The Avengers: Four

Tight. I liked it.

Four is a retro-flavoured miniseries written by Mark Waid that has Captain America heading a new Avengers team after the OGs “decided to take some time off.” So they’re now down to four members: Cap, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver. Since the newbies are all “reformed villains” and relatively underpowered Cap has his work cut out for him whipping them into a functional unit. A point that’s underlined by the way they get their butts kicked out of the gate by the Frightful Four, with all the bad press that follows. Egged on by the media, even the public start getting into it, mocking the “Mighty Pretenders.” Things are really not off to a good start for the not-so-fab four.

Things get much worse however when they rescue a young Thai lady named Cressida from the Stranger. Cressida has the power to drain the life force from others, leaving them dried-up husks. She can either absorb that life force or transfer it to someone else, making them “better, faster, stronger.” Which sounds a bit like being a coach for the Olympics.

The Avengers basically adopt Cressida and start calling her Avenger X. But she has nefarious plans of her own, apparently being motivated by revenge. I don’t know for what. Her character isn’t filled in very much, and she even mocks the suggestion made at one point of providing an origin story. The Stranger considers her to be not a mutant, even though she says she’s had her powers since she was a kid. I think we just have to take her as a given.

She’s a formidable enemy though, both in how she schemes to set the Avengers against one another and for her (borrowed) superpowers. Indeed, she’s basically too much for this new team and at the end the OGs have to come back and lend a mighty hand. Which I thought was a bit of a cop-out. The story arc seemed to be the familiar one of the team coming together and solving their own problems. The way they’re thrown a literal lifeline here undercut all that.

Still, I loved the throwback feel to the art and the way the story held together. It’s a nice, satisfying unit, with all the different sub-adventures contributing in different ways to the main Cressida storyline. In terms of character the good guys are conflicted and the bad guys wicked in their usual bickering, arrogant way. Good and evil are complementary and evenly matched, and Waid can bring both darkness and humour to the proceedings (Wizard’s epitaph for Avenger X was a bitchy twist I wasn’t expecting!). In sum, it’s nothing wildly out of the ordinary, but it does everything a superhero comic is supposed to do, which was a treat.

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Cla$$war

In which a bunch of cynical, burnt-out, and horny superheroes, created by an ex-Nazi scientist with a thing for human experimentation, dress up in stars-and-stripes costumes and fight America’s wars. But when one of the members of the team (he’s just called “American”) develops a conscience the world’s mightiest heroes are soon fighting among themselves.

With a synopsis like that I was expecting something very much along the lines of The Boys, and that’s what Cla$$war is. But Cla$$war actually came first, running from 2002 to 2004 while The Boys was 2006-2012. And Marvel’s Civil War storyline, which also shares some similarities to what we get here, kicked off in 2006 as well. Actually, at the time Cla$$war was thought to have been influenced by DC’s The Authority, but Rob Williams says he didn’t know The Authority before he started writing and that his inspiration was more drawn from the Noam Chomsky he’d been reading.

The title, complete with dollar signs, is a bit misleading. In fact, I’m not sure why it was chosen. Nothing in the comic addresses class war in the sense of economic exploitation and the effects of entrenched social inequality. Instead, its target is American imperialism. The Enola Gay team (that’s what they’re called) are more supersoldiers than superheroes, fighting alongside the troops in foreign countries while the political rot deepens at home.

I wasn’t thrilled by the story here, not because of any political leanings (I like Chomsky too) but because the political message wasn’t new. The references here are up to date, with the president that American begins by attacking (he publicly brands the word “LIAR” on his forehead) being a stand-in for George W. Bush, and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq being referenced as earlier forays by Enola Gay. But it also felt a lot like the 1970s, with the Vietnam War and the political conspiracy thrillers of the time. And the invasion of Glenada is clearly a reference to the 1983 invasion of Grenada.

That said, I came away thinking this is a comic that should be better known. Perhaps being published by Com.x, a smaller British comic publisher, meant it didn’t get as much exposure. I thought the art by Trevor Hairsine and Travel Foreman was first-rate, and while the story was pedestrian I liked the way the different characters sparked off one another. American is a bit of a stick, but the other members of Enola Gay, while jerks, have distinct and complicated personalities. And the new superfreak the Nazi doctor whips up in his lab had real potential. I wanted to read more about all of these guys, but for whatever reason the series didn’t continue. It was initially planned to run for 12 issues but they only did six. As things stand the story breaks off, with only the character of Heavyweight now removed from the picture. Twenty years later I doubt we’ll see the series continued, at least in the way Williams might have intended. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a sequel.

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Shaft: Imitation of Life

No, this comic doesn’t t have anything to do with the 1959 Douglas Sirk melodrama of the same name. Instead, it takes its title from a long interior monologue our hero Shaft has over the question of whether art imitates life (mimesis) or life imitates art (Oscar Wilde). Doesn’t that seem a little heady for Shaft? Well, in my review of the 1971 film Shaft I did remark upon the well-stocked bookshelves in his apartment. He’s not just a complicated man but a  guy who reads!

That monologue has a point here because Shaft is looking for a missing person and his investigation takes him (as per usual) into the seedy underbelly of a rotten Big Apple, specifically a mob-run porn operation. But at the same time some indie filmmakers, financed by the same mob outfit, are making a movie about Shaft’s adventures (called The Black Dick, if you can dig it) for which Shaft has been hired as a consultant. So before long it feels like the line is being blurred between what’s real and what’s movie moonshine.

It’s a simple story, of the kind that was popular at the time (that time being the 1970s). Think of movies like Hardcore. The bit of a twist they give it is that the missing person is a young gay man rescued by another gay man who teams up with Shaft. But to be honest, I didn’t find this part that interesting. It does benefit though from keeping things simple, and Dietrich Smith’s clean artwork is an incongruous but oddly effective fit with the sleazy proceedings. With his skin-tight turtlenecks showing off an overdeveloped chest that casts a pronounced shadow in any light, Shaft himself seems more than a bit like a plastic action figure, but that works too. They could have gone with a generic look, which is what I was expecting, but I like how they went with a more cartoonish change-up. Yeah, I could dig it.

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Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Volume 2

This volume is a direct continuation of Daredevil’s beginnings as collected in the first Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil. As such, a lot of what I said about the character there still applies. To take just a few of the points I raised in my review of that book:

(1) “Effectively, Daredevil isn’t blind at all. Anything he needs to be able to do, he can do.”

To take some examples from the issues collected here: In the boat to Ka-Zar’s home of Skull Island (not that original, is it?) Daredevil can “sense vegetation . . . such as Earth has never known for millions of years! As though I’ve been transported to the dawn of time!” Now how would he know what vegetation smelled like (I assume he’s smelling it) millions of years ago? Also, he can identify people at a distance not just from their smell (as in previous issues) but from reading their emotions. How does that work? Just reading heartbeats?  And what are we to make of his “indescribably accurate hearing” that allows him to “tune in” to police short-wave radio broadcasts as he vaults above the city? There seem to be no limits to his (dis)abilities.

(2) “For the most part Daredevil is taking on B-list baddies who are nonetheless a lot of fun.”

So in this volume the “omnivorous”(?) and “omnipresent”(?) Owl is back. The Masked Marauder shows up, is defeated, and then teams up with the Gladiator, and is defeated again. Not the Strontian Gladiator, by the way, but Melvin Potter, a big guy with a chip on his shoulder who runs a superhero costume shop. So they’re a pair of B-listers. Then there’s the Ox, who is a big dumb guy (I’ll bet you never would have guessed) who gets a genius-level intelligence upgrade when a mad scientist switches bodies with him. The Plunderer (or Lord Parnival Plunder, to give him his full title) is a modern-day pirate who would have more of a Marvel afterlife because of his family connections (he’s actually the brother of Ka-Zar). Because I wasn’t as familiar with these guys I actually enjoyed them a lot more. They don’t have god-like super powers but are mostly just either really strong or really smart. And they’re all driven by a sense of bitterness at the world for not respecting them enough. I think this might have had been one of Stan Lee’s hang-ups.

(3) “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.”

The office-romance stuff with Foggy always lusting after Karen who in turn has a secret crush on Matt plays out again here. And at least Lee seems to have recognized how painful it all was. After one cutaway to the land of thought-bubbles revealing hidden desires we get this editorial comment: “See how we try to please everybody? We even presented the preceding page for the benefit of soap-opera lovers!” And in a later issue, after another such romantic interlude, we get this apology: “Many thanks, Marvelite, for staying with us during the hearts and flowers portion of our yarn!”

This self-awareness, however, only goes so far. This part of the Daredevil story is painful. It does play a bit of a role when Foggy dresses up as Daredevil in an attempt to gain Karen’s affection, but otherwise it’s pointless. Pointless and annoying. At one point “Sensation-monger Stan” even gives his “batty bullpen” a “no-prize award” for presenting seven thought balloons in one panel. Which is as awkward as it sounds.

Speaking of Foggy putting on a Daredevil costume, it’s interesting how this is a motif in several of the comics here. When the Ox goes on a rampage he dresses an unconscious Daredevil in his clothes so that the police will mistake him for the troublemaker and lock him up. And then later the Masked Marauder has his entire gang wear Daredevil costumes as a way of diverting DD from the heist that the Marauder is planning. By sheer coincidence I read this volume at the same time as I was reading Chip Zdarsky’s Daredevil comics and the idea of people dressing up as Daredevil was a significant plot point there too. I also remembered that this was something that turned up in Frank Miller’s Born Again story arc, when Kingpin got a psycho killer to wear a DD costume to kill Foggy and Karen. Were imposters something Daredevil had a special problem with?

On a final note, when a gang of thugs break into Matt Murdock’s office he tells them that he has “business with Murdock too – and I hate to take sloppy seconds!” Today the expression “sloppy seconds” basically has only one meaning, and it’s one that goes back quite a ways. Though I’m not sure what it would have meant to readers in September 1966, the date of the issue Daredevil uses it in here. Good for a laugh anyway.

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