#and all the characters are so wonderful and nick derringtons art is SO good

[milfygerard]

the thing about doom patrol (2016) is that its SO important and also i think a necessary read if you want to understand thematically what gerard is going for throughout his art

edit: to be clear i do mena gerard ways comic though the show is also SO good

[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.