Captain America/Black Panther: Flags of Our Fathers

The basic story here is meat-and-potatoes stuff. It’s World War 2 and an elite force of Nazis headed by the Red Skull, Baron Strucker, Master Man, Warrior Woman, and Armless Tiger Man are off to Wakanda to steal some of that awesome vibranium stuff to power their secret weapons. But the African kingdom is protected not only by its reigning Black Panther (T’Challa’s grandfather), but some (very) paleface visitors in the form of Captain America and Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos.

What follows is a lot of fighting as the good guys kick Nazi ass in a manner a little bloodier than usual. The Wakandans decapitate an advance party of Nazis and stick their heads on stakes as a warning. Armless Tiger Man is a cannibal with sharpened teeth who tears into people mouth-first (since he doesn’t have arms, you see).

I actually liked this better than I thought I was going to. There were a couple of places where it seemed like a page was missing though, as the story kept skipping around different parts of the battlefield. And I wasn’t sure what Black Panther was using to take out Master Man and Warrior Woman. Vibranium? Perhaps I just wasn’t paying close enough attention.

The other thing I could have lived without was the lecturing from Black Panther about how post-war America will have to live up to its ideals of freedom, meaning civil rights and all that. “The true test of your ideals will come when the war is over. A nation at war has an enemy to unify them. A nation with no enemy often looks for one within its own borders.” The Panther was becoming a mouthpiece for stuff like this around this time, and it just sounds stiff.

Still, if you want a violent shoot-‘em-up you get it here. Also included as a bonus (since the Flags of Our Fathers storyline is only four issues) is Rise of the Black Panther #1 but I thought this was dreadful. Nothing at all happens, as it’s just backstory about T’Chaka, leading up to the point where he’s killed by Ulysses Klaw. And boy is the action ever talky! Now to be sure Black Panther has often been a talky comic. The Christopher Priest years were thick with text. And he’s always been political too, again in the Priest years but also going back to his fights with the Klan. But the talk here is really dull, just reciting biographical material I mostly already knew, and the art wasn’t working for me either. So that finished the book on a down note.

Graphicalex

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Volume 1

Another ‘Sixties superhero start-up, this time with Daredevil finding his legs.

It took a bit of time. He started out with a yellow uniform that had a black vest with a single red D on the front. It would later turn into the all-red outfit he’s best known for wearing, with the iconic double-D on its chest, but it’s never explained why they made that change. I mean, his name isn’t Dare-Devil.

The other issue they had trouble sorting out was his blindness. Championed (especially in recent years) for being a superhero with a disability, it’s actually nothing of the sort. In fact, the one thing the “man without fear” admits to being afraid of is having surgery to get his sight back and then losing his super powers. You see, the accident that caused Matt Murdock’s blindness involved being hit by a truck carrying radioactive material, resulting in his compensatory senses being jacked up to god-like levels. Because we all know that’s the way radioactivity works. You don’t just die a slow, lingering death from cancer but turn into a superhero. Or villain. Or expire right away in agonizing pain, like Dr. Van Eyck in issue #9.

So while Daredevil is blind that’s not a disability because his “atom-induced radar sense” can accurately judge the precise size, speed, and location of any physical body. His sense of smell is so advanced he can trace an individual, hours later, through the streets of New York City by the scent of their “unusual hair tonic.” Hair tonic, for Daredevil, being as distinctive as a man’s fingerprints, he can pick up a scent at any point “approximately within one city block of his quarry.” He can sense the heart rate of individuals standing anywhere near him and tell if they are lying or experiencing any stress. He can read books, not in braille but “merely by feeling the impression of the ink on the page!” He can tell what people are wearing by the sound the fabric makes when they move. He can detect (by radar, not by touch) whether someone is wearing a ring on their finger, and what sort of ring it is. Flying in a jet over the petty  European state of Lichtenbad he can “sense a walled city” thousands of feet below . Then, once inside the castle of the Lord of Lichtenbad his radar senses can “see” through several stone floors “as though it’s [the castle’s] made of glass.” That’s some radar!

You can tell by this that they were winging it. Effectively, Daredevil isn’t blind at all. Anything he needs to be able to do, he can do. Just like that billy club of his can do everything, including allowing him to swing through the streets of the city like Spider-Man.

If you put all that aside, what you got here was still a really enjoyable comic in the grand Marvel manner of the time. For the most part Daredevil is taking on B-list baddies who are nonetheless a lot of fun. People like Killgrave the Purple Man, the Matador, the Stilt Man, and the animal cos-players of the Organization. But when he goes up against Namor (in what is a genuinely funny adventure) he’s beaten up pretty badly, and this in his own comic! Even Iron Man got to knock out the Hulk in the pages of Iron Man.

Most of the titles here were written by Stan Lee, and that includes the usual good and bad. Fast-paced stories that don’t want to spend a lot of time explaining things. Colorful characters. Relentless boosterism. Item: the issue that has Daredevil’s “epic battle” with Electro “may well be remembered as long as literature endures!!” Right on the first page of issue #1 the lucky reader is congratulated for having purchased “another prized first edition! This magazine is certain to be one of your most valued comic mag possessions in the months to come!” Well, maybe not in the months to come. But if you held it for seventy years . . . in 1964 it had a cover price of 12 cents and now goes for between $1,500 and $5,000. That’s a decent return. Smilin’ Stan didn’t tell many lies. He just ran away with the hyperbole.

On the downside, and as I’ve mentioned before, there’s his hopeless portrayal of women. The love triangle going on between Matt, his law partner Foggy Nelson, and their secretary Karen Page is just an annoyance. This was a day when women really knew their place, and had no shame in delivering such self-deprecating lines as “I guess I’m just a silly female!”

I was never a fan of Daredevil when I was a kid but I enjoyed this book a lot more than I was expecting. In later years he’d go through some “adult” makeovers, especially highlighting his Catholic faith, but for sheer entertainment value these early adventures stand up well. I even love the “Here Comes Daredevil” titling, with its in-your-face promise of “get ready for fun!” And as for disabilities, they’re no handicap at all.

Graphicalex

Superior Spider-Man Team-Up: Versus

As the Marvel Universe began splintering every which way a lot of familiar names came in for makeovers. The Hulk, for example, turned Red and Grey and took on a host of different personalities on different Earths and different timelines. But I think Spider-Man probably had the most variations, to the point where it’s hard to speak of Spider-Man in the singular at all.

Superior Spider-Man, in case you were wondering, is the name adopted by the webslinger after Doctor Octopus switches bodies with Peter Parker (who then expires in Doc Ock’s body). But Doctor O doesn’t want to be a bad guy anymore, intending instead to become a better superhero and better guy all around than the old Peter Parker/Spider-Man. Hence, “Superior.”

Normally a premise like that would have lost me right away, but Superior Spider-Man is actually an interesting character. Doc Ock is a real snob and it’s fun to listen in on his interior monologues running down everyone he meets. What’s more, the storylines here are pretty good. In the first, Spidey is chasing down a body-hopping version of Carrion, which means taking out all the superheroes Carrion temporarily inhabits. In the second he grudgingly joins forces with his clone, the Scarlet Spider, to do battle with the Jackal and his army of genetically-modified critters. And in the third a creature possesses a young lady studying in the Cloisters, turning her into a being of pure electricity who gives herself the name Fulmina and who has the power to knock civilization all the way back into her beloved Middle Ages. Spider-Man has to juggle fighting her with beating back an alien invasion of NYC.

You’ll note that each of those storylines involves a lot of fighting, and the comics here deliver in that regard. And the way the fighting is represented is great, being both dramatic and easy to follow. The series used different artists for every issue and they all knew how to bring the action.

But the best part is the writing. The dialogue feels real, whether it’s just the usual banter or something more developed. I particularly liked the argument between Spidey and Fulmina. As noted, she wants to take humanity back to medieval times, a world with “days measured by the hours of the sun . . . nights softened by the glow of candlelight.” Spidey accuses her of being a tyrant, and she responds that she’s not a tyrant but someone “freeing humanity from the tyranny of progress to devote themselves to poetry . . . to prayer . . . to song . . .” Spider-Man has to consider this, but returns later with his put-down of the good old days:

So you can roll back the centuries, and restore the world of the Middle Ages? A world without the clamor of industry, the pace of technology, the blare of the media? A world without the lockstep conformity of the modern world . . . the onerous duties of citizenship . . . the burdens of personal freedom . . . a world of poverty and plague, crude, primitive medicine . . . rampant superstition . . . brutal class divisions . . . incessant, internecine warfare . . . You want to return us to this?

As Spidey talks a medieval scene plays out in the background slowly being taken over by the specter of death. It made me think of the medieval poem about the three kings and the three dead. Meanwhile, Fulmina objects that he’s “twisting it all around . . . making it ugly.” And she’s right. But he is too.

I’m not saying there’s anything profound in all this, but I did think Fulmina one of the more compelling and original villains Marvel has come up with in recent years and the rest of the stories here are at the same high level. It’s a good comic.

Graphicalex

The Zombie Night Before Christmas

Along with “peak zombie,” the early twenty-first century saw the mass zombification of classic literature, the seminal text being Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The Zombie Night Before Christmas was published a year later, and what I was reading was the 10^th anniversary edition, though I don’t know if they made any significant changes.

What we have here is most of Clement C. Moore’s classic poem – whose original title was “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and which Moore may not have written – mixed in with some references to rotting corpses and flesh-hungry zombies. Basically the world has been overtaken by the zombie apocalypse and now everyone is a zombie, but still going about living their normal lives. For some reason, however, nobody has told Santa about this turn of events (he knows if you’ve been bad or good, but not if you’re still alive). So on Christmas Eve he’s in for a rude surprise, and soon finds himself on the run from the hungry dead.

To be honest, I felt kind of sorry for Santa in this one. He manages to avoid an initial zombie attack by landing on a roof, but then gets jumped by a zombie as soon as he comes down the chimney. Again, I don’t know why he’s bothering at this point, seeing as he knows the situation. But anyway, he’s bitten and then “A blink of his eyes / and twist of his head, / Soon let me know / he was now living dead.” And all his reindeer too.

It’s a cute little book and a bit of fun. But maybe they needed to take a freer hand with the poem to come up with something really new. Either that or just illustrate the original text with zombies. Mad Magazine used to do adaptations like that, and it’s an approach that might have worked here. This sort of tries to have it both ways, and the result is more a light work of whimsy than a deathless Christmas classic.

Graphicalex

Archie Horror Presents Chilling Adventures

As you know if you’ve been reading any of my previous posts, I’m a fan of the Archie Horror imprint. I think they’ve done a lot of really creative work and been successful in expanding the Archie brand in ways I wouldn’t have thought likely. That said, Chilling Adventures is a total dud.

The idea here was to present a horror anthology, with a bunch of short stories from a variety of authors and artists. According to the editor’s introduction the model was supposed to be something like EC’s Tales from the Crypt, which I can see, but I think the more immediate reference might have been The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror. And if that’s the comparison being made I think Chilling Adventures suffers by it. In fact, I can’t think of any comparison it doesn’t suffer by.

The blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the writers. Normally in a variety-show effort like this you can expect a mix of good and bad. Here I had trouble identifying anything that was good. Pretty much everything on tap was either tired and clichéd or confusing. Sometimes both. There’s a gesture at a frame story as Madame Satan gets bored with ruling hell and takes up being a high school principal. Archie gets trapped in a killer video game. Veronica is possessed by a demon dress. Jinx (Sabrina’s “familiar”) rescues a bunch of stray animals from a sorcerer. Jughead (the werewolf version) fights Krampus. Shape-shifting aliens land in Riverdale. Some of this might have been interesting, especially given the talent assembled, but it’s just a dull mess that never got any better as it stumbled along. Were they in a rush? Uninspired? I don’t know, but nothing here worked for me.

Graphicalex

The Immortal Hulk Volume 7: Hulk is Hulk

Well, that was interesting.

Apparently Xemnu, I’m not sure how, was creating a mass illusion among the entire human race that had everyone believing he (Xemnu) was a cuddly figure from a children’s television show that never actually existed. And implanting other false memories as well. It’s the Mandela effect except on a universal scale. The point of this exercise in mass delusion being to absorb people and repurpose them as mechanical offspring. He’s even got deep inside Hulk’s head . . . but not deep enough as things turn out. You see, the Hulk knows who he really is. Hulk is Hulk.

That’s another good premise to start with, but there was so much other stuff going on that I felt a lot of it sort of got lost in the mix. It’s like Al Ewing has attention-deficit issues and doesn’t want to spend too long developing any particular storyline too much. I mean, I really liked the Minotaur from the previous volume, but when his time is up he gets disposed of quickly here and I never did figure out just what his plan for global domination was.

There are longer story arcs that we return to. The Leader is still up to something relating to the planet Hulk crushed a while back, and he’s also being connected to the Hulk in Hell mythos and something to do with Bruce Banner’s father. I have to say I’m not grooving to all the psychomachia stuff and Dr. Banner’s dissociative identity disorder, but the subplots are working for me and even though the eating-people and skin-shedding tropes feel overused (they both come up again here) I do like the punctuation of the “Hulk Smash!” double-page, hammering-time spreads. In other words, all the meat-and-potatoes comic-book stuff. Do I care about the Hulk’s battle with his personal demons? Not yet, anyway.

Graphicalex

Alien: Revival

It’s easy to get lazy reading comic books. In particular, you can let your eye drift over the art, not paying close attention to everything that’s going on and picking up on all the small but significant details. There was a telling moment for me in this regard when reading Alien: Revival. One of the characters refers to the discovery of a victim of the Xenomorphs that’s found in one of those incubation cocoons, only with her feet torn off. This made me flip back to the scene in question because I hadn’t noticed the victim’s feet. But they had indeed been torn off.

Later in the comic we’ll see other humans who have been given the same treatment, with arms and legs removed. I guess because all that’s needed for gestation is a chest. I don’t recall this ever being a thing in the movies (though I’m not caught up on all the films in the franchise), and it’s a detail that’s pretty damn disturbing, to be honest. But Revival is a comic that takes the Alien mythology and turns up the ick factor quite a bit.

The story is again impressive. As I’ve noted before, the Alien comics beat the pants off the movies in coming up with original plots. I don’t know why they didn’t just film them. Would have avoided all of Ridley Scott’s later mythologizing and the Aliens vs. Predators crap.

The story has it that a bunch of humans have started a religious colony on a terraformed mining moon named Euridice. But wouldn’t you know it, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation wants a place to test out a new strand of Xenomorph and so Euridice is up.

At first I thought the whole religious sect of “Spinners” (because they worship a divine Mother who spins creation on her cosmic loom, or something like that) was overdone. They even talk in frontier or Appalachian folksy dialect, saying things like “I might oughta brought that shotgun.” But after a while it grew on me, and they turned it into something interesting when the Spinners started to question whether any of their beliefs and holy books were real or were just a construct of the Corporation.

There’s a kick-ass heroine named Jane who has a bow. There are some very evil synths (androids), one of which I actually guessed the identity of before the reveal. But it was pretty easy this time (usually this series conceals them really well). One thing I did raise an eyebrow at though was Jane swearing at a wicked synth that she was going to kill it. Is that a threat to a synth? Why would a robot care if you threatened to kill it?

Also included in this volume is Alien Annual #1, which is a standalone story starring the security man Gabriel Cruz and some more space marines facing off against yet another evil synth. Androids really aren’t our allies in these stories. Bishop was the exception to the rule.

Graphicalex

Bone: Out from Boneville

There’s a line of thinking out there that has it that the best children’s literature is capable of being read on different levels, meaning many adult levels beyond the ken of most kids. You hear this a lot when talking about books like The Lord of the Rings, where it’s a story you can enjoy when you’re seven or eight years old (which is when I read it), but which has all kinds of deeper resonance and layers of meaning.

The Lord of the Rings was apparently one of the inspirations for Jeff Smith’s Bone comic, and it has that same generational range to it. On the one hand the blobby inhabitants of Boneville are cute, Smurf-like creatures that might as well be hobbits. You don’t think they’re going to do anything remarkable or have any epic adventures. But then the three Bone cousins – Fone (the hero), Phoncible P. “Phoney” Bone, and Smiley – wind up in a fantasy valley where most of the inhabitants are human but there are also magical creatures like the scary Rat Creatures and a friendly Great Red Dragon. It seems like something really important is afoot, from social breakdown to the fate of Phoney’s soul and some final struggle between the forces of good and evil. There’s also not just love in the air, as Fone falls helplessly (and understandably) for the beautiful Thorn, but more carnal stirrings as well. Our first glimpse of Thorn, after all, has her dropping her trousers to bathe her legs in a stream, and later when she and Fone wash up together there will be a sly comment from her about him needing to be a bit more careful with the soap. As it turns out, he’s eaten the soap. But we know what was meant, and we’re even given a blank panel to imagine it.

The edition I was reading is a colorized version put out by Scholastic ten years after the original comic, which was published in black-and-white, started up. I’m assuming Smith approved of the change and I thought the colours looked good, even if I had a nagging feeling it all might have worked better in black-and-white. The more sinister elements might have been more threatening, for one thing. The Rat Creatures here have Christmas-tree balls as eyes, and there are pom-poms at the end of the Red Dragon’s ears that look even sillier. Also, the snow-white Bone cousins appear even more other-worldly against a full-colour background, which I’m not sure was the intended effect.

Smith does a great job modeling the Bones’ plastic (bone-less) faces and bodies into expressive forms though, and they remain the more “human” characters we can relate to (Thorn and Gran’ma Ben seem like the weirdos). The only visual I really didn’t like was the way Fone’s head takes on the shape of the pie Phoney shoves into his mouth. That just didn’t work for me even as a gag.

It’s a classic tale, full of archetypal characters and situations, some of which get a gentle modern gloss. I do think I’d have enjoyed it a lot more as a kid, but even now I found it entertaining enough, if not something I’ll ever return to or for that matter even continue on with.

Graphicalex

Scooby Apocalypse Volume 2

Things kick off here with the gang breaking out of the Mall-Mart and then getting back on the road in the Mystery Machine, driving through a landscape intermittently filled with monsters spawned by the nanite plague created by Velma. She naturally feels a lot of guilt over this, but is excused because (1) her intentions were noble, and (2) somehow the nanites were either corrupted by someone or self-evolved so as to turn people into so many colourful, plastic-looking demons.

But despite all of the driving they do there wasn’t any sense that the story was going anywhere in the six issues collected here. The series is actually quite episodic, with some of the links between the issues feeling a bit herky-jerky. Scooby-Doo is missing at the end of issue #7, but at the beginning of issue #8 he’s rejoined the gang with only a cursory explanation later served up as to how he got back. Then issue #10 takes us out of the main timeline entirely into what is only revealed at the end to be a dream. Now it’s a dark and interesting dream, and the hospital story in issue #8 was a fun diversion, but none of this carries things forward.

And indeed at the end of this volume we still don’t know anything new about the nanite plague or what caused it. It feels like we’ve just been driving around. Scrappy-Doo has a couple of quick cameos, revealing him to be a tortured, enhanced-canine soul. But nothing much comes of it. And one of Velma’s powerful brothers makes an appearance as a Donald Trump clone, holed up in an apartment tower with his last name in giant gold letters out front. This made me wonder if somebody is keeping a record of all the different presentations of Trump-like figures in popular culture there have been. I think that would be a book in itself.

And then things end with another cliff-hanger.

This second volume wasn’t bad, and I thought the haunted hospital issue was great, but overall I was losing interest in the storyline and the characters. It’s a bit darker than the first book, with some downright nasty stuff in places (Rufus Dinkley/Trump is a real piece of work), but I felt like I needed a break from the series by the time I got to the end. Originally I thought the fact that this wasn’t just another zombie apocalypse was a big selling point, but it didn’t take long before I was tired of the mutants and missing the more traditional, flesh-eating walking dead. That’s not a good sign moving forward, but I’ll keep giving them a chance.

Graphicalex

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