Agents of Atlas # 5
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Carlo Pagulayan, Jason Paz & Jana Schimer
Published by Marvel Comics
Usually when Spider-man shows up as a guest star, you end up reading a comic book writer's not-very-funny attempts to be funny, because comic book writers en masse seem to operate under the assumption that a major part of Spider-man's "personality" is that the character is possessed of a rapier wit to go along with whatever the rest of his powers are. It's odd, because 95% of the time Spider-man's "quips" read like cribnotes from a Friedberg/Seltzer script, and the rest of the time its just because the writer is funny. Spider-man himself? He's not funny. He's about three inches away from being a contestant on Tool Academy. The only reason that odyssey of slime didn't happen during Spidey's guest appearance in Atlas is tangled up in Jeff Parker, who decided to use "spidey-sense" as his rutabaga to twist up the tired "super-team fights super-team" moment that is, as always, necessary for these type of stories. It's a decent choice, mostly because Spider-man has used his spidey-sense pretty infrequently since joining the New Avengers book, which has been running for five years. Seriously, five years? You could probably write a synopsis of that entire series on a post-it note.
Written by Tony Daniel
Art by Tony Daniel, Sandu Florea, Ian Hannin & JD Smith
Published by DC Comics
Earlier this year, Neil Gaiman gave the world a Batman story based in insufferably stupid nonsense regarding the "legacy" of "icons", a shitty story that only served to make those giant Alex Ross comics seem like Nordic war poetry by comparison. The idea that Batman comics needed something like that, or that it was somehow "mature" to produce a Batman story that doesn't involve Batman punching people, is his own. It's wrong, but it's still an idea. Battle For The Cowl is a different beast entirely--it's had punching, kicking, all the "action" stuff that a Batman comic pretty much screams for--but what it didn't have was any sense of being created in the service of telling a story, or doing anything. It was just random characters, at least 20 of them, screaming and jumping, posing on various objects and outcroppings, talking about fires and memories. Sometimes a guy got stabbed. Sometimes a girl got punched. Lots of shit blew up. At the end, a guy won a fight by using talk therapy and a high kick. Then he changed his clothes, and, for the umpteenth time in the past 12 months, DC Comics published another splash page where a character told the reader how awesome Batman is. And yeah, that's sort of true: Batman is Awesome, he Owns Your Fucking Face, he's definitely not anywhere near the loser that Connor Hawke is. But if DC is wrong--and hell, if Marvel is wrong too--and there does come a day when some non-comic-reader actually shows an interest in a Batman comic, they sure as hell aren't going to think Batman is very Awesome upon reading any of these Battle For The Cowl things. The only thing that's awesome about this latest chapter of bullshit?
It's over.
Written by Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin & Fred Hembeck
Art by Luke Ross, Rick Magyar, Frank D'Armata, Marcos Martin, Muntsa Vicente, Fred Hembeck & Chris Giarrusso
Published by Marvel Comics
The last few issues of Captain America, this one included, are part of some kind of bet Marvel Comics has going with the creative team to see if they can put out a comic book based around really fucking stupid one-sentence plots. Could they pull off creating something that doesn't make the reader, or the creative team itself, reassess that whole "comic books are inherently better than the Twilight book series just cuz" principle? #49 was the story of a crybaby who killed Captain America and lost her baby, all while crying, and #50 is the story of a guy who still celebrates his birthdays with cakes and shit despite living a life based mostly around tracking down and killing the enemies of America. So it's kind of like a competition in reading form. Except...you're the winner? Or something to that effect? Oh, and this is the first one of these Fred Hembeck back-up pages that wasn't better than the main comic it was shoved into. The eventual collection of these Hembeck back-ups will still be pretty fucking tight, but this one won't be the reason anybody buys it.
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Goran Sudzuka, Rodney Ramos & Jamie Grant
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics
Sometimes your wife and kids are such a fucking drain, you know? You've sacrificed so goddamn much for them, given up on any hope of becoming a rock star, abandoned the fantasy that you'd wake up someday to find a couple of porn-ready double G's in the bed alongside you, squashed any hopes that her brother would join you in the sack for just one night, and the fucking nagging, the fucking constant nagging--it's like living with a goddamn beehive, y'know? A fat beehive. A fat beehive that eats money. And dreams. You'd just like to take it out in a field, you know? So you can kill it and leave it there? Peter Milligan understands you, he does, he speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.
Take her outside. Bring the kids. Blame it on the plague.
Written by Garth Ennis
Art by John McCrea, Keith Burns & Tony Avina
Published by Dynamite Publishing
There's this old comic called Dinosaurs For Hire--real piece of shit, but it had nudie chicks in it, nipples and so on. Thong underwear, bikini shots, the whole nine yards, as long as the whole nine yards doesn't include penetration. That was a comic you could rub yourself raw too, and being as that was half of the point, good show. Herogasm operates under the mentality that its "satire" of shitty super-hero team-ups will succeed solely on the basis of the primary setpiece, which is that all your Crises and Invasions and Secret Wars were just a smokescreen while the various heroes were at a beach resort reenacting Caligulia. As an idea, sure, it's got some cleverness to it. But the only way it's going to really fly? If the tits look luscious, the cocks look hard, and the fucking--the oh so sweet fucking--looks tasty. Herogasm needed the fog of lust steaming up the eyeballs. Without it, you're just stuck with a comic full of embarrassing looking action figures and poorly drawn cocks. And while the bungled and the botched--as well as the spastics--might call this classic anyway, simply because it "had the courage" or something to that effect, the simple truth is that this thing right here isn't half as good as it could have been. It needed sticky pages.
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Tom Fowler & Dave McCaig
Published by Wildstorm/DC Comics
While Mysterius the mini-series has basically served as an exercise in predictability, albeit a thoroughly attractive sort of predictability that's well crafted, issue 5 sets the stage for what happens to be the first major cliffhanger ending of its run. It's not the "will main character survive" thing that the comic ends with, that's a done deal. No, the question you're left with is this: are the guys behind the green door going to make this comic about a selfish asshole, or is he going to unveil a touch of responsibility that he doesn't really seem to possess? Is he going to fuck this Girl Friday type over the same way he's fucked over all the rest of them? While it doesn't seem wholly likely that Mysterius will go nasty--Tom Fowler's closing drawings of the face depict a heavy brow, burdens of the soul, that type of shit--Jeff Parker drops a little hint that maybe cynicism and selfishness aren't solely the purview of the Ennis/Azzarello types. Apparently, Mysterius has been stealing life off innocent people for his entire existence, and that's why he's basically immortal. Maybe there is more to this series than Tim Callahan thinks. Who saw that coming?
Written by Peter Tomasi
Art by Lee Garbett, Trevor Scott & Brian Reber
Published by DC Comics
Is there room for a comic book based around Alfred Pennyworth fucking people up, Liam Neeson-in-Taken style? You're goddamn right there is. Now, there's never going to be a single Outsiders story worth reading as the team now stands, because it includes characters like Geo-Force, Katana, Halo & Owlman, and those four right there are proof positive that the argument "all super-heroes are basically the same" is factually inaccurate, because really, there are no stories in existence that those four jackals can't fuck up. But if you ignore the actual team stuff that takes up the majority of this comic's pages, you'll discover one of the top five reasons comic books exist: so that you can read stories about an aging, balding-no-more butler flipping the script on some gutter prick. You'll read about Alfred Pennyworth mentioning he used to be an MI-5 officer, and while Peter Tomasi might want to do a little research on MI-5 (MI-6 are the ones who would have been catching bullets "in Tangiers", MI-5 stick around the homefront), he's still gonna earn a pass as long as he's willing to write stories about a shit-kicking butler who punches Deathstroke The Terminator in Deathstroke The Terminator's fucking one-eyed pussy face. There's only one way to get an Alfred Pennyworth: Agent of Annihilate The World mini-series. Vote with your wallet, bitches.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
Mysterius is kind of a time warp in itself-- it reminds me of the "what the hell, why not" off-brand titles DC used to publish in the mid- to late eighties. Fun, kinetic, carefully & lovingly assembled... It doesn't look like the end product of Industry at all. Certainly not the sort of thing you're conditioned to expect out of DC/ WILDSTORM / WE PRINT LICENSES.
Props to those shameless hucksters for publishing Mysterius! Here's hoping Fowler & Parker pair up again.
Posted by: revD | 2009.05.25 at 11:19
>Now, there's never going to be a single Outsiders story worth reading as the team now stands, because it includes characters like Geo-Force, Katana, Halo & Owlman, and those four right there are proof positive that the argument "all super-heroes are basically the same" is factually inaccurate, because really, there are no stories in existence that those four jackals can't fuck up.
I laughed out loud when I read this! Coupled with your last month's "the Outsiders" comment ("Alfred: you get the Outsiders and still have to work, even though I am dead and you are old."), I really feel that when it comes to "Comics of the weak", you give "the Outsiders" a special brand of love:)
Posted by: Vanja Miskovic | 2009.05.25 at 14:42
SEMANTIC CORRECTION: Sal Cipriano lettered Hellblazer; I'm pretty sure Jamie "Why The Fuck Am I Not Working On Batman And Robin" Grant did the colors, which, as you've commented before, raise it above almost everything else Vertigo publishes, at least visually.
Posted by: David Uzumeri | 2009.05.25 at 17:14
whoops, fixed!
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2009.05.25 at 19:37
Yeah I have to say: Captain America is starting to get into pointless territory. When did these writers forget that even in the midst of an overarching storyline, each issue must contain the basic storytelling elements of protagonist, antagonist and conclusion?
Posted by: Pj Perez | 2009.05.25 at 22:34