The Abyss, Paper Edition: The Wake #1 Review

Editor’s Note: I got to tell you, I give this whole thing a spoiler-factor of about nine point five.

James Cameron’s 1989 movie The Abyss is one of my favorite movies (and if you could quit fucking around with deep sea diving and get a Blu-Ray version mastered, Jim, I’d sure appreciate it). It’s got a mix of claustrophobia, environmental danger, interpersonal conflict and threatening weird alien shit that, even a quarter-century later, it’s just hard to find anywhere else. I saw it in its initial theatrical release, I’ve owned it on VHS and DVD, and will forever harbor an inappropriate and filthy crush on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio because of it, despite the fact that she’s not still 29 any more than I’m still 18.

If I had to hazard a Russian Roulette interrogation guess, I’d bet that writer Scott Snyder is a big fan of The Abyss, too. Because the first issue of The Wake, the Vertigo miniseries he took a break from American Vampire to produce, is rocking a lot of the elements of that movie. We’ve got a female ocean-related scientist who’s been called back to her area of expertise. She’s trapped on an undersea oil drilling platform with a male former co-worker with whom she has a contentious relationship. The military is throwing their hand in. And there are aliens there: aliens that are threatening to use our oceans to wipe us out… only Snyder implies that, without Ed Harris there to suck pink goo at the bottom of the ocean and use his inappropriate and filthy crush on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio to whimper for our lives, we’re kinda fucked no matter what happens in the remaining nine issues of this ten-issue miniseries.

So make no mistake: you’re gonna see things that you have seen before in this issue. But is it worth checking out even if you’ve spent hundreds of hours watching The Abyss (Or perhaps thousands of hours, if you count the time spent freeze-framing on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s boobs)?

The Rich Are Very Different: The Green Team #1 Review

The Green Team is one of those comic book superhero teams that is destined to become part of comic book history. By which I mean, in about 20 years, some hotshot, big idea comics writer like Neil Gaiman was in the 90s will ressurrect them and try to treat them seriously as an archetype of a particular type of comic, written by middle-aged adults about adolescents, trying to capture the zeitgeist of a particular period of history. And that purely theoretical comic book writer of 2028 or 2033 will be heralded as a genius for finding a way to take The Green Team seriously, the way that Gaiman was when he wrote Prez into Sandman #54 20 years ago.

But that will happen in 15 or 20 years. Today, The Green Team feels very much the way Prez did back in 1973 (before my time, but I remember the series getting some play in DC Comics house reprint ads in the mid, late 70s, maybe as a giant sized gallery reprint, and even at that age I thought the idea was ridiculous): an effort by someone too old to be part of youth culture, trying like mad to grab bits and pieces that they either do understand or that they’ve read about, to make a book to appeal to them… and ultimately feeling like its trying too hard and mising the mark.

And maybe that’s my problem; after all, I am old enough to remember Prez, which means that my only relationship to youth culture is related to the things I would do to Lindsey Lohan if I had a double-strength condom and an iron-clad fake name to give her. But the trials and travails of a bunch of rich kids with Twitter trying to prove themselves to daddies who want them to grow up to become bougouisie douchbags like themselves (mission accomplished!) somehow doesn’t land home with me.

Plus: we’ve already got an Iron Man, guys.

Tom Sawyer’s Funeral: Green Lantern #20 Review

If you’re anything like me, when you see Green Lantern #20, and its thickness, squared binding and eight dollar price tag, you will think of The Amazing Spider-Man #700 from just five months ago – an issue that was padded with secondary stories to pad out it’s length. So you might think that Green Lantern #20 would do the same to fill its 86 pages and get a little upset that you’re dropping eight clams on what would seem to inevitably be a big chunk of filler.

You would be wrong. Sure, there is filler here – I’m not sure I needed nine pages of messages of congratulations to writer Geoff Johns (although DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson’s message makes me believe she might be the brains behind the Horse_EBooks Twitter account) – but on the whole, this is a one-story comic book. So you’re damn sure getting your money’s worth with this comic book.

And it is a big story. This is Johns’s final issue driving the Green Lantern franchise, and he treats it like the series finale of a long-running television show, even though the Green Lantern books will continue, as the five full-page ads in this issue for those books attests. And as a series finale-feeling story, it brings back all the old favorite characters for a final bow, it throws all the old fan favorite moments at the wall, and as is befitting a sci-fi action story, it blows stuff up real good.

But this is a space opera, not hard science fiction. So while Johns puts all the pieces into place to make a slam-bang action-packed story, there are a bunch of elements required to push that story forward that are firmly based in the scientific principle, as defined within the Green Lantern universe,  of the Theorem of Shut Up That’s Why. So some of the points between A and Z require a lot of taking on faith to avoid nitpicking… but if you can, you’ll have yourself a damn fun read that brings all your favorites up to bat one last time, and even tells you where some of these characters would end up.

Bastard Sons of The Father: James Robinson Leaves DC

Well, there goes all my hopes for another Starman story… or worse: here comes another Goddamned Starman story.

Allow me to explain. Yesterday, via Twitter, the magical service that allows people to reach into my life across time and space to show me the things that they are about to have for dinner,  DC Comics’s Earth 2 writer James Robinson announced that he is leaving that book.

So as of today I am leaving Earth 2 with Issue #16.It’s been a blast.Man, it’s a lovely day.Think I’ll take Rex to the beach.

— JamesDRobinson (@JamesDRobinson) May 17, 2013

Okay, that’s a bummer, especially considering that when it comes to alternate versions of classic heroes, Robinson is one of the best in the business – so good that the characterizations in his Elseworld’s story The Golden Age became, pre-New 52, part of DC’s Golden Age canon.

But hey: maybe this was good news! Maybe Robinson was freeing himself up to do that last Starman story he’s always been saying he wants to do! Maybe it means that he’s clearing himself up to do a complete new Starman series! Maybe it means –

Oh, what’s that? It means nothing of the sort?

One For The Faithful: Deathstroke #20 Review

Editor’s Note: And one last look at last week’s comics before the comic stores open late today… and it contains spoilers. But they are spoilers on a book that has been cancelled and lives no more. So do you really give a fuck? Thought not.

“So the final issue of Deathstroke was in this week’s take. You gonna review it?” I said.

“Fuck that,” my co-Editor Amanda said, “As far as I’m concerned, that book’s been over since Rob Leifeld took over from Kyle Higgins last year. DC editorial took a perfectly good book about a professional dealing with the perils of entering middle age and turned it into a book about some badly-proportioned, footless steroid head beating on space douchebags.”

“But Justin Jordan’s been writing the book for the past few months. Do you think it’s improved at all since then?”

“I haven’t been reading it.”

“Why not? Jordan writes Luther Strode, and you like that.”

“Yeah, but so what? It’s damaged goods. Taking over Deathstroke after Liefeld had his grubby mitts all over it is like watching a buddy get married to a whore. He might be totally in love and committed to making it work, but here ain’t a force on Earth that can make people look at her and not picture when she had three dicks in her mouth. Let Deathstroke go under and lie fallow for a while. I’ll try it again when it feels a little less… dirty. You review the last issue.”

Okay I will. Despite not having kept up on Deathstroke since Higgins left the book any more than Amanda did. Which means that I have no idea what the hell led into the events of this issue, which includes all the Usual Suspects you’d expect from a big Deathstroke story. We’ve got Terra, Rose (Slade’s daughter who became Ravager before the New 52), Grant (Slade’s son who became Ravager back in the 80s – c’mon, at least try to keep up), Jericho (Slade’s other son, who was a good guy in the 80s before becoming a bad guy in… ah, fuck it) and, well, Majestic (for some reason), locked in a epic battle to the death that requires some ugly choices, brutal methods, and one deus ex machina on Slade’s part.

Which is fine, but what matters is: is it any good? And more importantly: does it work as a final story? You know, with “final” in subtextual quotes, since ain’t no one really gonna kill a character that appears on The CW’s Arrow?

“Legion” Is A Strong Word: DC Cancels Four Titles While DeMatteis / Maguire Tease New One

DC’s August solicitations are starting to be released and, as one will when a comic pubisher spends most of 2011 extolling their new group of 52 comics, I perused them to see which of those 52 new and exciting books are getting the ick.

And the short answer is: four of them, with two coming from the original New 52 from September, 2001. Those books being Dial H, Threshold, Demon Knights and Legion of Super Heroes, with the latter two being two of those original relaunched titles.

I have long since stopped keeping count of how many of the original New 52 titles are still sucking breath (although it’s clearly more than ten percent… because at least seven of them are Batman Family titles that will only be cancelled if some dingbat hires Joel Schumacher to reboot the Batman movie series. And by “reboot,” I obviously mean “add nipples to Batman’s boots”), but none of these cancellations are particularly a surprise to me. Dial H was clearly a Vertigo title marooned in the DC Universe; a book initially edited by former Vertigo chief Karen Berger, and given the upheaval in DC’s Editorial division, this book probably only had a matter of time unless someone changed the title to Dial B. With Gotham City’s Area Code Before The “B.” And Then Dial “Atman.”

Personality Crisis, or: Skype Is Free: Batman #20 Review

Dear creators working in DC’s Batman office: there is a product available on the Internet called Skype. It is free. And it allows you create a virtual conference room, where you can invite any number of people to join, and then, you know, talk to each other.

I say this because there is obviously no communication happening about how Bruce Wayne is handling the death of his son. The writer of that death, Grant Morrison, has Bruce sucking down Man-Bat serum and going on a revenge rampage over in Batman Incorporated. Peter Tomasi has Batman scouring the world looking for a way to bring Damian back to life, including the psychological torture of the last Robin to get killed on his watch this month, and making an attack on fucking Frankenstein for answers last month.

And Scott Snyder, the writer of the main Batman title? Well, as a guy who has to turn in a comic book during this whole, sudden, “Damian’s-Dead” shitstorm, he has Batman affected by the event in the margins, while making the meat of the story a decent, if workmanlike, two-and-done featuring an antagonist no one really cares about, and a big Easter Egg in this week’s Batman #20 to delight the rubes (I was certainly delighted). However, as a guy who has reached A-List status at DC in the past year and a half, with arguably as much pull as Morrison, Snyder has clearly said, “Um, yeah: I’ll give you a couple issues mentioning this death, but this is Grant’s problem. I think I’m gonna scrap my Riddler plans and do a year-long story set in the past while you guys deal with the fallout from the whims of that crazy Scottish fucker.”

So if it seems every Batman writer has picked a different stage of grief to stick Bruce Wayne into over the death of his son, Snyder has clearly chosen “Acceptance.” Which means, at the very least, that it is the less histrionic of the two Batman titles on the stands this week. But the question is: is that enough to make it any good?

Bros Before… Ah, Nevermind: Batman And Red Hood #20 Review

Batman And Red Hood (previously named Batman & Robin but recently renamed due to Robin being occupied by a previous engagement with a dirtnap) #20 is finally proof – to me, at least – that when Grant Morrison killed Robin in Batman Incorporated, he really didn’t tell anyone what he was planning to do ahead of time. Because the only possible explanation I can think of for a comic like Batman And Red Hood #20 to exist is that the creative team had to come up something – any damn thing – to fill the pages that was at least somewhat on point with this dead kid they suddenly found themselves saddled with.

Seriously: sudden, blinding panic is the only explanation for some of the things we’re seeing in this issue. Trying to introduce some version of Carrie Kelley that we’ve never seen before is a bad enough flailing grasp from a creative team realizing that they’re buying groceries with the money made from a book with the name “Robin” in the title. But it also is the only explanation for, hell, almost the remainder of the book. There are so many problems with this issue, from off character moments to weird methods of attack that make no sense to a couple of legitimate “what the fuck?” panels that I have to believe the issue was whipped together at the last minute in a pants-shitting panic.

Because otherwise, I need to believe that a writer of a Batman comic book would think that Batman would engage in a drive-by shooting in the interest of resurrecting the dead.

Yeah, you heard me.

Crowdsourced Batman: The Movement #1 Review

Somewhere, the kids from Anonymous are shitting themselves with glee, because with The Movement, they’ve got their own comic book. And they’re superheroes and everything. Except they have custom facemasks instead of the omnipresent V For Vendetta masks, because not even those guys want to face the wrath of Alan Moore.

Okay, lemme take a step back. I was not a part of 2011’s Occupy movement, because I have one of those job things, but I walked past the Boston incarnation at Davis Square every day because they were between the job thing and one of those bar things. And while you can argue about that movement’s (Movement! Get it?) motivations, success or failure, it was pretty clear to a daily passer-by that, at face value, it was a group of people who were committed to battling corruption, policing themselves and providing their own version of social services. Also marijuana, but mostly those three things.

Write Gail Simone’s The Movement #1 takes those three concepts, throws in the social crowdsourced vigilante justice of Anonymous, mixes them up with a healthy dollop of superpowers, drops them into a DC Universe city so filthy and populated by killers, filth and dirty cops that it makes Gotham look like the city from Logan’s Run, and tries to show us what Occupy and Anonymous might look like in a place where something like that might not only be needed, but where no one can stop them.

Which is an interesting concept, but is it any good?

High Ideas: Batman Incorporated #10 Review

Editor’s Note: Criminals are a cowardly, spoilered lot…

On my initial readthrough of Batman Incorporated #10, I was fully prepared to lower the boom on writer Grant Morrison. Here’s why.

Did you ever get really drunk or high and have an epiphany? One of those moments where, seriously under the influence of something, you realize something that is so seemingly obvious that you can’t believe nobody else ever came up with the idea, yet so seemingly transcendant and perfect that you firmly and totally believe, in your stupor, that your idea will change things deep down at their core? So you stumble around and you find a piece of paper and a pen and you write it down… and then you wake up in the morning, praying for relief and wondering if you should consider shaving your tongue, and you find the piece of paper… and it says something like “pizza beer.” Or maybe “Dorito-flavored rolling papers.” And you look at that piece of paper, and you think, “Yeah, that’s a pretty obvious idea… but it’s also really kind of obviously stupid,” and you chuck the piece of paper and you lurch into the sunlight, looking for greasy food.

In a bunch of ways, Batman Incorporated #10 lives and dies by that kind of late-night, shitfaced, obvious idea that never survives the harsh light of day… except Morrison missed that part where you sober up and realize that the whole concept is a little on-the-nose and kinda dumb.

Yeah, I was ready to do that. And on a lot of levels, I still am: the final reveal on the last page (not like it’s much of a reveal, given the book’s WTF gatefold cover that gives up the ghost before page one) simply stinks of a guy ripped to the tits on absinthe and psilocybin screeching, “Wait a second, wait a second and hear me out… what if Batman… actually was a bat? Stop laughing and gimme that one-hitter…” But with that said, there’s some decent imagery here, a tease that some characters we saw months ago might come back into play in an unexpected way, and a tease that Talia might be facing some trouble on all fronts.

But that ending really should’ve been held until someone sobered up, man.