What I Bought 8/17/2018 - Part 1

With a combination of timing and luck, I've managed to find every comic I wanted this month that's come out. Granting there haven't been that many, with so many books being delayed. Anyway, here's two books at their third issues.

Multiple Man #3, by Matt Rosenberg (writer), Any MacDonald (artist), Tamra Bonvillain (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer) - Going off the covers we've seen, this is probably the weakest one of this mini-series. It's not bad - Marcos Martin is hard-pressed to do a bad cover - I just don't quite like it as much as the others. The intentionally jumbled nature makes for a mess.

The Madrox army is busting down the doors of the resistance. Jamie gets Forge to build a few time travel bracelets and sends the un-altered versions of those weird Jamie dupes with the powers into the future to do. . . something. Find help, somehow. Then he's captured, and Jamie and Layla's son is executed (Layla is somewhere else, fortunate for Jamies). At least they do that off-panel, although MacDonald isn't really doing graphic violence much anyway. The Mystic Madrox gets one between the eyes and it's a small hole and he falls over. Jamie is brought to Emperor Jamie, they blather at each other, and then the Emperor chops the other Jamie's head off.

I thought Jamie's brilliant plan was going to be to try and absorb the Emperor, the way he did the dupe he fought in Hank's lab. I don't know that it would have worked, if the Emperor is essentially Jamie Prime now, but watching him try it as a big play only to fall flat on his face would have fit with the tone of this book. Think that line from Spaceballs: 'This is why evil will always win, because good is dumb.' This Jamie's a putz. Maybe that's because he's a good dupe produced from an evil Jamie Prime. It's how Emperor Jamie conceives of "good", so any duplicate he creates that's good is a loser. Or Rosenberg just didn't want to write a Jamie that is at all competent.

At one point, Layla's son points out they've lost their Hulk, and Jamie replies: 'Ooooh. The Hulk. That's why he was green. . . I didn't get that for some reason.' At the end of the previous issue, just before Hulk Madrox exploded, Jamie was telling the opposing army they were making a mistake making him angry, which sure as hell sounds like he's making a Hulk reference. He could be making a joke, but it isn't really presented as such, it's more like he's just a moron.

And sometimes that's funny. He tries to block the door with his body, until one of the dupes reminds him what bullets do to doors. His attempts to lie to Emperor Jamie. But there's still that disconnect where the series seems like it wants us to take this at least somewhat seriously - that Emperor Jamie is a Problem and it needs to be fixed - but you can't take this well-meaning duplicate Jamie seriously at all.

Stellar #3, by Joseph Keatinge (writer), Bret Blevins (artist), Rus Wooton (letterer) - What are those little lemurs that have the giant sad eyes? That's what that thing has. Probably knows what happens to the faithful steed in those kinds of settings.

Stellar spends years stranded on her homeworld, just her and that critter on the cover. Then she's attacked by her remaining two friends, altered by Zenith. She's captured and brought to him, and we learn the war that's torn the place apart is actually with an alternate universe. Which Zenith has opened another gateway to, I think. Stellar just wants to go back to the world she was on when the series began, but that's not going to be an option here.

Curious choice to gloss over the years she spends alone in a couple of pages, or maybe to even do that at all. I'm not sure why the time jump was necessary, or what the point of it all is. Stellar doesn't seem noticeably changed, other than her external appearance. She still doesn't want anything to do with Zenith or his plans. She still asks them to leave her alone or she'll kill them. Neither of those points suggests she had come to the conclusion she needed to hunt Zenith down and end things. She wants to leave in peace, and is only involved in whatever is going on when it comes knocking on her door.

It could be the skip forward was to give Zenith a plausible amount of time to get his plans to a certain point. But we don't have any frame of reference for how long it had been since Stellar split off from the group, or how smart Zenith is, so they could have said it took him however long they wanted. We don't have any evidence to contradict it, because about all we know of Zenith is he enjoyed killing with his powers, and Stellar was afraid of him.

Zenith, in addition to modifying a couple of his old teammates with some sort of liquid metal stuff, also found himself some giant robots. Those remind me of the ones from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was playing off a slightly earlier era of sci-fi/adventure stories than his other designs, but it still looks pretty good. Their design is different enough from Apogee and Aphelion to show that they're something leftover he cobbled together, while the former teammates look more like something he came up with himself. He'd done the same to himself, only he uses it a little better than they do. It looks like solid armor sometimes, and other points it's more fluid. He throws a punch at one point where his fist extends and it flows around Stellar's arm to hit her in the stomach. Blevins blurs and reduces the detail and contrast in those areas to show their less defined nature compared to the more solid parts of Zenith.