My Dead Canadian Girlfriend: Batman: The Dark Knight #21 Review

We haven’t spent a lot of time talking about Batman: The Dark Knight since its relaunch in September 2011 – honestly, we haven’t reviewed even a single issue. And part of the reason has been that the title has always existed on the fringes of the Batman universe – the main plots have been in Batman and, to a lesser extent, Batman Incorporated, but Batman: The Dark Knight has always kinda done its own mostly self-contained stories. And being a comics Web site, we’ve tended to pay more attention to the big, money shot stories while Batman: The Dark Knight has sorta chugged happily along on its own, telling smaller, more simple and self-contained Batman stories.

And in its own way, Batman: The Dark Knight #21 is no different. The conflict happening here isn’t one that I’ve seen referenced in any of the other Batman books. The conflict is based on a relationship that hasn’t been mentioned anywhere else. It features a B-List villain in The Mad Hatter, who is the kind of villain you normally dig up when you have a story requiring a nutjob and you realize that it’s only been three months since the other Batman books have used The Joker, The Riddler, or The Scarecrow… and frankly, The Mad Hatter only gets picked once the writer sobers up enough to realize that resurrecting Chandell continues to be a shitty idea.

So what you wind up with is a Batman comic that almost exists in its own little bubble universe where it can just tell a simple Batman story. And that’s exactly what it does: it give us a Batman motivated only by the events of its own story, filled with rage and showing a ton of iconic visual action, with a simple message to deliver about how Batman exactly is different from the monsters that he battles. And, not being a part of the greater ongoing Batman continuity, it is kinda doomed to be midlist that probably goes out of print pretty quickly. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a damn good and simple story, and one that’s well worth checking out.

You Know, For Kids!: Justice League #21 Review

Captain Marvel occupies a strange place in the superhero comics world, in that he is a character that occupies about a thousand places in a million different fans’ hearts.

He is simultaneously the Big Red Cheese who fought talking mescal worms with his gentleman tiger Tawky Tawny, while he is also the generic 1970s superhero who rode around the desert in a Winnebago punching dudes and talking to a big nipply globe on the dashboard, and at the same time he is the horribly damaged and tragic character who beat Superman to a standstill before sacrificing himself to save the world in Kingdom Come. Hell, there are times when I can’t think of the character without remembering my early 2000s drunken tirade that Dan DiDio should give Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham a million bucks a piece to complete their Miracleman story using Captain Marvel, since Miracleman was never anything but a royalty dodge on The Big Red Cheese anyway.

My point is, each version of Captain Marvel means something to somebody, and paying service to one means that you stand a real chance of alienating fans of the others. Slap a big C. C. Beck smile on Captain Marvel’s face and the Kingdom Come fans think you’re yanking their chain. Make him tortured over the adult horrors he’s witnessed as a superhero and you piss off the fans of the childlike original. Put him in a Winnebago out in the middle of the desert with a creepy old dude and you’ll never see the outside of a jail cell again.

This was the line that writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank were trying to negotiate with their Shazam backup story in Justice League for the past several months. And to be honest, when it started, I thought they botched it; Billy Batson was a petulant little bastard who I would have rather seen get scabies than superpowers. But that, however, was a while ago. This month’s Justice League #21 is devoted to the conclusion of the Shazam story… so the question is, not that it’s all said and done, who did Johns and Franks piss off?

Really, probably nobody. There’s enough elements of the classic kids’ Captain Marvel here to at least pay service to those fans, and enough modern realism so that he doesn’t stick out from the New 52 continuity. And the conclusion is, in fact, really pretty good. Not perfect, but fun enough to be worth the ride.

Although the people hoping for RVs and “Mentors” are gonna be furious… but seriously, fuck those people.

Dog’s Eye View: Hawkeye #11 Review

Hawkeye #11 is turning out to be one hell of a hard book to review in the way that I normally do it. Oh, I can hear you: “But Rob,” you’re saying, “You normally review comic books drunk, and you’re looking a little weavy right now. Plus, you smell an awful lot like a fraternity carpet.”

Well… yeah, Fair enough. But most of the time, the comics I review are about guys and women in tights, smacking the crap out of each other when they’re not trying to accomplish normal, human-type things. And Hawkeye #11 isn’t like that.

Because Hawkeye #11 is about a dog. Specifically, Hawkeye’s dog Lucky. Formerly known as Arrow, when he was owned by Russian mobsters. And known by Twitter as Pizzadog. And while I have seen comic books about dogs ever since I was a kid – Krypto and Rex The Wonder Dog from Steve Englehart’s old Justice League of America books leap to mind – those dogs were always presented as having human thoughts and motivations. Human thoughts and motivations that somehow elevated above, “I can lick my own sack! I will be busy for the immediate future!” but human thoughts nonetheless.

Hawkeye #11 writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja try something very different. These guys are trying like hell to put us readers into the head of Pizzadog, and they do it with the full recognition that dogs don’t think in complete sentences, and they don’t think in terms like “conspiracy,” or “treachery,” or, “long-term goals.” They think in smells and in immediate motivations and in sounds and in vague memories, and their loyalties are based on a combination of simple and complex motivations that come from current need and prior treatment.

And the end result is a comic book that you don’t read so much as decode and experience. And while I don’t think the result is completely successful – show me, for example, a dog that can salute out of nothing but pride, and the next time you’ll see my fat ass will be on Letterman – what it is is one of the most interesting single issues of a comic book you’ll find, and one of the best books I’ve read all damn year.

Neverending Doom: Fantastic Four #9 Review

Editor’s Note: Stretch, I’m tellin’ ya… I messed with spoilers I didn’t understand, and it all blew up in that jerk’s face. Literally.

Considering he’s one of the premier villains of the Marvel Universe, Doctor Doom’s origin has always been kinda crap.

I mean, think about it: the dude is a brilliant scientist and a master magician who, upon having an experiment blow up in his face, uses that wealth of head-earned knowledge to alleviate his condition by covering it with an iron mask that looks like it was forged and riveted by a seventh grade industrial arts student. And on a basic level, we’ve spent years being told that, if it weren’t for the one, single incident of his horrible disfigurement, Doctor Doom would never have become a tyrannical despot with a lust for immortality and ultimate power despite being born the heir to the throne of a third world Eastern European toilet (an area historically known for its great record on human rights) and having the positive family name of “Von Doom.” Which is, of course, the Germanic term for fucking “of doom.”

So I have never completely bought into the simplistic background of Doctor Doom… and clearly neither has Fantastic Four writer Matt Fraction. Because in Fantastic Four #9, he gives us a firsthand view of Doom’s originating accident, but from a completely different angle then we’ve seen before. And while it doesn’t make Doom’s motivations any more complicated – it actually simplifies them by a pretty significant level – it does make Doom and his personality a lot more believable, if not any more relatable. He doesn’t make Doom, who has always felt a little like a guy who only wears an iron mask to stop himself from twirling his moustache and cackling, “Moo-hah-ha-ha!”, any more complex… but he does make him a two-and-a-half dimensional megalomaniac that I find more believable.

And it is very, very good.

A Whimpering Bang: Age of Ultron #10 Review / Postmortem

Editor’s Note: The trick of it was, when Ultron tried to defend himself, it triggered a self replicating spoiler…

A few weeks ago, I asked what the point of Age of Ultron was, and now we know: it was to sell more comics.

Seriously: the best thing I can figure is that we comic readers spent a minimum of several months and 40 dollars to entice us to see Miles Morales fight Galactus, and to see Neil Gaiman’s Angela character from Spawn join the Guardians of The Galaxy. Not to see these things in Age of Ultron, mind you, but to tease you to buy them in other upcoming comic books. Seriously: both the Galactus and the Angela reveals in this issue were immediately followed by full page ads telling you in which future comic books you could find those parts of the ongoing story.

So the mission statement of Age of Ultron seems, ultimately, to have been: “set up a way to do weird shit that will sell comic books in the third financial quarter.” Because now that it is all said and done, we are left with a story that had no identifiable protagonist, no identifiable antagonist, no real character motivations other than “make stuff normal again,” and no consequences beyond the fact that Marvel can do weird, dimensional crossover shit now that will likely sell more comics. It’s like there was a Marvel Creator’s Retreat where someone said, “Okay, everyone yell out the weirdest crap you’d write if time, space, dimension or publisher trademark were no object! Okay, Bendis: you’re only writing 76 titles right now, so go off and make this happen! You’ve got ten issues, so take this methamphetamine extract, this DVD of Primer, and get it done!”

Well, it is done. And all I can say is that if big, weird reveals were the point of this big mess? That last reveal should Goddamned well have been Marvelman.

Year One Two: Batman #21 Review

I bought Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, back when it was just Batman #404 through #407, from the spinner rack at my local supermarket for 75 cents a piece.

That story was a stone classic from the word go, right from the first issue, which opened with James Gordon telling us what a hell on Earth Gotham City was, and ending with Bruce Wayne not only bleeding out, but willing to bleed out unless he found some inspiration to make his war on crime more sustainable and effective than just trying to stomp out local goons. You know the images; we all know the images: the giant bat crashing violently through the window, the smile on Bruce’s face, and the bloody hand on the bell to call Alfred, with the caption, “Yes, Father… I shall become a bat…”

I can spin that sequence of panels off from memory because Batman: Year One is Frank Miller, in 88 tight pages, telling one of the greatest Batman stories ever told (on the tails of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which is the greatest Batman story ever told, and I’ll fight any man what says different), and cementing his position as one of the greatest comic storytellers ever, regardless of any future paranoid writings or rantings.

That was in 1987. It is now 2013, and we have the first issue of Zero Year, written by Scott Snyder, on the tails of Death of The Family, one of the best Batman / Joker stories in recent memory. Just based on the title, Zero Year is meant to elicit in us memories of Year One. And based on the events of this first issue of Zero Year, it covers some, if not all, of the same period of Batman’s career that Year One did.

Look, don’t get your hopes up here. Zero Year #1 / Batman #21 isn’t on the same level as Batman: Year One #1 / Batman #404, and I think we all knew that it wasn’t gonna be. After all, there is only one first love of your life, and when it comes to Batman stories, Frank Miller and Batman: Year One got to anyone old enough to buy comic books with their own money long before Scott Snyder ever put a word in Batman’s mouth. So I could sit here all day and compare the new book – or pretty much any other modern comic book – negatively to the old one, but that really doesn’t matter.

What matters is: does Zero Year #1 hold up on its own as a good Batman story?

Unfolded: Superman Unchained #1 Review

I’ve had some issues with Superman ever since his New 52 reboot. Because frankly, through the eyes of hindsight, Superman’s reboot was kind of a schizo mess.

On one hand, we had Grant Morrison on Action Comics, showing Superman as a kid in a t-shirt with a reduced powerset punching out millionaires. At the same time, Superman was going full blast in his own title, separated from Lois Lane and having big adventures, all while the original writer was screeching about editorial interference and jumping off midstream, leaving the title in the capable hands of the man who rebooted Starfire to be an amnesiac cockmonger. In the meantime, Morrison made Superman’s invulnerability partially contingent on some weird Kryptonian battle armor, and then Geoff Johns had Superman start chucking the meat to Wonder Woman. And that’s all if you ignore what’s happening in the out-of-continuity, video game tie-in title Injustice: Gods Among Us, where Superman is following “The American Way,” if by that you mean, “Ruthlessly enforcing order through the use of constant pervasive surveillance.”

That’s all gone on in just 21 months, and while it might be all well and good for your average rabid comics fan, there’s not much that screams, “It’s Superman!” to Joe Blow on the street… and that is a problem when DC’s last, best hope for creating a Marvel-style movie empire is Man of Steel – a Superman movie opening, well, tomorrow. And imagine that one-in-a-thousand moviegoer who is lucky enough to live in a neighborhood like mine, where there is a movie theater a block away from a comic store, and who leaves Man of Steel, wanders to that comic store and buys everything he sees with Superman on the cover… only to find a dude in armor making out with Wonder Woman when he isn’t incinerating banana republics for disobeying his orders.

Enter Scott Snyder, Jim Lee and Superman Unchained: a Superman story that uses the new costume and Superman’s New 52 status quo, but is still identifiably an old-school Superman story with an identifiable Big Blue Boy Scout, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and everything else that that mythical Some Dude Walking Into A Comic Store After Man of Steel might expect. And it should act as a pretty solid entry point for any non-comic readers that Man of Steel might attract…

…except for that fucking poster, which is an abominable choice.

Anti-Heroes: Kick-Ass 3 #1 Review

As a guy who grew up – and, arguably, grew old – reading superhero comics, it can be hard sometimes to read Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass stories. Because it is all too easy to see myself in pieces of every “superhero” in this book… and every “superhero” in this book is a pretty Goddamned pathetic excuse for a human being.

We’ve got The Juicer: a couch-surfing leech who spends money he should be using to get his shit together on comic books, Blu-Rays and beer. There’s Ass-Kicker, who’s using his low-level of fame (and we’re talking low, citizen superhero makes middle market overnight disc jockey look like Jon Bon Jovi in 1988) to troll for MILFs to bang on the Internet. And then there’s Kick-Ass himself, who uses his father’s death at the hands of supervillains as an excuse to get his own place and to utterly fail to break Hit-Girl out of jail in favor of “training”: working at a fast food joint and arguing about pop-culture ephemera at his local comic store, where they know him by name because he never fucking leaves.

These characters make reading Kick-Ass 3 #1 difficult for its target audience: me, an inveterate comic book geek. And while I have never worn a superhero costume (not even for the purposes of weird sex), I can see bits of myself in all of these losers (I have, in fact, been a middle market overnight disc jockey), and it can make the story a hard go. It is never easy to find yourself faced with your own flaws in a story, particularly when those flaws are embodied by generally ineffective and irritating no-accounts.

That, however, does not mean the story is bad.

Choose Your Own Adventure: Astro City #1 Review

Astro City is good. It has always been good.

For 17 years, across multiple miniseries and a variety of publishers, writer Kurt Busiek and artist Brent Anderson have come up with a generally can’t-miss formula: create a city that has neighborhoods that match up to the Marvel, DC, and even EC horror comics universes and populate them with a mix of existing superhero and villain pastiches and some original characters. Then throw in a general population of people more fully realized than the average running, screaming, goggle-eyed cannon fodder that’s normally trampled underfoot in a world of superpowers. And then not only turn them loose, but tell us what some of them, from the strongest hero to the worst villain to the average schmuck on the street, are thinking about the whole experience.

That formula has allowed the creators to examine some of the biggest eras and characters in comics, from DC’s Justice League (Samaritan, Winged Victory and the rest of The Honor Guard) to Spider-Man (If Jack-In-The-Box isn’t supposed to be Spidey, then please call 911, because this massive stroke is impinging upon my critical faculties) to the 80s darkening of comics in The Dark Age. And the use of pastiches has allowed Busiek and Anderson to really dig into some of these old stories and eras without having to worry about servicing any trademarks, or pesky editorial interference like being fired from the book after it’s solicited.

And now Astro City is at Vertigo, and Busiek seems to have decided to take that opportunity to, well riff on Vertigo comics. Specifically those early, proto-Vertigo books, where the characters still lived in the DC Universe and bumped into superheroes every now and again. Because this time around, the pastiche is pretty clearly Psycho-Pirate from Grant Morrison’s 80s run on Animal Man (with what seems to be a Galactus story brewing), and while that parallel all but screams from the page and colors your expectations, it is actually very, very compelling.

Because Busiek isn’t just acknowledging the reader… he’s involving us.

Rosebud: Daredevil: End of Days #8 Review

Editor’s Note: I’ve been there for a lot of people’s last words. And every time it’s the one thing they spoiled about the most.

Mapone is not a thing.

I have, as I’m sure a lot of people have since Daredevil: End of Days began several months ago, Googled the living shit out of the word “Mapone.” And there is nothing there; there is some family out of Italy, a Fleetwood Mac fan on YouTube, some promotional trinkets company in South Africa… and since October, a bunch of reviews of Daredevil: End of Days. If you look for the definition of “Mapone,” there isn’t one. If you try contextual searches, you wind up with articles about Halo battle maps, mapping values in computer programs, and MAPI interfaces.

In short, “Mapone” is not, by any real definition, a word. It is, rather, a sound you make with your mouth. So as a mystery, writers Brian Michael Bendis and David Mack picked a good mysterious word to act as a throughline for the story… but Daredevil: End of Days #8 is the last issue of the miniseries, meaning that it is time for them to put up or shut up.

And they have put up. We learn the meaning of the word “Mapone” on the very last page of the issue, Citizen Kane-style. And the reveal is, in fact, a surprise, and it is, in fact, generally satisfying… until you close the book and stop and think about it for more than ten seconds.

So it is a really fortunate thing that this issue accomplishes so much beyond the silly little mystery, closing out a story that turns the legacy of Daredevil into a tragedy that is almost Shakespearean in scope, and which is implied to doom everyone it touches. Daredevil: End of Days #8 is a truly weighty and satisfying speculative end to the story of Matt Murdock, regardless of the whole “Mapone” mystery that has kept us going through this story. And that is a good thing.

Because Mapone is not a thing.