Monthly Dose: July 2015

Monthly Dose is a semi-regular column where I read one issue each month of long-completed series.  

100 Bullets #33: Something struck me when Megan Dietrich showed up in this issue that has been running underneath this arc from the beginning: we know Milo was in an accident, but ever since this story kicked off, there's been a feeling that the accident isn't over. The crash was just the beginning, and he's been feeding off of the momentum of it even as it propels him toward whatever worse fate awaits him than a fucked-up face. I'm not saying Megan's arrival is the other shoe dropping, at least not yet or not fully, but we already know how connected and powerful she is, and we know Milo has no idea, which means he's about to get in over his head if he isn't drowning unknowingly already. Seeing Lono is the first issue was, I suppose, the first hint of dark days ahead, and Milo's determined brand of self-destructive behavior in the name of revealing hidden truths is always going to cause problems, but it was someone as high-up and precise as Megan who finally brought into focus just how screwed Milo is or will certainly be soon. It's exciting and sad, because Milo is one of the most stylized and stand-out characters, in his dialogue and appearance both, to have graced the pages of this title up to now. But he can't possibly survive going up against Megan without knowing how much wool is in front of his eyes, and he's not a careful or good enough detective to remove all of that wool before it's too late, if he ever does. The rest of what happens in this issue is largely exposition as Milo goes over the facts again, plus a small bit of him dodging a nosy but friendly and seemingly stand-up cop, but that all ends up as background chatter to the growing dread of what's in store for Milo at the end of this storyline.


Automatic Kafka #9: The final issue of this series goes full-on meta, and also unfortunately drops many threads that are never to be picked up again. Basically, based on what's here, the comic got cancelled, and so since they knew they weren't going be able to finish the way they wanted, Joe Casey and Ash Wood decided instead to insert themselves into the book so they could talk the titular hero through the end of his reality. It's an entertaining conversation, and I particularly enjoy the bit where Casey and Wood make it clear that they're doing this mostly to prevent other creators from getting their hands on Kafka in the future and misusing or mishandling him. They wanted some real finality, so they unmake him completely, send him into the oblivion of cancelled comicbook characters. It's a good way to bring closure to the title even without wrapping up the narrative, and this is a good story in which to do something like that. Sure, there were some throughlines established, like the baby bombs that the Warning was making or the Constitution of the United States becoming a porn star (which they make reference to in this final issue but don't exactly resolve). But mostly, Automatic Kafka tried to tell new, short, complete stories in every issue, so there's no sense of a master plan being undone by the cancellation. It's definitely a shame this book didn't get to last any longer, because there was some truly ambitious, hilarious stuff that came out of it, but at least Casey and Wood got to say goodbye, and no amount of truncation can undo the material they did get to produce. I revisit this book every so often and, while it's definitely flawed, it's also a very worthwhile read, especially if, like me, you find superheroes equal parts fantastic and ridiculous. Automatic Kafka celebrates both of those aspects, and Wood's controlled chaos art style complements both of them perfectly.


The Maximortal #3: This issue contains three short stories, related to one another through Wesley/True-Man but not directly connected. First, and somewhat confusingly, we see an elderly, mostly retired Sherlock Holmes take the case of the little boy who murdered an entire old west town, and it kills him. He summons with his violin both the "angel" from earlier issues who seems to have created Wesley, and El Guapo, the mystery man who somehow seems to be fighting against the angel, and who is the biggest connection between the stories in this issue. Those two beings indriectly cause Holmes to fall into his beehives, and the bees he so loved attack and kill him. It's a nicely written, haunting, beautifully disturbing bit of comics, but I'm not sure what Sherlock Holmes has to do with anything. Next we see the origin of True-Man as a comicbook character, which is quite similar to Superman's own history in the real world, and feels like the first part of a larger commentary on comic creators' rights in general. The two earnest creators of True-Man sign a contract without reading it, which is never good, and the assumption is that, in the future, they're going to get as screwed out of ownership of their creation as Siegel and Shuster and so many others like them have over the years. The person they sell the idea to, however, is Sidney Wallace, who we met last time as the wannabe stuntman who got his testicles crushed during an encounter with the real Wesley. So Wallace having dealt with a real, warped version of Superman makes him an interesting person to buy the rights to a fictional Superman knock-off, and is bound to provide some strong storytelling possibilities down the line. In the context of a series examining all the angles of Superman, this middle story is the most obviously relevant, as it switches from following a twisted take on Superman to following a twisted-but-less-so take on Superman's creators and publishers. Finally, we see Wesley get discovered in a secret bunker where the military is holding him, uncovered as part of a semi-fictionalized version of the Manhattan Project. This feels like a tale only half-told so far, with Wesley's discovery and the discovery of his heat vision are the end of this issue, but clearly only the beginning of his significance for a group of scientists trying to build the ultimate weapon. Wesley is the ultimate weapon, so this is clearly setting up for things to come. These stories are ordered chronologically, but also logically, with the strangest and most distant first, the most thematically connected coming second, and the most narratively connected and biggest cliffhanger closing things off. A well-done example structural play, and I'd say the best overall issue of the first three in the series.

Monthly Dose: June 2015

Monthly Dose is a semi-regular column where I read one issue each month of long-completed series. 

100 Bullets #32: Kind of a slow issue, but it works because of the lovely pulpy tension Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso are infusing into this arc. Milo is such an over-the-top hard-boiled guy that it's fun to watch him work, constantly smoking, being aggressively sexual, threatening to shoot people in the genitals if they don't tell him what he wants to know. He's hilarious, practically a caricature, his internal darkness spilling all over the page even when he's getting laid. There's not a ton of new info, but the little bit we get is super valuable. Milo figures out that Lono, who caught only a glimpse of last issue, is responsible for killing Karl Reynolds. The why of it all is still a total mystery, except that it is in some way connected to a painting Karl was trying to get his hands on. So Milo's got a solid start, a lead that led to another lead that hopefully will help him put all the pieces together. Things are progressing, however slowly, and through it all he's a fantastic character to watch, especially with the bandages all over his face. It gives him a baseline look of intimidation and meanness that helps him in his work and makes him all the more entertaining. It does feel like it's about time for something to break, though, for a major reveal instead of more tiny odds and ends. After two full issues of him as the star and narrator, I have a pretty solid handle on Milo, so now it's time to really put him through the ringer and see if he makes it out. Luckily, his last line is one of intense foreboding, so next month we ought to some some shit connect with some fans. If so, it'll come at just the right time, and might help push this arc officially into my favorite so far in this book.


Automatic Kafka #8: After playing a bit of a back-up role for a few issues in a row, Kafka himself becomes central again here, which was nice. The issue is basically spit into two halves, the first centering on Kafka's new show as well as the suicide of Diesel Quake, his drug dealer/assistant. The second half deals with Kafka confronting the Warning about the latter's various shady dealings, with a splash of the Constitution's adventures in professional pornography thrown in as well. I much prefer the opening, where we see Kafka going through the motions of his continued celebrity while reading in captions the body of Diesel's suicide note. The note provides a nice bit of insight into the psychology of a character who's been two-dimensional at best up to now, and it's a nice reminder that everyone thinks they are the good guys, even the supervillains. Diesel doesn't necessarily try to take the moral high ground or present himself as a misunderstood do-gooder, but he does point out that the $tranger$ operated in less-than-righteous ways, that Kafka in particular seemed to take a weird joy in causing his enemies pain, and that he and all of his former teammates ultimately took fairly significant falls from grace, ending up with lives that reflect their biggest flaws rather than their greatest deeds. All of that is compelling to read, and Joe Casey writes it well. He also takes away Kafka's source of nanotecheroin, meaning we get to see what it looks like when a robot suffers from withdrawal. It's not all that dramatic, but it does lead Kafka to question the Warning, though as with most people who try to challenge the Warning, things don't go very far. In the end, we see Kafka approached by some kind of magical/hallucinatory/who-knows-what caterpillar that turns into a gorgeous bright butterfly and offers to save Kafka from yet another "story arc." So things get crazy meta as we prepare to head into the final issue. The butterfly is probably my favorite single visual from Ash Wood in this series so far. It stands out starkly and fits in perfectly at once, a tough trick to pull off, but Wood does it no sweat.


The Maximortal #2: While less directly tied to Superman's history than the debut issue, this is still a pretty spot-on imagining of how a superpowered child might act and influence the world. After finally killed his adoptive father, little Wesley Winston sets to work on his "farming," meaning pulling people's heads clean off their bodies and dumping them into a silo. While there's no specific reason given for why he chooses human heads as the thing to farm, it works quite well in the context of this gleefully morbid book. Rick Veitch seems to have a lot of fun in making the decapitated bodies as cartoonishly gruesome as he can. They're not excessively gory but they are effectively unnerving. As for Wesley, he's innocently and amusingly content with his labors, even proud of himself for how efficiently he's getting his farming done. Ultimately, his activities lead the citizens of Simpltown to try and attack him, blowing up his silo full of heads while Wesley is inside. The child, of course, survives the blast, and then proceeds to throw a tantrum, as children are wont to do when you ruin their games. Only Wesley's tantrums are intensely destructive and fatal. All of this death and devastation leads to the U.S. military showing up at the very end of the issue to claim Wesley as their own, a terrifying proposition than can't lead anywhere good. Meanwhile, at the beginning and in the background of this issue, we meet El Guano, a mysterious figure who seems to have some magical insight into the world. The narration refers to him as a warrior and also as a man-of-knowledge, and we see him have a startling premonition of Wesley as a full-grown superhero, cape, spandex, and all. Exactly what El Guano's role will be in the narrative is still unclear, but he does show up at the end to fight with the "angel" who we saw give birth to Wesley last time, so it's clear El Guano plays a significant part in these proceedings. Similarly, we're introduced to Sidney Wallace, a young, brash, self-important jerk with dreams of making it big in the movies. These dreams appear to be purely financially motivated, though, as Wallace tries to steal Wesley himself once he realizes the money-making potential such a powerful creature might possess. Everyone wants a piece of Wesley, is the point, from his mother to Wallace to the government to El Guano. Their interests in Wesley and approaches to dealing with him vary, but everybody's invested. What will all of this attention mean for Wesley in the long run? That's the central question, but based on what we've seen so far, there will no doubt be more terrible things in Wesley's future.

Monthly Dose: May 2015

100 Bullets #31: Now we're talking. Kicking off a new arc, "The Counterfifth Detective," this issue is pure hard-boiled pulp noir gold. Main character Milo Garrett sounds like every classic P.I. rolled into one, and he looks tough as nails, too, with his crumpled suit, bandage-covered face, and the cigarette that's pretty much always hanging out of his mouth. Both Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso do a good job of keeping this story right in the sweet spot, not over-the-top with the clichés but still very much utilizing the tropes of the genre. Milo is both likable and a schmuck; there's drinking, murder, intrigue, and plenty of stylized, metaphor-and-similie-filled narration. It's all quite familiar, but fresh enough to pull the reader in, and the added detail of Agent Graves giving Milo one of the attaché cases that he's been handing out since this series began makes things that much more interesting. There's not a ton of narrative meat on the bones so far, because this first chapter is more about introducing Milo and getting us in his corner. In that, it's a major success, and there's enough of a story hook at the very end to bring people back for more. This is the sort of finely crafted issue that 100 Bullets was full of at first, but that's been missing for a while, so it ended up being a fabulous return to form that reignited my enthusiasm for this title.


Automatic Kafka #7: Automatic Kafka goes out to lunch with one of his old supervillain foes, Galaxia, a scientist who replaced his head with a tiny spiral galaxy. Kafka has a good deal of leftover animosity toward Galaxia, but the former bad guy is ever the gentleman, politely and intelligently talking Kafka into letting go of their shared past. They even manage to reminisce a little together, and though they don't exactly become friends, they pretty much bury the hatchet before their meal is over. It's impressive how Joe Casey manages to write their conversation so that the reader can be genuinely invested in them working things out, even though we haven't ever seen any of their previous conflicts, since they all took place in an off-panel time period. The hero-villain dynamic is so universally accessible, Casey can do something like this even in a brand new continuity and it still works. It helps that both Kafka and Galaxia have such strong voices, of course, and that they each have such fascinating looks. Even their speech bubbles are different colors, not just from one another but from everybody else, so their exchange offers something on every level, from script to art to letters. This was not the most exciting issue of Automatic Kafka, but it was one of the most thoughtful examinations of what life might be like for a retired superhero like Kafka, and it had a lot of heart and humor along the way. Also, in the end, the Warning uses Galaxia to power up a bunch of the baby bombs that have been an ongoing thread in this book, which was a nice way to conclude this, tying an otherwise isolated chapter into what's come before.


The Maximortal #1: I just wrote about this issue a couple weeks ago as part of a PopMatters column on three of my favorite debut issues. And in the early days of this blog, a did a short post on the whole of this series. But I wanted to do it for Monthly Dose because its a dense book, and every issue sort of touches on a different aspect of the Superman mythology and/or history, deconstructing that character, superheroes as an idea, and the comicbook industry as a whole. It's an ambitious, weird, well-done passion project from Rick Veitch. This first issue doesn't actually set up that much of what's to come, focusing instead of doing Veitch's version of the Superman (or True-Man, as he's called in this comic) origin story. A couple named the Winstons finds a baby boy inside a bizarre fallen meteorite, and they try to raise him as their own, but his superpowers make him well more than they can handle. The child destroys their house with his strength and heat vision, bites of his adopted father's finger, and in the end he uses the threat of further violence to get his dad to carry him away from the farm and into an unknown future. It's a much more brutal, darkly comedic take on this well-known superhero story, casting Superman as something of a menace, but only because he's too young to know or even want to use his abilities responsibly. He's just a kid throwing superpowered tantrums that his simpleton parents have no way of controlling, so he ruins their lives and takes over. The events of the story are pretty tragic, but Veitch's art and the exaggerated, caricature-like personalities of the Winstons make it work as parody, too, so we get both a funnier and a much bleaker version of Superman at once. That's the mission statement of The Maximortal, and it couldn't be clearer here.

Monthly Dose: April 2015

Monthly Dose is a semi-regular column where I read one issue each month of long-completed series. 

100 Bullets #30: This story was quite the dud. Nothing changes except that a relatively minor new character dies, and other new characters of varying importance kinda-sorta become better people for it, at least for a minute. Wylie is a drag and an immovable asshole, Shepherd's cryptic nonsense has gone on so long even Dizzy is openly complaining about it, and this time around we get Angelina, and offensive caricature of sexuality who's mostly there as a prop for Dizzy and Wylie to talk about. Also, the reveal where the contraband wasn't drugs or guns or anything like that but exotic animals was weak, unoriginal, and pointless. It didn't work as a joke, it didn't teach us anything new about this story except for the simple fact of what Wylie had in the truck, and the only real purpose it served was so Hopper could scare the birds with gunshots when he freaks out about Doctor Dan dying. He could just as easily have destroyed more run-of-the-mill illegal goods, so the birds felt like a fake-out for the sake of it, like the real point was just to make it hard for the reader to guess what was in the truck. I didn't even care about what was in the truck, to be honest, and like Wylie, I would've been fine never knowing. It might even have been preferable. This arc seemed most interested in introducing Wylie, but it did that pretty well in like the first couple scenes three issues ago, so much of what follows is water-treading, a series of random and often dull interactions between Wylie and Dizzy, Dizzy and Shperherd, and Wylie and various criminals, strung together into a narrative just to fill the space or pass the time. One of the nice things about 100 Bullets is that whole new locations, situations, and groups of characters can show up at any time, so I'm still excited for whatever comes next, but this last storyline was, in the end, a waste.


Automatic Kafka #6: Why does the only female superhero in the $tranger$ have to get her powers from sex? It just seems too easy, and it's a tendency of Joe Casey's writing I don't like. Not that all his characters have sex-based powers, but that when he writes women there's frequently something aggressively sexual about them, their personalities or their histories or the way other characters see/treat them or any combination of those things. I guess there's aggressive sexuality from both genders in Casey's writing, and I'm just as unenthusiastic about it either way, as evidenced by how little I enjoyed Sex. There were other huge problems in that book, too, and there's nothing wrong with graphic sex in a comicbook in and of itself. On the contrary, there is most certainly value is this kind of head-on, intense, comically in-your-face sex, but it's not as compelling for me as the main themes of Automatic Kafka, the discussions of celebrity and washed up superheroes trying to find their place in the world. That's all here, but it gets overshadowed by the sex, and the fact that this sudden erotic supercharge arrives at the same time the first major female character is introduced is gross and sexist and lame. Come to think of it, all the women in this book so far have been hyper-sexualized, from Death to the NSA agent who tries to seduce Kafka to the Bill of Rights to Helen of Troy here. Maybe I take back when I said about both genders before; I've read other comics by Casey where men and women are on more equal sexual footing, but this is not one of them, and this issue is such a loud, long reminder of it that it's more frustrating than anything else. I dug the flashback sequence because it had more to do with superheroing than fucking, and it hinted at the origins of the baby bombs that seem mysteriously central to this series. But beyond that and the awesome look and soothing blue speech bubbles of the character who shows up at the end, this was mostly superhero porn, which is all well and good, but I've seen lots of porn and I'd much rather read comics that give me something I can't get other places.


X-Force (vol. 1) #30: The first caption on the first page of this issue says, "This is all either of these two young men have ever wanted." Then there are 5 captions worth of explaining who the men are (Shatterstar and Adam-X) and that they've been forced to fight each other by Arcade. Then you turn the page, and the first caption of the second page says, "It is not what either of them want." Ummmmm...what? You literally just told me it was all they've ever wanted. One page ago. So yeah, I think I'm done with X-Force. As I'm sure everyone remembers, back in my first ever Monthly Dose, I mentioned that I wasn't necessarily going to read every issue of this comic. At the time I owned the first 24, and then several months ago I bought #25-30 just to keep this project going. No more. I know that, years from now, if I keep at it, I'm going to get to some really good stuff in this book. Someday, I'd still like to read that. But I'm not interested at all in the comic in the state it's in right here, at issue #30. The art, no matter who's drawing it, is way too bulky and 90's and cramped, and the story is so all over the place with such uninteresting characters that I can't hang on long enough to get into anything. Enough is enough of that. I understand the action-packed, in-your-face-jam appeal of this title, but it's not targeted at me, and I can't possibly justify spending any more money on it just to keep bashing it on my blog.

Monthly Dose: March 2015

Monthly Dose is a semi-regular column where I read one issue each month of long-completed series.

100 Bullets #29: While presumably still focused on Wylie, this issue felt like it was dominated by Mr. Shepherd more than anyone else. It is Shepherd who introduces us (by introducing Dizzy) to Juárez, where much of the action takes place. Shepherd also gives Wylie's name to Mik, a detail that comes into play in a big way at the end, and is most likely some kind of deliberate wrench-in-the-works move from Shepherd. It seems far more likely Shepherd knew that Wylie, pretending to be Hopper, was going to do business with Mik, and thus intended to have Mik spook Wylie by saying his real name aloud. Why Shepherd would want to rattle Wylie like this is impossible to tell, but that's true of almost everything what Shepherd ever does. He's at least as mysterious as Graves, and as manipulative, which is why I assume that the consequences of any action he makes must be exactly what he wanted. The tension in this issue comes from Wylie, and more pages are centered on him than not, but even so, Shepherd's presence is the one you feel more powerfully. He's the only character who knows what's going on and is in control of his fate from start to finish, so he comes out looking stronger and more significant. None of this is a complaint; I love Shepherd and find him considerably more interesting to follow than Wylie or anyone else in this arc. And the trouble Wylie gets into at the end of this issue is scary and exciting and, if not unexpected, at least hard to predict. Who are the gun-wielding figures in the shadows? How is Wylie possibly going to get out of this? Why did poor, simple Dan have to die? We're left with some decent hooks to pull us back for the story's final act, even though Wylie isn't a standout star here, and generally hasn't convinced me I should care about him yet. It speaks to both Brian Azzarello's story-crafting skills and Eduardo Risso's exceptional suspense-building that the conclusion of this issue draws me in so effectively even though I'm not fully invested in Wylie, and his journey is not what gets the spotlight this time around. I'm still all-in on 100 Bullets, despite the current storyline being only so-so, because the overall quality of the series maintains even during its lower points.


Automatic Kafka #5: After a few pages of Kafka being interviewed, the bulk of this issue stars his former teammate from the $tranger$, the Constitution of the United States of America. I love that as a superhero name, but the character himself seems a lazy, easy, nuance-free take on America's fetishistic adoration of violence and machismo. His opening speech where he's trying to rally the troops is more than enough to understand him and what he represents, yet that only takes up two pages, after which we get another nine pages of him and his crew annihilating a drug lab and all the people in it. Of course big, needless action sequences are part and parcel for superhero comics, but in this specific case it felt like one note played for too long, an utterly simple character introduction stretched over way too large a space. Near the end we see the Warning's baby bombs again, so there are hints of a larger, connected story here, but only of the vaguest kind. The real purpose of the babies in this issue is to piss off the Constitution, who prefers his violence and destruction to be hands-on, and dislikes the distance with which the babies' controllers commit their acts of murder and destruction. Which is almost interesting, but by the time that point gets made, I'm so tired of the Constitution (and his dialogue is so clipped and indirect) that it's hard to even muster up the energy to comprehend what he's saying. Ash Wood does chaotic, over-the-top action well, and he nails all the other elements of the Constitution's overall theatricality, too. So the art is as good as always, but it, too, sells the character concept quickly and then goes nowhere new with it, making this a good-looking but visually repetitive comic. Every issue of Automatic Kafka is a new, wild adventure, and this was no different, but somehow shifting the book's attention to a superhero other than the title character produced something blunter and lighter than usual, like a watered-down version of what the series has been prior to this issue.


X-Force (vol. 1) #29: I've seen a lot of this before. Cable walks around, surveying the team, thinking about how bad things have been lately. Old news; very boring. The rest of the issue, on the other hand, has a plot that's new, or new to this title, anyway: Arcade kidnaps Shatterstar and pits him again opponents from his homeworld. It's fine, though not considerably less boring than the other part of the issue. Arcade is lame, a spoiled child of a villain even at his best, and this is far from his best. His insane bright pink sunglasses and head-sized polkadot bow tie look terrible, and he's not even really the main baddie here, just a gun for hire working at the command of a mysterious employer. Who cares? Is the point of this just to spotlight Shatterstar? I'm going to go with yes, especially since Arcade makes Shatterstar put on his original, Liefeld-all-over costume for absolutely no reason at all. But why give that character this kind of focus now? There's way more urgent stuff going on, like Feral quitting and Tempo possibly joining up, but that all gets the most meager lip service in the Cable pages while all the action and meat in this issue is Shatterstar-centric. It seems a wholly random detour, and a frustrating one, and it ends with X-Treme showing up, who is just so overwhelmingly 90's I can hardly look at him. Bottom line is that I did not care for one bit of this issue. Matt Broome's pencils are clear and consistent, but his style is not to my taste at all, too bulky and heavy and cramped. As for the script, Fabian Nicieza writes these scenes well enough, but they weren't the scenes I wanted to have to sit through. Follow the threads already established, don't shunt them aside for new, arbitrary, pointless action pieces that only involve one of the series' stars.

Monthly Dose: February 2015 (Super Belated)

Monthly Dose is a semi-regular column where I read one issue each month of long-completed series.

100 Bullets #28: A fairly dull, slow-moving change in setting and introduction to a new character, Wylie, and his world. Wylie is presented as a pretty uninteresting slacker, not happy but not necessarily upset about having a dead-end job in a tiny town where nothing ever happens. He's realistic about it and seems determined to make his peace with that life. He's not a bad character, likable and intelligent and mostly honest, but there's nothing that grabs me about him. Meanwhile, Dizzy and Shepherd arrive in town, and at the end we're told unsurprisingly that they're there for Wylie, though we don't know why yet. It's a safe (and correct) assumption that he's a Minuteman at this point, because if he reminds me of any other character from when we first met them, it's Cole Burns. This means things are bound to get more exciting, and the fact that Wylie gets pulled into some kind of mysterious criminal enterprise promises the same, but this issue I was mostly bored. Also, Dizzy's outfit seemed needlessly skimpy. Though the setting was definitely hot, nobody else was falling out of their tops, and it didn't seem as though seducing Wylie was her endgame, nor does that feel like her style. Megan toyed with Benito on purpose, so at least her oversexualization served some narrative purpose, but in this issue Dizzy is dressed in almost nothing for no obvious reason. Eduardo Risso didn't focus on her body for more than a few of the panels she was in, but there were those few, and none of it added up. A subpar issue in the midst of a weaker streak for this title, but as I said, Wylie's life is bound to get more complicated and compelling very soon.


Automtic Kafka #4: I actually wrote a whole Cheese Stands Alone piece about this issue way back when. I stand by what I said there, except for getting Charles and Lucy's marriage status wrong, which was corrected for me in the comments. Anyway, that post is more words than these paragraphs ever are, so go ahead and check that out for my thoughts. For the record, though, I did reread this when I read the other two comic for this Monthly Dose.


X-Force (vol. 1) #28: This was one of those big fight comics where everybody talks their mouths off even though they are supposed to be in the middle of combat. Some of the lines are simply too long to have been spoken in the same time as the action seen in their corresponding panels. It's frustrating, both because of the lack of believability and the lack of necessity. Plus it gets in the way of the action. I liked Antonio Daniel's art, his blocky Cable especially, but Fabian Nicieza's words didn't fit it, and broke the rhythm of it more than once. So that was all disappointing. The cast gets a shake-up in the end, though, which is interesting, and there is something conceptually appealing about X-Force only barely pulling off a mission nobody else wanted them to complete, including the guy they rescued, and then having all their efforts be for naught in the end. There's been a consistent level of bleakness in this book, and that fits right in, as did Feral leaving the team. I doubt if her departure will stick for long, but it's a significant loss for the team, and Nicieza makes it natural enough to feel in-character but still be a surprise. Daniel handled the issue-long battle well, and made everyone on both sides look cool at some point (except maybe Reaper, but he was on his way out already when the issue began). The broad strokes of the issue were good, I guess, but the ultimate execution fell short. It wasn't just the number of words, either, it was that characters were largely repeating points that have been made before, sometimes even having the same conversation multiple times in this very issue. Feral and Gyrich go back and forth about three times too many over whether or not she's going to kill him or free him. It's maddening. It's been sort of a long time now since this book really impressed me. I feel like when Capullo showed up it looked good, like it was headed for change, but lately it's just Cable and his kids fighting bad mutants again, and that's not as enjoyable a read.

Monthly Dose: January 2015

Monthly Dose is a semi-regular column where I read one issue each month of long-completed series.

100 Bullets #27: This issue presents what is, essentially, a piece of historical fiction, wherein JFK's assassination might have been carried out by Joe DiMaggio as retribution for Marilyn Monroe's clandestine murder. None of those names I just mentioned ever get said aloud, but they're not exactly kept secret, either. There's a record-breaking baseball player whose celebrity wife also has a relationship with the President, and is then murdered for it, so Graves gives the player the attaché with the hundred untraceable bullets, and on "November twenty-second. Nineteen Sixty-Three," the player takes a shot at the President in Dallas. You don't really need to hear anyone's name to know who this story is about, or who it's inspired by anyway. We're even told that there were other shooters, and no one knows whose bullet actually did the job, so this version of events fits with both the official story of what happened and many of the more popular conspiracy theories. None of which matters all that much, anyway. The real point of this narrative in the context of the larger series is to establish just how long Graves has been doing the thing where he gives people the attaché, and how much influence he has or at least used to have back in the day. Though the narrative of the baseball player is the focus, the takeaway has to do entirely with Graves, which speaks to how well Brian Azzarello writes the issue. He gives us background on one of the most important characters (and perhaps the most inscrutable) without needing to remove any of Graves' mystery or natural intimidation. If anything, he's more intriguing and scary than ever. The strongest aspect of this issue, though, has nothing to do with Graves or the baseball player, at least not directly, and may not even be something Azzarello wrote. It's the entirely silent background story about the two nurses (or maybe she's a nurse and he's an orderly/resident?) who sneak off for some romance and it angers a patient so much that she dies. Eduardo Risso weaves it in quite easily without it stealing the spotlight or taking up too much space, and he makes it light and funny somehow despite the darkness of the resolution. The old woman always makes me laugh with her classic, almost cartoonish curmudgeonliness. I'm not totally sold on the JFK/Monroe/DiMaggio thing, if only because JFK conspiracy talk feels trite, but I like the expansion of Graves and I love the B-plot, so I enjoyed more of this than I didn't.


Automatic Kafka #3: To escape the clutches of the shadowy National Parks Service, Automatic Kafka decides to become a celebrity (at the Waring's suggestion). It's a clever move, one that makes sense considering both Kafka's history and goals. He was always partially just meant to be a star, a member of a manufactured superhero team that had merchandise and marketing from day zero, so cashing in on his name now is a pretty easy thing to do. And with the whole world paying attention to him once again, it becomes considerably harder for the NPS to make good on their threat to make his life miserable, since the NPS would rather the public not know what kinds of secret, evil government shit they're really up to. It does take the issue kind of a long time to get there, but in between the scenes of Kafka talking to the NPS and then the Warning, we see him as the host of a gameshow called The Milling Dollar Detail, where the contestants are literally killed at the end if they can't guess one random, secret detail they have no good way of knowing. It's a bleak but not unbelievable vision of the evolution of popular entertainment, in the same way Kafka is a severe yet logical reimagining of both classic android and classic superhero characters. Between a fresh appearance from the Warning, the two pages with four panels each of Kafka in ads for various parody products, and all of the scenes of Detail, this was the funniest issue by far, though a dark comedy to be sure. It was also the least story advancement in an issue yet, but the progress that did get made was very interesting and unexpected, and it resulted in a lot of solid material. I was also really impressed with the visual changes that accompanied the Detail stuff; Ashley Wood does those pages in a wash of blue, a much softer and more inviting color than we've seen used so dominantly in this series before. Along with that, only the middle third of those pages have actual panels of them, and the top and bottom tiers are filled with the overlapping logos of a bunch of imagined, mostly satirical companies, all presumably sponsors of Detail. It was a great way to fit a bunch of jokes in a small space, and along with the coloring, it helped those parts of the narrative pop on every level. Predicting the direction of this comic is a futile exercise, and that's what I like most about it. This issue was a perfect demonstration of the kinds of sudden turns Automatic Kafka likes to take, and of how effective they can be.


X-Force (vol. 1) #27: This was a pretty classic X-story, dressed up in the hyper-90s aesthetic and attitude this book has always had. There's a human who hates mutants, so the bad mutants want to kill him, and the good mutants want to stop the bad mutants because that's what good mutants do and who needs more reason than that? And that's fine; I like a good action comic just fine, and this is definitely that, but it doesn't particularly stand out because there's nothing special going on. It's 100% the one-sentence synopsis I provided above, nothing deeper or more complex to it, or at least not that we're shown within this issue. Are twists coming, are there narrative wrinkles yet to be discovered? Probably, but this opening beat is all surface, characters stating their feelings aloud and X-Force fighting the MLF primarily because no other heroes are available, as opposed to some more compelling connection between the two teams. They've faced off before, but that was when Stryfe was running the MLF so Cable was personally invested. Now, it's a more generic mutant-related problem, and it's only through spying on the Commission for Super Human Activities that X-Force even know about it and decide to get involved. Before that happens, we see the MLF kidnap their target, Henry Peter Gyrich, and learn that not every member of that team gets along or agrees on what level or mercilessness is appropriate in the field. I imagine this dissension amongst the villains' ranks will come into play later, but for now it's merely something we discover exists. Afterwards, X-Force splits into three teams and invades the MLF's base, and they win some fights and lose others, which was to be expected. That's where things resolve this month, with some of X-Force doing well and other doing horribly in the midst of this somewhat misguided rescue mission. All fine, but none of it grabs me or makes me especially excited for next time.

Monthly Dose: December 2014

Monthly Dose is a semi-regular column where I read one issue each month of long-completed series.

100 Bullets #26: Mr. Branch tells a woman he's sleeping with, possibly a prostitute, some very vague things about the Trust and the Minutemen that have pretty much all already been hinted at if not fully revealed before. There are two reasons for all of this recapping: 1. It's a useful if unneeded way to get the audience all brought up to speed on this fairly complicated story before whatever comes next, and 2. There are a bunch of splash pages done by various guest artists to go along with different parts of Branch's narration. It's kind of a cool gimmick, but it does make the issue feel crazy light, since not much goes on and little-to-no progress gets made. Some of the splashes are cool, particularly Mark Chiarello's drawing of Cole Burns and J.G. Jones' take on Dizzy's Parisian street fight from an earlier issue. The best guest artist contribution was actually the first one, Paul Pope's awesomely depressing Benito Medici, a cigarette barely hanging from his mouth as he stares at himself with hate and disgust in the mirrored wall of a crowded nightclub. It's a perfect encapsulation of that character and, really, of the spirit of this whole book. On the other hand, Frank Miller's portrait of Agent Graves' floating head was a complete waste of space, and even Eduardo Risso's pages of Branch and the unnamed woman have less going on than usual. It's a sex scene played straight, and Risso does it well for what it is, but there's just nothing important or unexpected happening, even at the end when she robs him and exposes to the reader that she can in fact speak English, not just French like she's been pretending. So there were some strong images, but a few weaker ones, too, and nothing significant took place in terms of plot. All told, a boring but visually varied and therefore occasionally rewarding read.


Automatic Kafka #2: Lots of exposition this issue, but delivered through an amusing interrogation between the National Park Service's Agent Stahl and the Warning, smug genius and super-rich guy. Turns out the Warning was the corporate sponsor and founder of Automatic Kafka's old superhero team, the $tranger$, and now that the NPS is looking for Kafka (we don't know why) they come to the Warning for help. In the course of asking for that help, Stahl and the Warning rehash the past, not only of the $trangers$ but much of the Warning's backstory from before they were formed, the events in his life that led up to him creating his own superhero team. He's an awesome character, cocky in a way he can always back up, and effortlessly funny, almost incidentally so, because he sees the big joke(s) in life that everyone else fails to get or refuses to even acknowledge. We spend more time with the Warning than the title character this issue, but when we do catch up with Kafka, things go nuts, and Ashley Wood's art gets to really blast off. Kafka, still loving the hell out of his new nanotecheroin, makes his supplier come with him to a closed/abandoned amusement park. He then connects the park to his own internal computer systems, and turns everything on remotely while he comes up on his high, experiencing the sights, sounds, and other wonders of the park on many levels, both real and imagined. Eventually he comes down hard, the park collapsing around him, just in time for some huge, terrifying-looking, heavily armored people to show up and take him in. We ultimately learn that these are NPS troops of some kind, as Kafka wakes up in the agency's custody, bringing the issue to a close. Well, actually, first he (and the reader) meets Agent Travers, who is one of his captors but also a self-proclaimed fan of his from his $tranger$ days, an interesting combo to say the least. Her introduction is also the issue's conclusion, a creepy and effective cliffhanger. Joe Casey jumped in with both feet for the debut of Automatic Kafka, so here in issue #2, he provides more background info more clearly, but still leaves room for Kafka to get into some crazy, drug-fueled trouble. It's a strong second beat all over.


X-Force (vol. 1) #26: After the super-sized clusterfuck of excitement and confusion last month, X-Force takes a deep breath and collects itself. Most of this issue is Cable walking around X-Force's home base and thinking about each member of the team one by one, mostly focusing on their emotional damage. Cable is starting to feel guilty and foolish for having assembled such a messed up group of kids, and wondering if maybe he's not equipped to lead and/or teach them the way they need. His fears seem legitimate, based on what we see here. There's a lot of unrequited love, Siryn's heavy drinking, Shatterstar's lack of emotion, and plenty of arguments and insults big and small among the ranks. The dysfunction and unrest are widespread, which helps make this issue compelling despite the relative lack of action. There is some token violence at the end when Reignfire frees the members of the former Mutant Liberation Front from prison so they can form a new Mutant Liberation Front. The art this time is by Mat Broome instead of usual artist Greg Capullo. Broome is a good replacement, his characters just as large and looming as Capullo's, though somewhat more angular in their features. He did make several hilarious clothing choices, most notably a shirtless Rictor in tattered jean shorts. It was extra 90's. I liked this issue, even if it dragged a little, because it was a lot clearer and more carefully put together than the last few, and more thoughtful, too. These little pauses in the action are good for a book that goes so hard at the action so often, letting the cast and readers reset before things get crazy again or, hopefully, crazier than ever before.

Monthly Dose: November 2014 [Belated]

Monthly Dose is a semi-regular column where I read one issue each month of long-completed series.

100 Bullets #25: There is an awful lot of talk about the Trust and the Minutemen in this issue, way more conversation on those topics (and somewhat less cryptic), than we've seen in this series thus far. Brian Azzarello isn't providing many concrete answers, but we get a considerable amount of insight into how the Trust operates, and what their relationship was and is to the Minutemen. Exactly why and how those two groups parted ways remains unclear, and what either side wants now is hard to suss out, too, mostly because it doesn't seem like the Trust even knows what Graves wants, and Graves is the Minutemen, for all intents and purposes. The air of mystery surrounding these characters is enticing, but at the same time, a good chunk of the dialogue in this issue felt empty because of its ambiguity. The members of the Trust took various shots at one another and at Graves, but it didn't amount to much, and most of it was too vague to carry any real weight. The most enjoyable part of seeing the Trust all together was the variety Eduardo Risso brought to their designs. Physically, they're quite the unusual bunch, but they all share the smugness and self-importance that comes with being insanely wealthy and powerful, and all of their body language speaks to that, even if they all have different body dialects. The Trust felt like the center of this issue, but the real thrust of the arc has always been Benito's plotline, and it concludes here in a fairly spectacular fashion. Benito offers his would-be killer a choice: either take the cash he thinks he's owed, or risk everything by taking a bet on a basketball game for significantly more money. It's an intelligent play by Benito, presenting him as much smarter, more aware, and more concerned for others than he's been up to this point, yet it still fits with what else we've seen of his character. He's a more layered figure than he appeared initially, and this arc did a lot to build him up, as well as adding depth and intrigue to the overarching Trust-Minutemen story that we'd gotten only glimpses of before.


Automatic Kafka #1: Right away, Automatic Kafka is a trip, yet Joe Casey and Ashley Wood take pains to make it comprehensible, too. You get a full hook: android and former professional superhero/celebrity Automatic Kafka has spent his whole life trying to find some kind of humanity for himself, and finally touches it when he tries nanotecheroin, a drug/nanobot hybrid designed specifically to get androids high. Most of the issue is us watching Kafka experience that high, revisiting parts of his past, both specific and symbolic, guided by a nude woman who claims to be death but is probably really just a powerful, perhaps even supernatural hallucination. It gives Wood ample opportunities to draw some crazy, near-abstract stuff, since it's all essentially Kafka's dream, so it doesn't need to abide by any rules. Casey can go a little nuts, too, and that's the whole spirit of this book from the cover to the backmatter—free-flowing creativity. It makes for an incredibly fun read, and a bit of a challenge in places, more a comment on or exploration of the comicbook medium than the superhero genre. Kafka being a hero is, for the debut at least, largely incidental. It helps explain his existence and gives him some rich material for his high, but his being a robot is more important, and so is the mere fact that he's on drugs. This issue does what a first issue ought to do, introducing the story's protagonist and inserting him into an interesting situation, and it does so with style. Casey's writing is verbose without being dense; Wood's art is chaotic without being unclear. It's a damn impressive opening move.


X-Force (vol. 1) #25: The big 25th-issue extravaganza sees Cable return to X-Force, and it's a pretty big disappointment from my point of view. I've been loving this series since it switched gears and became all about a group of young, angry mutants trying to forge their own path, but with poppa Cable back in the mix, I'm not super optimistic about where this comic is going anymore. It took such a long time for the old, Liefeld-era crap to be disposed of, and just when it seemed like we were done with that for good, here comes perhaps the most classically Liefeldian character of all time. The story's fairly weak, too, all about the team trying to reclaim Graymalkin (or at least its programming) from Magneto, which, again...it's just all Cable shit, the comic's past showing up and taking the reins again. I was also sort of confused by everyone's behavior...Exodus arrives suddenly with a weird offer to take a specific set of X-Force's members to someplace called Heaven (it's Graymalkin), and the reactions from the heroes seem off to me. Cannonball, rather than being all "Fuck you" like usual, agrees to go with Exodus, but only if certain extra people from X-Force can come along. Then that the whole thing turns out to be sort of a scam, because Cannonball gives Cable the means to track him when he leaves with Exodus, which feels like it defeats the purpose of his going in the first place. If Cannonball is legitimately interested in what Exodus has to say, then why have Cable and the rest of the team do a track and rescue thing? If Cannonball's not interested, why not tell Exodus to shove it? I have a hard time understanding the motivations, and it's all immaterial, anyway, since the real point of all that is just to get Cable to Graymalkin so he can be pissed off at Magneto for stealing it. Oh, and the reveal of Magento, as well as the much earlier reveal of Cable, are both about as unsurprising as possible. I'm sure there's more I could say, but I'm finding I don't have the energy to keep going, because this issue was more deflating than anything else. I disliked it passionlessly.

The Cheese Stands Alone: Automatic Kafka #4

The Cheese Stands Alone is a semi-regular column featuring examinations of single issues that can be understood and appreciated on their own, without reading any of the preceding or following issues of the series.

Automatic Kafka was an incredible, short-lived series created by writer Joe Casey and artist Ashley Wood in 2002. Over the course of just nine issues, Casey and Wood delved into the problems of government corruption, the arbitrary and sometimes destructive nature of fame, the dangers of technology, and even a meta-discussion about the frustrations faced by the modern comicbook creator. All of this was explored through the eyes of the title character, a washed-up android superhero who just wanted to get as close as he could to something like humanity. It's an excellent series that is jam-packed with all manner of crazy, lewd, violent, and daring material, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. But for Automatic Kafka #4, Casey and Wood briefly set aside all of the people and things they had been and would be developing, and devoted an entire issue to the characters from the beloved newspaper comicstrip Peanuts. All grown up now, Charlie Brown and company still have largely the same relationships with one another that they had as children. The difference is that as adults, those relationships have become several shades darker.
     It's remarkable the care that both creators took in composing this issue. Everything and everyone you could want to see from Peanuts is there, but twisted and/or pushed to its logical extreme so that we get a much different version of these oh-so-familiar faces and ideas. There's Pig-Pen as a homeless man, Woodstock as a tiny yellow bird whom Snoopy kills as a gift for his master, The Great Pumpkin as a delusion so powerful Linus must spend his days in an insane asylum. Schroeder shows up to play a concert, now a successful musician, but no less detached or wry than ever. And remember Lucy's five-cent psychiatry stand? Well she's a practicing therapist now, and Charlie Brown is still her patient/mental torture victim. He's also her estranged husband, and their dysfunctional, depressing marriage is the central focus of Automatic Kafka #4. Or perhaps more accurately, the focus is on Charlie's personal dysfunction and depression.
     The basic arc of the story is this: Charlie Brown returns home after losing as a contestant on a game show (hosted by Automatic Kafka himself in the preceding issue), and is forced to live another day in a life that he despises. After an abusive therapy session with his wife, Charlie and his sister visit her husband (Linus) in the asylum where he now lives, and the doctor there gives them a pretty hopeless assessment of his condition. Then Charlie goes to Schroeder's concert, where he drinks all alone and watches Lucy shamelessly throws herself at their old friend. Also at the event is the Little Red-Haired Girl, now shallow and self-important and working at a makeup counter, and Charlie gazes at her from afar as she hits on some random, sleazy schmuck. Eventually, Charlie's inebriation and jealousy get the best of him, and he breaks, screaming at the aforementioned schmuck about how not everyone is beautiful or popular or successful or happy. Finally, he is thrown out of the party (at Lucy's shrill demand), and he stumbles into Pig-Pen living on the street. Returning home, Charlie finds the dead bird offering Snoopy left him, and then sets to writing a somewhat desperate letter asking for a second chance to appear on the game show on which he was so recently defeated. Basically, life dumps all over him, and even though he sees how sad and hopeless things really are, he tries to keep his chin up and look for potential routes to happiness in his dismal world.
     Of course, this is exactly who Charlie Brown has always been: a sad sack buried in depression but aiming for optimism. It's what made him so charming and relatable in Peanuts, and it has the same effect in Automatic Kafka #4. Honestly, even if you'd somehow never heard of Charles Schulz's comic strip, this issue would still be great. I admit that the first time I read it, the Peanuts connection went entirely over my head, but everything is so well-scripted and the themes so universal that I loved the story anyway. You don't need to know everything about everyone's histories to understand the fucked up nature of all of their relationships in the present. We've all felt jealousy, hopelessness, and lust. We all have friends we've lost touch with, and others we wish we could. Everybody, at one time or another, takes stock of their lives and feels something comparable to, "Good grief." It's why Peanuts was and is so popular, and why it deserves this kind of thoughtful, brilliant homage. It's also why Automatic Kafka #4 can be read and adored without any prior Automatic Kafka or Peanuts knowledge whatsoever.
     Then again, understanding the numerous, specific details which Casey and Wood include can only serve to improve the experience. Every page, if not every panel, has a tribute to the source material, a twist on it, and a bit of heartbreak. Even the cover is an allusion to Snoopy battling the Red Baron from atop his doghouse. Automatic Kafka #4 is a poignant and respectful examination of what made Peanuts so great, as well as a mirror held up to the comicstrip's darkest aspects.



Automatic Kafka #4 was published by WildStorm Productions and is dated December 2002.