Scooby Apocalypse Volume 2

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

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

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

And then things end with another cliff-hanger.

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

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The Immortal Hulk 6: We Believe in Bruce Banner

Quite a break from The Immortal Hulk: Breaker of Worlds volume. We left off that book with Cosmic Hulk smashing a planet and the sudden appearance of the Leader. There’s nothing like that going on here and the Leader doesn’t show up at all. Instead we have a political Hulk comic, with Bruce Banner (“an angry middle-class white guy talking about revolution”) on a crusade against corporate “crisis” capitalism. This means taking on the Roxxon Corporation and its CEO: a nine-foot-tall man-bull called (fittingly enough) the Minotaur.

Roxxon is the epitome of all kinds of capitalism gone mad, and Dario Agger/Minotaur is a great villain. He likes to drink espresso out of little china cups that he shatters. Because he’s a giant man-bull and they have a thing for breaking china. He also has a habit of crushing the heads of his underlings when they say anything that upsets him.
So when the Hulk destroys a Roxxon server farm, taking signature platforms like YouRoxx, Roxxface, and Yambler offline, the Minotaur decides to fight back by bringing in some recruits from Monster Island to have a showdown with the Hulk in Phoenix. With the level bad guy being Xemnu the Living Titan.

The cover to this collection is actually very misleading, as Xemnu only appears on the final page and we never see the Hulk and Xemnu fighting. I guess that’s coming up next issue. Unless they do another swerve like at the end of Breaker of Worlds and leave us hanging.

Overall I quite liked this volume of the Immortal Hulk saga. It stays in the here and now, without whisking us through the green door or out into deep space and the even deeper future. The main storyline was also pretty interesting, and I like the idea of a progressive Hulk. Though maybe he’s not really progressive since he basically wants to smash the world. The battle in Phoenix was a waste though, and the kaiju that the Hulk fights are a bore. And what struck me is that once again we have the business of characters being eaten. I’m starting to think Al Ewing has a thing for this.

In any event, things are looking good so . . . on we go!

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Lady Killer Volume 2

Volume 2 of Lady Killer is very much more of the same as Volume 1, but that’s a good thing in my book. Housewife/contract killer Josie Schuller is back trying to juggle a stereotypical 1950s home life (husband, two beautiful little girls, hosting Tupperware parties) with being a murderess for hire. Only now, having broken up with the Organization, she’s freelancing. But this only leads to more stress, and it seems likely that she’ll be taking up with a new syndicate until the re-emergence of an old partner-in-crime, a fellow who turns out to be a Marcel Petiot figure who is very hard to get rid of. I’d say he has a crush on Josie, but it’s not that kinky a comic. Meanwhile, Josie’s cranky mother-in-law is revealed to know even more about Josie than she learned in Seattle.

As with the first book, it’s not an overly complicated plot. It’s more the stunning vintage-style art that makes the sale. I love the way Joëlle Jones recreates this world, as though clipping it out of the pages of fashion and lifestyle magazines of the period, with great use of fabric as a design element. And while Josie’s obviously a sort of feminist icon taking a bloody revenge on various chauvinist types this is an angle that isn’t overly played up.

One nagging question I had right from the opening slaughter had to do with the running gag about how good Josie is at cleaning up the mess she makes when she bludgeons her victims to death with a hammer or whatever likely weapon is at hand. I get the joke (Tupperware really is handy!), but surely the smarter thing to do would be to not make such a mess in the first place. A professional with her amount of experience should have figured that out by now.

Well it’s a great comic and a lot of fun, even if it feels like it’s over too soon. The end would seem to hold out the hope for more to come, but seeing as these comics were first published in 2017 and nothing has happened yet on that front I suspect there may not be a sequel. Then again, maybe the release of a movie based on Josie’s character will create demand for more. It certainly seems as though the story has room to grow.

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All-New X-Men: Out of Their Depth

The All-New (a.k.a. “original” or “classic”) X-Men continue trying to find their way in twenty-first century America, encountering the next generation of other classic characters (Lady Mastermind, Rachel Grey/Summers) as well as some now grizzled vets (Wolverine and Sabretooth still thrashing it out like the comic-book Monsters of Rock they are).

To be honest, I started to feel the storyline was getting tired here though. The plot Mystique was hatching with her gang is revealed to be not all that interesting, or even worth bothering with. Madame Hydra is both surprised and unimpressed by it. The subsequent battle is full of lots of mind games, and Wolverine’s classic “Now it’s my turn” fell flat. As for the rest of it, there was too much talk, even though the story does call for a lot of it as all the characters have to come to grips with who they turned into in the new timeline. The Avengers as the senior superhero body were unwelcome cameos. And like so much Marvel product at this time you just want to throw your hands up at the amount of backstory and other stuff you’re supposed to be totally up to speed on to fully make sense of it. I mean, I suppose every long-time X-Men fan has a basic understanding of the Dark Phoenix storyline from way back when I was a teen, but you also have to know about Cyclops killing Charles Xavier in the Avengers vs. X-Men storyline and other stuff that’s happened since. There are so many timelines, alternate worlds, and threads of the multiverse going on with Marvel now that it feels like it’s sinking under its own weight a lot of the time. I think this series does a great job dealing with the problem, but it’s still a problem.

Brian Michael Bendis handles all this well, but it’s not a job I’d wish on anyone. There are just too many balls in the air, too many characters, and too much schmaltzy drama. I mentioned in my notes on Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men Volume 1 how the horny teen X-Men were all hot for Jean Grey and that even Charles Xavier was feeling thirsty. In the last comic included here we have Hank McCoy (the Beast) finally getting some romance action with her. I guess when you look like a comic-book superheroine (Covergirl looks, Playboy body in sexy outfits) you just have to learn to deal with all the attention, but you’d think she’d be starting to feel tired of having every guy she meets falling in love with her, in every different timeline.

The art by Stuart Immonen is solid in the Marvel house style at this time. David Lafuente does All-New X-Men #15 and he provides a nice change-up with a Manga-flavoured look (pointy noses, spikes of hair) that fits with the teenage vibe to that issue. I especially liked Jean in fuzzy pink slippers bumping into her daughter in the residence building. That was a great moment, nicely presented without any dialogue. In any event, at this point they were heading into crossover territory so things were about to get even messier with even more timelines coming into play. Which is not really what I was hoping for.

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