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Some girl drug-overdoses. Everybody who does drugs in fiction always overdoses.

26 Apr

By Ayo

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Jupiter’s Legacy, no. 1
Mark Millar, Frank Quitely
Millar World/Image Comics
April 2013

Look, Frank Quitely is the best superhero artist in the world. His use of space in his signature horizontal compositions is still understudied and overlooked. Nobody put out a better superhero comic this week because nobody is better than Frank Quitley.

But sweet heaven, this was also likely the most boring comic this week as well. As a debut issue this was about equivalent to the first track on a hip hop CD that features two and a half minutes of the rapper talking lazily to his friend over a good beat about something so vague that it fails to even make an impression. Feels like a waste of a good beat.

The Comics Journal’s Tucker Stone and Comics Alliance’s David Brothers already gave this comic as serious a looking as it deserves. This is the kind of work that gets produced when writers and artists are allowed to rest on their laurels and feed off of the fat of their past achievements. As the introduction of a new work, Jupiter’s Legacy is lazy. It is banking on the reader’s emotional investment., not the work at hand. But as a brand new story with new characters, a new world to explore, the only emotional investment of loyalty that a reader can have is an investment in the authors. Having enjoyed another work previously doesn’t make this project better than what appears on the page. On its own merits, Jupiter’s Legacy is just no good.

How About Alex?, -or- The One Punch Chump

29 Mar

By Darryl Ayo

“Let The Good Times Roll”
Uncanny Avengers, no. 5
Rick Remender & Olivier Coipel
Marvel Entertainment

Not to be Mister-Anti but I actually liked this comic book. It moved several characters with distinctive worldviews through one day that ended with somebody getting his neck broken by accident. The flat-note ending was pitch-perfect for me and I like that the ending’s implication is…implied by the way Rogue looks up to see the press cameras all directed at her. Not a word is needed after that moment and not a word is offered. That is the end of the story, CRACK, neck broken.

But let’s be reality, the reason people care about this particular comic is a scene that happens earlier. Alex, a character who is indicated by the story to be the leader of this group of characters, delivers a press conference where he says something so silly that I’ve never heard it before in real life.

Alex:

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Short and simple: my only problem with Alex’s speech is that “mutant” isn’t “the M-word.”

“Mutant” in comic storyland isn’t a slur in and of itself. It’s a group descriptor like “gay,” “black,” “Muslim.” A slur would be a crude term of division which shouldn’t be spoken in polite company (taking its cue from “the ‘N’word” of real life). The slur would be a term of undisputed hostility and derision (ie, “gene-joke,” “mutie,” “freak”), not the term which merely describes the group of people.

Now, Alex could be a “self-hating mutant,” I suppose. Particularly to contrast with his brother Scott, who is concurrently raising a mutant revolution army in some other comic book. Scott the separatist and Alex the assimilationist. That could work as a believable tension. But it still doesn’t work in the particular language twist that this scene tries to achieve. This scene doesn’t achieve its goal of paralleling real-world expressions of oppressed people (which the mutants are meant to represent).

Here is writer Rick Remender weighing in about the contrasting opinions on twitter

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Not a problem, I live in Greenpoint.

All jokes aside, I strongly suspect that Remender was responding to people who opposed his story’s anti-bigotry message rather than members of oppressed groups who objected to the logic of his story’s argument. That said, he’s made his statement and that’s that. I do find it interesting that nobody in Marvel Entertainment editorial second-guessed the tone of character-Alex’s press conference. That nobody saw the glaring problem of equating general group description with the idea of a pejorative slur. Because even a character who is self-hating in his or her cultural identity would know that the generic descriptor isn’t a “___-word.”

This comic makes a try at tackling a real-world issue. It misfires. That’s okay, try again.

-Ayo2013xoxo.

Overreaction is my only reaction; which only sets off a chain reaction

16 Dec

By Ayo

Human beings don’t act like this.

“Cable and X-Force,” no. 1
Dennis Hopeless & Salvador Larroca
Marvel Comics, 2012

Here’s what I can understand from this comic: previously, Cable was dead. Now he’s alive and stalking his daughter. Not in the “bad” way but in that creepy movie way where he watches her from afar. For no apparent reason. The implication is that he wants her to live a normal life with her foster parents but let’s be honest: Cable is a psychic, cyborg soldier from the future and his daughter is also a soldier from the future. He could just send her a telepathic “hello” message and be done with it.

This comic has no real thrust to it. It does the thing where the story starts in the midst of action then backtracks to some causation. But the reader isn’t given enough of the action OR the causation for it to have any effect. It’s all just layers of vague implication. Also Cable shoots his uncle Havok in the face which is only funny because Havok’s enduring character trait is that he’s a rube and a chump. He’s all “I know this man. Please tell me this isn’t what it looks like…” ZAP.

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The highlight of this issue is Domino. She’s Cable’s ex-girlfriend, a super-proficient spy/assassin/mercenary who smiles as she jumps from high places. I like Domino a whole bunch and have to restrain myself from buying comics that she stars in. As you can see, my will was weak this time.

Small problems, no great loss

5 Dec

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Madame Mirage, no. 1-6
By Paul Dini and Kenneth Rocafort
Top Cow Productions

This is the comic book equivalent to a decade-old movie that’s now being played on Saturday afternoon when you ought to be out of the house doing better things but somehow you’re not. You aren’t pumped to read this but you’re not saying no either. The plot is interesting enough to pull even a skeptical audience along and the drawings of Kenneth Rocafort… the drawings of Kenneth Rocafort…

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The appeal of Madame Mirage is simple without getting into the details of the plot: a beautiful woman with no obvious weapons brutally annihilates a crime syndicate from the lobby to the top floor. There’s reasonable story explanations for every concept that is presented and if the reader is receptive to action tropes with mild sci-fi seasoning, this comic is just as palatable as the hypothetical Saturday afternoon movie. Mildly engaging, unchallenging, moves more by momentum than by ingenuity.

For his part in this affair, Kenneth Rocafort fails to pull me in with his imagery. As the title suggests, Madame Mirage deals a lot with tricks of the eye and optical deception. Unfortunately whenever the title character pulls a fast one on a bad guy, the comic just gets confusing for the reader. One needs to rely on Paul Dini’s dialogue to indicate what trick has occurred. It isn’t a tragedy by any means; by genre convention, we are all pretty used to boastful characters telling their victims how they have outwitted them (by extension, they tell the audience). That’s kind of okay. Nothing of value is lost.

There is a slight problem in that two key characters essentially look alike: the villain and the hostage/ally are almost identical in appearance but I think that once again, the script helps us keep track. And context.

There’s an another, almost insignificant problem at the tale’s end: not really sure what happens to the title character. Spoiler: I think Paul Dini kind of forgot. No big deal.

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This comic is about a chesty lady in a low-cut dress who kills a lot of bad guys through the power of “being the protagonist. The world will never be safe from crime, war and papercuts until every bad guy from Bad Guys, Incorporated is stabbed to death with a pithy send-off line of dialogue. I almost feel like you don’t get to complain about certain things with a comic like this. I won’t.

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I once was told of a mutant who could twist space around him and now it seems that I’ve met him.

10 Aug

By Ayo

“Japan, 1954.”
Godzilla: The Half-Century War, No. 1 of 5
James Stokoe
IDW Publishing, August 2012
(c) Toho, Co., Ltd.

With sidekick Kentaro Yoshihara at the wheel, L.T. Ota Murakami sets eyes upon the greatest white whale since Moby Dick. I don’t say that to make “The Half Century War” out to be something that it’s not, but to draw a line indicating the ancestry of the particular kind of story that James Stokoe has crafted in this book. This is a man versus whale story. And Godzilla might be the biggest whale in popular culture.
Continue reading →

It’s New York in August…

3 Aug

2012-08-01 Comic Book Diary

By Ayo

“Lucky”
Hawkeye, No. 1
Matt Fraction & David Aja
Marvel Comics, Oct 2012

For reasons unknown to the reader, Clint Barton (Hawkeye) lives in a low-rent apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. This comic is set in a different part of Bedstuy than I lived in, but I think that I went to a party here once. To my eye, the neighborhood looks more Bushwick-like, mixed with South Brooklyn, but what do I know?
Continue reading →

Uncanny X-Force number 28

30 Jul

By Ayo

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The cover is by Jerome Openã but the inside drawings are by a lesser-known fellow named Julian Totino Tedesco. He’s got a knack for doing everything in this issue. He executes the climactic scene extremely well and he handles the human moments of the story with ease and finesse. I am not familiar with the name but he is clearly a seasoned professional. The colorist is fantastic but also a mystery. The cover indicates “White” which could only mean “Dean White” but the credits page indicates “Justin Ponsor.” Whoever it is, terrific job.

The story of Number 28 is the exact story of “The Minority Report.” Future world with precognitive anti-crime police carrying out preemptive executions. Punisher has found gainful employment. One wonders why Punisher isn’t a cast-character in this iteration of X-Force to begin with. Anyway:

The middle of this dystopian future story pauses to have a scene in which the characters stop running and start talkin to each other. There are six characters in the protagonist side. Wolverine talks to Deathlok about the situation at hand. E.V.A talks to Psylocke about the death of Fantomex in the issue previous. Age-of-Apocalypse Nightcrawler talks to Deadpool about why Deadpool is on missions after losing his powers. Everybody gets their own “moment.” That is usually all I can ask for.

When I was a kid, reading the original X-Force, all I could have wanted is for the characters who I like to have a “moment” in each issue. Just one where they acknowledge that they know one another and that they all risk their lives together.

There is also a moment in this current comic where we see the human victims of this precognitive, “preventative termination” in progress. Just a moment to capture both sides, and just enough for us all (readers and characters alike) to get the idea.

Also observe—

Deathlok: MURDER for any reason is still MURDER!

Wolverine: Sometimes murder’s the price we pay to protect innocents.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

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Hmmmm.

30 Jul

By Ayo

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Oppenheimer mowing down invaders. Giving zero fucks of any sort.
“Infinite Oppenheimers”
The Manhattan Projects, No. 1
Drawn by Nick Pitarra, written by Jonathan Hickman.
This comic book is batshit bananas. In high school, this is the type of comic book I would have bought the first issue of, respected its gangsta but not returned for another issue. Hickman combines cerebral plotting with visceral violence in a way that appeals to many intellectual comic readers, but I’m more of an emotional reader. This comic is good but it has no heart.

That said, I’m going to likely read more issues soon because I’m not solely an emotional reader, I have grown to like the cerebral stuff. But this story needs to grow an empathetic character at some point or I won’t enjoy it in the long run.

To me, my X-Men!

13 Jul

By Ayo

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X-Men, No. 1
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Pub. Marvel Comics, Sept. 1963
Purchase digital copy

Billed as “The Strangest Super-Heroes of All!,” the X-Men appeared in late 1963 as another off-beat invention of the insurgent Marvel Comics, once again blowing holes in the very notion of what a comics magazine is about. Rooted in postwar American existential fear and in the midst of the Atomic Age, the X-Men (also billed as being in the style of the runaway hit Fantastic Four) sought to be an even more daring conceptual piece. Ultimately, series creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would abandon the X-Men, focusing their energies around their first baby, the Fantastic Four–but until that time comes, the X-Men are part of the Lee-Kirby freight train of exploratory fiction ideas.

Most people are familiar with the X-Men as an allegory for the civil rights struggles in the U.S. but the reality of the text is that this comic concept is purely about the post-nuclear world. Professor Xavier’s parents were nuclear scientists. It is strongly suggested that mutants developed from radiation from the age of the Second World War. The theme of the X-Men is fittingly pacifism. Or, pacifism through violence. The objective stated is that these irradiated teenagers are being trained to use their abilities to protect people. When they do that, they are instantly thanked. Stan Lee was already exploring the persecuted superhero with The Amazing Spider-Man from the year previous (created with cartoonist Steve Ditko). With X-Men #1, Lee’s attention seems to have drifted back toward the superhero as beloved helper-figure.

Continue reading →

Is it a spoiler if it’s in the title?

21 Jun

By Ayo

“The Butler Did It”
Legends of the Dark Knight, No. 1
Damon Lindelof & Jeff Lemire
DC Comics for cell phones

Hey, the butler did it. There is literally zero purpose in reading this story because the title isn’t a clue, it’s the solution to the mystery. So YOU are fired. The real reasons to read this comic are 1) Jeff Lemire art. Fans of his /Sweet Tooth/ will want to see his Batman pages. And reason 2) to test out DC’s Digital First program to see if these cell phone comics are right for you.
Continue reading →

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