Daredevil: Supersonic

This volume is the sequel to Chinatown. Chinatown was so called because it was set in Chinatown. I’m not sure why this one is called Supersonic. It consists of three stories and the third one has Ulysses Klaw as a giant “kinetic living audio wave” so maybe that was it.

Charles Soule is the writer in charge again, though each of the three stories has a different artist. The last is illustrated by Vanessa R. Del Rey, who I last encountered in The Empty Man, where I said her drawing style was not my thing. I didn’t think it worked any better here. Her art just puts me off.

I didn’t care for the stories much either. The first has Daredevil battling Elektra, because she’s been brainwashed into thinking she had a child that Daredevil abducted. Weird. And it doesn’t go anywhere because her brainwashing is fixed and she just leaves at the end to find out who did it to her, and why.

The second story starts off well, with Matt Murdock crashing a high-stakes poker tournament in Macau. He’s able to beat a telepath because the telepath’s ability to “see” the other players’ hands doesn’t work with Murdock because he’s blind. That said, Murdock’s strategy of just going off of other players’ cues while not knowing any of the cards he’s holding himself doesn’t strike me as a likely winner. In any event, it turns out what he’s really after is a briefcase full of valuable information that he teams up with Spider-Man to steal. Again though I felt like things ended abruptly, leaving me wondering what the point was. Daredevil mentions how everyone has lost their memory of his secret identity but doesn’t say how it happened (you’ll have to wait for an explanation of that). Then Spidey warns him about going through a “black-costume phase” (like Spider-Man did), but even though Daredevil’s uniform has changed I haven’t got the sense that Soule was changing the character much. This isn’t dark Daredevil, or even dark-er.

Finally, the third story has Klaw turning New York into a city of sonic zombies. Daredevil and Echo (who is deaf) team up to stop him. And finally there’s a coda with long-time adversary the Gladiator descending deeper into criminal psychopathy.

I didn’t like any of this as much as I liked the Chinatown storyline. Blindspot shows up briefly in the fight with Elektra before being disabled. I like how Daredevil tries to protect him, recognizing when a challenge is out of his league. As happened when fighting the Hand in Chinatown. Overall I thought there were some good ideas here that just needed more development. The emphasis on action over plot is something I’m usually OK with in a superhero comic, but in this case I thought Soule was just coming up with hooks or concepts and not turning them into stories with any legs.

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Chew Volume One: Taster’s Choice

This is the first volume in the award-winning Chew series, written by John Layman and illustrated by Rob Guillory. And you could tell right away it was going to be great.

Why? I’d start with the terrific world-building. We’re in a world sort of like our own but with a slightly off-kilter history. Sometime previous to the action described, the world has suffered through an outbreak of what authorities determine was an avian flu, though some suspect that calling it bird flu was part of a cover-up for something more nefarious. In any event, tens of millions of people died and one of the results is that chicken is now a black-market menu item while the rest of us have to make do with synthetic substitutes like Poult-free and Chickyn. In the U.S. one of the most powerful government organizations now is the F.D.A., which still stands for the Food and Drug Administration. One of their top agents, Mason Savoy, is what’s known as a cibopath: someone who can, just from tasting food, be given a vision of its entire prehistory. Example: take a bite of an apple and know what tree it came from, what pesticides were used on it, and when it was picked.

And with a bite out of a corpse, a cibopath can tell how said corpse met its end.

There aren’t many cibopaths. One day Tony Chu, also a cibopath, is enlisted by Savoy into the F.D.A. and together they go on various adventures fighting secret gangs and investigating other mysteries. Tony also falls in love with Amelia Mintz, who is a food columnist and also a saboscrivner, which means she can describe food so accurately that her readers have the actual sensation of tasting the meals she writes about. As with Tony’s cibopathic abilities, this is a kind of superpower in the Chewiverse.

It’s nutty, very gross, and lots of fun. The best thing about it though is Guillory’s art, which is a buffet of caricature figures (Savoy’s tank-like torso and spindle legs being the prime example) and bone-crushing action. I actually slowed down to enjoy the different elements in the many fight scenes, they were so good. Guillory’s art is the perfect complement to the weird world Layman conjured, and had me feeling both full at the end and looking forward to more.

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Marvel Zombies 3

Fresh meat. Meaning a new writer (Fred Van Lente) and artist (Kev Walker). And I was looking forward to a change in the storyline, since (as I’ve previously noted) I wasn’t that thrilled by Robert Kirkman’s first two volumes. I found Walker’s art nearly indistinguishable from that of Sean Phillips so didn’t register any change on that account.

And . . . Van Lente really came through. The story here is tight, not at all like Kirkman’s sprawling and confused cosmic zombie epic. If you want you could see some continuity with the previous books, but basically this is a standalone. There’s a zombie universe in play, meaning one that has been taken over by zombies. Unfortunately, since the zombies have finished eating everything they’re now looking for new worlds to colonize/devour, or whole new universes where they can spread what they’ve taken to calling the “Hunger Gospel.” Which would be the zombie virus. Same thing.

Zombie Kingpin is top dog in this zombie dimension, but he has lots of flunkies. Among them is zombie Doctor Strange, who can cast a portal to other locations in the multiverse. This, in turn, lets zombie Morbius and zombie Deadpool infiltrate a secret inter-dimensional facility that exists in our world.

To what end? Well, the zombies have a wicked plan cooked up whereby they will pretend to inoculate all of our superheroes against the zombie virus while really infecting them with the same, which will then make us easier to take over. Man, that’s what I call dirty pool. Not to mention a storyline that feeds into every anti-vaxxer’s favourite conspiracy theory.

Trying to stop them are Machine Man and Jocasta, who have to visit the zombie universe and then make it back. To be honest, if Jocasta did anything on this mission I’m not sure what it was. But Machine Man really kicks ass. He’s a one-man zombie Armageddon. But will that be enough?

As things got started I was wondering if I was going to be able to get into it. Once again, things are very dark. Dark in a way that deadens the wisecracking and attempts at humour. I get the gore, and the fact that zombies do eat people. But Van Lente continues with Kirkman’s thing for heroes being tied up and then cannibalized, which reminds me of the people kept in the basement of the house in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Here they even have a clone farm in the zombie universe to keep the hungry dead fed on vat-grown meat. And even heroes who aren’t as good to eat are also kept vaguely alive, if you can call Morbius or Vision alive, just so that they can be tortured. To be honest, I wasn’t sure why else Morbius and Vision were being kept around, except to add to the whole theatre-of-cruelty effect that’s going on.

If you can handle all that, the story itself is pretty compelling and I read the whole book in a rush. It really helps that things are more streamlined than in Kirkman’s comics, as the action is a lot easier to follow. Given how fast things move, this was a big plus. Throw in some fun stuff like zombie Captain Mexica (a Mexican Captain America preserved from an alternate timeline where the Aztec empire never fell), a bonus section of the usual parody covers (not just of famous comics but of movie posters too), and a relatively happy ending, and I ended up having a good time. In my opinion it was the best Marvel Zombies book yet, and had me finally looking forward to what’s next on the menu.

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Titans: The Lazarus Contract

If you’ve been following along you’ll remember that I’ve taken note of the presence of Deathstroke lurking in the shadows of the previous two Titans books I’ve reviewed (The Return of Wally West and Made in Manhattan). I’d started in on Titans Volume 3 when I found a reference to the team’s battle with Deathstroke in the past tense. Had I missed something?

Turns out I had. But I picked up a big pile of these comics for a dollar each from the library’s overstock sale so I had the missing piece, which is this book. It didn’t have a number because it was part of what’s known as a “crossover event” involving a bunch of different titles, in this case Titans, Teen Titans, and Deathstroke.

This led me to the next question: Was all the build-up worth it?

No.

Basically what you need to know here is that one of Deathstroke’s kids, Grant Wilson, was recruited by H.I.V.E. (ahem: the Hierarchy of International Vengeance and Extermination), who gave him a serum that turned him into the supervillain Ravager but that ultimately brought caused him to have a heart attack while fighting the Teen Titans. Deathstroke sort of blames Grant’s death on the Titans, and decides he’ll use the Flashes’ (Flash and Kid Flash’s) ability to enter into the time force to go back into the past and save his son’s life. Since everyone knows disruptions in the space-time continuum always go wrong, the Titans and Teen Titans team up to stop Deathstroke. This they manage to do and Deathstroke, more disappointed than angry, decides to “retire” by setting up a new team of hero/villains composed of his other kids.

I don’t like most time-travel stories. This one doesn’t work for all the usual reasons. I particularly didn’t care for the blather trying to explain the mechanics of time travel. You see, Deathstroke modified an extractor made by someone for Flash to keep his speed power under control. Deathstroke uses this device to store that energy in battery cells connected to his fancy new “Ikon suit” (complete with lightning bolts!) that has a “gravity sheath” that allows him to move at near-light speed and enter the “time stream.” Then, when the Titans and Teen Titans want to follow Deathstroke they mimic his combination of Kid Flash’s super-speed and the gravitational properties of his costume by joining Jericho’s gravity sheath with Flash’s speed to create a “time vortex” stabilized by Raven’s “chrono-kinesis” and Starfire’s energy, all while being tethered by Raven’s mind-meld to the rest of the team as Flash goes running into the speed force, at least until Raven’s “vast mystical powers” begin to fray and her soul-self is in danger of being trapped in the “speed force,” which is where Deathstroke has looked into the face of God and achieved a higher consciousness.

Enough already. I lost interest in all of this long before the end. It all just seemed like a bunch of sparks and noise, with too many characters involved and not much for most of them to do but stand around barking at each other. Not that I knew who a lot of these people were anyway, or cared. I do know Deathstroke and have found him an interesting character in the past, but he’s a lot less so here, especially when he starts spouting scripture (a lot of scripture) in the epilogue. I think maybe there are fans who like this kind of story but it wasn’t my thing and by the time I finished I was glad that I was done with it, and nearly done with my Titans book haul.

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The MAD Book of Mysteries

Since I’m a fan of both MAD Magazine and classic detective fiction, a book like this couldn’t really miss. I also like that it’s full of original stories and not a grab-bag of previously published material, and that all the stories have the same author and artist (Lou Silverstone and Jack Rickard, respectively).

So the line-up of crime-solving all-stars here sounds like the cast of Murder by Death. There’s Hercules Pirouette, Archer Spillane Spayed, Shtick Tracer, Allergy Queen, Charlie China, Perry Maceface, and Shamus Holmes. And there’s also a spoof on G-Men movies now and then, a quick trip to Peanuts-land with Chuck Frown, Private Eye, and a bunch of gags about what cops say vs. what they really mean. Alas, there’s no Nero Wolfe or Miss Marple, though they’re on the back cover. I would have loved seeing them.

The gags aren’t terribly funny but Silverstone knows his stuff and the way he pokes fun at the material will make you smile. He takes digs at Poirot’s long, drawn-out and confusing explanations of the crime, and has Number One Son getting back at his dad for all the mean cracks made at his expense. But the style of humour is mainly geared around running a gag-a-page of snappy comebacks. When Shamus Holmes declares that a murder victim lived near a canal Dr. Whatso says “A canal? That’s eerie, Homes.” To which Holmes replies: “No, alimentary, my dear Whatso!” Because the deceased worked at a candy company you see.

Rickard often gives the supporting characters familiar movie-star faces. James Cagney and Robert Redford, for example, as their era’s representative G-Men. I loved the look of all the stories, though MAD‘s house style of square speech bubbles and sans serif lettering seemed out of place. I don’t know why they couldn’t have played around with that more. Lettering matters.

What I took away the most from revisiting this pocketbook today though is how much the cultural landscape has changed. In the late ‘70s-early ‘80s classic detective fiction could be sent up for a mass audience, here or in the aforementioned Murder by Death, because it could be assumed everyone had some familiarity with these characters. Today I think that kind of awareness belongs to a vanishing few older readers. To be sure, golden age detectives still have their cults, but they aren’t household names anymore. And what’s more, nobody has taken their place. Caricature exploits character, and the old guard had plenty of that. But how can you caricature Inspectors Morse, Rebus, or Gamache? They’re more realistic and psychologically grounded but not as memorable, and give satirists a lot less to work with.

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Aliens: Dead Orbit

Dead Orbit is a one-man show, being written, drawn, and lettered by Canadian comic artist James Stokoe. It’s impressive when someone can handle all these roles as a comic auteur, but there are times when you think a division of labour might have helped. That’s the feeling I had here anyway. I love Stokoe’s art, which turns a space station into a giant, crumbling oatmeal cookie and sees Xenomorphs hiding in the wicker nests of wiring and machinery. I also liked the visual concept he had of turning the impregnated survivors who are “rescued” being burned to a crisp in their cryo pods so that it looks like rotting zombies are giving birth to chestbursters. That was a great touch, typical of the inventiveness found throughout this comic franchise.

The story, however, is hard to follow. I wasn’t sure of the time scheme, as most of the story is a flashback, but I don’t know how much because within the flashback there are a couple of flashforwards, though not as far forward as the story’s frame. This lost me completely the first time through because I got confused as to when Wascylewski was cocooned by the Xenomorphs. And what happened to the salvagers anyway? It seemed like that might be important, and then it wasn’t.

Things were just moving too fast. At one point there’s even a joke made about how quickly the creatures are growing, which is a poke at Alien that is often picked up on. The point remains however that everything here seems to happen in a rush and even at the end I was still wondering a bit about what was going on and in what order.

The supplemental materials describe Stukoe’s original pitch, which was a much more conventional Aliens story featuring space marines infiltrating a planet infested with Xenomorphs. But at some point he decided to go in a different direction, and this is definitely more like the first film than the second. The crew don’t even have any firearms and have to improvise with whatever tools they can find on the ship. Good luck with that!

Perhaps a little too scrambled in terms of its narrative for its own good, this is still another solid instalment in the Aliens franchise, and not to be missed by franchise fans.

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Demon Slayer Volume 2: It Was You

A mangaka is a comic artist who writes and/or illustrates manga. Demon Slayer’s mangaka goes by the name of Koyoharu Gotouge, which is a pseudonym. His self-portrait or avatar in the comics is an alligator that wears glasses.

I only mention this because Gotouge is both author and artist for Demon Slayer, which I don’t think is the norm. Even though manga is a more conventionalized artistic style than its form of storytelling. You can even buy books on “how to draw manga.” Meaning how to draw comics that look like every other manga comic. Anyway, what led me to bother pointing this out is that my response to this second volume of Demon Slayer has split into a good-bad dichotomy and Gotouge is responsible for both.

I like the story. Toshiro is still a young man on a mission to save his sister Nezuko from her infection with the demon virus. This leads him to fight a series of demons, beginning with the sad, fat demon he was in the middle of fighting in the previous volume, and a trio of demons who have been terrorizing Tokyo. This is all standard stuff, but there are some interesting twists, like the way the trio of demons keep popping in and out of a transdimensional bog. As he slices and dices his way through these bad guys Toshiro finds out the name of the chief demon, the one he has to locate if he wants to save his sister. This is some dude-ish fellow named Muzan Kibutsuji. When Toshiro finds Kibutsuji he’s disguised as a family man with a hip-cat sense of style. He sort of looks like a 1930s American gangster. Toshiro confronts him at one point, but Kibutsuji has a legion of demon obstacles to throw in his way. None of that is going to stop Toshiro’s commitment though. As he bracingly declares at one point: “I’ll follow you to the depths of hell and your neck will feel the edge of my sword!”

This all seemed good, or at least acceptable to me, and I managed (just) to keep up with all the new rules regarding demons and how to fight them that were being tossed out. I only wondered at why Toshiro had to fight the trio of demons with the box he’s using to transport Nezuko still strapped to his back. That was ridiculous.

But then there’s the art. I don’t like the way this comic is drawn. The action has already become repetitive and is confusing to boot. Unless you already know what the Seventh Form Drop Ripple Thrust-Curve is and can see that movement happening. In quite a few places the drawing seemed almost like rough preliminary sketches and I don’t know what Gotouge was doing with the eyes of some of the characters. I don’t think it was just the demons who had bug eyes, and even if it was I thought it looked bad.

Will I read any more of these? At this point I’m not sure. Looking ahead, I know that the series goes on forever. And while I liked the story well enough it’s not a comic I enjoy looking at. So I think I’ll take a bit of a break anyway before I continue.

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Druuna: Morbus Gravis I

I still have the first appearance of Druuna in North America, an issue of Heavy Metal magazine that came out in 1986. More specifically, and regrettably, it’s a copy of that issue as it hit the newsstands in Canada, with several pages removed by state censors. Canada was very tight about sexy stuff back in the day.

Heavy Metal (a magazine that I believe has stopped print publication) had a reputation for publishing adult-themed SF comics, but even so Druuna pushed the boundaries. The brainchild of Italian writer and illustrator Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, Druuna was a raven-haired bombshell pin-up living in a weird post-apocalyptic urban wasteland where people are mutating into tentacle monsters at the hands of a disease called Evil. It’s a dystopian world where everyone, even the mutants, is driven by sexual lust. Which is a fate of affairs that Druuna is both a victim of and that she exploits as she tries to save herself and her lover Shastar (who is now far gone with the disease).

In terms not only of the plot but the world-building the results are hard to keep straight. From Wikipedia: “During the more than thirty years of publication of Druuna’s adventures in Morbus Gravis, the plot has evolved through several stages, differentiated with numerous jumps in the storyline, with some attendant inconsistencies.” That’s putting it mildly. I was never sure what exactly what was going on, and I don’t think Sepieri was either. That said, I always thought there was more to it than just a futuristic setting for a string of hardcore sex scenes, many of which involved threatened or actual rape. There’s a dream (or nightmare) logic to the proceedings, and in the blurring of technology, sex, and body horror I think Serpieri saw a ways into our future. Druuna could be thought of as a virtual reality porn program that has gone viral in the worst way, blurring the line between love, lust, and sex addiction in ways that have come to seem more and more relevant. Druuna is both the ultimate object of sexual desire and someone who is turned on by that objectification, a male fantasy but also a transcendent figure who reigns over her fallen world of mechanical desires.

This is the ‘80s epic of SF T&A, and right from the start, with Druuna lolling in bed for three pages like a post-apocalyptic odalisque, you know where you are in terms of genre if not in the cosmos or space-time continuum. And forty years later it still works. It’s a comic that’s stuck with me, like being haunted by a sexy ghost. And I’m not going to complain about that.

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Old Man Logan 3: The Last Ronin

Ronin because we’re in Japan. Why? Because Logan/Wolverine is hunting down Lady Deathstrike, who he tore apart at the end of the previous volume, Bordertown. This is apparently “to settle the score for what she and the Reavers did in Killhorn Falls.” So why didn’t he kill her at the end of that book? I can’t say.

The story felt to me like it was falling apart. The first book set up the idea of a Logan from the future coming back to prevent the supervillain uprising, but then that idea was sort of shot down because how can you prevent anything in the multiverse, where all things are not only always possible but ever-occurring? So then Logan went north to a Canadian mining town and fought Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers. And this book kicks off with him having tracked Lady Deathstrike to Japan, in order to finish her off. I didn’t feel like there was any through narrative here but just Logan going from place to place and fighting different bad guys.

Well, as things turn out Lady D. was just being used as bait to lure Logan into a trap set by the Silent Order and their superpowered mutant level boss the Silent Monk (who is actually quite loquacious). They have a big fight and . . . Logan is on the road again. But perhaps all roads lead back to home.

You’ll be able to tell from this quick synopsis that I’m not a big fan of Jeff Lemire’s work on the story here. I think there is a larger narrative, but it’s hard to keep in focus and in the meantime these side alleys aren’t very interesting and just feel like they’re not going anywhere. On the plus side, however, Andrea Sorrentino’s art really does a bang-up job of carrying the load. I love the way he builds pages and images around text and sound effects that become important design elements, like the wallpaper of BRAT-AT-AT-AT machine-gun fire, the explosive THOOOM!s, the SNIKTs of Logan’s claws extending, and the FWIP labels that come with individual arrows sticking into him. Our hero really takes a shit-kicking in these comics, and you don’t just see it, you hear it. Which, in turn, helps you feel it, in a good way. One complaint I’d register though is Sorrentino’s bizarre way of rendering a muscular mid-section. Both Logan and Sohei have six-packs that go up almost to their necks, and their abs look like giant tumors. He does all his shirtless male heroes like this, and it looks sick.

In short, a visually brilliant and well-designed comic that brings the action but I really didn’t care too much about where the story might be going, despite the time spent trying to build up Logan’s relationship with Maureen and maybe starting a family. I guess I should give points for at least trying to do something in this direction, but given the shattered narrative it just wasn’t working for me. Maybe you have to be more up than I am on all the different timelines. Also there’s no bonus comic included with this volume so that was a bit of a letdown too.

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Titans Vol. 2: Made in Manhattan

The Return of Wally West left off with Deathstroke wondering who Wally West was, but we don’t pick up on that here for some reason. There’s just another quick cutaway to Deathstroke spying on the gang’s flashy new headquarters, the Titans Tower, which rises out of the East (or Hudson?) River across from the Manhattan skyline. I don’t know how they got a building permit for that, but surprisingly they do acknowledge that this might have been problematic.

So . . . instead of Deathstroke what we have here is the return of Bumblebee, in a storyline that has an evil company called Meta, run by the Fearsome Five, offering to take superheroes’ powers away (they’re a curse as well as a blessing, you see) and then selling them on the black market. This was five years before Facebook turned into Meta, which for all anyone knows is up to something even worse. I don’t know if there was any connection there.

I wasn’t too happy that the Titans, despite ditching the “Teen” prefix, are in fact still a bunch of undergrads. Titans Tower is just the typical superhero dormitory, with a gym and a cafeteria and individual bedrooms with posters of rock stars on the walls. They spend a lot of time eating pizza and drinking pop. There’s boyfriend-girlfriend nonsense going on with Donna and Roy (Arsenal), and Wally and Linda. They get mad at each other, kiss and make-up, etc. I found this juvenile, but that shouldn’t be surprising. I think they were still going for an adolescent demographic.

It’s a decent comic. There are two storylines. The first is the one where they take on the Fearsome Five. In the second, which was a standalone that ran in Titans Annual #1, the four junior Titans are transported to a very dark site where they meet up with their four seniors. So there’s Wally West Flash and Barry Allen Flash, Nightwing and Batman, Tempest and Aquaman, and Donna Troy and Wonder Woman. It’s unclear who was behind the abduction, but the eight heroes come together and smash their way free of the prison they’re in, which turns out to have been in Alaska.

Both stories end abruptly. The Fearsome Five are sent packing, leaving the Titans to speculate as to who was fronting them. And the ghoulish guy who was running the extraordinary rendition scheme in Alaska disappears through a dimensional doorway, where he meets the sinister force who was pulling his strings. But that’s all we get, as we never see who was behind it all.

And as I say, Deathstroke is still waiting in the wings. I think it’s time for him to start getting more involved.

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