The Immortal Hulk 6: We Believe in Bruce Banner

Quite a break from The Immortal Hulk: Breaker of Worlds volume. We left off that book with Cosmic Hulk smashing a planet and the sudden appearance of the Leader. There’s nothing like that going on here and the Leader doesn’t show up at all. Instead we have a political Hulk comic, with Bruce Banner (“an angry middle-class white guy talking about revolution”) on a crusade against corporate “crisis” capitalism. This means taking on the Roxxon Corporation and its CEO: a nine-foot-tall man-bull called (fittingly enough) the Minotaur.

Roxxon is the epitome of all kinds of capitalism gone mad, and Dario Agger/Minotaur is a great villain. He likes to drink espresso out of little china cups that he shatters. Because he’s a giant man-bull and they have a thing for breaking china. He also has a habit of crushing the heads of his underlings when they say anything that upsets him.
So when the Hulk destroys a Roxxon server farm, taking signature platforms like YouRoxx, Roxxface, and Yambler offline, the Minotaur decides to fight back by bringing in some recruits from Monster Island to have a showdown with the Hulk in Phoenix. With the level bad guy being Xemnu the Living Titan.

The cover to this collection is actually very misleading, as Xemnu only appears on the final page and we never see the Hulk and Xemnu fighting. I guess that’s coming up next issue. Unless they do another swerve like at the end of Breaker of Worlds and leave us hanging.

Overall I quite liked this volume of the Immortal Hulk saga. It stays in the here and now, without whisking us through the green door or out into deep space and the even deeper future. The main storyline was also pretty interesting, and I like the idea of a progressive Hulk. Though maybe he’s not really progressive since he basically wants to smash the world. The battle in Phoenix was a waste though, and the kaiju that the Hulk fights are a bore. And what struck me is that once again we have the business of characters being eaten. I’m starting to think Al Ewing has a thing for this.

In any event, things are looking good so . . . on we go!

Graphicalex

Lady Killer Volume 2

Volume 2 of Lady Killer is very much more of the same as Volume 1, but that’s a good thing in my book. Housewife/contract killer Josie Schuller is back trying to juggle a stereotypical 1950s home life (husband, two beautiful little girls, hosting Tupperware parties) with being a murderess for hire. Only now, having broken up with the Organization, she’s freelancing. But this only leads to more stress, and it seems likely that she’ll be taking up with a new syndicate until the re-emergence of an old partner-in-crime, a fellow who turns out to be a Marcel Petiot figure who is very hard to get rid of. I’d say he has a crush on Josie, but it’s not that kinky a comic. Meanwhile, Josie’s cranky mother-in-law is revealed to know even more about Josie than she learned in Seattle.

As with the first book, it’s not an overly complicated plot. It’s more the stunning vintage-style art that makes the sale. I love the way Joëlle Jones recreates this world, as though clipping it out of the pages of fashion and lifestyle magazines of the period, with great use of fabric as a design element. And while Josie’s obviously a sort of feminist icon taking a bloody revenge on various chauvinist types this is an angle that isn’t overly played up.

One nagging question I had right from the opening slaughter had to do with the running gag about how good Josie is at cleaning up the mess she makes when she bludgeons her victims to death with a hammer or whatever likely weapon is at hand. I get the joke (Tupperware really is handy!), but surely the smarter thing to do would be to not make such a mess in the first place. A professional with her amount of experience should have figured that out by now.

Well it’s a great comic and a lot of fun, even if it feels like it’s over too soon. The end would seem to hold out the hope for more to come, but seeing as these comics were first published in 2017 and nothing has happened yet on that front I suspect there may not be a sequel. Then again, maybe the release of a movie based on Josie’s character will create demand for more. It certainly seems as though the story has room to grow.

Graphicalex

All-New X-Men: Out of Their Depth

The All-New (a.k.a. “original” or “classic”) X-Men continue trying to find their way in twenty-first century America, encountering the next generation of other classic characters (Lady Mastermind, Rachel Grey/Summers) as well as some now grizzled vets (Wolverine and Sabretooth still thrashing it out like the comic-book Monsters of Rock they are).

To be honest, I started to feel the storyline was getting tired here though. The plot Mystique was hatching with her gang is revealed to be not all that interesting, or even worth bothering with. Madame Hydra is both surprised and unimpressed by it. The subsequent battle is full of lots of mind games, and Wolverine’s classic “Now it’s my turn” fell flat. As for the rest of it, there was too much talk, even though the story does call for a lot of it as all the characters have to come to grips with who they turned into in the new timeline. The Avengers as the senior superhero body were unwelcome cameos. And like so much Marvel product at this time you just want to throw your hands up at the amount of backstory and other stuff you’re supposed to be totally up to speed on to fully make sense of it. I mean, I suppose every long-time X-Men fan has a basic understanding of the Dark Phoenix storyline from way back when I was a teen, but you also have to know about Cyclops killing Charles Xavier in the Avengers vs. X-Men storyline and other stuff that’s happened since. There are so many timelines, alternate worlds, and threads of the multiverse going on with Marvel now that it feels like it’s sinking under its own weight a lot of the time. I think this series does a great job dealing with the problem, but it’s still a problem.

Brian Michael Bendis handles all this well, but it’s not a job I’d wish on anyone. There are just too many balls in the air, too many characters, and too much schmaltzy drama. I mentioned in my notes on Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men Volume 1 how the horny teen X-Men were all hot for Jean Grey and that even Charles Xavier was feeling thirsty. In the last comic included here we have Hank McCoy (the Beast) finally getting some romance action with her. I guess when you look like a comic-book superheroine (Covergirl looks, Playboy body in sexy outfits) you just have to learn to deal with all the attention, but you’d think she’d be starting to feel tired of having every guy she meets falling in love with her, in every different timeline.

The art by Stuart Immonen is solid in the Marvel house style at this time. David Lafuente does All-New X-Men #15 and he provides a nice change-up with a Manga-flavoured look (pointy noses, spikes of hair) that fits with the teenage vibe to that issue. I especially liked Jean in fuzzy pink slippers bumping into her daughter in the residence building. That was a great moment, nicely presented without any dialogue. In any event, at this point they were heading into crossover territory so things were about to get even messier with even more timelines coming into play. Which is not really what I was hoping for.

Graphicalex

The Lady of Shalott

In my post on The Highwayman I said how much I loved this Visions of Poetry series. In a half-dozen volumes they came up with beautiful and distinctive illustrations of famous short poems, ostensibly for kids but (much as I usually despise the crossover) equally enjoyable for old folks. One of the things they had going for them was that most of these popular poems were narrative ballads, and the artists lean in to the way that pictures also tell a story. Sometimes even a different story from what’s expected.

Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” has been the inspiration of a lot of art, especially in its native nineteenth century. In this version by Geneviève Côté the setting is updated from medieval (or Pre-Raphaelite medieval) times to the same early-20^th century as Murray Kimber’s “The Highwayman.” Sir Lancelot doesn’t drive by on a motorcycle, but he’s not dressed in resplendent armour either and the streets of Camelot (Paris? Montreal?) have automobiles in them. As for the castle, its “Four gray walls, and four gray towers” are the Battersea Power Station. You get the picture.

Côté’s re-interpretation of the poem has a lot more to it than this though. Giving it a feminist slant is nothing new – the lady shut away in her domestic drudgery and solitude, dreaming of a (sexual) awakening – but it’s presented in a fashion that’s both subtle and sweeping here. Subtle in the way the lady holds herself, looking more than half sick of shadows. Sweeping in her transformation at the end into a butterfly released from the pod or cocoon of her boat. That seemed so original and inspired a visual motif that I had to wonder if it had ever been done before. If not, hats off to Côté for coming up with the idea.

You could, and should, linger over every illustration. They make you alert to things going on in the poem that you may not have noticed or at least not thought much about. I hadn’t imagined the barley reapers as figures of death, for example, but presented here dressed in black and with sunglasses and scythes, that’s clearly the effect. Then there’s the line “Out flew the web and floated wide.” That’s the web of her weaving coming undone, but how does that actually work? It’s still unclear, but you see it here in the fine lines of colour that swirl around the lady when the curse is come upon her. An image that is dramatically repeated in a shattered version of a frozen moment as the mirror cracks from side to side. And her face looking back over her shoulder (at us?) in the same illustration is remarkable. A really unforgettable image done with only a few lines and a bit of colour.

So another great little book. I’m so happy I picked up the whole series of these when they came out. I only wish they’d done more.

Graphicalex

Batman: Justice Buster Vol. 2

I won’t say Batman: Justice Buster Vol. 2 was one of my favourite recently-read comics, but it is one of the best continuations I’ve seen in a while. As previously noted, Vol. 1 just sort of pricked my interest without standing out in any particular way. But with Vol. 2 (chapters 7-13 in the original series) things really pick up.

There’s not too much I can say that won’t be either a spoiler or, more likely, incomprehensible to non-fanboys. As you’ll know by now, and as a postscript starring Bat-Mite and creators Eichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi further explains, this is an alternate-world Batman. In this world the Joker is a masked man who turns out to be Jason Todd, who is also mentoring young Dick Grayson. Batman and Superman are still locking horns every time they meet, though it isn’t all that clear why, or at least why Batman hates Superman so much. Joe Chill is both the guy who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents and the guy who killed Dick’s parents and he’s also been posing as Grayson’s Uncle Sam. And finally Batman’s crime-fighting AI, known as ROBIN, has (as I not so presciently predicted) gone rogue. Which means the mechanical monstrosity dubbed the Justice Buster is getting ready to mete out its own kind of justice, which is a sort of anti-justice, if you know what I mean. Because what would perfect justice look like anyway? As Hamlet put it, use every man after his desert, and who of us would escape whipping?

This is all very weird, and convoluted, but I really got into it. Of all the recent reimaginings of the Batman character and his mythos this is the one I’ve found most original and enjoyable. About the only thing I found to fault was one real headscratcher of a translation error. How is “Sam Reynauld in Death,” which is shown twice, an obituary notice?

So where before I felt the series was only just worth sticking with, I’m really looking forward to Volume 3.

Graphicalex

Marvel Zombies 2

This Marvel Zombies volume doesn’t flow directly from the first run of Marvel Zombies, but constitutes a second miniseries of five issues. Things begin with the zombies suffering the effects of withdrawal after having spent the last forty years eating their way through the whole universe. So they decide to head back to Earth because if they can find a mechanical portal to another dimension there’s a chance they can skip over to another part of the multiverse and eat that too. Which means recovering zombies like Black Panther and Wasp have to try to stop them. And it’s a race against time because the non-zombies are starting to fight among themselves while the zombies are slowly starting to get better on their own after being forced to go cold turkey.

I was disappointed in the first Marvel Zombies series and can’t say I was any more impressed with this one. Robert Kirkman just has too much going on. You’d better know your Marvel universes really well if you’re going to identify the army of different characters, some of them rather obscure, and follow them through the only-confusing-because-it’s-so-lazy plot. I mean, I didn’t recognize the Gladiator at all, or understand what was going on with T’Challa’s son, and I guess I should have. Then everything winds up with the usual conclusion in which nothing is concluded because there’s always that escape hatch to another dimension. The End? Not on your afterlife.

There are things I like about these comics. They do go in some directions I’m not expecting. And overall they hold my interest. But I also find them lacking focus and hard to follow or get involved in. I might like the series more if it took more time introducing and building up the different characters. That’s something that might make the story stronger too.

Graphicalex

Asterix and the Golden Sickle

Outside of the central characters and the basic formulas, I only recall bits and pieces of the Asterix comics from when I read them as a kid. But I do remember thinking that Asterix and the Golden Sickle was one of the best. It’s actually a nice little mystery story, with Asterix and Obelix traveling to Lutetia to find Metallurgix, Obelix’s cousin who is also a manufacturer of the golden sickles that druids like Panoramix need to harvest mistletoe. Unfortunately, when they get to Lutetia they find that someone has kidnapped Metallurgix as a way of cornering the market on golden sickles just before the big druid festival.

It’s eventful, fast-moving, and the plot holds interest throughout. The secondary characters are also interesting, from the little guy in the drunk tank who gets a shot of magic potion to the Roman prefect Surplus Dairyprodus, whose appearance was based on that of the actor Charles Laughton. Dairyprodus is one of the most original villains ever, taking up a life of crime and hanging out with lowlifes just because he’s bored of enjoying all the good things in life. He’s even looking forward to rowing in a galley at the end, just for a change of pace.

The only false note came by way of the new “North American” translation, which even has Obelix saying “Cool!” at one point. Not cool!

Graphicalex

Road of the Dead: Highway to Hell

Damn, now that’s a zombie comic cover! Nothing like an eyeball floating in the bowl of a hollowed out skull with a smoking shotgun barrel in the background. Could the comic itself live up to this?

No, it doesn’t. And in fact the cover is by Santíperez while the comic itself is illustrated by Drew Moss. So different artists. There’s a gallery of covers by Santíperez included in the bonus material here though and they all look nearly as cool.

In my review of the movie Zombieland I suggested that 2007 might be taken as the year of “peak zombie.” It just seemed like zombies were everywhere and nothing new was being done with the genre. So this comic, billed as a prequel to Road of the Dead though I’ve never heard of that book, was coming very late to the party (it was published in 2019). In particular, this really feels like a colour version of Kirkman’s The Walking Dead mixed with even older elements borrowed from the Romero films. There are highways jammed with stalled vehicles. There are warrior biker gangs. There’s a pair of pet zombies kept on chain leashes. There’s a guy with a spiked baseball bat. There’s a battle tank that turns out to be surprisingly (and unrealistically) effective in taking out zombies. There’s a story involving the attempt to transport a scientist working on a cure for the zombie virus to a safe haven in . . . you guessed it: Canada!

I don’t think there’s any way writer Jonathan Maberry wasn’t aware of all this. He even kicks things off with a billboard advertising the Monroeville Mall (setting of Romero’s 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead). But it’s hard to draw much of anything from a well that’s already been pumped dry. You can go the route of zombie parody, but even that was getting stale by this time. So there isn’t much to do here but watch the splatter. There’s a slightly more contemporary wrinkle added by the fact that the gang chasing our heroes are members of a sort of conspiracy cult, believing that a cure is being kept from them by government elites. But that’s never developed. And of course the underlying philosophy of the zombie genre is still in play: that the zombie apocalypse only reveals the state of nature as it already exists, a war of all against all with civilization a transparently thin membrane stretched over the abyss. Our lives so routine, meaningless, and devoid of human attachment we might already be dead. As the narration explains:

This is how it is now. Everywhere is a trap. Everyone is an enemy. Each of us is a traitor to the living the second we die.

Ten thousand years of human civilization. Everything we learned, everything we built, all we know about the world and the universe. And now the only thing that defines us is whether we’re predators or prey.

No dignity left. Hope and optimism are getting bitch-slapped. Compassion’s lying dead in a ditch somewhere.

It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for this sort of end-of-days nihilism, but as I say it’s something that’s foundational to the zombie genre and the fact is that Road of the Dead: Highway to Hell doesn’t have a new story to package it in. It’s the sort of comic I’d usually recommend only if you’re a huge fan of zombie stuff, but actually if you’re a huge zombie fan then you might feel let down by how unoriginal it all feels, since I’m sure you’ll have seen it all before. So while it’s an OK comic, it’s kind of hard to recommend to anyone except splatter-action devotees.

Graphicalex

Green Lantern Corps Volume 2: Alpha War

There are actually two different storylines here. The first is the Alpha War one, which has an excessively rigorous bunch of super-Lanterns on the HQ planet of Oa tasked with policing the rest of the Corps. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guardians? The Alpha Lanterns, that’s who!

And who is watching over the Alphas? The bobbleheaded Guardians hanging out in their Planetary Citadel. And you wouldn’t want to trust that lot.

Anyway, one of the dark moments in the previous volume had John Stewart kill a fellow Lantern who was being tortured by the Keepers into giving up the pass code they needed to break into Oa. As things kick off here, Stewart is judged by the Alphas and sentenced to death. But then Guy Gardner and some of his buddies break John out of his prison (what they call the “sciencell”), and have a battle royale with the Alphas, who end up being defeated.

I didn’t care for any of this. I couldn’t tell any of the Alphas apart except for the centaur guy and nothing about the plot seemed right to me. To be honest, by the time they wrapped things up I was thinking of giving up on this series.

I’m glad I didn’t, because in the next story line, that only gets introduced here, we learn about some space zombies who are just floating around turning everyone, including any Lanterns who cross their path, into more zombies. These zombies form a “third army” that the Guardians seem to be behind in some way. I told you those bobbleheads can’t be trusted. They’re also up to something when they release Xar from his prison and send him out to stir things up. Meanwhile, Kilowog and Salaak are on to the Guardians but they’re a little slow in piecing things together.

Then John Stewart, who has been sent off on a wild goose chase, meets up with the busty Fatality, and Guy Gardner gets his team of Lanterns wiped out by the space zombies, which results in him getting kicked out of the Corps and sent back home to Earth without any of his Lantern powers.

I don’t know where any of this is going, but I’m interested enough in what Fatality, Xar, the Guardians, and the space zombies are all doing to keep reading for another volume. Power up!

Graphicalex

Beowulf

This is a big book, 8.5”x12” format, which helps sell it as an epic, with the heroic, larger-than-life figures going at it in a giant mythic landscape. The double-page spreads, most often given over to climactic points in the hero’s three great battles (against the monster Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and finally a dragon), feel like paintings in a coffee-table art book and you want to enjoy them at scale. But they also mean that you can get more out of the inset art, which in a regular-size comic is harder to read.

I also thought that in most respects this was a faithful adaptation of the Old English poem. The colour scheme favours a bloody-fiery scale of reds, and Beowulf looks like his nose has been busted a fair few times, along with picking up a cauliflower ear. The monsters are believable, with Grendel’s mom maybe looking a bit too much like the Xenomorph from the Alien movies. But the dragon is pretty original, given that there’s less artistic leeway when it comes to drawing dragons.

There were a couple of odd interpretive flourishes. Grendel seems to fall in love with the naked, sleeping Beowulf, fingering his penis and then ejaculating all over him when Beowulf awakes. I wonder what that was all about. I do wonder.

Then a lot is made of Beowulf as an older man feasting at his hall. There is a focus on his mouth as he’s eating, with close-ups of his teeth and his tongue and even one cell that gives the point of view from inside his mouth as he pours a drink down his gullet. I can sort of see wanting to emphasize the eating, but I didn’t think this worked. It felt like overkill for a point that wasn’t that important in the first place.

As W. H. Auden said of the poetry of Yeats: “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” Perhaps that was part of what was meant in making such a big deal out of all the eating. Because we end on an interesting note, with the words of the Old English text appearing in print and then being digitized before finally taking the form of this graphic novel. It’s remarkable that the story of Beowulf has hung around as long as it has, but to have that kind of afterlife means putting a lot of work into adaptation, or digestion in our cultural guts.

Graphicalex