Saturday Splash Page #184

"Gorilla-Robot-Uranian-Merwoman Alliance," in Secret Wars: Agents of Atlas #1, by Tom Taylor (writer), Steve Pugh (artist), Tamra Bonvillain (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer)

So, besides those 3 mini-series I bought during Hickman's Secret Wars, I also bought this one-shot. Probably because Marvel wasn't putting much else out I was interested in at the time. It starred the Agents of Atlas, who hadn't gotten much run in the previous 4 years, though this was written by Tom Taylor rather than Jeff Parker.

Like most of the tie-ins, this focused on a specific section of Doom's Battleworld, one Heinrich Zemo rules through constant, totalitarian oversight and control, with SHIELD as his police force. Atlas is a hidden cell fighting against Zemo, but their leader Jimmy Woo (rocking an eyepatch in this world) went missing after the last mission. So besides the exposition, it's a rescue mission story.

With only one issue, Taylor can't spare much focus for Namora or Marvel Boy. Gorilla-Man gets most of the page time, since he describes the mission where Woo went missing to SHIELD boss Phil Coulson (who's been secretly helping Atlas), and is the one who finds Woo. And since this is essentially a What If? story, Taylor can afford to do a few things Parker didn't. So we finally see the Gorilla-Man curse transferred (to Helmut Zemo, who Pugh draws as a psychotic-looking kid before he becomes a psychotic gorilla-kid.) And we see Venus return to her roots as a siren, leading Heinrich to his death.

Those Zemos, always falling off stuff.

Pugh's design for Zemo's realm, called Metropolitia, is a weird mix. SHIELD's HQ reminds me a bit of Jetsons' architecture, all curved lines and discs, while the vehicles hew to a sort of '50s aesthetic. Which maybe fits with the origins of some of the characters, especially the later idea of Jimmy Woo as sort of a super-spy. But the Metropolitia also has circles in the ground that seem to discharge huge bursts of fire or energy, so there's a bit of Apokolips there. The bits of the city and factories imply a closed-in place, though this place is nowhere near as dirty and drenched in shadows as Darkseid's turf. Zemo's home basically looks like a classic medieval castle, all mortared stone and wooden doors with barred windows.

It could be argued to fit the hodgepodge nature of Battleworld, plus Zemo's attempts to dress up 20th Century fascism with a veneer of the divine right of kings. He should rule, because he's Zemo and he's better. And he should get to have a goddess for a wife. But he rules through a repressive watchdog state that treats his subjects as guinea pigs (he has an army of Weapon Xs, which are just regular people that were experimented on and run around in the weird helmet and underwear from the Barry Windsor-Smith story), and he has to imprison and torture Venus' friend to have any hope of getting her to speak with him.

Sunday Splash Page #353

"Run the Gauntlet," in Master of Kung Fu (2015) #3, by Haden Blackman (writer), Dalibor Talijac (penciler), Goran Sudzuka (inker), Miroslav Mrva (colorist), Travis Lanham (letterer)

And here's the other Secret Wars mini-series I bought. Set in a version of K'un Lun ruled by Shang-Chi's dad, Zheng Zu, where Shang's become a drunken derelict since Zheng made him kill the leader of the Iron Fist clan.

Shang's prompted into action when a group of outcasts (kind of like Morlocks, but half of them are New Mutants) try to defend him, and agrees to be their teacher. Realizing none of that will do any good so long as his dad rules the roost, Shang enters the Thirteen Chambers, the tournament held every 13 years to determine who will rule the city.

I admit I was expecting more focus on the tournament, which is relegated to maybe the last issue and a half. But I was also expecting something more like a shonen anime tournament. You know, with a bracket and 1-on-1 match-ups, leading to a final 2. Instead, Shang has to fight everyone else (see above) before he can face his father, which doesn't seem like much of a tournament to me. It's also kind of weird that Shang tells Kitty the Thirteen Chambers predates K'un Lun, but Zheng is somehow able to control it to make sure Shang will have to face everyone else.

Talijac and Sudzuka combine for a very clean look, even during the fighting, nothing is too gritty or rough. They tend to use each panel as a beat in the fight, showing the flow of action from one move to the next. A block in one panel, a twist in the next, a strike in the third. It's a nice way of showing he, even having given up on anything, Shang's still a well-trained fighter.

The designs on the characters vary widely in how close they hew to the character that inspires them. Black Panther and Psylocke - sorry, Lady Mandarin here - look pretty much the same. But Jessica Drew of the Spider Cult's quite different. Not that she's in the book much. Most of the other challengers are introduced and discarded in the course of the third issue.

It all boils down to Shang facing his dad, but first he and Danny Rand have unresolved business. Which turns out to not be what it seems at first. Shang isn't innocent, but he did it to prevent a greater evil. I guess as some sort of arc for Danny, that he sets aside his desire for revenge against Shang for the greater good of the city.

Overall, it's not really what I was hoping for, but it's not bad. The Francesco Francavilla covers are excellent, however.

Sunday Splash Page #347

"Land of the Dead," in Marvel Zombies (2015) #1, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Kev Walker (artist), Frank D'Armata (colorist), Clayton Cowles (letterer)

In 2015, when Marvel canceled all their ongoing titles to play along with Hickman destroying the universe in service of his Secret Wars, the need for product was filled by a bunch of mini-series, allegedly set on different pieces of the patchwork world Doom cobbled together from what survived the Beyonders' attempts to destroy the multiverse. I bought 3 of those mini-series. Mrs. Deadpool and Her Howling Commandos is long since excised from my collection. The second book we'll get to next month. The third, is this thing.

I never really got into the Marvel Zombies fad. Maybe the premise just felt too much like a '90s What If? blown out to increasingly bloated proportions, what with multiple mini-series going back to the same well. Obviously I'm not entirely immune to a "everybody dies" story, just look at last week's entry, but it's rarely my favorite thing. But Spurrier had written something I liked previously, and Kev Walker drew the hell out of Avengers Arena, and I liked Elsa Bloodstone (and my list of books was dwindling), so here we are.

And the zombies are not really the focus. One does manage to teleport Elsa far away from her post along "The Shield", a giant wall I think Doom made out of Ben Grimm to hold back the section of zombie world he incorporated, but it's mostly Elsa wandering the wilderness with a peculiar child that she wants to protect for reasons she can't explain. All the while something else is tracking them. There are still other zombies, an entire gang of them led by a Mystique, and they retain their intelligence because they keep a Deadpool tied up and take out a little of his brain to feed on everyday via, as Wade puts it, "le Spork."

But as with the best zombie stories, they're really there to give the non-zombie characters a way to show their true selves. Spurrier and Walker keep showing us flashbacks of this Elsa's upbringing with her demanding bastard of a father. Who insists on no weakness, and goes so far as to expose his wife to a horror that shreds her sanity so he can have her taken away, because she was interfering in his training of Elsa. So Elsa is constantly confronted with the notion of how her father would deal with this frightened, secretive child with no survival training or combat instincts, who for some reason doesn't turn after being bitten. And then she keeps going against that training, right up to the point they encounter something much worse than a zombie.

Walker mostly gets to draw various Marvel characters in various states of physical decay, and his does it very nicely. When he's not drawing that, it's mostly the flashbacks of Ulysses Bloodstone being an emotionally constipated ass towards a very young Elsa, who looks suitably frightened or sad. It makes a nice contrast from her as an adult, where she's mostly glowering with gritted teeth or looking irritated while stomping some zombie's skull to a pulp and cursing about the annoyance of the whole situation. Which also serves to contrast her from her father. Even after all the training, she still refuses to just accept the harsh realities of the life she's stuck in and bear it stoically. Is constant sarcasm and cynicism a better approach? Eh, probably not.

And with that, we bid farewell to Many Months of Marvel.

Saturday Splash Page #13

"The Darkest Timeline of All," in X-Men '92 (vol. 1) #1, by Chad Bowers and Chris Sims (writers), Scott Koblish (artist), Matt Milla (colorist), Travis Lanham (letterer)

Jonathan Hickman's Secret Wars started from the point where all the universes were destroyed, after Earth's heroes failed utterly to prevent this. Doom was able to destroy the Beyonders, because Doom is goal-oriented like that, and made himself god of a single surviving world, cobbled from pieces of those destroyed universes. Like Crisis on the Infinite Earths, but a lot less stuff salvaged, and much more messily pieced together.

Yes, even messier than Hawkman.

Marvel decided to lean into this by at least temporarily canceling all their ongoing titles. In their place, we got a bunch of four-issue mini-series, set in different zones of Doom's world. This is probably the oddest of those, considering it's playing off the early Nineties X-Men cartoon, of all things. Well, sort of. Sims and Bowers bring in characters that were not part of that cartoon, as part of what is a weird story.

The X-Men get an invite to a rehabilitation clinic supposedly helping violent mutants set aside their destructive and self-destructive impulses. A clinic run by Cassandra Nova, who in this reality is a clone body of Xavier's (made by Apocalypse, I do not remember that plotline) that is possessed by the Shadow King. Nova has some weird plan to smooth out the X-Men's rough edges and neuroses, to make them into bland, pleasant sorts, presented as making them "BSP Approved", meaning Broadcasting Standards and Practices. 

Yeah, I don't know. It feels like meta-commentary, but it isn't like the cartoon wasn't in some ways nerfed by the BSP back in the day. We didn't see Wolverine violently carving people up, just robots. Same for Bishop and Cable shooting things with their giant firearms. Nor was there much suggestion anybody was getting any, but Nova apparently felt there was just too much tension and innuendo going on between Gambit and Rogue. And this is all part of a plan to make sure Robert Kelly (who is Doom's "baron" in this sector) gets killed by some Frankensteined mega-Sentinel, so Nova can take his place. It doesn't work, thanks to an assist from a bizarre X-Force squad. Having Bishop and Cable on the same team seems like it would violate some limit on the number of firearms you can carry.

I think this comic must have been released digitally first, because some of the panel layouts are just bizarre if it was designed for print. Not at all what Koblish's layouts look like on anything else I've seen of his, or anything else I've seen that Bowers and Sims wrote. Pages with lots of empty black space and only one or two panels (like the page up above). I assume those were meant to read like you swipe and the next panel pops up, closer to a still in an animated feature. There are voice balloons where Nova says one thing, and there's a big red "X" stenciled over it and a little note saying it's inappropriate, with different, less suggestive dialogue in another balloon nearby. That said, the psychic battle between Xavier and Nova has some neat bits in it, with Xavier's consciousness being scattered into a bunch of little orbs that look very freaked out. I don't buy the Shadow King, Xavier body or no, can overcome the Phoenix, though.

As far as the four Secret Wars mini-series I've actually read, I'd probably rank this third, although I haven't re-read Master of Kung-Fu in a while.

Random Back Issues #67 - Marvel Zombies #4

I was under the impression parents weren't supposed to make kids choose sides.

Years after Marvel ran the whole "Marvel Zombies" concept into the ground, they brought this out as one of the "Battleworlds" mini-series published during Secret Wars. Set on the world Doom cobbled together from the bits and pieces of different universes he was able to save during Hickman's Avengers run.

Here, Elsa Bloodstone was one of the people who defends Doom's realms from the hordes of the undead, but she got dropped from the shield wall into the zombies' turf. Where she found an odd child, who led her to a coastline, where they encounter a version of Elsa's dad from a different reality. He's a zombie, but able to maintain a sense of self from all the bloodstones he collected from other realities' versions of himself or his kids. There's only one piece left and this Elsa's (who has been gradually realizing what an asshole her dad was) got it.

Elsa tries lopping his head off, but it doesn't take. She's ready to destroy her stone, but it turns out the "child" is actually the manifestation of her stone's power. Somehow it took a form that could convince Elsa to come to this place, something the bloodstones can do, apparently. Elsa tries for the big hero play, and gets her arm bitten off, causing her to start turning into a zombie. She also has the flashback at the top, which is the aftermath of her being too slow to kill some monster, and her father ordering her to leave its toxic blood on her head, staining her hair permanently red. When her mother objects, Ulysses shows her the monster in the basement, driving her mad, so he can have her locked away as the abusive parent.

Mystique and Bruce Wayne are impressed with that level of shitty parenting.

Elsa makes a speech that distracts Ulysses long enough for the little kid-thing to grab her gun and shoot him in the chest. It wouldn't kill him, but it does knock a big chunk of the stones loose, which Elsa gobbles like Jughead diving on a plate of cheeseburgers.

While all this has been going on, a group of zombies led by Mystique have been watching. They'd been pissed at Elsa because she killed their endless source of brains - Deadpool - the issue before. Also, they knew the child didn't turn when they bit it, so they wanted more of that. Now, with their minds falling apart rapidly from lack of brain food, they call up some big mutant with a cannon strapped to his back and take a shot. Elsa, now with a hand made of bloodstone, just blasts them to dust. Worried about having too much power, Elsa uses most of it to revert both herself and this version of Ulysses back to living humans, leaving her with just one piece of stone in her palm.

She tells Ulysses she'll accept his judgment might have been skewed by both the bloodstone and his mullet, and she's giving him a second chance. Which she will rescind by beating him to death with his own face if he screws up. Does she mean just the skin, or like she'll break off the facial portion of his skull as well?

The two of them head towards the wall, ending on Elsa suggesting 'Let's go exploring.' Which would be the strangest Calvin and Hobbes reference I've ever seen.

[7th longbox, 31st comic. Marvel Zombies (2015) #4, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Kev Walker (artist), Guru-eFX (colorist), Clayton Cowles (letterer)]

If The Ending Didn't Surprise, At Least It Did End

I got a chance to read the final issue of Secret Wars last week (I guess there will be spoilers, if you care). So hey, it's finally over. I'm not sure it even matters at this point. Hickman and Ribic dicked around and took so long finishing it that the rest of the Marvel Universe has moved on to deal with the fallout.

Which feels appropriate. My general impression of Hickman's Avengers run was things did happen, but off-panel. A lot of characters sitting around talking about what they had done, and hey, here's a bit of a flashback so you can see bits and pieces. Hank Pym takes a trip through the Multiverse for months to find out why universes are dying, we don't accompany him, we just find out about it secondhand once he gets back.

So with "All-New, All-Different" Marvel already going for over three months now, Secret Wars is kind of reduced to another flashback. We know Miles Morales is in the Marvel U. now, and oh yeah, here's Miles getting here. We haven't seen Reed or Sue, here's where they ended up. It makes for a bit of an anti-climax, but between the Merry Marvel Hype Machine, and the endless series of Big Events (and my own desire for the whole thing to just be done already), maybe that was always going to be the case. It was never going to end everything, obviously, and it couldn't change things too much from what Marvel deems most profitable either. So, shuffle a few of the deck chairs and hope for the best?

On the positive side for me, there were a few interesting mini-series, and I was able to read them and largely ignore the event itself. That was nice. On the downside, there was the mass canceling of all their ongoing series. Some of them only for a couple of months, but I still resent that I didn't get to read those books those months because of Secret Wars. I have no idea whether that's Hickman's fault. It really feels more like a decision made by the higher-ups, but at the same time, Hickman apparently wanted to write a story where he ended the Marvel Universe, so maybe he expected them to shut the regular books down to go along with that. I don't know. Whether it's on him or not, it was another level of annoying, even beyond the usual irritation that comes with your favorite titles doing event tie-in issues. At least with those, you still have the creative team you like (presumably), working on the characters you like, and hopefully they can spin something good out of the whole mess. Not as much of an option here. Even as few Marvel books as I was buying during the middle of last year, I'd say they still cost themselves some of my dollars, just because I bought even fewer of the mini-series.

I've watched the series with a bit of curiosity because of the fact that Doom did outdo Reed early on. Doom was able to attack the beings destroying universes (with the aid of Molecule Man and Dr. Strange) and defeat them, and saved millions of lives. The best Reed and his Illuminati buddies could come up with was some little lifeboats to save a few thousand people, and they couldn't even manage that right. Of course, once Reed and Doom get down to it at the end, it turns into Reed talking shit about how he'd have done it better than Victor, because he wouldn't have tried to grasp the power so tightly and keep it all consolidated (because Reed shares all his inventions with the whole world, like intergalactic space travel), and blah, blah, blah.

Some of that's my antipathy towards Reed Richards. Kelvin Green observed once that Reed is somehow exempt from that peculiar quirk of the Marvel Universe where arrogance is punished. If Spider-Man decides stopping a burglar isn't worth his time, that burglar will kill his Uncle Ben. If Victor von Doom refuses to listen when Reed says there's a mistake in his calculations, it will blow up in his face. But when Reed refuses to listen to those who say his spaceship needs more testing on its protective shielding, it's his friend who is turned into the orange rock monster. It's the same basic error -a belief he can't possibly be wrong - but he doesn't get hammered for it the way seemingly anyone else would*. The man calls himself Mr. Fantastic, and the Living Tribunal (or whatever physical representation you want to assign such acts to) looks and says, "I'll allow it."

I understand that if Doom is the bad guy - and I guess he is, because he built a world with a lot of unnecessary hazards in it, and expcts everyone to worship him - Reed is the person you bring in to confront him. But at the end of the day, it feels like Doom and Molecule Man did most of the hard work, and here comes Reed Richards to try and play the Big Man who is going to do things right (although it's still going to come down to Owen and I guess Franklin, since he's the one with the power).

I think I'd have rather seen Reed keep goading Doom, and Victor does it himself, just to prove Richards is wrong. "You believe I cannot create, that I cannot send the majesty of Doom out to a thousand new universes? Behold your folly, Richards!" Instead it's Doom admitting Reed is better than him and relinquishing the power, and Reed working with his kid and Molecule Man to create new universes. Reed wins again, even if I'm not sure he deserves it, but what else is new? Reed is like Gladstone Gander, Donald Duck's lucky cousin, the one stuff always works out for, whether it ought to or not.

Anyway, the thing is over and done. I should just be happy about that.

* And at least Doom could have argued a) he was still just a college kid, and b) he was building a device to communicate with a soul in Hell, which is probably not a field with a lot of earlier work to use as a stepping stone, and c) he was doing so to talk to his mother, which had to put some strain on him. Reed can't really use any of those arguments, he just wouldn't accept he was not correct about something.

What I Bought 6/12/2015 - Part 5

Let’s look at the other two Secret Wars mini-series I decided to try. I can tell you right now, I was pretty happy with both. This is not going to convince me to try more of the ones currently coming out, mind you, but it’s still a nice turn of events.

Marvel Zombies #1, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Kev Walker (artist), Frank D’Armata (colorist), Clayton Cowles (letterer) – Is Elsa grabbing the scalp of Zombie Volstagg? Volstagg is a zombie? Noooooo! Next you’ll be telling me he ate his kids or something. Don’t tell me he ate his kids.

Here, the Shield is a giant wall staffed with people who keep the ravenous zombie hordes in their little piece of land. Why the hell did Doom include a piece of Marvel Zombies Earth in his planet? Poor planning, Victor. Elsa Bloodstone is a commander there, and after killing one of her new recruits after he got bitten – because I guess Kev Walker was disappointed he didn’t get to draw Striker dying in agony in the pages of Avengers Arena? – Elsa gets teleported way the hell out into Zombie Wasteland by Zombie Nightcrawler’s Dad, I think. Where she wakes up to find some bald, amnesiac, non-zombie kid, and they try to make the trek back to safe territory. The kid spends a lot of time telling her he thinks they should go the other way, and Elsa spends a lot of time being verbally abusive, because that’s how her father raised her. I have to admit, as much time as the kid spends sniveling and crying, I’d probably tell him to shut up a lot, too. Anyway, after narrowly surviving Zombie Juggernaut thanks to some unexpected reaction from the Bloodstone amulet, Elsa sees just how many zombies are between her and home, and decides to go with the kid’s idea, while some creature, probably Zombie Nightcrawler’s Pop, watches them from a distance and plots to use her own knife on her.

I bought this for the promise of Kev Walker drawing Elsa bloodstone killing lots of monsters, and I’m getting just that so far. Spurrier’s taken the backstory Ellis gave Elsa in NextWave, about her father putting her through all this crazy training as a baby, and approached it from a more serious direction. That would be traumatic for a kid, it would certainly affect how she relates to other people she regards as soft, or unprepared, and would give her a mindset very focused on doing her job. It works, though I’m not sure that backstory was ever meant to be taken seriously. Also, I had figured Ellis was the only writer Marvel let use “toerag” in his books (considering Pete Wisdom couldn’t go 5 pages without saying it during Ellis’ Excalibur), but Spurrier gets to as well.

I don’t know if it means anything that most of the people on the Shield with Elsa had glowing red eyes. That seems like an ominous sign. Also have no idea what the kid’s deal is. No memory, vague sense of wanting to go south, no apparent skills, but somehow still alive in a land where anything alive is food for everything undead. Actually an android? An attempt at a Trojan Horse, zombies eat him, he infects them with some virus that kills them once and for all, but they can sense it and avoid him? Juggernaut went right for Elsa, even though she had the gun, instead of the kid. Paid the kid no mind whatsoever.

Particularly liked the panels Walker did of one of the zombies with rats crawling around inside its flesh while it lay dormant. Reinforces the idea the zombie is dead, rotting meat, also adds the idea they can remain still and silent for a long time, until something catches their interest. I also like how the panel borders get thicker and more ragged, the panels themselves slight tilted or angled, during tense moments, like the Juggernaut fight. Then the borders gradually smooth out, and the panels revert to a nice, even, rectangular shape. It helps zoom in on the action when that’s what needs the focus, and after is when you can pull back and get the sense of how desolate and alone the place they occupy appears to be.

Mrs. Deadpool and the Howling Commandos #1, by Gerry Duggan (writer), Salva Espin (artist), Val Staples (colorist), Joe Sabino (letterer) – I don’t feel like those guys really qualify as commandos, but it’s been several years since the last time Marvel used that to describe a team of monster creatures, so what the hell, right?

So there was the Deadpool: Dracula’s Gauntlet mini-series, where Wade fought and defeated Dracula, and then married Shiklah, to much rejoicing. In this version, Wade lost, because Dracula cheated, so Shiklah is still married to Drac. And it’s the crappy, “updated”, Final Fantasy villain Dracula, instead of cool, dark cape and beard, Gene Colan and Marv Wolfman Dracula. The Howling Commandos work for him, and Shiklah can’t stand them any more than she can Drac. But as the last living member of her family, she’s kind of up the creek. Until she finds part of the Scepter of the Manticore on one of her brothers’ corpses, and the other has a map leading to the other part. So she comes up with some excuse about ferrying their remains to Hell personally, and sets off in her best Lara Croft/Indiana Jones outfit. But Drac insists the Commandos accompany her, and tells Werewolf by Night to make sure she doesn’t survive the trip. Deadpool’s only present as a ghost narrator, telling people to get over making jokes about Man-Thing, then promptly making a Man-Thing joke a few pages later. Also, he grouses about dying in books in back-to-back months. I don’t have the heart to tell him he’s going to team-up with Thanos this fall, so he’ll probably be dying every page when that happens.

It says the one Commando is Marcus the Minotaur (also combined with a symbiont), but he looks more like a centaur to me. He has four horse legs, plus arms. Maybe Dracula’s just trying to confuse his foes, unless “minotaur” is the name for centaurs with diabetes, since Marcus has that. I also don’t know why one of Shiklah’s brothers is wearing an outfit that’s a cross between one of Jamie Madrox’ shirts and Rachel Summers’ old Hound outfit (the red one with spikes all over it), while the other stole that horrible outfit Frank Castle wore when he was Captain America for 5 seconds. Remember that, after Civil War, Fraction had him fight Hate-Monger and Frank decided he needed to stand up like Cap would have, and he wore some incredibly stupid garb? I do not appreciate this series making me remember that happened.

It’s nothing spectacular, pretty much an exposition issue, but I’ll trust the creative team to make it work. They used a Die Hard quote, that buys them some leeway, and I’m curious whether Shiklah will turn all these guys around to her side of things, or kill a few first to make a point.

Espin's art seems well suited for this. He draws monsters well, but since the book is far from serious in tone, the art needs to be able to do silly or comical, and he's up to the task. It's all kind of bright and exaggerrated. When the Commandos are temporarily turned to stone, it's done in one quick panel showing them looking surprised. No drawn out thing where they tried to flee, or close-ups on their terror. It's essentially so Shiklah can later tell Drac when he asks what she did, 'I made them hard.'  Jokes, but with monsters.