An Asskicking By Any Other Name: Avengers Vs. X-Men #2 Review

Avengers Vs. X-Men #2 is a big old action movie of a comic book, where the first punch gets thrown by the second page and the hits keep on coming until we’re reminded by the last page that all this hot, sweet superhero-on-superhero action (wait, I think that came out wrong) is in service of a plot related to the Phoenix Force coming to destroy the world before the Avengers movie even has a chance to come out.

This book is filled with satisfying, balls-to-the-wall action… but it is also filled with overblown, florid and somewhat pretentious captions that read like a sixteen-year-old either trying to use his comics addiction for an easy C in Intro to Poetry, or to charm the Drama Club skank into turning a backrub into a front rub. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

If you’re looking for any kind of story advancement in this issue, you’re not gonna find much. The issue opens with the X-Men and The Avengers beating the unholy shit out of each other, and pretty much ends the same, with only the minor plot points of, “Yup, Phoenix Force… still coming,” and “Yeah, Hope… still getting jacked up on the Phoenix Force,” being advanced. If this was a modern Grandmasters’ chess game, this issue would be the equivalent of Bobby Fischer darkly muttering about Jews while some scabrous geek flips on the opposing IBM supercomputer.

Gotham State: Batman #8 Review

I have said before that the Court of Owls storyline in Batman has followed a familiar and well-trod path that was previously laid down in stories like The Cult: Batman is overwhelmed by an implacable foe and imprisoned. Batman is psychologically broken down. Batman escapes and returns to his cave to cower for a while. The villain that broke Batman begins to run amok in Gotham City. Batman mopes around and listens to The Shins until Natalie Portman teaches him what it’s like to really feel. Wait, something there’s not quite right… I meant Batman returns to his cave and snivels. I think. Maybe. Whatever.

Anyway, Batman #8 continues following that classic old chestnut of an arc by starting the part of the story where Batman locates and reattachs his balls, and begins his counterattack against the villain who broke him. Based on what has come before, both in this story arc and in the similar stories that preceeded and clearly inspired it, this is expected and as predictable as night following day or Natalie Portman being introduced in a meet cute in any movie in which she appears that doesn’t include ballet or lightsabers.

Just because it is predictable, however, does not mean that it is boring. Because Jesus Christ, this is an intense and fun comic book… provided you can stop yourself from saying with every page turn, “I read this when it was written by Jim Starlin, drawn by Bernie Wrightson, and Natalie Portman was meeting cute with French assassins and posssibly the occasional delighted sweaty ‘fan’  in a stained raincoat.”

Who Knows What Evil Lurks In The Sacks Of Men?

It is Wednesday, as it winds up being every week, no matter how loudly we pray on Fridays, or how little we remember our Saturdays. However, Wednesdays means two things: the beginning of the fatigue hysteria that will dog us until Friday night’s first beer, and more importantly: new comics! And not a moment too soon, given the generally disappointing nature of most of last week’s biggest books.

But, as Scarlett O’Hara – or perhaps Scarlett from G.I. Joe – said: “Tomorrow is another day… only today is tomorrow. Wait, what? Look, trails!” Either way, it means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But there’s some good shit there, huh? We’ve got the first issue of Garth Ennis’s The Shadow, the opening of Scott Snyder’s Night of The Owls crossover Batman event, Jonathan Hickman’s second Manhattan Projects, and a ton of other good looking stuff!

But before we can review any of them, we gotta read them. So, as always: see you tomorrow, suckers!

Unctous Sodomites And Vain, Pampered Whores: The Shade #7 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: And one last brief review of one of last week’s comics before the comic stores open…

Looking back over this past week’s reviews, it seems like there wasn’t very much I actually liked. Which is a bummer, but just the way things go sometimes; some weeks you get journeymen turning in inspired craftsmanship, others you get dillitanates who are fucking around in the medium for the sheer, lunatic thrill of it.

Thankfully, The Shade is no dillitante… and neither is writer James Robinson, who is continuing via The Shade miniseries to channel the closest to a Jack Knight Starman story that we are every likely to see again.

Robinson is just over halfway through this 12-issue miniseries with this issue, and yet amazingly, it is not a bad place to jump on if you haven’t been reading from the beginning. Yes, it is mid story – even mid ministory within the series, which recalls adventures from the title character’s past – but Robinson gives the reader a three page recap at the start of the book, in the middle of a fight, to bring us up to speed. Which is valuable, and the kind of thing that I like to see in comics – I prefer a book that I can pick up and follow without having to hunt up back issues or old trades – although I’ll admit that the sequence is dialogue-heavy exposition.

America’s Got Rising Stars: America’s Got Powers #1 Review

America’s Got Powers is a book that is based on a simple and brilliant idea. That idea is J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars.

Writer Jonathan Ross is a well-known BBC television host who has dabbled in writing comics (he wrote Turf for Image Comics last year), and who has gone on record for saying that he loves comics more than masturbation. Which is a bold statement; I personally buy about 30 comic books a week and spend more on them than I used to spend on my two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, but compared to the Happy Slappy? A distant second, my friend… although I must admit I sometimes read my comics with my left hand so it feels like a stranger’s reading them. But I digress.

Ross is writing about American popular culture from the point of view of a European, which means that he sees us from the lowest possible common demominator view: a sporting event and television-obsessed unthinking angry mob, who would not only happily watch and / or attend an event where people are beaten to unholy and crippled pulps, but would bring their children and buy them cheap plastic souveniers of the savagery. Note that I am not saying that Ross is wrong about us. However, it is a little insulting to hear that kind of broad generalization from a lime-sucking buck-toothed rampant practitioner of pubic school buggery. But I’m getting off point again.

Ghost In The Machine: Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 #9 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Into every generation a spoiler is born: one in all the world, a chosen one. 

The kid in me says: “You’ve been willing to accept the concept of a robot Buffy since at least season five. when the Buffybot was introduced. And then, you accepted that a Buffybot was built well enough to fool even close friends, and anatomically correct enough to satisfy Spike’s carnal desires, despite the inevitable sheet metal barbs always found in home robot construction. Why is it so unbelievable, should Buffy’s consciousness be placed into a Buffybot, that she wouldn’t notice the difference between the robot and her body?”

But then the grown-up in me says: “Even if I were unaware that my consciousness had been transferred into a robot, as a human being older than seven, I would notice if I hadn’t taken a dump for several weeks.”

Alan Who? DC Debuts Before Watchmen Interior Art At C2E2

This past weekend brought us the C2E2 convention in Chicago, “C2E2” of course being an acronym for “a convention that’s growing like a weed since it is now almost purely and theoretically impossible to attend SDCC.” And since DC Comics’s Before Watchmen titles begin dropping in June, several weeks before the Big Dance in San Diego, and since displaying comics-related righteous indignation would technically require Alan Moore to obtain a difficult-to-secure work visa, it was a perfect time for Dan DiDio to take advantage of the con to trot out the creators and show off some preview art.

Pretty much all the creators were on the panel – you can get a pretty decent first-person recap of the panel at Comic Book Resources – but two highlights were Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan writer J. Michael Straczynski’s comments on Alan Moore’s… shall we say inchoate, snide rage over the entire project:

The Second Best There Is: Scarlet Spider #4 Review

Okay, I finally get it. Scarlet Spider is for people who want to buy both Spider-Man and Wolverine, but only have three bucks a month to throw around.

Make no mistake: this isn’t me screeching that Scarlet Spider is a bad comic book, because it isn’t; it is reasonably well-executed with a decent story, plot, characters, and pretty good art. But in its DNA, this is a book for the rare and nihilistic comics reader who says – presumably while listening to “classic” Limp Bizkit – “You know what would really make Spider-Man an ageless comic book hero? If someone would just write him as a stab-crazed, nearly-remorseless dickhead.”

This issue finds out protagonist being attacked by a bunch of ninjas out for revenge over the fact that, in his past as a lone, non-affiliated killer, he refused to pay allegiance to their clan. The ninjas have a bunch of superpowers, the fight goes public, the hero fights dirty, stuff explodes, dudes get kicked, and a lot of people get maimed in a visceral yet entertaining manner. All of which makes for an exciting comic book, but it makes an exciting Wolverine comic book. All of this feels a little weird when it’s happening with a guy in a Spider-Man suit.

Small Idea Comics: The Secret Service #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: If spoiled, the Director will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

I’m going to get the unpleasantness out of the way up front and recommend that, if you’re interested in reading Mark Millar’s and Dave Gibbons’s The Secret Service, you just skip the first issue of and think about picking it up when the entire story is collected into a trade. Because there’s a glimmer of a decent and potentially fun idea in this issue which might make it eventually worth reading, but it is wrapped up here in a gaggle of thoroughly unlikable characters, derivative plot points, and shock value slapstick violence. It is like watching an episode of Springer where Jerry hands out .44 Magnums; there is a certain level of entertainment value to the spectacle, but of the kind you would never admit to strangers.

The high concept behind this book is: what if James Bond was a real thing in the real world? Which is fine as these things go, but it put into stark relief the kind of comic books that Mark Millar writes when it’s something he owns: books that can be distilled down to the kind of elevator pitch one would make to Michael Bay, possibly while sharing a couple of rails.

Let’s go down the list:

Weakness On The Perimeter

Crisis On Infinite Midlives came to being the week that DC’s New 52 were gruntingly squirted into fruition. So the main story, on a week-to-week basis, has been the battle between the new DC books and Marvel trying to catch up, with the odd (excellent) indie book like Luther Strode, The Boys and Witch Doctor to keep things interesting.

That was September, 2011. It’s April, 2012, and the most exciting books of the week are Saga, America’s Got Powers and The Secret Service. Where’s your major-market comics publisher now?

However, we are still looking at a week with some major DC Batman titles, the first branchings of Avengers Vs. X-Men, and Mark Waid’s and Greg Rucka’s opening to their Spider-Man / Punisher / Daredevil crossover The Omega Effect. And either way, be they Picassos or stick-figure Batmen, that lineup means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

But either way, even disregarding the aforementioned stellar books, look at the rest of the take: Jason Aaron’s last Wolverine, a new Scarlet Spider, Kyle Higgins’s last Deathstroke (an aggrieved soon-to-be-lost favorite here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office), and even the first issue of The Bionic Woman, sure to be true-to-form to those of us who were grievously disappointed by that spinoff when we were Six Million Dollar Man fans back in  1978!

But as usual, before we can review any of them, we need time to read them. So until that day: see you tomorrow, suckers!