Captain America #10, by Rick Remender (writer), John Romita Jr. (breakdowns), Klaus Janson, Tom Palmer, and Scott Hanna (finishes), Dean White and Rachelle Rosenberg (color art) - Let's say that you, like me, are a weirdo who keeps track of how many pages of comics an artist did in stuff you bought during the course of the year. How would you count them doing breakdowns? Give them 10 pages (half-credit)? More? Less?Jet, reeling from her father's death last issue, gets more bad news from Cap about Ian. Then Sharon states she's gonna blow up the only thing Jet has left of her father. Fine, it's a mobile battle station loaded with mutates out to infect every human on Earth with Zola's consciousness, but still, it's too much, too soon for Jet, who grabs the detonator and takes off. Cap and Sharon give chase, and are in turn chased by Captain Zolandia and some mutates. Cap stalls them and Sharon gets through to Jet. At which point a giant Zola descends from the bottom of the battle station and starts talking trash about Jet. Because Zola wants to wrest Worst Father away from Magneto before Ulysses Bloodstone can. Sharon decides to drop away from the escape craft to shoot Zola in the face and be blown up with him when she triggers the detonator. Steve and Jet make it through the portal, Steve tries to come back, but time has passed, the portal's collapsing, Jet pulls him back to Earth, and now Steve gets to be sad about the love of his life and his adopted son.
But wait! Turns out Ian survived, and is the leader of the Phrox in a war to protect their home against surviving mutates (and possibly a reconstituted Zola)! How much do you want to bet Zola's new body the nest time we see him is Sharon Carter?
Sharon's death made no sense to me. She tells Steve she can't trigger the explosion because they're too close and would all die. So she slips out of her glove (which Steve was holding her up by), drops on to Zola, talks some shit, shoots him in the face, then blows them both up. The best I can figure is that the loss of her weight, combined with the time bought by her occupying Zola, gave Jet and Steve a chance to get outside the blast radius. Given I think she could have shot him the face with one hand while Steve kept hold of the other, then dropped the gun when it was time to trigger the blast, I'm calling flimsy on that. This reminds me of the end of Thanos Imperative, when it felt like Abnett and Lanning had a checklist of stuff that needed to be set up by the end, and they just threw it in there whether it made much sense of not. Like Remender saw he had "Off Sharon Carter" in his outline, and tossed in a death scene real quick. Can I believe Carter who really like to kill Zola? Sure? That she'd sacrifice her life to save Steve and the rest of the Earth? Sure. Can I believe she'd do it if there were a smarter way to accomplish the same goal without dying? Not really.
I think she and Jet could have been a hoot. Sharon trusts Steve's instincts, but I think she'd still be wary of Jet, even if it's just the chance of backsliding out of grief. And Jet might respect Carter's skills, but probably wouldn't be best friends with someone who hates her father so much. Even if Jet understands all the arguments against her father, he was still her dad. She's got a lot of good memories of him. That stuff isn't easy to discard, even in light of newer information.
The art here is variable, to put it nicely. The two pages of Steve and Jet back on earth look really good. The line work is solid, clear, not overdone, emotions are clear, body language conveys a lot of weariness. The page before that, though? Yikes. Steve's right eye went from being swollen shut, to just gone. That part of his face is smoothed over, like the injury happened years ago. The giant Zola wasn't as impressive as I was hoping, either. There's not much sense of scale, except when Sharon's hopping around on his face, and that's a vague blue shape with maybe an eye visible. There's no sense of the power of awe you should really have when you see it emerge among the fires of the rockets moving the station. The body looks stretched out, an action figure melting under a magnifying glass, not intimidating.
Anyway, Steve's back on Earth, which means I decided to drop this book two months too late. Darn.
Captain Marvel #15, by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Jen van Meter (writers), Patrick Olliffe (penciler), Drew Geraci (inker), Andy Troy (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Quinones made Carol look suitably fierce there. That's a good representation of a snarl.It's an Infinity tie-in. I guess this was the big attempt by the Avengers to stop the Builders before they make it Earth. It starts well enough, until it's revealed the Builders had the main portion of their force cloaked, and they whup our heroes' tails. This issue is Carol's perspective on the battle, filtered through her recent brain trauma. I had expected Carol would be dealing with a loss of all memories, and there's a bit of that there, like not understand why Jessica Drew would hate Skrulls. But it's presented more as though Carol still has all the memories, but lacks any emotional connection to them. So it takes her a moment to remember that bit about Drew and the Skrulls, because facts about her most best friend carry no more importance than the details of what she had for breakfast. I feel like Carol's been down this road before (I read an issue of Busiek's run where she was attacked by Doomsday Man and she confessed she might remember him, but it was like their past happened to someone else), but I'm not sure how much exploration that received, so a more in-depth look wouldn't be bad.
What's most curious about the whole thing, is none of her friends seem to notice. Certainly nobody comments on it. They seem to be treating it as if Carol is just focusing on the task at hand, and she's really good at it because she's a soldier. It makes me wonder if they even realize anything is wrong? But I couldn't understand why nobody was hustling after her when she flew into space at the end of the previous issue, given her condition. Did they get around to retrieving her eventually? Or did she wake up and come back under her own power, and they just assume that means she's fine? Admittedly, most of her interactions are with Hawkeye, and he's dumb as a brick these days, so maybe he's the only one who hasn't picked up on it, but if so, I'd expect Jessica or Captain America to say something.
You may have heard about Spider-Woman having a really dumb space suit for this Infinity stuff. The stories are true, she is wearing a suit that does not cover her abdomen for some reason, while gallivanting around in space. No, I'm not clear on what advantage that gives her. She can't fire venom blasts out of her chest (as far as I know), and the pheromone power wouldn't seem to be useful in a vacuum. For the record, though, Cannonball and Sunspot have similar outfits, and I'd swear the Falcon's upper arms are exposed. I'm assuming translucent material. Why, I couldn't tell you.
I mostly remember Olliffe's artwork from Spider-Girl, but Geraci's inks really smoothed it out here. What I'm used to is his characters have very squared off heads, and the inks providing a sharp delineation between the character and their surroundings. There are places here I'd swear it wasn't even Olliffe drawing it, things look so different. Other times, it looks exactly as I'd expect. Clint's face on page 15 is a good example. I think the shadows caused by the space suit create the same sort of strong outline effect I'm used to. Either way, the art is fine. It doesn't produce a lot of strong reactions in me one way or the other. I did like the shot of Spider-Woman leaping through space with blaster fire zipping past her.
Carol's got her Binary powers back now (somehow), so we'll see if that can turn the tide in the next issue.
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