Review: Ages of Thunder

Comic book fans aside, who the hell wants to read about Thor?

Aside from his silly colorful costume and winged helmet, he's a freakin God for Chrissakes. An actual Norse god. What the Hell is he doing in the Marvel universe? Not to mention the fact that he says "thou" enough to make you wish he could get kicked in the gnads a few times.

Most people that haven't read comics don't want to read about a character like that, which seriously makes me wonder if the Thor movie will have any success with a mainstream audience. People want to read about badass superheroes with cool costumes and powers. People want to read about Wolverine and Spider-Man. People don't want to read about a character that wears an American flag on his costume, a blaxpoitation superhero, or a kung fu superhero that compresses chi into his hand.

And yet, a funny thing has happened at Marvel over the last 5 or 6 years. Imagine if Republicans started coming out in support of gay marriage and supporting socialized medicine and Democrats reacted by merely slapping the cover of a leatherbound bible with the backs of their hands. It would be a topsy turvy world, which is exactly what was happening with the characters at Marvel. Loser characters were being handled by the best talent in the company and consistently making the top 10, whereas staples like Spider-Man and the X-Men stagnated and slipped into the 50,000's in sales.

Bendis started throwing Luke Cage into all his books and made people realize he's actually cool. Fraction and Brubaker took on Iron Fist and turned a campy 70's kung fu hero an turned his book into a multi-generational mythological machine. Brubaker started scripting and "death and return of..." story for Captain America that brought people to tears. And just a few years ago, J. Michael Straczynski took on the Norse god of thunder in a revamp for the ages. The book sold in the 100,000's, earned JMS a "Best Writer" nomination at this year's Eisners, and had people scrambling for collections of the classic Thor stories from the heyday.

Thor was cool again.

I must confess that as much critical acclaim as JMS's new THOR reboot has been garnering, I still haven't read beyond the first six issues. I know, I know... that's a big blow to my credibility as a comic book blogger. But I just have a sneaking suspicion that his whole run (which will be concluding shortly) will be collected in a giant gorgeous hardcover omnibus edition. One so pretty that all my friends will want to come over and just look at it, touch it. Okay, maybe not. But I do like to fantasize about things like that sometimes.

But then, at a comic book store, somebody warned me that there was critical plot information contained in the series of one-shot Thor stories that Matt Fraction had been writing, all collected in the Ages of Thunder volume. So I had some catching up to do. I also kinda figured I could pretend I was a real scholar researching a mythological figure while I was at it.

Now, Thor was an entertaining read and all, but he still seemed like a goody two shoes. I mean, what the hell was a god doing on Earth on the Avengers, getting involved with Earthly drama? It just doesn't seem like a god's style. Then, I read these stories, which take place in Asgard before Thor ever got involved with the Earth.

Man, was that guy badass.

This guy puts every man to shame. You could write more facts about this guy than you could about Chuck Norris. I can't remember how many times his face got completely covered with the fresh blood from a Frost Giant's corpse. And as if leaping through a Frost Giant's head with his hammer wasn't enough, I just can't tell you how awesome it was when Thor single handedly won a war against entire armies of the Undead when he single handedly piloted a giant Blood Colossus.

Oh man. Just that image slowly sinking into the blood from the battlefield, about to rise within the Colossus's skeleton. Chilling, I tell you. Chilling!

But the biggest surprise wasn't Thor's toughness. Everybody knew he was strong. What this story surprised me about is that the guy was actually a huge asshole. The three one-shots contained within are all essentially three acts about Thor's arrogance and the detriment it has on Asgard and the humans of Midgard. I mean, during Asgard's famine, the guy had hoarded golden apples and refused to share them with his starving comrades. What a cold-hearted bastard.

The climax of the book is actually the match of eternity. Thor vs. his own father, Odin. If you thought Thor was menacing, just look at the fully armored Odin brandishing his gargantuan sword. Holy shit.


Pick up this book if you'd like to see an awesome badass big mythological fall from heaven type of story. Matt Fraction, I salute you.

Review: Detective Comics #854

I know, I know... I have not been posting in this enough. It's been what, two months?

As much as I could complain about being chronologically drained by my work, it really only takes about 45 minutes or less to crank out one of these posts. I had the time - that's not the issue. I just never had the inspiration.

See, I tend to get the most enthusiasm for writing in this thing whenever I read a comic I really really like, or have some ideas that have been making me think of comics, and at some point along the line I get narcissistic enough to think people actually want to read what I have to say about funnybooks. And lately, the comics I've been reading haven't been giving me that spark. And I regularly pick up DEADPOOL, UNCANNY X-MEN, ASTONISHING X-MEN (soon to be dropped), GREEN ARROW & BLACK CANARY, THE WALKING DEAD, INVINCIBLE, CRIMINAL, and probably a few others I'm not recalling at the moment. Sure, the best books like FABLES and SCALPED are missing from the list, but I pick up those in trades.

Lately, my trips to the comic book store have been about every month, so I tend to get all of these titles in one big bag. It's usually about 10-12 books, enough to give me a few hours of reading the day of purchase. And honestly, in those few hours, I get at most a surprise here, a chuckle there, and even, God forbid, the occasional "Gee whiz!" But honestly, not a whole lot else comes about. Nothing to write home about, and certainly nothing to write the one or two people that read this blog either.

I picked up DETECTIVE COMICS #854 for a couple of reasons. One, there's an awesome creative team at the helm, with consistently good Greg Rucka writing and the sublimely awesome JH Williams III, who wowed me considerably with his work on Alan Moore's PROMETHEA.

Second, it features Batwoman, a character who I always thought was cool ever since her introduction in 52 but has unfairly gotten a bad rap since.

Third, and most importantly, guilt.

I say that because I've found from my years of comic book shopping that you can't just walk into a comic book store without buying anything. You walk into a store that, if you're lucky, has about one or two other people in it besides you and whoever's working there. The owner greets you with a friendly howdy, asks you if you need anything, and maybe even chats with you a bit and asks you where you're from. You spend about ten minutes browsing the wares, maybe even get a recommendation or two, and then you just... leave?

No, that's not right.

You can't walk out empty-handed from these things. You just can't. So through a sense of guilt and moral obligation, I picked up the only book that looked halfway decent, which again, happened to be DETECTIVE COMICS #854.

Holy smokes, did this book surprise me.


I must confess, as much as I built up my enthusiasm for this book, I can't really say much about the story. The real kicker hasn't really hit yet - more than anything this book is just reacclamating everybody to her character. "Oh yeah, she's a lesbian!" must have been a response from at least one comic book fan who hasn't even thought about her since 52. But still, the script is packed with that classic Greg Rucka wit to it. Like, in case you were wondering how a any chick could effectively fight crime with that flowing red hair of hers, she loses it about six pages in, on a tip from Batman, no less, who says "do something about your hair. One pull, the fight's over for you."

But the real treat of this book is really JH Williams III's delicious art, which is absolutely spellbinding. Take note - that's a word I don't use often. I reserved it specifically for this moment.

I'm also going to go out on a limb and gamble a lot of my credibility when it comes to fiction and narrative and say that even if the story doesn't go anywhere, the art is so good it doesn't even matter. Saying this goes completely against my ego, as I hate, hate, hate it when people say "Comics are all about the art" or "I didn't like it because I didn't like the art."

"The art's meant to tell a story - dammit!" has always been my mantra, and I have to break the rhythm this time around because Williams' art is that fucking good. Rarely have I seen an artist that is so strong on all fronts, whether it's detailed photorealism, deeply communicative facial expressions, or even just quick pacing. He's even good at the really angular, dynamic looking grids that Bendis is famous for, something that even big time artists like Bryan Hitch and Alex Ross have never really been able to pull off well. Christ, even if the story bores you, if nothing else you're left with a dynamite 4 dollar art book.

And speaking of 4 dollars, while I've been really frustrated with the price point hikes that the publishers have been pulling (I mean seriously, couldn't they just have jumped to 3.25 or 3.50?), I have to hand it to DC for having the good sense to give us more value by giving us a second feature. That's right, kids - the story doesn't end with Batwoman in this book. At the very end, you get a bonus 8 page comic featuring none other than The Question, also penned by Greg Rucka.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to what's to come. It might not be something I'm going to be telling my kids about ten years from now, but hey, you just might see me talking about it next month.

Some Opinions on X-Men Origins: Wolverine

This seemed like such a shoe-in.

While the disappointment that was X-Men 3: The Last Stand suffered from an excessive amount of characters and plotlines, a brief timetable for filming, and the ill-suited director Brett Ratner (of Rush Hour fame), it really seemed like they would get their act together for the fourth installment in the movie franchise.

When it was announced that Gavin Hood, the director of the award-winning African film Tsotsi was going to be behind the helm, things looked promising. The fact that they were spending so much time on the film made it seem like things were going to be even better. At the time, it seemed that there was no weak link in the formula. A very focused and human look at the world's favorite mutant was potentially in the works, and there weren't any weak links that could be spotted.

Of course, I hadn't read the script at the time when I was forecasting. My mistake! While it seems like I had high hopes for the franchise, I knew that the law of superhero movie production was that unless Chris Nolan is behind the camera, there is no way to tell whether the project is going to be good. I walked in expecting nothing more than a decent film: some *snikt*ing here and there, some fun fights and some even cooler flashback sequences would have made my night.

Instead, we were given a real snoozer of a film. While the first two X-Men films did an excellent job (arguably an even better job than the comics at the time were doing) of developing the characters, showing anti-mutant tensions, and above all else, showing why the X-Men matter in their world, X-Men Origins: Wolverine doesn't seem to have any heart at all. The severe lack of time they spent establishing the character and the conflicts in his world made for a plot structure without any foundation. Consequently, as the plot structure continues to build upon that vacuum, the pacing sputs and stalls, the dramatic moments are stale, and it builds to a conclusion that is almost laughable.

As if that wasn't enough, the cancer that infected the crux of the story seemed to have gone malignant through the scripting process, because various other aspects of the film seemed to be infected as well. Virtually all of the dialogue and plot structure are insultingly predictable, with a plot twist that is so transparent it makes you wonder why it was even there at all.

Like the other films, there are various unnamed references to the diverse array of mutants in the X-Men universe, and yet most of these references are completely contradictory to the canon of the comics. Silverfox, Wolverine's love interest of Native American descent, reveals toward the end of the film that she has a sister in captivity. That sister ends up being Emma Frost. Aside from the fact that there is no sibling relation of this kind in the comic book, tell me - How on Earth could a Native American woman be related directly to a blonde British woman? In this case, the writers consciously entered a lose-lose situation where the references pass over the mainstream audience's head and the devoted comic book fans who actually get the references are insulted by the lack of reverence for the source material. Why bother?

One of the primary functions of the movie was to cement the backstory of the character and lead into the continuity of the X-Men trilogy. However, this movie only seems to confuse and convolute the continuity of the story, not clarify it. One of the biggest, gaping plotholes of the whole construction is that the entire movie focuses on the relationship between Wolverine and big brother Sabretooth over the years, as Wolverine fights his animalistic nature and Sabretooth relishes it, teasing his brother over the denial of his true nature. Not only does Liev Schreiber's portrayal of a physically flexible, agile, short-haired, and conversant Sabretooth completely contradict the stiff in body and language take on the character in the first X-Men movie, but there is one very critical gap in the link between the two films: Wolverine loses his memory of his past at the end of the film, whereas Sabretooth does not.

See the resemblance?

Now tell me, why does a character who says "You will always be my brother" as he departs at the end of this film suddenly become quiet and demure during their subsequent encounters later in the timeline? Wouldn't he make some passing reference to their relation? It makes you wonder why they bothered at...

Wait a second, did I already say that about something else in the movie? Maybe I'm getting it wrong by breaking the movie down and talking about how each component not needing to exist and missing the big picture: the whole movie doesn't need to exist. See it and your 90 minutes of boredom at the viewing experience will incline you to agree.

"This is not a comic book"

I think everybody remembers Adrian Veidt's famous moment of revelation at the end of Watchmen, when just after he has explained his master plan in the most stereotypically supervillain manner, he gives the most chilling response to the question, "When are you planning to do it?"

"Do it?" Adrian replied.

"Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome?"

Adrian Veidt is essentially saying "This is not a comic book." You can't expect the typical tropes and tricks of comic book storytelling to apply to the real world. That kind of self reflexive storytelling was revolutionary...

...back in 1985. Since then, it seems it's been done to DEATH. I can't tell you how many times I've heard something to the extent of "What do you think this is? A comic book?" Yes, as a matter of fact it is a comic book, and the irony of the situation is no longer appreciated after reading the same trope for the 5,634th time. I really wish I could produce a bunch of on-hand examples of this to make this expose a little more convincing, but alas, this happens about as frequently nowadays as a character changing in and out of a costume - it's so utterly common it's completely forgettable.

However, it did happen again in this month's issue of KICK ASS.


I realize the whole book is meant to be self-reflexive, as it's a twisted take on the idea of a superhero existing in the real world, but do we really need another one of these look-at-the-camera-and-wink moments? This seems like a nitpicky criticism, but frankly, I just expect more from Mark Millar, especially when all the other comic book cliche meets real world collisions were so funny and different than the ones I've already seen. And hell, this book only seems to come out twice a year now. With this kind of time inbetween issues, can you blame me for expecting a top notch book?

Backwash: Jar of Fools by Jason Lutes

I've talked previously about the distinction between "mainstream" and "serious" comics, with the former often dealing with elements of genre and a sense of fantasticism, whereas the latter often deals with issues taking place in reality, rarely if ever imparting any powers or physical anomalies into the fiction (if it even is fiction). Mainstream comics tend to be published by big publishers, serious comics by small, independent ones.

While a lot of seriously great work has come out of the serious/indie camp, if there's one thing I'mm disappointed in, it's the severe lack of variety among the stories they publish. While everybody and their pets (myself included) are complaining about the dominance of the superhero in mainstream comics, few people seem to realize that the independent comics scene is largely dominated by memoirs, autobiography, and slice-of-life stories.

I don't mean to suggest that these books are bad by any means. I love me some Tomine and some Thompson. Blankets is one of my all time favorite comics, Box Office Poison boasts some of the most realistic character development I've ever seen, and Maus is a book that deserves close to every rave review it gets.

What I mean to say is that while the content and the conceit of these books is intending to be comparable to the Fiction and Literature section of your local bookstore, the breadth and variety of these books is lacking. Would it really hurt to give us some stories in the realistic vein that aren't just about guys working in convenience stores or going through breakups? As much as I enjoy some of these books, when I'm reading them, I usually can't help but feel that these writers are just documenting themselves and the people around the. Isn't that kind of easy?

Ed Brubaker once said in an interview that discovering Harvey Pekar was like discovering punk rock. Just as the gritty 3 chord rock of the Sex Pistols, The Ramones, and The Damned set a stark contrast to the emerging glitter and sensationalism of rock music in the 70's, Pekar's focus on everyday issues ranging from domestic disputes to returning overdue videotapes was revolutionary in a time when the field of comics wasn't just dominated by genre, it was perceived as a genre. And just as punk rock was a call to arms for many short haired folks with musical ambition and a lack of technical proficiency, Pekar's comics carried a similar message: You don't have to construct big universes and have flashy art. You can just write about yourself.

Fast forward 30 years and Pekar's model has become the norm in independent comics, with some cartoonists like Joe Matt and Adrian Tomine arguably doing better work than Pekar himself ever did.

However, to say that the breadth of realistic fiction is writing about the jobs you worked in college, the messy breakup you had last year, or realizing you forgot your change while on the way to the laundromat is just as silly and narrow-minded as thinking a comic book has to contain guys in tights shooting lasers out of their orifices. We now have plenty of guys in the medium that have mastered the slice-of-life concept, but where are the Mark Twains, the John Steinbecks, or even the John Updikes of comic book fiction? Where are the writers that painstakingly research and write about people they have next to nothing in common with?

Enter Jason Lutes, who seemed to have known about the very thing I'm talking about long before I ever had the idea and long before I had even heard of him. As early as in 1996, Jason Lutes had published his first graphic novel, Jar of Fools, a story about a cast of characters as broad as a young alcoholic, an old retired magician hiding from a kind of mandatory living sentence at an old folks home, a frustrated barista, and a father-daughter team of grifters living on the streets. Now, I don't know much about Jason Lutes's life, but I'm willing to bet that his years of being a cartoonist and an art director don't overlap much with the characters in this story. Score one for research.

It's not the best graphic novel ever done and it's not even the best graphic novel Jason Lutes has ever done (though personally I suspect Berlin might qualify on both counts after its completion). However, what it is is a very compelling story about human hurt, longing, compassion, and friendship, as we see the various characters' plotlines intertwine. Despite how little I have in common with just about any of these characters, their charisma and quirks really shine through their interactions.

Watch out for this guy. As soon as he starts putting out comics on a more regular basis (Christ, issues of Berlin seem to come out only once a year), there's a chance that he just might author the Great American Graphic Novel. That is, assuming James Sturm hasn't done it already.

Backwash: The Books of Doom by Ed Brubaker

I really wanted to like this book. Seriously.

I tend to think Doctor Doom is an underrated character, so I figured that a book about his life history would be really enjoyable. I also generally like Ed Brubaker's stuff, and I figured that if it's written by a two-time Eisner winner for Best Writer, it must be pretty good.

And I wouldn't say it's bad necessarily. While I was reading it, I was actually actively confused as to why I was disliking the reading experience. Ed Brubaker's prose filled narration effectively nails Doctor Doom's arrogance and struggle for superiority over his fellow man while subtley hinting at the pain and anguish underneath that caused him to armor and mask himself against the world. It's a full three issues or so before he dons the mask, so we get to see a lot of young Victor Von Doom as he undergoes childhood and adolesence, dabbling in the dark arts here and there before finally studying science in America alongside Reed Richards.

But while I was reading it, I just didn't really feel that oomph that's needed to engage me in the story. That's right, oomph. It's a real world - look it up.

If I had to guess why the book didn't resonate with me, I would say that it's because I just couldn't relate to the character. Doom's conviction that nobody is nearly smart and talented as he is just comes off as obnoxious when I'm seeing it every page. The little bit of humanity that we get to see is his isolation, his feeling of loneliness and struggle for independence in the wake of his parents' deaths.

However, we saw so little of his parents that it was really difficult to feel the same kind of heartbreak that Victor was experiencing. We only saw Victor's mother for literally 4 pages before her death. Having spent such little time with her, I can't understand why Victor would spend so much of his life being haunted by her memory.

One could reasonably argue that there were so many events in the story that it was difficult to fit everything in. But personally, I would way rather see a little less of Doom tinkering with his inventions, leading militia groups, and just generally being a dick to people if I could just get a little bit deeper of a glimpse at the one thing in his life that made him feel like a human being.

I think if you look at most stories about villains in other genres and media, what you usually see is an emphasis on the little empathy that these characters possess. Both The Sopranos and The Godfather are just as much about the closeness of family relationships as they are about ruthlessly killing people. Humanity is what we want to see in our characters, good or bad. With that being said, I'm personally inclined to think that a villain book can't work if it's just about a supervillain cackling and asserting his genius (unless it's a comedy, in which case it can often be hilarious). We need to see their pain or a little bit of the care they have for the loved ones in their lives.

Brubaker should probably stick to writing bad guys in CRIMINAL. In the meantime, I'm hoping there's somebody out there that can take the concept of a supervillain book and do it right.

Backwash: Zot! OR Where's a Superhero When You Need One?

I can't sleep tonight.

I got a call from my landlord at 2:30 in the morning that my car had just been broken into. Just six months ago, one of my car's windows had been similarly smashed, except this time it was to nab my fancy schmancy Garmin GPS system. So at this point, I had been smart enough not to leave anything of value in the car.

When I had gotten dressed and walked down to the car, I looked through the broken back window (which is the most expensive to fix after the windshield) and noticed that the contents of the car looked virtually untouched. My two books of CDs were lying in the same places, my Atlas was still lying on the bed of the trunk, and the front console was unopened. This wasn't attempted theft, this was pure vandalism.

I don't really have any enemies, so I know it wasn't a personal attack. I do however, live across the street from several bars, next door to a Hookah bar, and am right on the edge of a ghetto. It could have been a surly drunk, a high schooler on a power trip, or a crazed homeless man unaware of what he was doing.

It could be any of these things, I don't know which, nor do I care. I just have this wish I could have seen the act and punished the fucker for doing it. Punish the guy for having the audacity to just destroy something that belongs to somebody else for kicks and kicks alone. Do people out there really have that little to do with themselves? Weirdly enough, right now I think I want to be wringing this guy's neck more than I want the event to never have happened. Columbus, you are really testing my patience right now.

And all I can say is, where's a superhero where you need one?

Weirdly enough, this connects to a review I've been meaning to write of the book ZOT! by Scott McCloud, a superhero comic from the 80's which is about an upbeat Silver Age-esque superhero named Zot that travels from his world of science fiction, self-satisfaction, and heroics to our world, a world where good doesn't always win, where disappointment, anxiety, and general emotional uncertainty outguns optimism by a longshot, where...

Oh hell, you're familiar enough with it. Do I even need to introduce you?

The funny thing about this book is that I never had any enthusiasm about reading it. I never heard any positive reviews, none of my friends have read it, no comic book store employees had recommended it to me. I didn't even think it was going to be that good. As awesome as Scott McCloud is for his work on Understanding Comics, I had known him primarily as a comic book theorist, so there was no guarantee that his work in fiction, particularly superhero fiction, would be any good at all.

It was guilt that made me check it out. Ask most creators that are only known for one particular work and they will tell you that they hate their reputation for being pigeonholed for something that isn't representative of the breadth of their work. When people talk about Art Spiegelman and they only refer to Maus, they're referring to the guy as if he's a one hit wonder. I can't help but feel a sense of sympathy for artists in that position, and that sense of guilt eventually made me pick up Zot! from the local library.

However, the book ended up sitting on my shelf for a couple of months. The page count of 550 daunted me a bit, so I didn't want to spend close to a week reading a book that may not even be all that good when I could be catching up on FABLES, DAREDEVIL, or hell, just plain old books that I've been ignoring lately. A few months and a dry spell of comic reading later, and I was finally willing to give the book a shot.

Man, was I glad I picked it up.

McCloud takes the two world premise and runs with it, painting a wonderful contrast between the fantastical and surreal world of genre fiction that Zot lives in with the stark and real world that we live in. The whole purpose of Zot's visits to the real world are to spend time with his girlfriend Jenny, a 15 year old girl attending high school in Lexington, Massachusetts. While we get to see Jenny's big eyed reactions of awe and wonder observing Zot's world, just as well we see the frustration and bewilderment in Zot as he experiences a world of pain, sorrow, and racial division, where perfectly good people are victimized and nobody seems to do anything about it. While Zot is a successful celebrity living the life of an optimistic professional super boyscout in his own world, that approach doesn't work so well on our side.

But this isn't even the real meat of Zot! It doesn't take Alan Moore to write a story about a superhero ripped straight from the pages of a 60's DC comic book feeling a sense of frustration about not being able to solve the world's problems by punching people, and in the process gradually coming to a sense of awareness that good doesn't always win over evil and developing the same cynical attitudes as the rest of us. No, a story like that would reek of bitterness, feeling like a misguided writer's attempt at punishing superheroes for making them believe in the goodness of the human spirit when in actuality, we live in a world where nice guys finish last, your parents get divorced, and on some occasions, your car gets broken into.

Zot! ends up becoming so much more than what can intuitively be done with the concept. While it seems like the presence of the two worlds might diminish each other, McCloud somehow managed to do the opposite, using the contrast to highlight the two worlds. After seeing Zot's wild and wacky world, Jenny's world of mundane troubles doesn't come across as dull or boring. Instead, amidst the context of a story about an army aiming to deevolutionize the world or a looney supervillains attempting to rob a bank, Jenny's sexual frustration with not knowing her exact feelings for Zot come across as much more real and strangely beautiful. Just as well, while it would be reasonable to suspect that the heavy weight of our world might make Zot's world seem ridiculous and silly, on the contrary, McCloud's detailed splash pages of a big and busy world in addition to his fast-paced superhero romps couldn't have been brighter.

Sure, his initial stories start out kinda rusty. The dialogue was a little weak and it didn't seem like he quite figured out how to balance the two worlds yet. But there's an emotional maturity that develops over the stories as McCloud came into his own much more as both a writer and an artist. The plots got a little more interesting, the emotional reactions a little more real, and his art more detailed. By the halfway point, his referenced backgrounds looked so detailed that their portrayals could have rivaled those of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Japanese artist and master of all things mundane.

The book is divided into two sets of stories. 'Heroes and Villains', which comprises the first 17 issues or so, is composed of stories that mostly take place on Zot's world. As the stories progress, we get to see more of Jenny's friends take the plunge, including her brother Butch who appears in their world as a monkey for some strange reason. As the cast of characters gets bigger and bigger, a glitch occurs as Zot travels back to Jenny's world and he's suddenly trapped. This begins the remaining 9 issues, the 'Earth Stories.'

This is where McCloud really begins to shine as a writer. Each issue presents a stand alone short story that takes place from a different character in the cast. Whether it's Jenny's mother describing her own problems with her divorce and hoping that Jenny gets something better, a comic book collecting nerd that has troubles with women (who I suspect is based on McCloud's high school buddy Kurt Busiek), or a friend vying for Jenny's attention who takes a stand in a way that Zot never could, we get to see little intimate portrayals of daily life in a New England high school that are as raw and real as anything Adrian Tomine ever produced.

And finally, at the end of the story, we're given one last look at Zot's world before the book's conclusion. I don't want to spoil anything, but the last issue of the book's parting glances at both of the worlds felt almost like a referential nod to genre and serious fiction. At the time this was written, there were some pretty firm dividing lines between the two camps, with most of the well regarded indie press guys like Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar decrying superhero stories as juvenile escapism and most of the mainstream Marvel and DC guys never so much as touching a story about the struggles of ordinary people. Considering how rare it was for anybody to write fiction that blurred the lines, I can't help but feel that the concluding speech by one of the characters, "So this it. The great escape. Is it wrong for us to want this?" is a message defending the idea of genre fiction. And of course, that puts a possible spin on all the previous stories, suggesting that maybe Zot's world is a metaphor for immersing yourself in an imagination completely unlike your own world.

Zot! is, quite simply, a rare breed. It's a smart and innovative take on classic Silver Age comics without ever dipping its toes in cynicism or hard-edged perspectives is nothing short of remarkable. Hell, it was almost ten years after Zot!'s creation that Alan Moore himself dabbled with the same ideas in his run on SUPREME. The fact that Zot was able to walk away from his experiences on our world after having been hospitalized for a gunshot wound (and brutally savaged on other occasions) and still has hope for saving it, really makes you wonder if you should feel the same. Hell, it even makes me think that a broken window really isn't so bad.

Overrated Villains: Magneto

If you ask people who they think is the most badass villain in the Marvel universe, most people will probably say it's Magneto.

Everybody has a pretty favorable impression of the guy. Maybe it was the performances by Ian McKellen in the movies, maybe it's the similarity to righteous extremists like Malcolm X, or Hell, maybe it's just the fact that he's so powerful that he can give any group of the most powerful superheroes a run for their money.

But when you actually go back and read the comics, you'll find that Magneto isn't as badass and cool as you remember him to be.


In fact, Magneto tends to come off very much like a typical scheming supervillain from the Silver Age. Even as recent as his portrayal in Grant Morrison's NEW X-MEN run, Magneto may act with a moral righteousness behind his terrorism, but at heart he is still a moustache twirling supervillain with plans of world domination that are, at best, half baked and poorly executed.

I mean, how is it that the most powerful mutant in the world, one who is intelligent, educated, and has a more alluring promise to the ones disgruntled by anti-mutant prejudice than the X-Men do, loses time and time again to a bunch of teenagers with goofy powers like shooting eyebeams and making snowballs? If you ask me, he's more like a Scooby Doo villain shaking his fists at "those meddling kids" than he is a Malcolm X figure.

Couldn't we as readers be treated to a depiction of the character that fit our initial expectations? I'm not saying that Magneto should be so brutal and badass that he kills all the X-Men and takes over the world (although that would make a cool "What If?" story). I'm just saying that if you can tell at first glance that drilling to the center of the Earth from an Antarctic base, reversing the Earth's polarity, or choosing a Brotherhood that includes useless characters are bad ideas, then chances are Magneto could too. Let's see him hatch a real plan for once.

But even aside from his plans, there is a total lack of depth in the character that still makes him feel much cartooney than the other characters in the X family. Alan Moore once sardonically commented on Stan Lee's conception of Marvel characters from the rigid, old-school heroism of the DC universe by saying "...Stan Lee had this huge breakthrough of two-dimensional characters. So, they dress up in costumes and do good, but they've got a bad heart. Or a bad leg. I actually did think for a long while that having a bad leg was an actual character trait. "

No character fits this bill more than Magneto. You have two ingredients to make a Magneto.

1. Several large doses of wrath. I'm talking veins bulging, chair throwing, pants piss inducing fury.

2. Intermix some pathos for mutantkind throughout his character to make him feel like he has some kind of moral spectrum.

That's it.

On one hand, he's this world threatening evil supervillain.

But on the other, he's a guy that loves his mutant family and whose vegetarianism precludes him from eating the cude, cuddley animals he so adores.

Would it hurt for the guy to have a hair more depth to him than we've been given? I don't know about you guys, but if I need to see Scooby Doo villains, I can just watch Scooby Doo.

Harvey Pekar on Letterman in '87: On Strike Against NBC

While I generally enjoyed the American Splendor movie, one thing that disappointed me was that during the scene where Harvey goes on Letterman's show to protest against NBC and their owner General Electric we were shown a reenactment instead of the original footage. That was one of my favorite scenes in the comic, so I really wanted to see how it compared to the actual event.

I dug around on YouTube only to find other guest appearances on Letterman's show (he did several), but just a little while ago the actual interview was posted.

Pekar was just as grumpy and as sardonic as you'd expect. However, one thing that was surprising was that Pekar seems much more obnoxious and disruptive than in his portrayals in the movie and in his own comic.

The Marvel Book I'm Most Looking Forward To

Marvel has had a lot of great books lately. There's Fraction and Larroca's INVINCIBLE IRON MAN, Straczynski and Coipel's THOR, Garth Ennis's PUNISHER MAX, Ed Brubaker's work on both CAPTAIN AMERICA and DAREDEVIL, and Mark Millar's work on Wolverine: Old Man Logan.

What's the commonality between these? Critically acclaimed talent exercising their creative muscle telling relatively continuity free stories with their characters of choice. Judging by the fact that Marvel now has over 52% of the market share as well as the fact that of the seven total recipients for the Eisner award for Best Writer, two of them are current Marvel exclusives (Ed Brubaker won in '07 and '08 and Bendis won in '02 and '03) and all of them with the exception of Alan Moore have done work at Marvel in the last five years.

In short - Marvel is kicking ass. And they have yet another book that's going to be added to the aforementioned roster with WOLVERINE: WEAPON X by Jason Aaron and Ron Garney.


If you're not familiar with Jason Aaron, he's the writer of SCALPED, which is a crime comic that takes place on an Indian reservation and is quite possibly the single best Vertigo book right now, one that might possibly end up in the same ranks as Y: THE LAST MAN, PREACHER, and THE SANDMAN. It seemed like before I had the chance to even pick up the trades and see what everybody was talking about, Marvel had already picked up the guy in an exclusive deal, having Aaron pick up scripting duties on GHOST RIDER and WOLVERINE.

The WOLVERINE storyline he was hired to write was a 4 part storyline following the Messiah Complex storyline entitled Get Mystique. During the Messiah Complex storyline, several forces struggled for the life of the newest mutant baby to be born since the catastrophic House of M event where the mutant count was limited to only 198 and mutantkind was rendered essentially infertile. With mutant extinction just on the edge of the horizon, it doesn't take Professor X to tell you that this mutant baby is pretty damn important. In the midst of the chaos, Mystique steals the baby and nearly kills it in an act of selfishness.

What is Cyclops' response to this? Find Mystique, wherever the hell she is, and kill her. No questions asked. Just Wolverine and nobody else.

The whole storyline was Wolverine tracing her steps through the Middle East. As he gets closer and closer to her whereabouts, we're treated to flashbacks of Wolverine and Mystique's relationship through the ages as bank robbers in the 1920's and the long history of blood, betrayal, and sex that has happened since. To further complicate matters, Mystique has been using her shapeshifting powers to impersonate Wolverine as she savages her way through the countryside, so Wolverine isn't exactly greeted with friendly cooperation in his search.

What resulted was a really fun and imaginitive story that has actually reinvigorated my interest in the character. Previously I had always thought that Wolverine was a big cliche, another Clint Eastwood persona: a strong silent tragic hero with a rough and tumble attitude, a guilty conscience, and a heart of gold underneath that's visible underneath the layer of piss and vinegar.

Aaron brought out a new angle on the character by understanding that a character that has lived for 200+ years has a rich and complex history, any of which you can draw from in flashback sequences or have other figures from his past come back to bite him, something which seems so obvious in retrospect. He didn't change the character, but he figured out new situations to elicit what makes him resonate. Quite simply, he seemed like a very reasonable pick to write the book after Millar's completion of the Old Man Logan storyline.

Imagine my surprise when Marvel had not only taken my suggestion, but they'd taken it one step further and created a whole new book for him. WOLVERINE: WEAPON X will be a long running series done exclusively by Jason Aaron and artist Ron Garney. In a CBR X-position interview, Aaron gave some hints about what to expect that got me really pumped.

The book will be relatively continuity free ("This is a Wolverine series for people who've never read the character's adventures, who don't know anything about his long and complicated history"), will jump from genre to genre ("The first arc is a gritty, black-ops espionage tale. Future arcs will range from horror to even sci-fi"), and will be pretty high in the violence factor ("If I'm writing it, chances are it'll be bloody. I'm disturbed like that").

My hypothesis? This run has "seminal" written all over it.

What I Want: Villain Books

You know what has always bothered me about superhero comics? That despite the fact that just about every possible idea about superheroes has been capitalized on, from superheroes with physical impediments to loser superheroes, from parallel realities to time travel, from Magneto leading the X-Men to international superhero teams, we still have yet to see a long-running series about a supervillain.

Sure, there have been miniseries or graphic novels. There's some kind of Magneto miniseries running right now at Marvel, there was the Brian Azzarello/Lee Bermejo take on Lex Luthor in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel as well as their recent Joker graphic novel. While humanized Lex Luthor in a way that hadn't been done in recent comics, Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, Joker really paled in comparison to the villain's portrayal in the sublimely awesome The Dark Knight. While the hyperviolence and unpredictability of the character was captured, little else was, and as a consequence we got a portrait of the character that wasn't really able to relate his madness to anything, at least not in the way that The Killing Joke was able to relate it to an attempt to communicate psychological pain.

Some could even argue that certain titles being published today are centered around villains. Marvel's THUNDERBOLTS, for instance, centers around a team of supervillains employed by the government as a part of the Superhuman Registration Act in an effort to reform the villains into performing good. But the latter aspect ties into my basic complaint: instead of villains doing good instead of villains doing bad. While some characters like Norman Osborne and Bullseye seem to relish in their own chaos throughout the book, much of the book centers around Songbird, who is practically a fully reformed supervillain in her own right.

What I want is a book that centers around one supervillain. A completely unapologetic look at how a supervillain operates. No copouts like a gradual transition into being legitimate or good. Just a book that dives headfirst into the side of the villains, shifting our perspective as readers from the black and white of the heroes' worlds to the various shades of gray that are involved in a villain's work.

It doesn't have to be a new villain. It could be somebody like Dr. Doom.

Dr. Doom - who, judging from the photo, appears to be sympmathetic to my complaint.

I'm not interested in seeing this just for the novelty of the idea. I'm interested in seeing it because I think it opens up new directions for storytelling in a superhero universe that are currently untapped. We can see how villains cooperate or screw over other villains, how villains balance long term agendas (taking over some nation or section of the world) with short term ones (badly needing money). We can see how villains evade the law, or in some cases, deal with the consequences of being confronted with the law. Most of all, we can see their humanity. We can learn to empathize with their goals, see how they care for their loved ones, and even see them at their most mundane.

What I'm saying isn't entirely speculation. This kind of spotlighting the villains has already been done in other genres to beautiful effect, be it The Godfather, The Sopranos, or Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' CRIMINAL. So why can't we see this done in the context of a superhero universe? Surely, the addition of one book about a supervillain can't clog up the publication schedule any more than another book about Wolverine or Batman. I think it's safe to say that we've seen plenty of the heroes, thank you very much. Some of us would like to see what's going on the other side of the sandbox.

Wednesday Comics

DC Comics just announced it's newest weekly comic.

It's not another big continuity event.

It's not about the biggest superheroes.

It's not even about the supervillains.

Really, it doesn't seem to tie into the DC continuity much at all. It's something you wouldn't expect. They're taking chances in a way I never thought they would. It's not just going to feature unique talent or unique stories, it's going to have a unique publishing format.

Enter Wednesday Comics, a 12 issue weekly series starting in the summer. Each issue is going to be 16 pages in length and will be comprised entirely of one page stories, all by well known and well respected creators like Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Kyle Baker, Brian Azzarello, Kurt Busiek, Michael Allred, and a whole bunch of others. Stories will be about characters like Sergeant Rock, Hawkman, and Metapmorpho, and the whole format will harken back to the Sunday comics you used to read as a kid, so you can add a big slavering of nostalgic goodness to some already good stories.

If you ask me, this is exactly the kind of thing DC needs. With so much of their news having been monopolized by big continuity events and with so many star writers being picked up by Marvel instead of DC, it's refreshing to hear that they're getting back to the basics and understand that having quality talent behind the stories is possibly the best predictor of a story being good.

Let's all cross our fingers and hope it doesn't disapppoint.

Source - Robot 6

Underrated Superheroes: The Scarlet Spider

You know who I like? The Scarlet Spider.

That's right. The clone of Spider-Man.

I'm willing to concede that the clone saga never should have happened. Clone stories really seem like an artificial and silly way to induce drama into the series by having a "Who's who?" question thrown out there combined with the fact that you do eventually have to kill off the clone, because as much as every fanboy wants to see 2 Spider-Men flying around New York, it ends up getting pretty messy after 5 or 10 years.

This is exactly what they did to Ben Reilly, Peter Parker's clone, in the end. However, prior to his death, they gave him this really cool costume and identity as The Scarlet Spider. He had the same powers and personality as ordinary Peter Parker, but with a few key differences that make him cooler.

1. Being less experienced as a superhero, he was forced to be more resourceful in order to accomplish his goals. He took Parker's formula for web shooters and developed it into impact webbing - super strong balls of webbing that pack a wallop as well as some spider stingers that have a low dose of toxicity. Badass.

2. Many will disagree with me, but personally I think his costume looks cooler. It looks much more like a homemade costume, with it's solid fill red and blue instead of the intricately stenciled web designs. The external web shooters look nice, too.

3. Treading carefully with his extra inventions, the Scarlet Spider did something Spider-Man could never do: he beat Venom in an all out brawl.

All that, and he brings his own booyah.

Genre in Comics

Now that I've given my little rant on genre in the realm of literature, I'd like to talk about how this relates to comics. However, I can't talk about the field of comics as a whole, since there are many different subdivisions, each with their own perceptions on what comics do and where they should be going. I'm going to lump the whole medium into two categories:

1. Mainstream comics: Take note - when I say "mainstream" I am more talking about style than I am about sales. If it has the feel of a network television show, it's a mainstream comic. A mainstream comic isn't just one that includes superheroes, it's a comic that's hip, accessible, gritty, or what have you, so this camp consists of Y: THE LAST MAN as much as it does SPIDER-MAN. Most of the comics on Image, books like SCOTT PILGRIM at Oni, virtually everything on the Vertigo line, and oh, did I mention Marvel and DC?

2. Serious comics: Okay - I confess I couldn't find a good name for this camp within comics. "Underground" or "indie" seem like the most likely choices, and yet many comics like Maus or Persepolis have sold in the millions, which is hardly "underground", and with guys like Harvey Pekar and the Hernandez bros getting deals with DC and Pantheon, these books are hardly independent either. What I'm referring to is a camp within comics that consists of people at publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly. Guys like Dan Clowes, James Sturm, Craig Thompson, Jason Lutes, and Art Spiegelman, who are all essentially attempting serious literary fiction within comics. These are the kinds of books that Time Magazine typically writes about.

Clearly, not everybody fits into one camp or the other. Scott McCloud is a guy that seems to hang out with the serious crowd, and yet he flirted with mainstream ideas in his sci-fi/superhero comic ZOT and even hangs out with Kurt Busiek. The Hernandez bros were always exclusively independent and yet Jaime had a lightheartedness to his early work and included a few superhero characters in LOVE & ROCKETS. Alan Moore has constantly drifted between the two, doing big mainstream books for DC in the 80's, subsequently doing serious work in the Doystevskian graphic novel A Small Killing, and then going back to doing mainstream work for Image and Wildstorm.

But, on the whole, people choose their camps and stick with em. Mark Millar's much more likely to be going out drinking with Garth Ennis and Brian Bendis at cons than he is with Chris Ware, and conversely somebody like Adrian Tomine is much more likely to write the introduction to a book by Lynda Barry than somebody like Robert Kirkman.

Aside from these "who sits with who" cafeteria type divisions, there is a clear distinction between the two camps in their perceptions of genre.

The serious comics camp tends to stick to, well, serious fiction. There's the autobiographical comics of Harvey Pekar, the slice of life stories seen in Adrian Tomine's OPTIC NERVE and the Hernandez brothers LOVE AND ROCKETS, and memoirs that range from the historical (Maus and Persepolis) to the deeply personal and confessional (Craig Thompson's Blankets and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home). While some of these stories border on the fantastical, they rarely, if ever feature elements of genres such as detective fiction, spy fiction, or the superhero.

The mainstream comics crowd tends to go for much bigger stories than the relatively austere, serious crowd does. Rarely will you see a comic from guys like Brian Bendis, Mark Millar, or Greg Rucka that doesn't feature big action, crime elements, violence, chases, explosions, and whatever else that could get your blood pumping. The visceral is favored over the mundane, the fast pace over the snail crawl, and action over introspection. Don't expect any of these guys to write any of these guys to write stories about guys that work in convenience stores.

What's interesting about these two camps is how little crossing over there is, despite the fact that some mainstream writers have the potential to do great general fiction and visa versa.

Garth Ennis, for instance, demonstrates a really firm grasp of characterization as well as some of the best, most naturalistic dialogue in the business. Both of these qualities make him seem completely prime for a personal, non-genre related story, and yet the vast majority of his published works are war fiction, Westerns, or over the top superhero parodies. Just as well, Bendis's flair for chitter chatter and drama of ordinary people that comes up in ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN makes him seem like a great candidate to do the same. And yet, on the rare occasion when he does something that's not a Marvel comic, it's much more likely to be a crime comic than anything else.

To my knowledge, serious camp doesn't seem to decry genre elements so much as it avoids them. It's possible that people like Tomine and Spiegelman are all, at heart, huge Raymond Chandler fans, and that it just never comes up in their work. Many have, however, mentioned several times in interviews that they really dislike superhero comics. They don't like superheroes, they don't read them, and they certainly don't have any interest in writing or drawing them.

While I think it's becoming increasingly common to go from one camp to the other
(Brian Wood publishes both realistic fiction like Demo and Local as well as big sci-fi or action stuff like DMZ and NORTHLANDERS, Warren Ellis writes all kinds of sci-fi but also fits in a historical graphic novel like Crecy), for the most part, most creators stick to one or the other. Hell, most creators act like the other camp doesn't exist.

Personally, I'd like to see it more often. Let's see the folks at Drawn and Quarterly flirt with genre elements a little bit. Let's see somebody at Fantagraphics actually accept an invitation to work at Marvel. And let's see some of the Marvel and DC crowd do stories that don't feel like wannabe television shows for once.

What made me wish I went to WonderCon

When I saw the WonderCon '09 lineup, I didn't feel too badly about missing it.

1. I was already planning on going to the NY Comic Con, which was featuring a lot of big name talents like Bendis, Morrison, Stracyznski, etc.

2. It would have made for a pretty expensive plane ticket.

Of course, right after it happens, I hear about the awesome panel to end all awesome panels - a discussion between Matt Fraction, writer of INVINCIBLE IRON MAN and CASANOVA (two of the best comics out right now), as well as Michael Chabon, novelist extraordinaire and author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and WonderBoys.

It's funny - it seems so obvious that Chabon would be a comic book fan considering that Kavalier and Klay, his Pulitzer prize winning 650 page beast of a novel, is entirely about comic book creators in the Golden Age of comics. And yet still, I had this impression that he was somebody that had just grown up reading Superman comics and at best described his comics reading experience the way most people nowadays would describe collecting baseball cards or watching Saturday morning cartoons: Something that captured a lot of childhood's excitement and passion, but is really a thing of the past.

It was the only explanation that made sense to me. I thought - There's just no way a serious, accepted, literary author could keep up with the funny books every month! Comics are considered to be a lowbrow artform, after all. People are willing to see movies like A History of Violence, Road to Perdition, or Ghost World, but rarely show any interest in seeing the comic books they were adapted from. Hell, 90% of the people who raved about Dark Knight (and those ravings were totally legitimate) have no interest in picking up a comic book.

One time when I was working at Borders, I got to know an older employee who told me that when he was younger, he collected every Marvel comic book between 1961 and 1970. He was a totally devout enthusiast in his childhood and made an effort to collect and read any comic book he could get his hands on. WhenI asked him if he'd read any newer comics, he shook his head and said he thought they were "too adult". This is coming from a guy that read almost exclusively adult fiction.

No matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, people seem to think comic books are for kids.

Imagine my excitement when I found that Chabon, a critically acclaimed writer possessing "literary merit" is bona fide fan of current comics. Hell, he even reads IRON FIST, the lowbrow of a lowbrow artform. That's awesome. Ironically, the discussion him and Fraction had centered around the very subject I'm complaining about - the high culture and low culture division in fiction and literature, particularly the stigmatization of genre.

Reading this was like getting a huge deep breath of fresh air for me. Finally, I got to hear from writers within the establishment that had the same gripes I've had. I've always seen that writers like Philip K. Dick or Stephen King were relegated to Sci-Fi or Horror sections of bookstores, and to boot, there are many that will make the claim that the works of these writers "aren't literature."

Just what the hell does that mean?

I recall once reading something where somebody asked Orson Scott Card why Stephen King's books weren't considered literature. His response was "His works are obviously literature in the sense that people read his books and enjoy them. However, they are not literature in the sense that they are not accepted by the academic and literary elite." And that's really what this comes down to - what academia decides is and isn't art. In this case, the jury is still out on works of genre.

Personally, I don't buy the whole high art vs. low art distinction. I'm not entirely sure what people classify as "high art", but I'm going to assume that it's works that are considered to be intellectually stimulating or historically relevant. I think it's a terribly elitist assumption to assume that works that are more cerebral and require more intellectual engagement are inherently superior to works that are not. I think that "popcorn art" (be it a movie, comic book, whatever), as in works that are designed strictly to entertain, have a very important function in our culture. Imagine if everytime we got home from a long day of work we sat down and plunged through another few chapters of Ulysses before the next work day. This would probably result in a mass suicide epidemic.

But let's assume I buy into the high art/low art distinction as worthwhile. Does the presence of a detective, a talking gorilla, or God forbid, a superhero, really detract from the ability to tell an intellectually engaging story? Do these elements prevent us from telling stories that reflect human nature?

I really think not. And as Chabon and Fraction pointed out, there are writers like Vonnegut, Dickens, and Balzac, all members of the literary canon, that conformed to genre elements in some way or another.

- - - -

I'm going to cut myself off because I could probably get another 5 pages out of this. I'll be writing more about the subject of genre in subsequent posts.

Back from the dead

Not dead yet.

I just look like I'm dead.

Oh, and there was the whole not posting anything for over 3 months.

As you can probably tell, the blog has a new title. I felt really discouraged by the fact that a name that I thought was kind of original and cool ("...Another Comic Book Blog") was very similar to an already established blog with the name "Yet Another Comics Blog". In a post asking for suggestions, my friend Ed suggested this one and I thought it was possibly the coolest.

This may be partly because my name is Adam, partly because a friend calls me Adam Ant, and partly because it has been rumored that due to the incredible strength of my bone structure, people say my skeleton is made of adamantium. I'm sure if you look for it, you can find all kinds of other brilliant symbolism behind the title.

I'm going to try to post at least once a week. While the name thing kind of bugged me, I think part of the reason why I wasn't so eager to post very frequently on the blog was because I kept writing this ridiculous 10 page long posts that were probably just as much of a pain in the ass to read as they were for me to write. So instead, I'll just post the occasional review or rant and try to keep it brief.

So yeah, expect a post or two soon. Stay cool, and don't forget to drink your ovaltine.

Adam