Teenage Wasteland: Avengers Academy #37 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: I can give you all spoilers by changing the chemistry in your brains.

Avengers Academy is a book that landed on my pull list because the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me not to tell the paying customers that I intend to tell law enforcement that they favor books with pictures of children in spandex ass pants, decided to take a liberal interpretation when I told him I wanted to add “Avengers” to my subscriptions. It was a book that I didn’t particularly want when it launched, considering that the book’s predecessor, Avengers: The Initiative really did nothing for me. But over the years, the character-driven stories by writer Christos Gage have grown on me, taking the book from its initial charity buy I was too lazy to tell my local comic store owner to drop from my pulls to one of my must-reads when it drops… just in time for it to be cancelled as part of the Marvel Now relaunch (Because Marvel doesn’t reboot! Because DC reboots! And if someone tells Marvel Editorial that DC’s front office personnel regularly use the bathroom, Marvel’s brass will learn to love walking around with a load in their pants!).

And that cancellation is a Goddamned shame, because Avengers Academy #37 is a really good comic book. It wraps up a storyline that was an exceptional part of the Avengers Vs. X-Men event by consciously not being a part of that event, places a solid focus on the characters and their motivations while not skimping in any way on the action, and delivers one hell of a satisfying conclusion to the event that reminds us just how young and conflicted some of these characters are. And it shows us a character dying too young, in a puddle of his own blood, for no good reason at all… kinda like the book itself is gonna go in two months.

Killing In The Name: Avengers Academy #32 Review

Editor’s Note: This Sentinel’s Prime Directive: Ruin or spoil all stories about mutants.

Being a cynical and ironic child of the late 1980s / early 90s, there isn’t a reason on Earth why I should like Avengers Academy #32. It is naked and blatant in its attempts to manipulate the reader’s emotions by placing children and their pets in mortal danger from a cold and callous external threat. It blatantly pulls the old E.T. trick of making kids the emotionally satisfying voice of emotional trueness in the face of cold and calculating adult logic and compromise, and it even alludes to the old Old Yeller tearjerker moment when it isn’t obviously humping the corpse of Short Circuit. Truly, a book like this should have me sneering disdainfully while listening to Nirvana on my way to a Richard Linkater film and slacking. Or something like that.

With all that said, it’s now 2012, and the other day I almost got weepy when the Boston Red Sox traded Kevin Youkilis. So I don’t know if I’m losing my edge or what, but rather than being turned off by the obvious emotional manipulation going on in this comic book, I found it to be one of the best of the week. So either writer Christos Gage is damn good at what he’s doing, or I am turning into a colossal pussy. Regardless: I liked this book.

Forward Into The Past: Faith & Angel #6 Review

Remember that episode of Buffy where Willow got all twisted on dark magic and couldn’t leave the house? And she was willing to ignore anything else that was going on in the Buffyverse because she was just too willing to roll around in the darkness in exchange for a free taste for a load of evil across her naked chest (Perhaps I’m misremembering the episode… but if I am, don’t you fucking dare tell me)? Yeah, that’s what Angel & Faith #6 is: the crack of the Buffyverse.

Whereas the actual Buffy The Vampire Slayer comic feels committed to advancing the Buffyverse and showing the Scooby Gang pushing forward into adulthood, Angel & Faith as written by Christos Gage, particularly in this issue, feels committed to beefing up and filling out previously mentioned areas of the Buffy mythos. On its face, this can be dangerous; any storyline that is less concerned with advancement and more concerned with its own continuity runs a serious danger of crawling up its own ass and dying (hello, Grant Morrison’s run on Batman!).