Conclusion of a stellar (lunar?) run: Review of Moon Knight (2016) #10-14
Posted: December 17, 2017 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, Greg Smallwood, Jeff Lemire, Jordie Bellaire, Marvel, Moon Knight, superheroes, US 2 CommentsThanks to Marvel’s ‘Legacy’ reboot, a new Moon Knight series with a new creative team has started recently (more on that in a later blogpost). The last 5 issues of the Lemire/Smallwood run have been collected as trade paperback vol. 3: “Birth and Death” (even though the story arc is titled “Death and Birth” in the individual comic books), and if there was any justice in the world, this comic would now show up on all of those year-end best-of lists for 2017 (it doesn’t – more on that in a later post). For what it’s worth, here’s why you should read it anyway.
Language: English
Authors: Jeff Lemire (writer), Greg Smallwood (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colourist)
Publisher: Marvel
Pages per issue: 20
Price per issue: $3.99
Website: http://marvel.com/comics/series/20488/moon_knight_2016_-_present
Previously in Moon Knight: Marc Spector has escaped the mental asylum, but his friend Crawley is being held captive by the god Anubis. And Moon Knight has yet to confront Khonshu, the god who created him.
In the beginning of this new story arc, Moon Knight seeks out Anubis. They strike a deal: if Moon Knight succeeds in rescuing Anubis’s wife Anput from the Overvoid (a parallel dimension reminiscent of ancient Egypt, except that people ride on giant dragonflies through the air and pyramids float above the ground), Crawley will be released. This story is intertwined with another, Moon Knight’s origin, the two strands alternating in segments of 3-6 pages each.
Marc Spector (right) and his new friend Steven Grant in Moon Knight #10
The flashback to Moon Knight’s past starts early, in Marc Spector’s childhood. We learn that already back then he created an imaginary friend (or so his psychiatrist says), Steven Grant, who later becomes an aspect of his own personality. And Marc is already visited by Khonshu who introduces himself as Marc’s real father.
Later, we see Marc as a U.S. Marine in Iraq when he gets dishonorably discharged because of his mental illness. He stays in the region and becomes first an illegal prizefighter, then a mercenary. On a mission to plunder an archaeological excavation site “near the Sudanese-Egyptian border”, he turns against his employer, Bushman, when the latter ruthlessly kills the archaeologists. Spector is defeated by Bushman and left to die alone in the desert, but Khonshu resurrects him.
Then we’re back in the present again and Marc faces Khonshu. I won’t spoil the outcome of this confrontation, but let’s look instead at that last transition from past to present in detail: in issue #14, p. 4 we’re in the desert in Marc’s past. Then on p. 5, Moon Knight in his ‘Mr Knight’ persona in the white suit is in the mental asylum again. He enters a room where he is greeted by his “good friends Bobby and Billy and Doc Ammut” – hybrid creatures of asylum staff and mythological figures. They subdue Mr Knight and give him an injection which knocks him out.
On the first panel of p. 6, we’re in the Egyptian temple in the desert again, where Khonshu carries the dying Marc Spector onto an altar before the statue of Khonshu. Marc asks, “Wh-what is this? What’s happening to me?”, and Khonshu replies: “This is a flashback, Marc. It is being intercut with the present.” On the next panel, the unconscious Marc is put on a table too, but this time by Bobby and Billy in the mental hospital. Khonshu’s voice continues though: “Time means little here.” This back-and-forth goes on for the next 4 panels of the page and so does Khonshu: “So past and present intermingle. They blend together and become one. Just like different aspects of your broken mind. The moment of your birth is here and there. It is then and now. All times lead to this instant.”
As past and present are about to fuse, the middle axis of the page no longer serves as a mirror axis that separates the two columns in the 2 × 3 panel layout of p. 6 in Moon Knight #14. Also note on the right panel how the hospital couch onto which Marc is fixated to undergo eletroconvulsive therapy has turned into an Ancient altar.
This is the most (delightfully) confusing and metafictional transition sequence, but there are many more of these mind-bending moments in this comic, and they are the main reason why it’s so brilliant. Add to this all the clever design, layout, composition and colouring decisions that Jeff Lemire, Greg Smallwood and Jordie Bellaire have made and you get one of the most remarkable superhero comics in recent history.
Rating: ● ● ● ● ○
When an artist carousel actually works: Review of Moon Knight (2016) #6-9
Posted: December 21, 2016 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, Francesco Francavilla, Greg Smallwood, identity, James Stokoe, Jeff Lemire, Jordie Bellaire, Marvel, mental health, Michael Garland, Moon Knight, superheroes, US, Wilfredo Torres 3 CommentsThese four issues constitute a story arc of their own (titled “Incarnations”), the end of which is also marked by Greg Smallwood’s return as the sole artist from the next issue on, so it makes sense to review them now.
Language: English
Authors: Jeff Lemire (writer); Greg Smallwood, Wilfredo Torres, Francesco Francavilla & James Stokoe (artists); Jordie Bellaire & Michael Garland (colourists)
Publisher: Marvel
Pages per issue: 20
Price per issue: $3.99
Website: http://marvel.com/comics/series/20488/moon_knight_2016_-_present
Previously in Moon Knight: Moon Knight has escaped from the mental asylum but then met his patron god Khonshu, fell out with him, jumped from a pyramid, passed out and awoke in his Steven Grant persona. He is producing a film starring his girlfriend Marlene as the female lead. Everything seems fine and the last panel of issue #5 shows a smiling Steven.
And here his troubles begin. Our protagonist keeps involuntarily changing in and out of his identities, and his surroundings change with him. Everywhere he is haunted by incarnations of his tormentors at the mental asylum, nurses Bobby and Billy and psychiatrist Dr Emmet. And also by werewolves from outer space.
Neither Moon Knight nor the readers know which reality is actually the real one. The guest artists reduce the subtlety somewhat, but it is also an interesting gimmick that each of Moon Knight’s personas/realities is drawn by different artists: taxi driver Jake Lockley by Francesco Francavilla, film producer Steven Grant by Wilfredo Torres and Michael Garland, and space pilot Marc Spector by James Stokoe.
So how exactly does this brilliant device of switching back-and-forth between identities work? Jeff Lemire employs a variety of ways to do this, but let’s take a closer look at the beginning of this arc in issue #6. The first panel (art by Torres and Garland) shows Moon Knight in his old cape fighting some villain in what looks like ancient Egypt. So far, this could be a classic Moon Knight story. In the second panel though, a speech bubble is partly obscured by a boom microphone, and on the following double page we learn that this was only a Moon Knight film being shot, produced by Steven Grant. The name of the leading actor though, whose face we never get to see, is Marc Spector – the real name of the real Moon Knight!
On page 5, Steven and Marlene enter a taxi and talk about a fundraising event at a mental hospital (because their film “explores some real themes… identity, mental illness”), which of course later turns out to be the hospital where Moon Knight was detained earlier. The last panel on this page contains a caption: “Steven Grant is too soft for what comes next…”, and on the next page (from now on drawn by Francavilla) their taxi driver turns out to be Jake Lockley! After he has dropped Steven and Marlene off, he meets his friend Crawley, who remembers the events from the first arc (the escape from the mental hospital) but Jake can’t.
Crawley tells Jake on p. 9, “You’re in the hospital right now”, then disappears. Jake opens the trunk of his taxi where he keeps his Moon Knight costume. The following page is drawn by Torres and Garland again, and on the first panel we see Steven Grant looking at his dinner suit (which looks not unlike Moon Knight’s ‘Mr Knight’ costume) on his bed from the same perspective. Apparently he and Marlene are getting ready for their fundraising party at the hospital. Steven is confused and says to Marlene, “I – I was somewhere else! I was in this cab and there was this man, this old man with white hair, and he told me – he told me I was in a mental hospital.”
Marlene answers, “Have you been taking your meds? […] You remember last time you got off, how you got.” So (according to this version of Marlene) Steven is mentally ill, which would explain the Jake Lockley scene as Steven’s delusion. But Steven doesn’t even remember being on medication at all.
And so it goes on. It’s a joy for the reader to gradually realise on how many levels the various realities are intertwined, and how they all contradict each other. Until issue #9 when Moon Knight, in his Mr Knight outfit and drawn by Greg Smallwood and Jordie Bellaire again, confronts his other three personas, defeats or makes peace with them, and they vanish.
The “Incarnations” story arc was one wild ride, and if Lemire, Smallwood and Bellaire keep up their good work in the next arc, Moon Knight will surely be the best current Marvel comic, now that The Vision has ended.
Rating: ● ● ● ● ○
The best Moon Knight ever? Review of Moon Knight (2016) #1-5
Posted: August 31, 2016 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, Greg Smallwood, Jeff Lemire, Jordie Bellaire, Marvel, Moon Knight, superheroes, US 3 CommentsOne of the many series recently rebooted by Marvel was Moon Knight, and as Moon Knight is a character I tend to follow (see my previous reviews of his series: Moon Knight (2011) #6-8 and #9-12, Moon Knight (2014) #1-3 and #4-6), I thought I’d give him another try.
Language: English
Authors: Jeff Lemire (writer), Greg Smallwood (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colourist)
Publisher: Marvel
Pages per issue: 20
Price per issue: $3.99
Website: http://marvel.com/comics/series/20488/moon_knight_2016_-_present
Previously in Moon Knight: No idea what happened at the end of the previous series, because I dropped it when Warren Ellis left after only six issues. (Maybe I should have stuck to it, because it turns out Greg Smallwood’s artwork is almost as striking as Declan Shalvey’s who left the book shortly after Ellis…)
One of Moon Knight’s/Marc Spector’s defining characteristics is his precarious mental health, so it makes sense for Jeff Lemire to start the story with Marc being a patient – or should we say ‘inmate’? – in a mental hospital. Marc has these memories about being Moon Knight, but none about how he got there, and the hospital psychiatrist tells him that he has been there since he was twelve years old. Then again, he has these visions of his Egyptian patron deity, Khonshu, which suggest to him that the hospital staff are in fact other, evil Egyptian mythological beings.
Mental asylum break stories (if that’s a thing) are powerful when they manage to convey the feeling of despair in the protagonist: he or she is the only one who knows what’s really going on, but everyone else thinks he or she is just crazy (think Terminator 2: Judgment Day). This Moon Knight series adds the thrill of leaving the reader in the dark, at least initially, about which is the truth and which is Marc’s imagination: we are shown both the hospital staff and, alternately, the Egyptian gods, but only one of the two can be real (think David Cronenberg’s Spider).
One of the few things in which Ellis didn’t succeed in his run was the handling of Moon Knight’s backstory. Lemire achieves this by including several of Moon Knight’s supporting cast, and by putting more emphasis on his different personas (the millionaire, the taxi driver).
And then there’s the art. Often there are only few panels on a page, of different size and horizontally centered so that there is a lot of white space, giving a massive, iconic, grave and simply powerful impression. Some guest artists were involved in issue #5, which makes sense because each draws a different scene in a dream (?) sequence. Alas, from the solicitations it looks like Smallwood leaves the series after #6.
If there’s one thing I don’t like about this Moon Knight, it’s that the Egyptian gods often don’t talk like one would expect gods to talk, thus appearing less awe-inspiring than they could be. Granted, deities in the Marvel Universe are more mundane beings than the omnipotent gods from ‘real’ mythological tradition, but still…
All things considered, this might indeed be the best Moon Knight series ever, and (together with The Vision) the best Marvel book right now.
R.I.P. The New 52: a look back at Justice League Dark
Posted: August 31, 2015 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, DC, J. M. DeMatteis, Jeff Lemire, Justice League Dark, Mikel Janin, Peter Milligan, publishing, superheroes, The New 52, US 1 CommentAlmost exactly four years ago, DC Comics cancelled all their monthly comic book series, just to relaunch most of them again as ‘The New 52’. I hesitate to call this a proper reboot, for reasons I have discussed here before. Anyway, now (in May/June) they have done the same thing once again, at last dropping the ‘New 52’ label: approximately half of the monthly series was cancelled, while the other half was renumbered to #1.
Several other weblogs have taken a look back at the 3 1/2 years of The New 52, among which I particularly recommend Steve Foxe’s “In Loving Memory: All 68 DC Comics That Have Come and Gone Within the New 52” at Paste. The general consensus seems to be that The New 52 was a bold marketing decision that may have made sense commercially, but in terms of the quality of the actual comics, not much really stood out.
If I get Foxe right, 93 ongoing series had been launched at some point during The New 52. Out of these, 25 have been relaunched and continued to the present day, while approximately 47 were cancelled already before this latest relaunch (i.e. after the ‘Convergence’ crossover event). The former consist of mainstays such as Batman and Action Comics, while among the latter we find mainly obscure oddities that were probably doomed from their very beginning, e.g. G.I. Combat or All-Star Western.
This leaves us with ~21 titles that sit in the middle, having made it to their 40th issue, but not being continued in this new iteration of the DC comics line. From a commercial perspective, these comic books seem to have ultimately failed too. But wasn’t there something in them that might be worth remembering? Didn’t all the effort that creators put into them amount to more than a mere footnote in the history of American superhero comics?
With this question in mind I re-read all 40 issues (plus Annuals and the like) of Justice League Dark, the only New 52 series I happened to have collected from start to finish. (More precisely, I started from #9, then got the first trade paperback and #7-8 later.) Instead of summarising the story, I picked the following 20 most memorable moments in Justice League Dark, in chronological order of publishing, to show that this series (and probably others with mediocre sales performances) might deserve a second look.
1. JLD #1 The very first issue (by Peter Milligan (w) / Mikel Janin (a) / Ulises Arreola (c)) is already full of brilliant ideas. Take the opening page, for instance: Madame Xanadu sits there and seems to look at the reader, while her tarot cards float around the room, some of them face-up towards the picture surface for the reader to see. (This is a composition that refers to earlier ones, two of them pictured in the Madame Xanadu Wikipedia Article.) The tarot cards show who be the protagonists of this first story will be: Deadman, Enchantress, Mindwarp (who actually turns out to not play much of a role), Constantine, June Moone, and Zatanna. The cards are labeled with the traditional tarot card names – ‘The Magician’, ‘The Fool’, ‘Death’, etc. What better way to start a story? You could even argue that the cards are on a different diegetic level and only there for the reader – after all, why and how would Madame Xanadu make such a tarot deck? Then again, the cards are shown several more times in the story and seen by other characters too.
2. JLD #1 Peter Milligan lend a dark sense of humour to his stories that neither Jeff Lemire nor J. M. DeMatteis, Milligan’s successors as writer of the book, ever accomplished. In this issue, supernatural phenomena suddenly occur, most of them only briefly told in one panel. My favourite one has the following caption text: “In a neighboring town, a shower of books in a dead language kill six people.” Get it? “Dead”? “Kill”?
3. JLD #1 Generally, Peter Milligan’s version of the Justice League Dark was much darker than that of the writers that followed. Almost all of our ‘heroes’ are shown to have a dark side. Madame Xanadu, for instance – otherwise a rather bland character – is shown to be addicted to some kind of drug. “How much of this stuff are you doing?”, she is asked by Shade, holding a phial in his hand.
4. JLD #2 In the first few issues, Milligan needs to introduce a lot of characters, and he does a brilliant job of it when it comes to Deadman. Deadman is a ghost, and the only way he can touch and be touched is to possess a living person. Things get awkward when he wants to do that to sleep with his girlfriend, who is not so keen (“You’re asking me to sleep with another man”).
5. JLD #5 What all JLD writers emphasise is that the JLD is quite a fragile superhero team. Consequently, the first break-up of the JLD already happens in the fifth issue (and it’s not going to be the last). “I’m going, and I don’t ever want to see any of you again”, says Constantine.
6. JLD #8 John Constantine and his irreverent attitude has been the biggest draw of this book for me. Madame Xanadu: “My ‘project’ didn’t last as long as I’d hoped, but… but I truly believe… that is has been worthwhile.” – Constantine: “Worthwhile my jacksey. We might as well all have stayed home and got pissed.” (Jeff Lemire came up with some good Constantine one-liners too when he took over in #9 – Steve Trevor: “Around ARGUS we’ve even taken to nicknaming you the ‘Justice League Dark.'” – Constantine: “That is the stupidest name I’ve ever heard.”)
7. JLD #9 Jeff Lemire’s first JLD issue is generally another apex of the series. There’s an ingenious example of medium specificity in the scene in which Constantine wakes up with a “truly epic hangover”. A voice says to him, “We need to talk.”, and Constantine answers, “You didn’t spend the night, did you, sunshine? I mean, I was drunk, but I don’t think I was that drunk…” Perhaps it needs to be mentioned that in this series, Constantine is not written as bisexual, so the reader might expect he is talking to a woman. On the next page, the person turns out to be Agent Steve Trevor, who visits Constantine strictly on JLD business. If this was a film, it wouldn’t be half as unexpected, because Trevor’s voice would be recognisable as a male one.
8. JLD #9 Another brilliant display of medium specificity are the gutters between the panels in the same issue: when the JLD enter an ancient Peruvian temple, the gutters are shaped like spiderwebs. This is a kind of foreshadowing, because not until the next page, spiders (well, human/spider monsters) actually appear.
9. JLD #10 A trio of villains, the “Demons Three”, are introduced on a splash page. The way in which they are presented is charmingly old-school: facing the reader, delivering a short monologue, speaking in custom lettering. Throughout the series, beautifully designed villains are depicted in this way, most notably “Black Boris” and “Blackbriar Thorn” in #12, “Blight” in #27, and “The Between” in #32. This ‘Monster of the Week’ pattern, however, becomes tiresome at some point and brings us such underwhelming villains as “Pantheon”, “Pralayah”, and “The Beyond Beyond”.
10. JLD #12 Some more medium specificity: when Doctor Mist says to Zatanna, “I will deflect your backwards magic right back at you”, he turns her speech bubble with backwards speech into a sound effect (in which the letters appear in normal order) which he throws at her.
11. JLD #0 Each New 52 series got a ‘Zero Issue’ in which the origin story was told (similar to the later Secret Origins series, but tied to comic books rather than individual characters). A charming detail of this one (still written by Jeff Lemire, but pencilled by Lee Garbett) is that we get to see how Constantine got his iconic trench coat.
12. JLD Annual #1 Lemire’s story is hopelessly convoluted, but it’s a nice twist when the villain, Nick Necro, tells Zatanna that it was him who formed the JLD in the first place, in order to get the Books of Magic. “You weren’t so hard to get on the team, Zee, but can you imagine how difficult it was to convince anyone to put John Constantine onto a super hero team? I tell you, getting out of hell was easier.” Maybe a(nother) metatextual stab at the concept of the whole series?
13. JLD #14 When Black Orchid explores the House of Mystery (Constantine’s home), she stumbles upon a room in which Constantine keeps files on many superheroes, including Orchid herself. This is a much-needed recap of some of the things going on in the DC universe (in other books mostly). At the same time, it’s fun to see how close Constantine is to revealing the secret identities of Superman and Batman (which the reader is only able to tell through extra-textual information).
14. JLD #15 The JLD is teleported to some kind of magical counter-world in which the JLD members turn into their opposites: the immortal, ageless Madame Xanadu turns into an old woman, Deadman becomes alive again, and Constantine can’t tell lies anymore. The latter aspect becomes relevant for the overall story arc when we learn that Constantine’s feelings for Zatanna are apparently true.
15. JLD #24 J. M. DeMatteis takes over as the new JLD writer, and he takes Constantine on a “Magical Misery Tour” on which he confronts his inner (?) demons. A well-written exploration of Constantine’s character – although one could argue it’s a little out of place in a team book.
16. JLD #26 Swamp Thing has recently joined the JLD, and what I like best about him is when he transforms himself, e.g. grows wings. In this issue, he briefly turns into some sort of whale.
17. JLD #27 In order to defeat the villain Blight, who is the embodiment of evil, Constantine and Nightmare Nurse decide to fight fire with fire and invoke the “Blackmare Curse”. This spell “drills down into the deepest pits of the soul… unleashing all the darkness there”, which turns the two into fierce monsters. Naturally, the Curse works better the more corrupted and depraved its evocators are. Thus we are given another little piece of the puzzle that is the true nature of John Constantine’s character.
18. JLD Annual #2 Another interesting spell is the “K’Am’Deva Curse” with which Zatanna rips Constantine’s heart out of his chest so that he loses all feelings for her, and all memories of ever having loved her. The explanation why they do this is that the bond between them acts as a “magical battery” for some supervillains. At the end of the issue the two get separated when Zatanna is sucked into a “whirling hole in space and time” (#35). Things get awkward when they meet again in the final issue.
19. JLD #35 Zatanna emerges in another parallel world in which she meets her father, Zatara the magician, who was supposed to be long dead. Zatara tells her he had found a “doorway through time” through which he took his wife and little daughter with him and settled in a world were “thought itself would instantly become manifest reality” and “no one grows older”. Wait – his daughter? Zatanna realises there’s something not quite right about Zatara’s story… I won’t spoil the ending, but ultimately this story turns out to be a nice version of the old ‘dream within a dream’ theme. On the flipside, this is once again not much of a ‘team book’ story, and it’s too bad the book is no longer drawn by Mikel Janin at this point.
20. JLD #36 Towards the end of the series, an old villain returns: Felix Faust, the ancient sorcerer. Except he is in the shape of a monstrous caterpillar now. I like him best in the cover image (by Guillem March and Tomeu Morey), in which I only saw the caterpillar monster gripping the herous with its tentacles at first, and only later did I spot Faust’s tiny head at the end of the monster. This is probably one of the best JLD covers after Ryan Sook had stopped doing them (#14 was Sook’s last one, I think).
DC’s The New 52 – cool or not cool? Part 1/2
Posted: May 26, 2014 Filed under: review | Tags: Animal Man, Batman, Brian Buccellato, comics, continuity, DC, Francis Manapul, Greg Capullo, intertextuality, Jeff Lemire, remakes, Scott Snyder, superheroes, The Flash, The New 52, Travel Foreman, US 3 CommentsIn September 2011 – two years and eight months ago – DC started this New 52 thing. So it’s hardly “new” anymore, but they still put “The New 52” on their comic book covers. Maybe this time is as good as any to ask: was it all worth it?
First of all, what is The New 52? Some people call it a relaunch, or a reboot. Essentially, though, it was a renumbering: all of DC’s monthly comic book series were set to “#1” in September 2011. Therefore, Action Comics #904 from August 2011 is followed by Action Comics #1 in September instead of #905. Likewise, there is no Detective Comics #882, and so on. This seems like a risky idea, but commercially, it worked wonders for DC, at least in the beginning. By now, it looks to me as if the sales boost effect has waned, judging by the estimates published on The Beat, for instance (see e.g. this column by Marc-Oliver Frisch on DC’s July 2013 sales).
Back in 2011, the goal behind this move seems to have been to make people start reading DC comics who had not been reading them before, advertising the new “first” issues as good “jumping-on points”. The problem with these #1 issues was, they were not actually “relaunching” or “rebooting” their respective series, at least not in my understanding of these terms. A proper relaunch or reboot would have been to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch by introducing the characters and their settings again, without relying on knowledge that readers have acquired through other, previous material. Although the creative teams of each series changed and new story arcs began, it was never clear how much the new series built on the old continuity, or to what extent that backstory would be retconned. Later, DC tried to alleviate this problem and fill in the blanks through events like “Zero Month” (or the current “Secret Origins”). At any rate, I don’t think DC did a good job at catering to new readers (probably in order not to lose their old core readership), as I will show in this two-part blog post using the example of six number ones from The New 52. Here are the first three, in no particular order:
The Flash #1
Language: English
Authors: Francis Manapul (writer/artist), Brian Buccellato (writer/colourist)
Publisher: DC
Released: 2011-09-28
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: the links given on the DC website are all broken.
I picked up the first Flash trade paperback mainly because of Marc-Oliver Frisch’s glowing review of #1, and because I wanted to see how this unusual creative team setup (writer plus writer/artist) worked out. The merits of this comic aside, it’s not a particularly good jumping-on point for readers unfamiliar with its eponymous protagonist. The title page on p. 4-5 briefly tells his origin story:
Struck by a bolt of lightning and doused in chemicals, Central City police scientist Barry Allen was transformed into the fastest man alive. Tapping into the energy field called the Speed Force, he applies a tenacious sense of justice to protect and serve the world as The Flash.
Seriously? Lightning? Chemicals? “The energy field called the Speed Force”? We’re in the 21st century now, but this reads like some Golden Age origin story full of magical thinking. And it doesn’t explain where Barry got his ring from, from which his costume somehow emerges and wraps around him. The Flash’s basic superpower – speed – is easy enough to understand, but on p. 8, he uses two secondary powers that aren’t as easy to grasp: levitating things by producing vortices from his hands, and vibrating through solid objects. Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato surely didn’t make these things up, but that is of no help to the new reader.
For readers who are somewhat but not overly familiar with The Flash, it may be confusing that there’s this character called Iris West, hinting at the possibility that Wally West, another Flash, might still be introduced later in the story to complicate things further. Another weak point of this story is the characterisation of Barry, or lack thereof. In the next few issues, the supporting character Manuel seems more fleshed-out than Barry.
Batman #1
Language: English
Authors: Scott Snyder (writer), Greg Capullo (penciller), Jonathan Glapion (inker), FCO (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Released: 2011-09-21
Pages: 24
Price: $2.99
From its launch up to now, Batman was always one of the best-selling comics book series on the American direct market, regularly outselling all other series except for new launches, crossover events or other special issues. (On the other hand, it is the only series with estimated monthly sales consistently over 100,000 copies, which says a lot about the current state of the industry.) It probably couldn’t have enjoyed that success on the basis of its title alone, so I eventually read the first TPB and wasn’t disappointed: Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo did craft a gripping story.
It is also a story that is accessible to new readers, although it may help to know who e.g. the Joker is. There are only two scenes that might be problematic for the newbie: one is Batman fighting a multitude of villains at Arkham Asylum at the beginning of the comic, some of which are quite obscure and “wasted” as extras in a melee. The other is the brief introduction of the “Bat-Family”: Dick Grayson a.k.a. Nightwing, Tim Drake a.k.a. Red Robin, and Damian Wayne a.k.a. Robin. Only one of the three is relevant to the story, so they’re only introduced here for (intra-New-52) continuity’s sake.
Animal Man #1
Language: English
Authors: Jeff Lemire (writer), Travel Foreman (penciller), Lovern Kindzierski (colourist)
Publisher: DC
Released: 2011-09-07
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Animal Man is another comic that I only bought in collected form, probably around the time of the crossover with Swamp Thing. Jeff Lemire is, beside the aforementioned Scott Snyder, the other new “superstar” writer to emerge from The New 52. That status, however, wasn’t enough to prevent the cancellation of Animal Man with #29 two months ago.
Initially, Animal Man’s superpower was to temporarily gain one single ability of one single nearby animal, e.g. strength from an elephant, or flight from a bird. A goofy but fun concept. Later (but still before The New 52), he gained the ability to take on powers from all living beings, not only those nearby. That made him one of the most boring superheroes ever, as he can now at any time gain superstrength and flight etc., like so many other superheroes.
In Animal Man #1, this leads to clumsy storytelling by way of internal monologue in captions, such as “I just take on the weight of a bumblebee”, or “I reach out and grab the napping ability of a cat” (p. 14). Anyway, unfortunately for new readers, the story in this issue isn’t so much about Animal Man and his powers, but rather the beginning of an arc that puts Animal Man’s daughter Maxine in the foreground as the “avatar of the Red”. This new metaphysical concept of the three struggling primordial forces, the Red, the Green and the Rot, is relatively well explained in the following issues, but it overshadows Animal Man as a character.
Another potential problem with this comic for old and new readers alike is Travel Foreman’s art, which is certainly distinctive with its expressive lines and scarce but heavy cross hatching. I for one never got used to it. Readers already familiar with Animal Man will notice how similar the setting is to that of Grant Morrison’s acclaimed run from the late 1980s, with a focus on Animal Man’s domestic life with his wife and two children. This raises the question, though, how these runs are interconnected, or why all the familiar characters are still the same age as back in the 80s, even though the story is clearly set in the present day.
For two other interesting takes on The New 52 and its convoluted continuity, see Vaneta Rogers’s blogpost “The NEW 52 Two Years Later: The Reboot’s Biggest Surprises” at Newsarama and Paul C’s “The New 52 Continuity: It ain’t so bad!” at Last of the Famous International Fanboys.
Why I stopped reading Swamp Thing
Posted: August 10, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: Animal Man, comics, crossover, DC, fantasy, Francesco Francavilla, horror, Jeff Lemire, Marco Rudy, mystery, Scott Snyder, Steve Pugh, superheroes, Swamp Thing, The New 52, US, Yanick Paquette 5 CommentsReview of Swamp Thing #7-12
Previously in Swamp Thing: by the time I wrote my last review, Alec Holland was about to turn into the Swamp Thing, and the series was about to get really good.
Language: English
Authors: Scott Snyder (writer – plus Jeff Lemire in #12), Yanick Paquette/Marco Rudy/various (artist)
Publisher: DC
Pages: 20
Price: $2.99
Website: http://www.dccomics.com/comics/swamp-thing-2011
Back in issue #7, the series still seemed to be going in the right direction. With the help of the Parliament of Trees and his “bio-restorative formula”, Alec Holland is finally transformed and emerges from a giant cabbage as the Swamp Thing. The artwork by Yanick Paquette leaves little to be desired.
In issue #8, however, Paquette shares artist duties with Marco Rudy, depicting the clash of Swamp Thing and the army of the Rot. (For an insightful critique of that concept, see Iann Robinson’s review of #12.)
This pattern is repeated in issue #9: the first 8 pages are drawn by Paquette, the remaining 12 by Rudy. This constant back-and-forth between those two artists is annoying, but at this point, their styles had grown so similar that I almost didn’t mind anymore. A lot of mystical, epic fighting takes place in this comic book.
With issue #10, a completely different artist, Francesco Francavilla, takes over (including the colouring). While Francavilla is by no means a bad artist, his style is such a far cry from Paquette’s and Rudy’s that one cannot help but notice the difference and wonder why.
Especially since in issue #11, Rudy is back as the artist. What was Paquette doing in those 2 1/2 months when he apparently wasn’t drawing Swamp Thing? In fact, the next Swamp Thing issue with Paquette as artist will be #13, which is scheduled for October. I couldn’t find a statement from DC that explained what makes this merry-go-round of artists necessary. Apart from being irritating for the reader, I can’t imagine Eisner and Harvey award-winning writer Scott Snyder is fond of constantly working with fill-in collaborators. This situation is telling about DC’s attitude towards its authors.
The last straw came in issue #12 with the start of the dreaded Animal Man crossover story (“Rotworld”). In fact, this issue is part two of a two-part “prologue” to said storyline, the first part being Animal Man #12. Crossovers that require you to read every single tie-in issue to keep up with what’s going on are a clumsy attempt increase the sales of each involved series, and it doesn’t work with me. I have tried to get into Animal Man before, but didn’t like Steve Pugh’s art, so I don’t feel like picking it up now. Neither am I interested in seeing other characters from the DC universe make guest appearances in Swamp Thing (which will happen in issue #13).
So I won’t be reading Swamp Thing anymore. By means of crossover mania and artist roulette (which DC intends to keep spinning), DC has killed a strong series. Still, it was worth reading for most of its first year, both as a DC universe comic that does without (regular) superheroes, as well as for the intricate ways in which it refers to the pre-relaunch era. Thus the first trade paperback, collecting #1-7 and coming out this month, might be of general interest. For me, however, there are more interesting comic books being published by DC at the moment – more on those in later posts.
Rating: ● ● ○ ○ ○
The 650-Cent Plague 