Comics Of The Weak: Everybody Get Back On Your Sled, We're Going To Try To Do This Thing In Reverse

The Boys # 29

Written by Garth Ennis

Art by Darick Robertson & Tony Avina

Published by Dynamite Entertainment

Whereas last week, DC Comics provided the fan service of Hal Jordan telling Black Canary that he hated the Meltzer/McDuffie Justice League just as much as cumbersomeasspirate47 does, this week Garth Ennis provided the splashy action sequence that anybody who has ever disliked the X-Men has not-so-secretly wished for. Page after page of a bunch of stupid brain-dead personality-less mutant stand-ins getting machine-gunned, rocket-launched and flame-thrower...uh. Flame Thrower-ed? It would be giving Ennis too much credit to say "He couldn't have timed it better! They're doing one of those Really Important X-Men/X-Force/Go Fuck Your Mother Cross-over Books Right Now" because hey, it's a month of the year isn't it? When isn't there a fucking X-Men must fight to change the future of everything you've ever known about candy apples type event going on? Water is still wet, right? Sure, all that slippery tongue-lapping is sandwiched behind a predictably GEEZUS "watch the french maître d from Hell's Kitchen pick up ghetto black kids so he can buttfuck them in exchange for toys" history lesson, but hey, it's not like Garth Ennis hasn't made it abundantly clear that he thinks awful shit = funny, and ya'll sensitive pussies can ride or die, it's not like he's trying to do this child rape shit in fucking Tiny Titans, the Tale Of Tim Drake's Trip To Turkey, or Why You Should Never Smuggle Hashish In The Orient.

Agents of Atlas # 3

Written by Jeff Parker

Art by Gabriel Hardman, Elizabeth Dismang, Clayton Henry & Jana Schirmer

Published by Marvel Comics

It's a good thing the robot in this comic doesn't talk, because if he did, then this comic would have a chattering robot as well as a sarcastic gorilla mercenary, and eventually everybody would forget that there's other "Agents" because hey, there aren't many comics about chattering robots and sarcastic gorilla mercenaries on the stands. There should be, and there used to be, but now it's just this and Marvel Apes, and Marvel Apes was a really stupid piece of shit and a mini-series to boot. Writer Jeff Parker decides to go the always dangerous route of having a crying about dead family members sequence to add some gravitas to his female leads, but he deserves some credit for not writing it in such a way that it makes the reader want to kill other people's family members just to see if this is really how a human being, tight clothing or no, would react. It is still super-people crying about dead family members, but hey, can't win 'em all. Besides, this comic's opening sequence features the gorilla character fending off a bunch of machine-gun toting lunatics with a table, and the table has a checkered tablecloth on it, and while it's really, really fucking sad that something like a checkered tablecloth makes you stop and go "Hey, why the fuck don't more people give a shit about setting the goddamn scene? Why aren't there more checkered tablecloths in comic book scenes set in restaraunts?", that's the way the industry rolls along, and hey: nobody gives a shit anyway. We're all going to die, and when we do, we're all still going to hate each other because we don't share the same opinion on whether or not Spider-Man should still be married to Mary Jane Watson. Fucking tablecloth, man. "HERE SHE IS RIGHT HERE!"

Battle For The Cowl: Man-Bat "I Am Whatever You Say I Am" # 1

Written by Joe Harris

Art by Jim Califiore & Guy Major

Published by DC Comics

Is Man-Bat the "meanest MC on the scene, on this Earth"? He's clearly "not what his friends think". He doesn't "owe you a motherfucking thing". He does "hate to be bothered". 

Pfft.

Anyways, it turns out that the whole "gotta be a joke, right" of Alfred Pennyworth being handed the responsibility of running The Outsiders, Suge Knight style, isn't a joke, and part of Alfred's job is to actually hang out with the Outsiders, like...he goes places with them? And he still dresses like a butler while doing it? That butler in the Avengers doesn't go on missions, does he? And...why would a bunch of super-heroes take orders from a butler anyway? Everybody knows, sure, that the current status quo of Batman comics, the one where the absence of Batman has caused the immediate, no fooling fall of the entire city into the sort of depravity that makes the youth of 1965 Watts look like a bunch of Don't Taze Me Bro types, you know this shit ain't gonna last. There's going to be some comic, probably Battle For The Cowl Proper: The Tony Daniel Show, where the new Batman/old Batman/some kinda Batman yells something like "I don't THINK SO STEVE" on one page before appearing in a splash on the next, and then Gotham is going to be back to just being a shitty city to live in, instead of being a shitty city to live in where people cook babies on barbeque spits. But just once, couldn't the silly fill-in state of affairs stick around for a bit? Because there's an untapped source of drama in a butler, dressed like a butler, who stands around watching the D list of superheroes giving them tips earned from his formative years of being an actor. And a spy. And army medic? And the last 30 or so, where he made sandwiches and told his crazy ass boss to go to bed.

Captain America Comics # 1

Written by James Robinson

Art by Marcos Martin & Javier Rodriguez

Published by Marvel Comics

Taken as a story and script, there's nothing at all here. It's Captain America's origin, this time done in one of those 15-minutes-before-Bruce's-mom-got-shot type of stories, where the outline of a comic book character's life gets another sub-heading, this being "right after the skinny Steve Rogers got his 4F rejection letter because he's cut like a crackhead, he fought some Nazis, skinny dude style." But Marvel didn't just bring in DC's crowd-pleasing James Robinson, they also brought on Marcos Martin & Javier Rodriguez, and a comic that on paper sounds pretty run-of-the-mill ends up being something kind of special because of intuitive panel layout and whip-smart cartooning. It's even enough to excuse the horrendous distraction of what Javier Rodriguez's computer does anytime Martin provides him with a static sky to color. Hell, Martin's work is so damn good that he's able to pull off one of those Family Circle style cartoons where the reader traces the character's movement through a crowded New York City street. (The credit for that may be due to an editor refusing to allow Martin to draw a dotted line, but hopefully that was never a question in the first place.)

Destroyer # 1

Written by Robert Kirkman

Art by Cory Walker & Val Staples

Published by Marvel MAX

Nice logo design. It's been done, but it's a classic, so fuck it. The comic itself isn't obnoxious or anything, it's one of those gory action comics that wouldn't seem out of place amongst any publisher's line-up, if anything, it's just curious that it exists at Marvel and not Image. Cory Walker likes to draw blood like it's latex paint, but considering that the main character--an elderly man with a heart condition--dresses like DC's old Mad Dog character, and taking into account that the script has a lot of set pieces built around Destroyer Destroying Shit, the whole thick sheets of blood thing sort of works, keeps it from being something that's "serious comics for serious people". But that's pretty much it--old man kills shit, dresses like he made his costume out of a catcher's uniform and Army Surplus gear, it costs too much, and it reads like a freebie comic handed out at a monster truck rally. Difficult thing to gauge, it's imagined. Maybe we're all just disappointed that this was a new story about some old-ass Marvel character instead of a comic book adaptation of the paperback adventures of Remo Williams.

The Flash: Rebirth # 1

Written by Geoff Johns

Art by Ethan Van Sciver & Alex Sinclair

Published by DC Comics

So, yeah. There's this thing.

Some people really enjoy the Ethan Van Sciver style of comics artwork. Not us. It's unbearable to look at, this mishmash of insanely detailed bullshit, a comic that laughs right in the face of the density of a Paul Gulacy fight scene or a Bryan Hitch cityscape and says "Nah, that ain't how you do it. Needs more fucking lines." There's just no flow to any of this stuff, the idea that less could ever be more gets fired off in a cannon. The screw-up stuff--like the page where Barry's shirt is clearly a white button up, only to become a red button up with Flash lightning bolt--that's general super-hero comic book art fuck-up, so it's not a huge problem. It's the contempt for comics that comes through, the idea that things like a panel layout that cares at all for high-falluting art fag notions like "readability" that's so repellent about this shit.  Of course, it's in the service of a story that's even more contemptible, so in a way, it's perfect--after all, the idea that anybody might only give a shit about a Flash comic that features a fucking character called the Flash running really fast, nah, go fuck yourself you nerdy fanboy. We're giving you this dipshit back, he's our trained monkey, and if we want him to stand around and talk like a sociopath instead of wear his spandex and run, that's what you'll get.

That's not the way a whore is supposed to work. You don't pay a whore to suck you off and then let her or him determine when and how they're going to do it. You pay a whore because fuck it, you're not going to do the work yourself to build relationships, you want a no contest blow job with somebody, male or female, who will get the fuck out of the car when the post-ejaculate shame sets in, that's why you hired a whore. Here's your four dollars, Barry. You'll run now. There's some argument to the contrary, the notion that fans, comics buyers, assholes, that they don't have any ownership over these corporate products, that is isn't up to them to control the universe in which they operate, that they're just supposed to throw good money after bad story and bail out for Dark Horse if they don't like it. And yeah, that's totally true. Fuck your t-shirt memory, go buy something else. The thing is--that audience that feels they own these characters? Those people who slab comics and buy variant covers? That's the only audience that exists for Flash: Rebirth. This isn't designed to get anybody into the Flash who isn't already well-versed in the universe. This isn't even designed for people who like Barry Allen, because fucking Barry Allen comics weren't all about the sublimely moronic thing that DC calls "The Speed Force", a mystical Earth related idea that attempts to add some tremendously fucking stupid "science" to why blond guys and old guys run really fast. Barry Allen fans were into a comic that was all Silver Age crazy, with time-travel, monkeys and lightning bolts that hit "chemicals."  This isn't the comic book character that Steven Spielberg uses as props in his look-how-awesome-the-past-was movies. This is a delivery system for an expectation that no one but old people had. This isn't a comic book. It's a statement on a genre that DC created--bought and paid for with blow-jobs at the pier of not caring.

And here's the note that somebody needed to give Van Sciver 10 years ago: stop putting Hal Jordan in that brown leather flight jacket with the sheepskin collar. He looks like a fucking tool.

Jersey Gods # 3

Written by Glen Brunswick

Art by Dan McDaid & Rachelle Rosenberg

Published by Image Comics

That's a Paul Pope cover, by the way. Jersey Gods # 3 isn't that much different than Jersey Gods # 2, in that the real world dating/family argument scenes are what works to keep the comic from being a non-stop pastiche of Jack Kirby type stuff. It's sort of hard to love something that looks backwards this much, but then again, Kirby probably would have preferred that people buy new comics as opposed to spending fifty bucks on his thirty year old work--not financially, sure, but it just doesn't fit with the Kirby legend that he would look at a hardcover of something he did decades ago and say "ahh, I win." McDaid is a damn fine artist though--his Kirbyish stuff doesn't look like Kirby as much as it looks like a guy who LIKES Kirby. But still, this is pastiche, it's homage, and while it certainly could lead to something else, eventually, it probably should start in that direction sooner rather than later. Unlike some of their contemporaries, it seems clear that Brunswick and McDaid have the ability to actually make that choice. (Which, yes, is another way to say that Geoff Johns doesn't.)

-Tucker Stone, 2009

Comments

[Sharif]

When Van Sciver breaks the panels up like that, it also makes it very inconvenient to read on a computer screen. My monitor isn't big enough!

[Richard]

Great review of Flash: Rebirth.

More people should use prostitution analogies when describing DC Comics.

[David Uzumeri]

But that's his DAD's bomber jacket that made him look like a fucking tool! Looking like a tool is a Jordan family tradition, Tucker, who the fuck are you to judge that?

[Tucker Stone]

I would totally approve of that dipshit jacket if, everytime Hal Jordan walked up to people, he went "Sorry about the jacket. It belonged to my dad."

[david brothers]

Just lean over and put your head in the lap of the Silver Age, Tucker. Let Hal put his bomber jacket over your head while you're down there.

You'll feel better. Trust me.

[seth hurley]

Why all this talk about art and story? Where is the talk about one dollar price hikes?

That dollar could have gone to buy the winning scratch ticket that would fund a pediatric clinic to treat cancer, AIDS, or teach them not to talk in movie theaters.

[David Uzumeri]

Are you talking about the "price hike" on Flash: Rebirth? The one that fits in with the extra eight pages of story? That "price hike"?

[Joey Manley]

Flame-thrown.

[LurkerWithout]

I would buy the hell out of a book that was nothing but Man-Bat working to become a rap star. I mean unless the writing or art totally sucked...

[DR]

Uh, Hal Jordan *is* a fucking tool. That jacket is totally fitting.

[Jim Kingman]

The beauty of Flash: Rebirth is that it actually made me miss all those Barry Allen stories of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. And that hasn't happened to me in 23 years. $3.99 for that kind of longing? (And to boot I got a nice bag and board to protect it, and a 15% discount on the book.) SOLD!

[Duncan]

Does anyone else not know whether Geoff Johns... like, the Green Lantern stuff - it seems awesomely retarded, but you maybe can't tell if that's knowingly so, or wrily so? And then this. I don't know if it makes a difference, really.

[Mithel]

Hal Jordan isn't a character, he is "Rock You Like a Hurricane" by the Scorpions distilled into CMYK. A stupid jacket that makes him look like a tool is totally appropriate.

[Jim Kosmicki]

were you aware that Marvel DID publish Remo Williams comics in the 90's? They published something like 8 issues of a B&W magazine and at least four issues of a color mini-series. There was a TPB as well, that I think was colored versions of the B&W books. IIRC, there was even some Ditko art in a few of the books. They were well done. I think Will Murray wrote at least some of the B&W stories.

and then of course there was the Jim Mullaney written Iron Fist mini which was a Destroyer story starring Danny Rand.

[Tucker Stone]

Finally, something to look for in back issue bins besides Brendan Mccarthy and that damn elementals sex special. Thanks Jim.

[LurkerWithout]

Remo fights ninjas in one of them. Man does Chun hate ninjas...