Battlefields: Dear Billy # 2
Written by Garth Ennis
Art by Peter Snjeberg & Rob Steen
Published by Dynamite Entertainment
Remember I Spit On Your Grave (Day Of The Woman)? That exploitation flick where the woman gets raped a bunch of times and then she goes after the guys who raped her? Imagine that crossed with a Discovery Channel special on fighter pilots and Band of Brothers. And imagine that you hadn't seen Peter Snjeberg 's art when it was on The Boys, because it turns out only Snjeberg should be inking Snjeberg. This is sort of like that, except everybody talks all British and shit, because it sounds classier. If you like that sort of thing, this is probably right up your alley. It's like "moving" and shit.
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Butch Guice & Frank D'Armata
Published by Marvel Comics
Although Butch Guice is probably the most punished artist by Frank D'Armata's all-art-must-be-fixed coloring decree out of the whole rotating Captain America art squad, he still gets a chance to fuck with things a bit here, as seen on the second page where he has Brubaker's Winter Soldier kick somebody so goddamn hard both victim and foot end up breaking outside of the comic panel. Other than that, it's some by the numbers super-heroics with Cappy back in his old Winter Soldier duds, out to get even with a mean old Chinese man who used to be peppy little Chinese kid. Not the best or most original story this title has ever had since the day Ed Brubaker helped everybody realize that words like "original" could still apply to a fucking comic book featuring Captain America, but it does have the most serious depiction of keeping an Aqua-based type person in a big aquarium. Didn't realize that was something that needed to be taken seriously, but now that it has, it certainly makes Aqualad look even dumber than he did before. Namor: taking chances and raising bars.
Written by Brian Michael Bendis, but that's according to the credits page and is probably a lie because this thing doesn't really have any writing in it if you define writing as something beyond the mere insertion of words on a page
Art by Billy Tan, Matt Banning and Justin Ponsor and one wonders how much Justin Ponsor hates working on this comic because one imagines it must be a lot, his hate I mean, this has to be a make-the-donuts kind of job
Jarring Guest Art Pages by Pretty Much Every Marvel Artist Findable
All Guest Pages Suck, some of them almost as bad as Billy Tan's shitty, horrible pencils, which are shitty and horrible, no matter what some people say about them, this guy's art is fucking terrible
Technically Speaking, Billy Tan's Closest Competitor In The Terrible Fucking Art Department Is Probably The Guy Who Used to Do Those Slutty Marville Covers Or Whatever That Wank Comic Was Called, Like Whatever It Is He's Doing With This Shit, It Looks Like A TV Guide Advertisement For That Hitman Video Game They Made A Movie Out Of. For Reals, Guy's Art Looks Like It Was Created To Wake Up Coma Patients By Instilling Them With A Subconscious Desire To Gouge Their Eyes Out
This isn't a very good comic book. Like, at all.
Written by Andy Diggle
Art by Roberto De La Torre, Carlos Magno, Scott Hanna, Frank Martin & Giovanni Kosoki
Published by Marvel Comics
Part of the irritation with having Barack Obama front and center in your comic book is that it demands a type of suspension of disbelief that's so goddamn specific as to irritate all but the most intuitive reader. So you've got the real US president, okay. And he's got regular human bodyguards? Why the fuck would the president only have regular human bodyguards? The Marvel version of Earth is attacked on every other Tuesday, it's covered over with evil motherfuckers bent on rape, aerial and serial murder...and Barack Obama has a couple of regular Secret Service guys? With regular fucking guns? That's probably not something anybody else cares about. They're probably too busy getting bothered by the art, which is garish and weird. Since when did slapping black bars onto a splash page in the layout process make something sequential art? What a fucking joke. Still, not really sure how much you can expect out of a comic that's been handed off to a new writer right after nearly all of it's main characters got yanked over to another comic book.
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Stuart Immonen, Wade von Grawbadger & Justin Ponsor
Published by Marvel Comics
One wonders if the struggle of writing so many terrible comic books is starting to work against Bendis, as he seems to have forgotten which comics assigned to him are illustrated by people who actually know what the fuck they're doing and deserve their job. The first half of this thing--this Ultimate Spider-Man # 131 thing--is excellently drawn. Seriously, it's drawn really, really fucking well. Unfortunately, it's also completely fucking terrible, and that's because Brian Michael Bendis either doesn't respect Stuart Immonen, or he's just too busy to remember who it is that's been stuck working with his overly wordy dialog. Whatever the case is, the result is this: a comic that contains one of the best two page drawings of Immonen's all around solid career, only for those pages to be completely and utterly ruined by Bendis' apparent loathing for having to write scripts for comic books, because comic books have all that pesky fucking art getting in the way of his ham-handed attempts to rip-off whatever movie he watched last week. It'd be one thing if Ultimate Spider-Man was always this bad--but it isn't, and that makes the cheesy, meandering bullshit that is J. Jonah Jameson's treacly monologue on "a hero" sandwiching the splash that much more insulting. Everybody involved in those words should sit down and write a letter of apology and hand deliver it to Stuart Immonen. (They won't.)
Written by Joshua Dysart
Art by Alberto Ponticelli & Oscar Celestini
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics
It'd be nice if whoever is telling Alberto Ponticelli to tone it down would back off. The guy has a weird way of drawing the human body, and it's in that weird category that's actually pretty interesting to look at. For whatever reason, he's currently keeping it right on the edge of that stupid "let's try to be sort of realistic" thing that Vertigo seems to believe is a good idea for any non-Grant Morrison title, hoping the reader will ignore the odd way in which a woman floats above a couch she's supposed to be all "come hither" on, or trying to pretend that what looks like a bizarre ballet jump somehow associated with a flying bench is actually just a guy kicking a bench. Beyond that, Unknown Soldier is a comic that's still too fucking safe, content just not to be exploitative grinding Africa-as-scary-wasteland stories. In the shit house standard of quality that serialized comics have to operate under, sure, that makes it interesting--but Dysart and Ponticelli have the potential to do something a lot more effective than just "better than." Considering the last page of this one is another tired "lady fights off rapist by being more violent" sequence, the evidence that A Change Is Gonna Come isn't here yet. Keep trying?
-Tucker Stone, 2009
-Tucker Stone, 2009
Did you read that Preacher special about Starr that Snjeberg drew? That was pretty fantastic, and I think he was inking himself. Everything else of his I've seen - which I think was just Starman and the Boys - has been awful.
Posted by: Sean Witzke | 2009.03.02 at 00:45
I see so much potential in The Unknown Soldier for a berserk political action series but I don't know if that is going to happen.
I find the idea of child soldiers terrifying so I naturally want more of them. From those twin brothers that lead the God's Army, Children of the Corn, to Willy Wonka, kids are horrible little shits on their own, never mind armed groups of them.
The biggest misstep of the 24: Redemption movie was not having Baur & Begbie slaughtering dozens of kids under the thumb of the Candyman.
Posted by: seth hurley | 2009.03.02 at 12:09
Snejbjerg has the most awesome name in comics. I love typing it.
Snejbjerg. Snejbjerg.
And seriously, Mr. D'Armata, I'm at the point now where I'm just genuinely curious what a Captain America story that takes place during the day looks like.
Posted by: David Uzumeri | 2009.03.03 at 07:41
David, I'll bet you dollarss to donuts that daytime in the D'Armata universe? Always overcast.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2009.03.04 at 00:40
He did the Starr one, of course. I knew I'd heard of him before The Boys stuff--looking at again, it's clear they were just trying to push it through as if it was Robertson's work, and it suffered. I think that was when Robertson was having to do Exterminators or Authority Prime?
And Seth--I don't know if much could've fixed the 24 Redemption thing. I think the only ambition was to just not be grossly offensive, to remind you what people's names were, and to spoil the future hamminess that is Jon Voight circa-every movie he's done in the last 15 years.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2009.03.04 at 00:43
The title of this column reminds me of like a rejected title for the Liars' first album.
Posted by: Marty | 2009.03.06 at 14:19
I just recently got my copies of the two-part Thunderbolts story (waited until the 2nd issue came out & then ordered both online so I could read the whole story @ once), and I had the same exact reaction regarding the Secret Service in the Marvel Universe.
Air Force One should probably be something more advanced, like an Avengers Quinjet, and instead of being followed by a couple of fighter jets, there should be like a fleet of stealth bombers surrounding it @ all times. And, instead of an "escape pod" there should be an instant teleporter onboard, to get the President to safety, if necessary. And the secret service agents should be decked out in something like Iron Man/War Machine armor, instead of just being the usual men in business suits, armed with regular guns (they should @ least have laser guns).
Posted by: J.R. LeMar | 2009.03.15 at 13:42