to be shooting beams out of his shillelagh, Claremont wisely keeps him out of the action as much as possible, leaving him to bare-knuckle box Banshee since they are both immune to each other's powers for no apparent reason. I'd like to see just one panel of him hitting Banshee upside the head with the shillelagh, but sadly we are deprived. He also reveals that he and Juggernaut have been paid by someone or other to lure the X-Men into this trap, which is good, since I was worried Tom just wanted to kill Banshee so that he could have the castle all to himself, like Scar from the Lion King, but with a shillelagh. You know, the more I say "shillelagh", the more I like Black Tom. Not as a character, cause he's a pube, but without him I would have no excuse to keeping putting "shillelagh" into my journal.

Luckily though, he's relegated to only a few pages, whereas the majority of the battle takes place between Juggernaut, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Wolverine. Given the dubious circumstances leading up to the fight it's surprisingly tense. Despite their best efforts, Colossus just isn't strong enough to hurt Juggernaut, Wolverine's claws can't penetrate his armor, and since it hasn't yet been established that Nightcrawler can teleport anybody other than himself he's likewise powerless. And Storm panicking in the background just ratchets up the intensity.

No matter how her friends try to reach her, she can't even stand, let alone fight (which leads to a pretty awesome bit where Wolverine interrupts Colossus, who is pleading with Storm, and hurls him at Juggernaut like a chair in a bar fight). In her distress we get to see a flashback of Storm's past where her parents are killed by a crashing plane during the Suez Crisis between Egypt, France, Britain, and Israel. Storm's claustrophobia came when she was buried in the rubble along with her dead parents. Then she was a street urchin, made her way to Kenya, became a god, yadda yadda yadda, I'm sure you know most of this. Flashbacks can be pretty ****, but in this case it helps to build tension even further in a fight that might otherwise be pretty run-of-the-mill.

It turns into a cliff hanger when Professor X, all the way across the Atlantic in New York, hears her psychic cry of distress. He and Scott have a rather heated exchange over Scott's unwillingness to leave Jean's side to help in a fight that would be over long after he got there anyway. This of course leads to Prof X giving one of those "You ungrateful little bastard! I gave you food and shelter!" speeches and then raising his hand to give Scott five-across-the-eye. I guess his pissiness brings on one of his Shi'ar visions, as he sees then Lilandra in a mirror. We'd seen the one dream several issues ago, and Xavier mentioned other dreams on several occasions, but for the most part the Shi'ar subplot had been completely under the radar.




Yeah, no can find the bottom panel with Lilandra in the mirror, but this is the real reason to dig this page. Oh, and Jean has a roommate named "Misty Knight". My assumption is that she is a stripper.

And just as **** is getting tense over in New York, we are plunged back into the castle, where the battle is reaching its conclusion. Juggernaut defeats Nightcrawler, Wolverine, and Colossus, and Black Tom finally hits Banshee with his shillelagh. Twice. Even Storm, who manages to overcome her fear and offer some small amount of resistance, is overcome.

Even though follow up to the Phoenix storyline is rather scant, the parts that do matter are suitably ominous, such as Lilandra in the mirror, and a now awake Jean having an odd conversation with her roommate that implies that the Phoenix may be lurking just beneath Jean's consciousness. They also serve to add pacing to the battle that takes up much of the issue, which otherwise may have lacked much personality. Black Tom and Juggernaut still don't matter, other than as a distraction from the real plot, and I'm only mildly interested in whoever hired them, but they manage to make their appearance in this book pleasurable this time at least. The only real thing that I have against this issue is that after Nightcrawler is knocked unconscious, he is rescued and taken into the walls of the castle by leprechauns. What the ****, Claremont?

The Excelsior! Network: All shillelaghs, all the time!

Well, first of all, this issue has absolutely no Jean, no Cyclops, no Professor X, and no Phoenix. This is just pure Black Tom and Juggernaut. It's been a while since I saw the cartoon, but I don't remember the first Phoenix arc being this much of a slow burn. It's nice to see Claremont pacing himself and keeping us guessing, but I'm still getting used to my expectations being off. It kind of helps that this issue is also easily the best Black Tom book so far. And I say that in spite, and maybe even a bit because of the leprechauns.

As always Claremont and Cockrum catch your eyes with a flashy first page. This time, with an unconscious Nightcrawler being carried through a stone tunnel by seven leprechauns. I want to hate this. But it's just so absurd that my desire for serious storytelling is overridden by my love of stupid ****.




How the **** am I even supposed to critique that? How can I possibly do anything but snort in resigned amusement and just go with it? So anyway, I thought the people Black Tom kidnapped were the castle steward's family. Nope. Tom and Juggernaut kidnapped a bunch of leprechauns. There's an honest-to-****ing-god leprechaun hostage situation going on in the pages of Uncanny X-Men. The Animen are starting to seem pretty down to earth right about now. And now that Nightcrawler has woken up and had his moment of "WTF?! L3PRICONZ DON'T EXIST, YO!", it's now up to him to save his friends who've been captured by Shillelagh-Man/Black Tom.

Unfortunately they're all being kept in some kind of dungeon filled with unnecessarily futuristic, Comic Code-approved torture devices. But most nefarious of all is Black Tom's metal, psychic-torture glove with which it appears he will use to molest Storm. The rape-grin is a dead giveaway.




Pulpy or not, the quasi-futuristic torture chamber does add a bit of a threatening atmosphere. Claremont does a rather good job of keeping up the energy of the last issue pretty much throughout, and even building on it to make it feel like things are heading for a climactic, shillelagh confrontation.

Luckily, with his image inducer, Nightcrawler is able to trick Juggernaut into busting a hole into the torture chamber's wall, and now with the power of fresh air, Storm regains her senses and blows this popsicle stand with a bit of the wind beneath her wings. Wolverine and Colossus are taken along for the ride with minor protest before being dropped on their primary-colored asses outside the castle.




Also, in the confusion the leprechauns are able to escape, and then again rescue Nightcrawler, this time from some fallen rubble, just in time for him to save Banshee from the clutches of Juggernaut and Black Tom, who are threatening to hurl the Irish stereotype from the top of the castle walls. Thus ensues a most spirited fracas. Banshee has a rematch with Black Tom, who has sadly replaced his shillelagh with an ax, thereby losing whatever interest in him I ever had. The others all take on Juggernaut, with better, though still indecisive results. Oh, and Storm fights the traditional anti-Viking castle defense of arbitrary laser turrets.

The tide finally turns when Banshee manages to hurl Black Tom from the battlements into the raging sea, and there's a surprisingly emotional moment where Juggernaut, without a second thought to his own safety, throws himself after the man who he claims is the only friend he's ever had. Not gonna lie, I was kind of touched.

It's certainly impressive that regardless of this plot's pulpy silliness, I was still slowly own over by some excellent characterization on the parts of Nightcrawler, Storm, and even the villains at the end, though the shillelagh is the real star here.

And to add some actual relevance to this issue after all the pulp fun, we discover at the end that the person who had hired Black Tom and Juggernaut was none other than Eric the Red, the guy who'd captured and mind-controlled Havoc and Polaris way back in issue #97. Eric is himself having his strings pulled by who I assume is the current Shi'ar dictator, whose goal is to prevent "Princess Neramani", who is obviously Lilandra from Professor X's dreams, from making contact with the X-Men. So, the seemingly pointless Eric the Red subplot is merging with the first appearance of the Shi'ar, which will also go hand-in-hand with the main Phoenix uber-plot. There apparently is a method to Claremont's madness. Most bitchin' of all, Eric the Red has enlisted the help of Magneto. Juggernaut is all well and good, but the first battle between Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and mother****ing Magneto is yet more history in the making.




May the shillelagh be with you... (totally replacing "Excelsior!" jokes with shillelagh jokes for the time being)

That cover is a bit misleading. It implies that the X-Men were actually able to put up a legitimate fight against Magneto. This is not the case. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Our story starts with our heroes sticking some anti-mutant assturd up on a pole because he won't let them take out his hovercraft boat even after they've already paid to rent it. Colossus however is able to reason with him. So to speak. They then head out to their friend Moira MacTaggert's laboratory on some island off Scotland. Some guy has been looking after it while she's in New York helping to take care of Jean, but he hasn't been heard from in a few days, so the X-Men are checking it out.

No sooner do they near the island than their hovercraft is ripped apart by some unknown force and they wash up onshore, only to be trapped in some kind of air bubble that is never satisfactorily explained. The bubble then rises into the air and shoots toward the walls of the laboratory, though the combined might of the X-Men is enough to destroy the wall before they can be crushed by it. Apparently Nightcrawler can now punch walls.




Within the laboratory the X-Men are finally confronted by the terrifying power of Magneto's cheesy villain introduction speech. And also Magneto himself. Things quickly turn to **** at this point, as it doesn't take a genius to figure out what's wrong with battling a guy who is known as the "Master of Magnetism" when half your team is made out of metal.




Even Storm and Nightcrawler are helpless, as Magneto can use magnetic hoodoo to reflect Storm's lightning back at her, and "sense disruptions along the magnetic lines of force" to predict where Nightcrawler will teleport. Not sure of the scientific validity of any of that, but I'll go with it. There are some pretty imaginative uses of Magneto's powers in this fight, and none better than when he pulls iron dust from the wreckage of the hovercraft to basically encase Banshee in carbonite. The only problem is that with all this clever stuff going on, Claremont must of course explain everything in minute detail. Still, its pretty much what I was hoping for in a fight with Magneto.




All is not lost however, for Cyclops and Moira have just arrived in the Blackbird (or astro-jet or whatever the **** they're calling it right now). They quickly find the man who is supposed to be looking after the laboratory, who reveals that it was Eric the Red who attacked him and freed Magneto, who was being held prisoner here after his last defeat by the X-Men. A defeat that left him as a child. I... okay. Going with it. So after Eric de-childifies Magneto they decide that Magneto will wait for the X-Men to show up, while Scott realizes that Eric has likely gone to attack Professor X while the rest of the team is across the ocean.

Scott finds the other X-Men just in time to distract Magneto with his optic blast before he can finish them off. With a few seconds of breathing room Cyclops gathers his teammates and they retreat to the Blackbird in order to make it back to Professor X. This results in yet another pissing match between him and Wolverine, who is none too pleased at having to puss out of the fight. I suppose he's not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.

The issue ends with a last page packed with foreshadowing. At the top we see the first ever appearance of the man we will find out is Scott's father, whose headband, large earring, and porn star mustache clearly show him to be a space pirate. Below that we see Lilandra finally arriving at Earth only to be attacked by another space ship. And finally we see Eric the Red watching Professor X and Jean Grey on a monitor and shaking his fist in a villainy manner, right about a caption that reads: Next Issue: PHOENIX UNLEASHED!

****. Yeah. Magneto certainly provided an excellent battle, though its shortness was kind of anti-climactic, but I imagine it's just supposed to be a taster for their next confrontation anyway. He's still a placeholder villain though, but with the revelation that both he and Black Tom and Juggernaut were just diversions in the first place at least we know why the X-Men were getting so much busy work. Well, whatever the case, next issue looks like when the real **** finally hits the fan.

Deuces, true believers!

Shit. Meet fan. Fan. Shit. Well the slow burn seems to have become an excrement shrapnel explosion. There isn't an emotional roller coaster scene like the goodbye in the space shuttle at the end of #100, or Jean in the hospital after the shuttle crash way back in #101, but as far as fast-paced action with not a hint of pulp this is hands down the best issue of the whole run. There isn't even any competition. You might say it's a bit of an abrupt change, but considering how long we've been building up it's a refreshing change of pace, like a wet dog nose on your back when you're sound asleep.

As usual page one takes off with a bang with the X-Men about two seconds into a confrontation with Eric the Red at their private airfield. It's all lookin' like smooth sailin' and ass kickin' for the team till page two when Fire Lord drops from outer space to take some names of his own. (If you don't remember Fire Lord from the 90s X-Men or Fantastic Four cartoons he used to be one of Galactus' heralds.) Eric plays the victim to convince Fire Lord that the X-Men are the real villains, and the ensuing fight is over almost before it begins. Damn. Ever since they got back from space the team have been doing nothing but getting their asses handed to them from one end of the globe to the other. Juggernaut and Black Tom, Magneto, but none of them has the X-Men into the dirt quite so decisively as Fire Lord.




Cut to a couple bug-looking spaceships near Earth, with Lilandra's ship being chased by a Shi'ar Captain Kirk: he starts off making a verbal ship's log, half slouches in a chair in the middle of a circular bridge, and has an alien science officer (well, they're all alien, but there's no such thing as a science officer except on Star Trek in the first place). Luckily, instead of some homely-looking guy with pointy ears, the science officer is a foxy, blonde, alien chick. But yeah, the captain is totally Kirk. Except with a horizontal, feather mohawk. Anyway, he's pursuing Lilandra under orders of her brother, the emperor of the Shi'ar Empire, and almost catches her until they all panic upon hearing that the Earthlings have previously beaten Galactus four times. Overused plot much? Still, before pulling back they manage to destroy Lilandra's ship, who luckily manages to use a Star Trek transporter to get to Earth. (Oh ****! Apparently the captain's name is actually "K'rk". God bless comic books.)




Cut again back to Earth and Jean Grey's apartment, where she is being visited by Professor X and her parents. With barely two panels of downtime Lilandra teleports right into the room and collapses, and we shortly discover that she is similarly foxy. By giving Lilandra a quick telepathic English course Xavier bridges the language barrier and likewise reads a bit of her mind, which will be important later. From here on it's pretty much nonstop mayhem. It was pretty hectic before, but I checked, and there is only one page until the end that doesn't have an explosion or energy blast, and that one has Nightcrawler swinging from a pole with his tail. Close enough.

As if all of this wasn't upsetting enough, Fire Lord blows up one of Jean's walls like an *******, and declares that he is there to take Lilandra and Xavier. Naturally, since this is the seventies and Jean's roommate is black and has an afro, she draws a revolver, cause she's obviously Foxy Brown. Luckily for Fire Lord she isn't forced to waste this jive turkey as Jean becomes Phoenix and blasts him out of the apartment and out into Central Park, where he promptly falls on and blows up a car. He got lucky.




It's been almost five issues since we last saw Phoenix, and boy does she make up for lost time. Fire Lord is pretty bitchin', and puts up a good show, but doesn't quite seem to understand that they are not going blow for blow. He is getting knocked halfway across New York City. She is not. With crashing flame dudes, screaming civilians, and energy blasts galore this is just what the doctor ordered, but it isn't too long before Jean finally finishes off Fire Lord and blasts him straight to hell (i.e. New Jersey). It's also worthy of note that Jean, while Phoenix-powered, seems to be for the most part herself. Phoenix's personality peeks out here and there, and Jean somehow knows how to use powers she's never had before, but Jean Grey is still in control.




Lest we forget Eric the Red, in the confusion he knocks Lilandra and Professor X unconscious, bringing them up onto the roof of Jean's apartment to be brought back to the Shi'ar emperor via a "stargate", which basically looks like the Stargate stargate if it were constructed from an erector set. Then there's a whole bit where the X-Men ride in to the rescue in an unexplained hover craft and get shot down, which is important since they hadn't been pooped on since the beginning of the book and they were due. They manage to save Xavier, but Eric the Red still ****s off with Lilandra in the stargate, which closes after him.

Too late to do much of anything useful the rest of the X-Men, quickly followed by Phoenix, arrive at the stargate to find Xavier saying things like "Curse you!" He seems disproportionately distraught at the abduction of some random alien chick he has just met, but with a little help from some awkward exposition from Jean we discover...




In some ways this run so far has been kind of overrated since Giant-Size X-Men. There's been hit-or-miss emotional moments, and the tendency to fall back on lame pulp can be aggravating, but the quality is steadily rising as Claremont gains experience. And he's obviously improving. Just look at the difference in quality even of the pulp with the laughability of Count Nefaria vs. the relative sophistication of Black Tom. The main difference being a greater emphasis on character interactions and sequential storytelling that continues directly from one issue to the next. From what I hear, when John Byrne replaces Dave Cockrum as artist with #108 is when the true classic Uncanny X-Men period starts, so I'm looking forward to it.

Well, that's about it. Next issue we get to see what's on the other side of the stargate, and likely get to see even more Phoenix awesomeness as her battle with Fire Lord was clearly a taster. Supposedly Claremont actually wanted her to fight Thor, just to show everyone how much of a badass she'd become, but the Marvel bigwigs apparently didn't want one of their star characters getting beat up by a girl, so instead they faced her off against somebody who'd recently, at the time, fought Thor to a standstill.

Oh yeah, **** you, you sexist Marvel editors and misogynistic comic book fans! You stole Phoenix vs. Thor from me! You can kiss my ass. I hope they turn Thor into a girl just to piss you off. Oh wait...

What the crap? I feel like I just read the comic book version of a clip show. It starts out where the last one left off, with Xavier on the roof of the building with the stargate. Jean's parents and her roommate, Misty Knight (aka Foxy Brown), are all looking rather concerned, while Fire Lord, fresh from New Jersey, is demanding to know the license plate of the Phoenix that just ran him over. Before the scene can get very far Xavier passes out, seemingly due to Lilandra's disappearance and the psychic connection that she forged between them for an as yet unexplained reason.




All well and good. Sounds like a nice way to build some tension, right? Well, perhaps you can forgive me for instead seeing the entire rest of the issue as a rehash of the new X-Men vs. old X-Men fight in #100. Cut to the inside of Charles Xavier's mind, who is now dreaming of the X-Men in the Danger Room. They don't seem to be getting along very well, until the old X-Men show up and give them the same "We think you guys suck, so we're going to kick all of your asses and go back to being the real X-Men" speech that they used six issues ago. And so ensues the rehashed battle sequence.




I get the basic point. Even aside from Charles' issues, it's been established that the new X-Men are rough around the edges as a team, and the writer is trying to compare and contrast them with the old X-Men, but they've done this. If Claremont wanted to reinforce this idea, then he should have come up with something that wasn't just plagiarizing himself.

So they all fight, yadda yadda yadda, and then Xavier shows up and reveals that this is all just a figment of his imagination. But of course, since Claremont is creating a filler issue to deal with a problem (Xavier's mental state) that doesn't really need it's own book, he's going to fall back on goofy pulp, and what pulp comic book would be complete without a goofy pulp villain? And since we already have rehashed doppleganger X-Men, then logically the villain should be a doppleganger Professor X, who is apparently Xavier's selfish side who's been allowed to run rampant now that his mind is all out of whack.




And then there's a fight, and Xavier retakes control of his mind, and who really gives a ****? Good lord, Claremont. You've been winning me over more and more and now you drop this turd at the exact moment I'm expecting for the pace to maintain its pace? You can't keep doing to this to me, and if you are, don't suck at it.

NEXT!

Well, they managed to wash the taste of #106 out of my mouth. This is pretty much the no-holds barred romp that was promised with the end of #105 when the X-Men all jumped through the stargate. The only thing that doesn't happen is some Phoenix action, Jean being too tired from powering the stargate to be any help. Other than that though, they deliver on their promise of fun.

From the very beginning the X-Men step out of the stargate into what looks like an intergalactic Gay Pride Parade, but is in actuality the Shi'ar Imperial Guard surrounding the emperor D'Ken as he keeps Lilandra captive right next to what looks like the universe's largest Ring Pop.




I'm sure we can all guess what happens next. Someone tries to reason with someone else and it doesn't go well. These are superheroes meeting for the first time after all. These things never do. Sci fi action ensues...

The best has to be when Wolverine gets his clothes burned off by a Fire Lord knockoff, throws the dude's girlfriend at him, and then steals the Wolfman's caveman outfit.




Honestly I think this may have be his best character moment yet. It's the first time where Wolverine really feels like Wolverine and not just the guy who I know is Wolverine.

Nightcrawler is also great to watch in a battle. A guy like Colossus just has to punch his way through, but Kurt's powers are only really useful for evasion unless he uses his noggin, so if he's on panel it's usually right before he's about to do something clever, such as when he uses his holographic image inducer to trick a shapeshifter in the form of a giant monster into thinking he's an even bigger monster. If he weren't so ****ing cool looking he'd be easy to overlook as an underrated character.




He's also the only one who can rescue Lilandra, who is about to be... eaten(?) by some soul-stealing demon to whom she is being sacrificed by D'Ken. In the nick of time Nightcrawler manages to teleport her away, which I would assume would stop the whole bad thing that's about to happen, since D'Ken makea it sound like only Lilandra's soul will do, but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference in the end, so... I guess it's just an arbitrary damsel in distress kinda thing. It's cool though, since it shows for the first time that Kurt can teleport somebody else, of which he wasn't yet aware, though it nearly kills him to do it.

Now with Lilandra in hand she drops about two pages worth of exposition that has just enough bitchin' spaceships and creepy aliens to make it not boring. So... brother D'Ken wanted supposedly lost ancient ultimate evil weapon and she was all like "You're a douche" and he arrested her and there was civil war and she lost but managed to escape, and theeeeen... for no apparent reason she accidentally formed some kind of psychic-soul mate connection with Professor Xavier and decided to head for Earth. So far there is no explanation for how this occurred. All of a sudden they were just OTP 4 life. So basically the entire catalyst for this plotline is that love transcends time and space.

As excellent as the action is, I'm starting to doubt the magnificent brilliance of my man Chris Claremont. It's one issue from the end of the first part of the Phoenix Saga, and he's still making me facepalm. The whole "evil weapon that might accidentally destroy the universe" thing is supposed to be brought about by the alignment of nine "death stars" that activate the giant Ring Pop (M'Kraan Crystal) and... well that's next issue. But unless Claremont pulls something out of his ass we're dealing with phlebotinum. And supposedly the whole "Phoenix as an intergalactic entity" thing was a retcon, with Jean originally just getting her powers supercharged by cosmic rays, Fantastic Four-style. So at this point there isn't even an actual "Phoenix". Jean is just a bit wonky in the head.

The ending is saved to an extent by the appearance of the Starjammers, the space pirate team of rebels led by Cyclops' dad, Corsair, who arrive to turn the tide against the royal guard, thought too late to stop the M'Kraan Crystal from activating. At least we know that he's actually Scott's dad even at this early point, as Jean reads his mind and discovers the truth. The issue ends with that astronaut guy who was supposed to be piloting the space shuttle in #100 talking to Mr. Fantastic about how the fabric of reality just hiccuped or something. Spooky.

I'm glad Josh Byrne is coming on next issue as artist, not that I have anything against Dave Cockrum, as he's done a fine job so far, but if Byrne is the other half of the writing team that really made this series the best thing going on in comic books throughout this time period, then he needs to show up as soon as possible. Claremont obviously has great ideas, and despite some shortcomings in his ability to write the kind of ambitious story arcs he's aiming for, he really does have a flair for engaging storytelling. But an extra set of hands would not go amiss.

Well, this was a task. Finally got all the way through the first Phoenix Saga and I need a break from this comic for a bit, not to mention from reviewing a series issue by issue as I read along. I feel like Trollheart doing all this ****. At least this saga went out with a bang. I was all prepared to roll my eyes at the phlebotinum, but Claremont managed to come out with some pretty good sci fi epicness.

It starts out about as I pictured, with the X-Men and Starjammers marveling at the terribleness of the M'Kraan Crystal being activated. Soon they are confronted by a midget/robot/goblin-looking thing that turns out to be a guardian of the crystal. There's a nice little scene of Wolverine taunting it and then mocking Cyclops for warning him to be careful.




A battle ensues, and even Phoenix/Jean can't beat the midget-thing head-on, until Banshee finally hits it with a sonic blast that scrambles its circuits. No sooner have they patted themselves on the back than a giant robot with power "a thousand times greater" than the midget-thing's arrives to **** on them. One of the Starjammers arbitrarily decides to throw Lilandra's dictator brother, D'Kan, at the M'Kraan Crystal, which causes them to be immediately transported to a weird, dead, alien city inside of the crystal.

At this point I'm thinking things are finally getting a bit interesting. I can't find the picture, but all the buildings have got that white, quasi-futuristic look that's just a bit too Utopian. What should be the sky is just blackness. Not even stars, just blackness. And then there's the weird yellow sphere in the center that looks like a small sun. The history of this place is never explained, but we can assume that the sphere had something to do with it. All in all it's a pretty mysterious and menacing place.

The sphere then emits some kind of rays that hit the X-Men and make all their worst nightmares come to life, but only Jean is able to overcome them. Unfortunately, Scott is panicking at this point and accidentally hits the sphere with an optic blast, cracking it. Jean now switches to Phoenix form, all flame-birdy, and merges with the sphere to try to repair it.

Alright, here's where things get obtuse. Jean seems to have some kind of instinctual understanding of what the sphere is, so most of the rest of the issue is her narrating what's going on. The sphere is some kind of containment field, a "geodesic latticework of... anti-energy?" that is holding in a neutron galaxy. The fact that I have to look this up and most of it isn't even in Wikipedia after almost forty years is pretty impressive, even if their scientific validity is highly dubious.

This lattice is dying, and when it does the neutron galaxy will be released, and since it is so ultra-dense, it's gravity will destroy the universe (go with it, this isn't Larry Niven). All throughout all of this exposition is some stunning imagery that would be pretty special even by today's standards.





In order to rebuild the lattice she must use her life energy, the energy of the Phoenix, but it's still not enough. So, she gets help from Storm and Corsair, who she now informs that he is Scott's father. This is successful, though there is again question as to whether Jean will survive, but this time she does. Then there's talk about a tree, and, **** it, here...




Apparently this nebulous, tree concept is the new anti-energy lattice or something, and then everybody is back through the stargate (not skipping anything, they're back the very next panel), Jean's okay, Fire Lord knows they're the good guys, D'Ken is now catatonic, Lilandra is still exiled until the Shi'ar council decides she's Empress, in the mean time she and Xavier can have cripple sex, and in general all's well that ends well. Of course Jean still has the Phoenix, but that's a tale for another day...

I don't know how much of this ending Claremont had planned and how much was just him flying by the seat of his pants. The abruptness of the concept of the neutron galaxy and all the rest suggests he was coming up with it as he went along, but if he pulled all of this out of his hat it's still impressive. It's likewise a mystery just how far along the concept of the Phoenix was by this point. If it's true that it was originally just cosmic rays supercharging Jean's powers and not an actual entity, this issue still hints that the Phoenix was something else. I also don't know how much of all this was thanks to new artist John Byrne, but given the unprecedented ambition of the artwork, I'm imagining he may have had a hand in the raised quality of this issue. From what I hear the very next issue is a Wolverine-centric one, and since Byrne was supposed to be his biggest fan on the team, I'm imaging he had a lot of creative input pretty early on. If so then it should be a pretty wild ride from here on out. An excellent finish to an up-and-down story arc. Well played.

How far are you intending to go with these X-Men write ups and how far do you plan on reading upto with the X-Men?

Well, I'm at least going to the end of the "Dark Phoenix Saga", although I'd like to finish "Days of Future Past" at some point too. I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep up the same pace though. Taking all that time to do a write up after every single issue was exhausting. I'll at least wait till I read a few issues before doing an issue by issue review next time.

But I'm definitely taking a break from that series at the moment and catching up on Uncanny Avengers, which I've been meaning to read for weeks. I was going to do something not X-related, but then I found out Sunfire was joining the Avengers around issue #8, and I kind of love him for being such an *******, so I had to get in on that. Excellent series, BTW. Gonna feature it pretty soon.

Deadpool vs. Carnage #1-#4 (miniseries)

Well this was a fun little romp of oddness. Not necessarily one for the Comic Book Hall of Fame, but neither is it disposable. Seeing as how I've only really been reading comics a short while, I've never really read any Deadpool. I've seen a few random pages here and there (like his "Yo mama" joke battle with Spider-Man), so I at least understand the basic gist of the character, but this is still pretty much my first real introduction to him. Haven't read all that much Carnage either, but I at least know enough. Regardless, when I saw the title, I just had to hit "download".

What seems like a completely arbitrary mash-up actually works pretty well, as the basic premise of this seems to be figuring out just which one is more whacked in the head. You'd think Carnage would have the edge, just by virtue of being the villain, but this is not so. Carnage may be a homicidal maniac, but as far as the nuts and bolts of being a fruitcake, Deadpool is in a league of his own. At the beginning, Carnage has just recently escaped from prison, and in order to evade the law he decides to commit only completely random acts of murder and mayhem. Whether it be in a roadside diner or a pawnshop, there is no method to his madness. No great, evil plan. No "And now I shall finally destroy Spider-Man!" scheme. Just arbitrary violence without any pattern to be traced. Or so he thinks.

Enter Deadpool. He is likewise out of his gourd, but seems to be able to tap into some kind of pattern laid down by an unnamed, higher power by using clues that any sane person would overlook or dismiss. He sets out on a hunt for Carnage, not because he's being paid, or out of a benevolent sense of duty, but because he was channel surfing and the various sentence fragments he heard from the split second he paused on each station seemed to form a message telling him to go find the symbiote. So, Carnage is crazy enough to shed reason in the name of chaos, but Deadpool's crazy is so advanced that it can actually interpret this chaos. Hijinks ensue.




That's pretty much what makes this series work too. Any other day of the week, Carnage is so unpredictable that everyone else is forced to play catch-up. But not Deadpool. He starts his search by following an arbitrary butcher who just happens to be carrying a bleeding package of meat, which leads him to a convenience store where he sees a kid playing a Mortal Kombat knockoff arcade game which, purely coincidentally, says things like "Massacre!" and "Maximum carnage!", and wouldn't just know it, there's a magazine rack with a magazine with Cletus Kasady on the cover. Underneath that is one with a ghost town on it's cover. So naturally Deadpool decides this ghost town must be where to find Carnage. **** me if he isn't right, too.

Carnage does not know how to deal with this, or Deadpool's off-the-wall fighting style. He always somehow manages to elude Deadpool, and yet, like Frankenstein, there he is again. And again. One of my favorite things about this miniseries is that they kind of humanize Carnage a bit. Not to make him sympathetic, or develop his character, but just to make him look almost like a poor, hapless chump being subjected to the whims of a madman.

My favorite scene in the series is one in which Carnage, now in his human form after having recently evaded Deadpool for the first time, is riding along the highway with his girlfriend, Shriek (from Maximum Carnage), Bonnie and Clyde-style. They seem to have a legitimate, mutual affection for one another that makes them seem weirdly domestic at times, so rather than evil crazies on the way to their next atrocity, it just feels like a wholesomely-criminal couple out for a drive.

Enter Deadpool. Without warning, out of the CB radio in the backseat comes the voice of Deadpool. Carnage, one of the most fearsome villains in all of comic bookdom, whose rampages horrify even the stoutest of superheroes, is stupefied, for there is absolutely no reason why Deadpool should have been able to find him (how he did find him was even more convoluted than the magazine rack thing). Carnage and Shriek don't even have any idea where Deadpool is until they see him in the grain harvester strapped to the tractor trailer directly in front of them. The expression on Cletus Kasady's face is one I can only describe as wide-eyed-"WTF?!".




I imagine this is about as light-hearted a series as you can have with Carnage in it. Aside from him having a girlfriend, they also take the piss with him by playing up him being a redneck, his name being Cletus and all. He has a mullet, walks around in his underwear, hawks loogies, and uses "ain't" and other Southernisms on a regular basis. Imagining symbioted-up Carnage's voice with a distorted, hick drawl is surprisingly amusing. And of course Deadpool zeroes right in on this. Another highlight is during their first encounter, when Deadpool offers to have a long chat about their issues, "Maybe over a beer... or your pappy's favorite moonshine...". Not that there isn't more blood, guts, and graphic violence than you can shake a stick at, of course. This is still a series co-starring Carnage after all.





I'd also like to think that, while Carnage is obviously a Spider-Man villain, that he may also develop an equal rivalry with Deadpool. While Spider-Man may beat his body, Deadpool somehow manages to shatter Carnage's entire belief system. I'll leave you to interpret that statement.

So, if you dig violence, stupid, and either Deadpool or Carnage, then I'd definitely give this a shot. It won't redefine your concept of what a comic book can be, but it's a fun way to pass an afternoon.


Oh, and while doing a Google image search for "deadpool vs carnage", I found this. I must hunt.

Just got a few graphic novels/trade paper backs recently.




Now, the reason I'm mentioning this, aside from just being happy about showing off my new comic porn, is that I feel good about myself for supporting the comic industry. I've actually already read those Hawkeye comics, and "have" The Black Mirror, but I still just had to have them for real. I really am just a truly grand and wonderful person. But in all seriousness, I think it really is even more important to spend my money on real comics than music albums, even though the vast majority of what I'm reading is... shall we say, creatively obtained with electronic assistance of a dubious nature. It's like listening to music on the internet. Sure, I'm technically ripping someone off, but without access to these resources, I'd probably never be giving things like Thor: God of Thunder, Hawkeye, or Uncanny Avengers the time of day, yet now I'm lusting after books I never would have otherwise, which means a net gain for my local comic book store (and yes, even Barnes & Noble).

A rationalization? Certainly. But it's still true. The reason I feel it's even more important to buy comics than CDs though, is that buying an album puts a lot less money in the pockets of an artist than if I go to one of their shows and buy a t-shirt, whereas comic book creators actually have a lot more ownership, and get more money from their works than music artists, not to mention that, so far as I know, there aren't any other ways to support them. And it's not just the artists and writers either. The local comic book stores are the backbone of the industry in a way that independent record stores no longer are for the music industry. Most of my albums are bought from soulless chain stores who I could give a **** about. Borderless Comics though (holla for free advertising!), not to mention the many other places in the area, are a much bigger component of their respective industry, and so are even more important to contribute to, so it would be far more unconscionable to stiff them as far as I'm concerned.

So, rationalizing, self-righteous thief or not, I still feel a legitimate responsibility to spend money on comics that I don't feel towards music, or at least not quite as much, since I definitely make a point to buy actual albums too. I doubt that anyone else here is as prolific as I am about the less honest ways of obtaining comics (and if you are then you desperately need a life), but I still like to put all this out there.

/End douchey diatribe.

Well, after Deadpool vs. Carnage I've been on a Carnage kick. Heard good things about this and the sequel mini-series, and the covers were the last straw. From tongue-in-cheek we go to the other end of the spectrum to horror. I haven't read Carnage's old comic appearances, but looking at covers and single pages I got the feeling that he was generally used without much subtlety or class for the kind of exploitation-masquerading-as-gritty-maturity that plagued the nineties. A fun villain, but without the awesomeness of the symbiote just a poor man's Joker. Luckily with Carnage they definitely go a long way to doing him some justice.

The basic premise of this story is that an unscrupulous business man, named Michael Hall, has captured Carnage, who was presumed dead in space, and is now using the symbiote to produce symbiote-infused cybernetics that respond to thought, for use in everything from medical prosthetics to weaponry. As I'm sure you might guess, this ends well for all the parties involved.

Spider-Man and Iron Man are the heroes of the story, but they really play more of a supporting role here. The real protagonist is a psychiatrist named Tanis Nieves (apparently "Tanis" is a woman's name), who is treating Carnage's old Maximum Carnage girlfriend, Shriek. Nieves becomes involved when the company keeping Carnage captive has Shriek moved from her care to a secret facility in order to use her ability to produce negative emotions in those around her to power the symbiote, as it feeds off of these negative emotions. As I'm sure you might guess, this ends well for all the parties involved.

Dr. Nieves attempts to stop the armored car transporting her patient, but only succeeds in getting her arm shot off by one of the Iron Man-lite enforcers working for Hall Industries during a riot caused by Shriek. Hall Industries gives her one of their nifty little cyborg arms, and she ends up being taken to their facility as Shriek's doctor.




Long story short, the symbiote takes control of Nieves' arm and uses her to help it escape before bonding with her. And so proceeds a series of bitchin' fights that, as I'm sure you might guess, end with the final return of Cletus Kasady.

The best thing about this series is definitely the horror movie atmosphere. The art is a big part of this. You see a lot of this kind of art style that tries to look painted these days, which can be cool, but often just looks awkward. No matter how well it's done, it always takes away at least some of the visceral quality of an action scene, and if done poorly it can really take the life out of a comic. Done well though, while still making a panel look a bit static, it adds a unique sense of drama. I was a bit dubious when I saw the first page, as I've seen this done brilliantly (Thor: God of Thunder), and I've also seen this done horribly (new Uncanny X-Men), but for the most part I was very impressed. Use of dark and muted colors really add an eerie quality as well, as you can see...




The funny thing about this comic though, is that this dark vibe isn't so much about Carnage, as it is about the psychological horror of the symbiote itself. Cletus Kasady doesn't even appear until the end of issue #3. Which is also when the quality takes a slight dip. As cool as the fight scenes are, a redneck giddy about murder kind of ruins the more subtle tone of the earlier issues. Subtlety being relative of course. I'm being a tad unfair though, as the climax has some truly epic action sequences, and Nieves and Shriek's final confrontation is plenty emotional. But this series is definitely at its best when exploring the mind of the symbiote through its attempt to control Dr. Nieves.




They certainly keep the creep factor pretty high for a while. And Dr. Nieves is definitely being set up to possibly play some kind of a part in the greater Marvel universe, as, while she eventually loses the Carnage symbiote, it leaves behind a little bundle of joy in Tanis' cybernetic arm. A bit of a spoiler I suppose, but it's important for the next Carnage mini-series, so I kind of have to mention it.

Another thing I like about this series is that, while there is plenty of violence, the gore is kept to a minimum, which makes the truly horrifying moments all the more effective. I don't have the heart to spoil the coolest moment in the comic, but suffice it to say that Carnage uses his control of Hall Industries' cybernetic weaponry to make some rather unique kills. And even then, the art is too blurry to really make out what's going on, so your imagination has/gets to fill in the blanks.

I highly recommend Carnage. Violence with a brain. And it's made even better since the follow-up series is just as good, if not better. Get's you this mag, dudes.


Oh, and I don't have anywhere else to put this, but it's just too cool to leave out.

Alright, I was just gonna do this series as one post, but pretty soon I realized I wanted to do it issue by issue. I dig this series. I dig it a lot. I'm even reading it all the way through again as I'm writing this. So, seeing as how this is going to be a lot more detailed than the above entry, this is going to be spoiler-filled. If you don't care, then please continue, but if you intend to read this series and don't want anything ruined then just take my enthusiasm as my recommendation. Love Carnage? Love violence? Love horror movies? Love cripple fights? Then read Carnage U.S.A. and get outta my face. So, on with the actual review...

One could be forgiven for thinking this was a more light-hearted series than the previous one, what with that cover, which is actually the least delightfully goofy cover of them all. You would however be mistaken. This is as dark and merciless a comic as Carnage was and, since it focuses much more on Cletus Kasady, even more gleefully sadistic. The same team, writer Zeb Wells and artist Clayton Crain, is working on Carnage U.S.A. as well, so it really is a direct sequel, in tone and art style as well as the storyline. Not that this is a retread mind you...

The most significant difference to me is the greater realization of Cletus Kasady as a character. Carnage was really more of a side character in his own series last time around, but now he takes center stage in a big, "Oh, God, what has that sick **** done now?!" kinda way. I get the feeling that Wells may not have known exactly what to do with Kasady last time around. Scratch that. I don't know if he knew what to do with Kasady as Carnage, since the couple scenes with just him were certainly on the creepy side. When he's all suited up though, Carnage tends to come off as not much more than a psychotic thug. He's fun, but far more interesting in human form. A big reason for this is the simple fact that Cletus Kasady is a Joker ripoff. Excuse me, Joker "inspired". Chaos, murder, crazy laugh, etc. I tracked down a Spider-Man/Batman crossover a few days ago, and the one good thing about it was that the Joker and Carnage team-up for a short time, until discovering that their two philosophies, while similar, are actually too different to be reconciled. You see, the Joker likes to spread chaos and mayhem through convoluted, flamboyant schemes. Carnage thinks this is bull****. He likes to spread chaos and mayhem through immediate, random violence. Not surprisingly, regardless of the fact that the Joker was terribly written in that story, he still came off looking like the bigger badass in that particular scene, cause let's face it, Carnage's modus operandi is good for an issue or two before getting stale, whereas the Joker... well, he's the ****ing Joker, god damn it!

Zeb Wells seems to understand this. Before these two series, the most in-depth storyline I'd heard of from Carnage was Maximum Carnage, which, if word-of-mouth is any indicator, got repetitive and boring after a while, since all Carnage did was show up somewhere, kill a bunch of people, scamper off, repeat. Not so this. My boy Cletus has taken a lesson from his big bad daddy and committed a large scale atrocity so devious that it would make even the Clown Prince of Crime jealous. Is it possibly sacrificing a bit of his previous interpretation to make him into even more of a Joker clone? Probably. But who cares? Sex and pizza, man.

Our tale of woe begins like any Carnage tale does: in a small town in Colorado...



I generally don't make a habit of posting four full pages like that, but it's just such a perfect opening to the series and says everything you need to know right up front. The very first panel, where we see that the population count on the town sign has been crudely added to, presumably in blood, works perfectly as both black humor and foreshadowing. You pretty much know what's going to happen for the rest of the series right there, even if the devil is in the details. Then we go from a picturesque American dream town, to what is one of the creepiest panels I've yet seen in a comic book. And then Carnage's final declaration and the caption beneath him drive home the point of this series even further.

In case you're wondering why it is that Cletus Kasady seemed to be eating raw cow (at least we hope it's cow) from a meat processing plant, it was to provide sustenance to his symbiote so that it could increase its mass to the point where it could assimilate the entire town.




The brilliant thing about this development is that Carnage doesn't kill anyone. Well... that's not really true, but for the most part the town is alive, just controlled by Kasady. He even lets them keep their own minds rather than having them be mindless slaves. Otherwise, how would he psychologically terrorize them? Another nice touch to this series is his southern accent. When sitting down on a porch swing with a horrified elderly couple, lazily watching the clouds go by this picturesque slice of smalltown Americana, Kasady's good ol' boy way of talking goes from amusing to terrifying. The seeming normalcy of it all creates this ironic tension that does far more for my love of this character than any amount of wanton brutality ever could.




Of course there are the good guys. When word of this gets to the government, thanks to the town sheriff who is sent to the neighboring county with Kasady's list of demands carved into his flesh, the Avengers are sent in. Honestly, even though the "demands" basically amount to a declaration of a new "sovereign symbiotic state" and an allusion to potential world domination, I don't really know that Carnage's motives are actually anything more than a confrontation. He's Carnage after all. This time around the Avengers team consists of Spider-Man (naturally), Captain America, Wolverine, Hawkeye, and the Thing. They probably play an even smaller role this time around than Spider-Man and Iron Man did in Carnage, but they still give you a nice little scene to introduce the personalities of the protagonists: Spider-Man trying to convince Wolverine to let Hawkeye shoot an arrow off of his head, before being interrupted by Captain America. And Hawkeye's annoyance at the Thing's constant mentioning of Yancy Street, his aunt, and his "ever-lovin' blue-eyed schtick" reminds me of why I'm now a Hawkeye fan. "It's clobberin' time!" "Of course it is..."

At this point the comic basically becomes a quasi-zombie movie. The Avengers enter what appears to be a ghost town, walking down a deserted main street. Eventually they find the townspeople, who are just standing around, seemingly only able to say "Big smiles. Big big smiles." They are then confronted by Kasady, shielding himself with a baby.




And in case you think this is just a cheap ploy to get around the fact that the Avengers could otherwise beat Carnage's ass into the sidewalk, think again (although they did exclude Thor). Carnage's symbiote has increased its mass to the point where it soon overwhelms the entirety of the team, except for Spider-Man, and possesses them as well.




So, Carnage has now taken control of over a thousand people, and still has the juice to put down the Avengers like they were red-headed step-children. At this point I'm wondering if he might actually have been able to take down Thor as well. Maybe not head-to-head, but as soon as those tendrils hit you, you're kind of done. If Wolverine's healing factor can't fight them off, then Thor being a god may not save him either. Carnage pretty much comes off as Satan in this issue. He's just so, so deliciously evil. He may not quite have the Joker's twisted, serpentine imagination, but he certainly shows the promise that he can be further developed given the right chance. And Marvel seems willing to give him that chance too. This is his second mini-series in little more than a year. Too bad his third series didn't get nearly as good reviews. Still, I'm now waiting for a worthy follow-up to Carnage U.S.A., and I get the feeling I'm not going to have to wait all that long.

We're left with this cliff hanger, with the last panel revealing the inside of a military facility where a general is gazing at a screen showing a number of symbiotes aligned on the side of truth, justice and the American way, including Venom, Anti-Venom (smh), and a certain doctor you might remember from the previous series, now going by the name of Scorn.

An excellent start to a series that deserves the praise it gets. If this isn't the definitive Carnage story, then somebody please tell me what is, cause I'm sure it'll cause me to need to change my underwear.



Edit: Yup, new Carnage series already coming soon. Apparently he plays a part in the new Avengers/X-Men crossover event, Avengers and X-Men: AXIS, and will get his own spin-off, three-part mini-series in October called AXIS: Carnage. It'll be written by Rick Spears, and drawn by German Paralta. Paralta's art looks somewhat similar to the style of this series, with that painted look, so they may be going for a similar tone. Rick Spears seams to be more of an indie writer, so I imagine Marvel isn't looking for just another violence fest like the newest Superior Carnage, which, while I have only read the first issue, I was not really impressed with. Not sure what to think of him though, a year or two ago I read the first volume of a series he did a called Black Metal, which was basically a Metalocalypse-inspired series about two black metal fans conquering hell or something. I seem to remember it being fun, and if the new Carnage writer is a black metal fan, then I'm cautiously stoked.

I don't know if this is my favorite cover of this series or if it's the one with Carnage crossing the Delaware. Either way... awesome.

With the Avengers now out of commission, we are introduced to Mercury Team, a special forces group made up of American soldiers controlling catatonic alien symbiotes. They're not nearly as powerful as Carnage or Venom, but they also don't have the danger of being bonded to their symbiotes and losing control. For the most part, their other halves mainly give them the ability to make better use of traditional weaponry, but the guy who controls the symbiotic dog is pretty bitchin'.




And then of course there's the return of Dr. Tanis Nieves, still sporting her new symbiote, Scorn, from Carnage. She's now under US control, and being trained as an agent. Since her symbiote was "born" in a cybernetic prosthetic arm, it is part machine, and gives Nieves the ability to bond with other technology. She isn't entirely pleased with being Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole, but appears to have accepted her new lot in life if only because she's too numb to really deal with what's happened.




I kind of love her. Her arc in Carnage was definitely the most interesting thing about that series. She started as an idealist intent on helping even the most damaged of individuals, but was disillusioned by her experience in the mind of Carnage and witnessing her former patient Shriek's relapse into a murderous psychopath, and not entirely because of her bonding to her symbiote. Now the former doctor is playing the role of assassin, willingly throwing away her Hippocratic oath. If I don't quite consider her a hero, it's not so much because of her symbiote making her a Venom-style anti-hero. She's fully in control of her sanity, but while she is following her conscience to an extent, she's seems to be going along with the flow more than anything. I think that's pretty interesting, as I imagine that's how many would react to becoming a "superhero"; she doesn't quite know what to do with herself at the moment, but has a vague notion that she should make like Superman, and letting the government point her in a direction is as good a plan as any. I don't know how much of a role she's going to be playing in the Marvel universe, but I'd definitely be happy to see them develop her further. She's had only two appearances after this series, one in Venom #15, and again in Superior Carnage #5, which was released in November 2013, so she's been inactive for almost a year. Since she's been associated with Carnage in three separate series, maybe she'll make an appearance in AXIS: Carnage. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Aside from Mercury team, Spider-Man has made contact with a resistance movement operating out of some guy's private zoo. Yeah, you read that right. So, what with an imminent special forces strike, partisans, and a deadline of morning on the following day before the Air Force turns the entire town into a fireball, this is setting up a warzone that will engulf the rest of the series.

But Carnage hasn't been idle. He doesn't so much seem to be preparing for war, as he is devising new ways to torture his captives. His current little game is that he's decided to "adopt" two children.




And that Spider-Pet is Doppleganger. It's like a four-armed, monster version of Spider-Man. He's sort of like Carnage's dog. Anyway, Kasady is unfortunately not particularly impressed with the loyalty of their mother. So he orders her to kill her husband while the children watch, or else he will make her watch as he kills the children. The only problem is that the father is one of the resistance, so he gives them some... equipment...




Kasady really is turning in one of my new favorite Comic Book Psycho performances. His sadism is low key. Rather than turning his hands into axes and racking up as high a body count as possible, he's concerning himself mostly with spreading misery in more insidious, psychologically damaging ways. Hell, he only wears the suit for a few pages in the beginning of he book. There are more shots of the townspeople and the Avengers wearing the symbiote than him, and that's the rule for most of the series. Seriously though, if anyone knows a better Carnage story then I need to know.

Good God this series has bitchin' covers. Well **** finally hits the fan in this issue. I mean, ****'s been kinda hitting the fan the whole time, but now the big, bad symbiote showdown finally begins. It starts with the symbiote special forces squad, Mercury Team, infiltrating Doverton. At this point, Nieves separates from the group to do... something that will become more important in the last two issues.




Meanwhile, Cletus Kasady has found God. And by "found God", I mean he's put on a priest's outfit in the town church and is making each of the townspeople remove one of their teeth with a pair of pliers. It's about this time that you realize that he doesn't really have much of a plan. He's set up his little "country", but doesn't have any grand vision for what to do with it. He's just kind of doing the first thing that comes to his mind at any given time. I mean, is it just me, or does it sound like Carnage just pulled that out of his "Evil Acts to Perpetrate Upon the Hapless Townies" hat completely at random? I want that hat. I imagine given time he'd probably end up killing them all once he got bored in a week or a month or whatever. But until then we get treated to delightfully wanton cruelty such as this...




I suppose if you're one of those people who likes their plots to have some greater meaning, then you might not be so into this, but if you're a terrible person like me, who loves a bit of mindless sadism in his entertainment, especially if that sadism is aesthetically creative, then this is your cup of tea. I really want one of those hats.

And yeah, that's Captain America going, "Nnnnnnnyaahh!" while trying to break free of the symbiote's control in the middle ground of that panel. Kasady pretty much keeps the Avengers around all the time as bodyguards/unwilling witnesses whenever he's not making them play pool. Now Kasady gets his rocks off by telling "Captain Flag Face" of the wife and children who he's sent to kill their father. Speaking of...

Back at the resistance compound/private zoo, Spider-Man is awoken from sleeping in full costume to find the father in question driving his truck through the surrounding fence in order to get back to his family, who is waiting for him outside. Obviously this doesn't go as he planned, as his wife tearfully tells him that she has to kill him. Luckily, Spider-Man manages to save the day (natch), but Kasady takes remote control of the wife and children through the symbiote and they run back to the church, while Kasady gloats about how he will kill them with the wife's own voice. A bad, bad man.

Also luckily, the symbiote team has tracked Kasady down to the church, but are then confronted by the townspeople, now completely possessed by Carnage. The scene pretty much turns into Aliens meets Night of the Living Dead.




The battle outside distracts Kasady, just long enough for Captain America to momentarily break free from the symbiote's control, and just long enough to get a message to an unknown person...




Oh yeah, Flash Thompson is Venom now. It's a lot more awesome than it sounds. But yeah, this series rules. 'Nuff said.

This issue basically opens with Spider-Man making an Army of Darkness speech, shotgun raised aloft, as he convinces the resistance to go help him kick some symbiote ass (cause they have tranquilizer guns from the zoo or something). This scene is worth the price of the book just to see Spider-Man standing on a pickup truck with a shotgun.




Spider-Man and his boomstick are sorely needed, as the symbiote special forces dudes are having a time of it being surrounded by the Carnage-enslaved townspeople. Not only are they running out of ammunition (natch), but now Carnage himself enters the fray, not to mention his buddies the Avengers: Captain America, Hawkeye, Wolverine, and the Thing.




One good thing would be for the entire team to be there so they could fight as one, but instead, Scorn/Dr. Nieves is in the meat packing plant talking to herself about ball bearings and gigahertz. I mean, she does have a symbiote in her head that's half machine and can bond with other technology, but that still counts as talking to herself.

But no sooner is their **** about to be wrecked than Spider-Man and his pickup truck posse show up with molotov cocktails and shotguns (unfortunately Spider-Man doesn't have his anymore). It's looks like Mad Max in pajamas.




The series is pretty much just a superhero free-for-all from this point on. Every few panels somebody is fighting somebody else, and it's ****ing awesome. Oh yeah, then Venom shows up with a big ****ing grenade launcher and just flattens Carnage's ass with... sonic grenades or something. They never really mentioned what those were, but they were badass anyway.




So, obviously at some point the tables return on the heroes and the villains are about to win and you've seen a movie so you know what I'm saying. This is when Scorn hits Carnage with a bulldozer. For most of the series she's been pretty much in the background, but now she hits Carnage with a bulldozer. It's ****ing awesome. I know I already said that about something else, but I don't care. She hit Carnage with a ****ing bulldozer and it ruled.

And if that's not enough to show what an underrated badass Scorn is, hitting Carnage with a ****ing bulldozer was just a way to get him into the meat packing plant, where she'd rigged some kind of sonic doohickey to separate Kasady from his symbiote. Constructing a device that basically looks like it shoots down a giant column of pure sound out of meat packing equipment sounds like building a radio out of a coconut, but I guess her command of machinery is just that awe-inspiring, so I'm willing to go with it. Besides, it sets the stage for Kasady and Flash/Venom's cripple fight in the next issue (Venom kinda got bulldozed too... by accident... maybe). And I'll explain why they're both crippled next time.

Unfortunately I can't find any scans of either the bulldozer or the sonic... disruptor... meat packing... thing, so you'll have to use your imaginations. The best I can do is a pic of the outside of the meat packing plant in the next issue. Oh wells.




Yeah, if Scorn can do that to a meat-packing plant in less than a night, she's gonna be giving Reed Richards a run for his money soon. Perhaps some anti-fun individuals might say that turning a meat packing plant into a... sonic thing, is dumb. **** them. The bulldozer at the beginning forgives all. Besides, this isn't a series where I was particularly concerned with the brilliant culmination of the protagonists' master plan. Carnage did bad, bad things, and however they actually managed to beat him would have been secondary regardless. Zeb Wells used Cletus Kasady masterfully and, with Clayton Crain's moody artwork, created a truly unsettling glimpse into just what Carnage is capable of. The tooth thing... man. That **** was ****ed up.

And the last battle is still to come anyway...

Carnage U.S.A. #5 of 5

Alright, one little teeny, tiny nitpick that will probably mean absolutely nothing at all whatsoever to anyone but me. That hand salute is ****. There is a very precise way to perform a hand salute. First of all, you don't curve your hand like that. Your fingers are to remain straight, so that your forearm, wrist, and hand form a line, with your thumb tucked to the side of your palm, NOT UNDER IT. Plus, even from this angle I can tell he's holding his palm sideways. Not so. It should be tilted slightly downward, so that if someone is in front of you they can only see the back of your hand and not the inside of your palm. And his hand placement. Yeesh. If not wearing a cover (hat) with a brim, the tip of your middle finger should just touch the corner of your right eye. It should not be touching your goddamn forehead. ****ing redneck.

I'm just going to quit now before I start in on what he's doing wrong with his left arm.

So, I believe I mentioned a cripple fight last time. Well, a while back Flash Thompson/Venom, was a soldier fighting in Iraq, and lost his legs, but now he has, like... symbiote legs. And before the events of the first Carnage mini-series, some guy called sentry straight ripped Cletus Kasady in half at the waist (Sentry apparently has a bad habit about this).



That isn't from this series, but it's still pretty ****ing cool. Anyway, so they're both missing their legs, but their symbiotes have given them replacements. Except now Scorn's meat packing sonic doohickey has separated them both from their symbiotes... so they must cripple fight.




This is actually a pretty ****ing trippy issue. Zeb Wells obviously wanted to go all out with this one. He'd created some sick stuff for the earlier books, so I suppose he didn't want the ending to be overshadowed by being just another superhero fight. Having two uber-powered freaks with alien parasites fight each other without the use of legs has definitely gotta be a first in comic books.

Another first has to be the symbiote-possessed zoo animals the rest of the Avengers are doing battle with outside. Yeah. Not much to explain. The zoo animals that were chillin' at the private zoo got loose, and then when the symbiotes became separated from Flash and Kasady they found the closest living hosts (the townspeople having been freed when Kasady was separated from Carnage).




There's a rather delightful scene where a gorilla taken over by the Venom symbiote tries to get to the meat packing plant to help Flash, but is attacked by a Carnage-possessed lion. All looks hopeless until Spider-Man kicks the lion and the gorilla goes loping off toward the meat packing plant. I have a tendency to be oblivious to just how weird things can be the first time around, so I'm glad I'm going back over all of this, as the entire issue is really quite odd.




The ape has good timing too, as Flash is sort of hanging from a meat hook at this point.




And thus ends the cripple fight as Flash gets his symbiote back and grabs Kasady by the neck. Then the air force drops napalm on all of the symbiote-controlled animals and we're pretty much done. There's one last bit of niceness though. Not surprisingly, when the heroes defeat Carnage and capture the symbiote, rather than chainsawing him into several pieces and dropping them into various parts of the ocean all across the world, they arrest him. Cause that's what heroes do. Now, the whole "Why are we arresting him when we could remove this threat to the world forever?" trope has been done, but given the level of Carnage's depravity in this series it feels like a particularly relevant question this time around. He may not have almost destroyed the world, but I highly doubt anyone who would force over a thousand people to each remove one of their own teeth is worth saving.

While Kasady is being marched onto the Avengers' plane, the man whose wife and two children had been ordered to kill him by Carnage walks up with a shotgun. He fires one round at Kasady that accidentally hits (and bounces off of) the Thing, before being disarmed by Spider-Man. After a couple conversation bubbles giving the ol' "Do you want to become him?!" thing, the man shuts Spider-Man up by telling him that he'd had three children before Carnage showed up.




The thing that makes this scene ring true for me is that it just makes the heroes look so impotent. Most of them have just spent the majority of the series being forced to watch as this sadist had his way with an entire town. And now they have to put him back in his cage to wait for the next massacre. There's usually some moral that ends up justifying this though, at least to some extent, but when Spider-Man tries he finds himself speechless when confronted by the depth of this man's tragedy. Who knows how many people are dead, half the town has been destroyed, not to mention the psychological trauma on all of those still alive, and Cletus Kasady gets to fly away with a smirk on his face to three square meals a day in some prison. Again, not a terribly original concept, but it's very appropriate here.

God this series was fun.

I haven't read the actual comic book, only seen the animated adaptation, so this is only about that. If that scene in the comic is anywhere near as emotional as the movie then I have to read it. I'm serious about the crying thing. I don't mean straight-up bawling. I don't think I've done that in over a decade about anything. But that part puts a lump in my throat and brings an honest to god tear to my eye every time I think about it, which is more than I can say about most real life ****. I'm sure that as I write this the same thing will happen, just as it did when I watched the video a second ago.

If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, the Flash has the ability to run so fast that he can go back in time. He doesn't do this for the most part for obvious reasons, but this time he goes back in time to save his mother, who originally was murdered when he was a child. When he gets back to the present the entire world is different (some crap about ripples in the space-time continuum that affect even things that have nothing to do with what was changed): his mother is still alive, but there is no Justice League, Superman crashed in Metropolis instead of Smallville and is a prisoner of the government, Wonder Woman and the Amazons are waging a war with Aquaman and Atlantis that is devastating the Earth, Hal Jordan never got his ring, and many other things. But the most important one for this post is that instead of Bruce Wayne witnessing his parent's murder, his father and mother watched Joe Chill kill Bruce. This caused Thomas Wayne to become Batman and Martha Wayne to snap and become the Joker.

In order to restore the timeline to its rightful place, Barry Allen (or the Flash if you're stupid) seeks out Batman. When he finds Thomas Wayne things don't go so well though. I suppose the loss of a child is even more traumatizing than the death of a parent, as this world's Batman is far more nihilistic than "ours". He uses guns, isn't afraid to kill, doesn't seem to give much of a **** about what's going on in the world, outside of waging a war of vengeance against crime in Gotham, and just seems to be in general a broken man with nothing to live for. The only way that Flash even gets him to agree to help him is by telling him that restoring the time line will save his son. Then blah blah blah, epic awesome **** happens, watch/read it cause it rules, and an hour and a half later the timeline is restored. It's during the final battle that a critically-wounded Thomas Wayne gives Flash the letter to give to his son, which you saw if you watched the clip.

There's no way anyone with a soul can't be even a little bit touched by this. If Bruce Wayne is around forty as I've been given to understand, then it's been thirty years since he last saw his parents. Thirty years where he's likely thought about them and that moment every day of his life. This is an event that had such a profound effect on him that he gave up his childhood to travel the world alone while training his mind and body to a peak that quite possibly no man has ever reached in all of history, comic book or otherwise. Even after all of this time, this event so profoundly rules his mind and his heart that he's given his entire life to righting this wrong. I imagine he likely secretly pictures his parents' murderer in the face of every criminal he fights, a little boy just hoping to wake up and see his mother and father by his bed (*).

And now, after three decades (not to mention seven decades of real life time), his father is speaking to him. This isn't a letter he'd written years ago that Bruce had just discovered in an old trunk in the attic; these are words written by a living man who has felt the same loss, who has lived through the same private hell, whose words carry the same emotions that Bruce himself feels. This is a little boy's closure.

If this makes you feel nothing then I don't even know what to say to you. It says everything about the power of Batman's story that in a series dedicated to the Flash, Bruce Wayne's moment steals the show, even though Flash is pretty much going through exactly the same thing. And thank God they got Kevin Conroy back for that little "cameo". No voice actor who's played Batman since could have made that scene what it is.

* That right there is where I got choked up again. Actually needed a tissue.

It always surprised me just how both Venom and Carnage maintained their popularity as major villains in Marvel for all these years, because when they first came on the scene they looked like they would blow themselves out, as writers overused both of them.

Also have you read any of 1980s Flash, I always remember this being one of the best DC comics of that era?

Haven't read any Flash. As a hero the guy who runs really fast doesn't appeal to me all that much, but he does intrigue me as an annoying loudmouth.

Holy ****! That was awesome! There's just something about the Punisher. He's pretty much what an actual superhero would be in the real world, even though he's not really "super", and not much of a hero. If anybody was gonna strap up and dedicate their life to fighting crime, they'd probably have to be a borderline-psychotic, ex-military gun nut whose family had been murdered right in front of him. He's pretty much Batman, but stripped of all the rationalizations that make him kid friendly.

And yet pretty much nobody can name a single one of his enemies, allies, or famous storylines. I imagine the fact that he's generally kept PG-13 leaves him in also-ran status. But there's a reason I checked this series out: I saw it on a list of the best comic book series ever made. Apparently when you let the character loose in all of his rated R glory, magic happens.

It says something about this series that, even though Frank Castle pretty much has no personality to speak of, no character arc (so far), and shows barely a hint of human emotion, that he is still such an imposing figure in this story. In fact, he's ****ing terrifying. For the most part you don't even see his face, and I'm not sure if they ever show his eyes. Almost every time you see him he's shrouded in shadow with a face so lined that you're not sure if they're wrinkles, scars, or just the outward manifestation of his own scarred soul. The first time you ever actually see his eyes---kinda sorta---is in a pitch black room while he's telling a "friend" that he plans to kill him. I say "kinda sorta" because the lack of light in the room leaves his eyes as pitch black orbs of nothingness, with twin points of light in each one that give a horrifying approximation of pupils. So, for pretty much the entire series (or at least the series that I've read), Frank Castle looks like a demon from hell. No humanity, no soul, just robotic malevolence.

Perhaps even more impressive is that I really can't empathize with this character at all. For instance, issue #1 starts with the murder of his family, and I actually felt something---in what in a good person might be called a "soul"---when I saw the look of fear on his daughter's face, underneath the caption...

"I hit the ground beside my daughter. She'd been gutshot, badly, and when she saw the things that boiled and wriggled from her belly the expression on her face was not a little girl's."

Sad ****, right? And yet the sociopath that we see afterward bears no resemblance to anything that had ever been a father, so any empathy just doesn't transfer. All that's left of Frank Castle is a killing machine without remorse.

I think the perfect summation of his character is in issue #4, when he is telling a story to a "friend". After the murder of Frank Castle's family, but before he became the Punisher, a neighbor comes to his house, and they have a talk. At one point the neighbor mentions that he's left his wife for a coworker. Castle responds, "I lost my wife. And you threw yours away like she was nothing", and then proceeds to assault the man. His explanation: "In his heart, he knew it was wrong. But it was what he wanted. So he went ahead and did it, and hoped everything would work out all right. That's why he deserved to be punished." That kind of binary, black/white logic shows the reasoning of a psychopath without emotions like mercy or empathy to influence his outlook on life. It's the reasoning of a child. He may be a "superhero", but at this point he seems more of a serial killer who just so happens to target criminals.

Oh, and the action is pretty badass too...



Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go read issue #7.

P.S. If you're going to read this series, might I suggest listening to Bolt Thrower while you do. I'm not one to listen to music while reading, but it just felt appropriate.

Aw yeah.

The Punisher must be one of the most caned to death characters in Marvel, I remember when he first appeared in Amazing Spider Man and since then his character hardly ever changed.

Regardless. In this series, he's ****ing money.

This would be the 2004 graphic novel by Dan Slott, not the one from '89 by Grant Morrison (which I also have :p:). Before I started reading comics online I was starting to come up dry with new stuff to get at my local comic shop. I'd gotten most of the Batman stuff that I knew was good, and I didn't know enough about anything else to be comfortable dropping money on it. Now I almost feel physical pain at all the **** I have to leave for another day. Damn comic books.

On a side note, I'm starting to feel like I'm going to a show every time I head out to the shop. I'm accumulating a decent amount of comic book shirts, and I always debate with myself at which one I should wear. Of course I can't wear one with the character of the series I want to get, as that would be tacky. I'm not sure if this is douchey.

As of right now it is 7:09 pm, I have the oven set to 425 with fries and a frozen metal lovers' pizza waiting in the freezer, and I'm cracking open Batman: Year One, all in preparation for the premier of Gotham in... fifty minutes. I'm gonna try to review the pilot during the commercial breaks as I watch it, so here's hoping I can type fast...

7:59!

... Yeah, that didn't work out. I was far too busy running around getting my artery-clogging feast ready during commercials to bother writing anything. Was worth it though. I had a constant stream of fried potatoes and pepperoni going being stuffed into my fat face. America. Fuck yeah.

Anyway, it was basically "worse than I'd hoped, but better than I'd feared". Not really fair since, it being a Batman(ish) series, I was pretty much hoping for the best thing since Firefly. Unrealistic, but it's Batman, so I can't help but pray for true greatness. But it was definitely better than the CSI clone, with a few characters thrown in with names of people who they would one day turn into, that I was afraid of it being. I can't say that I loved it, but for the most part I dug it, and there were definitely some really excellent scenes, so definitely see potential for it being at least more than a little awesome. I'm cautious, but optimistic. It's ****ing Batman after all. Other than the Schumacher Batman movies, he hasn't really failed to achieve greatness when crossing over out of comic books since... ever?

*spoilers ahead*

The episode starts out strong. Pre-Catwoman is the first character we meet. She does a wee bit of parkour to give a taste of the show's ability to capture action in a cinematic way, while also establishing her as a thieving urchin. Not a revelation obviously, but character building is necessary regardless. Running from a newly-walletless man she happens upon the iconic scene of the mugging that would soon change Bruce Wayne's life forever. It unfolds as expected, with Thomas and Martha Wayne lying dead in an alley and Bruce kneeling by their bodies. Then the camera pans up, staying centered on child Bruce, and you just know the "KKKKHHHHAAAANNNN!!!!" moment is coming. I could taste it, like bad milk. But instead of a piece of uber-cheesy narm from an awful child actor, the kid lets loose with the kind of ragged, heart-wrenching scream, straight from the depths of his soul, that I would expect from a boy who has just witnessed his parents' murder. I don't know exactly why, but the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents just gets to me. This kind of thing generally doesn't affect me, but I guess since it's a character who has been part of my DNA since my age was in the early single-digits I have more of an emotional stake in his fate. The kid does this scene justice far better than I was expecting for a network television show. So, I was sold from the first five minutes. If this series has the instincts for good writing and casting to nail what will likely be the most important scene in this season, then that's a good sign. Granted, it's a scene that comes fully-formed from seventy-five years of comic book history, but if it works, it works.

The other iconic scene from the comics to be adapted for the show would be the meeting of Bruce Wayne and Jim Gordon. It will be a relief to know that the question of Bruce's role in the show is established pretty convincingly here. The murder of his parents is clearly not the simple mugging that is often portrayed in the comics. There appears to be a conspiracy involving the various criminal organizations behind it, and the main plotline of the season is obviously going to be unearthing this tangled web. There is also a complete lack of a school in this episode, so if anyone is worried that this will be CSI awkwardly spliced together with Smallville, then fear not. Throughout the episode, Gordon investigates the case, meeting the main and supporting characters of the series along the way (Harvey Bullock, Renee Montoya, Fish Mooney, Penguin, Poison Ivy, Carmine Falcone, and I'm probably forgetting someone or other), establishing what will likely be a set of subplots of varying degrees of importance. Bruce is largely absent for much of the show, but it ends with a scene that sets up what will obviously develop into an alliance between himself and Gordon to uncover the true killer, and which will likely gradually bring the boy into crime fighting for the first time.

Just before, he's shown standing on the roof of his mansion, seemingly about to jump, but we soon learn that he was trying to "conquer his fear". It's not yet clear whether he's merely reacting to feelings of guilt over not doing anything to stop his parents' murder, or if he's even now planning for what will come. Either way, during his final conversation with Gordon, it is clear that he is no longer a little boy. He carries himself as an adult, an equal to Jim. His time as a victim was remarkably short, ya know, for anyone who isn't Batman. This is another scene that makes me think that Bruce has been cast correctly. Most child actors come across as flat, like they've memorized their lines, but don't understand how to actually act. This kid is something else entirely. Definitely impressed.

Most of the show is dedicated to being a police procedural though. This isn't quite a CSI clone or anything, but it's still a genre that's been mined so completely that there really isn't too much you can do to make it fresh. Gotham doesn't do a half bad job though. Shows like Grimm and Hannibal rely on outlandish premises and execution to set themselves apart, but this show has a simple way to do the same thing: rather than being episodic and dedicated simply to solving this week's case, Gotham is actually about fighting crime. It's a subtle distinction I suppose, but since we're dealing with entrenched, organized crime syndicates that won't be dislodged by some detective with a hair, a one-liner, a bottle cap only produced by one company between 1954 and 1955; rampant police corruption that includes even main characters; and recurring villains, many of whom will obviously remain active long after the events of this series, Gotham will be much more involved and plot driven than your average Law and Order rip off. It doesn't necessarily make those scenes where some breakthrough happens because of something-or-other any more exciting, but in the long run I imagine this show will have a personality all its own, with or without the Joker.

Where the show did shine when it was in procedural mode, were in the action sequences. The camera work throughout the episode was very cinematic, and went out of its way not to look like a television show. Even in moments of more traditional drama everything feels larger than life. But the action scenes were the most obvious example of this. One extended scene where Gordon is chasing down a man suspected of murdering the Waynes, and who also happens to be a young Poison Ivy's father, is kept dynamic and tension-filled by a wide variety of camera techniques and constantly changing angles. It was definitely more than a few notches above your average television drama.

For the most part, the characters were well-acted and well-cast. From commercials the most high profile character would probably be Penguin. The actor did a good job of portraying him as a vicious, sadistic psychopath with an inferiority complex, in a way that's probably closer to Arkham City than your average non-gamer would be used to. Many of the characters, such as Poison Ivy, are obviously being introduced as a way to engage new viewers up front, before being pushed aside until later in the season. Penguin's arc however, is clearly going to be continuing for the foreseeable future. Looking forward to it.

I'm waiting to see how much I like Gordon though. A straight-laced boy scout isn't exactly the most compelling character, but even now he's showing signs of the morally incorruptible man who is nevertheless willing to bend the rules when necessary who we know from the comics. I'm hoping that he will develop into a more interesting character as he evolves and becomes more seasoned. His partner, Detective Bullock, isn't particularly interesting at first either, as he appears to merely be a cynical, veteran cop stereotype, but as the episode progresses and his relationship with the mob becomes apparent, I became much more interested in his arc. He's clearly a man of some principle, even if he's not living up to it at the moment. How his relationship with his partner develops should make for some good drama.

Selina Kyle barely has a speaking part, but she reappears several times after watching Bruce's parent's murder, watching him from afar, and usually perching cat-like on something like a wall or a statue in a cemetery. I suppose it would have been harder to introduce her character without her having some connection to Bruce, and it makes sense to play on both of their negative experiences with their parents. Carmine Falcone is obviously going to be a central villain in the series, which means that Gordon, and by extension almost certainly Bruce, will be going after him. If Bruce is involved in a fight with Falcone then it might mean that his relationship will develop a similar dynamic as in The Long Halloween. Though how that would play out without Batman I don't know.

I was also pleasantly surprised by Falcone. He only appears for a short time near the end of the episode, but he is already showing himself to be a more three-dimensional character than the boring, mafia stereotype from Batman Begins.

Can't forget John Pertwee as Alfred either. He plays the character as a more hard-edged type, likely to play up Alfred's military history. He only appears in a few scenes, and without much in the way of dialogue, but he shows both a protectiveness towards Bruce that feels appropriate, and just a hint of the character's hallmark dry wit. I'm guessing that the more gruff portrayal will be used to make him a more awkward father figure to Bruce, in order to develop Bruce's isolation from people in general. Just a guess though.

All in all, I quite enjoyed the first episode of Gotham. The glut of characters might have been too much too soon, but having read an interview with the creator of the show which promised that this was merely for the pilot, I'm confident that things will be much more settled by next week. Here's hoping that this will be the best show of the year. If all goes well it has the potential to be.

This issue is so new that I had to bust my ass just to find a cover the right size that didn't look like ****. But yeah, there's a female Thor now. If you didn't know that, then I really don't know what you're doing here, cause it's been hot **** news for like months. Even my (bitchass) friend who's lukewarm to comic books in general, and thought the first Thor movie was ****---in all fairness, it was---knew about it when I brought it up a while back. So no excuses. I actually haven't read the thing yet though; I just wanted to say a couple things first to mark this occasion.

There's been a lot of flak hurled Marvel's way over this, and not without cause. This was clearly an editorial decision, and not the idea of Jason Aaron, writer for the newly ended Thor: God of Thunder, and current writer for Thor. Supposedly, half the current readership for comic books are girls, and this is clearly who they're trying to reach with this. I don't know how true that statistic is---it certainly seems counter-intuitive---but I'll go with it. The current successes of Marvel Studios may very well have had this effect, and if so, Marvel obviously wants to capitalize on it.

It's also clear that they don't need to do something so drastic to revitalize the character, as God of Thunder has been trading places with Hawkeye the last couple of years at the top of lists for Marvel's best series, and I can second that. So we're left with an obvious case of executive interference.

I'm also leery of this as the transition has already been pretty awkward. The whole justification for a female Thor has been that the real Thor will somehow become unworthy of Mjolnir, which will mean that it may end up going to someone else who is, who will then gain all the powers of Thor. Marvel had actually been doing a good job up till this point: Thor's arc in his series showed him to be impotent and disheartened in the face of enemies that he could not fight merely with his fists (namely evil corporations and Asgardian politics). So I assumed that when I "opened" the final issue of T:GoT, that it would finally reveal how he was to become unworthy, and cap off a truly epic series while leading seamlessly into Thor #1.

Nope. I looked at the very first page, where it gives short bios on the main characters and a quick synopsis of the recent history of the series (take notes DC, you need to start doing this), only to see that Thor is ALREADY unworthy. Apparently he became so in issue #7 of Original Sin, which is the most recent of those damn company-wide crossover events that nobody but the nerdiest of the nerdy will every keep up with. And it wasn't even good apparently. ***spoiler*** Nick Fury just kind of whispers something in Thor's ear and he drops Mjolnir on the moon. We don't even know what Fury said. Bam. Unworthy. ***end spoiler*** So, the most important thing to happen to Thor for years didn't even happen in the pages of his own series? Hell, it didn't even happen in his Original Sin spin-off mini-series, Original Sin: Thor and Loki - The Tenth Realm.

****. You. Marvel.

And yet I am both optimistic, and sort of stoked. I am optimistic, because the same writer who made God of Thunder into comic book sex, Jason Aaron, is staying on for the new series. Marvel may have cocked up Thor's becoming unworthy, but you can hardly lay the blame for that on the guy who wasn't even writing Original Sin. After all, he's been responsible for actually giving us a character arc that might actually make the transition make any kind of sense at all. He's also clearly been building up to this since the start of the series. Even from the beginning he's been introducing plot elements that have been building over the past two years, and are just coming to fruition as we speak. If all goes well he's about to unleash some truly epic, Viking ****. Not to mention the whole thing with Galactus... He's even hinted at who may very well end up becoming the new Thor, and if I'm right, then I rather approve.

But I'm stoked because of my fellow fanboys. The sheer amount of misogynistic furor has been mind-boggling. Now, you all hopefully know me well enough to know that I am not a moral crusader. In all likelihood I sympathize with your race/gender/creed/nationality/etc's respective plight(s), but I probably don't care enough to give you anything but wishy washy moral support. (Go, black people!) These turds however, make me ashamed to be a comic book fan. The thought that I might be thrown in with these losers is simply unacceptable. So, I welcome this. Even if this attempt to attract female readers is horribly awkward, if it and other series targeted toward women succeed and female readership grows, then maybe the women-hating pigs will be shamed into silence, and I won't have to see them on Reddit while I'm looking for the newest issue of Harley Quinn. Hell, maybe they'll just quit reading comic books altogether and go bother the Dr. Who fans instead. If comics can't survive without them then they're probably a doomed medium anyway.

Also, I just have a serious thing for strong female characters. Never been quite sure why. I even prefer to play as girls in video games. If I'd ever shown any interest whatsoever in women's clothing I'd wonder if I was secretly a tranny. But either way, a badass Nordic thunder goddess? I'm totally on board.

But enough of my critically-acclaimed ramblings. Time to read this ****ing thing...




Well, Jason Aaron certainly didn't go out of his way to piss people off with issue#1. The new Thor doesn't even appear till the last two pages, and we still don't know who she is. At this point I'm just happy she doesn't look like she shares clothes with Red Sonja. The only new wrinkle about her is that it appears that Thor's mother, Freyja, might have something to do with her taking up the hammer. There seems to be a power struggle developing between her and her husband, Odin, who has until recently been in some kind of dimension that's a prison but also a hut, keeping some other guy captive. I don't really know what that's about, but he's back now, and his wife doesn't seem willing to give up the power that she had been holding. A rather unsubtle parallel to what's going on, but a power struggle in Asgard at this point in time will be interesting.

But the main focus is still Thor at this point, though I think that will shift starting with #2. The issue starts with the same gorgeous, fantasy/sci fi artwork that made the last series so amazing. I was worried when I found out that Asad Ribic wouldn't be carrying over from God of Thunder, but my fears were apparently unfounded, as the new artist, Russell Dauterman, is doing a kickass job right out of the gate. Like I was thinking, the plot points that have been building for the past two years are finally being realized. Frost giants are invading Midgard, led by their ally, Malekith the Accursed, king of the dark elves of Svartalfheim. With the hints that have been dropped further back in T:GoT about a further alliance with the demons of Muspelheim, the emergence of age-old enemies of Asgard in the angels of the recently rediscovered Tenth Realm from Original Sin: Thor and Loki - The Tenth Realm (long story), a whole evil-Loki-vs-good-Loki-and-time-travel thing from Loki: Agent of Asgard (long story), and the continued evilness of the Minotaur-led multinational corporation, Roxxon, from the latest arc of T:GoT (long story), this is shaping up to be an epic war to span time, space, and whatever else you can think of. It's gonna take some really ****ty writing for Jason Aaron to not come up with gold here, especially since the new Thor, assuming she's who I think she is, will be all wrapped up in another part of the story that's been developing since issue #1. It's gonna get convoluted, folks.

Oh yeah, right. Frost giants. There's a pretty spectacular scene at the beginning, where an army of Jotun ("frost giants" for the mythologically illiterate) attack a bitchin' undersea base owned by that evil corporation I just mentioned. There's a whole thing about a skull that Roxxon found at the bottom of the ocean that's supposed to bring back some big, bad, frost giant king or something (I'd have to break out T:GoT #25 to refresh my memory, and I'm lazy), and Malekith is helping them get it back. It's one of the more visually impressive scenes I've seen recently.

Also, "attack sharks". Oh yeah.

The issue is mostly taken up with this plotline, and Thor on the moon, despondent over his inability to pick up Mjolnir. There's a whole thing where all of his fellow Asgardians are gathered around him like some weird family standing around a boy's bed, commiserating with him that he just can't get it up to **** his girlfriend... You know, this is all kind of a metaphor for erectile dysfunction and penis envy, isn't it? I'm sure the fanboys are ****ting themselves with chauvinistic rage right about now. But anyways, the scene feels pretty natural. Thor really feels distraught and listless in a way that doesn't feel cheesy or poorly written. Then Odin's messenger crows, Mugin and Hugin ("thought" and "memory" if I'm not mistaken), show up to inform them all of the frost giant attack. Cue short debate with Odin and Freyja over what to do about it, which seemingly leads to Freyja plotting something or other that we are to assume results in whoever it is picking up Mjolnir and becoming Thor. If one weren't familiar with T:GoT, it might seem that Freyja herself had picked it up, but the hints about the other woman that have been given, along with the lack of any kind of foreshadowing as to Freyja becoming Thor, lead me to dismiss this possibility.

The book finishes with a bitchin' fight between Thor (who's stopped feeling sorry for himself long enough to get a big, ****ing axe), Malekith, and the frost giants on the bottom of the ocean. Just to add injury to insult, Aaron really puts one over on poor old Thor by having Malekith CUT OFF HIS HAMMER ARM!!! This has been alluded to in T:GoT, what with a whole recurring storyline of a future Thor who is king of Asgard and only has one arm, but now we finally see how it happens. Bitchin'. He's left on the bottom of the ocean to die---because what villain would ever be stupid enough to leave a seemingly-defeated hero still alive to come back and kick their ass later on?---before the final cut to the new Thor, and a bitch-****in'-in' splash page of her holding Mjolnir aloft, lightning a-cracklin'.

So, we're not really allowed to judge the new Thor even in her first book, but I think that's a good thing. The important thing is the storyline after all, especially as it's a storyline that's been developing for over two years, so having her overshadow it from the word "Go!" wouldn't be so great. And from what it looks like, female Thor aside, Aaron really is picking up right where he left off, which is exactly where I wanted him to. It's still up in the air whether the new Thor will find her place here, but I have faith in this writer. Lookin' good so far.

Thank god she wasn't wearing a metal bikini.

* Note: This is concerning the original run from the early '00s, and not the newer Miles Morales series, which I have yet to read.

Ultimate Spider-Man is just the ****. It's pretty much everything I could hope for in a Spider-Man comic book. The super hero stuff? Flawless. The battle scenes are dramatic and emotionally tied into the theme of the story arc in a way that makes them more than just "the battle scene". The drama? Remarkably fleshed out, with charming yet tasteful Buffy-style high school melodrama, seamlessly side-by-side with hard-hitting issues that develop the personalities of not just Peter Parker, but multiple supporting cast members in ways that really make this an ensemble series. Love, love, love this comic.

The star of this series is clearly the slow-burning writing of Michael Bendis. Rather than the usual enemy of the week that even some of the best comics of today fall into, Ultimate Spider-Man takes its time. The first story arc, which details Spider-Man's origin (this being a non-canon "relaunch" that begins with Peter Parker as a fifteen-year-old high school student without powers), rather than taking up two or three issues, as it could, instead lasts for seven issues, and I believe we don't even see Spider-Man until issue six, (Though I could be wrong as it's been a couple months since I read that arc.) This could easily become tedious, but brilliant characterizations that really make Peter, MJ, Gwen Stacy, Norman and Harry Osborn, Aunt May, Ben Parker*, and a host of others all seem like real people, making their lives just as, if not more interesting than the spandex elements.

*I actually think I might have just noticed an inconsistency. In a later issue, Aunt May claims that Peter's mother was her sister, which would mean that Uncle Ben was an in-law to the Parkers, and would assumedly not have the last name "Parker". And yes, I checked, and I'm fairly sure his last name is still "Parker" in this universe. Of course, he's an old hippy now, so maybe he was just being anti-establishment or something.

Peter's journey though is obviously what any Spider-Man comic lives or dies by. Even the original series never quite made him feel like the child that he really was, but Ultimate Spider-Man really sells that dynamic. It's a really great touch to make him fifteen (he was actually originally seventeen). It allows him to really come across as the kind of insecure man-child, uncomfortable in his own skin, that only a child at that stage of their life can be. Whether it's fear of women, fear of humiliation, or fear of the wider world in general, his teenage neuroticism makes him appear completely out of his depth in his new role as a hero. Artist Mark Bagley is just as instrumental to this as well. With his short stature and gangly frame, Spider-Man has never looked more like a shrimp who couldn't win a fight with a wet paper bag. Against the likes of the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus, it really looks like David vs. Goliath. When these Bendis and Bagley combine their talents, Peter's sheer terror at the truly harrowing predicaments that he finds himself in make it a feat of heroism all by itself that he can even find it within himself to move when faced with these challenges, let alone banter.

Another thing that I love is that this series, like any Spider-Man comic worth the name, never takes itself too seriously, while avoiding camp, except in small, charming doses. I took this comic back up after a short break after unsuccessfully trying to get into Uncanny X-Force. That is a series which does seem to be rather po-faced, though admittedly I didn't make it much past issue two or three. Aside from the delightful inclusion of one of my new favorite comic characters, Deadpool, this series is all serious, all high comic book epicness, all the time, with a severe art style to match. It kind of makes it hard to really connect with the characters when they're so grim all the time, so what should be gripping drama just feels kind of flat. Ultimate Spider-Man on the other hand, isn't at all afraid to bathe in quasi-Gossip Girl drama, but with its focus on strong characters you're too busy falling in love with them to care that you're twenty-eight years old and hoping that Peter and MJ quit being such goobers and tell each other how they feel al-****ing-ready. The result is that despite, or possibly because of, the lighter tone, you end up becoming more emotionally invested in the characters, so that when something happens to them, you really care (To date, I have become misty-eyed twice; one of those times officially has me shipping Peter/Gwen over Peter/MJ.) Michael Bendis clearly has a love for Spider-Man that can only come from a gushing comic book fanboy who doesn't give a **** that his parents spent much of his teens/twenties hoping he'd just grow up and get a real job already.

The only real complaint I have about the series is some of the artwork. While the the facial expressions are certainly engaging, the faces themselves are kind of goofy looking. It doesn't detract too much, but Bagley's facial structures aren't exactly his strong suit. Also, what the **** are with those squiggly lines on Spider-Man's suit's eyepieces? They kind of look like those triangle eyes in anime, where the character is closing them because they're really happy, and it just looks really weird for no apparent reason. It wouldn't be so bad, but sometimes, in dramatic moments, when he should look shocked or angry or sad, he just looks happy and content.




Well, other than those very minor things, this series is one of my favorite finds. If you dig Spider-Man, then you need this comic in your life. Like, yesterday.

Ahem.



There. I feel better.

So, for the last day or so I've been on one of my little downloading sprees, and I have quite a few new things things to read, not to mention all of the other comics that are already clogging up my flashdrive. But for most of today I couldn't read any of them. No matter how good they were there was no way on Earth that I would have been able to dive into them after I'd heard about this series. Since early this morning (Friday), I've been scouring the internet for volume 1 & 2 of Dr. Fate. Not because of how good they were supposed to be---before I read vol 1 I honestly didn't have the slightest idea of its quality---and not because I was particularly obsessed with the character; aside from a few mentions in a book and a single episode of Batman: The Animated Series, I had almost no familiarity with Dr. Fate whatsoever. In fact, Dr. Fate is a Golden Age hero from the forties, and the Dr. Fate of this series isn't even the original. The new "one" is actually a boy and his widowed stepmother who combine into the titular hero like the Fusion Dance from Dragonball Z (God I love comic books.)

No, the reason I dropped everything to desperately troll the internet for copies of this series, is that the boy and his step mother are in love. And did I mention that the boy is ten-years-old?

Seriously.

Ten-years-old.

I'm not even sure if it's a defense that he, Eric, has been magically aged to adulthood, but... he has been, so it's only like... quasi-pedophilia? And since they're not blood relatives I suppose it's only quasi-incest. I suppose it's also worth mentioning that nothing has been consummated yet, as it's more of an unrequited thing... mutually unrequited. So yeah, it's totally normal and not at all horrifying. (Please note the lack of a Comic Code Authority logo on this book in a time before Vertigo.)

Seriously, how could I not obsess over reading this... thing? And you know what? It's kind of amazing, even aside from the Oedipal pedophilia. I'm not even entirely sure what to make of the relationship to be perfectly honest. A lot of the themes of the story could be interpreted as supporting the idea, but then again, their... budding relationship, is so blatant and non-subtextual, that I can't be sure it's not just a bizarre literary device meant to **** with your head. Cause that's kind of what this book is about.

After a short battle between the original Dr. Fate, Kent Nelson, and a demon named Typhon, the tale begins with Linda, the step-mother, and Eric going to a playground, where she implores him to go play with some other children. He's not too keen on this, as he's "an old soul" or something, and doesn't really connect with people his own age. After he goes off to do what children ought to be doing, Linda reflects on how she feels that she's far too preoccupied with her step-son. She's clearly squicked out about this, but her attraction seems mental rather than physical at this point (I hope). Too show that the writer, one J.M. DeMatteis, is self-aware of what he is doing, while Linda is preoccupied with her thoughts, a man who we later discover is Kent Nelson approaches Eric and leads him away, presumably to a white van.

This theme is further explored after Dr. Fate takes the boy to his magical tower where he is introduced to the Rolling Stones' mouth logo on acid, who goes by the name of Nabu and currently resides in the middle of Nelson's chest. Apparently this mouth-thing is a "Shining One", which is a spirit/angel/thing on the side of Order (Typhon being his opposite on the side of Chaos). Long story short, the power of Dr. Fate comes from Nabu, but he now needs to take control of Eric's body so that he can become the new Dr. Fate. Without the boy's consent the spirit invades his mind, ages him to adulthood, and bang, pow, boom, he's the new Dr. Fate. This is all very creepy and, along with Nabu's predatory grin directly after the fact, is clearly a metaphor for rape.

Nabu seems to do this with alarming frequency, as we later learn that the Shining Ones implanted the idea in Kent Nelson's archaeologist father's head to take him to an ancient Sumerian dig site, where Nabu kills the kid's dad and takes over his mind in much the same way. Kent kind of went along with this, not realizing that Nabu was controlling him, until finally realizing near the end of the series that his mind has been basically been violated and Nabu has been hijacking his life for over forty years. It's all very Steve Wilkos. So yeah, Nabu is kind of an *******.

For weeks Eric is trained in the ways of being the new Dr. Fate, while Linda is beside herself, not knowing if her step-son/pedo-crush is alive or dead. Eventually Nabu takes Eric out to fight Typhon, but abandons him in the middle of the battle, and his mind is violated AGAIN by the demon, driving him insane. Typhon's human minion, Benjamin Stoner (huh huh huh), who is a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum---where they seriously need to work on their screening process---locks him up in a padded cell with a straight-jacket. Before now Eric had pretty much acted like an adult, even as a child, but his mind is now broken and he can only huddle in the fetal position and mutter his own name and "wannagohome" over and over again without any spaces. It's pretty unsubtle in presenting him as a victim of molestation.

Alright, so far I haven't really backed up my claim that this series is "kind of amazing". All the creepiness is kind of distracting after all. But the basic premise of this book is that basically, there are the forces of Order, and the forces of Chaos. They've got this karmic cycle thing going on where the world goes through several time periods: in the beginning the universe kicks ass and everything is daisies, then Chaos starts to creep in and it only mostly kicks ass, then Chaos really starts causing trouble and it doesn't really kick ass that much anymore, and then finally Chaos takes over and destroys all life, after which the cycle starts all over again. Not an original idea by any means, but the surprisingly literary execution really elevates the subject matter (even... the other thing... kind of).

I think Benjamin Stoner is probably the best thing about this series. As I said, he's an Arkham psychiatrist who was passionately committed to helping the insane. But as the years went on he became disillusioned by the world, and that's when Typhon approached him, promising to take away his ability to care if Stoner would let Typhon possess him and make him is servant to help destroy the world. The Killing Joke is clearly a huge influence on Stoner's character, which is alluded to by several one-panel cameos of the Joker in the asylum. Stoner has the same basic character arc: a good man who couldn't deal with the horrors of the world, so he threw away his humanity to numb the pain, and now just wants "to watch the world burn". He's not as cartoonishly fun a villain as the Joker, but his pathos and descent into madness feel more realistic, making him a great character in his own right, rather than just a two-dimensional cardboard cutout.

The forces of Order are barely any better. The Shining Ones consider themselves superior to humanity, and are willing to sacrifice them and the universe to allow the cycle to continue, reasoning that the perfect, golden age that will follow is worth what will be lost. They seem to fight for order merely because it's their place in the universe to do so. Even Nabu, who is sort of a rogue intent on saving humanity, is arrogant and uses individual humans for "the greater good" in order to further his goals to save humanity as a whole, regardless of the consequences to his "allies". Consequently, the human race is basically caught between the two opposing forces and is being crushed between the gears of this merciless, indifferent machine.

Eric and Linda are the foils to Stoner and Typhon. They are unwilling to give in to despair and let Chaos and Order destroy the world for their own ends. It's a clear metaphor for staying true to one's convictions rather than giving in to the dehumanizing apathy caused by the world's horrors, or the cynical resignation of conforming to society's compromised, pragmatic pseudo-morality. It's a pretty powerful message that speaks to me much more than the simple, black-and-white messages of many superhero comics.

The possible subtext though, is that Eric and Linda going their own way is also symbolized by their... non-traditional relationship. Dr. Fate's magical powers come from the fusion of Nabu and his host. Nabu insists that these people (it's alluded that there have been several Dr. Fates) must give in to his control so that he can exercise his powers directly. Near the end however, it's revealed that to truly unlock Dr. Fate's potential requires a fusion of a man and a woman in love (hey, it's comic books), whose combined willpower will be able to control Nabu's powers in a more equal, symbiotic relationship. But Nabu desires control, so he is unwilling to allow this, and the subtext of the resulting conflict basically is that Nabu and the forces of Order (mainstream society perhaps) should quit being such arrogant dickwads and just let Eric and Linda be together already. Creepy. I suppose I might be reading too much into this, but it's kind of hard to come up with another interpretation.

But back to Eric in the asylum. The reason why Stoner and Typhon have imprisoned him is so that they can steal the power of Dr. Fate in order to destroy the universe. They eventually succeed, and it gets pretty badass after that. As the new Dr. Fate, Stoner merges completely with Typhon, and they basically become Venom.



And yeah, I checked, and this series came out in the summer of 1987, while the first appearance of Venom was almost a year later. So Todd McFarlane definitely ripped this comic off (nice bit of trivia, huh?). And since McFarlane also tried to steal several characters that he co-created with Neil Gaiman (Angela, Cogliostro, Medieval Spawn) he's looking more and more like a complete ****. But anyways...

With the combined powers of Dr. Fate and Typhon now unleashed upon the world, we get some seriously Lovecraftian imagery of nightmarish demons and spirits spreading madness over the world. It's pretty fantastic and almost makes you forget the pedo stuff for a little while.



Then of course, Eric and Linda are reunited, strike and uneasy alliance with Nabu and Kent Nelson, and head off to Egypt where Stoner/Tyson are trying to use the power of the pyramids to finally destroy all of creation. Also of creepy note is that during their confrontation, Stoner nearly kills Eric, body and mind, leaving him nothing but a single thought... that looks like a sperm. Then of course there's the whole thing with Eric and Linda trying to merge and Nabu being all like "**** that ****", until eventually he consents, and turns Linda into a bolt of pure energy which shoots toward Eric's thought-self, looking like a meteor. It doesn't take much to imagine this looking like a sperm fertilizing an egg. So, basically, them "joining" is symbolic of sex. This isn't as clear a panel as a few of the others for making it look like a sperm and an egg, but the dialogue makes the symbolism pretty blatant.



Well... that's just a big ol' pile of "WTF?!" So they merge, kick Stoner/Typhon's ass, and then all is good with the world. Cue end of mini-series and start of Dr. Fate volume 2.

I really don't know what to do with Eric and Linda's relationship. There's no way it isn't horribly, horribly wrong, but it's so in-your-face that I can't help but wonder if it isn't just some bizarre literary device to further muddy the moral waters of this series and **** with your mind. The conclusions I can draw about the author's possible intentions are obvious, but if he was trying to express his own deviant sexuality, then why on Earth wouldn't he try to hide that **** more? But... GAAAAHHHH!!!!! I don't ****ing know. I just don't. Either way, it's like a train wreck, and I just can't look away. And the quality of the series is such that, even with the ****ed-up relationship between Eric and Linda, I can still appreciate it on its other merits. I'll definitely be checking out volume 2, which stars the same two characters as Dr. Fate, and which goes on for over forty issues. Someone else takes on the identity of Dr. Fate around issue thirty-something, but still, this is a relationship that was maintained in some form for what adds up to THREE YEARS! Three years DC Comics kept on saying, "Alright, sounds good." So... I guess this series must be worth reading at least.

And just to leave you with some imagery to haunt you...



Holy ****, this comic book needs Jesus.

I could never really make up my mind about the Punisher as a character, because he was really just a product of the 1970s and came out around the time of the early Death Wish films where vigilantes of extreme violence were very much en-vogue.