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OPTIC VERVE #2 27 Aug 02 | MATT MARTIN |
| Sequart.com Columns |
Before I launch into the first part of this week's reviews, I'd like to make an offer to the readers of this column (assuming, of course, that there are any readers). I operate on what it essentially a limitless comic buying budget. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but I promise it's not. If the book or TPB is in print, I have access to it. That having been said, I'd like to offer to allow you, the reader, to use the perks of my job to your own advantage. That is to say, if there's something out there that you've been eyeing at your comic shop, but aren't sure if it's worth your hard-earned cash, let me know (for example, at Julian's request, I'll be doing a comprehensive review of the entire run of 100 Bullets in the near future). I'll do my damnedest to get myself a copy of it (assuming I don't own it already; my library is pathetically extensive for a man who's engaged) and get a review up as soon as possible.
Also, if you're out there, please let me know what you think of the column, even if it's only to say that you disagree with me completely. I'd love to see some actual feedback from actual readers. So with that out of the way, I tip my hat to you, the Theoretical Reader, and launch into this week's reviews:
Incredible Hulk #44
This issue, however, is not such a case. I find it hard to believe that anyone who is currently buying this book couldn't enjoy this issue at least a LITTLE. For those who haven't been reading, a moment to bring you up to speed:
Bruce Banner, as the Hulk, has been accused by the media of running rampant (no shocker there) and, through that rampage, causing the death of a young boy. Banner goes on the run (a clear homage to the television show), hounded incessantly by a black ops group whose employer has yet to be revealed. All the while, Banner receives updates on the status and position of those tracking him via electronic messages to his laptop from an unknown benefactor known only as Mr. Blue (Banner himself is Mr. Green, of course). As our issue opens, Banner has successfully eluded the grasp of this shadowy agency multiple times, most recently with the aid of his former rival, Doc Samson; Samson himself was knocked unconscious by the Hulk at the close of the previous arc, a point that is important for this issue's story.
So now, after a series of multi-issue story arcs, we finally get a nice, self-contained issue, which Jones pulls off rather nicely. I can't say enough good things about the pacing of this story; it just flowed along so well. To be perfectly honest with you, I'm so conditioned to expect at least a three-part story out of Jones that I was rather shocked to see it actually have a beginning and resolution in this issue. And maybe I'm just not very bright, but I didn't see Samson's ruse coming at all; I certainly felt a little dense at not immediately seeing how simple it would be for a "certified genius" like Sampson to outwit his former employers (and I'm usually fairly swift about stuff like this, having said "Oh, I get it, he's dead" and "Hey, what if they're the same guy?" within the first fifteen minutes of The Sixth Sense and Fight Club, respectively). So Bruce Jones, I tip my proverbial hat to you.
In regards to the art, I must confess to being a little less impressed with Lee Weeks recent work after having enjoyed the hell out of John Romita Jr.'s pencils in Jones' opening arc. This is not to say that Weeks' did a bad job (far from it, I thought he was rather good, just not as good as JR Jr.); however, I digress, as Stuart Immonen guest pencils this issue and does a sterling job, in my opinion.
An all-around solid issue, I give it: .
Daredevil #36
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After putting down this issue, I actually almost said out loud, "Man, this is more like it..." I confess to being a little unimpressed by Bendis' first arc on this book (y'know, the Leap-Frog arc, entitled "Wake Up," I believe). As well, his first couple issues of the current run were far from his best work. However, after the extremely ill conceived silent issue, I thought Bendis really hit his stride and I was recommending the hell out of this book to all and sundry that darkened the door of my shop. I defended Bendis' story to those who "But it doesn't go anywhere" and "But nothing ever happens... they just TALK about doing something." "No, no," I would reply, "he's definitely building to something." However, #35 left me wondering if my defense had been misplaced. At a point when I thought we'd finally see a resolution to the current story arc, which has Matt Murdock ostensibly exposed as Daredevil to the NYC media, we were instead subjected to a completely pointless fistfight between the team of DD and Spider-Man and the low-rent DD villain, Mr. Hyde.
With #36 though, Bendis is starting to revive that faith in him that I thought I had lost. Matt Murdock finally addresses the media to refute the claims that he is the masked vigilante that a member of the press claims he is. As well, Murdock's grounds for denial are actually valid; in a purely technical sense, he's not lying. I won't spoil his logic for those who haven't read, as it was good enough to give a chuckle.
As always, Alex Maleev provides strong, atmospheric visuals. Under Maleev's hand, DD is the most grim and street-level that it's been in a long while, possibly since Miller's renowned run. At the same time, it's not needlessly "grim 'n' gritty," a trend that we clearly saw all too much of in the 90s. Rather, Maleev and Bendis work well together, giving Daredevil the treatment I've always thought he deserved, something that Miller nailed as well: DD is a sort of street-level Spider-Man, a superhero whose rogues' gallery features outlandish / ridiculous villains like Stilt-Man and The Purple Man, but centers primarily around darker figures like The Kingpin and Bullseye. Maleev gives Daredevil's world the weight that it needs to stand distinctively apart from the more light-hearted world Spidey swings through most days.
All in all, Bendis has bounced back nicely from what I found to be an uncharacteristically weak issue last month.
I give it: .
Ultimate X-Men #21
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The root of my problem here lies in the comment I made to a diehard X-Men fan in my store a few days ago. I asked him if the comics world was so seriously ignorant of the basic concept of the X-Men (i.e., they live in what is ostensibly a school and save a "world that hates and fears them" about every five minutes) that we need to be subjected to a new edition of "a new student is introduced to the school and its environs" issue every couple months?? To be honest, I find it rather hard to believe that anyone even moderately familiar with the X-Men doesn't know that they live in a school for mutants and that the world hates and fears them. This is basically the mantra for the book, repeated ad nauseum for the last forty-something years.
So why does Mark Millar feel compelled to subject his audience to yet another installment of what is already a tired and worn out plot device? I haven't the slightest idea.
What we're basically left with is something that I complained about in my review of Ultimate Spider-Man #25: we've got 22 pages of "story" and about 2 pages of actual new plot development. If you figure in the fact that a) one of those two pages is a full-page splash and b) the plot development is really just a rehash/update of the Phoenix Saga, we're not left with a whole lot of value for your money in this issue.
I honestly enjoy the Ultimate line and have stated on MANY occasions that I generally think that Ultimate X-Men is probably the way the X-books should have been written years ago, but this is just one of the rare instances where I think Millar is just killing time and I think it shows.
To his credit, Adam Kubert gives us pencils on par with his usual clean, easy to follow style. It's clearly not the art that I have issue with this month; it's simply the story.
The only reason I rate it even this highly is because even though the plot device is tired, this was a moderately entertaining take on it: .
Uncanny X-Men #411
In contrast to Ultimate X-Men, this month we had two issues of Uncanny X-Men, both of which dealt, sometimes tangentially, with the concept of a new student gawking at the world that the X-Men live and "work" in.
Up until this month, I would have been genuinely ashamed to be seen paying money for Uncanny X-Men; Joe Casey's run on the book was that bad. However, Chuck Austen is handling the writing chores now and so far, that's a good thing. Vaguely related to the topic, when asked if I thought he'd be a good writer for the book, I told a customer that since Austen did fill-in pencils on one issue of Miracleman, I thought he was automatically a better writer than about 99% of the people who've ever written an X-book. When it was pointed out that Austen penciled, not wrote, a Miracleman issue, I replied that it didn't matter, merely being associated with Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman set him head and shoulders about the cream of the crap that typically pen an X-book.
With my off-topic rant out of the way, we can get down to the business and the question at hand. Namely, "Is it any good?"
It's a tough question to answer, frankly. If, by that question, we're really asking, "Is it art?" my answer is a definite "No." If we're asking, "Is it original?" my answer is "Well, not really." However, if we're asking if it's fun, I can wholeheartedly say "Hell yeah."
| I frequently get a lot of complaints from X-Men fans whose comfortable microcosm of spandex fetishism is threatened by the new idea enema that Morrison is giving New X-Men... . A good majority of those customers also express a real affection for Chris Claremont's X-Treme X-Men, ... a sequential abortion of a book. |
I could go on a tangent about how much there is to like, if you're a fan of superheroics, in this issue and the one preceding it. For God's sake, there's a reference to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of my favorite flicks (for the record, Nightcrawler asks Iceman, "Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?"). But rather than ramble on incessantly, I'll summarize its strong points.
The humor in the book is sprinkled liberally, but not to the point that it's distracting or slapsticky; just enough kept it distinctly different from the self-indulgently serious tripe that Claremont churns out. Sean Phillips delivers an artistic style that both suits the tone of the book and is very easy to follow. It's clean and dynamic, with a real sense of motion to some of the panels, something that a lot of artists lack. As well, Austen brings back a cornucopia of recently missing X-Men characters, from Juggernaut and Black Tom Cassidy to the formerly-languishing-in-a-Howard-Mackie-book Havok.
In the end, the real value of Austen's Uncanny so far has been the similarity of his writing style to that of Chris Claremont when he still brought his A-game to the playing field, prior to his meteoric descent into self-indulgency. Claremont is to the X-Men what Frank Miller is to Daredevil; that is to say, every writer that comes after him feels the effects of his work, even if they choose not to emulate it. Austen, it seems to me, is clearly influenced by the high points of Claremont's classic run with John Byrne, juggling both superheroic action and soap opera in equal parts, maintaining a delicate balancing act with sickening ease.
In the end, if you're a closet X-Men fan or simply one who's fallen by the wayside, give Uncanny X-Men a try; you're liable to enjoy it quite a bit. If, however, you're someone to whom the mere thought of paying money for a book with an X in the title induces stomach-churning nausea, Austen's work so far is unlikely to change your opinion.
It's just fun, dammit, so I give it: .
Captain Marvel #35
Oh, Captain Marvel, what in the blue hell happened to you? You used to be such an entertaining book... I almost don't even know where to start with this review, there's so much wrong with this book lately. Suffice it to say, when the coolest part of the issue is the story's title (The Short Goodbye) and that's only because it's a reference to one of your favorite books (The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler), you know something's seriously wrong.
So that having been said, I'll endeavor to keep this one short and sweet, 'cause the bad certainly outweighs the good.
To begin with, let's bitch about the cover, shall we? "The Ultimate Captain Marvel," it reads. I confess to an inordinate amount of amusement at watching the reactions on my customers faces this week as they thought they'd somehow missed out on nearly three years of an Ultimate book they've never heard of. And technically, the cover's not a lie; the literal meaning for "ultimate" means "final" or "last," and since this is the last issue before the relaunch, ultimate could be considered an appropriate tag line. However, my amusement was quickly overwhelmed by my annoyance at having to calm rabid Marvel fans down every ten minutes for three straight days. As well, it's just a cheap gimmick to sell a book and hasn't Captain Marvel already been the focus of enough cheap gimmicks lately as it is?
The story itself has really gone nowhere fast lately. This whole "Marlo might be a lesbian" subplot just feels really thrown together at the last minute. And it clearly is, since she's being written out of the book to give Rick Jones / Captain Marvel less baggage to deal with after the relaunch hits. I can't say that I blame David for not wanting his hero tied down, since I've always thought that marriage adds a rather awkward dynamic for a superhero book, but her sudden infatuation with Moondragon is just uneven and, frankly, being played for shock value more than anything else. Again, I appreciate that he's trying to trim the proverbial fat off the character for the relaunch, but it seems like he could have found a better way to deal with the Marlo factor...
To compound things, this issue is full of all these tired old superhero platitudes, things in the vein of "the power is an addiction, like alcoholism" and "being a hero only hurts the people you love in the end." Again, I can see that David is trying to add some drama here to provide a sense of closure, since this is ostensibly the book's "last" issue. But we all know that the U-Decide farce is nothing more than a well-designed publicity stunt to generate free press and sales for Captain Marvel. For God's sake, a "The End"-style ending doesn't carry much emotional weight when your audience knows there's a new #1 out the following month.
There are only two really strong points here for me: 1) the art, as per always and 2) the series is over, so I can stop collecting it. Expect no further frequent reviews of Captain Marvel, I'd say I'm officially done collecting the book, though I might read it while I'm at work from time to time for review's sake. On that note, anyone interested in buying an entire run of Captain Marvel #0-35 should e-mail me at matt@sequart.com.
Thank God it's over, so I can give it: .
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