Absolute Martian Manhunter 1: Martian Vision

DC’s Absolute Universe (AU) is a re-imagining of the DCU that I think takes pride in just how radically it refashions the traditional DC line-up of superheroes. That’s certainly the case with Deniz Camp’s and Javier Rodríguez’s version of the Martian Manhunter. Gone is the shape-shifting guy from Mars who assumes the human identity of a detective on Earth named John Jones. Now John Jones is an FBI agent who is somehow possessed by (or psychically “entangled” with) an alien force that can read minds, which is the essence of the “absolute perspective” that is “Martian vision.” What this looks like on the page is a groovy psychedelic burst of swirling clouds of coloured smoke with text that reveals various inner lives. The Manhunter him- (or it) self is rendered as a green Picasso face with a single big red eye and long rubbery arms. Yes, he’s Gumby. But he has no physical form that anyone can see and remains John’s imaginary friend.

He’s not even called the Martian Manhunter here but the Martin Mind****er. Because that’s what he’s all about. He’s not a superhero so much as an alien therapist with the reach of the Internet, operating like some concerned AI program able to read the minds of everyone in Middleton. “Why do people do the things they do?” John asks. MM replies in his typically disjunctive manner: “Traumatic quantities of pain damage despair! You I we are coming apart! Overexposure to fundamental reality results in anti-life spiral!” It seems the whole world is suffering some kind of psychic breakdown.

It’s nobody’s fault though because what’s really happened is that people have been infected with the mind virus of the White Martian. This is another alien force, opposed to the MM, that is turning people into homicidal maniacs. Together John and his Gumby parasite have to stop the White Martian, which I think they mostly do, though I couldn’t follow the story at all.

OK, it’s something different. Very different. Different enough to give you a headache. The feeling I came away with though is that there really wasn’t much story here. It felt like six issues of set-up, at the end of which I still didn’t think the idea had been properly introduced. If the style of it is your thing, I think this is creative to the point of being visionary and it’s incredibly original. At times I felt blown away. But in the end I wish it had been more grounded, with an actual story, and had made a bit more sense or been more coherent. Plus I hate almost everything psychedelic.

Graphicalex

Criminal 5: The Sinners

I don’t know if this is the longest volume yet in the Criminal series but it sure felt like it. There’s a lot of plot to get through. When last we left tough guy Tracy Lawless he’d gone to work, reluctantly, for Center City’s crime boss Sebastian Hyde. As things get going here he’s basically an enforcer and hit man, but Mr. Hyde thinks he’s not a team player and is too soft because he only whacks people who have it coming, not just anyone the boss man thinks needs whacking.

A problem has arisen though in that a bunch of crooked but supposedly protected types (“made men”) are being offed and nobody can figure out who’s doing it. Hyde puts Lawless on the case, which ends up involving a gang of vigilantes looking to clean up the mean streets. At the same time the army has sent a special agent after Lawless, who has technically gone AWOL. And Lawless is trying to rein in Hyde’s wild child of a daughter while at the same time having an affair with Hyde’s wife.

There’s a lot going on that needs to get sorted out, which it is in the usual brutal fashion. The pieces all fit together nicely though and I thought this was the best constructed story in the series so far. The only complain I’d register has to do with the speech balloons. These are often doubled so that two balloons are placed side by side with an open gap between them. The problem is that the space doesn’t make it clear if the text should be read straight across or in all of one bubble first and then on to the next. Once you get used to it you can read it more easily, but it remains a bit off-putting.

Graphicalex

Criminal 4: Bad Night

The fourth volume in the Criminal series is a bit of a side alley off the main mean streets of Center City. Several times in earlier comics we’d seen glimpses of a newspaper serial about a Dick Tracy-clone private investigator named Frank Kafka. And just saying that much I want to stop for a second and wonder when this neo-noir series is set. The stories in the previous volume, The Dead and the Dying, were time-stamped 1972. Bad Night is presumably set a generation later but I don’t think there were many newspapers running serial comic strips around that time. And the nod to Dick Tracy is unambiguous, down to the sharp brim of Frank Kafka’s fedora. I guess it’s always the 1930s or ‘40s in neo-noir, a timeless shade of gray.

Anyway, Bad Night tells the story of Jacob Kurtz, the creator of the Frank Kafka strip. Kurtz is haunted by various demons, including some damaging run-ins with the law years earlier, just after the death of his wife and being busted for his involvement in a counterfeit ring. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what all happened in the past, but it got a police detective named Max Starr (yeah, right) on Jacob’s case and there’s a mutual hate between the two that has continued. This complicates things even more when Kurtz falls in with a femme fatale named Iris and gets involved, against his will, in another bad heist. There seem to be a lot of bad heist plans in this series.

I found it perfectly readable, with all the requisite squalid highlights. Iris, for example, is a nurse and a stripper (virgin and whore), someone so sexually damaged that “to get off, she needed a savagery that bordered on contempt.” Which is another way of saying she has bad taste in men. I had some trouble figuring out what was driving Max Starr though, and the ending seemed a little muddled. Kurtz has visions of Frank Kafka appearing at his side throughout the back half of the book and it’s clear that he (Kurtz) doesn’t enjoy robust mental health, so any conclusions you draw have to be qualified given that you may be reading the diary of a madman.

Graphicalex

The Death of Superman

At the time (1992-93) this comic was an event and caused a sensation. But then with its success (it sold over 6 million copies) it became a kind of trend. Now superheroes, and indeed whole universes, are dispatched with ease. Because you can always bring them back in another timeline. Or, as happened in the case of Superman, have him regenerated somehow. It wouldn’t take long before The Simpsons were even mocking the whole thing as a “fake-out.”

I wouldn’t be quite that cynical, and I am a cynical guy. Sure you could call this a publicity stunt, but DC is in the business of drawing attention and selling comics. I don’t knock them for it. I was, however, a little disappointed at what they came up with for the Man of Steel’s final act.

This comic only contains the first of three story arcs that make up the Death of Superman cycle. It’s called “Doomsday!” which is the name of the behemoth who takes Superman down. Nowhere is it explained who or what Doomsday is. According to Maxima, who gets inside his head at one point, “He’s hate, death, and blood lust personified! Nothing more.” Huh. Later comics would go into his background, and it is kind of interesting, but here he’s just a juggernaut who destroys everything in his path. Why it takes so long for him to get out of his straitjacket wasn’t clear to me. Once we get a look at him he didn’t seem that striking in appearance, with his most distinguishing characteristic being the horny protuberances that stick out of his joints.

What really let me down though is that he’s dumb as a bag of sand. I would have thought Superman might have used his had and come up with a winning strategy given how predictable Doomsday is, but instead they just go toe-to-toe in a series of slobberknockers that turns the story into a repetitive slugfest, punctuated with sound effects like “KRAKATOOM!” and bellows of “GRAAUHRARR!”

It’s not a bad comic, and given the stakes you can excuse how seriously it takes itself. I also liked how the final issue is presented entirely in full-page drawings, with a final double-page spread of Superman expiring in Lois Lane’s arms. They really wanted this to be a comic for the ages. I don’t think they did though just because Doomsday is so limited a villain and there’s no plot to speak of at all. It does have a kind of primitive force to it though and is easy to remember, even if the rumours of Superman’s demise were, as everyone guessed, greatly exaggerated.

Graphicalex

Aliens vs. Avengers

I’ve said several times before how much I like the Alien comics, first the ones published by Dark Horse and then by Marvel. Within the framework of the franchise they’ve always succeeded in being highly original, entertaining, single-story arcs that deliver exactly what you pay for. Facehuggers, chestbursters, Xenomorph queens, space marines, evil or virtuous synths . . . we all know what’s coming and I’ve never been disappointed.

Aliens vs. Avengers comes close to breaking that streak. For starters, and I think for the first time in the comics, the Alien mythology is expanded to take on the role of the Engineers. I wish they’d never introduced the Engineers. They just confuse everything. Anyway, they’re the ones who created the Xenomorphs as a “universal extinction machine.” This plot is discovered by the Wakandan Galactic Empire though, who are sent into crisis mode when the Xenos use the same black hole transportation system the Wakandans have used to spread throughout every corner of the universe. Which means that yes, the Xenomorphs are coming to Earth.

Are you following all this? Because it gets even more confusing. This four-part series is a real mess. I think they could have run it out to 20 issues and it still would have been hard to follow. Perhaps the thing that surprised me the most is that because this story is set in the future the Avengers are a pretty old bunch. Lots of bald heads and grey beards. Bruce Banner is an old man and Tony Stark stuck is in a wheelchair, but they can still fight because the Hulk doesn’t age and Tony can turn his wheelchair into an Iron Man suit. Spider-Man is Miles Morales all grown up. Wolverine is a grizzled vet (living on Mars now with the other mutants), but then we’ve seen Old Man Logan before and we know he can still fight. T’Challa (Black Panther) has white hair, but his son Azari is taking over anyway.

So it’s the Old Avengers who are tasked with defending Earth. A job they certainly aren’t up to, since the whole planet is overrun in a couple of pages and the survivors have to escape in a spaceship, which reminded me a bit of the DCeased storyline. I don’t know if these comics are making a broader cultural point about it being game over on Earth now, but it’s possible.

Anyway, as you may have guessed this is a talky comic and not all of the talk is good. I’m still scratching my head over “Sentimentality without permanence is purpose without cause.” And it’s also not really an Alien or an Avengers comic, though they’re both involved. What it finally comes down to is Mister Sinister teaming up with the Xenomorphs while the superheroes have to rely on Venom to save the day.  Which may not have been what you came in for. It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting. But that’s not always a bad thing and I didn’t think it was all bad here. It’s just that these epic story arcs put me off and there’s so much new world-building going on here that the proceedings aren’t easy to follow or, for that matter, to stay interested in. The presentation of the Avengers as retirees was also a bit of a downer. So credit to Jonathan Hickman for going his own way, and good art from Esad Ribić, but not my thing. And please, can we just get rid of the Engineers?

Graphicalex

Criminal 3: The Dead and the Dying

The third entry in the Criminal series is itself made up of three separate stories that are linked by way of certain recurring characters. In other words, you could think of The Dead and the Dying as a sort of microcosm of Criminal as a whole.

All the stories are set in 1972, so they deal with a previous generation to the characters we met in Coward and Lawless. Though to be honest, nothing here feels a bit different from the later stories. I don’t think Center City changes very much. The middle story, “A Wolf Among Wolves,” is about Teeg Lawless, the father of Tracy and Ricky (and yes, it’s yet another story of a heist gone wrong). Then we get the back story of how Sebastian Hyde came to be the crime boss of Center City. But the main connecting thread has to do with a woman named Danica (whose pussy is “a deadly weapon”) and how she is abused and let down by various men.

It’s another effective comic. I especially liked the black beats that interrupt Teeg’s section. That’s a technique that might not have worked, but Brubaker and Phillips don’t set a foot wrong with this material and I thought the interrupted visuals added to the sense of Teeg’s mental and moral disintegration. Otherwise, it’s a comic that fills in blanks and adds to the sense of a tightening web of fate being drawn around these people. It’s funny how each comic ends with the words “The End,” as it’s clear that nothing is ever over in this town.

Graphicalex

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk Volume 1

When I was a kid I had a paperback collection of the first six or so issues of The Incredible Hulk, so basically the same comics as are collected here. I read that book until it fell apart, but didn’t have any other books like it. I don’t think that experiment really took for Marvel, but this Mighty Marvel Masterworks series seems to be doing well. They’re cheaper reproductions in a smaller format than the Epic Collections, but as long as you’re not a comic purist who gets upset at any tampering with the format or colour of the original then they do the job.

So what we have here is the Hulk’s original origin story, with Dr. Bruce Banner being irradiated from the blast of the gamma bomb he designed. He should have been observing the blast from a safe distance but he had to go out to rescue 16-year-old Rick Jones, who had driven out onto the test site. Rick Jones will, unfortunately, continue to be the Hulk’s sidekick for all of these early comics and he’s a pointless burden. Literally as he holds on to the Hulk’s back as they go hopping around.

Stan Lee was just trying out ideas here, looking to see what would work. In the first issue the Hulk is actually gray but this turned out to be too hard a colour to manage so in subsequent issues he experienced a chromatic shift (without any explanation) into the more familiar green. As initially introduced he also turns into the Hulk only at night and is Dr. Banner by day, which was too limiting for the character and so was discarded nearly as quickly as the gray skin. Then for a while Banner built a gamma ray machine that allowed him to change himself into the Hulk and then back again, but you could tell that device was wearing thin already by the later issues here. And finally there’s the question of how the Hulk gets around. In issue #3 Rick easily runs away from him: “Lucky for me the Hulk can’t move too fast!” But later in the same issue the big green guy is literally flying around with his island-hopping jumps.

In short, things were very much in a state of flux and it wasn’t clear what sort of a character the Hulk would be. Though that’s something that has stayed with the Hulk over the years, as evidenced by the different forms and colours he’s taken. Essentially this is another take on the Jekyll-Hyde dichotomy, the “milksop” scientist and the unleashed beast, and it’s always been a live question how much the one bleeds into the other.

The writing is slapdash in the extreme. Apparently Dr. Banner and Rick have excavated that underground hideout where the Hulk can be locked up all by themselves. And when the Hulk breaks the door down and smashes the elaborate mechanism used to shut it, it can be quickly repaired. “Lucky I was able to replace this shattered steel ramrod!” Rick tells us. Lucky indeed. When the Toad Men arrive from outer space their “grapplers” are quickly able to identify “the most brilliant scientific brain on Earth” (which would be Dr. Banner). When the Hulk and Rick and Betty Ross escape from the underground kingdom of Tyrannus the Mighty, Betty is in a state of shock that is like “some kind of amnesia!” Which means she conveniently won’t remember any of their adventures. You can see how comics had a lot of growing up to do. At this point superhero comics were juvenile entertainment and made no bones about it.

Originally published from 1962 to 1963, there’s the usual Cold War overlay, something I mentioned before in my review of the contemporary Ant-Man comics. The Hulk faces off against such Red menaces as the Gargoyle (whose defeat might signal “the beginning of the end of the Red tyranny too!”), Mongo (not a “gladiator from space” but a robot built by the “wily Reds”), and General Fang (a Chinese Communist warlord who leads his hordes against peaceful neighbours). “Do those commies think they’re playing with kids?” the Hulk asks, as he crushes one of their grenades in his hand. If so, they are soon disabused of the notion.

I liked this well enough when I was a kid, which isn’t surprising given that was very much who these comics were aimed at. That’s obvious just from the presence of Rick Jones and the Teen Brigade. These kids are actually the most dated part of all these books, saying things like “Daddy-O.” But that’s the price you pay for being hip.

Graphicalex

Asterix and Cleopatra

Asterix and Cleopatra is one of the classic Asterix comics. Perhaps the best known and best loved. I’ll always cherish it for the scene where tiny Dogmatix jumps into Obelix’s arms and he says “Dogmatix! You nearly knocked me over!” This is funny because Dogmatix is so small and Obelix so big, but ever since, with all the dogs I’ve had, whenever they’ve come up to me for a hug I’ve always told them that they nearly knocked me over. That’s how tightly some throwaway line read in childhood can weave itself into your life.

Anyway, Asterix and Obelix, joined this time by Panoramix the village druid and the newly named Dogmatix, are off to a Cecil B. DeMille version of Egypt, where Cleopatra is having a torrid affair with Caesar. In an opening argument the Queen of the Nile makes a bet with Caesar that she can build a palace in only three months. In order to make this a reality her clueless court architect Edifis has to travel to Gaul and enlist the help of you-know-who. So once again we have the formula of a journey out and back (the pirates are thumped again, or rather scuttle their own ship rather than have to take a beating), ending up with a celebratory banquet back home. Along the way there’s a lot of local colour, from the imperial architecture (which I loved as a kid) to the clever way the Egyptians speak in hieroglyphics. These speech bubbles rhyme and even cross over with the always creative grawlixes, which aren’t just typographical characters but take the form of storm clouds and skulls.

As a comic it’s also very smart. You have to be on your toes to catch the jokes that are happening even in the margins. And then there all the Latin tags and historical winks. As Asterix is leaving he says to Cleopatra “If, one day, you want to build something else in Egypt, a canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, for example . . . well, then call upon someone from our land, by Toutatis!” This is a nod to the fact that it was a French company that was in charge of building the Suez Canal in the 1850s. I think most readers, especially French readers (and we’re talking about children here), would have got that in 1965. Today I’d bet against that sort of general knowledge.

I don’t know if this is my favourite Asterix story, but it’s the one that first comes to mind whenever the subject of Asterix comes up. Not all of these comics have kept their glow over the years but this one has and it made me happy that I decided to revisit the whole series.

Graphicalex

Tales from the Crypt Volume 2

In my notes on The Haunt of Fear Volume 2 I mentioned how EC editor Al Feldstein had written every one of the stories in the collection, as well as the “The Old Witch’s Niche” and the text-only shorts. I also mentioned how he was doing most of the writing for the other EC bi-monthly publications. At least he was for Tales from the Crypt, because he again gets sole writing credit for all 24 of the comics in this volume and probably wrote all the short stories as well, though these are uncredited.

“So,” as I said in that earlier review, “if there are some duds in the mix here, or the action starts to follow a formula, are you surprised?” You certainly shouldn’t be. And I wasn’t. There are a number of recurring EC horror archetypes. Reduced to its most basic elements a classic EC horror story features a murder for gain with the victim returning from the grave (sometimes after being buried alive) in order to exact a gruesome revenge on their killer.

I think that synopsis might describe two-thirds of all the horror stories EC published. Now Feldstein did his best to add little twists. Like the first story here being about a man coming back from the dead, except it’s told in the second person. But there are few real surprises. Riffing on a Poe story is to be expected, and that it’s the less well-known “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” doesn’t change things up much. Nor is it that big a twist when a developer disturbs an ancient Indian burial mound and the spirits thus released come back from the dead to scalp him.

If I wanted to be really critical I’d also focus in on the letters in “The Crypt-Keeper’s Corner.” I thought that very few, if any, of these were real. They read like plugs for the very comics you’re reading. And the constant pitching from the three GhouLunatics to buy their pictures got a little wearing.

These caveats in place, I still enjoyed all of this. I liked the in-jokes and odd bits of humour in the background (like the ship the honeymooners are on being the S. S. Pinafore), as well as all the contemporary historical details. I think having a television in your living room in 1951 meant you were pretty well off, for example. Or the Black Widow murderer having to buy seven funeral wreaths for a total of $14 and leaving the florist muttering “Fourteen dollars! The beast . . .” I looked it up and a basic funeral wreath today will run you around $200. I guess that’s inflation. And there was one language reference I had to look up, when a pair of cops examining the body of a murdered husband refer to him as a “poor old gink.” “Gink” isn’t a word that’s encountered much nowadays, but it does, or did, have the meaning of a foolish or unfortunate person. I’ve never heard it used before.

But my favourite story was the one with two medical students who need a dead body to study anatomy on, or else they’ll never be able to graduate! Corpses are expensive you see, and aren’t covered by their lab fees. So of course they decide to dig a freshly-buried one up. But they can’t dig it up themselves, even though they’ll both be present at the exhumation, so they have to enlist the help of Clem, “the rather stupid college handyman.” This leads to further problems, as you might expect, but I just laughed at the notion of the two students being unable to dig up a fresh grave by themselves and needing to pay a general labourer the whopping sum of five dollars to do it for them while they watch. I mean, Feldstein needed Clem to deliver the punchline at the end of the story but it’s still funny how useless the would-be doctors are.

So it’s another entertaining collection, though I wouldn’t recommend reading a lot of these all at once since EC horror was pretty much of a piece. Just dipping into them every now and then is the way to proceed.

Graphicalex

Trout: Bits & Bobs

A dream, or nightmare, set in some fantasy realm where a little boy or large baby named Trout is cared for by an old man named Giuseppe Lint, head of the Lint Brothers’ Turnip Works.  Trout doesn’t speak but in the first story he has a repressed memory that comes to life and starts eating up an entire town. In the second story a traveling puppet-show monster steals the souls of all the town’s children and turns them into tadpoles.

I didn’t know what to make of the story. It really wasn’t my thing. I did like the art though (Troy Nixey both wrote and illustrated, so he takes praise and blame). There’s a spiral motif worked throughout, from the long sleeves of Trout’s pyjamas to Giuseppe’s handlebar moustache. The faces and figures of people and monsters (there’s no clear dividing line between them) are quite original and there’s no denying the unique world Nixey has conjured up, but it all feels a bit like an elaborate doodle. I gather Nixey really had his heart set on making movies anyway. I’m not sure how many more Trout comics he did but while I could appreciate some of this, there was enough of it here for me.

Graphicalex