Druuna: Morbus Gravis I

I still have the first appearance of Druuna in North America, an issue of Heavy Metal magazine that came out in 1986. More specifically, and regrettably, it’s a copy of that issue as it hit the newsstands in Canada, with several pages removed by state censors. Canada was very tight about sexy stuff back in the day.

Heavy Metal (a magazine that I believe has stopped print publication) had a reputation for publishing adult-themed SF comics, but even so Druuna pushed the boundaries. The brainchild of Italian writer and illustrator Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, Druuna was a raven-haired bombshell pin-up living in a weird post-apocalyptic urban wasteland where people are mutating into tentacle monsters at the hands of a disease called Evil. It’s a dystopian world where everyone, even the mutants, is driven by sexual lust. Which is a fate of affairs that Druuna is both a victim of and that she exploits as she tries to save herself and her lover Shastar (who is now far gone with the disease).

In terms not only of the plot but the world-building the results are hard to keep straight. From Wikipedia: “During the more than thirty years of publication of Druuna’s adventures in Morbus Gravis, the plot has evolved through several stages, differentiated with numerous jumps in the storyline, with some attendant inconsistencies.” That’s putting it mildly. I was never sure what exactly what was going on, and I don’t think Sepieri was either. That said, I always thought there was more to it than just a futuristic setting for a string of hardcore sex scenes, many of which involved threatened or actual rape. There’s a dream (or nightmare) logic to the proceedings, and in the blurring of technology, sex, and body horror I think Serpieri saw a ways into our future. Druuna could be thought of as a virtual reality porn program that has gone viral in the worst way, blurring the line between love, lust, and sex addiction in ways that have come to seem more and more relevant. Druuna is both the ultimate object of sexual desire and someone who is turned on by that objectification, a male fantasy but also a transcendent figure who reigns over her fallen world of mechanical desires.

This is the ‘80s epic of SF T&A, and right from the start, with Druuna lolling in bed for three pages like a post-apocalyptic odalisque, you know where you are in terms of genre if not in the cosmos or space-time continuum. And forty years later it still works. It’s a comic that’s stuck with me, like being haunted by a sexy ghost. And I’m not going to complain about that.

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Old Man Logan 3: The Last Ronin

Ronin because we’re in Japan. Why? Because Logan/Wolverine is hunting down Lady Deathstrike, who he tore apart at the end of the previous volume, Bordertown. This is apparently “to settle the score for what she and the Reavers did in Killhorn Falls.” So why didn’t he kill her at the end of that book? I can’t say.

The story felt to me like it was falling apart. The first book set up the idea of a Logan from the future coming back to prevent the supervillain uprising, but then that idea was sort of shot down because how can you prevent anything in the multiverse, where all things are not only always possible but ever-occurring? So then Logan went north to a Canadian mining town and fought Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers. And this book kicks off with him having tracked Lady Deathstrike to Japan, in order to finish her off. I didn’t feel like there was any through narrative here but just Logan going from place to place and fighting different bad guys.

Well, as things turn out Lady D. was just being used as bait to lure Logan into a trap set by the Silent Order and their superpowered mutant level boss the Silent Monk (who is actually quite loquacious). They have a big fight and . . . Logan is on the road again. But perhaps all roads lead back to home.

You’ll be able to tell from this quick synopsis that I’m not a big fan of Jeff Lemire’s work on the story here. I think there is a larger narrative, but it’s hard to keep in focus and in the meantime these side alleys aren’t very interesting and just feel like they’re not going anywhere. On the plus side, however, Andrea Sorrentino’s art really does a bang-up job of carrying the load. I love the way he builds pages and images around text and sound effects that become important design elements, like the wallpaper of BRAT-AT-AT-AT machine-gun fire, the explosive THOOOM!s, the SNIKTs of Logan’s claws extending, and the FWIP labels that come with individual arrows sticking into him. Our hero really takes a shit-kicking in these comics, and you don’t just see it, you hear it. Which, in turn, helps you feel it, in a good way. One complaint I’d register though is Sorrentino’s bizarre way of rendering a muscular mid-section. Both Logan and Sohei have six-packs that go up almost to their necks, and their abs look like giant tumors. He does all his shirtless male heroes like this, and it looks sick.

In short, a visually brilliant and well-designed comic that brings the action but I really didn’t care too much about where the story might be going, despite the time spent trying to build up Logan’s relationship with Maureen and maybe starting a family. I guess I should give points for at least trying to do something in this direction, but given the shattered narrative it just wasn’t working for me. Maybe you have to be more up than I am on all the different timelines. Also there’s no bonus comic included with this volume so that was a bit of a letdown too.

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Titans Vol. 2: Made in Manhattan

The Return of Wally West left off with Deathstroke wondering who Wally West was, but we don’t pick up on that here for some reason. There’s just another quick cutaway to Deathstroke spying on the gang’s flashy new headquarters, the Titans Tower, which rises out of the East (or Hudson?) River across from the Manhattan skyline. I don’t know how they got a building permit for that, but surprisingly they do acknowledge that this might have been problematic.

So . . . instead of Deathstroke what we have here is the return of Bumblebee, in a storyline that has an evil company called Meta, run by the Fearsome Five, offering to take superheroes’ powers away (they’re a curse as well as a blessing, you see) and then selling them on the black market. This was five years before Facebook turned into Meta, which for all anyone knows is up to something even worse. I don’t know if there was any connection there.

I wasn’t too happy that the Titans, despite ditching the “Teen” prefix, are in fact still a bunch of undergrads. Titans Tower is just the typical superhero dormitory, with a gym and a cafeteria and individual bedrooms with posters of rock stars on the walls. They spend a lot of time eating pizza and drinking pop. There’s boyfriend-girlfriend nonsense going on with Donna and Roy (Arsenal), and Wally and Linda. They get mad at each other, kiss and make-up, etc. I found this juvenile, but that shouldn’t be surprising. I think they were still going for an adolescent demographic.

It’s a decent comic. There are two storylines. The first is the one where they take on the Fearsome Five. In the second, which was a standalone that ran in Titans Annual #1, the four junior Titans are transported to a very dark site where they meet up with their four seniors. So there’s Wally West Flash and Barry Allen Flash, Nightwing and Batman, Tempest and Aquaman, and Donna Troy and Wonder Woman. It’s unclear who was behind the abduction, but the eight heroes come together and smash their way free of the prison they’re in, which turns out to have been in Alaska.

Both stories end abruptly. The Fearsome Five are sent packing, leaving the Titans to speculate as to who was fronting them. And the ghoulish guy who was running the extraordinary rendition scheme in Alaska disappears through a dimensional doorway, where he meets the sinister force who was pulling his strings. But that’s all we get, as we never see who was behind it all.

And as I say, Deathstroke is still waiting in the wings. I think it’s time for him to start getting more involved.

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Fighting MAD

I grew up with MAD Magazine. And much to my delight, I actually held on to a lot of them, including a bunch of these paperbacks. So re-reading them now is a real stroll down memory lane.

This particular book was published in 1980 but the content is drawn from magazines published from the 1950s to the 1970s. What a different world that was! What struck me as particularly strange was the target demographic. MAD was a satirical magazine, including a lot of political satire that I would have thought over the head of most young people. And while there’s not much in the way of politics on tap here, there are passing references to Harvey Matusow and Dave Beck. Give yourself a pat on the back if you recognize either of those names. Or if you get the joke about a subliminal ad in a bookstore telling people to buy a copy of The Hidden Persuaders (1957).

Maybe young people as well as the culture at large were just more aware back then. I mean, I didn’t get (and still don’t get) the 1873 on the pugilist Alfred E. Neuman’s belt buckle. “The Great Dumb Hope” is a spin on the phrase “Great White Hope,” which only goes back to 1911. But what happened in 1873?

A joke like “Great Dumb Hope” wouldn’t fly today for obvious reasons, but this isn’t the most politically incorrect cover among the Mad pocketbooks I have so get ready. Indeed, you should be braced for some of the content here as well. Things kick off with a parody primer for teaching tots how to read that describes the adventures of a brother who helps his grandfather run a stolen car ring and a sister who tortures and kills the family cat. Brother and sister (looking to be seven or eight-years-old) meet up with their buddy Bobby (a juvenile Marlon Brando from The Wild One) for some extracurricular activities:

Bobby sells reefers to the other children at school.

Sometime we buy a stick from Bobby.

We light up behind the garage.

Crazy, man.

Then, in a later piece, there are these final words of wisdom for anyone quitting playing golf:

Giving it up is easier than you think. Many former golfers find that drinking takes their minds off the game. For others, gambling provides a new outlet for that competitive spirit. Sleeping late is also a good substitute. Or beating up your wife.

What did I think of this, reading it as a pre-teen? Did it register at all? If the violence was scary, you could find solace on their being an ad for the “wife-of-the-month” club that promises domestic bliss: “How would you like to come home from the office on the first Monday of every month, and find a new wife cooking supper for you?” When you hear manosphere types talking about trad wives, remember this is the stuff they may have been raised on.

The references to smoking reefers and lines like “Crazy, man” also date things a bit. As does the modernized or “up-to-date” Shakespeare that translates the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet into hep cat patter. “My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound” turns into “My lobes have not yet dug a hundred notes of your jive, but, like, I’m woke to your sound,” and becomes less comprehensible in the process. Or take this exchange: “By whose direction found’st thou out this place?” “By love, that first did prompt me to inquire” becomes “Who finked on how to find my shack?” “Love, baby, love first bugged me to plea.”

That all sounds kind of lame today, but I still got a smile out of reading it again. And several of the pieces included here hold up very well. The parody of a Mickey Spillane novel is great, and the nursery tales retold as newspaper stories were nicely done. But really I found all of it enjoyable, however much it had dated and had slipped into an irretrievable past.

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Aliens: The Original Years Volume 2

About the only bad thing I can say about this collection is that I didn’t think it was quite as good as Aliens: The Original Years Volume 1. Given how highly I rate what’s been done with the Alien franchise in comics, that can’t be taken as a criticism though. These are all great comics.

Specifically, what you get here are a bunch of stories that ran in Dark Horse publications in the early 1990s (the rights to the Alien comics line were sold to Marvel in 2020, so that’s why these Epic Collection anthologies are published under the Marvel logo). There are three main stories on tap, introduced by a few shorts. Here’s the line-up:

Countdown: a team of space marines tries to escape a planet with a Xenomorph infestation problem. One of the survivors has a little secret. I knew where this was going but it was still great.

Reapers: I did not know where this was going! A funny Aliens story from the great Simon Bisley. This is a quickie with a surprise gag ending that actually made me laugh. Not a twist I was expecting!

The Alien: the president has to go negotiate with one of the Xenomorph-hating Pilots, who is terraforming Earth for its species to colonize. The Pilot isn’t someone to be negotiated with, but the president has a nuclear-option bargaining chip.

Genocide: a pharmaceutical company that makes a super-steroid named Xeno-Zip needs to harvest a special chemical ingredient contained only in the “royal jelly” of a Xenomorph queen. A joint corporate-military mission is sent to the Xenomorph’s home planet, now riven by civil war, to grab some of the stuff. You may have sensed by now that all of these stories tend to play on basic plots and characters introduced in the first two films (the military-industrial complex seeking to mine or exploit other worlds, the kick-ass but ultimately out-of-their-depth marines, the slimy, soulless corporate hack, the question of who’s human and who’s an android, etc.). What’s odd is that the stories are all so fresh regardless. They add just enough stuff that’s new that every story has its own character.

Hive: a different team are looking for that royal jelly, now described as “the most sought-after consciousness-altering substance in existence.” Giving it a further gloss: “It gives some an intense feeling of well-being and competence. Others experience levels of their own being not normally perceived. Still others have an orgasm that seems to go on forever.” Sounds great! One of the scientists on this mission is addicted to the junk. The great new element here is that they’ve invented a robot Xenomorph to help them. Why hadn’t they thought of that before? I mean, if they can make human androids that nobody can tell aren’t real it wouldn’t seem too hard.

Tribes: this isn’t a comic but a novella with lots of art work. The art is great; the novella isn’t. I couldn’t finish it. Maybe it just wasn’t my thing.

Aliens: Newt’s Tale: this is basically a graphic version of the 1986 film Aliens, except told from Newt’s point of view. There’s some new material at the beginning giving Newt’s backstory but otherwise it’s a quick run through the highlights of the movie, including most of the main moments and memorable lines. Although Hudson’s “Game over, man. Game over!” is oddly missing. I guess it hadn’t become a meme yet.

So aside from “Tribes” this is a line-up of great, (mostly) original stories, each illustrated by a different artist in a distinctive style. I particularly liked the work of Kelley Jones in “Hive.” Another can’t-miss title then in the terrific Alien comic franchise. This is a series that, for decades now, has never seemed to miss.

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Daredevil: Chinatown

This comic constitutes the launch of the Back in Black series, a semi-reboot of the Daredevil character that was part of the “All-New, All-Different” Marvel branding exercise that kicked off in 2015. What I mean by a semi-reboot is that it isn’t an origin story but it does involve a universe jump as we’re now in a timeline where nobody knows that Matt Murdock is Daredevil except for his former law partner Foggy Nelson. Or I guess it’s the same timeline but one that’s been adjusted by the powers-that-be so that Matt has regained his virginity. How all this happened is explained later in the series. And yes, it’s lame.

That introduction aside, this is a decent story by Charles Soule that mixes the traditional Daredevil plot that has DD fighting gangs in New York (though it’s Chinatown this time, not Hell’s Kitchen), with the supernatural elements of the Hand joining the fun. Instead of a defence attorney Matt is now a prosecutor, and he has a suspicious Chinese cult in his sights that’s run by a guy named Tenfingers. So called because he has ten fingers (or nine fingers and a thumb) on each hand. To be honest, I thought this was really silly, and all the extra digits seemed more like a disability than a superpower, but it does make him stand out.

Anyway, Tenfingers stole some bad mojo from the Hand and now they want it back. This leaves Daredevil, along with his protégé Blindspot (don’t call him a sidekick, though “apprentice” may be OK), caught in the middle of a high-level gang war, with lots of innocent civilian lives in danger. Much fighting ensues.

Blindspot (apparently the fourth Marvel hero to go by that name) seemed like a character with some potential. He’s a young undocumented Chinese immigrant who’s invented a battery-operated invisibility suit. He knows some martial arts as well and is a handy guy to have around. Unfortunately, his mother works for Tenfingers so family dysfunction bites him in the ass. But you do get the sense that DD genuinely cares about him and is doing his best to be a mentor. That side of the comic works quite well.

The art by Ron Garney is more stylized and rougher around the edges than the generic Marvel house manner, and it fits here. I thought it really worked for the action scenes, of which there are a lot. I’m not a fan of Daredevil’s black costume though, or the flaming DD’s. Not an improvement on the all-red outfit, at least in my eyes. But maybe since they decided they were doing a reboot they figured they might as well spring for some fresh duds and see what people thought. Well, thumbs down from me.

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Gideon Falls Volume 4: The Pentoculus

Ah, things were really clicking in this series now. There’s a lot of jumping around, from the different dimensions accessed by the Pentoculus (that’s the multiverse machine Norton Sinclair built in his barn) to the different bodies that the Laughing Man (or as I call him, the Bug God) inhabits, but I found it all reasonably easy to follow. In part because the threads were starting to be drawn together, as the main characters (it is written that there must be five, constituting a kind of Fellowship of the Bug) all finally find themselves on the same page. Dr. Xu even gets to see herself as Old Dr. Xu in the village dimension, which is somehow at the center of everything.

In addition to the Fellowship of the Bug there are also other networks in play, including the uninspiring Ploughmen and the Bishop’s gathering of bug-fighting priests. Meanwhile, the Laughing Man is vomiting his bugs into his victims in the sort of mouth-to-mouth process that has long been popular in horror movies (see my note on this in my review of The Invasion). Once possessed, these people go on bloody rampages, all (I think) just to get attention since the Laughing Man only needs to possess Danny in order to open all the doors. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it’s just because Danny, as a character, seems like such an empty vessel thus far.

Lots of slam-bang action, and Andrea Sorrentino was really pulling out all the stops when it comes to fragmenting the page into hallucinogenic collages. This is always been his style, and with this series he gets to indulge it fully. So overall it’s a series that’s finishing strong, making me hopeful for the conclusion.

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The Avengers: Four

Tight. I liked it.

Four is a retro-flavoured miniseries written by Mark Waid that has Captain America heading a new Avengers team after the OGs “decided to take some time off.” So they’re now down to four members: Cap, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver. Since the newbies are all “reformed villains” and relatively underpowered Cap has his work cut out for him whipping them into a functional unit. A point that’s underlined by the way they get their butts kicked out of the gate by the Frightful Four, with all the bad press that follows. Egged on by the media, even the public start getting into it, mocking the “Mighty Pretenders.” Things are really not off to a good start for the not-so-fab four.

Things get much worse however when they rescue a young Thai lady named Cressida from the Stranger. Cressida has the power to drain the life force from others, leaving them dried-up husks. She can either absorb that life force or transfer it to someone else, making them “better, faster, stronger.” Which sounds a bit like being a coach for the Olympics.

The Avengers basically adopt Cressida and start calling her Avenger X. But she has nefarious plans of her own, apparently being motivated by revenge. I don’t know for what. Her character isn’t filled in very much, and she even mocks the suggestion made at one point of providing an origin story. The Stranger considers her to be not a mutant, even though she says she’s had her powers since she was a kid. I think we just have to take her as a given.

She’s a formidable enemy though, both in how she schemes to set the Avengers against one another and for her (borrowed) superpowers. Indeed, she’s basically too much for this new team and at the end the OGs have to come back and lend a mighty hand. Which I thought was a bit of a cop-out. The story arc seemed to be the familiar one of the team coming together and solving their own problems. The way they’re thrown a literal lifeline here undercut all that.

Still, I loved the throwback feel to the art and the way the story held together. It’s a nice, satisfying unit, with all the different sub-adventures contributing in different ways to the main Cressida storyline. In terms of character the good guys are conflicted and the bad guys wicked in their usual bickering, arrogant way. Good and evil are complementary and evenly matched, and Waid can bring both darkness and humour to the proceedings (Wizard’s epitaph for Avenger X was a bitchy twist I wasn’t expecting!). In sum, it’s nothing wildly out of the ordinary, but it does everything a superhero comic is supposed to do, which was a treat.

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Cla$$war

In which a bunch of cynical, burnt-out, and horny superheroes, created by an ex-Nazi scientist with a thing for human experimentation, dress up in stars-and-stripes costumes and fight America’s wars. But when one of the members of the team (he’s just called “American”) develops a conscience the world’s mightiest heroes are soon fighting among themselves.

With a synopsis like that I was expecting something very much along the lines of The Boys, and that’s what Cla$$war is. But Cla$$war actually came first, running from 2002 to 2004 while The Boys was 2006-2012. And Marvel’s Civil War storyline, which also shares some similarities to what we get here, kicked off in 2006 as well. Actually, at the time Cla$$war was thought to have been influenced by DC’s The Authority, but Rob Williams says he didn’t know The Authority before he started writing and that his inspiration was more drawn from the Noam Chomsky he’d been reading.

The title, complete with dollar signs, is a bit misleading. In fact, I’m not sure why it was chosen. Nothing in the comic addresses class war in the sense of economic exploitation and the effects of entrenched social inequality. Instead, its target is American imperialism. The Enola Gay team (that’s what they’re called) are more supersoldiers than superheroes, fighting alongside the troops in foreign countries while the political rot deepens at home.

I wasn’t thrilled by the story here, not because of any political leanings (I like Chomsky too) but because the political message wasn’t new. The references here are up to date, with the president that American begins by attacking (he publicly brands the word “LIAR” on his forehead) being a stand-in for George W. Bush, and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq being referenced as earlier forays by Enola Gay. But it also felt a lot like the 1970s, with the Vietnam War and the political conspiracy thrillers of the time. And the invasion of Glenada is clearly a reference to the 1983 invasion of Grenada.

That said, I came away thinking this is a comic that should be better known. Perhaps being published by Com.x, a smaller British comic publisher, meant it didn’t get as much exposure. I thought the art by Trevor Hairsine and Travel Foreman was first-rate, and while the story was pedestrian I liked the way the different characters sparked off one another. American is a bit of a stick, but the other members of Enola Gay, while jerks, have distinct and complicated personalities. And the new superfreak the Nazi doctor whips up in his lab had real potential. I wanted to read more about all of these guys, but for whatever reason the series didn’t continue. It was initially planned to run for 12 issues but they only did six. As things stand the story breaks off, with only the character of Heavyweight now removed from the picture. Twenty years later I doubt we’ll see the series continued, at least in the way Williams might have intended. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a sequel.

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Shaft: Imitation of Life

No, this comic doesn’t t have anything to do with the 1959 Douglas Sirk melodrama of the same name. Instead, it takes its title from a long interior monologue our hero Shaft has over the question of whether art imitates life (mimesis) or life imitates art (Oscar Wilde). Doesn’t that seem a little heady for Shaft? Well, in my review of the 1971 film Shaft I did remark upon the well-stocked bookshelves in his apartment. He’s not just a complicated man but a  guy who reads!

That monologue has a point here because Shaft is looking for a missing person and his investigation takes him (as per usual) into the seedy underbelly of a rotten Big Apple, specifically a mob-run porn operation. But at the same time some indie filmmakers, financed by the same mob outfit, are making a movie about Shaft’s adventures (called The Black Dick, if you can dig it) for which Shaft has been hired as a consultant. So before long it feels like the line is being blurred between what’s real and what’s movie moonshine.

It’s a simple story, of the kind that was popular at the time (that time being the 1970s). Think of movies like Hardcore. The bit of a twist they give it is that the missing person is a young gay man rescued by another gay man who teams up with Shaft. But to be honest, I didn’t find this part that interesting. It does benefit though from keeping things simple, and Dietrich Smith’s clean artwork is an incongruous but oddly effective fit with the sleazy proceedings. With his skin-tight turtlenecks showing off an overdeveloped chest that casts a pronounced shadow in any light, Shaft himself seems more than a bit like a plastic action figure, but that works too. They could have gone with a generic look, which is what I was expecting, but I like how they went with a more cartoonish change-up. Yeah, I could dig it.

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