Comic Books and Graphic Novels

So over the past week I went through a longbox-diving binge and re-read the first run of Alpha Flight (1983-1994). I remembered it being an interesting comic that took a lot of standard superhero conventions and kicked them to the curb - this team actually had to worry about government oversight and funding, main and supporting characters got killed off at a rate rivaling A Game Of Thrones, and unlike most comics it tied itself explicitly to real-world people and events.

But holy cow, as a youngster I had no IDEA how absolutely bad most of the writing was. When I have to admit that John Byrne - John "barely-sentient cave-dwelling misogynist troglodyte" Byrne - was not the worst writer on the title, I feel a sense of quivering shame. Bill Mantlo, you used to be awesome - what happened to you here?

There's some great stuff in the early run - the backstory for the team and characters is well-done and cohesive. Guardian's death in only the 12th issue was a perfect came-out-of-nowhere shocker. But then things started to go off the rails a bit. Guardian's widow, Heather, gets elected to lead the team out of sentimentality. Not a single issue goes by without recapping Puck's unrequited love for Heather or Shaman's estrangement from his daughter - which she expounds upon every single time they're in the same panel together. If you thought Claremont's reliance on over-repeated catchphrases was bad, this puts "the focused totality of my psychic powers" to shame.

Also, if people couldn't figure out that Northstar was gay from about the third issue onwards - holy cow were they dense. This wasn't subtext, this was all just plain text. Talk about a transparent closet. Also - he and Aurora were apparently elves? Because Asgard and Canada are... wait, what? Since that was never referred to again, chalk it up to "Loki lied."

Once the series hit the 1990s - oh my god, the horrible factor went exponentially off the scale. The Dreamqueen arc (hey kids! It's Jim Lee! Hi, Jim Lee!) was hands-down some of the worst comics storytelling ever. Almost every single character becomes a single-faceted strawman for a political cause or vacillates almost Sybil-like between characterizations.

There were some high points - the Box/Scramble plot was brilliant: genius amputee inventor creates a robot suit for himself, but has an emotional breakdown when his new girlfriend ditches him for her recently-resurrected ex. So he goes to the flesh-manipulating brother of his best friend, gets new legs (made out of corpses, yum!) and then when they start decomposing, he begins to lose his mind and eventually gets merged with said fleshcrafter as a horrible Clive Barker monstrosity and gets lobotomized and then mercy-killed by his best friend, who takes over piloting the robot suit. Of course, said metal-manipulating best friend proceeds to immediately fall in love with the team leader and the series goes back to having the emotional depth and complexity of a CW teen drama.

Northstar! Talk about a character that I just cannot STAND in most modern comics. But back in the day, he may have still been loathsome but at least he was well-written with deep characterization. His personality sucked, but at least he had one! And now he's just "the gay X-Man". He was a grade-A jackass, but at least he was a believable jackass.

And the art. When John "sketchy scribbly everyone-looks-the-same WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE YOU HORRIBLE GOBLIN" Byrne is the high point of art on the series... yeah. I don't know. It's obvious when the early 90s hit because suddenly everything is oversaturated flat colors, everyone wears leather jackets, mullets (for men and women) and lantern jaws are everywhere... if it had been intended as parody that'd have been one thing, but this was earnestly terrible.

The series ended in 1993 - and a well-deserved death it was. It'd been on life support for years, and was easily among the lowest-quality book Marvel published through the early 1990s AND THAT'S SAYING SOMETHING. It's been relaunched and rebooted three times since, never making it past the 20 issue mark.

I guess sometimes nostalgia colors stuff and makes it look a lot better in memory than it actually was. I'd say out of 130 issues of the original series, maybe about 20% of that was what I'd call "good comics" and the rest was Oh My God Crap.

Blame Canada.

Bill Mantlo is the guy who decided that a heroic character couldn't possibly be a little person without it being the result of an evil curse, right? Cos that shit right there was when my 12 year old self thought 'this is dumb' and stopped picking that one up.

Exactly.

Byrne wrote characters that were legitimately stupid - but believably and realistically so. James Hudson didn't wind up founding Alpha Flight out of patriotism, he'd committed industrial terrorism and sold out to the government as a last-ditch resort. His wife was initially a 17-year-old secretary who ran away with him in a creepy "Don't Stand So Close To Me" May-December relationship. Sasquatch was a former physicist/football star (WHAAAAAAAT) who got his powers from intentionally trying to turn himself into the Hulk.

Canadian superheroes all have the secret power of being complete morons.

They should bring back the Great Beasts. Those kooky character designs were probably some of the only things Byrne ever did that I liked.

I liked them in the 80s because they reminded me of the Inhumanoids cartoon.

You would most likely recognize him as the guy on the left with the curly hair on the Totally Rad Show. I'm not a gigantic fan of him as a personality, and I think that Y is a property that adapts really, really poorly to film and really, really well to television, so I don't quite grasp what the studio is thinking here, but he doesn't seem to be an odious director.

Doctor Nemesis carries around dinosaur tranquilizer on the off chance it'll come in useful. If they ever make an X-Force movie, he must be played by Adam West.

Catching up on Ultimate Comics Spider-Man. I'm one of those people who wasn't big on Miles Morales coming in, though I recognize that I wasn't in great company given how many of them were just upset that Miles was a gawddam minority stealin' our spider-jerbs. Mostly I just really, really liked Ultimate Peter Parker. I've said before that he's my favorite version of the character and I will stick to that. So killing him off to make room for a whole new character just made me sad. Still, I liked the start of what they were doing with the new Spidey and despite the fact that Ganke is the most annoying superhero's best friend character since Zeke in inFamous, I thought the direction of the book was pretty good.

But then Marvel decided to have a big Ultimate Event with teaparty-separatists-as-Hydra ended up staging a civil war and blah blah blah and Spider-Man had to tie into it no matter how little sense it made and holy shit did this book fall into the crapper. I can't lay all of the blame on Spidey, it's just a dumb crossover event and I've still got a few issues left, but Jesus, this book used to be the flagship of the Ultimates line. Now I can't imagine buying any Ultimate book. This stuff makes Jeph Loeb's Ultimates 3 and the worst of Ultimate Fantastic Four look great by comparison.

Also, Jesus, since Mark Bagley left the haven't kept an artist on this book for more than two consecutive issues. And some of 'em are awful.

Oh man, Ultimate Marvel right now is a train wreck. Where's my favorite page...?




Ultimate Tony Stark becoming the Iron Patriot and shooting terrorists while singing Hulk Hogan's entrance theme is so bad it HAS to be intentional. I think the Ultimate universe is Marvel's equivalent of The Producers. Someone looked at Mark Millar and went "THAT'S our Hitler!"

One of the reasons I stopped reading superhero comics for years was the very ill designed costumes for the female characters. I never understood why Witchblade's Sara Pezzini is naked only to be covered with her Witchblade "armour."

This is the cover for Artifacts #25, out this Wednesday.

Because EMPOWERMENT.

Just going to leave this here.

Overall print comics market topped $700 million in 2012. Surprisingly there are no numbers for all the movie, games, and toys licensing. The Avengers movie alone made over $1 billion.

Scantily clad hot chicks don't need super powers. That is their super power!

I've never used this word before, but SQUUUUUEEE!

Okay, I'm caught up on Ultimate Comics Spider-Man and I'm ready to call this book a complete mess. By issue 20 of Ultimate Spider-Man, Peter had lost his Uncle Ben and learned that with Great Power Comes Great Responsibility and his greatest foe (and the man who would ultimately kill him) is born in the form of the Green Goblin. By issue 20 of Ultimate Comics The Overreaching Adventures of Miles Morales, he's suffered the loss of his uncle, the villain known as the Prowler, possibly due to careless use of his own powers, has been accused of murder, has seen his father nearly beaten to death by Venom, has participated in the civil war against Hydra, has personally saved President Captain America's life and has been accepted as a full member of the Ultimates.

Kurt Angle didn't get this much of a buildup in his first year.

Dear Marvel,

Put out an Ultimate Comics Spider-Woman book. I'd read that.

Regards,

Bahi

Edit: Lemme add that I think it's in questionable taste to feature the death of a real person who is still alive. I'm sure at the pitch meeting the statement 'let's kill off Obama so Captain America can be elected president' elicited lots of high fives, but ... no. Bad idea. Stop it.

Dear Marvel,

Put out an Ultimate Comics Kurt Angle, Agent of SHIELD book. I'd read that.

Regards,

Nute

What book is this?

Cable & X-Force. This week's issue has Doctor Nemesis and Forge getting bored and thus having Giant Scorpion vs Robot Monkey gladiator battles.

Thanks.

I have a dumb Comixology question. Is there a way to mass buy multiple issues at once? I wanna buy I Kill Giants, which doesn't have a collection version there -- and Amazon doesn't have a Kindle edition -- and I certainly CAN just click Buy seven times, but it would be nice if I could just have a "buy all" button, or at least be able to tick a bunch of checkboxes and "buy selected."

While I'm asking: how the hell do I read Love and Rockets? The descriptions don't help at all, and even Fantagraphics' "How To Read Love and Rockets" page is just confusing me.

Comixology doesn't even acknowledge the existence of Astro City. Gonna have to order it from Amazon or see if my local shop has it if I want to try it.

First issue of Saga was free on Comixology. That was pretty cool.

Sadly, there isn't. Which was a stone bitch when they had Strikeforce: Morituri on sale for 99 cents an issue.

How to read Love and Rockets - first you time-travel to 1988...

But seriously, the Fantagraphics page is pretty much the best advice. Go with the Locas hardcover which collects the first three Locas TPBs. Then pick up Locas II: Maggie, Hopey and Ray - those all should give you a pretty good assortment of the best of the series. If you're a completist and want to read everything, you're pretty much on your own because los Hernandez Bros seemed to have a schizophrenic Dadaist approach to publishing.

Be prepared for your new role as Comics Hipster, though. Because it doesn't really get any more indie-cred than Love and Rockets. Well, if you're a super-nerd and go for the Dan Clowes stuff, but all of that is shit.

Agreed, says the resident Comics Hipster.

I just read (all of) I Kill Giants. That was both different from and more upsetting than I expected.

I really, really hated the pre-/post-issue dialogues between the writer and the artist.

Oh, I also read The Dark Knight Returns and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1. More to come probably.

TDKR: This was fine basically? But I do not understand why this is supposed to be one of Frank Miller's great contributions to the medium. EDIT: Did not think much of the art at all.

LXG: Just an adventure story, but a fun one. I dig Captain Nemo and I suspect everyone else does too. The back section is presented as a period magazine and it was pretty great, especially Quatermain's maze.

Dark Knight Returns doesn't hold up well nowadays since it's become cliché, but at the time it was a new and innovative look at Batman in a future where his relevance has gone by the wayside. Some of Miller's proclivities come through in that every woman must either be super-butch (Ellen Yindel) or an oversexualized caricature (usually a prostitute of some flavor). While Miller's sexism isn't as overt as, say, Dave Sim's, the fact is that the only female character in the story that doesn't fit one of those roles is an ostensibly-teenage girl whose only validation is "Good soldier".

About Frank Miller:

Love and Rockets -- not doing it for me.

Chew -- through volumes 1 and 2, a lot of fun.

Five Fists of Science -- also a lot of fun but I really wanted more exposition.

Well, one of these stories was written by Frank Miller. While TDKR is considered his best and "most important" work, comparing it to pretty much a laundry list by Alan Moore will, in my honest opinion, make it come up short. I would probably still enjoy Miller's Daredevil run if I read it again today but it's like ... comparing Oliver Stone with Stanley Kubrick, maybe? Even when Moore is just farting about, like in his Batman story The Killing Joke, everything is just a hundred times more original and, I suppose, clever. I mean both of them are crazy and what they created in the 80's pretty much destroyed super hero comics for a long, long time but talent-wise there really is no comparison.

Miller's art in TDKR also seemed to me like a step down from his Daredevil work.

Just started Booster Gold: 52 Pick-Up by Geoff Johns. Has anyone ever seen Booster Gold and Peter Parker together in the same room?

After seeing comics shops in Minneapolis and San Diego, I am forced to admit that my local comics shops all suck. :(

EDIT: Atomic Books is pretty good but that is sooooooooooooo faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar. By which I mean like 20 minutes but I also have to find street parking and :effort:

I read Planetary, Vol. 1. That was pretty good. I am not much for the 1950s mold of superhero story, but I like the ones where not everyone is a cookie-cutter hero.

I gather that people who have read a lot of comics will get much more out of Planetary than me as it is apparently packed chock-full of references to other comics and tropes. But the ride is fun enough for me so far.

Planetary is one of the best comics of the past 15 years. Took forever to get resolved due to having the slowest penciller on the planet, but well worth the time.

Pick up the second collection at least. Planetary #10 could be in my top ten single comic book issues of all time.

Not just comics. There are some specific issues that will take the piss out of the 80s Vertigo line, for example, but Planetary goes far, far afield of merely comics references. It's like a clearinghouse of every crumb of pop culture stuck in Warren Ellis' fevered imagination. Marilyn Monroe, Godzilla, Sherlock Holmes, Michael Moorcock, it's all fair game. It's like the tag line says: Archaeologists Of The Impossible!

I finished, among other things, Planetary volume 2. I dug it a lot. I also saw the main big reveal coming, but that's okay.

I don't understand what is so well-loved about issue #10. Is this something I don't understand because I don't have much comics background? It seems like essentially nothing happened in it, at least not to anyone I have any reason at all to care about.

My favorite was issue 8, the one about City Zero. It reminds me of the Facility dungeon from the Secret World, which is kind of a similar idea about Cold War science, seen from the other side's eyes: an old, abandoned Russian facility in which a splinter organization called the Red Hand attempted, through grossly unethical human experimentation on its own people, to create the first true cosmonaut. Not the safe, limited kind that goes up in a spaceship to nearby worlds and moons, but one who can explore the reaches of the universe, without mechanical aid. The lore to that one is soulcrushing if you dig into the details.

Yes. Those are the Superman / Green Lantern / Wonder Woman analogues for Planetary. That's definitely an issue that hinges on your pre-knowledge of classic comics, along with #7 (the "Vertigo" issue I mentioned above).

Planetary is one of the Warren Ellis comics that fits into his Good pile, focusing on the theme that people can be evil bastards and horrible shit will happen and it's unstoppable and inevitable - but that there do exist people who want to help others and make the world a better place. It's why I consider Transmetropolitan to be one of the most feel-good comics around in the last arc.

Okay, but why am I supposed to care about that? In the context of the story it's meaningless. I get it as commentary on comics in general, but... it's not much to rest an issue on, unless comics fans care way more about that than I realize.