As soon as we see Dr. Strange in Defenders, he's being kind of an ass. In his narration, he already regrets the one-night stand he had with a young grad student who isn't even dressed yet. But his regret is full of insincerity and weird, insulting jabs at the young woman. From there, he doesn't stop being a jerk until, at the very end of the series, all of reality is saved through Strange realizing that he shouldn't have been so jerky to the aforementioned grad student in the first place. Which is admittedly a funny and surprising way to wrap up the story, but I'm not sure it's worth the pages and pages of him as an inept, arrogant superhero prick.
Some amateur magician who tries to bully Strange gets his soul trapped in a jar and left on a random shelf, never to be thought of again. To be fair, he did threaten one of the great loves of Strange's life...but only kind of. The woman in question, Martha, was accidentally brought back to life by Strange, except that he brought her back as she was when he first knew her many years before. Since then, she'd been married and had children before she passed away, but the version Strange summons has no memory of that. When she asks him to tell her the truth, he does, and coming to terms with the idea that she died and came back and lost an entire lifetime of memories in between is almost impossible for her to handle. Before she can fully digest it all, the kid who ends up in a jar arrives and poses a danger to Martha and Strange's secret, impossible relationship, so Strange sends her away. He doesn't want to know where she goes, ostensibly for her own safety, and the poor woman (who can't use her own identity because she should be older and dead) ends up cast out in the world alone with no plan.
These are small-scale offenses, and not the only ones, but there is a central, enormous dick move Strange makes that is literally the cause of all the rest of the trouble in the story. When he and the rest of the Defenders stumble on a bizarre, well-hidden, well-guarded, and totally inexplicable machine, his first thought is that they should steal it. With his allies' help, he takes it home to be studied, because god forbid there be something in this universe he doesn't understand. He also rather rudely sends the rest of his teammates away, since apparently no one could possibly be of any assistance to a mind as great as his. It's infuriating behavior right away, and the simple act of moving the concordance engine (as we learn the machine is called) from its original home is the mistake upon which the rest of the comic's end-of-the-universe narrative is based.
It's too frustratingly complicated to get into how the Defenders learn the details of the concordance engine and what it's for, but it boils down to it being one of several that were built and placed on Earth by outside forces so that the planet would be especially full of superpowered people, hypothetically strong enough together to fight off the Death Celestials that travel from one universe to the next unmaking things. Strange's decision to displace one of the engines throws off their mojo in some vague way that leads to a Death Celestial showing up and successfully wiping out life on Earth instead of being stopped by a unified group of heroes like it was supposed to be. By the time Strange finally realizes it's all his fault, the damage has been done. So he goes back in time and uses very simple magic to prevent himself from ever even going on the adventure that would lead him to the engine in the first place. Instead, he takes the grad student he was so cold to the first time around out on a date, and apparently that tiny bit of pseudo-decency was all that had ever been standing between the obliteration of everything and life continuing as normal. Again, that concept makes me laugh, but it doesn't make me like Dr. Strange or look any more fondly on the time I spent with him.
Because even if he course corrects in the end, for me as a reader, all the horrible shit that Strange's actions brought about still happened, and he was still dense and selfish throughout those events. Also, I'm not wild about the idea of a whole story building up to a final beat that undoes everything which came before it, but that's a different point, I guess. What I'm really saying is that Strange is both a bad guy and the bad guy in this narrative, responsible for the success of a great evil through several smaller evils of his own. The argument might be made that his intentions were good, but I don't buy that. I think his main intention was to figure out a mystery because he's fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of something he can't solve or decipher. He never even asks if there could maybe be consequences to moving the engine, let alone considers what those might be, or thinks that maybe all the awfulness that follows might be because of what he'd done. Someone else has to point it out to him in a painfully direct way. And that someone is the Silver Surfer.
Separated from the rest of the group by the hyper-powerful beings who originally built the concordance engines, Silver Surfer gets a full explanation handed to him of what's happening with the Death Celestial and how to fix it. What he does with that info is telepathically pass it on to Dr. Strange, showing the sorcerer the error of his past ways, and this ends up being the most important thing any of the Defenders ever do. Which I guess is what I really mean by my claim in this post's title that Surfer is the story's only hero. The other characters genuinely try their best to do good and battle evil, but Surfer has the only actual success. Everyone else manages to delay the game a little at best, and actively (if inadvertently) exacerbate things at worst. Even Surfer only does that much until a big-time deus ex machina plucks him out of time and space to show him the truth. Maybe he's not any more or less heroic than anybody else, just lucky enough to be more effective. But in terms of who puts an end to the primary villain's (Strange's) wickedness, it's Silver Surfer all the way.
John Aman, the character played as the main antagonist, is also clearly a villain. He's just as self-important, over-confident, and stubborn as Strange, and their mutual tendencies to use violence first and keep everything to themselves is what makes them enemies rather than allies. They basically want the same thing, but fight one another instead of spending the time to figure out that they could be on the same side. Aman is worse insofar as he straight up murders several people, only to discover they weren't even the people he meant to kill. He also commits genocide against his own country, though we don't see that happen, just the aftermath. Yeah, ok, he's way worse. He's aggressively, knowingly evil at a level Strange never reaches. BUT. Though he's completely nuts and morally bankrupt, Aman's ultimate goal is to undo Strange's original mistake in moving the concordance engine. He goes about it all wrong, but his obviously deep-running insanity makes me understand if not forgive his psychopathic methods. Dr. Strange, on the other hand, ought to know better. That's not objectively as bad, but it irks me more.
Then there's the Death Celestial, a villain in the mindless beast sense, but on the stage for such a short time compared to either Aman or Strange. The same things apply to Nul, Breaker of Worlds, the enemy of the opening arc who leads the Defenders to the first concordance engine they find. These characters are one-note unstoppable forces, not possessing sentience in the way we understand it. Nul is more animalistic, driven by instinct rather than want. The Celestial presumably operates on a higher mental plane than humans have access to, but certainly doesn't perceive our lives as being significant, nor does it in any way try to communicate. It's an agent of constant devastation, not concerned with the details of the things it destroys. These characters are dangerous, but I hesitate to label them as "evil," and whether I do or not, they're not as responsible for what they do as the human villains who have the ability to look at the consequences of what goes down, and who actually care about them.
So even if he's not the most forceful, purposeful, or maniacal of the many baddies in Defenders, Dr. Strange is the one who bugs me most. His particular brand of wrong-doing gets under my skin, because it's so easily avoidable, it's immature, and it comes from a guy who claims to be on the side of righteousness.
Tomorrow: Forget everything I said above! Let's talk about how gorgeous this series is!
Monday, September 23, 2013
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Elsewhere
Last week, I made my regular contribution to PopMatters with a quick look at how secret identities seem to matter and exist less than before. This week I was more productive, with a couple reviews for read/RANT on T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #2 and Thor: God of Thunder #13, a new "1987 And All That" for The Chemical Box about G.I. Joe Special Missions, and another column at PopMatters discussing the interesting and accurate depictions of teenaged attitudes, morals, and flaws in Young Avengers and Harbinger. I always like it when I get to have stuff come out on all three of the sites I write for outside of Comics Matter in the same week, so that was nice.
Something I Failed to Mention
The column about Harbinger and Young Avengers was more of a character examination, so I sort of intentionally didn't really discuss the real-life creators behind the titles. However, one of the key things that sets those two series apart is the fact that Young Avengers is the collaborative product of a single amazing creative team, while Harbinger is basically just writer Joshua Dysart's project, with many different artists working on it, sometimes even within an issue. As is to be expected, this distinction gives Young Avengers the edge, making it more of a standout, signature piece. Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Mike Norton, Matthew Wilson, and Clayton Cowles have been the steady hands at the wheel of their book from the start (with the seriously perfect pick of Kate Brown subbing in on art for issue #6), and the clarity of vision they share is evident every month. They get to really play with the comicbook medium, not necessarily breaking the mold but definitely doing some unexpected, experimental bits here and there. To his credit, Dysart is writing well enough that the visual ups and down in Harbinger don't ruin it. The acting isn't always clear, but the characters' voices have the strength to support that. Where the art has the most potential to hurt the book is in the action scenes, but that also tends to be what the various artists do best. So all-in-all they're both series I feel very connected to and invested in, but Young Avengers has the not-insignificant advantage of looking consistently fantastic.
Something I Failed to Mention
The column about Harbinger and Young Avengers was more of a character examination, so I sort of intentionally didn't really discuss the real-life creators behind the titles. However, one of the key things that sets those two series apart is the fact that Young Avengers is the collaborative product of a single amazing creative team, while Harbinger is basically just writer Joshua Dysart's project, with many different artists working on it, sometimes even within an issue. As is to be expected, this distinction gives Young Avengers the edge, making it more of a standout, signature piece. Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Mike Norton, Matthew Wilson, and Clayton Cowles have been the steady hands at the wheel of their book from the start (with the seriously perfect pick of Kate Brown subbing in on art for issue #6), and the clarity of vision they share is evident every month. They get to really play with the comicbook medium, not necessarily breaking the mold but definitely doing some unexpected, experimental bits here and there. To his credit, Dysart is writing well enough that the visual ups and down in Harbinger don't ruin it. The acting isn't always clear, but the characters' voices have the strength to support that. Where the art has the most potential to hurt the book is in the action scenes, but that also tends to be what the various artists do best. So all-in-all they're both series I feel very connected to and invested in, but Young Avengers has the not-insignificant advantage of looking consistently fantastic.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Dial E: My Last New 52 Comic for a While
Two years back, I was pretty excited by the New 52. I didn't believe all of the hype, but enough of it to pick up about 1/4 of the original 52 books. I appreciated the bravery of starting everything over again, and at first it seemed like there was a genuine effort on DC's part to have some variety in their titles, which I also liked. Sadly, as time has passed, I've grown ever more disillusioned with the line. Of course all the rumblings of editorial interference and subsequent turnover of creative teams factors into my opinion, but I began dropping DC books even before that kind of news seemed to come out every week. I didn't like the series themselves—they were dry and uninspired, they made decisions about the characters that made no sense and served no purpose, and I just didn't find myself looking forward to reading them. Also they began to feel more homogenous, and it quickly became clear that DC had not actually started everything anew as they claimed—some series got fresh beginnings, while others tried to have their cake and eat it, too, keeping some details of DC's past while ignoring others in sometimes contradictory ways. One by one, these comics were cut from my pull list, and I tried to find replacements (even reading the first few issues of the entire "second wave") but nothing they offered held my interest for long.
Except for Dial H. I already wrote about it on PopMatters, so I won't delve too deeply into why that book above all others was one I stuck with, but suffice it to say it wasn't like anything else coming out of DC or, to the best of my knowledge, any other publisher. It had the same looming darkness that seems to cover the entirety of the New 52 like a sticky film, but Dial H managed to have a lot of fun, too. It was full of puns, and its main characters were a likably pathetic doofus and an elderly woman who still kicked ass. It felt fresh and daring, and while not all of the art was exceptional, and sometimes the story got hazy (especially toward the end when it had to be wrapped up before its cancellation), it was reliably quirky and silly and stimulating.
Which brings me to Dial E (technically Justice League #23.3 but I refuse to call it that and I always will). Published as part of the DC's current Villain's Month, Dial E is basically the punctuation mark at the end of the complex 15-issue sentence that was Dial H. And honestly, it's not a very good comicbook. It has a story but no plot, people but no characters, action but no stakes. Every page is drawn by a different artist, so that it functions more as a showcase than an actual narrative. It's incredibly disjointed, as the script amounts to writer China Miéville unloading all of the ideas for new super-people he didn't have room to fit into the main series. Point being, as a single issue, Dial E has very little merit. But taken as the final piece of the whole, it's sort of the perfect conclusion. Crazier and goofier than anything that came before it, this finale is the boldest, loudest example of the guiding spirit of Dial H, even if it's only tangentially connected to the actual narrative of that book.
As you can see, I didn't exactly love Dial E, but I was still sorry when I reached the final page. It marked the end of an era, not just because one of my favorite books is gone now. It's also the last New 52 comic I plan on buying for the foreseeable future. Having slowly but oh-so-surely let go of every other New 52 series I've tried in the last two years, Dial H was all I had left, and now they've gotten rid of it, and I see no concrete reason to start with anything else. There are a few titles that have solid reputations that I'd like to catch up on someday: Batman & Robin, All-Star Western, The Flash. But they're all minor additions to an enormous list of comics from many eras and publishers that I know I need to track down and read through, and I'm not nearly as interested in contemporary DC material as I am in basically anything else on said list.
So I'm done with the New 52 for now. Not with all of DC—Batman Black and White had a great first issue, Batman '66 has been wonderful, and I plan on heavily sampling the new stuff coming from Vertigo. But DC's main line of books can take a flying leap, for all I care. I've been so let down by it so consistently, and the pile of information about dissatisfied creators that keeps growing all the time does nothing to entice me back. I didn't make an official decision all at once to abandon the publisher, it happened organically as every series I tried to follow gave me one reason or another to drop it. With Dial E having come out on Wednesday, my pull list is void of New 52 titles. And I have to say...it looks a lot better that way.
Except for Dial H. I already wrote about it on PopMatters, so I won't delve too deeply into why that book above all others was one I stuck with, but suffice it to say it wasn't like anything else coming out of DC or, to the best of my knowledge, any other publisher. It had the same looming darkness that seems to cover the entirety of the New 52 like a sticky film, but Dial H managed to have a lot of fun, too. It was full of puns, and its main characters were a likably pathetic doofus and an elderly woman who still kicked ass. It felt fresh and daring, and while not all of the art was exceptional, and sometimes the story got hazy (especially toward the end when it had to be wrapped up before its cancellation), it was reliably quirky and silly and stimulating.
Which brings me to Dial E (technically Justice League #23.3 but I refuse to call it that and I always will). Published as part of the DC's current Villain's Month, Dial E is basically the punctuation mark at the end of the complex 15-issue sentence that was Dial H. And honestly, it's not a very good comicbook. It has a story but no plot, people but no characters, action but no stakes. Every page is drawn by a different artist, so that it functions more as a showcase than an actual narrative. It's incredibly disjointed, as the script amounts to writer China Miéville unloading all of the ideas for new super-people he didn't have room to fit into the main series. Point being, as a single issue, Dial E has very little merit. But taken as the final piece of the whole, it's sort of the perfect conclusion. Crazier and goofier than anything that came before it, this finale is the boldest, loudest example of the guiding spirit of Dial H, even if it's only tangentially connected to the actual narrative of that book.
As you can see, I didn't exactly love Dial E, but I was still sorry when I reached the final page. It marked the end of an era, not just because one of my favorite books is gone now. It's also the last New 52 comic I plan on buying for the foreseeable future. Having slowly but oh-so-surely let go of every other New 52 series I've tried in the last two years, Dial H was all I had left, and now they've gotten rid of it, and I see no concrete reason to start with anything else. There are a few titles that have solid reputations that I'd like to catch up on someday: Batman & Robin, All-Star Western, The Flash. But they're all minor additions to an enormous list of comics from many eras and publishers that I know I need to track down and read through, and I'm not nearly as interested in contemporary DC material as I am in basically anything else on said list.
So I'm done with the New 52 for now. Not with all of DC—Batman Black and White had a great first issue, Batman '66 has been wonderful, and I plan on heavily sampling the new stuff coming from Vertigo. But DC's main line of books can take a flying leap, for all I care. I've been so let down by it so consistently, and the pile of information about dissatisfied creators that keeps growing all the time does nothing to entice me back. I didn't make an official decision all at once to abandon the publisher, it happened organically as every series I tried to follow gave me one reason or another to drop it. With Dial E having come out on Wednesday, my pull list is void of New 52 titles. And I have to say...it looks a lot better that way.
Friday, September 13, 2013
Debutiful
For reasons that are too complicated and dull to get into here, today was my first chance in the last two weeks to visit my local comicbook store. That meant a bigger stack of new stuff than I normally get, but there was something else unusual about this particular haul: six different #1 issues from six different publishers. Seems like a statistical improbability, right? So let's quick look at each of them and see who comes out the gate strongest, and who is left limping in the back of the pack.
Batman Black and White #1 (DC): Everyone should buy this, and here's why: it's fun Batman. Black and White was a much-loved anthology series from the 90's, and DC has decided to bring it back, which is a great idea. Especially because the creators who work on the five 8-page stories in this issue take the opportunity to tell Batman tales that are lighter, less serious, and way less depressing than pretty much any of the current in-continuity Bat-Family books. They're not all straight comedy, but neither are they tragic melodrama, which is refreshing and entertaining as all get out. So let's all pick up a copy to let DC know that Batman can be a good time. I won't fully recap or even review each story here for the sake of space, but they're all good on the writing and art fronts both. They examine very different aspects of Batman's character and reality, but never really contradict or clash with one another. The best-looking and best-written was the Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy story by Maris Wcks and Joe Quinones right in the middle. Harley was of the classic yuk-yuk variety that made her a fan favorite in the first place, so that was great. And Quinones had a lot of nice tiny touches, particularly Batman's glowing eyes. Each of these tales did something better than the others, though. Chip Kidd and Michael Cho's opener was retro but original, capturing an old-school superhero feel in a brand new narrative. Neal Adam's piece was intentionally confusing and discomforting for the sake of a solid final page, and though it was a little ham-fisted, it had the most interesting thing to say, a valid point about the Bruce Wayne/Batman relationship that I agree with 100%. Howard Mackie and Chris Samnee did the last story, and get serious points for using the Ventriloquist in a way I haven't seen before, both in terms of Wesker and Scarface's roles and the way the villain relates to Batman. Coming in second overall was John Arcudi and Sean Murphy's tale of Batman fixing the Batmobile after an especially intense car chase. With the best action and ending, this is the creative team I most want to see more from, especially Batman material. So yeah, this is a winner top to bottom, not something I'm used to thinking about current Batman comics.
Brain Boy #1 (Dark Horse): While essentially a character study, this issue struck an excellent balance between introducing its main character and developing its plot. Everything we learn about Matt Price a.k.a. Brain Boy (a nickname he despises) comes from seeing him in action. Having him as the narrator is helpful, too, of course, but it's really getting to watch him utilize his various abilities in the field that makes this comic so strong. And Price's explanations of his mental skills are succinct, perhaps some of the best power description writing I've ever seen. Fred Van Lente has clearly taken his time to figure out the ins and outs of his protagonist, and it pays off throughout this debut. Price's hot-headedness, youth, arrogance, and tremendous power are all clearly and quickly displayed, so that by the time the issue comes to a close he feels familiar. He's got a good sense of humor, too, never taking himself or his work too seriously. It gets him into some trouble, but it's also his most endearing quality. For all of Van Lente's stellar work, though, Brain Boy #1's greatest strength is artist R.B. Silva. Considering how many new characters he had to design, his inventiveness is astounding, as nobody really resembles anyone else in attire or demeanor. Yet the world is still cohesive, because Silva includes enough tiny details to make it look and feel real. The way he does Price's powers is just as good—no, better—than Van Lente's descriptions of them. Each new move have its own imagery, but just like with the cast, they all fit together. Most impressive was Silva's skill at mixing the goofily comedic with the horribly grim, once again managing to make them mesh seamlessly. This book has plenty of both, and that blended tone is a big part of what makes it so good. I believe Brain Boy is an old property being revamped by this team, but if that's true I have no experience with any earlier versions, so I didn't really know what to expect. After reading this issue, my expectations for future chapters are pretty damn high, because there really wasn't a single page I disliked. It's fast-moving but easy to follow, and built around a great hero with an intimidating powerset who's already involved in some terrifying, mystifying shit. More, please.
Eternal Warrior #1 (Valiant): This turned me off on its very first page when the title character punched his daughter in the face to try and stop her from joining him on the battlefield. It never got better. The "story" of most of the issue centers on a huge fight in ancient Mesopotamia. The Eternal Warrior (Gilad Anni-Padda) and his people fight against the forces of the death god Negral, for reasons undefined. It doesn't go well for Gilad's side until Xaran, the daughter he tried to keep out of the battle with physical abuse, shows up riding an elephant and overruns the enemies. For a hot second, everyone's happy, but then Xaran decides to go a step further and trample the women and children on Negral's side. This does not sit well with her father, so they trade blows yet again, and ultimately Xaran throws a spear through his chest and the chest of her brother Mitu. Gilad survives because he's immortal (hence "Eternal Warrior") but Mitu dies, and then we jump to the modern day where Gilad is hiding out in Africa somewhere and trying to lead a life of peaceful solitude. Except, wah wah, Xaran arrives at his doorstep, announcing that she, too, is immortal, and saying she needs his help with...something. Oh, but first her presence makes Gilad's dog go insane, so Gilad has to kill it, which is just disgusting and stupid and pointless. There's SO MUCH death, animal and human, leading up to that point, throwing in a scene of a man snapping his own pet's neck was a step too far for me. I have no idea what Greg Pak is going for with this ultra-violent debut that does almost nothing to establish the characters or a plot or...anything, really. It's just fighting. The first half of the issue is a war we have no reason to care about. Then modern Gilad kills his dinner in the African wilds, there are a couple pages of reflective calm, and finally Xaran shows up and causes the dog death scene before introducing some kind of threat/conflict that I don't understand whatsoever. It's jumpy, rushed, unfocused writing that starts low and goes nowhere. Artist Trevor Hairsine doesn't help much. His work is rough and chaotic, and while that fits the madness of the opening combat, it often makes it hard to tell what's happening or who it's happening to. It's easy to mistake Gilad for either of his children, and none of them look quite the same from one page to the next. I've been really enjoying Archer & Armstrong, the series in which this character was introduced, but Eternal Warrior lacks any of that book's fun or structure. I found myself surprised it had ended because so little had been accomplished.
Kings Watch #1 (Dynamite): I expected this to be the best of the batch, and while Brain Boy gave it a run for it's money, Kings Watch takes the cake when it comes to these six #1 issues. And it is Kings Watch, not King's Watch, even though in the actual story people reference the "King's Watch." I double checked the inside cover where the copyright information is, and I know it makes no sense because it makes it look like the telling is telling a bunch of kings to watch it, or announcing that they do, but what can I tell you? It's Kings Watch for sure. And it's amazing. Jeff Parker not only gives us his versions of main characters The Phantom, Mandrake, and Flash Gordon, but also what is already a surprisingly large supporting cast. There's an incredible fight scene (see below), the beginnings of an impending apocalyptic danger, the expected handful of jokes from Parker, and some stunningly efficient characterization. Each new member of the cast has an immediate presence, and Parker shows us who they are through the simplest actions, words, and choices. I say Parker, but of course Marc Laming deserves equal credit, for the character work especially. When Phantom, Lothar, and an elephant have an 8-page fight with a humungous humanoid dinosaur creature, the sheer awesomeness of it is all Laming. That's pretty much all we get as far as meeting the Phantom, but it's more than enough to see what kind of guy he is. Laming draws spaceships and cityscapes just as well as he does giant lizards and jungles, so it's all beautiful. Most importantly, he gives great depth to every character. For such a fantastical book, it's marvelously realistic, making everything feel a little heavier, scarier, and more believable. A great deal goes on in this issue, because Parker and Laming both pace each scene brilliantly. They jump around the globe, handle a half-dozen or so major characters, have fun, and keep the story moving constantly forward, and do it all with aplomb. This has the potential to round out 2013 as one of the best series of the year, assuming it maintains the high energy and smart structure of this first issue.
Mighty Avengers #1 (Marvel): So I broke a promise to myself and spent money on another comicbook drawn by Greg Land. With Al Ewing writing and a team including two of my favorite characters (Luke Cage and Monica Rambeau) I figured it would be worth the crummy art. And you know what? The art was better than I expected, so all in all I'd say I made the right call. Land still has a hard time making human faces look human, especially Monica, whose hair and facial structure seem to change every panel and who also looks a lot different than she ever has before. But there are some really strong layouts in this comic, and the stiffness that's usually such a pervasive part of Land's action scenes is nowhere to be found. Everyone moves fluidly and naturally, which is a major improvement over his previous work. Ewing does a pretty solid job of introducing his cast, and gives them all their own voices, outlooks, and motives. And the threat that is going to bring the team together shows up in a destructive and impressive way, so all the pieces of a decent debut are here. Theoretically working against the book is the fact that it's an Infinity tie-in, but speaking as someone who hasn't read any of Infinity, I still understood everything that happened here. Well...maybe not the super brief scene with Dr. Strange toward the end. I'm assuming that's something from the event itself, but it only really lasts for a page of this issue, and its purpose is mostly just to let the villain say some creepy-sounding but largely meaningless things, as villains are wont to do. So it pulls that off, anyway. Catching up on the current statuses of a few characters I adore and meeting a couple new ones (new to me, anyway) who I'm eager to see more of is a decent way to start off a new series. Being pleasantly surprised by an artist I usually hate ain't half bad neither. So in the end I think I'm slightly more excited for this title than I was before, which I suppose is the mark of a successful (if not exceptional) opening chapter.
Reality Check #1 (Image): A well-done, straightforward introductory issue. The main character is comicbook writer/artist Willard Penn, who narrates directly to the reader, giving us his full background in the cleanest, clearest possible way. He's struggling to get his career going, has a juvenile and somewhat cowardly approach to romance that doesn't seem to do him much good, and the defining moment in his life was the death of his older brother Timmy. The two of them were best friends, and Timmy was sort of everything Willard wanted to be—an incredible artist, good with women, confident, popular, etc. Losing his brother gave Willard a new drive when it came to creating comics, and he's let every other aspect of his life go neglected in pursuit of that dream. Lucky for him, his latest series, Dark Hour, had a wildly successful debut, so after years of hard work, Willard is finally getting what he wants. Unfortunately, he's having a hell of a time producing the next issue, feeling as if his ideas have been literally pulled out of his head. On the final page, he discovers that is exactly what's happened, when Dark Hour himself shows up in the flesh asking Willard for help. This is purely set-up, but that's all it wants to be, taking its time to lay a foundation sturdy enough to hold up whatever else is coming in future issues. Writer Glen Brunswick makes Willard a well-rounded sad sack, lonely and a little afraid of the world, but still doing his damnedest to achieve his dreams. Brunswick also includes some smart and quirky humor, with the cream of the crop being when Dark Hour's Black-Cat-esque girlfriend Demonica says, "I don't steal retail!" The more lightweight feel of this series is matched by Viktor Bogdanovic's artwork, whose lines have a softer edge. Dark Hour has a good-looking but not-too-flashy design, and his secret identity, Thomas Scott, hits just the right level of Bruce Wayne knock-off. Intentionally so, as Willard himself describes Dark Hour as "libidinal Batman" (another joke I enjoyed). Would it have been even more impressive if Brunswck and Bogdanovic had gotten past the preliminary stages of their premise? Obviously yes. But for a first issue, getting all of the pieces in place, making me care about the cast, and ending on a big reveal that will undoubtedly launch into some kind of awesome superhero adventure is more than enough. I got exactly what I wanted out of Reality Check #1, and I'm anxious to see what else this title has in store.
Batman Black and White #1 (DC): Everyone should buy this, and here's why: it's fun Batman. Black and White was a much-loved anthology series from the 90's, and DC has decided to bring it back, which is a great idea. Especially because the creators who work on the five 8-page stories in this issue take the opportunity to tell Batman tales that are lighter, less serious, and way less depressing than pretty much any of the current in-continuity Bat-Family books. They're not all straight comedy, but neither are they tragic melodrama, which is refreshing and entertaining as all get out. So let's all pick up a copy to let DC know that Batman can be a good time. I won't fully recap or even review each story here for the sake of space, but they're all good on the writing and art fronts both. They examine very different aspects of Batman's character and reality, but never really contradict or clash with one another. The best-looking and best-written was the Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy story by Maris Wcks and Joe Quinones right in the middle. Harley was of the classic yuk-yuk variety that made her a fan favorite in the first place, so that was great. And Quinones had a lot of nice tiny touches, particularly Batman's glowing eyes. Each of these tales did something better than the others, though. Chip Kidd and Michael Cho's opener was retro but original, capturing an old-school superhero feel in a brand new narrative. Neal Adam's piece was intentionally confusing and discomforting for the sake of a solid final page, and though it was a little ham-fisted, it had the most interesting thing to say, a valid point about the Bruce Wayne/Batman relationship that I agree with 100%. Howard Mackie and Chris Samnee did the last story, and get serious points for using the Ventriloquist in a way I haven't seen before, both in terms of Wesker and Scarface's roles and the way the villain relates to Batman. Coming in second overall was John Arcudi and Sean Murphy's tale of Batman fixing the Batmobile after an especially intense car chase. With the best action and ending, this is the creative team I most want to see more from, especially Batman material. So yeah, this is a winner top to bottom, not something I'm used to thinking about current Batman comics.
Brain Boy #1 (Dark Horse): While essentially a character study, this issue struck an excellent balance between introducing its main character and developing its plot. Everything we learn about Matt Price a.k.a. Brain Boy (a nickname he despises) comes from seeing him in action. Having him as the narrator is helpful, too, of course, but it's really getting to watch him utilize his various abilities in the field that makes this comic so strong. And Price's explanations of his mental skills are succinct, perhaps some of the best power description writing I've ever seen. Fred Van Lente has clearly taken his time to figure out the ins and outs of his protagonist, and it pays off throughout this debut. Price's hot-headedness, youth, arrogance, and tremendous power are all clearly and quickly displayed, so that by the time the issue comes to a close he feels familiar. He's got a good sense of humor, too, never taking himself or his work too seriously. It gets him into some trouble, but it's also his most endearing quality. For all of Van Lente's stellar work, though, Brain Boy #1's greatest strength is artist R.B. Silva. Considering how many new characters he had to design, his inventiveness is astounding, as nobody really resembles anyone else in attire or demeanor. Yet the world is still cohesive, because Silva includes enough tiny details to make it look and feel real. The way he does Price's powers is just as good—no, better—than Van Lente's descriptions of them. Each new move have its own imagery, but just like with the cast, they all fit together. Most impressive was Silva's skill at mixing the goofily comedic with the horribly grim, once again managing to make them mesh seamlessly. This book has plenty of both, and that blended tone is a big part of what makes it so good. I believe Brain Boy is an old property being revamped by this team, but if that's true I have no experience with any earlier versions, so I didn't really know what to expect. After reading this issue, my expectations for future chapters are pretty damn high, because there really wasn't a single page I disliked. It's fast-moving but easy to follow, and built around a great hero with an intimidating powerset who's already involved in some terrifying, mystifying shit. More, please.
Eternal Warrior #1 (Valiant): This turned me off on its very first page when the title character punched his daughter in the face to try and stop her from joining him on the battlefield. It never got better. The "story" of most of the issue centers on a huge fight in ancient Mesopotamia. The Eternal Warrior (Gilad Anni-Padda) and his people fight against the forces of the death god Negral, for reasons undefined. It doesn't go well for Gilad's side until Xaran, the daughter he tried to keep out of the battle with physical abuse, shows up riding an elephant and overruns the enemies. For a hot second, everyone's happy, but then Xaran decides to go a step further and trample the women and children on Negral's side. This does not sit well with her father, so they trade blows yet again, and ultimately Xaran throws a spear through his chest and the chest of her brother Mitu. Gilad survives because he's immortal (hence "Eternal Warrior") but Mitu dies, and then we jump to the modern day where Gilad is hiding out in Africa somewhere and trying to lead a life of peaceful solitude. Except, wah wah, Xaran arrives at his doorstep, announcing that she, too, is immortal, and saying she needs his help with...something. Oh, but first her presence makes Gilad's dog go insane, so Gilad has to kill it, which is just disgusting and stupid and pointless. There's SO MUCH death, animal and human, leading up to that point, throwing in a scene of a man snapping his own pet's neck was a step too far for me. I have no idea what Greg Pak is going for with this ultra-violent debut that does almost nothing to establish the characters or a plot or...anything, really. It's just fighting. The first half of the issue is a war we have no reason to care about. Then modern Gilad kills his dinner in the African wilds, there are a couple pages of reflective calm, and finally Xaran shows up and causes the dog death scene before introducing some kind of threat/conflict that I don't understand whatsoever. It's jumpy, rushed, unfocused writing that starts low and goes nowhere. Artist Trevor Hairsine doesn't help much. His work is rough and chaotic, and while that fits the madness of the opening combat, it often makes it hard to tell what's happening or who it's happening to. It's easy to mistake Gilad for either of his children, and none of them look quite the same from one page to the next. I've been really enjoying Archer & Armstrong, the series in which this character was introduced, but Eternal Warrior lacks any of that book's fun or structure. I found myself surprised it had ended because so little had been accomplished.
Kings Watch #1 (Dynamite): I expected this to be the best of the batch, and while Brain Boy gave it a run for it's money, Kings Watch takes the cake when it comes to these six #1 issues. And it is Kings Watch, not King's Watch, even though in the actual story people reference the "King's Watch." I double checked the inside cover where the copyright information is, and I know it makes no sense because it makes it look like the telling is telling a bunch of kings to watch it, or announcing that they do, but what can I tell you? It's Kings Watch for sure. And it's amazing. Jeff Parker not only gives us his versions of main characters The Phantom, Mandrake, and Flash Gordon, but also what is already a surprisingly large supporting cast. There's an incredible fight scene (see below), the beginnings of an impending apocalyptic danger, the expected handful of jokes from Parker, and some stunningly efficient characterization. Each new member of the cast has an immediate presence, and Parker shows us who they are through the simplest actions, words, and choices. I say Parker, but of course Marc Laming deserves equal credit, for the character work especially. When Phantom, Lothar, and an elephant have an 8-page fight with a humungous humanoid dinosaur creature, the sheer awesomeness of it is all Laming. That's pretty much all we get as far as meeting the Phantom, but it's more than enough to see what kind of guy he is. Laming draws spaceships and cityscapes just as well as he does giant lizards and jungles, so it's all beautiful. Most importantly, he gives great depth to every character. For such a fantastical book, it's marvelously realistic, making everything feel a little heavier, scarier, and more believable. A great deal goes on in this issue, because Parker and Laming both pace each scene brilliantly. They jump around the globe, handle a half-dozen or so major characters, have fun, and keep the story moving constantly forward, and do it all with aplomb. This has the potential to round out 2013 as one of the best series of the year, assuming it maintains the high energy and smart structure of this first issue.
Mighty Avengers #1 (Marvel): So I broke a promise to myself and spent money on another comicbook drawn by Greg Land. With Al Ewing writing and a team including two of my favorite characters (Luke Cage and Monica Rambeau) I figured it would be worth the crummy art. And you know what? The art was better than I expected, so all in all I'd say I made the right call. Land still has a hard time making human faces look human, especially Monica, whose hair and facial structure seem to change every panel and who also looks a lot different than she ever has before. But there are some really strong layouts in this comic, and the stiffness that's usually such a pervasive part of Land's action scenes is nowhere to be found. Everyone moves fluidly and naturally, which is a major improvement over his previous work. Ewing does a pretty solid job of introducing his cast, and gives them all their own voices, outlooks, and motives. And the threat that is going to bring the team together shows up in a destructive and impressive way, so all the pieces of a decent debut are here. Theoretically working against the book is the fact that it's an Infinity tie-in, but speaking as someone who hasn't read any of Infinity, I still understood everything that happened here. Well...maybe not the super brief scene with Dr. Strange toward the end. I'm assuming that's something from the event itself, but it only really lasts for a page of this issue, and its purpose is mostly just to let the villain say some creepy-sounding but largely meaningless things, as villains are wont to do. So it pulls that off, anyway. Catching up on the current statuses of a few characters I adore and meeting a couple new ones (new to me, anyway) who I'm eager to see more of is a decent way to start off a new series. Being pleasantly surprised by an artist I usually hate ain't half bad neither. So in the end I think I'm slightly more excited for this title than I was before, which I suppose is the mark of a successful (if not exceptional) opening chapter.
Reality Check #1 (Image): A well-done, straightforward introductory issue. The main character is comicbook writer/artist Willard Penn, who narrates directly to the reader, giving us his full background in the cleanest, clearest possible way. He's struggling to get his career going, has a juvenile and somewhat cowardly approach to romance that doesn't seem to do him much good, and the defining moment in his life was the death of his older brother Timmy. The two of them were best friends, and Timmy was sort of everything Willard wanted to be—an incredible artist, good with women, confident, popular, etc. Losing his brother gave Willard a new drive when it came to creating comics, and he's let every other aspect of his life go neglected in pursuit of that dream. Lucky for him, his latest series, Dark Hour, had a wildly successful debut, so after years of hard work, Willard is finally getting what he wants. Unfortunately, he's having a hell of a time producing the next issue, feeling as if his ideas have been literally pulled out of his head. On the final page, he discovers that is exactly what's happened, when Dark Hour himself shows up in the flesh asking Willard for help. This is purely set-up, but that's all it wants to be, taking its time to lay a foundation sturdy enough to hold up whatever else is coming in future issues. Writer Glen Brunswick makes Willard a well-rounded sad sack, lonely and a little afraid of the world, but still doing his damnedest to achieve his dreams. Brunswick also includes some smart and quirky humor, with the cream of the crop being when Dark Hour's Black-Cat-esque girlfriend Demonica says, "I don't steal retail!" The more lightweight feel of this series is matched by Viktor Bogdanovic's artwork, whose lines have a softer edge. Dark Hour has a good-looking but not-too-flashy design, and his secret identity, Thomas Scott, hits just the right level of Bruce Wayne knock-off. Intentionally so, as Willard himself describes Dark Hour as "libidinal Batman" (another joke I enjoyed). Would it have been even more impressive if Brunswck and Bogdanovic had gotten past the preliminary stages of their premise? Obviously yes. But for a first issue, getting all of the pieces in place, making me care about the cast, and ending on a big reveal that will undoubtedly launch into some kind of awesome superhero adventure is more than enough. I got exactly what I wanted out of Reality Check #1, and I'm anxious to see what else this title has in store.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Comics, TV, and Giving Things a Chance
If you want to recommend a television series to me, the absolute worst thing you can say is, "You have to get through the first season before it really gets good." Fuck that. I already follow too many things to be slogging through a show that doesn't know what it's doing when it starts. It's true that some of my favorite shows got a lot stronger later in their lives (Parks and Recreations and Bob's Burgers spring to mind immediately) but they were still plenty good when they began. They hadn't reached their full potential yet, and maybe they still haven't, but they immediately had a voice and a direction and I liked watching them right away. These days, if the first fifteen minutes (give or take) of the first episode of a show I'm trying out don't do it for me, I abandon ship. It happened earlier this week with Orange is the New Black. I'm sure it gets funny at some point because so many people have told me it does, but it didn't once make me laugh or even smile in the opening half-dozen scenes or so, which means I'm done. Maybe I'm cutting myself off from things I would enjoy. No, not maybe, definitely. But I've got a full enough TV docket as it is, and nobody is ever going to watch every single episode of every single series they could possibly like, so I've got to draw my own lines somewhere. Is my yardstick too short? Probably, but it's suited me just fine for a long time, and I watch tons of excellent stuff all year long.
With comicbooks, I'm admittedly a bit more patient, though not by much, and when I drop something I drop it just as definitively. Three issues is the standard trial period for a new title, after which if I'm not hooked I walk away as fast as I can, at least until there is a total creative team switch or similarly significant change. I know that, in TV terms, three issues is theoretically three whole episodes, and I'm not totally sure why I'm so much quicker to give up on a show than a comicbook. Part of it is that I love comics more than TV, so I can put up with dreck a little more patiently. There's also the fact that, when reading a comic, I can absorb it at my own pace, whereas shows tell their stories on their own time. I can go back over a given comic scene, page, panel, what have you as many times as needed to see what it's doing, to find the value in it if indeed there is any to be found. Yes, I could rewind a TV show and go through the same process, but they don't naturally lend themselves to that type of consumption. They have a specific rhythm, a deliberate timing that is part of the package, and if I get far enough into an episode and still don't care about it then I can't bring myself to sit through the rest.
The thing about both TV and comics is that brand new shit is coming out constantly. Just keeping up with the things I'm already following can at times be overwhelming, so I don't think it's unreasonable to be extra picky when it comes to adding anything. In both cases, I already have an ever-growing lists of series I know I need to start, finish, or catch up on so I can begin following them as they come out. There's just not a great deal of room for material that doesn't interest me quickly enough.
I don't know why I'm writing this, really. I recently decided to drop Larfleeze, and as I mentioned, I had a powerfully negative reaction to Orange is the New Black not long ago, so I guess all of this has just been on my mind for the past few days. Also fall's coming around, which means loads of TV shows have their fresh seasons starting up, so I'm settling back into some old favorites and making decisions about what new things to sample. Finally, several new comicbook titles had their debut issues in the last couple weeks, and I'm planning to do a comparison of them all here on the blog once I finally get back to my local shop. Until then, I suppose this is a sort of unofficial prelude to that post, an excuse to publish online the thoughts that have been bouncing around my brain lately anyway.
With comicbooks, I'm admittedly a bit more patient, though not by much, and when I drop something I drop it just as definitively. Three issues is the standard trial period for a new title, after which if I'm not hooked I walk away as fast as I can, at least until there is a total creative team switch or similarly significant change. I know that, in TV terms, three issues is theoretically three whole episodes, and I'm not totally sure why I'm so much quicker to give up on a show than a comicbook. Part of it is that I love comics more than TV, so I can put up with dreck a little more patiently. There's also the fact that, when reading a comic, I can absorb it at my own pace, whereas shows tell their stories on their own time. I can go back over a given comic scene, page, panel, what have you as many times as needed to see what it's doing, to find the value in it if indeed there is any to be found. Yes, I could rewind a TV show and go through the same process, but they don't naturally lend themselves to that type of consumption. They have a specific rhythm, a deliberate timing that is part of the package, and if I get far enough into an episode and still don't care about it then I can't bring myself to sit through the rest.
The thing about both TV and comics is that brand new shit is coming out constantly. Just keeping up with the things I'm already following can at times be overwhelming, so I don't think it's unreasonable to be extra picky when it comes to adding anything. In both cases, I already have an ever-growing lists of series I know I need to start, finish, or catch up on so I can begin following them as they come out. There's just not a great deal of room for material that doesn't interest me quickly enough.
I don't know why I'm writing this, really. I recently decided to drop Larfleeze, and as I mentioned, I had a powerfully negative reaction to Orange is the New Black not long ago, so I guess all of this has just been on my mind for the past few days. Also fall's coming around, which means loads of TV shows have their fresh seasons starting up, so I'm settling back into some old favorites and making decisions about what new things to sample. Finally, several new comicbook titles had their debut issues in the last couple weeks, and I'm planning to do a comparison of them all here on the blog once I finally get back to my local shop. Until then, I suppose this is a sort of unofficial prelude to that post, an excuse to publish online the thoughts that have been bouncing around my brain lately anyway.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Larfleeze is Not a Star
I've never been the world's biggest Larfleeze fan. I know I'm not the first to make the comparison, but he's kind of the Jar Jar Binks of the Green Lantern universe: overly obnoxious, weird speech patterns, naive/immature to the point of often being plain stupid, etc. I don't hate him with the same vehemence many others seem to feel, either. When he was introduced during the Blackest Night lead-up, he was neither the most nor the least annoying new character created as part of Geoff Johns' expansion of the spectrum of light. He was just minor enough not to ruin anything, and interesting enough that I got a decent amount out of pleasure from the pages on which he appeared.
But he was such a supporting character, greed personified as a grouchy alien, that I was baffled when DC announced he'd be fronting the back-up feature in their Threshold series several months back. Even for ten-page stories, he didn't feel fleshed out enough to be a protagonist. I was so surprised by this decision, and drawn to Keith Giffen as the writer of a goofball spaceman, that I had to buy Threshold #1 out of sheer curiosity. It wasn't something I wanted to read but something I needed to try.
It was not horrible. Well, the main series was ("The Hunted"), but the Larfleeze story actually had some bits that made me laugh, and it looked way better than it had any right to. Scott Kolins was a great fit for the character, getting both the unbridled anger and complete childishness of Larfleeze just right. Kolins does outer space stuff well, the empty enormity of the setting and inventive designs for new races and planets and such. The art was what I liked most about this initial taste of Larfleeze-centric comics, but Giffen didn't slack off, either. He added Pulsar Stargrave as the wry and under-appreciated butler, a job that suits the character and is the right kind of role for someone meant to be part of the cast of a Larfleeze book. And having the conflict center on Larfleeze trying to figure out who robbed him made a lot more sense than, say, cooking up a complicated new villain or cosmic-level threat. It was a narrative tailored to its hero, but still containing its share of intrigue and surprise.
So I kept buying Threshold, even though it cost $3.99 I hated the first 2/3 of every issue. This went against everything I believe in when it comes to comicbook shopping, but the Larfleeze material kept being juuuust strong enough to bring me back. Every chapter had a couple of solid jokes, and Giffen tried to explore the Larfleeze concept as much as he could. How do you take a character who's whole deal is "I'm greedy!" and make him into someone worth following for more than a scene or two? It looked like Giffen had some answers, like making Larfleeze's powers more effective when he was trying to prevent theft, having him literally not understand the concept of paying someone for something, or his definition of "fair fight" being one that he wins. It wasn't the most in-depth development work I've ever seen, but it was admittedly more than I thought Larfleeze had to offer, and it was getting done in ten-page chunks that also included splash pages, chaotic fight scenes, additions to the cast, and an ever-evolving mystery. The story may not have left my jaw on the floor, but it always had me grinning, and Kolins' artwork kept up its quality all the way through. It was fun, funny, vibrant, and energetic, good enough that when Larfleeze became a series of its own, I followed.
That's when things went downhill. The new book is plotted by Giffen with scripts from his long-time collaborator J.M. DeMatteis, and still drawn by Kolins but now off of Giffen's breakdowns. And it STINKS. Three issues in, I'm already completely turned off of the whole experiment, as disappointed by the full-length Larfleeze material as I was pleasantly surprised by the back-ups. Instead of building on the little bit of progress made in the Threshold pages, this book has decided to let its stars flounder in their worst, simplest, most one-dimensional forms so that a bunch of epic sci-fi junk can go down instead. Larfleeze no longer gets to display the many faces of avarice, reduced to a constant string of temper tantrums punctuated by combat he loses. His new foes are big bad space monsters from another dimension, threatening to unmake our existence for simple amusement now that their home world has already been totally destroyed (by them). It's the wrong kind of narrative for Larfleeze, one that calls on him to be a world-saving epic hero instead of the pissed off kid he usually is. Giffen and DeMatteis do their best to give Larfleeze a dog in this race by having the new villains take control of Stargrave, but that's a weak motive, one made even less convincing by Stargrave's own passivity and grating sarcasm. It worked in small doses during the ten-pagers, but in these twenty-page installments Stargrave becomes just as major a character as Larfleeze. That's too much responsibility for someone who uses most of his lines to make fun of and/or undermine what other characters just said.
Kolins is still Kolins, but the tone of the story has become graver and more significant, which consequently means the art doesn't get to be as uninhibited and silly as it used to be. There's a lot more angry Larfleeze now than the mix of fury, confusion, fear, and hubris he brought to the table before. Of all the characters to darken, this one needed it the very least, and it shows when comparing the Threshold-era visuals to the current ones.
I'm not going to say Larfleeze could never support his own comic. If nothing else, Giffen and Kolins taught me that the potential exists. Put him in the right setting and handle him with the right approach, and this clown can definitely carry a story. But I wonder if he'll just always operate better in a smaller space. If you asked Larfleeze, of course, he'd demand as many panels and as much dialogue as possible. Yet that extreme personality of his may be what makes him more entertaining in fewer pages. I don't know how much the character is to blame, how much falls on the creators, and (as with all of DC's line these days) how much is editorial nonsense. But I do know that after five months of back-up stories convincing me Larfleeze was worth my attention, it only took three months of stardom to undo all that work and reverse my opinion of him all over again.
But he was such a supporting character, greed personified as a grouchy alien, that I was baffled when DC announced he'd be fronting the back-up feature in their Threshold series several months back. Even for ten-page stories, he didn't feel fleshed out enough to be a protagonist. I was so surprised by this decision, and drawn to Keith Giffen as the writer of a goofball spaceman, that I had to buy Threshold #1 out of sheer curiosity. It wasn't something I wanted to read but something I needed to try.
It was not horrible. Well, the main series was ("The Hunted"), but the Larfleeze story actually had some bits that made me laugh, and it looked way better than it had any right to. Scott Kolins was a great fit for the character, getting both the unbridled anger and complete childishness of Larfleeze just right. Kolins does outer space stuff well, the empty enormity of the setting and inventive designs for new races and planets and such. The art was what I liked most about this initial taste of Larfleeze-centric comics, but Giffen didn't slack off, either. He added Pulsar Stargrave as the wry and under-appreciated butler, a job that suits the character and is the right kind of role for someone meant to be part of the cast of a Larfleeze book. And having the conflict center on Larfleeze trying to figure out who robbed him made a lot more sense than, say, cooking up a complicated new villain or cosmic-level threat. It was a narrative tailored to its hero, but still containing its share of intrigue and surprise.
So I kept buying Threshold, even though it cost $3.99 I hated the first 2/3 of every issue. This went against everything I believe in when it comes to comicbook shopping, but the Larfleeze material kept being juuuust strong enough to bring me back. Every chapter had a couple of solid jokes, and Giffen tried to explore the Larfleeze concept as much as he could. How do you take a character who's whole deal is "I'm greedy!" and make him into someone worth following for more than a scene or two? It looked like Giffen had some answers, like making Larfleeze's powers more effective when he was trying to prevent theft, having him literally not understand the concept of paying someone for something, or his definition of "fair fight" being one that he wins. It wasn't the most in-depth development work I've ever seen, but it was admittedly more than I thought Larfleeze had to offer, and it was getting done in ten-page chunks that also included splash pages, chaotic fight scenes, additions to the cast, and an ever-evolving mystery. The story may not have left my jaw on the floor, but it always had me grinning, and Kolins' artwork kept up its quality all the way through. It was fun, funny, vibrant, and energetic, good enough that when Larfleeze became a series of its own, I followed.
That's when things went downhill. The new book is plotted by Giffen with scripts from his long-time collaborator J.M. DeMatteis, and still drawn by Kolins but now off of Giffen's breakdowns. And it STINKS. Three issues in, I'm already completely turned off of the whole experiment, as disappointed by the full-length Larfleeze material as I was pleasantly surprised by the back-ups. Instead of building on the little bit of progress made in the Threshold pages, this book has decided to let its stars flounder in their worst, simplest, most one-dimensional forms so that a bunch of epic sci-fi junk can go down instead. Larfleeze no longer gets to display the many faces of avarice, reduced to a constant string of temper tantrums punctuated by combat he loses. His new foes are big bad space monsters from another dimension, threatening to unmake our existence for simple amusement now that their home world has already been totally destroyed (by them). It's the wrong kind of narrative for Larfleeze, one that calls on him to be a world-saving epic hero instead of the pissed off kid he usually is. Giffen and DeMatteis do their best to give Larfleeze a dog in this race by having the new villains take control of Stargrave, but that's a weak motive, one made even less convincing by Stargrave's own passivity and grating sarcasm. It worked in small doses during the ten-pagers, but in these twenty-page installments Stargrave becomes just as major a character as Larfleeze. That's too much responsibility for someone who uses most of his lines to make fun of and/or undermine what other characters just said.
Kolins is still Kolins, but the tone of the story has become graver and more significant, which consequently means the art doesn't get to be as uninhibited and silly as it used to be. There's a lot more angry Larfleeze now than the mix of fury, confusion, fear, and hubris he brought to the table before. Of all the characters to darken, this one needed it the very least, and it shows when comparing the Threshold-era visuals to the current ones.
I'm not going to say Larfleeze could never support his own comic. If nothing else, Giffen and Kolins taught me that the potential exists. Put him in the right setting and handle him with the right approach, and this clown can definitely carry a story. But I wonder if he'll just always operate better in a smaller space. If you asked Larfleeze, of course, he'd demand as many panels and as much dialogue as possible. Yet that extreme personality of his may be what makes him more entertaining in fewer pages. I don't know how much the character is to blame, how much falls on the creators, and (as with all of DC's line these days) how much is editorial nonsense. But I do know that after five months of back-up stories convincing me Larfleeze was worth my attention, it only took three months of stardom to undo all that work and reverse my opinion of him all over again.
Monday, September 9, 2013
Superb Heroes: Enigma
Superb Heroes is a semi-regular column celebrating comics that are exemplary and/or exceptional in their treatment of superoheroism.
The story of Enigma is the kind where everything that happens leads to a single significant event at the end. I don't mean to suggest that the journey isn't wonderful, just that the destination is really the point. The closing pages of the closing issue of this series see a comicbook character, creator, and fan join forces to battle a superpowered evil together in the real world. That's a fantastic final beat, and all the insane and earth-shattering events that build up to it exist so that the ending can feel earned and real and important. It could have been a comical conclusion, played for laughs, winking at the audience with a "Do you see what we've done here?" attitude. Instead, Peter Milligan, Duncan Fegredo, and Sherilyn van Valkenburgh craft a narrative that, while acknowledging its own outlandishness, also takes itself seriously enough to have significant stakes and a lasting impact.
Enigma is also a thoughtful look at superheroes as icons, questioning their positions as moral guides, and the very idea of morality at all. Enigma (the titular hero) doesn't just use lethal force against his opponents but, it is revealed later in the series, he's also responsible for their existence. He transformed random people into supervillains using his immense powers, simply so he'd have something to do. He had decided to become a superhero, and that required bad guys to fight. Forcing people to do something evil and then killing them for it is pretty rotten, as protagonist Michael Smith emphatically points out when he learns what Enigma has done. But because of how vast his abilities are, Enigma sees himself (perhaps accurately) as being more than human, and therefore operating outside of our concepts of right and wrong.
Enigma the book isn't really about Enigma the man anyway, or at least it's not focused on him. Michael is the story's center, the person we follow and relate to the most. He's as everyman as a character can get, a point Milligan's script drives home immediately and in no uncertain terms. The omniscient narrator of Enigma has a fabulous voice, sarcastic and sometimes even bored with the story, yet at other times openly concerned that it's not telling the story well enough. There's also an amazing reveal about the narrator's identity in the last issue (which I won't bother spoiling here) that makes its attitude throughout the series ten times more amusing in hindsight.
Anyway, the narrator explains right away how commonplace and insubstantial Michael's life is when everything begins. His dead-end relationship with its scheduled sex, his lack of ambition or energy, and similar details of his overall in-a-rutness are laid out clearly. He's shaken loose when he gets attacked by the first of Enigma's villains, The Head, a hideous creature with a cartoonishly swollen cranium from the brains it sucks out of its victims. Enigma kills The Head just in time to save Michael's life, and that encounter is the first major step toward Michael leaving behind his old self and replacing it with a more adventurous, passionate, active version. When he wakes in the hospital and sees on the news that Enigma is battling a new bad guy named The Truth, Michael recognizes both characters from his favorite childhood comicbook, and senses that he is connected to these mysterious events in a significant way. He's not wrong, and his journey leads him to become more than just a fan of Enigma, becoming his closest ally, his confidant, and his lover.
At first Michael pushes back hard against his homosexuality, but when he and Enigma finally meet face to face, he can no longer resist the feelings that have been bubbling up for so long. He falls rather madly for his childhood hero, and at first it's all he's ever wanted. Eventually their romance is twisted, tainted a little when Michael learns that, just like with all the supervillains, Enigma used his powers to make Michael fall in love with him, as opposed to it being a wholly natural attraction. Yet even in this knowledge, Michael chooses his new life over his old one, preferring to feel excited and self-confident and deeply in love than to return to his previous stagnation, even if it means allowing himself to succumb to a sort of lightweight form of mind control. This decision is the end of the character's personal arc, and pretty much the end of the entire series, because, as I said, this is Michael's story. Once his new life is firmly established, and he officially decides to stick with it rather than allowing Enigma to undo the changes he made to Michael's psyche, there's not much left to tell. Enigma's own story is left open-ended, but the book still reaches a fitting conclusion, and one that satisfies completely.
As for Enigma, he's not literally a fictional comicbook character come to life. He's a hyper-intelligent and superpowered human being who chooses to model himself after a comicbook hero after the real world almost ruins him for good. Thrown into a well in his infancy by his crazed mother, Enigma never had a name (that we know of) or a childhood or anything resembling a normal life. But he did not die down there on his own in the darkness. Using what were already impressive mental abilities, he was able to sustain himself by psychically asking the world for food and receiving lizards and bugs and other such critters to live on. This was his perfect existence for decades, contentedly living underground with no sense of the world above, not even truly aware that he was human or what that meant (if, indeed, it means anything). Finally, he was discovered and "rescued" from the well, brought to a mental institution that tried to make sense of his condition. Right away, Enigma was overwhelmed and mightily depressed by what he encountered, from the vast openness of this surface world to the ignorant and idiotic efforts of the humans around him. To him, they were no more intelligent or impressive than the lizards he used to eat, and so he used his powers to free himself and return to the only home he'd ever known. Sadly, his well was spoiled now by his knowledge of the reality outside it. Unable to truly get back the life he'd lost, he set out to invent himself a new one. More or less arbitrarily, he chose to transform into a long-forgotten 1970's cape-and-mask crimefighter named Enigma, and began turning other people into his foes and friends.
What works so well about this idea is that it acts as its own excellent superhero tale and as criticism of superheroes in general. Because Enigma is not a part of regular human society, and his mind does not operate at all the way anyone else's ever has, his interpretation of a typical superhero comic is quite different than the usual one. He does not see in the main character a beacon of righteousness and justice, because those words have no value for him. It's just a collection of costumes and names, people fighting one another as a way to pass the time, less-than-mindless entertainment with no morals to teach or lessons to impart on those who read it. At the same time, Enigma inadvertently becomes a legitimate hero, saving Michael from an existence he hated, bringing a bit of happiness where once there was gloom. And he does everything he does in an attempt to prepare himself to battle his mother, the woman who tossed him down a well all those years ago, and is now a horrible monster, a distorted reflection of her son with the same level of power he possesses but none of the intellect. She's a mindless beast, determined to finish what she started and finally kill her child, and Enigma knows he'll need help to stop her. It's a classic hero-villain dynamic, and not an entirely unusual mother-son relationship either, so while his methods are perhaps not the best available, we still root for Enigma in the end.
Milligan's writing is a big part of the reader ultimately siding with Enigma is spite of his more unlikable actions. The character has such a matter-of-fact voice, a detached outlook that makes it difficult to be angry with him. He's not coming from the same viewpoint as we are, we're not supposed to understand or even necessarily connect with him. For that we have Michael, and through Michael's choice to love and forgive Enigma we are able to do the same.
But even if you don't land where Michael does, even if the existential/nihilistic overtones of this series rub you the wrong way throughout and make you angry with the ending, there's some seriously breathtaking art in these issues. Duncan Fegredo brings a dreamlike quality to much of the series. Things move strangely and feel like they are barely held together, but it's not a sketchy or uncertain style at all. Some of the strongest panels are the smallest, tiny moments Fegredo includes to greatly enhance or add to a scene. These are usually quick, close shots of someone's face, a brief flash of emotion that adds a lot to whatever page it's on. It's a carefully composed piece, even if the overall effect is one of out-of-control energy and madness.
The designs for Enimga and, more than that, his villains are all exceptional. Even in this comicbook, they feel like characters from a comicbook, so much broader and more bizarre than everything else we see. They are less restrained than their actual 1970's comicbook selves, which we also get to occasionally see over the course of the series. Michael still has his old issues, and we get glimpses of pages here and there when the story calls for it, when something happening in real time is a reference to something from the fictional original book. Fegredo switches up his style in these places so the comic-within-the-comic is always distinct and immediately recognizable. It looks and feels like a series from its era, whereas the real-life Enigma is very much a contemporary piece (and I say that now, even though it's twenty years old). Fegredo clearly has a reverence for a well-done superhero story, and brings all of that admiration to this book, taking his time to craft the super-beings as appropriately impressive, terrifying, awe-inspiring figures.
If Fegredo is responsible for the surreality of Enigma, it is colorist Sherilyn van Valkenburgh who brings things back down to Earth, though not in a way that at all dampens what Fegredo is doing. The coloring is dark and moody, more a reflection of Michael's internal life than Enigma's. It has its bright spots, plenty of harsh oranges and reds that can at times dominate the page. But these tend to come from fire and blood and the like, colors that accompany violence and danger, not necessarily meant to brighten the title's darker general tones. What van Valkenburgh does best is striking a balance between panels with realistic coloring and those that are more exaggerated or drenched in a single hue. When things are ordinary and/or the gravity of a scene brings reality crashing down, her palette reaches further and colors everything more or less as it would be in our world. Then in the most heightened scenes, a single shade will often take over, more starkly disconnecting the images from what the reader knows. So while Fegredo's work as a whole is less interested in realism than van Valkenburgh's, the two artists still collaborate well, playing into one another's strengths and weaknesses in equal turn as needed to deliver a strong final product.
Besides, the mash-up of things from reality and from someone's imagination is what Enigma's all about. The superhero Michael adored as a child becomes his flesh-and-blood boyfriend as an adult. Enigma takes characters invented by someone else and brings them to life so he can combat the real-life mother who wants to end him. The fictional and actual ram up against one another all throughout this series, until Michael finally picks one over the other and makes them into the same thing.
The story of Enigma is the kind where everything that happens leads to a single significant event at the end. I don't mean to suggest that the journey isn't wonderful, just that the destination is really the point. The closing pages of the closing issue of this series see a comicbook character, creator, and fan join forces to battle a superpowered evil together in the real world. That's a fantastic final beat, and all the insane and earth-shattering events that build up to it exist so that the ending can feel earned and real and important. It could have been a comical conclusion, played for laughs, winking at the audience with a "Do you see what we've done here?" attitude. Instead, Peter Milligan, Duncan Fegredo, and Sherilyn van Valkenburgh craft a narrative that, while acknowledging its own outlandishness, also takes itself seriously enough to have significant stakes and a lasting impact.
Enigma is also a thoughtful look at superheroes as icons, questioning their positions as moral guides, and the very idea of morality at all. Enigma (the titular hero) doesn't just use lethal force against his opponents but, it is revealed later in the series, he's also responsible for their existence. He transformed random people into supervillains using his immense powers, simply so he'd have something to do. He had decided to become a superhero, and that required bad guys to fight. Forcing people to do something evil and then killing them for it is pretty rotten, as protagonist Michael Smith emphatically points out when he learns what Enigma has done. But because of how vast his abilities are, Enigma sees himself (perhaps accurately) as being more than human, and therefore operating outside of our concepts of right and wrong.
Enigma the book isn't really about Enigma the man anyway, or at least it's not focused on him. Michael is the story's center, the person we follow and relate to the most. He's as everyman as a character can get, a point Milligan's script drives home immediately and in no uncertain terms. The omniscient narrator of Enigma has a fabulous voice, sarcastic and sometimes even bored with the story, yet at other times openly concerned that it's not telling the story well enough. There's also an amazing reveal about the narrator's identity in the last issue (which I won't bother spoiling here) that makes its attitude throughout the series ten times more amusing in hindsight.
Anyway, the narrator explains right away how commonplace and insubstantial Michael's life is when everything begins. His dead-end relationship with its scheduled sex, his lack of ambition or energy, and similar details of his overall in-a-rutness are laid out clearly. He's shaken loose when he gets attacked by the first of Enigma's villains, The Head, a hideous creature with a cartoonishly swollen cranium from the brains it sucks out of its victims. Enigma kills The Head just in time to save Michael's life, and that encounter is the first major step toward Michael leaving behind his old self and replacing it with a more adventurous, passionate, active version. When he wakes in the hospital and sees on the news that Enigma is battling a new bad guy named The Truth, Michael recognizes both characters from his favorite childhood comicbook, and senses that he is connected to these mysterious events in a significant way. He's not wrong, and his journey leads him to become more than just a fan of Enigma, becoming his closest ally, his confidant, and his lover.
At first Michael pushes back hard against his homosexuality, but when he and Enigma finally meet face to face, he can no longer resist the feelings that have been bubbling up for so long. He falls rather madly for his childhood hero, and at first it's all he's ever wanted. Eventually their romance is twisted, tainted a little when Michael learns that, just like with all the supervillains, Enigma used his powers to make Michael fall in love with him, as opposed to it being a wholly natural attraction. Yet even in this knowledge, Michael chooses his new life over his old one, preferring to feel excited and self-confident and deeply in love than to return to his previous stagnation, even if it means allowing himself to succumb to a sort of lightweight form of mind control. This decision is the end of the character's personal arc, and pretty much the end of the entire series, because, as I said, this is Michael's story. Once his new life is firmly established, and he officially decides to stick with it rather than allowing Enigma to undo the changes he made to Michael's psyche, there's not much left to tell. Enigma's own story is left open-ended, but the book still reaches a fitting conclusion, and one that satisfies completely.
As for Enigma, he's not literally a fictional comicbook character come to life. He's a hyper-intelligent and superpowered human being who chooses to model himself after a comicbook hero after the real world almost ruins him for good. Thrown into a well in his infancy by his crazed mother, Enigma never had a name (that we know of) or a childhood or anything resembling a normal life. But he did not die down there on his own in the darkness. Using what were already impressive mental abilities, he was able to sustain himself by psychically asking the world for food and receiving lizards and bugs and other such critters to live on. This was his perfect existence for decades, contentedly living underground with no sense of the world above, not even truly aware that he was human or what that meant (if, indeed, it means anything). Finally, he was discovered and "rescued" from the well, brought to a mental institution that tried to make sense of his condition. Right away, Enigma was overwhelmed and mightily depressed by what he encountered, from the vast openness of this surface world to the ignorant and idiotic efforts of the humans around him. To him, they were no more intelligent or impressive than the lizards he used to eat, and so he used his powers to free himself and return to the only home he'd ever known. Sadly, his well was spoiled now by his knowledge of the reality outside it. Unable to truly get back the life he'd lost, he set out to invent himself a new one. More or less arbitrarily, he chose to transform into a long-forgotten 1970's cape-and-mask crimefighter named Enigma, and began turning other people into his foes and friends.
What works so well about this idea is that it acts as its own excellent superhero tale and as criticism of superheroes in general. Because Enigma is not a part of regular human society, and his mind does not operate at all the way anyone else's ever has, his interpretation of a typical superhero comic is quite different than the usual one. He does not see in the main character a beacon of righteousness and justice, because those words have no value for him. It's just a collection of costumes and names, people fighting one another as a way to pass the time, less-than-mindless entertainment with no morals to teach or lessons to impart on those who read it. At the same time, Enigma inadvertently becomes a legitimate hero, saving Michael from an existence he hated, bringing a bit of happiness where once there was gloom. And he does everything he does in an attempt to prepare himself to battle his mother, the woman who tossed him down a well all those years ago, and is now a horrible monster, a distorted reflection of her son with the same level of power he possesses but none of the intellect. She's a mindless beast, determined to finish what she started and finally kill her child, and Enigma knows he'll need help to stop her. It's a classic hero-villain dynamic, and not an entirely unusual mother-son relationship either, so while his methods are perhaps not the best available, we still root for Enigma in the end.
Milligan's writing is a big part of the reader ultimately siding with Enigma is spite of his more unlikable actions. The character has such a matter-of-fact voice, a detached outlook that makes it difficult to be angry with him. He's not coming from the same viewpoint as we are, we're not supposed to understand or even necessarily connect with him. For that we have Michael, and through Michael's choice to love and forgive Enigma we are able to do the same.
But even if you don't land where Michael does, even if the existential/nihilistic overtones of this series rub you the wrong way throughout and make you angry with the ending, there's some seriously breathtaking art in these issues. Duncan Fegredo brings a dreamlike quality to much of the series. Things move strangely and feel like they are barely held together, but it's not a sketchy or uncertain style at all. Some of the strongest panels are the smallest, tiny moments Fegredo includes to greatly enhance or add to a scene. These are usually quick, close shots of someone's face, a brief flash of emotion that adds a lot to whatever page it's on. It's a carefully composed piece, even if the overall effect is one of out-of-control energy and madness.
The designs for Enimga and, more than that, his villains are all exceptional. Even in this comicbook, they feel like characters from a comicbook, so much broader and more bizarre than everything else we see. They are less restrained than their actual 1970's comicbook selves, which we also get to occasionally see over the course of the series. Michael still has his old issues, and we get glimpses of pages here and there when the story calls for it, when something happening in real time is a reference to something from the fictional original book. Fegredo switches up his style in these places so the comic-within-the-comic is always distinct and immediately recognizable. It looks and feels like a series from its era, whereas the real-life Enigma is very much a contemporary piece (and I say that now, even though it's twenty years old). Fegredo clearly has a reverence for a well-done superhero story, and brings all of that admiration to this book, taking his time to craft the super-beings as appropriately impressive, terrifying, awe-inspiring figures.
If Fegredo is responsible for the surreality of Enigma, it is colorist Sherilyn van Valkenburgh who brings things back down to Earth, though not in a way that at all dampens what Fegredo is doing. The coloring is dark and moody, more a reflection of Michael's internal life than Enigma's. It has its bright spots, plenty of harsh oranges and reds that can at times dominate the page. But these tend to come from fire and blood and the like, colors that accompany violence and danger, not necessarily meant to brighten the title's darker general tones. What van Valkenburgh does best is striking a balance between panels with realistic coloring and those that are more exaggerated or drenched in a single hue. When things are ordinary and/or the gravity of a scene brings reality crashing down, her palette reaches further and colors everything more or less as it would be in our world. Then in the most heightened scenes, a single shade will often take over, more starkly disconnecting the images from what the reader knows. So while Fegredo's work as a whole is less interested in realism than van Valkenburgh's, the two artists still collaborate well, playing into one another's strengths and weaknesses in equal turn as needed to deliver a strong final product.
Besides, the mash-up of things from reality and from someone's imagination is what Enigma's all about. The superhero Michael adored as a child becomes his flesh-and-blood boyfriend as an adult. Enigma takes characters invented by someone else and brings them to life so he can combat the real-life mother who wants to end him. The fictional and actual ram up against one another all throughout this series, until Michael finally picks one over the other and makes them into the same thing.
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Why am I Still Reading Sex?
I bought the first issue of Sex because I usually like Joe Casey's writing. I bought the second because I was so impressed with Piotr Kowalski art and Brad Simpson's art. Since then, I've struggled with whether or not to get each of the other issues, because a story that initially seemed like it was gearing up for better things has grown tired, bordering on dull, in only six chapters. So far I've continued to follow the title, but many aspects of it grate my nerves and don't seem to be getting any better. Yet the few redeeming qualities it has are always just good enough to keep me coming back, making Sex a frustrating but thus far effective mix of good, bad, and ugly.
The primary problem I have with this book is its protagonist, Simon Cooke. He's barely a character. Though his history is the foundation of the supposed premise of the entire series, in the present he is a passive un-man, wallowing in...I don't even know what. Self-pity? Self-loathing? Ennui? Quiet seething rage? Whatever emotion(s) he's feeling, feeling them is all he ever does. He never acts, speaks in vague and foolish terms, and offers no insight or assistance to his fellow cast members or the audience as to what's going on in his mind. Cooke used to be a superhero called the Armored Saint, but has given that up now and is struggling to find meaning in his life without the alter ego to rely on. I can see why giving up the costumed crimefighting lifestyle would be a rocky transition, but to see even a half-step of effort on Cooke's part would go a long way. This isn't the story of him trying and failing to establish a "normal" life. It's him saying he'll try but then refusing to do so, instead ending up in a stagnant state, neither living his old life nor his new one.
To make matters worse, the only people Cooke ever interacts with are his assistant Larry and his lawyer Warren, neither of whom are especially interesting. Larry is at least good at her job, and is the only person capable of getting Cooke to actually do anything as far as running his company or at all behaving like member of society. Don't get me wrong, I don't give a shit if the heroes of the things I read act like regular members of society, but since that is what Cooke claims is his whole goal, it's nice to see someone who legitimately wants to help him achieve it. Without Larry, the infinitesimal amount of forward progress this narrative has managed to accomplish wouldn't even have happened. What doesn't work about Larry is that she's a one-note character. Because Cooke is so stubbornly unwilling to become the man he says he wants to become, all Larry ever has the time or space for is reminding her boss of his obligations and doing her damnedest to convince him to fulfill them. She gets almost no story of her own, save for being aggressively hit on by a politician in the most recent issue.
Warren is just a scumbag who I'd rather not spend any more time with. I get that he's a lawyer for rich pricks like Cooke, and therefore a bit of a prick himself necessarily, but that doesn't make him easier to swallow. He's not a villain, but he's a bad guy through and through, and seeing him give half-hearted and self-interested advice to Cooke, which Cooke then refuses to take because he's so boneheaded, is wearing me down.
There is one person in Cooke's life who I'm interested in and want to see more of, but she's dead and only appears in flashback. Her name is Quinn, and from what we've seen she was essentially Alfred to Cooke's Batman, and her death is the whole reason he gave up being the Armored Saint. The details of their relationship haven't been revealed, but the few scenes she's been in have established Quinn as smart, capable, and self-assured, not qualities that many others possess in this series. A small but significant part of why I haven't dropped Sex yet is my eagerness to get to know Quinn and figure out why she ever teamed up with Cooke, and what exactly motivated her to ask him to retire from her deathbed.
Even worse than Cooke and his associates is the character being built up as the main villain of this tale, The Old Man. Here's what we know about this guy: he's evil. How do we know that? He murders women he's having sex with in the middle of having sex with them. He has his own Pulp-Fiction-style gimp who tortures people with anal sex so The Old Man can interrogate them. Basically, his role is to combine sex and violence in trite yet highly offensive ways that make no sense and serve no purpose just so the reader can keep being reminded that "THIS IS THE VILLAIN!" Nevermind that we were told right away that the dude was a major crime boss with a long history of wickedness who plans on using the Armored Saint's recent departure to take over the underworld once again. Apparently we need to be shown just how depraved The Old Man can be, more than once, over far too many pages. It's insulting to my intelligence to have to get through these scenes that say nothing new about the character or the story just so the book can justify its title.
So the lead hero and lead villain both drive me crazy. What could I possibly be reading Sex for? Surely there's more to like about it than the slight chance that I might get some new Quinn scenes (which hasn't actually happened in a few issues).
First of all, there's the art. I meant what I said up top; the main reason I picked up Sex #2 was because of how impressive the debut's visuals were. The sheer number of lines Piotr Kowalski draws in every issue is astonishing, particularly when he gets to do a cityscape. There is such immense detail in the buildings, rather than having them merely be looming suggestions of skyscrapers. Every window is actually there, and it happens even when all that's visible are glimpses of a few random buildings in the background of a panel. This carries over to all of the various settings—large offices, nightclubs, hospitals, etc. And the characters, too, especially The Old Man, whose face is so wrinkled he looks like a dried up reptile. But everyone has their own look, individualized personalities and fashions that say a lot about them, even the drabbest characters. It's a well-thought-out world Kowalski has built, as varied and full as our own. There's not a ton of violence, but what's there is always done efficiently, not overblown for shock value but still quick and brutal and sometimes hard to look at. There is, naturally, a lot of sex, and even though it rarely adds anything of import to the story, Kowalski at least makes it fittingly realistic. People are proportioned like people, and their whole bodies are involved.
Brad Simpson's coloring is equally fantastic. He's playful with it, not worried about realism in the same way as Kowalski seems to be, and the combination is what makes Sex look so good. There are a lot of flat colors, figures done in all one color against backgrounds done in a contrasting one. Some whole pages are washed in a single color, while others are done in a more down-to-Earth manner, with everything colored more or less as it would actually be. And these decisions are not made arbitrarily; Simpson is more responsible for establishing mood than any of the other creators. Brash colors flare up momentarily to match characters' emotions doing the same. Flashbacks are marked by their soft grayness, allowing them to appear in the middle of present-tense panels without ever being confusing. There is a mix of neon and muted hues that works surprisingly well, and underlines that Cooke abandoned one world for another but doesn't really operate in either. This series is fun and stimulating to look at, and while not a great deal actually goes on in a given issue in terms of the narrative, the images are always dynamic and gripping.
Good art alone doesn't make Sex worth the price of admission, at least not six issues deep. There's got to be something in the story that I care about enough to put up with the garbage, and in the case of Sex, it's mostly the stars of the B-plot that are holding my attention. Where Cooke and The Old Man turned me off a long time ago and have never improved one inch, Keenan Wade and The Alpha Brothers continue to be people worth watching.
The Alpha Brothers are the dual heads of an illegal organization of some kind, and as people they're not all that deep. They might be actual brothers, might be boyfriends, might be both, but their personalities are largely indistinguishable and they're activities aren't any more or less exciting than any other baddy in any other book. What I like about them is their matter-of-fact, businesslike approach to what they do. In the middle of killing a guy who owes them money, the brothers get into a spat over exactly how much he owes them, which leads them to pull out their smartphones and compare the numbers they each have on file. This outlook makes me laugh, talking about crime in terms of clients and reports and data. It makes sense for the modern world, and may well be what current real-world criminals necessarily have to do, but either way it feels different for a superhero comicbook and I always appreciate that. Like Quinn, The Alpha Brothers don't get a massive amount of stage time, but I always look forward to their moments in the spotlight, and rely on them for a bit of comic relief and intelligent conversation in this series.
Keenan Wade is the real reason to buy Sex, though, far and away a better character than anyone else. He's just a young waiter right now, but has ambitions of being the next great hero, basically seeing himself as a replacement for the Armored Saint, as far as I can tell. But his methods are unorthodox; it's Keenan who fucks with The Alpha Brothers' numbers, and he's currently considering joining a revived street gang called The Breaks so he can battle the baddies from the inside. He's got fighting skills, displayed when he wrecks some dickhead who's abusing his girlfriend in the club where Keenan works. And he's just a downright decent dude, as seen through his honest and caring attitude with his own girlfriend, perhaps the only truly affectionate relationship in the book. He also has some sort of unknown history with Cooke and Quinn, and is just as disgusted and disinterested in the man Cooke is now as I am, making Keenan a uniquely relatable member of the cast. It also gives me the smallest sliver of hope that Cooke might actually turn into someone I want to read about, should his and Keenan's stories ever collide due to whatever connection already exists between them. We've already seen Keenan break into Cooke's house, planning to announce his intentions of becoming the new head vigilante in town. But once he sees what a waste Cooke is these days, Keenan bails, setting off on his own to do things his way.
I can't yet tell what Sex wants to say, about superheroes or modern life or anything at all. It's getting to its point far too slowly and unsteadily, and it centers on characters that mostly range from the dissatisfying to the despicable. The few people I care about are minor players, and though I adore the artwork, it's not going to keep me around indefinitely. I'm hesitant to drop it because, for all its flaws, it's still different than most of the cape comics on the shelves, and every issue does something to delight and/or surprise me. Also, Cooke still has plenty of potential to grow into a likable leading man. He's flimsy and underdeveloped so far, which is bad, but leaves ample room for details to be revealed or added that would redeem him. So I guess I'm holding out hope, putting maybe a bit too much trust in creators I admire, and crossing my fingers that this is all headed somewhere. My desire to keep spending my time in this world is waning rapidly, though, and if things don't turn around soon, I'm hard-pressed to believe I'll be reading Sex for more than another couple issues.
The primary problem I have with this book is its protagonist, Simon Cooke. He's barely a character. Though his history is the foundation of the supposed premise of the entire series, in the present he is a passive un-man, wallowing in...I don't even know what. Self-pity? Self-loathing? Ennui? Quiet seething rage? Whatever emotion(s) he's feeling, feeling them is all he ever does. He never acts, speaks in vague and foolish terms, and offers no insight or assistance to his fellow cast members or the audience as to what's going on in his mind. Cooke used to be a superhero called the Armored Saint, but has given that up now and is struggling to find meaning in his life without the alter ego to rely on. I can see why giving up the costumed crimefighting lifestyle would be a rocky transition, but to see even a half-step of effort on Cooke's part would go a long way. This isn't the story of him trying and failing to establish a "normal" life. It's him saying he'll try but then refusing to do so, instead ending up in a stagnant state, neither living his old life nor his new one.
To make matters worse, the only people Cooke ever interacts with are his assistant Larry and his lawyer Warren, neither of whom are especially interesting. Larry is at least good at her job, and is the only person capable of getting Cooke to actually do anything as far as running his company or at all behaving like member of society. Don't get me wrong, I don't give a shit if the heroes of the things I read act like regular members of society, but since that is what Cooke claims is his whole goal, it's nice to see someone who legitimately wants to help him achieve it. Without Larry, the infinitesimal amount of forward progress this narrative has managed to accomplish wouldn't even have happened. What doesn't work about Larry is that she's a one-note character. Because Cooke is so stubbornly unwilling to become the man he says he wants to become, all Larry ever has the time or space for is reminding her boss of his obligations and doing her damnedest to convince him to fulfill them. She gets almost no story of her own, save for being aggressively hit on by a politician in the most recent issue.
Warren is just a scumbag who I'd rather not spend any more time with. I get that he's a lawyer for rich pricks like Cooke, and therefore a bit of a prick himself necessarily, but that doesn't make him easier to swallow. He's not a villain, but he's a bad guy through and through, and seeing him give half-hearted and self-interested advice to Cooke, which Cooke then refuses to take because he's so boneheaded, is wearing me down.
There is one person in Cooke's life who I'm interested in and want to see more of, but she's dead and only appears in flashback. Her name is Quinn, and from what we've seen she was essentially Alfred to Cooke's Batman, and her death is the whole reason he gave up being the Armored Saint. The details of their relationship haven't been revealed, but the few scenes she's been in have established Quinn as smart, capable, and self-assured, not qualities that many others possess in this series. A small but significant part of why I haven't dropped Sex yet is my eagerness to get to know Quinn and figure out why she ever teamed up with Cooke, and what exactly motivated her to ask him to retire from her deathbed.
Even worse than Cooke and his associates is the character being built up as the main villain of this tale, The Old Man. Here's what we know about this guy: he's evil. How do we know that? He murders women he's having sex with in the middle of having sex with them. He has his own Pulp-Fiction-style gimp who tortures people with anal sex so The Old Man can interrogate them. Basically, his role is to combine sex and violence in trite yet highly offensive ways that make no sense and serve no purpose just so the reader can keep being reminded that "THIS IS THE VILLAIN!" Nevermind that we were told right away that the dude was a major crime boss with a long history of wickedness who plans on using the Armored Saint's recent departure to take over the underworld once again. Apparently we need to be shown just how depraved The Old Man can be, more than once, over far too many pages. It's insulting to my intelligence to have to get through these scenes that say nothing new about the character or the story just so the book can justify its title.
So the lead hero and lead villain both drive me crazy. What could I possibly be reading Sex for? Surely there's more to like about it than the slight chance that I might get some new Quinn scenes (which hasn't actually happened in a few issues).
First of all, there's the art. I meant what I said up top; the main reason I picked up Sex #2 was because of how impressive the debut's visuals were. The sheer number of lines Piotr Kowalski draws in every issue is astonishing, particularly when he gets to do a cityscape. There is such immense detail in the buildings, rather than having them merely be looming suggestions of skyscrapers. Every window is actually there, and it happens even when all that's visible are glimpses of a few random buildings in the background of a panel. This carries over to all of the various settings—large offices, nightclubs, hospitals, etc. And the characters, too, especially The Old Man, whose face is so wrinkled he looks like a dried up reptile. But everyone has their own look, individualized personalities and fashions that say a lot about them, even the drabbest characters. It's a well-thought-out world Kowalski has built, as varied and full as our own. There's not a ton of violence, but what's there is always done efficiently, not overblown for shock value but still quick and brutal and sometimes hard to look at. There is, naturally, a lot of sex, and even though it rarely adds anything of import to the story, Kowalski at least makes it fittingly realistic. People are proportioned like people, and their whole bodies are involved.
Brad Simpson's coloring is equally fantastic. He's playful with it, not worried about realism in the same way as Kowalski seems to be, and the combination is what makes Sex look so good. There are a lot of flat colors, figures done in all one color against backgrounds done in a contrasting one. Some whole pages are washed in a single color, while others are done in a more down-to-Earth manner, with everything colored more or less as it would actually be. And these decisions are not made arbitrarily; Simpson is more responsible for establishing mood than any of the other creators. Brash colors flare up momentarily to match characters' emotions doing the same. Flashbacks are marked by their soft grayness, allowing them to appear in the middle of present-tense panels without ever being confusing. There is a mix of neon and muted hues that works surprisingly well, and underlines that Cooke abandoned one world for another but doesn't really operate in either. This series is fun and stimulating to look at, and while not a great deal actually goes on in a given issue in terms of the narrative, the images are always dynamic and gripping.
Good art alone doesn't make Sex worth the price of admission, at least not six issues deep. There's got to be something in the story that I care about enough to put up with the garbage, and in the case of Sex, it's mostly the stars of the B-plot that are holding my attention. Where Cooke and The Old Man turned me off a long time ago and have never improved one inch, Keenan Wade and The Alpha Brothers continue to be people worth watching.
The Alpha Brothers are the dual heads of an illegal organization of some kind, and as people they're not all that deep. They might be actual brothers, might be boyfriends, might be both, but their personalities are largely indistinguishable and they're activities aren't any more or less exciting than any other baddy in any other book. What I like about them is their matter-of-fact, businesslike approach to what they do. In the middle of killing a guy who owes them money, the brothers get into a spat over exactly how much he owes them, which leads them to pull out their smartphones and compare the numbers they each have on file. This outlook makes me laugh, talking about crime in terms of clients and reports and data. It makes sense for the modern world, and may well be what current real-world criminals necessarily have to do, but either way it feels different for a superhero comicbook and I always appreciate that. Like Quinn, The Alpha Brothers don't get a massive amount of stage time, but I always look forward to their moments in the spotlight, and rely on them for a bit of comic relief and intelligent conversation in this series.
Keenan Wade is the real reason to buy Sex, though, far and away a better character than anyone else. He's just a young waiter right now, but has ambitions of being the next great hero, basically seeing himself as a replacement for the Armored Saint, as far as I can tell. But his methods are unorthodox; it's Keenan who fucks with The Alpha Brothers' numbers, and he's currently considering joining a revived street gang called The Breaks so he can battle the baddies from the inside. He's got fighting skills, displayed when he wrecks some dickhead who's abusing his girlfriend in the club where Keenan works. And he's just a downright decent dude, as seen through his honest and caring attitude with his own girlfriend, perhaps the only truly affectionate relationship in the book. He also has some sort of unknown history with Cooke and Quinn, and is just as disgusted and disinterested in the man Cooke is now as I am, making Keenan a uniquely relatable member of the cast. It also gives me the smallest sliver of hope that Cooke might actually turn into someone I want to read about, should his and Keenan's stories ever collide due to whatever connection already exists between them. We've already seen Keenan break into Cooke's house, planning to announce his intentions of becoming the new head vigilante in town. But once he sees what a waste Cooke is these days, Keenan bails, setting off on his own to do things his way.
I can't yet tell what Sex wants to say, about superheroes or modern life or anything at all. It's getting to its point far too slowly and unsteadily, and it centers on characters that mostly range from the dissatisfying to the despicable. The few people I care about are minor players, and though I adore the artwork, it's not going to keep me around indefinitely. I'm hesitant to drop it because, for all its flaws, it's still different than most of the cape comics on the shelves, and every issue does something to delight and/or surprise me. Also, Cooke still has plenty of potential to grow into a likable leading man. He's flimsy and underdeveloped so far, which is bad, but leaves ample room for details to be revealed or added that would redeem him. So I guess I'm holding out hope, putting maybe a bit too much trust in creators I admire, and crossing my fingers that this is all headed somewhere. My desire to keep spending my time in this world is waning rapidly, though, and if things don't turn around soon, I'm hard-pressed to believe I'll be reading Sex for more than another couple issues.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)