Archie vs. Predator

Archie vs. Predator isn’t part of the Archie Horror imprint that launched in 2013 with the zombies-in-Riverdale title Afterlife with Archie, but is instead a mash-up from Dark Horse Comics that was no doubt inspired by the success of Afterlife but also by a much earlier crossover, Archie Meets the Punisher (1994). And indeed it’s closer in spirit to the latter in that it’s illustrated in the classic Archie style (very unlike the Archie Horror comics where even Archie himself is unrecognizable) and keeps something of the sweetness and innocence of the Archie-verse going in a story filled with splatter and just the slightest suggestion of an adult gaze (as both Betty and Veronica provocatively strip down to their underwear at different points). It’s a comic that wants to have its cake and eat it, and for the most part it works. When Betty says to the Predator “You are one ugly melon farmer,” it’s a good line.

But while enjoyable, I thought the writing was quite a letdown from the Archie Horror comics I’ve read. There are no funny jokes and the plot is incredibly slapdash, even by Archie standards. Why whisk the gang down to the Caribbean for a holiday? Why wouldn’t the Predator just land in Riverdale? Why introduce all the nonsense about the curse of the local Jaguar Goddess into a Predator story? Did it even mean anything? Is the teenage Predator in love with Betty and Veronica? Does that add anything? The skips in the narrative made the breaks between the individual issues invisible, and led me on at least two occasions to try to pull pages apart because I was sure something had gone missing. As a way of shuttling things along, Mr. Lodge’s medi-lab serves as a really awkward plot device. I mean, it gets us Super-Archie and the gag ending, but you’d think they would have come up with something a little more grounded. A lot of what goes on here doesn’t feel like it belongs in either the Archie or the Predator universe.

There are some parts that did share a strange continuity with the Archie Horror titles. Like the pre-eminence of Jughead as the ultimate victim (he’d been the first human zombie in Afterlife, and the werewolf in Jughead: The Hunger). Here he gets his severed head and spinal column stuffed in a snack machine. Meanwhile, Dilton Doiley has gained in importance from the classic Archie days as Reggie Mantle has all but disappeared. There’s one great panel that has Reggie taking a selfie of himself blasting away at the Predator with a machine gun, but I think he’s blown up just after this. And the fact that I have to say I think he gets blown up is telling, because I wasn’t sure and anyway that’s it for him. He doesn’t get a signature execution scene or anything. He just disappears. I find this strange because Reggie was one of the four main characters in the comic, being the dark foil to Archie, so that the two balanced out the equally light/dark competition between frenemies Betty and Veronica. He was a more interesting character than Jughead, and more worthy of receiving a gory comeuppance, but in the alt-Archie comics he’s largely forgotten.

Overall then, Archie vs. Predator is a lot of fun but not as good as I was expecting. I really liked seeing the Predator drawn in the Archie style, along with the assorted mayhem, but as I’ve pointed out the writing doesn’t deliver. It’s just not as clever a comic as it could and should have been.

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Talent

I give Talent high marks for its premise. It’s brilliant. A bomb takes out a passenger jet and there is one survivor, Nicholas Dane, who has somehow taken on the memories and talents (there’s your title) of everyone else who was on the plane. This serves him in good stead when the ruthless gang that bombed the jet come hunting after him, because now he instead of just being a lowly English professor (and that’s really low!) he is a trained killer, among other things.

The potential such an idea has is immeasurable. But it remains potential. A great premise is not a great story, it’s just the start. And the story here is lousy. The criminal enterprise that’s hunting Dane is a clichéd conspiracy of hooded figures known as the Cardinals. I had no idea who they were or what they were up to. After four issues the series abruptly ended in 2006 and hasn’t been continued.

Nor do I have any idea of how Dane got his powers. A mysterious female figure appears to him on occasion to try to explain what’s going on, but things remain pretty . . . vague. Basically he has become an agent of something called “the balance.” What is the balance? “It is what it is. The balance of all things, light and dark – yin and yang – good and evil, if the concepts do not offend you. The balance is the power that keeps the two opposing forces in check.”

Wow. “It is what it is.” I do not think they put a lot of time into figuring this balance thing out.

What disappointed me the most about Talent is that the concept could have been taken in so many interesting directions. There’s so much talent out there! Nearly everyone you meet has a talent for doing something. I could imagine storylines where Dane is tapping into the talents of an electrician or a cab driver or a dental hygienist. But they don’t do anything like that. The only talents sampled are those of a hired killer, a champion boxer, and a woman who makes origami. Now the first two are very useful in terms of their particular set of skills, but also a bit dull. There’s nothing interesting about how their talents are put to use. Dane just beats people up and shoots them.

So in the end I can’t say I liked this very much. Paul Azaceta’s art is very chunky, turning people into shapes and thick lines, so you don’t get to read any emotion on the faces. Indeed, it can be hard telling some of the characters apart. And the story is just a mess. Is Dane only staying alive, or is he on a mission of vengeance? Or is something else going on? I guess at some point they had plans for taking this further but for whatever reason that didn’t happen so what we’re left with is something that doesn’t add up and doesn’t come to any sort of a conclusion.  But apparently it’s in development as a cable series, and they still might be able to make something good out of it. I hope they do, because as I say the idea here is great.

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1984

One of the points I sometimes make about film and comic adaptations of classic novels is whether they provide a decent crib for students who don’t want to bother reading the book they’re based on. Because let’s face it, that’s what students do. Most of the time these “classics illustrated” are no substitute at all for the original works, but Fido Nesti’s adaptation of George Orwell’s famous dystopian text is an exception.

I’m not saying people can or should pass on Orwell and just read this comic version. I’d never recommend that for any book. But what Nesti gives us here is a remarkably thorough adaptation, including not only the complete text of Goldstein’s book but also “The Principles of Newspeak” appendix. You’re going to do a lot of reading here. Of course you’re not getting the full book, but there are times when you may feel like you are.

And that’s not to put down Nesti’s art. I really like what he’s done here. The generally drab colouring and layouts only make the imaginative moments (like the surveillance technology becoming a snaky network of wires, tubes, and monitors) stand out more. Plus the world of Airstrip One is supposed to be drab, with Winston and Julia just a couple of Claymation potato people with holes for eyes, fishy lips, and lumpy overalls. The lead comes straight from Orwell: “It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.” So if eyes are the windows to the soul it makes sense that O’Brien doesn’t seem to have any, as they’re either hidden behind his glasses or are just dots (in the case of the former there may be a nod here to Orwell’s description of speakers of propaganda in “Politics and the English Language” whose spectacles become “blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them”). The only time O’Brien seems to come to life is when he’s really laying it on Winston. But soul by this point has leached out of everyone anyway.

I think of a good graphic novel adaptation as being like a band covering a classic song. The artist needs to bring something fresh to the table, some display of talent, imagination, and personality that does justice to the original while adding to it and making it new. I think Nesti does that here and his 1984 is more than a cut above the usual run of these things. Not a substitute for reading Orwell, but a worthy complement to his timeless prophecy.

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Green Lantern Corps Volume 1: Fearsome

I’ve mentioned somewhere before about how inflation is built into superhero comics. The good guys have to take on increasingly powerful bad guys, or more of them. Then the good guys have to multiply so that you get more of them too, either by being paired with regular sidekicks or assembled into teams of heroes.

For the Green Lantern this translated into series like the Green Lanterns (plural) for the DC Universe Rebirth (I made some notes on Rage Planet here), and the Green Lantern Corps for the New 52. I don’t follow these things closely enough, so I wasn’t sure which came first. On checking into it, the New 52 was launched in 2011 and Rebirth in 2016. So now I know.

In any event, the GL Corps weren’t new in 2011 since they’d been around since near the beginning (I even remembered them from when I was a kid), but having armies of “Lanterns” (as they’re called) in every issue felt to me like just part of the same “more is more” mentality. And what makes it worse in the case of the Lanterns multiplying is that they’re all basically the same. They’re different species united from all the far corners of the universe, but their super powers are all just whatever “constructs” they generate from their rings. So having two of them, or 7,000, just feels redundant if not overkill.

Well, on to this iteration of the Corps and its ceaseless battle against evil in all its forms.

Things kick off here on a very dark note indeed. Some evil force attacks a Lantern Corps “sector house” and quickly disposes of the two Lanterns stationed there, decapitating the one and slicing the other in two. This sets off an alarm back at Lantern HQ (on the planet Oa), and a team of Lanterns, headed by Earth representatives Guy Gardner and John Stewart (not of The Daily Show), is sent out to investigate. They soon discover another major crime against the universe: All the water has been sucked off of a planet inhabited by a race of friendly-looking beaver creatures, leaving behind a dry sea-bed of corpses. Then, just to send a further message, the resident Lantern guardians of the blue beaver planet have been left impaled on stakes.

To be honest, after reading the first couple of issues of this one I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep going. It just seemed grim. I’m no prude when it comes to splatter, but there was an incongruous cruelty to the proceedings here, with various scenes of torture thrown into the mix that I really didn’t care for. And nobody rises above it. I didn’t even like Guy and John very much, and thought the only way they were being made bearable was because of how bad the bad guys were.

As for those bad guys . . . they weren’t working for me at all. They go by the name of the Keepers because of the role they had watching over the Great Green Lantern Power Supply (a.k.a. the Central Power Battery), before the Lanterns decided to up sticks and move, leaving the Keepers to rot on their miserable home planet. So they had a legitimate grudge, but I didn’t really understand all the politics. As for the Keepers themselves, they’re just the usual army of mooks, made to look like zombies. They have incredible will power and an imperviousness to the constructs of the Lanterns, so they can just sort of overwhelm the Lanterns until the green guys power up with some old-school weaponry. Even so, they’re looking likely to take over until Guy hits upon the expedient of dropping a fear bomb on them that turns them into a bunch of crybabies who are then sentenced to dig graves for all their victims on the blue beaver planet.

I didn’t care for this at all. It’s dark but not very smart and even by the end I hadn’t managed to keep any of the Corps members’ names straight. But I picked up almost the whole series of these when the library got rid of them in an overstock shelf-clearing, so I’ll read a few more anyway and see if things get better.

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The Immortal Hulk Volume 3: Hulk in Hell

This series is yanking me up and pulling me down. I thought the first volume (issues #1-5) lacking, but the second (issues #6-10) very good. Expectations raised, I was ready to enjoy Hulk in Hell, which kicks off with skinny Hulk and various tag-alongs having passed through the sadly unerotic Green Door and winding up in some sub-dimension of evil. But I was in for a disappointment.

Writer Al Ewing feels like he’s channeling Alan Moore (bad Alan Moore) with a sporadically literary pastiche of psycho-mythology. Thus the explanation for what’s going on here: “Gamma radiation is science. It’s measurable, predictable, it has rules . . . until it doesn’t. Until it makes Hulks and Sasquatches and Leaders. Metaphor people. Until it’s magic. When the first gamma bomb went off, it unleashed forces beyond our control. Unified forces. It opened a door, deep down into the pit of reality. Into the lowest hell. And any high concentration of gamma – that’s a door too. Including gamma people.”

What does all this add up to? Just another example of the old trope of a portal to another dimension that our heroes have to close in order to save the world from an evil invasion. Except that the Hulk himself is a door. So “What will the Hulk be? The accuser or the adversary? Khamael or Satan? Is he of Geburah or of Galachab?” Etc. The Hulk’s abusive father again puts in an unwelcome appearance, which is an angle I care for less and less. And the way things are going it looks as though immortality is a side-effect of all the gamma energy flowing everywhere, as various characters – Crusher Creel (Absorbing Man), Thunderbolt Ross, Doc Samson, Betty Banner, Rick Jones – start climbing out of their graves. Throw in the usual shadowy government agencies who are up to no good, epigraphs drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Camus, and I thought it all a lot too much. There’s even a “Devil Hulk” which is the big green guy’s id, and a Moore-ish master plot about the Hulk (the basic model) wanting to destroy humanity in order to save it.

Still, I can’t help thinking there’s something here worth sticking with. So I’ll see what volume 4 has to offer anyway.

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Apocalypse Nerd

“Apocalypse” is a word that has undergone a bit of a transformation in the modern age. In terms of Biblical literature it refers to a genre of spiritual writing characterized by a revelation (what the word means in Greek) of the end times, typically accompanied with commentary provided by a celestial interpreter or guide. What the end times usually involve is a final battle between the forces of good and evil, but in the end evil is defeated and both sides receive cosmic justice.

In this regard the apocalypse is actually optimistic in tone, with the world being made new and the kingdom of heaven being realized. It’s prophetic literature, but like most prophecy (a word whose meaning has also changed) it’s not meant so much as a prediction of the future but as a description of what is happening in the world right now, and specifically the persecution of the godly at the hands of the wicked. Within the Bible as we have it the chief examples of apocalypse are the Books of Daniel and Revelation, but there were plenty of other apocalypses being written in the ancient world and they all fit the same general pattern.

Today, when we say “apocalypse” we mean something a lot simpler and darker. What the word refers to is a catastrophic end-of-the-world scenario. Earth being hit by an asteroid, for example. Or civilization collapsing due to climate change. Or an outbreak of plague. Or people turning into flesh-eating zombies. Apocalypse Now begins with The Doors singing about “The End,” meaning the end of “everything that stands” in a bath of napalm. In Marvel comic books Apocalypse is a big, bad guy who wants to kill off most of the human race. You get the picture. There’s no battle between good and evil but just a brutal struggle for survival. And there’s no vision of a New Jerusalem but only a charred wasteland where whoever’s left behind might be able to start over.

I get it. The world is too much with us. I think a lot of us feel the need to press some kind of a reset button on civilization. There are many issues facing us that now seem intractable, and some kind of shift of gears into reverse, if not outright collapse, seems inevitable. That doesn’t mean we’re all building bunkers in our backyards or pimping out our basements in survivalist décor, but it does go some way to explaining current interest in the genre.

I don’t know why I just wrote all that, but it seemed as good a way as any to introduce Peter Bagge’s Apocalypse Nerd. The apocalypse in the title here is actually a bit retro – not going all the way back to Biblical days, but to the fear of nuclear Armageddon that was big in the 1980s. Though things have changed a bit. What we get here isn’t global thermonuclear destruction but a nuke launched from North Korea taking out Seattle. A pair of buddies who live in Seattle are camping in the Cascades at the time and soon find out that they can’t go home. This leaves them not so much wandering in a wasteland as semi-roughing it in the bush. They survive by hunting deer, foraging for berries in the woods, and raiding cottages for preserves and packaged foods.

The story itself doesn’t amount to much. It’s episodic and doesn’t build to any kind of climax. Indeed, in the final panel we’re left with the suggestion that it’s all been a wild goose chase. But despite this I felt swept along by the sort of urgency that’s expressed in the sweating, buggy faces of Bagge’s rubber-limbed figures, who always seem on the edge, or over the edge, of a total breakdown. Though it’s not a short book, Apocalypse Nerd is a very fast read. It doesn’t have a message beyond human beings going back to nature reverting to being cavemen, but that was enough for me to enjoy it.

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1872

Over the years there have been lots of entertainment columns written on the subject of promotional blurbs, to the point where you have to wonder what the point of them still is. In our time the pull quote of critical praise has become such debased coin that they’re widely recognized as not only worthless but laughable. Even a sticker announcing that a book has won some big literary prize is meaningless. Who cares what the last book was that won the National Book Award or Man Booker Prize? What does it matter that a book was named one of the New York Times’ Best Books of the Year? I guess it helps move a few copies, and as far as advertising is concerned it’s about all that publishers can do, but that’s it.

You can scrape the bottom of a deep barrel though in trawling for pull quotes. To the point where the blurbs I find on most new DVDs are usually from sources I’ve never heard of. The ratings from Rotten Tomatoes probably mean more, which isn’t saying much. I don’t even know if these are real people writing the “reviews” that quotes are drawn from now, as I think it’s something an AI could probably do more effectively, and better. A point that the team promoting Megalopolis apparently took to heart.

I say this because the cover of 1872 has “A rootin’ tootin’ good time” appearing on it, a bit of ad writing that comes courtesy of IGN.com, which as far as I can tell is just a blurb farm now. Then on the back cover we get “I’m not a fan of Westerns, but this comic book may have just changed my opinion of them,” which is attributed to ComicWow.com, a site that was offline when I went to find out if the blurb had actually come from a review and who might have written it.

Anyway, this is all beside the point. It’s just sort of a pet peeve of mind I thought I’d mention. I mean, there’s a really misleading bit of information scratched onto the Boot Hill tombstone on the cover too, but I won’t get after them for that.

I’m not even going to try to put 1872 into its context within the Marvel Secret Wars/Battleworld multiverse because that’s about as deep a rabbit hole as you can head down. Suffice it to say that we’re in the Old (and Wild) West, specifically the company town of Timely, which is populated by various Marvel superheroes and villains in period dress. Steve Rogers is the sheriff, Tony Stark is the town drunk, Bruce Banner is an apothecary, Natasha Romanov is the widow of former sheriff Bucky Barnes. Among the bad guys is Kingpin as the mayor and Wilson Fisk with his gang of hired guns: Bullseye, Grizzly, Electra, and Doctor Octopus.

The centre of the story though is Red Wolf, a Native American out to blow up the Roxxon Corporation’s dam. Red Wolf isn’t a very well-known Marvel hero, so also included in this collected edition of the 1872 series is his origin story from way back in Avengers #80 (1970, and not 1963 as is stated on the back cover), as well as a later appearance in Marvel Comics Presents #170.

I did like the story here. It’s straightforward while at the same time being clever in how it adapts characters we’re familiar with to their new surroundings. I loved Doc Ock’s multiple-gun contraption, and the appearance of Vision in one of those fortune-telling booths. The storyline follows a standard Western formula, but it’s punched up with extra violence that has a lot of the characters being killed. Steve Rogers is even thrown into a hog pen, where he gets eaten! That was a real shocker.

Not an epic Western maybe, but a great B-film that hits all its marks and has a genuinely fresh spin on the action by putting the old characters in some new costumes. Good stuff! And if anyone wants they can blurb that.

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Thor: First Thunder

I’ll start off by saying that Thor has never been a favourite superhero of mine. Being a god and all I find him pretty dull and very full of himself. I also really don’t like the way Marvel renders his speech here and in other contemporary Thor titles. The Asgard lettering looks too flowery and it’s not at all necessary.

Since I’m on a negative roll here I’ll also say I’ve given up on all the reboots and multiverses these characters now exist in. For what it’s worth, this is basically an origin story, showing how Dr. Donald Blake came to bond with the spirit of Thor, and their subsequent rocky relationship. As such it sticks pretty close to the canonical Thor backstory, at least as I understand it. But again I question the necessity.

That said, it looks great. Tan Eng Huat’s artwork hits all the right action notes, and while the plotting here was nothing special (Radioactive Man just sort of pops up before being tossed away in a whirlwind) I thought Bryan J. L. Glass made something out of the whole Christian parallel, with Odin (God the Father) sending Thor to Earth (or Midgard) and giving him a human form where he can atone for his sins if not for humanity’s. Some of the big fights were also well imagined, from the statuary of New York (the lions in front of the Public Library, the bull of Wall Street) coming to life to the Fantastic Four being defeated in what I thought was a dark and gruesome style. I expect a bit more out of Loki, who’s once again presented as Marvel’s Joker, down to his inverted pyramid face, fancy suit, and full pages of HAHAHAHAHAHA!s. But then Loki has never been a big favourite of mine either. He keeps having these great plans for taking over the world and ends up getting spanked like the naughty boy I guess he basically is.

So I didn’t go in expecting much but I was really happy with what they did with it. Given the foundation that’s laid, I’d even look for more.

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The Empty Man: Manifestation

Manifestation is the third and final (so far) volume in Cullen Bunn’s Empty Man series, with Jesús Hervás again providing the raw and scratchy artwork and questions still flying every which way as to what’s going on.

We begin with a nod to Kubrick’s 2001 and a caveman finding a pillar or monolith of blood and bone. Where are we? When are we? I suppose this is the dawn of man, and more particularly the dawn of human consciousness, a point at which the Empty Man came into existence. Or so, I think, Agent Langford explains when he shows up back in our dimension, carrying shotguns and with cancerous tumors spilling out of his guts.

Any idea of the meaning of all this is going to have to be found in Langford’s account of his trip to the Empty Man’s world, but I found this just as mystifying as the rest of the story. My own interpretation is that the virus is the physical expression of malignant narcissism, with the Empty Man looking to create peace and unity among all the peoples of the world but only on his/its own terms. Its need to project itself by way of various media platforms is sort of like the amplifier effect of social media. The way people worship it as a god reflects our own cults of celebrity.

Well, that’s a stretch but it’s my story and I’m sticking to it. As I say, it’s left pretty vague. We can’t even be sure if this is the end of the story, as we leave things with the Kerry family (who are relegated to the role of luggage in this volume) locked and loaded, ready to go after the cult in a cosmic horror “holy war.” The apocalypse beckons. But as for what has happened to Jensen, again I have no idea. Apotheosis? And the creepy kids? Are they better now? I guess we’re supposed to stay tuned.

I don’t know how much of the mystery here was deliberate and how much was Bunn just not being sure what it was he was trying to say. But I’m inclined to think it was more the latter, as looking back on the series as a whole it really is a mess. There are some interesting ideas raised, I think, but they’re covered in a whole lot of psycho-spiritual stuff that doesn’t gel. Being left to guess what the point of it was after three books was disappointing.

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Simpsons Comics Unchained

I first read Matt Groening when I was in university in the late 1980s and his strip “Life in Hell” was appearing in one of the alt-entertainment weeklies. It was the only thing worth reading in that rag. Everyone thought it was really funny. It was just after this, however, that The Simpsons took off and Groening became mainstream, the name behind a franchise.

I don’t begrudge him any of his success, as the TV show The Simpsons, at least in the early days, was really very funny. I haven’t seen it in twenty years, but I hope it’s still going strong. And the comics are good too. The question I had reading Unchained is whether Groening himself has anything much to do with them. And the reason I ask is because his name is on every credits page, even though he’s always given a joke title like “Reformed Nerd,” “Cue Card Boy,” or “Lard Lad’s Best Customer.” I had to wonder if there was some legal reason for that. Because he wasn’t writing or drawing or colouring, I think all he’d normally get a credit for is as publisher, or for “characters created by” (just as every Batman comic even today has to credit Bob Kane for creating Batman). So I just don’t know.

In any event, this is a selection of stories taken from the pages of The Simpsons comic, specifically issues #36-#42. There’s not much in the way of connective tissue, though many of the stories deal with members of the family getting in trouble with the law. So that fits with the jailbreak theme of the cover. Overall it’s a typical Simpsons effort, with a gag in nearly every panel, and sometimes several, and with even more hidden in with the fine print (which in one instance I honestly couldn’t read without a magnifying glass because I guess I’m getting too old for this stuff). Some pieces land better than others. I thought the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory spoof got away from them and the Jabberwocky send-up didn’t work. The story where Homer and the Comic Book Guy go to court was one of the better ones, in part because comic nerd-dom has always been close to the heart of the franchise.

I don’t think the line-up here is as good as that found in the Colossal Compendiums or the Treehouse of Horrors comics. I felt these stories were more like B-sides than the best of the best. But it was enjoyable enough while it lasted.

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