and Dead Tree Comics

[Thad]

Batman: Gargoyle of Gotham, by Rafael Grampa, is the kind of Batman story I find most frustrating: Grampa's art is fucking gorgeous; his writing is...well, it's pretty good if you like warmed-over Frank Miller imitations, I guess, but I very much do not. It's the kind of thing that would have been bold and exciting in the 1980s but just feels pointlessly violent and edgy in 2023, and that's without getting into the overwrought hardboiled-detective purple-prose narration. Issue #2's out this week but I don't think I'll be picking it up. I haven't even finished #1 and I'm already exhausted.

Avengers Inc, by Al Ewing and Leonard Kirk, asks the question "What if the Avengers were...the Avengers?" Wasp is called (in plainclothes) to investigate some supervillain murders in a prison; then...some twists happen and the mystery gets a lot weirder. It loosely continues Ewing's previous Ant-Man (with Tom Reilly) and The Wasp (with Kasia Nie) miniseries, but it's standalone and you don't really need to read those first. They're good, though; you should.

[Thad]

One thing that's fascinating about Grampa's stylistic choices is that he doesn't just do the old trick of blurring different eras (rotary phones and smartphones coexist, like the big-screen black-and-white TVs in B:TAS), he also blurs different cultures. Gordon is depicted as a redheaded Anglo as per usual, but the decor in his apartment and office is extremely Catholic in a way that suggests Latin American culture (Grampa is Brazilian).

This really is a gorgeous comic. I wish the writing were more to my taste.

[Thad]

Issue #2's out this week but I don't think I'll be picking it up. I haven't even finished #1 and I'm already exhausted.

so i picked up #2

god damn this series is so dumb

but so pretty

but so dumb

Issue #2 reveals that after Bruce's parents were murdered, he stole Gordon's baton and then beat a homeless man with it until he was paralyzed, because he thought it was the guy who killed his parents, but it was just some random homeless guy

but then three pages later it turns out nah, just kidding, it actually was the guy who killed his parents

(the funny part was I put the book down after that first bit and didn't pick it up and find out about that second bit until a couple days later)

There's also some potentially interesting stuff in there that implies that simply by existing as a billionaire Bruce Wayne is creating more criminals like the man who murdered his parents each and every day, but at least so far that part of the story is too half-baked to really make much of an impact. Maybe Grampa's going somewhere with it, but I'm not optimistic that this series is really going to turn out to have anything profound to say, but I'll at least give him points for bringing it up in the first place.

I dunno, I guess I'll probably keep buying it

The art is really good.

[Thad]

I like JMS more often than I don't, and I like what he's doing on Captain America. He's largely kept the status quo of the previous run with Cap moving back into his childhood apartment. That was my favorite thing about the last run and it still has a lot of potential left; I'm glad it didn't just get discarded by the new guy.

Also like the last run, it involves flashbacks to WWII and some retcons to Cap's backstory, but I think it works a lot better here than all that "Outer Circle" silliness. It's...well, grounded by the standards of a superhero story, which is to say there is an immortal demon involved and young Steve meets Meyer Lansky, but a whole lot of it is a fairly mundane depiction of the rise of fascism in 1930s America. JMS isn't being subtle in the connection he's drawing to our current moment, though it's subtle enough that AFAIK J*rdan P*terson hasn't started weeping about it.

I like the art by Jesus Saiz on the first 3 issues quite a lot, though I occasionally get distracted recognizing which actors he's drawing (hey, that's Christine Adams as Misty Knight!). Lan Medina splits the art duties on #3 and apparently is the main penciler going forward; his style is more straightforward and less flashy, which has its benefits and drawbacks.

[Mongrel]

J*rdan P*terson hasn't started weeping about it.

No time. He's busy throwing a big beautiful pissbaby tantrum right now, claiming his court-ordered social media training is a reeducation camp.

It's absolutely delightful.

[Thad]

I wanted to like Animal Pound #1, by Tom King and Peter Gross. And Gross's art is fucking excellent!

But King...it's like he didn't do a second pass for internal consistency.

Right off the bat, the story starts out with a dog who's being put down, and our hero, Fifi, who is a kitten who has a dog's name for some reason. Then there's a time jump, and Fifi is now one of the oldest animals in the pound; the story repeatedly refers to her ailing joints and various other signs of age. And there's at least one cat who's been there longer than she has.

So okay. We have a pound that puts animals down, but also keeps some of them for like 10-15 years.

And it gets worse! There's a reference in the story to how Fifi felt when her kittens were taken from her, and how? Fucking how? She's been in the pound since she was a kitten, but also she had kittens? This is a pound that kills animals but also keeps them for decades at a time, doesn't fix them, puts them in a room with members of the opposite sex that also aren't fixed, lets them breed and then carry the offspring to term, and then takes them away?

I guess it's possible there's a rug-pull coming in issue #2 and things aren't as they seem (Love Everlasting, also written by King, started off as if it were a straightforward romance comic before getting all postmodern), but I don't see sticking around for it. It all just seems kinda half-assed. Which is a pity, because the art is fucking great.

[Thad]

Not sure how I feel about Avengers Twilight. It's another damn Dark Knight Returns riff. And there is still some life left in that formula -- I enjoyed the hell out of Catwoman: Lonely City -- but I'm not sure this is it.

I like Acuna's art, though, particularly the colors.

[Thad]

oh hell yeah

greg weisman is returning to writing spider-man next year in a book starring both peter and miles

calling it "The Spectacular Spider-Men" is going to put my expectations unreasonably high

Issue #1 is perfectly good. Didn't blow me away but did a good job setting up what this series is and what it's going to do. I like the dynamic; Peter keeps making dumb jokes and Miles keeps saying "You are such a child."

It gets a couple mysteries going, brings back a few old Spider-Man supporting cast members and introduces some new ones, speckles the fourth wall a couple times, makes at least one Gargoyles reference, and generally does a solid job as a hang-out/team-up book that does a lot of table-setting for what's to come.

It didn't blow me away but it was a good time.

[Thad]

Ultimate Invasion didn't do it for me but Ultimate Spider-Man (by Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto) and Ultimate X-Men (by Peach Momoko) are really fucking good and make the case for why this new Ultimate line really is something fresh and interesting and not just another damn superhero reboot.

I picked up USM #1 because of the positive critical buzz around it. The elevator pitch is, "What if Peter Parker didn't become Spider-Man until he was middle-aged?"

Kind of a dead-simple idea, really; take Spidey's original hook, "the hero who could be you," and recognize that if you are picking up a monthly Spider-Man comic in 2024, there is a pretty strong likelihood that you are a middle-aged white dad with glasses and a beard.



I wear contacts and my hairline hasn't looked like that in a long time, but yes I do bear a more-than-passing resemblance to that dude.

Anyway, it's navel-gazey as hell but it's a surprisingly fresh take. We've seen middle-aged Spider-Men before but as far as I can remember it's always been "what if Spider-Man got older?" I'm not aware of any past stories that took the angle of "what if Peter Parker didn't become Spider-Man until he was already older?"; I wouldn't be surprised if that was the premise of an old What-If? or something but I don't think it's ever been a central part of a series before.

There aren't any arachnobatics this issue; it's table-setting, introducing the supporting cast (Peter's married to MJ and they have two kids; Uncle Ben is alive but Aunt May isn't; Ben runs the Daily Bugle with J Jonah Jameson until the board tells them they're rattling too many cages and they quit and decide to start their own newspaper, with blackjack, and hookers), and that's more interesting anyway. Spider-Man's always been about the character drama; it's just that this time, he's a middle-aged guy who's had a pretty good, if unremarkable, life but always had a sense that there was supposed to be more than this, that he was meant for something greater.

Which is relatable as fuck! except that in his case he's actually right, because he really was supposed to be something greater until a time traveler fucked with the past and prevented his superhero origin from happening.

And that's the only part that I've got some trepidation about, really: this thing is inseparable from whatever the fuck overarching Ultimate Universe storyline is going on. The reason he's not Spider-Man is because of some shit that happened in Ultimate Invasion; Aunt May and Norman Osborn are both dead because of some shit that happened in Ultimate Invasion; when he finally does become Spider-Man, it ties into some other shit that happened in Ultimate Invasion.

I really like the book, but I don't care about any of that shit. I'm here for the middle-aged ennui.

Now, Ultimate X-Men #1? That's a book that has absolutely nothing to do with any of that shit. There's a recap page that mentions it and talks about Sunfire and the Silver Samurai, so all that's bound to creep in at some point, but past the recap page issue #1 doesn't say another word about any of it. Or really much of anything else that makes this an X-Men book. The lead character is, nominally, Armor, but if Momoko had put out this exact same book and given her a different name, I don't think Marvel would have had any grounds to claim infringement. There's really nothing in here that says "Marvel" or "X-Men" except that it features a teenager suddenly manifesting superpowers.

It's not a traditional superhero book; it's a horror/coming-of-age manga about a Japanese schoolgirl who's haunted, both figuratively and literally, by her guilt over the death of one of her friends. It's gorgeous, it's eerie, and it's the most unusual book I've seen Marvel publish in maybe 20 years.

So yeah, the new Ultimate line is really fucking good, actually. At least, judging by these two #1s.

[Thad]

Helen of Wyndhorn is Tom King and Bilquis Evely's creator-owned followup to their excellent Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (soon to be a major motion picture! or possibly be completed and then have its release canceled as a tax writeoff!) and it's off to a strong start. It's got a similar conceit -- a mannered, elderly woman narrating the story of her decades-ago adventures with a hard-charging, hard-drinking teenage girl -- but where that was a sword-and-planet story this one has more of a gothic horror vibe. At least, so far. There are definitely some sword-and-sandal trappings here; the very first page is a Frazetta pastiche and the title character's father sounds an awful lot like Robert Howard. But issue #1 feels more Cthulhu than Conan.

It's off to a really fantastic start and I expect I'll be following this one to the end.

[Thad]

I haven't mentioned Ryan North's Fantastic Four (currently with Carlos Gómez on art) lately, but I'm continuing to really enjoy it. It's mostly one- and two-issue stories with some neat premises that remind me of old pulp-magazine SF, always grounded in the characters and their family dynamic. It's one I really look forward to reading every month.

[Thad]

Man's Best, by Pornsak Pichetshote and Jesse Lonergan, is Homeward Bound in Space and it's off to a solid start.

--

Batman: Dark Age is Mark Russell and Mike Allred's followup to Superman: Space Age, another alternate-universe story that begins around 1960. I liked most of it, though I didn't care for the ending.

We start off with an elderly Bruce in a rest home, his doctor encouraging him to write down his memories while he still has them. From the framing device we hop back to the origin story, but this version is different: Bruce doesn't witness his parents' murder, and instead of becoming obsessed with taking revenge on the concept of crime, he mostly just acts like a rich kid who doesn't expect to live long enough to become a rich adult. (This is one of the versions where the Waynes' murder is an assassination, and Bruce grows up expecting that he's next.) He throws money around with abandon, takes risks, gets himself into trouble, and throws money around to get himself out of trouble.

I think it's a mostly great take, a version of young Bruce I haven't seen before and which is frankly a lot more realistic than that whole crimefighter thing. But then the ending rolls around and it's dumb. He gets sentenced to 10 years in prison for beating somebody up, which as we all know is totally a thing that happens when a millionaire 17-year-old beats somebody up. I think Russell *probably* could have made it work if he'd suggested that the judge was on the take or otherwise in the power of the False Face Society -- the story's already pretty firmly established that they control basically everything in Gotham -- but instead of that he goes with some nonsense about how the Wayne Corp board cuts Bruce off from access to the firm's attorneys and Alfred doesn't have time to find another lawyer, so he gets stuck with an overworked public defender instead, and no, "they just show up at the courthouse one morning to find there are no lawyers there and the judge immediately assigns him a public defender and they just keep going" is a really dumb depiction of the legal system, and yes I'm aware this is a Batman comic I'm talking about.

And then Pariah shows up on the last page and yep this is another damn Crisis on Infinite Earths tie-in like the last one, but wait, Bruce is way too old in that framing sequence for it to take place in 1986 if he was born around 1950, so...does that mean this world actually survives the Crisis, or is this just another one of those examples of Russell not being particularly good at timelines? Or is Bruce just senile and none of this shit actually happened the way he recalls it?

I liked it overall, though; the only time I've ever picked up a comic by Mike and Laura Allred and thought "this isn't good enough for me to stick around for issue #2" it was the Book of Mormon.

Plenty of the usual Easter eggs and references around. Wayne Manor is the 1966 version, while Old Bruce looks a lot like he did in Batman Beyond. Young Bruce is shown reading a book about the Gray Ghost, and there's another book nearby about the trolley problem, which is a callback to Superman: Space Age. Fun stuff for those who like understanding references to things.

--

Transformers #6 will make you hear "The Touch" in your head, and Daniel Warren Johnson knows it so hard he worked the words "YOU KNOW THE SONG" into Optimus' speed lines.