Old Man Logan

I’ve dumped on the Marvel multiverse concept quite a lot over the years, so I think it’s only right to give them credit when it works. And if you wanted perhaps the best example of that you need look no further than this storyline by writer Mark Millar and artist Steve McNiven.

The world-building here is exceptional. The world in question is (checks notes) Earth-807128, which is about as rotten a hellscape as you could imagine. There’s been a battle between superheroes and villains and the bad guys won. America has been divided up among various boss-level villains and Old Man Logan, no longer Wolverine because of a tragic incident in his past that we only find out about later, is living as a rancher with his wife and kids in a burnt-out version of Sacramento. It looks like the Wild West.

This part of the U.S. is run by the Hulk Gang: the original Hulk/Bruce Banner, who has gone insane, and his degenerate and bullying green descendants. They even beat Logan up. Anyway, in need of money, Logan agrees to accompany a blinded Clint Barton/Hawkeye on a cross-country trip to deliver some secret contraband to D.C.

This is where the hellscape and world-building I mentioned really kicks in. As the two former superheroes pass through parts of the U.S. run by Kingpin, Doctor Doom, and finally the Red Skull (now the president of the United States) they are witness to scenes of incredible violence and desolation. They see the Punisher and Daredevil fed to a pair of dinosaurs in an arena. They meet up with Barton’s daughter, but she’s gone full Spider-Bitch and tries to kill him after overthrowing Kingpin. They’re chased by a T-Rex that has bonded with the Venom symbiote. They meet up with a sort-of resistance underground headed by the White Queen. And finally they get to D.C. where Barton gets killed and Logan is captured by the Red Skull. He escapes after decapitating the Skull with Captain America’s shield and returns to Hulkland only to find that the Hulk Gang has killed his family. He takes a spectacularly bloody revenge before riding off into the sunset with Baby Hulk, on their way to more adventures.

This is all hard, hard, hardcore stuff, especially with all the heroes and villains being cruelly tortured and destroyed. Logan himself takes several severe beatings, but of course he’s immortal so no matter how badly he gets disassembled or destroyed he’s always going to come back. But with that warning for the faint of heart, I came away impressed with what Millar and McNiven managed to accomplish. This is a fast-paced, wild ride that keeps upping the ante with every turn in the road (a road that I was grateful to follow with the map provided of Logan’s and Barton’s route across the no longer United States).

The road trip framework isn’t open-ended but makes this a self-contained story, with a beginning, middle and end, or departure, journey, and return. I’ve read few series with such a satisfying sense of completion, even if Marvel (as always) decided to keep the Old Man Logan storyline going. The way it all works is mainly through a kind of narrative edging: we keep waiting for Logan to snap and “pop his claws,” and Millar keeps denying us, even finding ingenious workarounds for Logan’s fight with the Red Skull. But when he gets back to Sacramento and finds what’s happened we finally get it, an orgasmic double-page spread of SNIKT! and then, claws finally extended “The name isn’t Logan, Bub . . . It’s Wolverine.”

Old Man Logan isn’t a deconstruction of the superhero mythos any more than the spaghetti western blew up the traditional Hollywood oater (and that’s a connection that’s very much in play here). But, like the spaghetti western, it’s a more violent and dirtier rendering of that mythology. So not for everyone, but in its own way a contemporary classic.

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Gideon Falls Volume 2: Original Sins

This second volume of the Gideon Falls comic feels like marking time. Even the structure repeats that of The Black Barn, with the same slow build to another psychedelic final issue that takes us through the looking glass (or the reassembled doorway) before pulling out and dropping us off in the same desolate locations. Only now there’s been a switcheroo and Father Fred and Norton (really Clara’s missing brother Danny) have crossed over into each other’s worlds. Which really doesn’t feel like it’s moved us forward at all.

There are no new characters aside from the real Norton Sinclair. He’s the Victorian tinkerer who built the thingamajig in his barn that seems to have opened a portal into an evil dimension. There’s still no idea what Norton Sinclair or the Laughing Man or the Bug God or whatever the hell it is might be up to though. If I had to guess I’d say he, or it, is just into doing evil stuff.

I still enjoyed what was going on, but at the same time it felt a bit early for the series to be running out of gas. As I’ve said, they weren’t adding much new here. There are a bunch of elements that felt tired, like seeing the episodes of a couple of the characters as frightened children, Norton strapped into a straitjacket and locked in a padded cell, Doc’s wall of newspaper clippings, and the insect monster breaking out of a human body. Sorrentino’s art didn’t even feel like it was adding much either, aside from the great double-page spread of Gideon Falls turning into Times Square. Maybe the Bug God is an urban developer then. That would actually make a kind of sense. Because if you invented a time machine wouldn’t you want to use it to make some smart investments in real estate?

Worth sticking with then, but at the same time: get on with it!

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Demon Slayer Volume 1:  Cruelty

Most of the manga I’ve read is of a particular kind, characterized as being full of videogame-style action where the hero proceeds through different challenges or levels, with his adversaries (or level bosses) becoming more powerful as he goes along. That’s the impression I got again here, and I’m not sure how long I’ll stick with the series as these things just tend to go on. They’re not like American comics where you follow individual story arcs through a half-dozen issues or so. It’s more like counting the cars in a long train while you’re waiting for a crossing to clear.

I used to live on a farm that had a freight line running through it. I counted cars a lot when I was a kid.

The setting here is Taisho era Japan, which was in the early twentieth century. I thought we were sometime a lot earlier than that. A kid named Tanjiro who lives in the woods has his family killed by demons. The only survivor is Tanjiro’s sister Nezuko, but she’s been infected by the demons. Tanjiro wants to save her (I guess you have to believe in something) so he sets out carrying her on his back in a basket, with a bit stuck in her mouth so she won’t bite anybody. His goal is to join the elite Demon Slayer Corps, but to do so he has to first go through samurai boot camp.

This combines physical training with a lot of hard-ass hectoring that carries a message I’ve also noticed a fair bit of in the manga I’ve read. This is the presentation of life as an endless and brutal Darwinian struggle, a battle to the death where only the strong survive. So you’d better get tough and not waste time being sentimental or thinking about the meaning of life too much.

I wonder if this is a big thing in contemporary Japanese culture. Is it something picked up from their super-competitive school system? It’s not a theme I’ve noticed reading Japanese novels or watching many Japanese movies (though Battle Royale comes to mind as an exception).

I did find the set-up a bit interesting though, and the line about how “When happiness ends there’s always the smell of blood in the air” stuck with me. I thought the story predictable trash but I may stick with the series for a few volumes anyway. If nothing else, it seems to be a cultural artefact of some weight and so worth taking a look at. From Wikipedia:

By February 2021, the manga had over 150 million copies in circulation, including digital versions, making it one of the best-selling manga series of all time. Also, it was the best-selling manga in 2019 and 2020. The manga has received critical acclaim for its art, storyline, action scenes and characters. The Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba franchise is one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.

I mean, they made a TV series out of it and then a movie in 2020 that had a budget of $15 million and took in over $500 million! So far I haven’t seen anything to explain that level of popularity, but I’ll try to let it grow on me.

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5 Days to Die

Version 1.0.0

A hard-as-nails cop named Ray Crisara is in crisis mode. He has a marriage that’s on the skids, and when his car is smashed into by a big rig, killing his wife and seriously injuring his teenage daughter, he becomes obsessed with getting revenge on the drug lord who he thinks is responsible. Also, because of a brain injury he received in the same crash Ray only has five days to live, so the clock is ticking.

You’d be excused for thinking you knew where this was going. The cover has Ray looking like a dead ringer for Marv from Frank Miller’s Sin City, and that neo-noir atmosphere where it’s always night, or it’s raining, or both, is very much the visual style. But there are two wrinkles Andy Schmidt throws into the mix. The first is that Ray, due to his injury, may be hallucinating some of what’s happening. The second is that Ray has to learn something about being a better parent from this experience, and in fact his quixotic mission of vengeance may just be a kind of coping mechanism.

These are interesting ideas to put in play, but in the end I didn’t feel like enough was being done with them. The hallucination angle had horror potential that was unrealized. As for the parenting stuff, maybe I’m being cynical, but noir is nothing if not cynical and the way things wrapped up here struck me as too sentimental. Even the drug lord gets some redemption. I expected, and wanted, something a lot bleaker than that.

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Volume 1

I signed this one out of the library after just glancing through it, thinking it might be an interesting take on Philip K. Dick’s classic novel. As the front cover tells us Do Androids Dream was the “inspiration” of Blade Runner, “inspiration” being a word that’s used whenever an adaptation is only very loosely based on its source. So instead of a graphic novel version of the film, what this promised to be was a return to the story’s roots.

I should have flipped the book over and read the back cover, where it says this is the “complete text” of Dick’s novel. When I started reading I was struck by just how much text there was. This was to be expected (I’d noticed the same thing in Fido Nesti’s adaptation of Orwells’s 1984), but complete text is on another level. And since I’d just recently re-read Do Androids Dream I found myself skimming a lot and focusing more on the pictures.

Pictures that weren’t that inspiring. Not bad, but I didn’t get the feeling Tony Parker (a Warhammer artist primarily, and someone whose name doesn’t appear on either the front or back cover) was offering a really creative new vision of the text. There’s nothing at all like the cubist style of the cover. Instead, and not surprisingly, I detected a lot of influence from the iconic look of Ridley Scott’s film. Even down to the movie-star appearance of the bounty hunter (don’t call him a “blade runner”) Rick Deckard. In the novel he “seemed a medium man, not impressive. Round face and hairless, smooth features; like a clerk in a bureaucratic office.” I see him as a bit of a schlub. But here he’s more a plastic sort of movie star, smoother than Harrison Ford but well-built and obviously a tough guy. Not an office worker.

Obviously this volume doesn’t contain the entire comic, though there is an omnibus edition out there that weighs in at over 600 pages. What we have here is the first four issues of a 24-issue series that ran in 2009. According to the back cover these first four issues are “hard-to-find,” which struck me as odd since this collected volume was also published in 2009. So why would the individual comics be hard to find, unless they just didn’t print very many of them? Then there are also some supplementary essays that are worth a look.

But the bottom line here is that I don’t think I’ll be reading any more of these. And I’m not even sure what the target audience is. Hardcore fans of the book will probably still prefer to read the book, and find lots to carp about in the adaptation. Hardcore fans of the movie will probably be disappointed it isn’t more like Blade Runner. Personally, I would have liked it if Parker had taken a freer hand visually, and that they’d cut a lot of the text, while maintaining the original story. I can’t fault them too much for what they’ve done here, but at the same time I don’t think it was necessary.

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Superior Spider-Man Team-Up: Superior Six

A pull quote on the cover says “This comic is a must read.” Meh. That’s generic praise. But then the source is a website called Unleash the Fanboy. What? Well, I’d like to tell you something about that site but when I went and checked it wasn’t there. So some pop-up blurb farm I guess.

I wouldn’t call Superior Six a must read but it is very good, continuing the high level of superhero action and storytelling chops on display in Versus. I think the character of the Superior Spider-Man was probably a lot of fun to write, given how he’s such a super-intelligent snob. But the different adventures he gets into are also well crafted and had me hooked.

There are three mini-stories in this volume. In the first Spidey has somehow gained mind control over the Sinister Six, rebranding them as the (you guessed it) Superior Six. Together they get in a fight with the Wrecking Crew and when Spidey’s control over his gang comes undone it looks like he’s in real trouble until a MacGuffin blows up and saves the day. In a coda, Superior Spider-Man wonders if maybe his arrogance is getting him into trouble and putting innocent people at risk. But a meeting with Namor (no slouch in the arrogance department himself) soon has him believing in himself again. That is, being an asshole. Thank goodness!

In the second story Spidey teams up with the Punisher and Daredevil to take on the Green Goblin’s crew, which has infiltrated the Spider-Base. This was just OK. It didn’t seem to go anywhere (because it’s part of a larger storyline), but I liked seeing the Punisher and Daredevil. Then in the final part we get a bunch of backstory about Doc Ock (as he then was) and Norman Osborn. This story ends up with the personality (soul?) of Peter Parker reasserting itself and Doctor Octopus fading away, leaving us with the original “Amazing” Spider-Man. And I think that was it for this series.

So good writing by Chris Yost and Kevin Shinick, but it’s kind of disjointed because with all the crossovers Marvel was running you feel you’re only getting pieces of other, larger arcs. Which sort of defeats the purpose of having these collected volumes in the first place.

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Batman: Year 100

Batman: Year 100 begins with our hero being chased across the rooftop of an apartment building by a pack of dangerous-looking dogs while helicopters hover overhead and a police dragnet draws tighter. It’s a moment that’s effective for a couple of reasons. In the first place it throws us right into the middle of the action, which is set in the year 2039 (that’s a hundred years after Batman’s first appearance in 1939). What is Batman doing here? Did he invent a time machine? Get sucked into a dimensional vortex? Is this even the same, original Batman, now dimly remembered only as an urban legend or bogeyman? We don’t know the answers to these questions and indeed we never find out. It’s all just a given, and I think the comic is stronger for not trying to explain any of it.

The second reason I like this way of starting out is that it sets the tone for much of what follows. Batman is constantly being chased in this series, a wanted man in a dystopic future police state. The federal police (“wolves”) are the usual jackbooted thugs, but they’re only the foot soldiers of an oppressive surveillance apparatus that puts cameras in eyeballs and even includes the use of mind-reading telepaths. It’s all Batman can do to stay one jump ahead of these guys, and when they do catch up he really takes a beating.

One reason he suffers so much damage is that he’s not encased in his usual body armour. Instead, his costume looks like a lumpy pair of sweats. Paul Pope even deliberately made the sleeves too short so that his wrists poke out of the gap between the cuffs and his gloves, giving “a sense of his concealed human vulnerability.” This isn’t the mecha-Batman of Justice Buster or the more conventional massively-muscled All-American Batman. He looks more like a guy in burlap pyjamas, and I loved it.

In fact I loved almost everything about this comic. I’m constantly being impressed at how writers and artists can continue to make something not only new out of this old warhorse of a character but something really good. The story here is first-rate, with a really neat plot twist I wasn’t expecting, and while I’m not personally fond of Pope’s style of drawing I did get used to it and thought it made for an interesting complement to the violence the characters endure. Faces seemed slapped together out of clay, especially with regard to mouths, and when the beatings come they look like they’re being slapped apart again. There’s also a lot of room for ambiguity, beginning with the cover of the trade paperback which I had to look at for a long time to figure out. I think I finally got it, but there I felt like they should have gone with something different.

This collection of the full four-part series runs without breaks, which were so seamless I couldn’t identify them. Also included is Pope’s “The Berlin Batman,” which re-imagines Batman as a crime fighter in Weimar Germany. Batman in this story is the alter ego of “Baruch Wayne,” a wealthy socialite. I wasn’t blown away by this story, but it makes for a nice extra.

So there you have it. Off the top of my head I’d rank it only behind classics like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Loeb and Sale’s The Long Halloween in the running for my favourite Batman storyline. Maybe every ten years you can count on something this good coming out.

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Asterix and the Goths

I think the Asterix comics were all stand-alone stories. At least I never thought there was any sort of continuity in the series. But as things kick off here we have Panoramix heading into the Forest of the Carnutes for the annual druid convention, which is an event that had been foreshadowed in the previous volume, Asterix and the Golden Sickle. What set the ball rolling in that story was that Panoramix had broken his sickle just before the meeting of druids in the Forest of Carnutes. So it does feel like there’s a shared timeline in place.

There’s a lot of plot stuff here that already had become established. Like Asterix and Obelix letting themselves get captured and then turning the tables on their captors. What I found most interesting though was the way the Goths (broadly: Germans) are among the few non-Romans in the series to be presented in an almost entirely negative light. I’m guessing there’s some political-historical stuff going on there, especially when they’re wearing Pickelhaube and their standards have a Nazi colour to them. Gauls vs. Goths is French vs. Germans, and this time the French get to win.

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Zomnibus

The title actually means something here, as this is an omnibus edition of three very different comic series, all dealing with zombies. It’s a bit unevenly weighted though, as the first two series are pretty standard after-the-apocalypse, Walking Dead kind of stuff, while the third is billed as the “Complete Zombies vs. Robots,” which is something else entirely. So let’s break it down.

Feast!: this was a very meat-and-potatoes zombie story. A busload of dangerous convicts crashes just after the zombie apocalypse, leaving the cops and cons having to work together to survive. They wind up in a small town where some other survivors have boarded up a building hoping to ride things out. The usual small-group dynamics and power struggles ensue as the number of survivors gets whittled down.

Being a fan of all (or most) things zombie, I enjoyed reading it. And the downbeat ending helped give it a bit more punch. Because all things considered, there was nothing exceptional about it.

Eclipse of the Undead: I mentioned in my lede how the first two stories here are standard zombie stuff, and evidence for that includes the way characters in both recognize immediately that they are living in a world already defined by the rules laid down in zombie movies. In “Feast!” the first character to twig to what’s going on says “You fuckers ain’t ever watched the movies? Zombies, man . . . Zombies!” In this story, while nobody knows how it happened, the zombie apocalypse is old news on arrival. “We saw them in the movies, in the funnies, we were almost used to them – a joke like Frankenstein or Dracula – but the fact is . . . the dead came back.” Specifically, George Romero’s living dead came back. Welcome to the metaverse.

The story in “Eclipse” (so titled because there is an eclipse, though I don’t know what the significance of that is) is even more basic than “Feast!” What we have is a bunch of people, abandoned by the military, breaking through the zombies besieging their refugee camp, which has been set up in the Los Angeles Coliseum. The usual small-group dynamics and power struggles ensue. The same good-guys and bad-guys having to work together, or falling out in ways that lead to their destruction.

I guess this was OK, but again there was nothing new about it. Even the old samurai guy seemed like a cliché.

The Complete Zombies vs. Robots: here we have the meat and the brains of this particular zombie feast. A now classic comic written by Chris Wyall and illustrated by Ashley Wood, Zombies vs. Robots is  fun, smart, and looks great. I don’t know if the series is complete even now though, so I don’t know how accurate the title is. What you get here are the first two volumes: Zombies vs. Robots and Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons.

This is not a comic you can just breeze through. The first time I read it, which was I guess fifteen years ago, I remember being confused as to what was even going on. There’s a complicated plot that involves time-jumping and the unexplained appearance of mythical beasts to join in the fun. I don’t think there are layers to the story though, and it’s enough to just enjoy the general parallel drawn between “the inhuman and the no-longer-human.” Or as the first page breaks it down: “Zombies! Braindead automatons and rotting reminders of man’s hubris! Robots! Brainless automatons and constructed remainders of man’s potential!” That’s great stuff.

If I were to sort it out a bit, I thought the first volume was the best. I love the possessed warbot that looks like a cross between R2-D2 and a tank, with a Punisher logo for a face. I couldn’t really figure out where the Amazons were coming from in the second volume, and didn’t think they were as interesting as the scientists. But it still played well and I thought it made an original contribution to the annals of zombie lore. Alas, I’ve heard rumours of a movie being in the works, and I don’t see how that will pan out. I guess all we can do is hope for the best.

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Gideon Falls Volume 1: The Black Barn

There are a lot of horror comics out there. I’m not sure why this particular genre should be so popular, but it’s always been a thing from back in the day when EC got into its groove (that is, after giving up on being “Educational Comics”). And while horror comics did suffer a lengthy time out in the doghouse when the censors cracked down, since the Comics Code fell into disuse they’ve been on a tear.

That said, with so many horror titles coming out you can expect a lot of variation in the quality. There are some series I’ve recently really liked and a few I didn’t get into at all. And the blame seems to attach equally to writers and artists when things don’t go right. Either the story makes no sense or the visuals are confusing or indecipherable.

I think Gideon Falls walks up close to this line, but for the most part I was really impressed with it. Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino team up again after working together on the Old Man Logan series, with results that feel really different but are equally effective. I thought the way Sorrentino’s experimental layouts and how he fragments a page worked really well, especially the double-page spread when Dr. Xu has her vision. It’s disorienting in a way that’s a perfect fit for what she’s experiencing. I might even call it creepy. Let’s face it, most horror comics aren’t actually very scary, but this one had its moments.

The story was vague and a bit generic. The Black Barn seems like the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, in being an inter-dimensional place of evil that scary things come out of and that you don’t want to visit. One of the heroes is a priest with the usual worldly issues to deal with, and heaven knows that’s a clichéd figure. The business about him needing to reclaim his faith was something I didn’t need. The other main character is a guy whose visions have turned him into a mental patient. Again, the kind of person you expect to meet in this kind of tale, but all the same not unwelcome as a sympathetic figure we can relate to.

So it’s not a story that feels all that original, but I thought Lemire did just enough to make it fresh and interesting. The two threads of the story were, a bit to my surprise, nicely interwoven both visually and with the text, and the plot builds to a satisfying break. It doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but takes us to a point where I was hooked and wanted to see what comes next.

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