Saturday Splash Page #189

"Escher Dimension," in Secret Avengers (vol. 1) #18, by Warren Ellis (writer), David Aja and Raul Allen (artists), Dave Lanphear (letterer)

Secret Avengers started in 2010, post-Siege, and focused on Steve Rogers, now as "Commander Steve Rogers", the current (temporary) Boss of All Superheroes, forming an espionage squad of Avengers. Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato were the initial creative team, and I did consider buying the book when it started, because Brubaker was going to put Nova on the roster, which seemed like an acknowledgement of Nova's big-time work protecting the universe in all the Abnett/Lanning Cosmic Marvel stuff of the previous several years.

As it turned out, good thing I didn't pull the trigger at that time. Nova was in the book for one story, most of which he spent under the control of the Serpent Crown. Should have expected the guy who just wants to write spy stories and noir stuff wouldn't do right by the sci-fi, human rocket hero. I did buy the book for the last year+ of its 37-issue run, when Rick Remender took over as writer and revamped the roster a bit. He wrote the best Hawkeye at Marvel during that stretch, neither Bendis' kill-happy version or Fraction's incompetent doof. A cocky but principled Hawkeye, not exactly enthused about having Venom on his team. Granted, more for the killing aspects than the part where Hanks Pym and McCoy devised a drug to keep the symbiote - a sentient being - docile and controllable, but you take what you can get. But the story was something about androids and artificial intelligences trying to take over the world? I can't even be bothered to go read my old reviews, and it got excised from the collection long ago. It had potential, but as with a lot of Remender's work, it didn't resonate with me.

What's left is the 6-issue stretch immediately preceding Remender's, that I picked up in back issues maybe 6 months after it ended. Each issue is a done-in-one of a specific mission for Commander Rogers and some portion of his team. In one issue, he may bring along War Machine, Valkyrie and Sharon Carter. In another, Carter, Black Widow and Moon Knight. I think only the last issue - where people are being used as receptacles for some other-dimensional horror babies - involves the entire team.

Each issue is drawn by a different artist (in order, Jamie McKelvie, Kev Walker, David Aja, Michael Lark, Alex Maleev, and Stuart Immonen), with a story tailored to their respective strengths. Aja gets to draw a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, Maleev's issue is the Black Widow trying to use time travel to prevent the death of the team without altering the sequence of events, which involves a lot of panels of her talking to people at different points in the past.

The missions are usually some bit of strange science that could be extremely dangerous - a Von Doom time platform big enough to disappear the city of Cincinnati, matter from a universe where electrolyzed water could turn the Earth into a star, a big rig roaming a war-torn country abducting people to co-opt their brains into an enormous bio-computer - but again, it's an excuse to let the artists go to town. There's never any sense the team is getting closer to the masterminds behind the "Shadow Council", just putting out various fires before they hit critical mass.

Which might explain why the team's first response is invariably, "kill," or at the very least, "severely injure."  The final issue of this stretch is the one where Rogers says he won't use torture, but he will leave the room while Black Widow and Moon Knight use torture. War Machine tries talking with the people being infected by Lovecraftian horrors, then gets berated by the rest of the team for not just killing those innocent victims before they could start to change. I guess cynicism is part and parcel of a book about superheroes doing stuff no one is supposed to know they did.

There were two more volumes of Secret Avengers after this, one following on the heels of the other, both running a little over a year. I bought the second of those (third volume overall), but Ales Kot was being too cute by half with his writing. I didn't even keep it long enough to do one of these posts about it, which is pretty damning considering how many books I've moved to the "give away" pile as soon as these entries were written.

Saturday Splash Page #183

"Busy Bees," in The Seeds, by Ann Nocenti (writer) and David Aja (artist/color artist/letterer)

Originally intended as a 4-issue mini-series to be released under Dark Horse's short-lived Berger Books imprint, The Seeds released 2 issues in 2018, then vanished, only to appear as a complete TPB in 2020. Here's another review of the series I did 4 years ago. 

Earth is dying, or at least that's what everyone seems to think. A billionaire tried shooting himself into space, missed his mark, and crashlanded on Enceladus. The people living inside the walls are dealing with frequent power blackouts and loss of wi-fi or communications networks. The people who moved outside the walls are living in the remains of what's out there, trying to get by without technology. At least, without wireless technology. Phones, Internet, things like that. They still have guns and the wheel and haven't abandoned agriculture. There's a quartet of aliens going around, gathering seeds and biological specimens. They hope the Earth is dying, because otherwise, the stuff they're collecting isn't worth anything.

But I think the point is that life is more resilient than we give it credit for. It's just that our particular notion of "life" isn't going to hold. Throughout the story, technology keeps failing, but life perseveres. There are two people, we only ever see them in hazmat suits. One is convinced their mechanical drone bees will handle pollinization, now that real bees are being killed by insecticides, pesticides mites. Specifically, pollenizing almond trees, because nuts are big money. The other is betting on things like planting wildflowers for the bees, or for fungi to repair ecological damage. At the end, the real bees have turned the drones into building fodder in their hives. The hives they built inside the tech acolyte's power junction boxes, messing them up in the process.

The quartet of aliens are used to dealing with single-celled life. Intelligent alien life (as intelligent as humans get, anyway) is a new thing for them, and it seems to mess with them. Race falls in love, or at least takes an interest in, a girl named Lola. Convinces her to move outside the walls, protects her from her cohorts. Eventually abandons the project. The leader of the quartet loses it, starts watching TV and shooting the sets with rifles. When a reporter named Astra publishes a photo of him and he becomes a star, he goes inside the walls the meet the people who find him interesting. By the end, none of the aliens seem to be making any plans to leave.

If they're actually aliens. There's a panel on the second-to-last page that suggests they may be lab-created by a biotech company, one that flew by earlier (flying over the no-tech zone) and sprayed stuff that killed the bees. The seeds aren't worth anything if the planet's still alive.

Aja draws a lot of nine-panel grids. Sometimes they're each showing individual things, but other times it's part of a larger picture, just broken up into smaller bits. There's also a recurring honeycomb motif, and in many cases, it's revealed by zooming in on something. Show a turtle, then zoom in on the design of the plates on its shell. Or zoom in on the wings of a fly, or an image on a phone screen until we're looking at a few pixels. The honeycomb design keeps popping up, suggesting a connection between living things, that we're not each just individual organisms, and technology is just humanity's best attempt at replicating life.

Sunday Splash Page #257

"Serpent Infestation," in Immortal Iron Fist #4, by Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction (writers), David Aja (artist), Matt Hollingsworth (colorist), Dave Lanphear (letterer)

Immortal Iron Fist may have been one of the first books I bought primarily because of the creative team, rather than the characters. Granted, when I first heard about it, I somehow confused Ed Brubaker with Brian K. Vaughn, who was writing Dr. Strange: The Oath, which I was very much enjoying. But the point remains, I don't recall having any strong feelings one way or the other about Iron Fist prior to this title, yet, here we are.

One of the major thing Brubaker and Matt Fraction did was posit that Danny Rand was only the latest in a long line of Iron Fists. Even if DC went away from the concept in the immediate aftermath of Crisis on the Infinite Earths, the notion of characters being part of a legacy or tradition made a slow but steady comeback in the late-90s, spearheaded by Starman and JSA.

Marvel never seemed to have a lot of time for that, outside the occasional nod like Rick Jones trying to take the codename Bucky to be Captain America's sidekick. Marvel seemed to prefer the "replacement" approach. Jim Rhodes taking over for Stark as Iron Man when Tony was in his cups, or Scott Lang becoming Ant-Man after Pym had shifted to Yellowjacket. When they did explore it, it was usually relegated to side universes like Spider-Girl's MC2 Universe.

After Immortal Iron Fist's success, suddenly legacies started popping up for all sorts of second-tier characters. Jason Aaron used it on Ghost Rider, and Moon Knight is nodding to the idea right now. Immortal Iron Fist also expanded the mythos what I would call laterally, by adding another six "Heavenly Cities", each with their own champion, with Fat Cobra seeming to be the fan favorite of the bunch.

(Aaron's Ghost Rider did this too, with Spirits of Vengeance across the world, and MacKay introduced the notion Khonshu has two "fists" at the same time.)

Amid the larger story of Danny learning he's really just the most recent (and least well-prepared) Iron Fist at the exact moment he's besieged from all sides by both HYDRA and his old enemy the Steel Serpent, the book would take time out to devote one-shot issues to some of the previous Iron Fists. Issue 7's spotlight on Wu Aoi-Shi, the Pirate Queen of Pinghai Bay (drawn by Travel Foreman, who also drew flashbacks at the start of most of the issues, alone with Leandro Fernandez and Khari Evans), seemed to be the fave.

David Aja was primary artist, and he brought a different sensibility to the action sequences. Where other artists would combine multiple actions into a single panel (via the after-image approach), Aja would sometimes draw Danny jump kicking a single HYDRA agent through a subway window across three panels. Really stretch out the moment. A lot of alternating between larger panels to show the scope of the challenge and lots of small square panels to cut between important points within a scene rapid-fire.

He also ditched the '70s high collar with plunging neckline costume early on in favor of the number above. It's more streamlined and practical and I don't have any complaints, but I don't know how more committed Iron Fist fans felt about the change.

Unfortunately, having David Aja as your regular artist means that if you're going to keep a monthly schedule, you're going to have fill-in artists. By the latter stages of the "Capital Cities of Heaven" arc that covered the second half of their run, Aja was sometimes drawing only a handful of pages, or none at all, with Kano or Tonci Zonjic taking over the lion's share of the work. They were close enough in style that characters maintained a similar look, but they didn't seem to have Aja's sense of style when it came to page layouts.

Also, the arc suffers from either not enough time, or too much build-up. We're told what's at stake is how often the Heavenly Cities may intersect with Earth. The loser, rather than being limited to once a decade, will be limited to once per 50 years, for example. It's unclear how you would determine a loser since there was apparently to be a battle royale between the fighters who lost earlier in the tournament. For that matter, if Orson Randall fucked the whole thing up last time by first refusing to fight, then killing another of the champions when he fled, how did that not result in K'un-Lun getting barred for fifty years?

It's a moot point, since the whole notion is dropped entirely to focus on the HYDRA subplot, which is itself really a revenge plot by a new character, descended from another new character we meet in flashback. Overall, I'm not sure the Brubaker/Fraction/Aja run doesn't end up being less than the sum of its parts, but the book didn't end when they departed.

Random Back Issues #98 - Hawkeye #1

I think the reason I never got around to watching Hawkeye was I didn't want to deal with the possibility of watching a bunch of dipshits in tracksuits saying "bro" constantly. And since Disney+ seems to be cracking down on account sharing, I never will. Because I sure as shit ain't shelling out for it myself.

Anyway, first issue of the Fraction/Aja Hawkeye run. What Clint does when he's not being an Avenger. And he's not being an Avenger because he fell off a building and landed on top of a car, breaking a lot of bones.

But he's out now, and somehow happy to be in New York in August, which he describes as being able to catch a whiff of fresh air beneath 'hot garbage, wet pennies and pee.' I know Clint didn't have a happy childhood, but certainly he must remember places with better smells than that? Whatever, after kicking his wheelchair into traffic, then ditching his taxi in more traffic - if Clint's meant to be extolling the virtues of NYC, he's really just convincing me he's had a lot of concussions - he returns to his apartment to find his neighbors being kicked out because the tracksuit guys tripled their rent.

Clint, having come into some money via some method I don't recall, decides to visit a secret casino and pay everyone's rent. Tracksuit Guy doesn't want their rent, he wants them gone to sell the building. Real estate thing. The Kingpin's involved, it ends up being a whole thing. It's why the Sad Clown Killer guy gets involved.

So Clint gets in a fight, gets thrown through a window. One of the tracksuit guys' dog, appreciating the gift of pizza Clint offered earlier, bites his owners hand when the guy shoots Clint, and gets kicked into traffic. Clint's attempt to alert, divert, something the driver of a car by flicking a coin through the his window with a finger, doesn't work and the dog gets hit. Which explains all the cutaway scenes through the issue of Clint bring the dog to a vet.

While Clint waits, Tracksuit Guy shows up, looking for a fight. Should have brought more than two guys, then. Clint's not that bad a fighter, no matter how inept he ends up looking through most of this series. Clint beats them up, stuffs them in a taxi to the airport with over 12.5 million dollars to buy the building outright, and all the problems are solved!

Or not.

[5th longbox, 95th comic, Hawkeye (vol. 4) #1, by Matt Fraction (writer), David Aja (artist), Matt Hollingsworth (colorist), Chris Eliopoulos (letterer)]

Sunday Splash Page #231

"Winter's Soldier," in Hawkeye (vol. 4) #6, by Matt Fraction and David Aja, Matt Hollingsworth (colorist), Chris Eliopoulos (letterer)

Oh. This series.

Fraction and Aja's Hawkeye seems to get a lot of credit for Marvel realizing fans might enjoy books with consistent creative teams granted the freedom to tell their stories without being stuck constantly tying into Big Event stuff. Those couple of years of Marvel Now! that produced the Soule/Pulido She-Hulk, G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel, so on and so on. I think the Mark Waid/Paolo Rivera/Marcos Martin Daredevil book that started a year earlier really deserves the credit, but Hawkeye sucks up the oxygen in the room because Fraction and Aja did an issue from a dog's perspective.

To be clear, I was excited for this book when it started! Expected Clint Barton to get to do a lot of cool stuff. And I maintained that excitement for the first 7 or so issues! Clint makes the impulsive decision to hand a bunch of Eastern European mobsters in tracksuits a duffel bag of cash for an apartment building so the tenants don't get kicked out, and this (among other things) puts him in the crosshairs of a bunch of crime families.

It's a solid premise, what Hawkeye gets up to when he's not being the best Avenger. Fraction filled it with a lot of snappy dialogue and banter, especially between Clint and Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye. There's potential to introduce a wide cast of characters as tenants to get us more invested in the conflict. Aja knows how to lay out pages in a brilliant way, whether it's doing a series of quick panels of Kate speaking in slow-motion in parallel with Clint releasing an arrow, or weird diagrams to emphasize how Pizza Dog perceives the world.

Although I wonder if those pages are where Jonathan Hickman got the notion for all those text pages and charts he's so fond of. If so, it may have been a real Pandora's box.

But after they killed off "Grills", one of the few tenants given even the tiniest hint of depth, it started to slide. The book spent five issues essentially replaying the time before and after Grills' death, but from different perspectives. Here's what Kate was doing, here's what the sad clown killer guy was doing, here's what the dog was doing, and so on. Combined with David Aja's inability to maintain even an every other month schedule (Francesco Francavilla and Annie Wu drew some of the issues in that stretch), and the five issues of Clint Barton moping around and being useless dragged on for nine months. Contrast that with the Gruenwald mini-series from two weeks ago. Clint is out-of-sorts at the start of issue 2 over being played by his girlfriend, and even though he remains angry and distant with Mockingbird, he still gets off his butt and does something. It was exhausting and frustrating, and if I had any sense, I'd have pulled the rip cord.

The delays themselves were a whole other thing. The book started in August of 2012, and actually shipped 6 issues by the end of the year, though two of those were drawn by Javier Pulido. Counting the Annual that came out in 2013 (also drawn by Pulido, but lacking a splash page), the book shipped 17 issues the next 30 months before it concluded in June/July of 2015. The pace slowed the longer it went. At one point, Marvel shipped issue 16 (focused on Kate) before issue 15 (focused on Clint), because Annie Wu (drawing Kate's adventures in L.A., which were pretty enjoyable) had been done for a while and there was no telling when Aja would actually, you know, finish issue 15.

It was difficult to square this version of Clint Barton with the competent hero we see in the Avengers. The guy who was a good leader for the Thunderbolts, who took down two Elders of the Universe, can't master the drawstring on his sweatpants all of the sudden. I understand this is supposed to be Clint during off-hours, and there's no team (unless you count the dog and his brother) backing him up, but I've seen Hawkeye handle threats a lot worse than a bunch of morons in tracksuits solo. I expected there would be some rough patches for the character in the book, but I also expected those to be interspersed with moments of him doing cool shit. This did not happen. In practice, it was other characters taking time out from yelling at Clint for fucking up to do cool shit.

(There was also the whole thing about Clint cheating on Spider-Woman, which is an Oliver Queen thing. Clint's the one who says dumb hurtful shit without thinking. Still better than Bendis repeatedly writing Clint as kill-happy, but that's a very low bar.)

The book finally wrapped up just as Marvel was (temporarily) canceling all their ongoing titles for a few months because of Hickman's Secret Wars. The ending was as satisfying as it could be, but by that point I was just glad it was over. It felt like a book that had been style over substance for a while. Very stylish, to be sure, but Fraction, Aja, and Hollingsworth proved they could still make it stylish while actually advancing the story, they just went through long stretches where it felt like there wasn't much interest in doing that.

The catch to a creative team being allowed to cook their way is, there's still no guarantee I'll like what they put on the table.

The Seeds of Destruction

Feels like the kid summed up the human condition rather neatly.

The Seeds was originally going to be a 4-issue mini-series published through Dark Horse's Berger Books line. Ann Nocenti and David Aja got two issues out, and then it just dropped off the radar. Finally, they released a collection of what would have been all 4 issues last winter.

So, the Earth's on the verge of total collapse. Some people still live in crowded cities, others have gone beyond the wall, abandoning phones and internet and whatnot to scratch out whatever existence they can. Probably the main character is Astra, your typical reporter in fiction who wants to do hard-hitting journalism, but has to give her editor the cheap sensationalist crap that gets views, or clicks, or whatever. And what Astra finds that might do both is Lola and Race. 

Lola's a young woman in a wheelchair. Race is a guy she finds herself growing fond of. Race is also part of a quartet of aliens living out beyond the wall. They're here because someone - it's never revealed who - is pretty sure Earth is about to go belly up. Their job is to gather as many seeds as possible for the Celestial Seed Bank. They aren't conquerors, or grand beings with plans of creating some Eden, so much as they're contractors, hired and sent to do a job. Race and one of the others, Sandy, both note at different times most planets they're sent to haven't gotten past single-celled life, so this was actually sort of a nice assignment.

 

A lot of the book is about choices, what people are going to decide is important. Is Race important enough to Lola to go beyond the wall? Is she important enough to him to go against his team's leader, who is clearly enjoying Earth a little too much. Is the opportunity to write the stories she wants worth Astra outing Lola as the one sleeping with an alien? Her boss argues yes, the public has a right to know there might be alien babies running around, but her boss also admitted that when she was going to write an article about a vampire cult, she created it herself. Basically, tell the lie hard enough it becomes truth.

There are a couple of other bits Nocenti adds in to round it out. A farmer wondering why his bees abandoned their hives, and feeling really bad about having to kill his prize sow. There are also two scientists somewhere, each of them with different ideas about what's going to save the planet, technology or nature. Which feels like a false dichotomy, since you can presumably use technology to help nature along. Technology might help you clear a field of invasive species so you could restore a native prairie full of wildflowers for the bees, for example.

I think Aja handles all the art and color work himself. The book sticks to a black/green-gray scheme. Which allows for high-contrast at times, but also can give things a sickly look. You probably wouldn't think a plant that shade of green was doing very well if you saw it. But it works. Even just the absence of the shadows works. Like when Astra's able to enlarge a photo of some idiot billionaire whose spaceship crashed on Enceladus, and she can somehow make out there's a plant sprouting in his eye socket inside his helmet. Cue Jeff Goldbloom "life finds a way."

 

He uses a pretty 9-panel grid most of the time. In some cases it's only one or two rows of 3 panels, and then a larger panel takes up the other third or two-thirds of the page. It makes things feel very restricted, I guess. Everything is caught in their own little boxes. Disconnected from larger things, maybe. There's a recurring motif of hexagonal grids. Beehives, insect wings, chain link fences, people's tattoos. I don't know what that means. Life falls into particular ordered patterns, and attempts to circumvent that are futile? Even if everyone is trying to isolate themselves, they still are connected? Trying to pretend nothing we do has an impact, and nothing else can impact us is a ludicrous notion? The things some people put stock in are incredibly fragile, while things considered archaic are more resilient than we expect?

I'm just spitballing, I don't really know. But I enjoy trying to figure it out.

What I Bought 9/12/2018

I had plans to come up with something for Wednesday, but consecutive 11+ hours days on the road took most of the initiative out of me. For today, we have a couple of books from this week, one that is wrapping up its opening arc, and the other is just halfway through.

Domino #6, by Gail Simone (writer), David Baldeon (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Clayton Cowles (letterer) - When you put them altogether there on the cover, it sure looks like Domino has never had a decent costume in her life. I'd almost vote for the one with the shoulder pads and the helmet/faceguard, just because it looks like its designed to handle being shot at.

Domino has a final showdown with Topaz. Desmond/Prototype didn't survive that punch in the head from Outlaw, so now hurting Domino is all the crazy redhead has left. But Domino is able to control her powers enough Topaz can't use them against her, and then Outlaw and Diamondback hit the angry lady with a Quinjet, and Domino pumps 12 bullets into, to Shang-Chi's disappointment. We can't all spend our time moping about being forced on the path of violence, Shang.

I don't know if I'm used to villains getting away to be constant pains in the rear or what, but this felt vaguely anticlimactic. Maybe the point was for Domino to have gained enough control that Topaz couldn't mess with her powers, which required getting over being afraid of the fact the lady could mess with her powers. Once that happened, where she would have luck back on her side, Topaz really has no chance. The part where she describes herself as a Disney princess was an odd choice of metaphor. It's tossed into the aftermath that Prototype had planted a tracker on Domino at some point. When, I have no idea. I don't recall him getting close enough to do that at any point before he was already showing wherever she was.

 The fight scene is drawn well, lot of energy to it, impressive blur lines for punches, people making exertion faces rather than looking totally calm when they're trying to punch someone's head off. It's not reinventing the wheel, but it works. There is a scene early in the book I'm not quite sure of. We see Outlaw wheeling Diamondback into a hospital, telling her she was lucky to be alive. After a confrontation with a bigoted doctor, the two ladies call Adelbert for news of Domino, but now they're outside the hospital and getting into a car. I'm not sure if I'm meant to assume there was a gap in there where Diamondback got treated for her stab wound, or if Outlaw was supposed to be wheeling her out of the hospital at the beginning of the whole thing and Baldeon got it backwards.

Other than that, the artwork was good, and I like how Arubtov incorporates the colors of the lights of Hong Kong into the backdrop of Domino and Topaz' fight. Using the reds and blues, mostly reds, for anger or focus of the two characters. Topaz trying to pick herself up with dull yellows behind her, she's not up to a full head of steam yet, while Domino's in front of bright reds, because she's pretty much resigned to ending Topaz, because that's what it will take.

I guess we'll see if Simone does something with this in subsequent issues, brings back some remnant of the program that experimented on her. It seems odd to bring all this in just to put it in the trash six issues later.

The Seeds #2, by Ann Nocenti (writer), David Aja (artist) - Nooo, not the turtles!

Rosa travels into the Zone to be with her alien boyfriend, Race, and his expedition. The reporter, Astra, also travels into the Zone to find proof of these aliens, but is suspicious about how easily she got though the checkpoints. She has a run-in with the more crazy member of Race's expedition, but escapes for the time being. Someone is planning to drop something in the Zone, but whether they're trying to kill bees, people, or maybe the aliens I'm not clear on. Probably people. And there's the subplot about the farmer being sad he had to kill one of his hogs for food.

There's a page about some rich guy who tries to travel to another planet and it's gone catastrophically wrong, but the video feed from his spaceship is still active, so everyone can see him freaking out. I chuckled at that. And the part where the one alien learns the others all call him "Nutwad", when they aren't calling him "Gasbag". Sometimes you just don't like your coworkers.

Through most of the issue, there's a turtle making its way across the landscape, with those plastic soda can holders around one leg. It makes its way past Lola at one point and she pauses from turning a rotten apple into a bong long enough to remove the plastic ring. Which feels significant someone, bothering to stop to help this turtle which, if the planet is well and truly fucked, then so is the turtle. Maybe I'm just grasping.

The concept of making up a story and then making it come true pops up again, but I'm not sure how that ties in. Unless the point is you can make up most any story about people and it could eventually be true. It's possible for you to imagine it, so it's possible people would do it, even if they aren't at that moment. The story gives them the idea? Again, I don't know. If the GreenTech folks are trying to kill people, why? What's there to gain? Same delusions of grandeur as the rich idiot floating in space?

Aja continues to work mostly in 9 or 7-panel grids. Mostly focuses panels on small areas. A single character, or the turtle, or the rusted remains of an old car. Gives a feel for the place where things are happening. He does that bit where Astra is taking pictures and one row of panels are three consecutive pictures she's taking as she pans across someone's trailer and front yard. There are a couple of pages of switching back and for between the farmer preparing to kill the hog, and Nutwad sneaking up on Astra. The potential victims both oblivious, and their would-be killers telling themselves different lies for it to work in their minds.

What I Bought 8/5/2018

A venture uptown last weekend gave me a chance to find the two books that came out last week I wanted. Hooray for good fortune. And it is good fortune, because I like both these comics!

Giant Days #41, by John Allison (writer), Maz Sarin (artist), Whitney Cogar (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Poor Tim Allen, those Hollywood libruls made him replace Wilson with an angry British lady in his Home Improvement reboot. Don't worry, there is no Home Improvement reboot. Although watching Susan try to flick cigs into Tim's mower's gas tank might be worth it.

Susan fears she has lost her edge for confrontation. Esther is trying to keep Daisy from having to interact with Ingrid. Esther is also slightly discomfited to see Nina hanging out with Ed is his tiny room. At the Halloween party, Esther and Susan get drunk and try to intimidate Ingrid, only for her to verbally eviscerate them until Daisy arrives and does the same to Ingrid. Considering Susan did not try to punch or stab Ingrid, I'm going to agree she's lost her edge. And Esther was practicing cultural appropriation with that geisha outfit, so she kind of deserved it.

I have the most horrible feeling the nude male model in the art class was Dean Thompson. Although the "Ubuntu" back tattoo seems out of place for him. Oh God, I just noticed the poster on the door of his room as Esther leaves Ed and Nina alone! It was Dean! Where's the bleach?!

I can't decide if the meeting in the park between Daisy and Ingrid was Ingrid being genuinely remorseful for her behavior in the art class, or some trick on her part to get Daisy back. I doubt Ingrid is actually smart enough to pull a stunt like that, but I can't rule it out. So many unpleasant theories this issue is bringing up in my mind. Well, I'm pretty sure I'm in a down cycle right now, so it's to be expected.

Scanning through the costumes at the party, there are two girls at the Halloween party dancing together as Ruby and Sapphire from Stephen Universe! I might almost have smiled at that. Or perhaps it was my stomach reacting to that Cajun burger last night (I'm typing this Sunday morning, after another weekend of questionable decisions with Alex). The montage of Susan and Esther's attempts to keep Daisy from having to see Ingrid was funny. "This supermarket smells of monkey nuts." But they're organic!

The Seeds #1, by Ann Nocenti and David Aja - Unless "Art Director" is some new title for a color artist, I think Aja handled that and the lettering himself.

There's a wall. it divides a city, into a place for people who want more technology and those who don't. There's a reporter, Astra, who wants to do a story on the non-tech side of the wall, but her editor won't approve it until she does one hyping some club that will supposedly let you experience death. Pfft, just go drive in Chicago, that'll take care of that for ya. There's a fellow named Race, possibly an alien, out collecting seeds from various species on the planet, because we're about to die. But Race is falling for a woman named Lola, and she might like him too. Except Astra's seen the face under his mask, and now she's on his trail for a story.

It's a quiet book so far, people talking and maybe trying to figure stuff out. So Aja spends a lot of panels on the stuff that makes up their lives. The plate of bugs they're eating, the contents of Asta's fridge, Gabrielle (Astra's editor), stubbing out a cig. The little things, motions, that people do as they go about their days. The first issue is 28 pages, and 14 of those are 9-panel grids. Half of the remaining pages are 7 panels, two rows of 3 panels, and one row that's just a single panel that stretches across the whole page. The larger panels are what Aja uses to establish the setting. What the wall looks like, topped with barbed wire and soldiers/cops/somebody patrolling with guns and gas masks, SAFE in big bold letters stamped on the side of their halftrack.

But everything stays in that grid pattern, ultimately. It does actually work very well for me in establishing the pace of things, in a way panel layouts usually don't. I'll read reviews of comics where the writer says, "So-and-so used {insert layout} to set a {insert pace description} to create. . ." and I almost never feel that way. I read most comics and I feel like I move through them at my pace. Fast if I'm skimming because something's happening I don't care about. Or I stop and linger over a panel if I'm hunting for background details or body language cues. But here, it actually works. The second-to-last page, as Nocenti and Aja build to Astra noticing Race's face worked really well. Panel of her sliding an arm into her coat. Next panel her lighting a cig. Next panel, Race and Lola moving away down the alley. Next panel, Astra's getting ready to take the cigarette out of her mouth to exhale smoke. It's just so obvious how short a span of time it all is that it really drives the deliberate nature of the thing home. I was surprised, maybe impressed, they didn't go for a bigger panel for the shot of Race's head. The zoom-in works just fine, but I'm conditioned to expect the artist gets more space for the big surprise, and they went against it.

Something that seemed relevant to me was the editor's speech about how, if you spread a lie or a myth long enough, people will make it come true. Her classmates insisted she slept around, even though she didn't, but everyone believed, and eventually she did. So if they say the club lets you experience death, maybe it will. But will it really be a brief experience? Also, her story doesn't touch on the idea of what the people who start the lie intend. Why did they want everyone to think she slept around? She brings up Roswell, that letting people think their were aliens gave the government cover for other projects they didn't want known. Maybe the idea was to present the truth in a manner no one would believe it, with a lie dressed up as the "real" truth others could use to dismiss the "lie".

There's a lot more here - there's a whole thread of a beekeeper bemoaning the loss of his queen bee I didn't mention earlier, and two birds on a wire - but it's only part one. I need to see more of this before I can figure out where exactly Nocenti and Aja are going with it.

31 Days of Scans - Day 24

Today is for Least Favorite Costume. Now, I want to emphasize that it's "least favorite", not "worst". There are countless costumes worse than the one I'm going to pick on here. The various female characters on the X-Men alone could fill a month of Sundays, depending on your sartorial preferences. Wonder Man had that god awful Christmas colored outfit for a stretch in West Coast Avengers (which would have bothered me more if Simon hadn't wound up in the role of "egotistical asshole" on the team, an impressive feat for a roster that had Tony Stark and Clint Barton). Then there were all the terrible "armored" outfits of the '90s: Captain America's, Daredevil's, that suit Ted Kord built for Booster, Azrael's Bat-suit I suppose (though there are certain artist who made that not look too bad to me).

But like I said, it's least favorite, and so I'm picking this, plainclothes, basic, whatever you want to call it look for Hawkeye. There's nothing distinctly awful about it. It's too simple for that. It's a t-shirt with a purple chevron on it and some sunglasses.

Which is the problem: It's dull. It would be a good outfit for someone trying to maintain a lower profile, but this is Clint Barton we're talking about. Low profile is not in his vocabulary. He's loud, he's boisterous, he's bragging and butting heads with people, demanding you notice him*. He was trained and spent a fair amount of his developmental years in a carnival, where the whole point is to draw attention, get eyeballs on you, butts in the seats.

Also, the old costumes are more practical, and sure, practicality is rarely my major concern with costumes, but I figure it's worth addressing. Clint is essentially a normal human. He doesn't have any enhanced resilience to injury, no healing factor or bulletproof skin. The older outfits offer protection from head injuries, though I suppose the sunglasses could be equipped to project a small repulsor field around his cranium. Clint's brash, but he isn't an idiot. A costume that has some sort of protection makes sense.

I will say I prefer the current outfit to the one from roughly Avengers #100, with the headband and the mini-skirt. That one's both ugly and impractical.

Clint demonstrates what I assume is proper bowman technique on a variant cover for Hawkeye #2 of the 2012 series, drawn and colored David Aja. The other two covers are from Clint's 2003 series. The first was penciled by Carlos Pacheco, inked by Jesus Merino, and colored by Frank D'Armata. The other was, well I'd swear that's Scott Kolins work, but the Grand Comics Database says Joe Bennett (who did do the interiors). If the GCD is right, Sandu Florea inked it, and Kickstart colored it. If it was Kolins, he inked it himself most likely.

* It might almost have made sense for that stint leading the Secret Avengers, except for the part where Venom and the Beast were both on the team, not to mention Captain Britain. Guy in a bright black-and-white living costume, big, blue furry guy, and a flying guy wearing a modified Union Jack does not exactly scream subtle. Oh yeah, and Valkyrie and her big, white flying horse.

What I Bought 7/22/2015 - Part 2

Two more comics, each starring heroes who can’t quite seem to get things right.

Ant-Man Annual #1, by Nick Spencer (writer), Brent Schoonover (artist, flashback), Ramon Rosanas (artist, present day), Jordan Boyd (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer) – Is Scott planning to stop a runaway trolley with the power of ants? That would be pretty impressive. Hopefully he’s not going to make them throw themselves under the wheels, in the hopes they jam them up. O’Grady tried that with a jet engine once, and I don’t recall it working terribly well. Plus, it’s kind of mean to makes the bugs kill themselves like that.

I was leaning towards giving this a pass and just waiting for Astonishing Ant-Man to start in October, but it got some good reviews, and I decided to skip All-Star Section Eight #2. Scott tries bonding with his employees at a Dolphins’ sports bar, to little success. Wait, there’s no such thing as Dolphins’ fans, said the supposedly non-existent Arizona Cardinals’ fan. Credit to Machinesmith for helping Grizz out. Also credit to Grizzly for sticking with a theme, even though the Bears are kind of a mess right now. Haha, enjoy rooting for Jay Cutler, says the guy who had to watch Ryan Lindley play quarterback like a drunk infant for his team last year. Lindley is a terrible QB. Roger Goodell could do something useful for once and force some team Arizona plays this year to start Lindley, just so their defense can pad their stats against him.

Where was I? Right, a broadcast announces Hank Pym died fighting Ultron in some book I didn’t read. Except I think everyone is just pretending he’s dead? This makes Scott think back to the last time he saw Hank, when Pym visited to track down something he hid in a lab inside the helmet Scott’s using. It’s a killswitch for some fake Avengers he built to make himself feel better, but they’ve been stolen by Egghead, who is back from the dead. I honestly assumed he’d been brought back years ago, just because that’s how it seems to go, but then I keep forgetting the Wasp is back, too, until she showed up at the end of this issue. Scott gets many laughs at Hank’s expense, which seems fair considering Hank keeps basically calling him an idiot, and outright says he let Scott keep the Ant-Man costume because he knew Scott wouldn’t make him look bad in comparison.

This is the thing I struggle with when it comes to Spencer’s writing. In a vacuum, this is all pretty funny. I chuckled more than once. But part of the reason it works is because I have certain familiarity with these characters based on past experience with these characters, and in that sense, it jars. It was an issue in Superior Foes too, where I couldn’t jibe Spencer’s Boomerang with the guy I’d seen previously, even accounting for Fred being the narrator and thus probably lying through his teeth to make himself look better. It’s like, “Ha, sick burn, but wait, would Pym actually think that? Well, OK, Hank can be kind of unaware of others’ feelings sometimes. Would Jan confirm Pym felt Scott was an idiot to Scott’s face?”

I know it’s all part of the theme Spencer’s going for, Scott being on the outs with other heroes, regarded as unreliable, a second-rate legacy version of a third-tier hero. To the point Stark can actually get other Avengers to ignore Scott when he calls for help, even though you figure at least a few of them would help just as a “screw you” to Tony. I think it’s all sort of satirical, taking something, then exaggerating it for comic effect. Pym struggles with confidence issues, so he builds robot versions of his teammates to say nice things about him, and talk shit about themselves. Lang has a tendency not to stick with any team for very long, and he’s not usually presented as a Reed Richards like super-genius, so he becomes someone who can’t see things through, and is not very bright, and people think so little of him they all tell him so. I think my issue is Spencer takes it a step further than I can stretch my disbelief, and it snaps me out of the story periodically.

Schoonover does a pretty good job of working close to Rosanas’ art style, though I’m guessing Boyd’s color work also has something to do with it. Schoonover gives Scott a bit bigger nose and more pronounced chin than Rosanas (not that you can tell when Scott has the helmet on, and I would laugh if it turned out the helmet was designed like that to deemphasize Scott’s chin and nose.) He also goes with much broader facial expressions and body language. Rosanas tends to keep things restrained, so even when someone is supposed to be freaking out, there isn’t a lot of weight behind it. Schoonover tends to go the other direction, people reacting more with their whole bodies. It’s not a bad approach. There is one glitch. When the flashback starts, Scott punches the Porcupine with his left hand, but he shakes quills out of his right in the next panel. I suppose he could have punched him less carefully with the right earlier in the fight and we didn’t see it. Also, I couldn’t tell if the A.I.-Vengers were supposed to be moving inside those tubes, or if he just wasn’t keeping their poses consistent. And whatever one might say about Hank Pym, he’s right about Wonder Man being a terrible actor.

Hawkeye #22, by David Aja and Matt Fraction (storytellers), Matt Hollingsworth (color art), Chris Eliopoulos (lettering) – Well, the Apocalypse will no doubt commence now that the final issue of this series has shipped. I have it on good authority God was waiting for this to wrap up before killing us all. Eh, it’s been a good run. We invented movable type and porkpie hats, not too shabby.

The redhead remembered the combination to red safe, but here’s Boss Bro and the Sad Clown. Clint shows up, then Lucky, then Kate. The other tenants take care of the rest of the goons, Kate deals with the tracksuit imbecile – finally! – and Clint, after some difficulty, puts down the Sad Clown. I think that’s the first fight Clint’s won in like 15 issues, so good for him. But Barney stole all his money back, and thinks Clint can’t find him again. Barney, Clint is friends with like 20 super-scientists, not to mention the Black Widow, I’m pretty sure he can track your fat butt down before you finish your drink if he wants to. Which I would, on principle alone. Barney appeared to throw in with Clint, then bailed. That’s betrayal, and I believe I’ve made my opinions clear on that a few times. But the whole universe is ending and Clint’s going to become real old for some reason or another, so I guess Barney gets away with it.

All the crime bosses have decided to continue trying to kill Clint and Kate, because they’re morons, I guess. You’d think Fisk at least would know better than to waste time with something like that. Is this an end result Fraction and Aja always had planned, or is it something Lemire was hoping to run with in his book, and this team was like sure, we’ll set that up for you? It doesn’t matter, really, other than I find it curious these characters, ostensibly concerned with making money and doing business, really think trying to kill super-heroes isn’t a waste of time and money. It’s something I was thinking about, given Marvel went ahead and started All-New Hawkeye before this had finished. I wonder if there were changes made to this, to accommodate that book.

It’s a pretty book as always. I’m curious about the use of the mauve/lavender color, whatever it is, Hollingsworth uses for backgrounds a few times. Almost always in conjunction with Aja doing a black shadow for whatever is in the panel, be it Lucky, an arrow, Penny’s hand and the gun she was holding. I don’t know if it just makes a good backdrop for the black, or if it’s meant to have a particular emotional resonance. He switches to a yellow when Clint and Kate finish off the clown guy. I really like the headbutt panel. Something about the way the shadows are drawn on Clint’s face, the way they almost evoke speed lines in his hair, makes me think of Joe Kubert’s art, the way he drew people getting hit, and how it could distort them. That’s never a bad comparison to elicit in my brain, for the record.

I might do a post-mortem in the future, though I could basically sum up my feelings in one double-page splash I’ve had saved on my computer for like 8 months now, but we’ll see. If I look at it strictly by itself, it was good. This is what I was hoping for from this book when it was originally announced. Lots of action, well-illustrated, some snappy dialogue. Clint getting to do some cool stuff and save the day, even if it doesn’t always go smoothly, and there are other problems to contend with down the line. It’s not the greatest final issue I’ve ever read, but it’s a long way from the worst.

What I Bought 3/24/2015 - Part 5

Two different titles, each nearing their ends, one issue each. One way behind schedule, the other cruising along just fine.

Daredevil #13, by Chris Samnee and Mark Waid (storytellers), Matthew Wilson (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) -I saw the first page from this issue on Samnee's Tumblr page, and he mentioned how it was the first page he'd seen in awhile that wasn't edited beyond recognition. I don't know what that means exactly, but I sure don't like the sound of it. DC seems to be adopting Marvel's approach of allowing their creative teams to actually make books that reflect their styles, don't tell me Marvel's gonna start imitating DC's new 52 approach of making everything the same somehow. Of course, the book has 5 editors listed, between assistant editors, editors, senior editors, and editors in chief. How the hell does it need so many editors?

So Matt and Kirsten are a couple now, and Matt is struggling with the implications. He's afraid of what will happen to her, and he's afraid of being happy, so Foggy has to yell at him a bit. Kirsten's in the middle of coffee with her dad, because she learned he hired bodyguards for her without mentioning it, when someone drugs and abducts her. Matt is of course convinced this is about him, but it turns out to be a killer Kirsten helped put away when she was a prosecutor. Kirsten is ecstatic at the prospect of an archfoe, while DD is less than amused. He ought to be more concerned that the Shroud seems to have teamed up with the Owl, who can now observe Matt through any electronic device, but then, Matt doesn't know about that. Yet.

I love the scowl Matt got when Foggy starts giving him grief about keeping Foggy hidden while Kirsten and Matt are out together all the time. It's such a little kid stance, it fits well with how Matt's trying to hard to deny that he loves Kirsten and wants to be happy with her. He's trying to resist the reality of that, because of how things have worked out in the past. It's also interesting how Matt refuses to look at Foggy for most of the conversation. Granted, he doesn't need to look in his direction, but Matt's usually polite enough to face someone he's talking to. Here, though, he's almost always turned away at least 90 degrees. He doesn't want to engage with Foggy's points.

I also like the shade of purple (lavender?) Wilson used for the knockout gas. It fits with the eventual revelation of the abductor's identity, but it's similar enough to the color of the Purple Man's skin it suggests a super-villain, which plays into Matt's fears (and all the panels through the issue of the Owl spying on Matt). Oh, and when DD confronts the killer, I thought Matt's mental checklist was amusing. The killer's knives might be a special alloy! Oh, he might have some super-fast attack ability because his pulse is up! No, no, he's just a serial killer.

Hawkeye #21, by David Aja and Matt Fraction (storytellers), Matt Hollingsworth (color art), Chris Eliopoulos (lettering) - Took me a second to realize Clint's wearing a sock cap with an "H" on it. Couldn't figure out how it was there until then.

Clint apologizes to Jess, so that's good. The redhead is coming back, though. That's bad. Clint's got his neighbors helping defend the apartment building, and that's good. Except that old woman let the clown in, and that's bad. And then she beat Clint with a bat? Seriously Fraction? Clint can't even handle some old lady with a bat? This book, I tell you. Clint's woozy, so I don't think he can even tell the tracksuits are yelling at him about the safe he stole from them a thousand years ago, and Barney refuses to use all that money Clint has to buy his way out. So he winds up with a knife in his back. But here comes Pizza Dog with an arrow. So maybe things are looking a little better for whenever the last issue shows up.

What color is that Hollingsworth is using the last several pages? It's not sepia, it's a brown with some red tinting to it. It's an interesting choice. I'd say there's something visceral to it, but that might just be because all the pages he uses for, someone is getting beaten or stabbed, so there's blood and viscera flying around. My doubts about Clint losing a fight to an old woman aside, the way her words are mixed in with the blood spatter, done with the same black color as the blood, and not separated within a bubble was a nice touch. I'm guessing that's Aja, but it could be Eliopoulos. Also the way that, as Clint regains consciousness, the black panels get narrower. As the scene on the roof reaches its denouement, Aja keeps going to more and more panels. Like page 18, the top row is 3 panels, middle row is 4 panels, bottom row is 5 panels. It's one of those times where I actually get the attempt to affect the pace I'm reading with the panel layout 

But the skill of the people involved in this book has never been in question. It's been whether the story was any good, and on that score, I still have my doubts. Barney apparently has a thing with Simone, the single mom, but it didn't exactly feel earned. On the other hand, Barney's death scene felt moving. Clint trying to drag himself up, the way we're only seeing bits and pieces of Barney's fight, Clint seeing the knife, knowing what's coming, but he can't move fast enough. That worked really well. I'd never given a crap about Clint's brother before this series, so Team Hawkeye can count that as a win (I suppose they also made me care a little about Kate, so count that as a win, too).