knifeonmars

[knifeonmars]

Dead Space: Artifact

January 27, 2023 saw the release of Dead Space, a remake of the original 2008 scifi horror shooter. For many fans and casual observers this is a chance to restore the dignity and legacy of a series brought low by the worst excesses of the triple-a game industry; they’ll tell you that Dead Space was a horror experience stretched to the breaking point by publishers and executives who just didn't get what it was and why it was so special. This isn't entirely the case, though to be sure Dead Space suffered greatly as a result of meddlesome publishers and the realities of the industry. Rather, Dead Space was and is a microcosm of a moment in time, a model in miniature of the games industry as a whole during the PS3/Xbox 360 era. It was a time of transition between games as they had been and games as they are now; the emergence of game franchises as multibillion dollar businesses, the growth of recurrent user spending, and weird crossovers. Dead Space (2008) is a transitional fossil, perfectly capturing this timeframe and the bonanza of unsustainable growth and cutthroat tactics which transformed the industry. The life story of Dead Space isn't the story of one series being ground down by the gears of capital; it's the story of videogames as a whole.

The Little Horror That Could

The original Dead Space was released on October 13, 2008, going on to sell over a million copies and become a seemingly unlikely hit in an age when single player games had become unfashionable with publishers. It was a gnarly, violent sci-fi horror shooter which drew plenty of inspiration from Resident Evil IV as well as 1979’s seminal Alien with (for now) just a trace of Lovecraftian cult horror. It stood out as something of a throwback, a disconcerting horror experience which threw players off balance by making its grisly dismemberment mechanics the most efficient way of dispatching enemies, rather than the pretty little headshots gamers are normally conditioned to pursue with frightening dedication. Players were cast in the role of the silent Isaac Clarke, an ordinary engineer stranded aboard the derelict Ishimura, a mining vessel which is one part USCSS Nostromo, one part Resident Evil haunted house. Armed only with repurposed tools like nailguns and laser cutters, Clarke must fight his way past the sinister necromorphs, zombie mutants created by space magic.

Despite latter day mythology, Dead Space did not emerge from nothing as an unlikely darling. It had the weight of Electronic Arts distributing and promoting it, and was the subject of a significant hype cycle. The marketing budget for a game or movie is, as a rule of thumb, estimated at equal to that of the game/movie itself, so there was significant money behind the promotion of Dead Space, much of which focused on the grisly death animations visited upon its silent protagonist, emphasizing that gnarly, edgy appeal. Further, within the same year as Dead Space's release there was a comic book miniseries from Image Comics, a rail-shooter spinoff for the Nintendo Wii, and an animated movie, none of which are the kinds of projects which can be thrown together overnight for a completely unexpected success. EA knew exactly what they had on their hands from the beginning, and the way they handled it was typical of both EA and the industry in general's approach at the time.

A look at the output of Electronic Arts, or even Visceral Games itself, shows an emphasis on franchises over individual games or even series of games. Dante’s Inferno, another Visceral project, came out of the gate with an animated movie, a comic book, and plans for a live action movie, even as the game itself flopped and never went on to have its planned sequels. Visceral’s ill-fated and questionably tasteful Jack the Ripper vs vampire sexworkers game, Ripper, memorably outlined at Polygon [link] was similarly surrounded by talk of prequels, sequels, movies, and a robust multiplayer even as the game never completed development. Visceral Games was in the business of making franchises, and business… was not actually booming.

Further, while microtransactions and shameless greed are often laid at the feet of the later entries in the series, it’s worth noting that the original Dead Space itself had an awe-inspiring number of content packs available to be purchased a la carte for real money. These twelve packs contained skins for the main character and his weapons, as well as exclusive weapons and weapon upgrades. These items generally ran between 1.50 to 3.00 dollars US after conversion to videogame storefront funny money, the same price point as the then infamous The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion horse armor DLC in 2006 [link]. Though long forgotten now, Dead Space’s content packs were a part of the first big wave of normalizing small scale DLC, a part of the long onslaught which dismantled the idea that a sold videogame was a complete product.

The Inevitable Escalation

If Dead Space riffed shamelessly on Alien, Dead Space 2 must be compared to Aliens; the bigger, badder, more bombastic sequel. Gone is the largely isolated and constrained experience of the first game, a lone, silent survivor fighting through an incomprehensible situation, instead the no longer mute Isaac Clarke finds himself in a story about a zombie outbreak on Titan and being drawn further into the schemes of the cult worshiping said zombies.This brought with it changes to the gameplay such as a more open setting, new, less idiosyncratic weapons, more streamlined design, and even a multiplayer mode. Dead Space was still action-horror, but the action had received a major promotion, making the game much less clunky and unusual than its predecessor.

2011 was a golden age for ill-considered and often thematically bizarre multiplayer modes in singleplayer games, which were stuffed into everything from Dead Space to Uncharted to Bioshock. For publishers, the proposition was simple; multiplayer games kept people playing longer and thus more likely to spend money on cosmetics, weapons, and other items, which become part of a haves and have-nots culture among players. In 2020 EA Games’ then-president Frank Gibeau would so far as to say that the single-player model of games was finished and that game developers were moving towards connected experiences. Ironically, in this same interview Gibeau pointed towards Dead Space specifically as an example of EA Games allowing publishers to pursue their own vision; considering where the series went, this statement seems inaccurate. The logic behind the move to online gaming should be familiar to anyone who’s played a modern live service game and tried to grind through a season pass to keep up with friends. Incidentally, Dead Space 2’s multiplayer mode was the one part of Ripper to make it out of development, as the new mode made use of much of the work done on its stillborn sibling series..

The sequel continued to hawk DLC in the form of costumes and weapons, while adding on a whole host of pre-order and special edition bonuses, and even a sequel chapter which tied into the first game’s spinoff; Dead Space: Extraction. Players inhabited the role of Gabe Weller, a space soldier trying to reunite with his wife, in a story which frankly didn’t augur well for the series’ narrative ambitions.

Whereas the first Dead Space had been at least somewhat on the bubble, an unknown quantity in need of justifying its existence, Dead Space 2 was not in the same position. Its overblown nature can be chalked up not only to EA wanting a more bombastic and mainstream product, but also the almost inevitable tendency towards escalation seen in sequels as developers find themselves with larger budgets, raised expectations, and a few simple tricks to sell their sequel as bigger and more important. Dead Space 2 was the series’ biggest hit and success as a multimedia franchise. In the year before and the year after Dead Space 2’s 2011 release there was also: a novel, another animated movie, a puzzle spin-off game, a mobile game, and an appearance by series protagonist Isaac Clarke in notorious Smash Bros. knockoff PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. This was the apex.

World Killer

The sins of Dead Space 3 are myriad and often blamed for killing the series, admittedly true given that until the announcement of the remake, Dead Space had lain fallow since 3’s release in 2013. It very much did kill the franchise, but Dead Space 3 was not an outlier, it was a natural progression of the trajectory which Dead Space had long been on.

The story and action had by now totally shifted, Isaac Clarke spends most of the game teamed up with a secondary protagonist who is a cool space soldier, gunning down human enemies on a frozen planet rather than, you know, in space. Traditional gunplay against traditional enemies is a much larger part of the gameplay, and the zombies have been so sidelined as a threat that only a single main character is actually seen to die at the hands of what was once depicted as a horror so profound it nearly drove Isaac Clarke insane. Clarke no longer has time for that kind of interiority (indeed the initial idea that the secondary playable character would be a figment of Clarke’s imagination was ruled out) because he has baddies to mow down and, in a example of sequel escalation taken to near parodic excess, zombie moons to fight.

The DLC packs made their triumphant return, with seven sets of weapons and costumes, a sequel campaign set after the main game, pre-order bonuses, and (I’m not kidding) a set of weapons only available through entering a promo code found in Slim Jim packages. Microtransactions had evolved since the first Dead Space, and Dead Space 3 saw major innovation on that front. Where previous packs had consisted of cosmetics with no real effect on gameplay and weapons which a dedicated player could presumably make it through the game without using, Dead Space 3 introduced a crafting system, because it was 2013 and if you didn’t have a crafting system you’d be laughed at by all the cool kids, and also because a crafting system means resource management. Resource management which could be cut down substantially if players were to, say, buy a pack of non-renewable in-game resources for real world money to spare themselves the hassle. Between the shameless money grabs and the sense that the series had rapidly lost touch with its roots, Dead Space seemed adrift. Neither of those things really had anything to do with the end of the series though, which ultimately came down to the most fearsome and cutthroat force in gaming: sales goals.

As Dead Space had grown as a franchise, EA’s ambitions for it had grown right along with it, and despite selling 605,000 copies in its first month, the series’ third entry fell well below EA’s sales goals. One might question exactly what sales goals EA had in mind for a series which began as a relatively niche riff on alien zombie horror, but keep in mind that this was in the gold rush era of game publishing. Development costs kept going up, as did promotional costs, so sales goals followed. Publishers at the time were so incensed by the idea that they might miss out on a penny of revenue that they took major steps toward killing the used game market (only a few years before digital sales would essentially wipe it out anyway) through pre-order DLC, locked on-disc content requiring single-use codes packed with new copies of the game, mandatory internet connections, and even the discussion of fees to activate used games. Dead Space 3 itself locked off its multiplayer co-op features behind a purchase code for used game buyers, who had to shell out additional cash for the full experience. It’s no surprise that in this unsustainable atmosphere Dead Space was gradually transformed into the kind of four-quadrant crowd pleaser EA thought they wanted, only to fail anyway because what EA actually wanted was a license to continually make more money forever, ideally while doing as little as possible. Dead Space 2 had eventually sold over four million copies, but even the apex of the series was still considered a failure, thanks to EA’s lavish spending on promotion, a sector of the media industry which definitely isn’t a grift.

Dead Space was a Cinderella story turned into horror, the developer dream of a weird project becoming an unlikely darling and skyrocketing to mainstream status, before being gradually morphed into a more and more interchangeable product about armored space marines blasting monsters as the publisher spend years hollowing it out in search of a real life infinite money glitch. It was 2013 and Dead Space was dead.

Until today. January 27, 2023 saw see a Dead Space remake released from Montreal-based Motive Studio. Visceral Games is no more, just one of the many studios shuttered by EA after its ludicrous sales projections failed to be met, chewed up and spit out when the delicious flavor of money began to fade like bubblegum made from developers’ hopes and dreams. But enough time has passed now that people are nostalgic for Dead Space, bitter about the sequels, and ready to go back to the old ways, just as the first game was itself a throwback. The devs have promised no microtransactions, though at this point that’s a bit like saying that your new car doesn’t even need to be fed oats and have its horseshoes regularly changed. The industry has evolved; the money might have stayed just the same, but the ways they get it are different. In the original Dead Space games they got it through clunky DLC packs with outfits and guns, then story expansions, and finally with onerous gameplay requirements which players could pay to skip. Now it’s different, the zombified corpse of a dead franchise lurching into view, the mind and heart is gone, the original creators and developers all gone, but it’s something shiny and new, dripping with viscera, animated by a terrible and ancient purpose. You can cut off the head and it still won’t die. It wants your money.

Epilogue

The Callisto Protocol is a game made by some of the people behind the original Dead Space. It is a spiritual sequel to the franchise, channeling the same aesthetics and horror gameplay as the original series. The Callisto Protocol came out on December 1st, 2022, about two months before the Dead Space remake. It had a season pass with character skins, two game modes, and a story expansion. It sold two million units and underperformed because it didn't sell five million [link]. You can’t win.

[knifeonmars]

Cyber Cart Crash

Pages 9-12

[knifeonmars]

Finally got around to writing up an essay about Hawkworld, a lowkey fascinating series which I've wanted to talk about for ages, and it's gone up on ComicsXF. Huge props to them for posting this, since I'm reasonably sure that I'm the only person who has cared about Hawkworld in the past twenty years.

[knifeonmars]

Comics that mattered to me in 2021

Every year when I sit down to do this I end up whinging about being exhausted with comics, and this year is no different. The churn of corporate superhero comics is deeply alienating, and after I made a concerted effort to read more prose this past year, I can't help noticing that a lot of the writing is, frankly, shit. Jonathan Hickman's Mr. Cerebral Scifi posturing looks a lot less impressive when you've been reading Herbert or LeGuin or Banks and realizing how shallow even the most acclaimed writing in superhero comics often is.

Nor did indie comics have much for me this year. 2022 will be Peow Studios' last year in operation, and while they're still publishing at the moment and their work remains stellar, knowing that they'll be gone casts a pall over things. Al Gofa's decision to cape for Brandon Graham by including him in his failed Gamma Twinkles Kickstarter campaign, even in light of the accusations of predation by Graham, after public backlash and the loss of multiple collaborators from the project really took the wind out of my sails re: indie comics by reminding me how shitty the space can be.

Spawn

The only comic which I read with any regularity in 2021 was, genuinely, Spawn, as preparation for my vanity podcast on the series, Regarding Spawn. I can't say that Spawn is good by any measure, indeed certain parts of it are complete shit, but as someone who has always struggled to find a community, it's nice to actually get to read along with someone and discuss a series for all its highs and lows. I guess the lesson is that comics and media in general are best when you share it with someone, so like, touch grass.

The Immortal Hulk

Probably Al Ewing's magnum opus at Marvel Comics, even if it is marred somewhat by its association with artist Joe Bennett and his unpleasant personal politics. While it was running there were few, if any comics like Immortal Hulk, certainly not from the mainstream superhero comics market. It was religious horror, it was action, it was sublime and funny and excellent. I'm glad that it got to have its run and, improbably for an Al Ewing comic, go uninterrupted by petty cash-ins and spinoffs (look at the current X-Men line to see what happens when that pointedly isn't the case). Immortal Hulk has unseated Planet Hulk as the best Hulk story, and it did so by being a completely different kind of story. We may not see its like again.

Home Time

The second part of Campbell Whyte's Home Time released this year, following a group of Australian middle schoolers trapped in a strange fantasy world during what was supposed to be their last summer together before high school. I'm no "YA adult", note my use of scare-quotes, but I really did love Home Time. It's hazy and weird, it evokes a kind of nostalgia which hit close to home for me, and I love the tricks and stylistic flourishes it displays in riffing on videogames.

Batman: Creature of the Night

Another title I've written about before, the last big project from the late, great artist John Paul Leon with collaborator Kurt Busiek, Creature of the Night is the companion piece to Busiek and Stuart Immonen's incredible Superman: Secret Identity, and yet it is totally distinct and its own beast. It's a story about mental illness and anger and grief, and it gets at the core of Batman in a way which is both more distinct and more honest than either fandom "BatDad" characterizations or self-serious "disturbed" takes on the character.

Jack Staff

It is a true pleasure to see a master at work in their craft, and Jack Staff is Paul Grist's clinic on the capabilities and potentials of both the comic book medium and the superhero genre. Grist pulls from reference points that a North American reader like myself has little familiarity with and in doing so constructs a superhero world which feels totally distinct from the one-millionth indie comics riff on Batman/Spider-Man/Superman/etc. The things he does with layouts, with lettering, with the page as a whole, must be seen to be believed. If you ever have the chance, do not miss Jack Staff.

Butcher Baker, The Righteous Maker

Neither Butcher Baker nor its creator Joe Casey are a problematic fave for me, and yet I guess they are. I don't love Butcher Baker unreservedly, but I can't help thinking about it in terms of my largely withered critical reading skills. I think that there is something profoundly ugly at the heart of superhero power fantasies, however much certain people online will argue that superheroes have always been politically "good" , and Joe Casey lays that bare in a totally unabashed, indulgent, but absolutely knowing way. Butcher Baker is a creep, a thug, and a libidinous bully, his enemies are over the top visions of American prejudices and fears, it's a weird book and I don't like every element of it, but I can't help thinking about it. Considering that so many superhero comics seem designed to slide smoothly off the brain as soon as possible, totally unprepared for or uninterested in critical reading, Butcher Baker is a welcome change.

Superman: Blue

It is with a heavy heart that I admit that Electric Blue Superman is Good, Actually, and these comics are damned solid. It'll sound like I'm damning it with faint praise, but this volume collecting the first set of stories from the brief Electric Blue era is just really solid superhero comics. I've slagged off series before for feeling like standard portions of superhero entertainment, but this isn't that. Superman: Blue has a lineup of great artists including Stuart Immonen in the early part of his career, and a rotating cast of writers telling charming, innovative stories using what I have to admit is a fun setup. There's no groan-inducing crossover high stakes here, nor the inflated self-importance of "nothing will ever be the same!" instead it's just solid, entertaining stories with fresh takes on characters new and old. Even as burnt out as I am on superhero stories, I must admit that you could do a lot worse.

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews, September 2020

Monsters by Barry Windsor- Smith

Self-consciously a magnum opus of comics as literature, the return of the great Barry Windsor-Smith to the comics art form, experimenting with a set of themes and ideas with, apocryphally, originate from his plans for Marvel's Incredible Hulk. Visually stunning, the work of a true master, and also a moving work of fantasy infused literary fiction focusing on how trauma echoes down through one family. It's a harrowing read, a slow motion, non-linear car crash of familial abuse and tragedy. Make no mistake, whatever the superheroic roots of Monsters, there is no moment of redemption, only the catharsis of tragedy, trapped in an aborted superhero origin.

For all the positives to be said of it, there are a few sour notes, particularly relating to the story's use of black characters and AAVE, as well as sexual violence, but even the criticisms I could make of this are more in line with what I'd say about literary fiction than mainstream comics. This is appointment reading.

Batman: Creature of the Night

Surely the last of the late John Paul Leon's major works, CotN is Kurt Busiek's companion piece to his earlier Superman: Secret Identity, a "real world" story about a character living out the adventures of a superhero figure. CotN goes in a drastically different direction from Secret Identity though, opting for a much more small scale story and a more somber tone, while still driving down the the core of its character. Busiek correctly sees that that the character whom Batman has the most in common with is, counterintuitively, the Hulk, because he's born from the childish impulse of anger, or wanting to make the world make sense, even if you have to hit it. It's a very different take on Batman than we're used to, differing both from latter day super-patriarch Batman and the damaged but cool solo anti-hero.

As a story about mental illness and grief, Creature of the Night isn't quite the uplifting read that Secret Identity is, but it's well worth the time. It's gorgeously rendered by JPL, and Busiek's spin on the Batman mythology is utterly unique, a ghost story by way of crime drama, and this is a must read.

Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy

This was my first experience dipping a toe into Jeff Lemire's shamelessly derivative Black Hammer comics universe, and for all that it is utterly derivative, it works very well for what it is. Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy is a unabashed riff on the Batman and Robin dynamic, but dialling in on Lemire's favoured themes of familial trauma and fathers and sons, to tell a story which, though inspired by the classic characters, could never ever be told with them. Tonci Zonjic provides the art for the series and is, as usual, an absolute beast, delivering stark, Toth-influenced figures but with an eye for delightfully fiddly details and knowing when to pull back on realism or frame a shot in cinematic terms.

This book is a delight for the kind of "mature"/mature superhero-inspired story that it's trying to be, and while it hasn't sold me on trying out the rest of Lemire's line, it's certainly elevated my opinion of it.

Ex-Mag #3

Peow Studios is shutting down come 2023, so run, don't walk, to get their stuff while you still can. For my money, the three volumes of Ex-Mag, a genre-based anthology series, is a great place to start. It's an introduction to indie comics, the style, the art, some of the names to look out for, and Ex-Mag #3 specifically is a real banger which runs across a variety of tones and takes on the dark fantasy genre. Like any anthology there's little to say about it overall, but it's well worth the time for an indie goons out there.

Sergeant Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place

I'm not much for war comics or stories about soldiers, but coming from a veteran like Joe Kubert I can respect them, and this one works. Azzarello's writing is fine, but really you're here for the Kubert art, and Kubert's mastery of the comic art form is on full display. Fantastic stuff.

Martian Manhunter: Identity

Martian Manhunter is one of those characters who's probably never gonna get a book which isn't about relitigating his origin story on some level, but at least this is good. The hook? J'onn J'onzz was a dirty cop on Mars, and he has to learn how to be a good one on Earth as he recovers from the trauma of losing his family and facing down, of course, a Martian villain. It's good. I mean, my tolerance for stories about cool cops who get to have a big gunfight at the end with a bunch of anonymous goons is, shall we say, wearing thin, but it's good.

All of the Martian stuff is actually great, the casual strangeness and alienness of a world of shape-shifting telepaths is actually explored, the idea of J'onzz seeking redemption among the familiar patterns of police work is great (if frustrating in that it gestures towards a more low key ongoing structure that I'm more interested in), and even the somewhat arch Martian villain has a cool design and novel motivation, having been locked in one form by the Martian authorities. The art from Riley Rossmo deserves special mention of its own, because it too is spectacular, there is perhaps no artist at the Big Two superhero publishers better suited for the kind of shifting, melting, and distorting bodies which populate the script.

It's not perfect, but as the latest crack at the Martian Manhunter divorced from the context of the Justice League, it works quite well and is a visual treat, even if it does fall into the same narrative rut that the previous Martian Manhunter series did.

Jack Staff: Everything Used to Be Black and White

It's not news to anyone who's really plugged in, but Paul Grist is an incredible writer and an even better cartoonist, and revisiting his first volume of Jack Staff stories, a superhero riff which pulls from Roy Thomas comics and UK superheroes a Canadian like myself would have never heard of, is really incredible. The vampire-centric opening story arc is a particular pleasure, boasting the most easily legible points of identification for someone from a US superhero comics background, before the later stories get into more UK influences. Grist's cartooning is the real draw though, even while his writing is both warm, wry, and inventive, his cartooning is on a level which few Western artists even begin to aspire to. The way he plays with layouts and gutters, the basic construction of the page, feels like watching a magician at work, both dazzling and a continual guessing game of just who does he do that? Grist is a master, and Jack Staff is a perfect place to get into his work.

Butcher Baker: The Righteous Maker

Joe Casey is a really interesting creator, he made it by with Man of Action Studios and co-creating Ben 10, and has stuck around the creator owned space as few have. While his writing tends towards the anarchic, a purposely action packed "grindhouse" style, I think that taking his work at face value is a disservice to it. To wit, Butcher Baker is a fantastic book which gets to the cruel heart of the superhero power fantasy and its relationship with American imperialism, (small c) conservatism, and power. Baker is an over the top man's man on a rampage across the nation, locked in battle with caricatured villains and spiritual enlightenment, with a puffed up chickenshit cop on his tail. It's all egregious, it's all cretinous, Baker is an unpleasant pig, as is the cop who serves as the series deuteragonist, a bully and a creep, opposed to anything outside of his violent and violently smallminded world view, finding the world crashing down on him as his masters look to dispose of him.

Would I recommend this to just anyone? No. But if you, like me, are fascinated by the excesses of American power, increasingly skeptical of the increasingly militarized superhero fantasy, and still all fucked up by the long legacy of the War on Terror, I think there's something to be gained from reading this one critically.

Sea of Stars Vol. 1

Gorgeously rendered space trucker action mashed up with space pulp inspiration, Sea of Stars is good and very much in the vein of Jason Aaron's graduating class of comic book writers. If you've read Rick Remender's F.E.A.R. Agent, or Aaron's own run on Wolverine at Marvel, you'll find plenty familiar here. Pulp, violence, emotion, you're in or you're out on this one.

Superman: Blue

Time, in my view, is kind to big superhero revamps like Superman: Blue, the first collection of comics from the infamous "electric blue" era of DC Comics Superman. With the benefit of hindsight and no longer wrapped up in panic and anger that our "faves" have been changed in sacrilegious ways, it's possible to look at the actual merits of this stuff. Turns out it's pretty damn good. This era, divided across multiple monthly Superman titles which formed a weekly narrative, was written and drawn by a veritable murderer's row of talent creators, and all of the ideas, even the central reinvention of Superman himself, are actually delightful and really inventive, much preferable to keeping the characters static like displays under glass. The Kandor stuff, Superman's strange new powers, Scorn as a counterpoint to the Man of Steel, it's all a delight. Like Christos Gage's take on Superior Spider-Man, or Snyder/Capullo's Jim Gordon Batman, Electric Blue Superman has rapidly become a personal favourite.

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews April 2021

A few of the things that I've been reading over the past couple of months. I surprised myself when I noticed that most of these were indie books, but that's probably because all of my needs for big dumb superhero comics are currently being more or less covered by the material I'm reading for my podcast, Regarding Spawn. Anyway, here's some review.

Grenade by Will Kirkby

Grenade is in many ways an art showcase, a vibrant little volume centered on a world somewhat along the lines of Shadowrun, a cyberpunk setting with fantasy elements. The story focuses on a main character somewhat typical for the cyberpunk genre, a traumatized transhuman war veteran turned cop, haunted by their memories as they are drawn into a web of conspiracy tracing back to their wartime experiences. The story is hardly surprising, but this is a book that you read for the texture, not the plot. Grenade is gorgeous, jam packed with detail in the maximalist tradition of artists like Geoff Darrow but with an angular, punk edge, and the world building and concepts are all fun and have great hooks. There are certain ideas introduced at tossed aside that I wished to see a bit more of, but overall it's a very satisfying cyberpunk flavoured romp that would be well worth it for the art alone.

Home Time Vols. 1-2 by Campbell Whyte

Stand By Me by way of Over the Garden Wall, if put in reductive terms, I picked up the conclusion to Campbell Whyte's stellar first volume of the series and recently had the chance to read them back to back. They're excellent, maybe some of the best comics I've read this year, stellar YA material with a bold, experimental style and great storytelling. Centering on four friends about to graduate from middle school and go their separate way, the characters are suddenly caught up in a strange fantasy world with no way back home and the story focuses on how they cope with this as they gradually learn more about the world. The kids all feel like kids (or at least how I remember being a kid), the worldbuilding is really unique and off-kilter, fleshed out by loads of journal inserts ranging from photos to diary entries, to a handmade encyclopedia right out of Gravity Falls. The art is stellar, sticking to a general cartoon-y aesthetic but jumping back and forth through various styles of coloring and rendering with each viewpoint character, including sections rendered in a pixelated style which evokes a great deal of nostalgia for me as someone who grew up reading sprite-based webcomics. Some of the plot beats might not surprise you, but others probably will, and I can't recommend checking this out enough.

The Grot by Pat Grant

Another Australian book, not that I've been on a kick or anything. The Grot is quite excellent, a sort of "low post-apocalyptic" story set in a world littered with the detritus of our own. The world building is a treat, lived in and recognizably plausible but strange; cars and boats are powered by low wage laborers on pedals, electricity and running water are unheard of, cholera runs rampant, and anyone and everyone is partaking in an algae-based gold rush. The Grot is very much a gold rush story, and indeed about the biggest criticism I could make about it is that it could just as easily be set in any given historical gold rush with little effect on the narrative, the conceit of a post-lapsarian world is hardly taken advantage of, but then perhaps that's the point, "the more things change, the more they stay the same" and all that. The story itself is a classic one of ambition and confidence games, following two young brothers who arrive in a boom town with plans to be the only ones not getting suckered. The artwork and colors are vibrant and distinct, a loose, cartoonist's touch which nevertheless manages to make everything look distinctly real and absolutely filthy. Everyone is ugly and dirty, dressed in distinct clothes, cutting distinct profiles, looking real and alive, even if Grant doesn't pursue a photorealistic style. I'd recommend it for those looking for something different from the standard action oriented fair coming out from most major American publishers, but not sold on art comics. The Grot is a great read packed with story and personality.

Sazan and Comet Girl by Yuriko Akase

Coming out in 2018, right in the meat of Wife Guy culture, and preceding the rise of himbos by two years, Sazan and Comet Girl is a book well suited to the moment. It's about a nice, not entirely bright young man pursuing a Cool Girl across the stars as they fall in love. It's also, in fairness, Sazan and Manic Pixie Dream Girl in some ways, though it holds off the worst of that genre by characterizing Sazan primarily through the lens of sincere enthusiasm and support for his much cooler, more powerful love interest. It's a distinctly fun, peppy book, that's really gorgeously rendered, with full lush water colours on every page and a design sensibility firmly in line with retro-anime. It's not entirely without points to criticize, the titular Comet Girl spends the entire book rarely wearing more than bra and a pair of brave Daisy Dukes, and the trick employed throughout the final sequence of the book, which takes up the entire back half (the pacing is also a touch off) to get the whole universe cheering for the heroes is a little cheap. But overall Sazan and Comet Girl is really charming, it's cute, incredible to look at, just a little horny, and a fun adventure. I heartily recommend it.

PTSD by Guillaume Singelin

I'd had this sitting in my To-Read pile because I wanted to take some time between reading Grenade and this book, since there are quite a few superficial similarities between the two: they're both sci-fi adjacent, they both star traumatized veterans, both are lushly rendered by indie cartoonists, so reading them back to back would have felt like a disservice. For the record, they're ultimately not similar at all. PTSD is the story of Jun, a traumatized war veteran living on the streets of an unidentified city, pushing away all attempts at help or community as she slowly spirals downward, killing drug dealers to fuel her addiction to pain pills. One thing that stands out to me about PTSD tonally and about its main character is that it's willing to let Jun be really unpleasant in a meaningful way. Jun isn't an "asshole" because she's too much of a hard drinkin', hard fuckin' badass, she's an asshole because she's so deeply traumatized that she lashes out verbally and physically at anyone who comes near her. It feels unglamourous and real in a really enjoyable way.The art is also a revelation, it doesn't quite cross the line into Geoff-Darrow-insired visual maximalism, but every panel and ever inch of the pages are packed with lovingly rendered detail. Singelin's drawing style tends more towards cartooning than pseudo-realism, in a way that makes the charming moments utterly charming and the brutal moments appropriately shocking. I have some minor issues with the ending, the story kind of cuts out without really delving into the messy implications and the long tail to Jun's conflict with the drug dealers, and there's a touch of action movie logic in that the main character is alone among the veterans in her trauma having left her as a kind of towering badass rather than one of society's victims, but putting those aside PTSD is a really satisfying story about trauma and community.

[knifeonmars]

Finally remembering to share this link here, I started a podcast about Todd McFarlane's Spawn Empire with my friend Lee. We're attempting to read through the entire franchise, from inception to present in largely chronological order, in order to answer the question "What's the deal with Spawn?"

It's a good time.

[knifeonmars]

I wrote this a few weeks ago for ComicsXF, and finally had a chance to lay out some of my thoughts about Ronin for a wider audience. I don’t expect it got a lot of traffic, but I really appreciated them letting me write this.

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews, February 2021

Here's some things I've been reading.

The Curse of Brimstone 

DC's New Age of Heroes books, emerging from the beginning of Scott Snyder's creative-flameout-as-crossover-event Metal, mostly constituted riffs on Marvel heroes like the Fantastic Four (in The Terrifics) or the Hulk (in Damage). The Curse of Brimstone is a riff on Ghost Rider. It's... uneven. The first volume is generally pretty good, and when Phillip Tan is drawing it, as he does the first three and a half issues, it's gorgeous and unique, when he departs though, the quality takes a nose dive. None of the replacement artists, including the great Denis Cowan, can quite fill his shoes, and the story gets old fast. Guy makes a deal with the devil (or rather, a devil-like inhabitant of the "Dark Multiverse" as a not horribly handled tie-in to the conceits of Metal), realizes it's a raw deal, and rebels. The characters are flat, lots of time is spent with the main character's sister haranguing him to not use his powers (it is, in my humble opinion, something of a cardinal sin to have a character whose primary role is telling other characters to stop doing interesting things), too many potboiler "I know you're still in there!/I can feel this power consuming me!" exchanges, a couple of underwhelming guest spots (including a genuinely pointless appearance by the old, white, boring Doctor Fate) too many flashbacks, and not enough of the action. There's potential in the classic demonic hero rebelling plotline and its link to the liminal spaces of the DC universe, forgotten towns and economic depression, but the wheels come off this series pretty much as soon as Tan leaves. The really disappointing this is that the series is clearly built as an artistic showcase, so after Tan's shockingly early departure, the main appeal of the series is gone and there's nothing left but the playing out of an obviously threadbare story.

Star Wars - Boba Fett: Death, Lies, and Treachery

I don't care much about Star Wars these days, and I think that most of the old Expanded Universe was, as evidenced by Crimson Empire, pretty bad. Death, Lies, and Treachery, is that rare Star Wars EU comic which is actually good. John Wagner writes and he's in full-on 2000 AD mode, writing Boba Fett as a slightly more unpleasant Johnny Alpha (who is like a mercenary Judge Dredd, for those unfamiliar) right on down to the appearance of a funny alien sidekick for one of the characters. The main attraction is Cam Kennedy's art though, along with his inimitable colors: this might be the best looking Star Wars comic ever. The designs are all weird and chunky, with an almost kitbashed feeling that captures the lived in aesthetic of classic Star Wars, and the colors are one of a kind. Natural, neutral white light does not exist in this comic, everything is always bathed at all times in lurid greens or yellows, occasionally reds, and it looks incredible. In terms of "Expanded Universe" material for Star Wars, this hits the sweet spot of looking and feeling of a piece, but exploring the edges of the concept with a unique voice. It's great. I read this digitally, but I'd consider it a must-buy in print if I ever get the chance at a deal.

Zaroff

Zaroff is a French comic (novel? novella?). It's like 90 pages and it delivers exactly on its premise of "Die Hard starring the bad guy from The Most Dangerous Game." It's pretty good. Count Zaroff, he of the habitual hunting of humans, turns out to have killed a mafia don at some point, and after miraculously escaping his own seeming death at the end of the original story, finds himself hunted by the irate associates of this gangster, who have brought along Zaroff's sister and her kids to spice things up. Zaroff not only finds himself the hunt, but he also has to protect his estranged family as they struggle to survive. Nothing about this book or its twists and turns is likely to surprise you, but I don't think being surprised is always necessary for quality. Zaroff delivers on pulpy, early-20th century jungle action, is gorgeously rendered, and the fact that Zaroff himself is an unrepentant villain adds just enough of an unexpected element to the proceedings and character dynamics that it doesn't feel rote. There's a couple of points, ones typical of Eurocomics, which spark a slight sour note, such as some "period appropriate" racism and flashes of the male gaze, but for the most part these are relatively contained. It's good.

Batman: Gothic

Long before Grant Morrison did their Bat-epic, they wrote Batman: Gothic, an entirely different, but then again maybe not so different, kind of thing. It starts off with what must be called a riff on Fritz Lang's film, M, only where that story ends with a crew of gangsters deciding they cannot pass moral judgment on a deranged child-murderer, in Morrison's story they go ahead and kill him, only for the killer to return years later to rather horribly murder all of them as a warmup for a grandiose scheme involving unleashing a weaponized form of the bubonic plague on Gotham City as an offering to Satan. Along the way it turns out that said villain, one Mr. Whisper, is a former schoolmaster of Bruce Wayne's, who terrified the young Batman in the days before his parent's deaths. It's an earlier Morrison story and it shows. Certain elements presage their later Batman work; Mr. Whisper as a satanic enemy recalls the later Doctor Hurt, and the cathedral Mr. Whisper built to harvest souls recalls what writers like Morrison, Milligan, and Snyder would do concerning Gotham as a whole years later.The art, by Klaus Janson, is spectacular. If you're familiar at all with his work collaborating with Frank Miller you'll see him continuing in a similar vein and it's all quite good, even when he stretches beyond the street milieu which most readers might know him from. There's one particular sequence where Janson renders a needlessly complicated Rube Goldberg machine in motion that manages to work despite being static images. The writing by Morrison though, is not their finest. The M riff doesn't last as long as it could, and Mr. Whisper's turn in the latter half of the story from delicious creepy wraith to a cackling mass murderer who puts Batman in an easily escaped death trap feels like something of a letdown from the promise of the first half of the book. Gothic is good, but not, in my opinion, great. It's certainly worth checking out for Morrison fans however, and I imagine that someone well-versed in his latter Batman stuff might be able to find some real resonance between the two.

Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters

For a long, long time, Longbow Hunters was THE Green Arrow story. It is to Green Arrow as TDKR is to Batman, deliberately so. Mike Grell wrote and drew the reinvention of the character from his role as the Justice League's resident limousine liberal to a gritty urban vigilante operating in Seattle over the course of these three issues, which he'd follow up with a subsequent ongoing. Going back to it, it certainly merits its reputation, but its far from timeless. Grell's art is unimpeachable absolutely incredible, with great splashes and spreads, subtle colors, and really great figure work. The narrative is almost so 80's it hurts though, revolving around West Coast serial killers, cocaine, the CIA and the Iran-Contra scandal, and the Yakuza, and it's hard to look back at some of this stuff without smirking. The story begins with a teenager strung out on tainted coke sprinting through a window in a scene that's right out of Reefer Madness. In the cold light of a day 30+ years later, parts of it look more than a little silly. The 80's-ness of it all doesn't stop with that stuff though, even the superhero elements smack of it. Green Arrow realizes that he's lost a step and has be to be shown a way forward by an Asian woman skilled in the martial arts (recalling Vic Sage's reinvention in the pages of The Question), and Black Canary gets captured and torture off-panel for the sake of showing that this is real crime now, not the superhero silliness they've dealt with before. The treatment of Black Canary here is pretty markedly heinous, it's a classic fridging and Grell's claims that he didn't intentionally imply sexual assault in his depiction of her torture is probably true, but still feels more than a little weak considering how he chose to render it.The final analysis is that this book is good, but it exists strictly in the frame of the 1980's. If you're a fan of Green Arrow, there are worse books to pick up, or if you're interested in that era of DC Comics it's more than worth it, but as a matter of general interest I wouldn't recommend it very highly.

SHIELD by Steranko

Jim Steranko is sort of the prodigy of the early Marvel years, a young guy who came up through the system, blossomed into an incredible talent, and then left the company, and by and large the industry, behind. He would go on to dabble in publishing, work in other mediums, and generally kick around as the prodigal son of Marvel Comics. This collection, of both his Nick Fury shorts in the pages of Strange Tales and the four issues he drew of the original Nick Fury solo series, charts Steranko's growth as an artist. The book starts off with Steranko working from Jack Kirby's layouts with Stan Lee's dialogue and writing, and Steranko might be the one guy in history for whom working off of Kirby's blueprints is clearly holding him back. The first third or so of this collection really isn't much to write home about, as Steranko is obviously constrained by someone else's style, and at the end of the day those early stories still read as somewhat uninspired pulp compared to the highlights of early Marvel. There are flashes though, of techniques and ideas, which foreshadow what Steranko is capable of, and when he finally takes over as solo writer/artist it's like he's been unleashed. He immediately has Nick Fury tear off his shirt and start throwing guys around over psychedelic effects. He writes out most of Kirby and Lee's frankly uninspired boys' club supporting cast, he makes Fury visibly older, wearier, but also so much cooler. It's the birth of Nick Fury as a distinctly comic book super spy.By the time he finishes wrapping up the previous writers' plotline with Hydra and Baron von Strucker, Steranko is firing on all cylinders. By the time it gets to Steranko's Fury solo series, he's somehow surpassed himself, turning in effects, panel structures, and weird stories which make the earlier installment about a suit-wearing Man from UNCLE knockoff and its strict six-panel layouts look absolutely fossilized.I can't recommend this collection highly enough for any fan of the artform, even if the stories themselves might not be everyone's cup of tear. It's truly incredible to watch Steranko emerge as an artist over the course of this single collection. The book itself has a few problems, it's not the most elegantly designed in its supporting materials and index, but the content of it more than outweighs that. It's great stuff.

[knifeonmars]

Comics that mattered to me in 2020

2020 was a pretty universally rough tough, for reasons that I don't need to explain. I spent a lot of time unemployed and stuck at home,and I read a lot of comics, though less than you'd think. I got into a lot of indie comics this year, and Peow Studios has been a favorite publisher of mine as I found myself underwhelmed with a lot of Big Two superhero stuff. So with that, here's my annual tradition of writing about some comics which mattered to me in the past year, which is different from the best comics.

Silver Surfer: Black

To say that the shine has begun to fade following Donny Cates' meteoric rise to stardom at Marvel Comics would be an understatement. In the past year Cates' creative output has taken a dive in quality, his public persona has gotten a grating, and the guy who looked set to be a breath of fresh air the new blood corporate superhero comics so desperately need, has ended up being just another guy. Silver Surfer: Black though, remains incredibly good. It's easy for a writer to come out looking good when they're working with Trad Moore, whose psychedelic, boundary pushing artwork leaves every page of this comics looking like it either belongs airbrushed on the side of a van or on a vintage blacklight poster, but Cates' writing manages to make the tone and feeling of Moore's artwork, even if matching the quality would be near impossible. The Surfer gets to be both complicit and noble, tortured and heroic, and is the best use of the character in that dramatic mode Slott and Allred's superheroic midlife crisis series several years ago. The oversized edition of this book is a treasure, and one I would genuinely and unreservedly recommend.

Batman: Year 100

The best moment in Batman: Year One is when Batman kicks a cop through a brick wall, but the fact is that virtually no creator since Frank Miller has had the guts to follow up on that and enshrine beating up dirtbag cops as a core part of Batman. Paul Pope though, had the guts. Year 100 is a comic that's all about Batman fighting against a dystopia that looks altogether unlike the ones we're used to seeing from superhero comics. There's no evil mastermind, no mind control devices, no outside forces subverting the Red, White, and Blue of good old American democracy; it's just a long, slow slide in totalitarianism which looks more and more recognizable and distressing to anyone awake and alive in the world today.  Year 100 is a kick ass action story, an unsettling vision of totalitarianism, and a misty, all-encompassing take on Batman as a symbol and a character. Even for Batman, a character about whom DC Comics has published a positively dizzying and relatively diverse range of stories, Year 100 is unlike anything else with the character, and is a must-buy deserving of more examination and praise.

Pretty Much Anything from Peow Studios

Indie comics publisher Peow Studios has emerged as a favorite of mine over the past couple of years, putting out distinct, charming, and diverse comcis which you'd never get even from larger, nominally indie publishers like Image Comics. Aeon 6, Salmon, Run!, Gleem, and the quarterly anthology Ex-Mag are all absolutely stunning, and I look forward to pretty much everything they put out.

Green Lantern: Earth One Vol. 2

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Green Lantern is the only one of the Earth One graphic novels to really make the most of the chance to do a standalone, Hollywood-style take on a classic DC character. Volume two of the series had an unenviable task in picking up where the first left off, but generally manages to make things work in a way that continues to weave in the Green Lantern mythos without becoming overly tedious or rote. This volume brings in the Yellow Lanterns and foregrounds the evil Guardians take with which the mainstream comics have such an ambivalent relationship, while also diving into the fascist controlled Earth only barely glimpsed in the first book. Green Lantern in general as undergone a kind of anti-Johnsian, small-r rebirth in the past several years with books like Earth One, Legacy, Far Sector, and The Green Lantern, and it was a joy to see volume two of Green Lantern: Earth One continue that.

Hawkworld

Hawkworld is not one of the best comics I read in 2020, though it's close. Not in that it would place number 11 out of a hypothetical top 10, but because it's so desperately close to being a genuinely great book that doesn't manage to follow through with what it needs to do. The first half of the miniseries seems to be the All Cops Are Bastards take on the Thanagarian spacecop version of Hawkman, a meditation on police violence, crumbling empires, and nostalgia aimed directly at the heart of 1990's America, but the second half completely fails to live up to the promise, or even the premise, of the first. The sweeping cultural implications of the first half are forgotten as Hawkman becomes just another Good Cop fighting another Bad Cop to uphold the status quo. Hawkworld was genuinely one of the most frustrating comics I read in 2020 because it is so close to being great; a bold, provocative reinvention of a staid DCU bit player that ultimately falls all over itself and squanders its potential as it retreats to being the most underwhelming and safe story possible. It fascinates me.

Batman: Last Knight on Earth

Last Knight on Earth is another book which is on here less because of its quality than because I found myself driven to distraction by it. I was so fired up and intrigued after first reading this book that I dashed off the only full-length essay I managed all year, about the worldview of the book, and that alone merits it a mention on this list. Last Knight on Earth is, for the record, better than something like Hawkworld because it follows through with exactly what it wants to be, and that is a no-holds barred post-apocalyptic DC Universe adventure; the Obama-era optimism of Snyder and Capullo's Batman run slamming full-force into an superheroic version of the 2016 election and becoming something truly ugly as the vein of misanthropy running through so much of Snyder's work breaks completely free. It is an ugly, miserable story with a dark, ugly worldview and a conclusion which rings truly hollow, but it's still an incredible ride and I expect I'll be coming back to it for further critical reading at some point. It's also a hell of a way for Snyder and Capullo to wrap their take on Batman, the height of their union in all it's strengths and its flaws, before the wheels palpably came off of their partnership with the self-important, middle-aged metalhead disaster of Dark Knights: Death Metal well and truly showing that their collaboration had ceased to be artistically challenging or productive.

Deathstroke RIP

Not everyone loves Christopher Priest's writing, for good reason, and Deathstroke never managed to sustain the same kind of buzz that books like Immortal Hulk or the Hickman-era X-Men have, but coming out of 2016's DC Rebirth, Priest's Deathstroke spent several years quietly trucking along as one of DC's best books and a reminder that Priest is a titan of the medium when he’s firing on all cylinders. Priest writes monthly comics in a way that few do, he sets things up, pays them off, and leaves each and every issue and chapter feeling substantial. Priest's Deathstroke is a genuine anti-hero, a horrible bastard rather than a secretly cuddly hitman-with-a-heart-of-gold, and RIP, the final volume of the series, lays bare the fact that this book has always been a character study. The Dark Multiverse gets its single best use as a concept when Priest uses it to bring in a version of Deathstroke as a truly irredeemable bastard, devoid even of the threadbare sense of paternal loyalty and "honor" which keeps his series' protagonist just barely tethered to likability, and has to two version of the character mix it up in a wonderfully literal "man vs self" climax which gets at what the series has always been about. Not only was Priests's Deathstroke a great character study which I'm eager to reread, it's also a great superhero action story. I might not recommend it to everyone, but for those who like this sort of thing, they'll like Deathstroke RIP a lot.

Batman: I, Joker

I, Joker does not sound like a comic book I would like, it's about a man brainwashed into acting like the Joker fighting a cult leader version of Batman in a dystopian future, and sees its hero ultimately recovering the true legacy of Batman and become a hero who is both Batman and the Joker. It shouldn't be my cup of tea, and yet... it's perfectly executed. I, Joker is everything it needs to be, it takes its premise just far enough and explores its world just thoroughly enough that I am left both wanting more and completely satisfied with what I have. Moreover, comments on Batman's fascistic side, an uncritical fandom which has well and truly missed the point, and presages the Joker's emergence post-Ledger/Phoenix as a populist antihero in a way that's a better engagement with any of those ideas than anything DC's done in the modern era. It's a perfect little Elseworlds one-shot which does exactly what those books set out to do.

Outland

Few people will have read this one, the comic adaptation of a 1982 scifi western movie starring Sean Connery, only ever published in the pages of Heavy Metal magazine, never reprinted, and created by Jim Steranko, the great lost scion of Marvel Comics' Silver Age. After learning about this book I became totally obsessed with it, and eventually, laboriously, managed to compile, print, and bind together a custom copy of it. It's an absolute treat. Steranko, late in his career and at the height of his powers, renders most pages as double page splashes, ringed with smaller panels, laid out ingeniously and unlike any traditional comic of its day, with deep dark colors, spot on likenesses of the actors, and a magnificently filed down take on the movie's story of corporate exploitation and uncompromising justice. Outland is an underrated gem in both movie and comic book form.

[knifeonmars]

Chiming in to note that it does have probably the best use of the Dark Multiverse in any DC Comic when latter day antihero Deathstroke throws down against what is essentially Deathstroke-as-Darth-Vader. It’s pretty explicitly a confrontation between Slade Wilson and the worst possible version of himself, as well as Priest’s commentary on what Deathstroke would look like if DC dropped the pretense of him being  a marketable antihero.

Thoughts on Christopher Priest's Deathstroke run?

From what I read, a very good run struggling and failing to overcome being about a black hole of a character.

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews, October 2020

A few general thoughts on some comics I have read in the recent past. 

Batman: I, Joker

Though it's sometimes considered one of the classic Batman Elseworlds tales, I'd long resisted reading I, Joker on the grounds that I'm very much not a Joker fan, but after a finally reading it I was thoroughly impressed. The premise sees a man brainwashed and surgically altered to resemble the titular archvillain in a futuristic Gotham so that he can be ritualistically hunted and murdered by "The Bruce" a descendant of the original Batman who controls a cult-like populace. It's a premise which has only gotten better with age, given that we're now 75 years in the age of Batman and the Joker has moved in the years since Ledger's portrayal in The Dark Knight and culminating in the recent Joker film, towards being a counter-culture symbol of angry populism. The presentation of an empty, cruel Batman satisfying a horde of bloodthirsty worshipers is an on-point as a piece of cultural criticism as it's ever been, and while it's not as vicious a parody as something like Marshal Law's City of the Blind, it's still a great skewering of Bat-fandom in general and what the character has become. It's also just a really solid comic: It's 50 pages, so it's tight and exactly as long as it needs to be, sets up and pays off everything elegantly, really well designed and rendered, well paced, and while I was left wanting more I was also satisfied with the story. I, Joker is a wonderful little gem that I think more people should read.

Fantastic Four: Grand Design

I've been a big fan of Scioli since American Barbarian, but I put off reading his Grand Design because I'd heard some unflattering things about Piskor's X-Men: Grand Design and feared similar issues here. I think Scioli's effort does have some of the same problems people have pointed out about Piskor's, but as a noted fan of him, I still mostly ended up liking this book. The nature of the Grand Design books is essentially skewed recaps, so this book is more than a little clipped and distant in the way it surveys the Fantastic Four's history, cutting out a lot of the emotion and nuance of many events in favor of wry humor. 

Scioli offsets this to some extent by emphasizing the troubled relationship between Reed Richards and Sue Storm, choosing to make explicit the troubles which are generally left subtextual. Here Sue actively pines for Namor as she realizes that leaving Reed would mean loosing her whole support network and Franklin Richards is strongly implied to be Namor's son rather than Reed's, the kind of stuff which has never flown in the mainstream comics. 

Those kinds of creative flourishes, the points where Scioli actually gets to write something rather than just recapping, is where the book comes alive, and so I have mixed feelings about the ending. Scioli essentially goes off the rail around the late 70's, abandoning established continuity in favor of his own inventions as he rushes towards the end. The results are refreshing and should feel familiar to followers of Scioli's other work, with Black Panther showing up in a Voltron-mech and Reed Richards becoming a Herald of Galactus, but there's a tangible sense that this is only happening because Scioli's not interested in Fantastic Four continuity past this arbitrary cutoff. To me, that was disappointing, given that I'd hoped to see an all-encompassing attempt to wrangle these character's' histories, and a lot of interesting characters and plots written after the 70's are dismissed to somewhat crotchety effect, and the actual ending is quite perfunctory. After most of the series has slavish recapped individual plot points, once Scioli is on the final pages of the book he skips over years of events and ends things without any sort of catharsis or emotional payoff. 

All in all, Fantastic Four: Grand Design did not end up being my favourite Scioli book by a long shot. It's clipped and dry for most of it's length, and then when it finally gets interesting, it just... stops.

The Marquis of Anoan

A long held subject of curiosity for me, a well-timed sale on Comixology meant that I finally took the plunge on checking out this short Eurocomics series. In it, a young Frenchman journeys around and beyond early 18th century France, having encounters with seemingly paranormal events and confronting them with rationality and science. It's quite enjoyable. It's gorgeous rendered, and though each story is relatively short by North American standards, they're densely written and presented, so they never feel overly short. They're very European in certain respects, like their approach to romance and nudity, but never in a way that struck me as particularly offensive, though that's obviously a matter of personal taste. I was ultimately left disappointed that the series is dead in the water after five books, with a decade having passed since the release of the last one. One of the most amusing threads running through them was the development of the title character's reputation as a magician and exorcist, much to his discomfort. The ending of the third book in particular has a diagetic text piece and illustration from a contemporary paper which shows how the populace at large views the protagonist and I'd have loved to see that kind of presentation further developed.Alas, the series is ended, but it's well worth checking out for anyone interested in relatively low key and beautiful Eurocomics. Just keep in mind though, that this ain't Hellblazer, nor does it aim to be.

Elseworld’s Finest

A two-part, 100-page Elseworld's tale that I picked up out of sheer curiosity, Elseworld's Finest reinterprets the duo of Batman and Superman as figures from the pulp adventure stories which saw their brief heyday in the years immediately preceding the birth of the superhero genre. It's a world informed by Indiana Jones and Disney's Atlantis, or at least by the things which influenced them. Bruce Wayne is a roguish solder of fortune, Clark Kent is the survivor of a misty and forgotten space kingdom linked to Atlantis, it's all very pulp as it moves through an origin story for the pair which sees them being variations of their more recognizable superheroic selves. It's really quite fun, and an amusing genre shift for the proceedings, which should appeal to anyone who grew up enjoying latter day takes on such stories, by which I mean, if you like Indiana Jones or Atlantis you'll find this fun. The only aspect which irked me is that there are a few too many winks towards the DCU as we know it, in the form of characters like Hal Jordan and Carter Hall popping up in bit roles, but overall the whole thing is quite agreeable. I don't think it's resonant in the way that I, Joker turned out to be, but it's still a very fun Elseworld's story.

First Knife

Simon Roy and Artyom Trakhanov teaming up for a post-post-apocalyptic story revolving around an ancient cyborg waking in a post-lapsarian tribal far future Earth is extremely up my alley, so I was really looked forward to this series and was not disappointed. Anyone who's seen Roy's work on the first arc of Prophet or Habitat at Image Comics will find the vibe and conceits here familiar, but not overly so, and the series takes things in a different direction than either of those stories did. This is not a series about cyborg Buck Rogers awakening in the future and saving the day with the power of old fashioned, plain spoken American gumption; it's about a barely human soldier losing his grip on sanity as he's worshiped as a god, and the people who surround him dealing with that. It's very good. There's action, wonderfully emotive, textured, and distinctive artwork, and it's generally a pleasure to read. Highly recommended to fans of that strain of primitive scifi.

[knifeonmars]

“I let them in and they broke me” The Worldview of Batman: Last Knight on Earth

Batman: Last Knight on Earth, from DC Comics' "mature readers" imprint Black Label, is supposedly the final word on Batman from the team of writer Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo, who have worked together on the character in some capacity since 2011's New 52 relaunch. This claim to finality isn't entirely convincing given that Snyder and Capullo's current Death Metal event series is also about a Batman and his friends fighting a bunch of evil Batmen, but for the sake of this examination, I take Last Knight on Earth at its word. As an experience, as a comic, Last Knight on Earth (hereafter LKoE) is really good. Snyder and Capullo are both heavily invested in the character and they're firing on all cylinders here, throwing out off the wall ideas which would never fly in the mainstream DC Universe and giving us lovingly rendered, absolutely beautiful pages of devastation and violence. It's a feast and a thrill ride, but it's also not going to be for everyone because it is deeply, deeply misanthropic in its politics. LKoE, more than anything else, is about disappointment in humanity, but where it goes with that disappointment is fundamentally conservative and nostalgic.

To understand this, it's important to know that Snyder's take on Batman has always been grounded in post-9/11, post-War on Terror urban fears. Batman had long been rooted in the urban fears of the 1980's; crime run amok, overwhelmed and inadequate police, etc, thanks to the influence of Frank Miller, a man who was famously mugged multiple times after moving to New York City and wasn't shy about reflecting that feeling of helplessness and anger in his work. Snyder's Batman, by contrast, was not a terrifying spirit of vengeance, but a shining beacon, a folk hero and aspirational figure, Snyder's Batman is heavily informed by the Obama era. LKoE is about this Obama era optimism, naivete if you like, crashing against the reality of the 2016 election of Donald Trump. It's not subtle in its allegory; the apocalypse of LKoE is set off by Lex Luthor and Superman having a debate about good versus evil and the people of Earth democratically "voting" in favor of evil, then rising up and destroying the world. They even come into the halls of power, or rather JLA HQ, the Hall of Justice, and destroy the very people who tried to protect them. The horror at the heart of the book isn't Trump, it's the idea that people are horrible, stupid, and selfish.

It's unrepentant in this misanthropy, but also noncommittal. For a book about how bad ordinary people can be, there are shockingly few of them in this book. There's no Carrie Kelly, no Harper Row (Snyder's own creation, who even he has evidently forgotten about) in this book, no one to push back against the idea that people in general are bad. There is no mention, no glimpse of those who didn't want this, who "voted" for goodness, the election condemns them all, renders humanity as a whole into a monolith of ravenous, mindless evil. The closest we get to confronting this monolith is the Slingers, ordinary humans who tried to use Green Lantern rings, and because they lacked the will to control them properly, have become giant, mindless, evil, energy babies. It's an evocative and amusing image, but the politics of it are distasteful: "This is you." says LKoE, a big baby, totally unprepared for a power which should only be placed in the hands of the chosen elite. One (1) single ordinary person gets to speak in this book; a toe-headed little boy who talks to Batman for just over a page, little more than a cardboard cutout, that's it. For a book that's about humanity's evil, LKoE is completely unwilling to look that evil in the eye.

The final enemy that Batman must confront isn't a Trump analog, it's not even humanity's selfishness as a whole, it's Omega, and who is Omega? Batman, but broken. Omega is the original Bruce Wayne, tortured and mutilated in the aftermath of the "election" as humanity descended into an orgy of self-destruction and violence, now having pieced himself back together as a totalitarian, mind-controlling villain who wants to protect humanity from itself. He could, charitably, read as the rise of fascism in light of chaos, the fear of the guy who comes after Trump, the cleaner, more articulate monster who can really get things done (though such a fear already seems outdated given Trump's efficacy in perpetrating horrors),  but I think that misses that mark. Omega is Batman as a blackpilled doomer, someone who has looked into the face of what humanity is capable of and given form to his misanthropy. Our Batman, the hero of the story, is a clone of this fallen Batman, with matching memories that stop just short of the "election" and his fall from grace. He's the same guy in every way that matters, the only difference is that he was never traumatized, he never really reckoned with what humanity was capable of: he was never a victim. Our Batman is a hero because of his ignorance, because he's been allowed to forget, and in doing so his underlying assumptions about the world have never been challenged. LKoE is a book in which even the Joker can earn redemption and a place in the extended Bat-family, but Omega has to die by the hand of our shiny, unblemished Batman so that the future can live. And what is that future? It's more of the same.

LKoE ends with an almost sickly sweet scene that looks a lot like hope: the heroes all hug each other and strike a group pose looking hopefully at nothing in particular, Batman holds a baby version of Superman and resolves to raise him and bring hope back into the world, but none of it really means anything. It's more of the same, the same people doing the same things, led by a man whose defining virtue is his ignorance of the past, a group of insular elites watching over a people they both hate and fear, doing nothing to make people better beyond hoping, vaguely, that they won't make the same mistakes again. There is no passing of the torch, no new Batman for a new era, it is pointedly, specifically, the same old Batman. LKoE is a comic that's ultimately about staying the course, doing the same thing despite knowing that it means nothing, acknowledging a fundamental contempt for the unwashed masses but not actually doing anything about it because hey, it's not like you got hurt. The bad guy is the one who won't let go of the past, who points at what people are capable of and demands change, and he can't be allowed to exist if we're to get back to doing things the old-fashioned way. 

Last Knight on Earth is motivated by the birth of the Trump era, and arrives as it nears a potential finish, but it doesn't point towards anything new, it just wants to go back to the way things were, even in the face of an unshakable hatred of people and a certainty that they are not to be trusted, that they need their betters to guide them. I don't want to be so thuddingly simplistic as to label what these means politically, but laid out like this it's clear. The ideology of Snyder and Capullo's Batman is born of the Obama era, warts and all, and cannot survive the Trump era, but the solution Last Knight on Earth offers is not to change and evolve once more, but to forget, to fall back. That doesn't work, it can't work, whether it's a comic book or the real world, history only ever goes one way.

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews - June/July 2020

I didn't read as many comics that I felt the need to write about these past couple of months, but the ones that I did I generally had a lot of thoughts on.

Hawkworld 

Back in 1989, DC attempted to revamp Hawkman, notoriously the most confusing character in a stable comprised of confusing characters, with Timothy Truman's Hawkworld, a dark, modern take on the sci-fi version of the character. The result is flawed in the most frustrating ways, just good enough that parts of it feel like they could be coming from a hidden classic of DC's back catalog, but never living up to its potential. The story entirely is set on Thanagar, casting Katar Hol (Hawkman) as a privileged heir who has thrown his lot in with the police force and pines for Thanagar's lost golden age, when men were men and heroes walked the Earth. The first couple of issues do some genuinely excellent work depicting Thanagar as a corrupt and crumbling empire which bears more than a little resemblance to the USA and casting Hol as a well-meaning but ultimately deluded dupe whose role as a cop makes him at best complicit in his culture's worst excesses. 

Unfortunately, the second half of the series never manages to live up to the first half, skipping forward in time by about ten years and ditching the systemic critique of its first half. Instead, the corrupt police commander who had previously appeared as a symptom of Thanagar's ills is turned into a literal monster, a strawman for the newly christened Hawkman to soundly thump over the head in place of addressing larger issues. The systemic concerns of the series' first half are never meaningfully addressed in the later issues and Hawkworld ends up falling back into being a simple tale of good cops versus bad cops, despite the first half of the series having been largely unambiguous about cops' nature as agents of state violence and imperialism. It's a shocking and deeply confusing disconnected that I can't tell if it's because I'm bringing modern politics and assumptions to the book or that someone at DC completely lost their nerve halfway through. This is what makes Hawkworld so frustrating to read, on the one hand its insightful and anti-colonial and surprisingly relevant to 2020, but on the other it never commits to those ideas because doing so would be too radical, the end result is a book which is very good right up until the point that it completely wimps out and shuffles back into mediocrity.

She-Hulk

After a long interval of living, unread, in my Comixology files, I finally read She-Hulk by Charles Soule and Javier Pulido. The quality of the series almost goes unsaid; it's one of the best of its era and niche, a part of the a whole constellation of early to mid 2010's "street level" Marvel superhero books which started, more or less with Daredevil and Hawkeye, ran through She-Hulk and Spider-Woman, extended into Hellcat and debatably Squirrel Girl, and then fizzled out several years ago. I try to fight nostalgia back most of the time, but it can't be overstated how good that whole wave of titles was, almost universally fun and approachable, grounded and empathetic, and with top-notch art across the board. Anyway, She-Hulk by Soule and Pulido is fantastic. It keeps to a relatively straightforward procedural style, makes the courtroom antics feel real thanks to Soule's actual background as a lawyer, and connects with the Marvel Universe in ways which set it among the others without ever feeling too overwhelming. The whole deal with The Blue File, the series' overarching mystery is well handled and does something really interesting with Nightwatch, an absolutely nothing character, who I'm a little disappointed we haven't seen turn up again since this reinvention. Reading She-Hulk made me nostalgic for this whole era, of which this series was one of the best.

The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal

Petals to the Metal is the arc where the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone podcast found its footing and really began to blossom into the series that it would become, so there were a lot of expectations riding on this entry in the graphic novel adaptations of the series. Generally speaking, it continues to nail most of what made the series work and polish the story into something a little more refined and coherent. The narrative trimming and changes done are smooth, the jokes still work, and its able to foreshadow events in a way that the podcast, given its nature as an emergent narrative, could never really do. Carey Pietsch's cartooning remains fabulous, and what makes this story work as a graphic novel must certainly be credited to her. This series remains the defining work of her young career and while I greatly enjoy what she's doing, I do wonder if she's really going to stick around do all seven potential books, especially if they keep ballooning in size. The only criticisms of Petals to the Metal as a comic are much the same as could be made about Petals to the Metal as a podcast and the big one is the main characters are kind of incidental to the story and don't feel like they have an important role in the emotional climax. Such is the nature of trying to tell a story in a DnD campaign, and its something that TAZ would get better at subsequently, but in graphic novel form hard not to think about. Without as clear of a distinction between "player characters" and "non-player characters" it's not quite as strange to see the main trio take a back seat, but without the charisma and speed of the podcast form it's much easier to sit back and say "wait, the main character's aren't even doing anything here". This volume is also noticeably thicker than the first two volumes of The Adventure Zone, and I hope that this series isn't going to swell, Harry Potter-like, with each entry, if only for the sake of Pietsch not keeling over from the effort.

Batman: Last Knight on Earth

Supposedly the capper to the Batman stories Snyder and Capullo's started telling all the way back in 2011 with the New 52 reboot of the character, though that's a little hard to swallow when they are still very much doing a bunch of Batman stuff in their current Death Metal event series. It's Batman playing in a post-apocalyptic DC universe, bombastic and unhinged, upending the toy box and smashing things like there's no tomorrow. It's fun, beautifully drawn, and incredibly over the top, but it's not going to be for everyone. For one thing, it's a tour of a ruined DC universe, so it's not exactly kind of most characters; there's a lot of death and mutilation and grotesqueness abounds. It's also deeply, deeply, misanthropic. I've got an essay talking about the politics of this book at greater length ready to go up at some point, but the short version is that this is a comic which starts off with an incredibly unsubtle allegory for the 2016 election and then ends with a big, cheesy hope shot that means absolutely nothing.

Even beyond my political reading of it, not everything about the story works. Snyder and Capullo's Batman work has had a ton of Joker in it and his role here is obnoxious and contains a bafflingly unearned redemption arc. More importantly, the book is built on misanthropy and the evil that ordinary people do but is completely unable to actually confront this thematically or narratively. It's a major thematic shortcoming.

I'm reminded of the ending of Grant Morrison's Batman Inc, a similar endpoint to an era of Batman which was fundamentally informed by the rejection of Morrison's vision by the rest of DC Comics. It's a bitter, angry book, but still beautiful and engaging, and fun to talk about.

Batman Universe

The complete other end of the spectrum from Last Knight on Earth, Batman Universe is a glorious romp through the DC universe, exploring the setting and characters and having fun in this day-glo fantasia. Nick Derrington knocks the art out of the park, and the constraints of shorter chapters mean that Brian Bendis' writing is more succinct and energetic than I've ever seen it before. I've idly wondered for years now why there's no current Batman animated series, and Batman Universe seems very much designed as the equivalent of one: the ties to current continuity are nearly nonexistent, the art is distinct and skews away from pseudo-realism in favor of pop aesthetics, and the approach in general is lighthearted.

It's not the deepest book, at least on an initial read, it's pointedly light fare, but it's still incredibly good. It is an unabashed, all-caps SUPERHERO STORY that doesn't feel retro or dated.

[knifeonmars]

Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Fanboy

Recently, I read Philip Jose Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life after years of curiosity. The book is many things, both not what I'd expected and incredibly familiar. It is not, despite what the title always implied to me, a fictional biography of Doc Savage, the famous pulp hero, the original Man of Tomorrow before Superman supplanted him, Rather, it is legible as that unique fan project, the wiki. His Apocalyptic Life consists of chapters breaking down Doc's background, his base, his gadgets, his enemies, his sidekicks, his family tree, and the timeline of his adventures. It is a compendium, a logbook, a resource. That's not quite a bad thing to me, I grew up spending an inordinate amount of time reading and rereading wiki pages and TVTropes, so to me there was something comfortingly familiar about His Apocalyptic Life, but all the same it is not so much a creative project.    

There are flashes of insight and interesting ideas, like Farmer's supposition that Doc Savage and his various companions could logically only have met during WWI, or his speculation on the reasons for Doc's shifting characterization from an icy and unflinching hero who killed with abandon to a slightly more affable figure who deplored killing, his move away from gadgets, and the implicit relationship which can be inferred between two of his companions. In these moments, the more creative ones, His Apocalyptic Life is at its most interesting, it is reminded me of Chris Tolworthy's fansite: Fantastic Four: The Great American Novel, another obsessively detailed tribute to the object of its affection which is at its most interesting when it diverges from the canon which it so loves in favor of speculation and fanon.     

Like FF: The Great American Novel, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life is for the most part distressingly devoted to the project of insisting that everything about the things that it loves makes sense. The chapter on Doc's base in New York, implicitly located in the Empire State building, spends a good bulk of its time rationalizing the existence of Doc's express elevators. See, real elevators could not go all the way to Doc's rooms on the 86th floor without a changeover on a lower floor, because the weight of the cables would be too great. Yet the stories repeatedly mention a non-stop express elevator from the ground floor to the 86th, and for Farmer this is a very big problem indeed. Page after page is devoted to rationalizing how Doc might have hidden his secret elevator from building inspectors, come up with a superstrong alloy to overcome cable weight issues before eventually replacing the whole thing with an enormous pneumatic tube.     

There's that great Grant Morrison quote:

“People say kids can’t understand the difference between fact and fiction, but that’s bullshit. Kids understand that real crabs don’t sing like the ones in The Little Mermaid. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really fucking dumb questions like ‘How does Superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile’s tires?’ It’s a fucking made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!”

I couldn't help thinking about this throughout much of Farmer's book. It's just so unnecessary, and in a very real way, adolescent, to get hung up on this stuff. That said, asking who pumps the Batmobile's tires or how Doc Savage's stupid pneumatic tube elevator works is a way of engaging with a text and for certain fans it can be very fun. It's just not hugely fun for me. The best parts of Farmer's book are when he stops getting so hung up on the nuts and bolts of things and focuses on what is only implicit in the Doc Savage stories: characters arcs, psychology, changing relationships.    

His Apocalyptic Life is not, I would add, a particularly good endorsement for the reading of the Doc Savage stories. Farmer doesn't seem to intend it, indeed is committed to a vision of these stories as worthwhile and gratifying tales of good versus evil, but Doc Savage emerges in Farmer's summary as a complete ass. A smug, self-satisfied aristocrat who subjects criminals to brain surgery to "cure" their criminal impulses (well, says Farmer, at least he's giving them a second chance at life and not putting a strain on the American prison system), withholds a miracle drug which slows the aging process (well, says Farmer, he knows that overpopulation would be both inevitable and disastrous), and looks down on New York from his position as the richest man in the world, in Farmer's words moving into action only when he is personally inconvenienced. Even past my own tendency to hate fun, Farmer really doesn't make the stories sound very good, more like a bunch of grown men in various states of arrested development engaging in endless horseplay. At least North American superhero comic books, rife with their own problems, have to some extent evolved with their audience over the years, so when modern Batman fans want to talk about how "deep" and "psychologically nuanced" the character is they can point to a Grant Morrison comic which both somewhat supports their arguments and is self-aware about itself, rather than doing what Farmer does in ascribing great nuance and depth to a series of not-very-good whizzbang adventure stories written for twelve-year-olds fifty years beforehand.     

It’s also invested in Farmer’s pet project of the “The Wold Newton Universe,” which posits that every notable pulp character (or really, just any character who Farmer and his nerd friends like) can have their genealogy traced back to a single English village and a cart full of rich people who were irradiated by a meteor. It almost goes without saying, but to me this is the worst sort of mythmaking nerd garbage, which at the very least wanders distressingly close to full-on eugenics in its obsession with bloodlines.

The book is not very good as a book, is what I'm saying. Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life is clearly the project of an intelligent and passionate fan and I'm sure that Farmer's actual novels are much better, but as it is, this book is just the 1970's version of an utterly exhaustive and exhausting wiki page or fan thread. It’s a fine resource, but in and of itself there is little worthy of attention. Doc Savage is not worthy of how much Farmer loves him.

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews - May 2020 - The Non-Cape Stuff

Curveball

A great big slice of life scifi romance comic with a nonbinary lead and an energy crisis. The cartooning is wonderful and the use of color, generally representing energy in an otherwise black and white book, is really great. It might not be for everyone, particularly if you’re a fan of more traditional action comics, but this is great as a slightly more offbeat book.

Hobtown Mysteries Stories: The Cursed Hermit

Somehow even more delightfully unsettling than the first entry in the series, the second Hobtown Mysteries story more than lives up to my expectations. It's Nancy Drew by way of Twin Peaks, but also much better than that hack way of pitching it sounds. This latest volume shrinks the cast down to two characters and focuses on their struggles at a sinister boarding school. It’s got stuff about gender and heritage, memory, trauma, all kinds of great stuff, wrapped up in this deeply unsettling package. 

Megahex

I found this one in a thrift store and was tickled pink to find such an unusual book but I ended up being disappointed. Here's the thing about Megahex: it's best taken as gag strips. Read all in one go, the gross out stoner humor of a group of truly shitty friends isn't so much amusing as it is exhausting. I didn't finish it.

Trigun Vol. 1

The classic manga that inspired the classic anime. The coolest dude in the world journeys across a strange, barren future pursued by two insurance agents. Like many longform manga series, Trigun takes a while to get its ducks all in a row, unite the characters, and by the end of this volume the long term arc of the series hasn’t even begun to rear its head, but even as it goes about this business it's still a great ride.

Deathbed

Another disappointment, sadly. I really wanted to like this given the talent involved, but I ultimately found it underwhelming. The premise of Deathbed is that an aging pulp hero embarks on a journey around the world accompanied by his ghostwriter. Deathbed feels like it would have been better served as a longer series, allowed to play out like Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary. Instead it's constantly feinting towards ideas, telling you about things that happened, and not showing or examining any of it. The core of the book is the pulp hero's flawed nature, that he's actually petty, conceited, and self-destructive, but by now that kind of subversion is more played out in this day and age than the pulp hero archetype that's being subverted. Moreover, the real main character of the book is the ghostwriter, and I have never in my life been more interested by the interior life of a mousy sidekick than the large scale hijinks of the hero, especially when the sidekick's interior life is a lot of incredibly cliched stuff about the creative process.

Persephone

A euro-comic adventure loosely inspired by the story of Persephone, with a focus on the relationship between a badass hero wizard mother and her gardening enthusiast daughter. It's great, with gorgeous art, likable characters, self contained and satisfying. I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone, it’s a bit more of a middlegrade book that I picked up purely for the art, but this is a great, accessible read.

Dr. Murder and the Island of Death

An indie deep cut, I loved this book, and got a bit of what I thought Deathbed was sorely missing. A handsome, oversized volume, Dr. Murder is like a slightly more introspective Venture Brothers, with a laser focus on the main character's pathetic, self-destructive nature. It's not exactly action-packed, but the cartooning is really incredible ,and the story darkly amusing.

VS

I reread the incredible and underrated Marvel Knights Deathlok the Demolisher and found myself wanting more strange, transhuman gladiator action so I picked up Esad Ribac's take on the same. It's not as good as Deathlok. Its got the beginnings of a good story in doing a classic aging athlete riff but in the context of space gladiators, but around the midway point the main character goes rogue with the help of his previous rival in a way which hasn't been foreshadowed and never gets explained. The art is great, but the story feels perfunctory and disjointed, like it an unpolished draft, and leaves much to be desired..

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews - May 2020 - The Cape Stuff

I read a lot of comics in May. Here’s what I thought of some of the superhero and superhero-adjacent comics I read.

Arms of the Octopus

A nostalgia pick, the collection of several annual issues containing a crossover between Superior Spider-Man, The Invincible Hulk, and the All-New X-Men. It is an artifact of a very specific and bizarre time in Marvel Comics, when Doc Ock was Spider-Man, the Hulk worked for SHIELD, and the original five teen X-Men were stranded in their own future. For a pure, relatively straightforward crossover romp, it's quite enjoyable. Spider-Man is a jerk, the Hulk fights a robot, the X-Men are befuddled by the present, all of the major beats for that particular moment in the Marvel Universe are there, and it's got some really great art. Jake Wyatt, during his regrettably short-lived stint with Marvel and the great Kris Anka unfortunately overshadow the other contributors, but it's all very good, if not the most accessible comic.

Maxwell's Demons

I came to Maxwell's Demons having heard a lot of critical buzz and with my expectations set rather high. I did not care for this book at all. Ambitious is the best word for this series, and that's not a bad thing. It's got ideas, about the craft, about the genre, about philosophy in general. It never quite manages to carry things off though; it's not as smart as it wants to be, and the high-minded ideas are never incorporated in particularly elegant ways. Three of the story's five chapters are essentially extended monologues in which the main character rambles on about some glorified shower thought for 20-plus pages. The first and second chapters are the exceptions to this pattern, and are quite solid as far as pointedly derivative superhero riffs go, even if the second chapter's riff on "What if Miracleman #17 was significantly less intelligent" is more than a little shameless in its lack of originality. The fourth chapter, by contrast, is the nadir of the series, easily the most embarrassing Manic Pixie Dream Girl tripe I've seen played straight in literal years. I'm reminded a lot of Translucid, another superhero pastiche, which essentially sought to do for Batman what Maxwell's Demons seeks to do for Lex Luthor. I warmed to Translucid significantly on my second read and I wonder if the same will end up being true for Maxwell's Demons, but I find that Translucid simply did a better job of incorporating original ideas and stating its themes in ways less stupefyingly clunky than Maxwell's Demon's ever manages. I hate to call a book pretentious, especially an ambitious one, but at present that's how I feel about this book.

Twilight

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Howard Chaykin's Watchmen-for-mid-century-space-heroes epic. It's good. Fabulous art, some really interesting ideas and a great premise. It's also more than a little Chaykin-y, with most of the male characters having fraught but amiable relationships with their much-too-good-for-them-and-they-both-know-it ex-wives. It has this particular brand of low grade misogyny that idealizes women but in doing so denies them interiority and, ultimately, humanity. Leaving that aside, though it is a major point to leave aside, it’s story of humanity rotting over eons of immortality, mad space gods, and humanity’s proclivity towards colonialism and genocide, it's great. It’s not an altogether pleasant book, it can be nasty and strange, in ways both intentional and unintentional, but it’s original and engaging and decidedly well made. Something of an overlooked classic of that era’s DC output.    

Green Lantern: Earth One

Literally the only one of DC's Earth One graphic novels that's worth a damn. Where most of the other Earth One books choose to start things off in a world resembling our own, Green Lantern starts off in a scifi future resembling something along the lines of Ad Astra or The Expanse, with Earth controlled by an only alluded to totalitarian government, humanity colonizing and mining the solar system, and Hal Jordan as a spacefaring roughneck who dreads the prospect of returning to Earth. Earth One is the rare Green Lantern story that manages to make Earth as interesting as the rest of the universe. The bulk of the action leaves this behind to focus on unearth the lost legacy of the Green Lanterns and refits their mythology in a clean way which will be unsurprising for anyone with a passing familiarity with the original comics but is still satisfying ad fresh. Fabulous art, fun take on the mythology, I'm left both wanting more and being satisfied with what we got.

Spider-Man: Life Story

In a just world, Chip Zdarksy, one of Marvel’s best writers these days, would be writing both Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, instead of having been relegated to shortlived spinoffs. Because life just isn’t fair sometimes, instead he was given this admittedly ambitious project, his all-encompassing take on the Spider-Man story as played out in real time. In the end it’s bold and engaging, but more than a little clipped in execution. Each issue is a snippet of Peter Parker's life as we catch up to him in a new decade so readers only get a quick glimpse of the action and are left to fill in the substantial gaps by drawing on our knowledge of continuity. The obvious comparison is John Byrne's Superman/Batman: Generations, but where that story really only took the broad strokes of those characters' continuity into account in writing its decades spanning story, Spider-Man: Life Story is dedicated to the remixing of Spider-Man's publishing canon. So it can’t just take an archetypal view of Spider-Man and play that out to its logical conclusion, instead it’s stuck trying to incorporate version of prominent Spider-Man stories like Kraven's Last Hunt, Venom, and Civil War. The result means that there’s a ton of exposition in each issue, and frequent use of shorthand to gloss over things which have happened since the previous issue, and it never manages to explore the series’ original ideas in detail. Also, I'll die mad that Michel Fiffe, the genius behind COPRA and one of my favorite cartoonists, public pitched basically this exact story a year or so before this project was announced, and even if Marvel didn't actually steal the idea, I'll forever pine for Fiffe's take on this premise.

Star Wars: The Crimson Empire Saga

Long before the Disney's take on Star Wars, with their codified takes on the mythology and careful curation of the franchise, there was the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, where seemingly anyone could tell any story they wanted using the mythology of Star Wars. While it resulted in some good stuff, like Timothy Zahn's fondly remembered Thrawn books, the vast majority of it was workmanlike or even bad. Crimson Empire falls firmly into the category of bad, a dumber than dirt story about an extremely cool space guy and his code of honor. It's the kind of story where multiple characters say "He's just one man!" right before or right after seeing their legion of anonymous flunkies getting demolished by the hero. It's got an inexplicable and bad love story. In the three miniseries collected here it spends about two pages total dealing with the idea that maybe, just maybe, the fact that it's main character is dedicated to the lost honor of Emperor Palpatine, a space fascist, maybe his code of honor is completely fucked. Of those three miniseries, only the first story is anywhere near something that could be called good. I wouldn’t called Crimson Empire utterly abysmal, but it’s not unironically good. If the name Kyle Katarn means anything to you, you might get something out of this as a nostalgia trip, but otherwise it has no redeeming qualities.

Deathstroke: Legacy

The first of the New 52 Deathstroke stories, which was never well regarded until Christopher Priest took it over with Deathstroke: Rebirth, I was driven to read this by a conceptual fondness for this era's Deathstroke basically looking and acting like an action figure. Through that lens, it's quite enjoyable. It's not as obviously in on the joke in the way that the classic Taskmaster: Unthinkable is, but it's over the top, has fun designs and baddies, and Joe Bennett (years before his career best heights in Immortal Hulk) provides consistently good art. As a pure action comic, it's good.

Wolverine MAX: Permanent Rage

Here's the thing about Wolverine: There are very few good Wolverine solo stories. Wolverine is a genuinely good character, but most of his solo stories are dumb action affairs, and there's literally never been a Wolverine comic that's even halfway as good as the Logan movie. Permanent Rage, the first storyline from the Wolverine MAX series though, is actually pretty decent. It plays out a lot like you might imagine a Wolverine movie made around 2004, with no superheroes, a Japanese setting that allows for some distracting orientalism, unrelenting violence, and a noir-inspired storyline. The present day storyline is all well and good, not great, but solid and relatively low-key, but what makes the book is the presence of Sabretooth as the main villain. His relationship with Wolverine, fleshed out through flashbacks drawn by some really talented artists, is probably one of the best takes on that relationship that Marvel has ever put out. The casting of Wolverine and Sabretooth as two lonely immortals, bound together by hate and the knowledge that they are each other's only true companions, absolutely makes this book. Is it great? No, but it's got enough interesting things going on that fans of dark superheroes stories would probably find something to enjoy. Subsequent volumes of Wolverine MAX moved even further from the character’s superhero trappings and supporting characters, which is a pity, but this one remains readable and enjoyable on its own.

Marshal Law Omnibus

A collection all of the non-licensed and non-text-only Marshal Law stories. It's weird, it's punk, it's violent, it's sick of superheroes but self-aware about it own silliness in a way that Garth Ennis' work like The Boys has never been (Incidentally, the fifth story contained here, Super Babylon, is just every self-righteous complaint Ennis made about superheroes in The Boys but presented with a modicum of good humor). It's quite fun as a mean-spirited anti-superhero romp, but anyone who is particularly invested in the moral rectitude of, like, the Flash, might find it an unpleasant read so I would advise avoiding it if that's you. It's also not perfect, even for what it is: it's approach to sex work and kink is very dated, it relies on sexual violence a little too much, and by the time you get to the final story, Secret Tribunal, it's come to revel in its previously ironic fascist and misogynist imagery and characters just a little too much. The third installment, Kingdom of the Blind, is for my money, the strongest of the lot, featuring both the most straightforward premise and the most incisive satire the collection has to offer.