Wolverine: Call of the Adamantine

Most of the comic volumes I review here collect five or six issues in a particular run following a single story arc, which is what I was expecting here with issues #6 through #12 of author Saladin Ahmed’s Wolverine. I thought this was going to continue the story of the mission of the Adamantine, “a buried power older than men, older even than the gods . . . the primordial spirit of metal itself,” to rid the world of the bastard adamantium (an alloy which the Adamantine “considers to be something between blasphemy and identity theft”). But that story actually ends (somewhat abruptly, I felt) halfway through issue #8, after Wolverine plugs Romulus’s pie-hole with his claws. Which leaves the Adamantine to skulk off with a muttered threat to Wolverine (“Our contest will come soon enough. But not this day.”). From there we’re whisked away to one of Arcade’s deadly game shows, which at least cures the Wendigo of his curse. Then there’s a standalone episode with a different writer of what I guess is one of Wolverine’s ancestors in samurai-era Japan. And from there someone (spoiler alert: it’s Jason Wyngarde/Mastermind) gets inside Wolverine’s head and lures him back to his old family estate where he is tormented by the spirit of his dead mother and gets into a fight with Sabretooth. Yeah, they’re both dead (Wolverine’s mom and Sabretooth) but they’re not really here so whatever. I actually thought there was some potential with this Wolverine-in-a-haunted-house business, but again it falls back on the idea of Wolverine just having to dig deep until he can get the upper hand. And to be honest, I’m tired of explorations of the tortured psyches of superheroes. Wolverine can dish out the punishment, but this is always followed by a downer: “the doubt and the loss and pain come callin’ again like old drinkin’ buddies you just can’t shake.”

I’m not going to be too negative on this one. I thought Ahmed had some good ideas even if they did sort of peter out or got cut short. And the art, especially in the later issues, didn’t let things down. But there’s not much of a payoff. The Adamantine will be back, someday. Arcade escapes. And even Mastermind can throw a final taunt at Wolverine, asking him if he knows if any of this is real. All of this is par for the course for most comics, which are always running to stand still, but I thought it seemed a little more obvious here, the conflict a little too familiar. And I really don’t find the inside of Wolverine’s head all that interesting a place. I get it: dark places, man. Find a therapist and don’t bore me with the rest of it.

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Wolverine: In the Bones

So our hero Wolverine is off taking another one of his breaks from the X-Men, pondering what he’s done and what he’s going to do with his life in that usual “superhero having a reflective personal crisis” sort of way. He’s even running with a pack of wolves somewhere in Canada’s Northwest Territories. But then trouble, as it always does, comes knocking, in the form of his old enemy Cyber. And here’s where things start to get interesting. After Wolverine kicks Cyber’s ass (when they butt heads it makes a great CLONG sound) Cyber skulks away and gets possessed by a recently awakened primordial force called the Adamantine. Now you’ll probably know that Cyber’s skin and Wolverine’s skeleton and claws are made of (or, to be precise in the latter case, bonded with) adamantium, which is a virtually indestructible man-made alloy. Adamantine, by way of contrast, is a naturally occurring metal that is more the stuff of legend. Both are fictional substances, by the way.

The Adamantine doesn’t like adamantium, seeing it as a kind of blasphemy, so it has a mission to destroy it wherever it finds it. To do so it takes over Cyber and then goes around hunting other supervillains with adamantium in their body and possessing them. Names like Lady Deathstrike, Constrictor, and Romulus. Of course it also wants to possess and destroy Wolverine. To stop them, Wolverine has to team up with his daughter (X-23), Nightcrawler, and a teenage Wendigo that he is helping fight the cannibal curse.

I thought it was a good storyline from Saladin Ahmed, though in the end it falls back on the cliché about our hero just being made of stronger stuff and having personal reserves too great for the evil force to overcome. I get tired of that, and was actually hoping the Wendigo, as the anti-adamantium force in play, might have had a larger role. But I was still hooked enough to want to see what would happen next.

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Macbeth (illustrated by K. Briggs)

In my notes on the Macbeth graphic novel illustrated by Gareth Hinds I mentioned some of the ways he’d cut and adapted the language of the play, concluding that it wasn’t a full-text Macbeth, nor should it have been.

This Macbeth, illustrated by K. Briggs, is a full-text version of the play, and while I want to give credit to Briggs for her ambition I came away thinking that this sort of thing isn’t well advised. I gave up on the graphic adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for much the same reason. The text gets to be too much, and if you know the novel or the play that’s being adapted well enough you tend to skim it anyway and just look at the pictures.

I also want to credit Briggs for her striking visuals. She’s got quite an original sense of style, playing a lot with the format of the pages and mixing in various novel bits of imagery, like tarot cards, into a collage. She’ll also flip images upside-down, or present scraps of text or medieval-themed design elements as background. You can spend quite a bit of time on nearly every page, pulling it apart. And there are other creative flourishes I enjoyed too. Macbeth is so often presented, at least today, as a heroic young man that I liked seeing him as a bald, professorial type. At least he looks a lot like professors I had. You could roll your eyes at Malcolm appearing as a Black woman, but given the spirit of the proceedings this barely stood out.

But then there is all the text, which Briggs does try to jazz up as much as she can but which still just feels like it’s getting in the way. To be honest, and not only because I do know the play pretty well and was skimming, I started wondering at one point if the book might have worked better as a strictly graphic presentation, with no text at all. I mean, they made a whole lot of silent films out of Shakespeare’s plays, so, as crazy as it may at first seem, the words really aren’t indispensable.

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Macbeth (illustrated by Gareth Hinds)

Even though Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays (I think only The Comedy of Errors has fewer lines), most productions still make a fair number of cuts, and we shouldn’t be surprised that a graphic novel adaptation, coming in at 134 pages, would be any different. Gareth Hinds doesn’t go wrong in getting rid of Hecate’s appearance before the witches in Act III Scene v (which Shakespeare might not have written), as well as the long and (in my opinion, tedious) exchange between Malcolm and Macduff in Act IV Scene iii. This isn’t a full-text Macbeth, nor should it be.

Purists may take fairer exception to places where the language has been simplified or expurgated. Among the foul ingredients going into the witches’ cauldron, for example, there’s a “Finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch-delivered by a drab.” That second line, identifying the strangled babe as having been birthed by a prostitute in a ditch, is omitted by Hinds. And at another point a notorious crux is done away with in Macbeth’s concern over washing the blood from his hands:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Should that final line read “Making the green one, red”? As in making the green ocean red? Or should it be read as saying “Making the green, one red”? Meaning making the entire ocean turn red? Hinds avoids the problem by changing the line to “No, this my hand will rather stain the great seas crimson.” Which is at least clearer, if you’re no fan of ambiguity.

As far as Hinds’s visual representation of the play goes, I think there’s good and bad. The good takes the form of a lot of interesting concepts like the witches first appearing as birds perched in a tree, Macbeth’s elongated shadow taking the form of a dagger as he sets off to kill Duncan, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth literally wading in blood after the scene with Banquo’s ghost (where Banquo’s ghost takes several different, monstrous forms), and Lady Macbeth’s obsessive hand-washing represented by multiplying sets of scrubbing hands. The not-so-good is mainly down to Hinds’s figures, which all look stiff and artificial to me. Adding to this effect is the lettering, which is just a regular font that doesn’t go well with the action and adds a layer to the generic feel. I wonder if comic lettering is a dying art now though. Too bad if it is. It’s something we often overlook, but it can make a difference.

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The Haunt of Fear Volume 2

This second volume of The Haunt of Fear collects issues #7-12 and I think the first thing you should know about it is that every one of the 30 stories (I’m including the text-only stories that appeared once in every issue) was written by editor Al Feldstein. Plus I’m pretty sure he was writing “The Old Witch’s Niche” which was the mailbag feature. At the same time, even though I’d have to check this, I’d be pretty sure he was writing a lot of the stories for EC’s other titles, like Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Weird Fantasy, etc. So if there are some duds in the mix here, or the action starts to follow a formula, are you surprised? When EC was operating at its peak in the early 1950s Feldstein was an absolute engine.

But this isn’t to say he was a one-man show. EC’s stable of regular artists were becoming well known to a hungry fan base. Names like “Ghastly” Graham Ingels. Johnny Craig, Jack Davis (probably my favourite, though it’s close), and Jack Kamen. What’s more, Feldstein knew these guys were the real stars, and in the later comics collected here he started a regular feature profiling “The Artist of the Issue.”

The first two stories are representative of EC near its best and then near its worst. “Room for One More!” has a young man who wants to be buried next to his deceased parents in the family mausoleum. But there’s only one spot left in the crypt, so he has to kill off all his relatives and make sure their bodies are never found so he doesn’t lose his spot. As he puts it:

“No! I won’t be cheated out of my rightful place! After the last spot is filled, the rest of us are to be buried in the soil! Well, not me! I’m not going to be stripped of my flesh by crawling worms and rotting grave-mold! After I die, I want to be put in a silk-lined casket . . . and placed in the cool clean air of the Whitman crypt!”

He does a good job carrying out his plan, but of course his murdered relations come back from the grave and tear him to pieces and then take over the last spot for themselves.

It’s silly, but in the crazy EC manner, indulging their penchant for corpses coming back to life and meting out rough justice. The next story, “The Basket!”, is just derivative though. I think even the thickest EC readers will have twigged to the fact that the wicker basket Mr. Cabez always carries on his right shoulder disguises his second head, a wicked Siamese twin. So the big reveal, which so many EC stories build to, is a disappointment.

I’m sure Feldstein knew that story was a loser. He even spends a later story, “Ear Today . . . Gone Tomorrow!”, with the Crypt-Keeper playing a series of gags on the reader’s expectations. Sure you know where the fertilizer company situated right next to a graveyard is going to find a solution to their need for bone-meal, but do you know what’s going to happen next? And after that? I didn’t, even with the groaner of a title. But then I didn’t think a story called “The Irony of Death!” was going to be set in an iron foundry either.

Another thing Feldstein knew, without needing the results of the readers’ polls for their favourite stories presented in the next issue’s “Old Witch’s Niche,” was that people saw the “text” instalments (short stories without any accompanying art) as skippable filler. “Aw . . . go ahead!” the Witch says just before one. “Read it!” She’s begging you! (Unfortunately, that particular story is one of the worst.)

Mostly then this is just a fun mix of silliness and gore, with stories that usually show some greedy person getting their just desserts. Oddly enough, it’s in the story “Poetic Justice!” that this looked-for comeuppance most disappoints. More satisfying is a story where a guide lets his client get captured by headhunters and the shrunken head returns to pay him back in a manner that plays like a version of those stories about disembodied hands doing people in. Only this time the head has to roll around on the floor and trip the guide up before biting him to death. Because it’s only a head, you see. “The Gorilla’s Paw!” is another riff on the theme of being careful what you wish for. It’s all that sort of thing, familiar themes endlessly repeated, and yet it doesn’t get old.

What does wear a bit is the Old Witch, the Crypt-Keeper, and the Vault-Keeper constantly pestering readers to send away to get their copies of 5”x7” autographed photos of the three GhouLunatics “as we actually appear in the inhuman flesh.” Only 10 cents apiece or 25 cents for all three. I always wondered what these pictures actually were, and it was only from reading the EC history Foul Play! that I found out they were photos of artist Johnny Craig made up to look like the three different characters. I imagine if you have any of these original pictures now in decent condition they’re worth a lot of money.

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Batman: One Bad Day: Penguin

I’ve said before how hard a task it must be for any comic writer, or artist, to make something new and interesting out of Batman, a character who has been with us almost since comics began. But nearly as difficult now is doing the same for Batman’s line-up of famous adversaries. All the more credit then to the One Bad Day series for taking on this mission, and, from the couple I’ve read, doing such a good job.

One Bad Day: Penguin begins with the all-too familiar eponymous villain sitting on a park bench, a derelict, after having been run out of Gotham by a swaggering gangland upstart named Umbrella Man (a title that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with his having an umbrella). Having hit rock bottom, there’s no place for Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot to go but back up and reclaim his criminal empire, which he does starting with only a gun and a single bullet.

As with the other Batman: One Bad Day books, Batman remains a secondary figure. He probably could stop Penguin, but as Penguin reminds him, things are actually worse in Gotham with Umbrella Man running things. Plus, wouldn’t Batman like to go back to the good ol’ days too? Which is an argument that Batman, surprisingly, buys.

As he goes along, Penguin picks up some muscle in the form of an all-girl gun gang and a really interesting sidekick named Lili. I think Lili may be a new character here, and I loved her. Basically she looks like a little girl with gigantic fists that she uses to beat down guys twice her size.

What Lili and another gang member who joins him share with Penguin is a memory of being a picked-on kid. This is a revenge tour for all of them in more ways than one, as they’re not just taking down Umbrella Man but hitting back at everyone who bullied them when they were growing up. It’s a way of making them more sympathetic as well as filling them out as characters, and while there have been no end of superhero and supervillain backstories like this (it’s something that, unfortunately, a lot of young people can relate to) I thought it worked here.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Penguin regains his perch atop the Gotham crime world, and ends up back running the Iceberg Lounge with his new team of sidekicks. Unlike the One Bad Day: Clayface volume this one feels more like it was meant to reboot the character and launch him into a new series of adventures with a new crew as back-up. I don’t know if that’s how it played out, but as a self-contained story I liked this well enough.

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MAD’s Don Martin Comes on Strong

There’s no way I can divorce my reading of these MAD paperbacks from the memories I have of them from fifty years ago, when I was just a little guy. They’re real trips down nostalgia lane, and on that score alone I can’t not enjoy them.

These stories by MAD regular Don Martin haven’t dated as much as a lot of the other vintage MAD books I’ve reviewed here. There’s less cultural and political stuff being sent up and more gags. What’s surprising though is how well Martin handles long-form comic storytelling, even if his punchline style of humour still comes out in the violent final panels that have guys being flattened by steamrollers or locomotives, or struck by lightning (“KAR-RACKK . . . ZAP!”). There’s even a couple of musicals thrown into the mix, with a take-off on A Star is Born and a chaotic opera that fittingly ends up with a pile of corpses on stage. And for the highbrow readers (of which I’m sure MAD had many) there’s no question that “Beauty from the Beast” was inspired by Jonathan Swift’s “The Progress of Beauty” (1719). I’m sure I didn’t get that when I was a kid, but I remember being reminded of it when I first read the poem later.

As a final note, I was surprised to find when I went looking for images of the cover for this one online that several of the stories had been uploaded in full to YouTube. That’s a platform that truly is eating everything!

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Something is Killing the Children Volume Three

This third volume of the Something is Killing the Children series collects issues #11-15 and even though it kept on after this (and may still be going, for all I know) things are brought to a conclusion here with the adventures of rogue agent Erica Slaughter in the Wisconsin town of Archer’s Peak. All the “big-toothed scary things” are killed and while the Order of St. George (not a team of heroes, it turns out) has suffered some uncomfortable exposure, they at least manage to find a fall-guy and hush things up.

Given how this volume ends I think I’ll take a break from the series. A break that may be permanent. I haven’t liked this comic much, and all the mumbo-jumbo mythology about the monsters and the familiars that the monster-killers carry with them didn’t interest me. I’m not into the story, or the characters, or the art.

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Batman: Off-World

Usually it’s a bad sign when familiar characters go off into space. In terms of horror franchises it didn’t work for Jason, Pinhead, or the Leprechaun, with each of those movies being clear indications that a shark had been jumped. So Batman in space wasn’t an idea I was keen on. “I have no business battling alien empires,” he reflects at one point. I could not agree more.

Given all that, I thought Jason Aaron did a decent job with this this six-part series. The set-up is, admittedly, crazy. Batman gets his butt kicked by some muscle that a Gotham gangster has brought in from way out of town. Specifically, he’s a goon from the Slag Galaxy. How he got to Earth I’m not sure, but I may have missed that part. Anyway, Batman figures that the only way he can beat the goon is to actually go to the Slag Galaxy himself and train against this new competition. So he gets on board an experimental rocket ship and off he goes.

The Slag Galaxy is a brutal place that’s run by the Blakksun Mining Company. The BMC have a mercenary force of War Stormers that go around enslaving the populations of various planets, resulting in mass orphanization. This of course gets Batman’s back up since he has a soft spot for orphans, not to mention injustice generally. So he decides to take on the BMC as part of his training, which proceeds with the assistance of the requisite sexy alien (a Stormchaser named Ione with lots of tattoos), a giant war wolf, and a Punch Bot that likes to get into fights (and lose them).

It’s pretty brutal stuff, as Batman works up the corporate ladder until finally taking on the co-CEOs of the BMC, a pair of baddies called the Blakksun Twins who rule the galaxy with “lawful omnipotence.” Wrath Blakksun is a tall dominatrix warrior woman while her brother Whisper is a nerdy-looking runt who makes people’s heads explode when he says something to them. They’re actually quite a creepy couple and I was only let down by how easily Batman manages to withstand Whisper’s dirty talk. It seems all you have to be is tough enough and you can take it. And we all know Batman is the toughest guy there is. Even if, as always, his code doesn’t allow him to kill any aliens. Which makes his taking out whole armies of mercenaries a bit hard to swallow, but at this point we just have to roll with it.

Then . . . back to Earth and a rematch with the goon he fought at the start. Who this time doesn’t stand a chance. It’s a tidy ending, and things are even set up for Ione to launch as she adopts the Batman mantle back in her galaxy (her sidekick, the Punch Bot. is now Bat-Bot for good measure). I think I can live without those adventures though, at least for a while.

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Batman: Europa

We begin with Batman going toe-to-toe with Killer Croc in some Gotham alley and the Dark Knight is really feeling it, but not in a good way. “Getting’ too old for this, Batman?” KC chides. And even though Batman finally puts the big guy down for the count, he has to admit that “it was harder than usual.” Is he getting old? In need of some testosterone replacement therapy? I mean, over the course of nearly a hundred years of crime-fighting he has taken quite a beating.

Alas, things are worse than that. It seems a secret canonical villain has infected Batman with a virus that will kill him in a week. This sends Batman hopping about Europe trying to find out who’s responsible. He’s first off to Berlin, then to Prague, Paris, and finally Rome (being sure to hit all the must-see tourist monuments like the Brandenburg Gate, Notre Dame, and the Coliseum). The twist is that he finds out early on that the Joker has been infected with the same virus, so they actually have to go on this little road trip together. It’s a team-up of unlikely partners, which turns out to be as much fun as you’d expect.

I didn’t care much for the story. The whole premise seemed like the flimsiest sort of excuse for throwing Batman and the Joker together. The problem I had with it is that I just couldn’t see how it made any sense, even on the level of the way the plots of most criminal masterminds in comic books are needlessly complicated and don’t add up. And then Batman’s trick at the end to take down the bad guy struck me as ridiculous.

But the plot isn’t the point anyway. What we’re really getting here is a gallery of striking artwork from different artists for each of the travel destinations. Now if all you want is art in the standard DC or Marvel comic book style then you may be put off by it. I found the Paris section by Diego Latorre to be particularly dark and sketchy, making a lot of the action hard to figure out. It reminded me a bit of Reptilian in that regard, for better and for worse. But most of the time I was really impressed.

Despite the interesting idea of pairing Batman and the Joker as buddies I really didn’t care for the script. What sells Europa is the art though, which is well worth a look.

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