albrown's Blog

Batman #663

(Thu 02/15/2007 12:16pm)
Grant Morrison returns.  No wait - that's his name, but this gibbering fanfic bullshit can't possibly be him. 

Whoever this jackass is who wrote this book, he think she's being all clever and mod by writing a prose story with illustrations interspersed.  Ooh, no one's ever thought of writing a comic book in prose before.  But I could get past that if it weren't such a terrible, terrible, lame story.

He's trying to reinvent the Joker here, give him the update that all characters need every few years to stay relevant.  And I don't mind the way he's reinventing him, so much.  It's just...oh God, the prose.  So...purple!  So...ridiculously amateur!

Maybe it's just that Grant Morrison's florid style of writing only works in speech balloons.  Maybe he's always been this inane, and it's the prose that's exposed him.  Or maybe this just represents a bad day.  But either way...

This is an unbelievably bad book. 

New Excalibur #13

(Tue 11/28/2006 09:12am)
There's a new category of supervillains these days - and it's probably Bendis's fault - whom I mentally call "Old-school dudes who exist solely to get the crap beat out of them while heroes talk about their feelings."  Writers dredge these guys up so that they can technically be having a fight, thus weaselling out of the whole "Wah, this comic book is nothing but talking heads" complaint - but there's no effort made to make them seem challenging in any way.  They show up, they blather a bit, they get punched, the heroes have conversations while they punch.

Most of Spider-Man's old villains are now in this group, which does sorta make sense since so many of them were kinda lame to begin with.  The Rhino is like the charter member.  I should really call it The Rhino team in his honor, in fact.  And the Wrecking Crew is here too.  (Although when the Wrecker was used for this purpose in New Avengers a ways back, that was actually a pretty good issue.  Better-than-average effort at making the fight actually count.)

And I'm not fully against this: I like seeing the old-school villains, and it really is hard to take some of them seriously.  (Like the Rhino.)  It's just that it's starting to be so recognizable at this point that any time I see someone like the Wrecking Crew these days I know automatically that heroes are about to show up and start...talking.  There's no sense of danger whatsoever.  They're just punching bags.

The other thing you do with old-school villains, of course, is you redefine them - re-establish their danger.  Like DC notoriously tried to do starting around Identity Crisis, with mixed results.  I guess it's best not to go all one way or the other; some guys should be updated and revigorated, and some guys should fade out ignominiously.  That's how things work in the real world, anyway.  But the fight between Excalibur and Wrecking Crew in this issue is even more perfunctory than most, and it's so obviously thrown in just to give Jim Calafiore something to draw while everyone angsts it up that it's almost insulting.

Okay.  Rant off.  On the plus side, the Power Pack crack made in the course of the fight is friggin' hilarious.  And more importantly, there's some great characterization done here with Cain Marko, the Juggernaut.  Issues are dealt with here that honestly never have been, ever since that Austen idiot shoehorned him into the X-Men in the first place.  There's even an appearance by Black Tom Cassidy that goes miles toward repairing the awful work Austen did on him.  To be honest, this is the first issue of New Excalibur that I've felt had any excuse for existence at all.  I'm even looking forward to the next issue, which promises to continue its focus on Juggernaut.

So.  Nice job, Tieri.  Too bad you'll have to give the book back to Claremont again soon.

Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane #12

(Tue 11/28/2006 09:11am)
I'm still trying to figure out exactly why I love this series as much as I do.  There's zero "superhero" stuff in it; it's just Mary Jane blushing and screwing up her love life over and over.  And if I was just feeling nostalgic for old, awkward, high-school, secret-identity-having Peter Parker, I could just head over to Ultimate Spider-Man, where it's being done at least as well and there's plenty of "superhero" stuff to go along with it.  So why am I here?  Is it Takeshi Miyazawa's cute art?  Na, it can't just be that; he may be the best in the game at showing people blushing and sweating, but this manga-inspired stuff isn't really even my bag.  So it must be Sean McKeever's intricate, character-driven soap opera plot that keeps me coming back month after month.  That or the fact that I'm a thirteen-year-old girl.  Shrug.

Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane breezes by pretty quickly; it's a light read, and it might work better in digest format.  This particular issue isn't the strongest, either.  Mary Jane and Harry Osborn are voted class flirts, and some high school newspaper chick tries to interview them about it.  The main storyline - which is, of course, Mary Jane's relationship with Peter Parker - pretty much treads water.  But even in a light month, I still have fun reading it. 

The Immortal Iron Fist #1

(Tue 11/28/2006 09:04am)
My deep and unabiding love for Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker is well-established, as is my passion for kung fu characters from the 70s and green footie pajamas, so it should be no surprise that my hopes for the relaunch of the Immortal Iron Fist were sky-high. And before you get too concerned that the series can't possibly live up to my expectations: I'm happy to report that it's just thirteen action-packed pages before my boy Danny Rand faces a mechanical Hydra spider named Mechagorgon.

As usual in Fraction's work, this book is dense and satisfying, and works as a self-contained story even while it sets up no less than two cliffhangers.  It efficiently gets new readers up to date on Iron Fist's origin and history, frames the conflict for the opening of the series, establishes the formidable power of the enemy, and...well, jeez, I didn't see those last few pages coming at all, even though they'd been telegraphed since the first page.  The art by David Aja is perfect: dark and dynamic, with beautifully choreographed action scenes and an occasional "focus bubble" gambit to draw your attention to the important punches.  My only complaint is that Fraction forgoes the classic Iron Fist second-person narration - "You are Iron Fist, and you are still wearing a leotard!" - but I'm gonna guess that he's just saving that moment for later.  (Because no one in their right mind would pass up that opportunity.)

I remember the last relaunch of Iron Fist back in 2004, which I reviewed for the site I was working for way back then -  here's the link if you want to see how awkward my writing style was back in the day.  I was excited for that too, but it turned out to be a pretty dire misfire.  It sank quickly and is now remembered by no one, including me.  Marvel is serious about this one, though - it's obvious that they're as high on Fraction as I am, and of course Brubaker's a big shot already - and their renewed commitment to the skinny white guy in PJ's is off to a promising start.

Wonder Woman #3

(Mon 11/27/2006 12:14pm)
Not only is Wonder Woman published too infrequently to follow, it doesn't make a great deal of sense on its own merits.  I'm not sure what's going on here; Allan Heinberg is usually a very competent writer (if incapable of hitting a deadline), and Terry Dodson usually gets the art job done clearly and attractively.  But somehow, something is going terribly wrong with this book.  It's got that jumpy thing that bad comics sometimes do: one panel someone's getting zapped with something, and the next she's hanging by her wrists, and it's not like it's impossible to figure out what happened there, but the scene just doesn't flow right.  The whole book is like that.  And particularly if you're gonna have the book star both Diana Prince and Donna Troy, you've got to write the thing very clearly.  (This is almost always the artist's fault, actually - but again, I expect better from the usually excellent Dodson.)

To make matters weirder, Hercules shows up and everyone insists on calling him Wonder Man all the time.  Marvel already has both a Hercules and a Wonder Man, so I don't understand this choice.  (Okay, Hercules is fair game; he's popped up before in DC, and nobody gets to lay claim to a Greek god anyway.  But why do they keep throwing "Wonder Man" around?  Is it just sortof a "Nanny nanny boo boo" to Marvel?  Because that is petty and lame.)

I had high hopes for this book, I really did.  But it's not working out.  Not a complete disaster...But not a success by any stretch, either.