Comics Of The Weak: New Day Rising

Amazing Spider-Man # 600
Written by Dan Slott, Stan Lee, Mark Waid, Marc Guggenheim, Zeb Wells & Joe Kelly
Art by John Romita Jr., Klaus Janson, Dean White, Marcos Martin, Javier Rodriguez, Colleen Doran, Jose Villarrubia, Mario Alberti, Mitch Breitweiser, Elizabeth Breitweiser, Derec Donovan, Antonio Fabela, Fumara, Chuckry & Caramagna
Published by Marvel Comics

The opening story, or "actual reason for purchase" part of this comic is, at its core, a Peter Parker fights Dr. Octopus plot, and the only tangible difference between that fight and every other fight involving Doc Ock is the change in the villain's status quo that presents him as a larval cocoon instead of his normal appearance, which is that of a fat Beatle. It's illustrated by John Romita Jr, so except for the page where Peter Parker acts like a complete fucking moron and gets called on doing so by Daredevil, it's exactly what a good Spider-man story is supposed to read like. (Everything involving Aunt May is horrible, meandering "mommy has it tough" nonsense, but that's par for the course. That character seems to exist solely to teach comic readers why real life is preferable to a fantasy one, because in real life, old people will eventually fuck off and die.)

Now that Marvel publishes this series on a near constant basis, the number on the comic has made it to anniversary status, and as such, the reader gets the chance to read "extra" stories, all of which are terrible. One features Peter Parker crying at his own greatness, which must be included by law, another features a drawing of the Simpsons even worse than the ones from the old Tracy Ullman show, another features a bunch of characters whose clothes have been stuffed with diapers, there's one where some kids play on the playground and talk like they're six going on seventeen, and then there's a five page story about Aunt May that covers the exact same plot point that was covered in the main story, except the main story covered it in two panels and treated it like a speedbump, whereas here it takes five pages to reveal that, like a Care Bear, the dead will be will your pen pal if you just Give Your All hard enough. It also looks like shit. 

At the end of the comic, there's a preview for what's coming up in the next year of Amazing Spider-Man, and it's incredibly effective, but only in that it makes one realize that once every 100 issues is probably the preferred way to deal with something like a regular Spider-man comic. 

Herogasm # 3

Written by Garth Ennis

Art by John McCrea, Keith Burns & Tony Avina

Published by Dynamite Entertainment

A masked man goes into a sperm bank, points a gun at the woman behind the counter, and says, "Open the safe." She says, "This isn't a real bank, it's a sperm bank." He says, "Open the safe or I'll shoot." She opens the safe, and he says, "Now take one of the bottles and drink it." After she opens the bottle and drinks it, he takes off his mask and the woman realizes the robber is her husband. He says, "Now you see? It's not so difficult, is it?"

Time it took to find that one, using the google search engine: 2 minutes.

Offensive dick n' pussy jokes don't have to be this hard. Especially when you have the freedom to draw actual dicks and actual pussies.

Wednesday Comics # 3

By Azzarello, Risso, Gibbons, Sook, Arcuid, Bermejo, Baker, Bullock, Heuck, Busiek, Quinones, Gaiman, Allred, Berganza, Galloway, Pope, Palmiotti, Conner, Didio, Lopez, Newman, Caldwell, Kubert, Kubert, Kerschl, Fletcher, Simonson and Stelfreeze

Published by DC Comics

Batzarello: Some people might think that Batman is shaking his fist because he's angry at the nerd for slapping the lady. Other people might think that he's shaking his fist because he's silently saying "peeping on the crazy, that's why I wear the outfit". That's how Azzarello works. He gives you choices.

KamanGibbons: Boy, those rats can't shoot for nothing. What are they, 10 yards away, at most? Missing Kamandi makes sense, dude is skinny. But the tiger? They can't hit the fucking tiger?

Superjerkoff: So Superman gets in an argument with his boyfriend Batman and runs home to his fucking mommy. You know, putting this on the USA Today website probably isn't such a bad idea, since that's basically the same kind of story that DC has to offer in their regular comics anyway.

Deadman: Although a lot of the Deadman stuff so far has looked like a mash note to Darwyn Cooke, this one looks like a mash note to old Dr. Strange backgrounds, Kirby lava meltdowns, AND Darwyn Cooke, which means the comic has passed from "you like that guy" to "oh wait, you actually know what you're doing."

The Busiek Lantern: Even when Dean Martin was an active, going concern, nobody ever said "Who does he think he is, Dean Martin?" They didn't because America used to fucking mean something, and what it used to mean was that women who gave that kinda lip were immediately put on laudanum.

Metagaiman: When a comic can have its main characters replaced by the cast of Rent and still tell the exact same story, you probably want to treat that as an admonition to try harder.

Teen Titans: There's some kind of mathematical equation here that determines how close to the character one has to be before they are allowed to have a nose drawn onto their face. When the director's cut of this Teen Titans story gets published, they should include that rule alongside the explanation for why the soldiers are wearing those yellow foam earplugs you can get for free on plane trips if, like, you whine enough.

The Papal Strange: Somebody at DC must have felt bad for the not-as-trendy artists that are sharing space with Paul Pope's Adam Strange story, because that's the only sensible excuse for the limited color palette he's allowed to have.

Supergirl: Although it's obvious that this story isn't going to have some crazy "everybody die now" twist, it would be kind of genius if somebody shot the cat and the rest of the pages where just Supergirl out for revenge. It's totally not cool to shoot cats, but if that plane crashes--look, it's still a fucking cat. There's probably a baby on that plane. Baby > Cat.

Metal Men: It would be a lot more fun if this comic could just get a little worse. Maybe kill the kid? Or maybe kill the Doctor, and have the rest of the comic be a hyperrealistic comic about the Metal Men spiralling downwards into alcoholism.

Wonder Woman: The problem here is that DC has spent so long doing a shitty job of publishing female characters that one spends half the reading time wondering why, if Wonder Woman is dreaming, she isn't dreaming about helping a male character find his mojo by getting herself beat up in an alley somewhere. 

Sgt. Kubert: What are pictures of beating up a dude in a chair good for? Wouldn't taking notes be better if one has to "document the interrogation"?

Flash: If the next installment of Iris West comics is just Iris driving in silence for eight panels, they can just announce the 2010 Harvey's that evening.

Catdemon: Yeah, we got it. The Cadbury Hills smell of ozone. It's a one page comic, no need to say it twice. Needs more Demon. (In this case, "more" means "any".)

BaketheHawkMan: When they have Wednesday Comics parties in the future, are they going to have a grown-ups table and a kiddie table? Because they really should.

Dark Wolverine # 76

Written by Daniel Way & Marjorie Liu

Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, Onofrio Catacchio & Marte Gracia

Published by Marvel Comics

This really shouldn't work, this whole Daken-as-Wolverine thing. There shouldn't be any pleasure to be found in a hackneyed faux Logan clone, a character whose defining features were probably pulled from a list of what 50 year olds consider "edgy"--a wallet chain, a mohawk, "tribal" tattoos. But work it does, and while the easy thing to do would be to attribute that to Giuseppe Camuncoli's ability to draw an acrobatic fight sequence so well it practically moves across the fucking page, or a two panel sequence involving Mr. Fantastic that points directly to how lazy most artists are when they have the opportunity to stretch logic, the truth is that Camuncoli didn't write this comic. Way and Liu did. Whether they've got more stories like this one in the bag or not, this is one worth being proud of.

Hellblazer # 257

Written by Peter Milligan

Art by Giuseppe Camuncoli, Stefano Landini & Jamie Grant

Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

Giuseppe Camuncoli drew this comic too, and Peter Milligan wrote it, and it actually has a nipple shot in it, which is a rarity in a Vertigo comic. (It's an old song you already know, but one more time: Mature Readers tags mean gore and language: sex is usually a no-no, and nipples even more so.) But if you remember anything about it, it's going to be Simon Bisley's hehhehehhahah hahahahah aaaaahaaaaha aaaaaa ahhhha AHAHHHAHAHAH aAAAGAH AAH AAAHH cover. Take a look at Bisley's happy trail. It looks like Abraham Lincoln's chin beard upside down. It might have something to do with the script, which is about how John is a pervert, and...perverts have the Devil in their pants where their junk should be? Or the Devil is their junk? And the Devil's head is upside down in place of their junk, so the goatee sticks out?

Dude, the Devil isn't fucking real.

Pluto # 4

By Naoki Urasawa

Published by Viz

Like something out of nerd fantasia, July 2009 probably stands as the strongest month of the year for comics worth giving a shit about--besides Asterios Polyp and Parker, Pluto 4 might just be the gnarliest entertainer of the bunch, a story that deals with death in a way that all the Black Lanterns couldn't dream of matching in terms of gravity. Delivered in the same kind of "what just happened" moment that McCarthy uses in his novels, the entire story leads directly up to the moment of sacrifice only to skip over the seconds in which it happens. Breaking after realization, it all leads up to a fuck-you-heroes sequence where the Gesicht character looks up at the flat image of a breaking news story and finally realizes how little his "life" remains his own. If it were just the story, it would just be good: but Naoki Urasawa is better at delivering the decision that precedes action than most of his peers, and in the fallout pages that follow, he delivers a rushed cacophony of images and dialog, all of it seeming to point that Gesicht has, somehow, joined Atom on the other side of evolution.

This book is better than you heard it was.

Immortal Weapons # 1

Written by Jason Aaron

Art by Mico Suayan, Stefano Gaudiano, Roberto De La Torre, Khari Evans, Victor Olazaba, Michael Lark, Arturo Lozzi, Edgar Delgado, Matt Hollingsworth, Jelena Kevic Djurdjevi & Jodi Wolff

Published by Marvel Comics

After successfully filling a couple of panels and serving as jazzy side characters in a kung fu story arc, Marvel has decided that it would be unfair for their "Immortal Weapon" creations to disappear into happy memory--after all, every other popular character gets slammed against the wall until everybody gets sick and fucking tired of it, why can't some of the new kids? Call it the Deadpool business plan: people like one thing for a short time, maybe they'll like another sixty issues of that one thing, especially if they all arrive at once. At the same time, you have to give Marvel a minor bit of credit for choosing to deal with Fat Cobra, the Bride of Nine Spiders and...the rest of them? in mini-series format. DC probably would have published six new ongoings, and they would have released them on the same day. Still, Jason Aaron's background story for Fat Cobra--the focus of this first issue--reads less like a triumph, and more like he's just dodged the "make up an origin for random character, pray it isn't boring" bullet. He chooses familicide, which is a spoiler, but hey: you don't pay your four dollars, you don't get to be surprised, trade waiter.

Phonogram The Singles Club # 4

Written by Kieron Gillen

Art by Jamie McKelvie, Julia Scheele, Matthew Wilson, David Lafuente, Christina Strain & Charity Larrison

Published by Image Comics

The conceit of this series is that its story all takes place in one night, and each issue will deliver sixteen pages of that one night, focusing specifically on one portion of the cast. This chapter focuses on Seth Bingo (who, according to the cover, hates you) and Silent Girl, the two of whom happen to be controlling the music on the night in question. Seth is a motormouth ninny, the sort of person more people are probably like than they realize, which is why there's a sense that he's an insufferable prick that slowly gets smothered by the fuzzy realization that he's the reader's mirror reflection. Silent Girl is...well, perfect, basically, a fantasy version of the coolest girl in the room. There's probably other characters in the series that are depicted as being more physically attractive, but it seems likely that Silent Girl tops everyone around her in the intelligence, taste and class department, which is something that becomes apparent not through Gillen's dialog, but through McKelvie's depiction of a raised eyebrow as the ultimate trump card. Overall, it's a pleasant comic, but it's acclaim seems tangled up in the fact that there just aren't any great comics about music right now (unless you want to jack off about ragtime) so a relatively good one will do.

Grotesque # 3

By Sergio Ponchione

Published by Fantagraphics

The sort of ridiculously imaginative goof around that few publishers seem interested in producing, so beholden they must be to ideas of legacy reprints, the name-making serial, or the movie deal, Grotesque is a comic book that might sound the "more of these" alarm. It shouldn't, because while that might be true, who, exactly, is going to create work like this? An inhalation and reformatting of a classic trope here and there, that's not something the shelves are lacking, what's lacking is the skill with which Ponchione ejects them, creating something wholly his own. Popeye as a nun using shoes as banana peels, Nino Brown's dialog from New Jack City repurposed in a Keebler village shoved into the wilds of a Baltic-seeming country, Dick Tracy villains on steroids, and a Build A Friend Kirby 'bot standing in as a travel-ready oracle: this, that which they do not make, this, that which they should.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

Comments

[david brothers]

The Complete Essex County came out this month, too. I got to hold both the hardcover and softcover in my hands at SDCC, and dang is it a beautiful book.

July basically won for the year.

[Chris Jones]

"That won't happen again! That man's in jail!"

Very probably the best line of the year.

[moose n squirrel]

"Baby > Cat."

Spoken like a man who clearly has had limited exposure to babies.

[Kenny Cather]

"This book is better than you heard it was."

Wow.... I've heard nothing but amazing praise for Pluto, so this is just all kinds of awesome. I just finished reading Tezuka's "Greatest Robot on Earth," so I'm all sorts of pumped for Pluto. I have my copies in my backpack, so I'm going to get to start reading it soon!

And yes, July 09 is one of the best months ever for comic enthusiasts. If only Love & Rockets V 2 or Ganges 3 was coming out this month....

David, the Essex County trilogy is some amazing reading. The second volume in particular was just too cool for school.

Speaking of books that need to come out, I'm really anxious for a collection of The Muppet Show. For those of us not living in a major metropolis like NYC, finding any issues of that series has been impossible. I'm pretty friendly with the guy who runs the comic shop here, but asking him to order something is always a craps shot. I've come to the realization I'm probably not going to read this thing until a collection comes out or I get to be a full time resident of Brooklyn.

[seth hurley]

Thanks Wednesday Comics, now I know what Douglas Sirk's "Flash" movie would have been like.

[Tim O'Neil]

AM I the only one who finds Phonogram not just bad but actually ire-raising? It's not a good thing if you think the book would be 100x better if the Punisher came in the front door and shot everyone involved point blank in the face multiple times, is it? Because that's been my reaction to every issue of Phonogram that I've so far read.

[Tucker Stone]

I don't think you're alone, no. This is the only one I've read, but from what I've heard, the other issues are quite off-putting. This one has that quality as well, but the overall effect is that it's supposed to, because it's a genuinely accurate depiction of snobby music types. It's actually kind of sweet.

[Zebtron A. Rama]

"...Iris driving in silence for eight panels..." - I would buy a whole book of this, I swear. Best Flash.

And Peter SO made the wrong decision when he chose to save Aunt May's life over his marriage with MJ. America really needs to get over their fear of death and grow up. Didn't HBO's "Six Feet Under" teach us anything. (Besides Russian Florists are bad house guests, of course)

[Chris Jones]

I haven't read any of the Singles issues of Phonogram, but I have the original series and I interpreted it as a story about learning how to get over yourself. They're still snobby music types by the end but it's like, there's a REASON they're like this and I got the impression that things were going to be kind of different from now on toward the end.

It's kind of both a celebration and a mockery of that hipster snobbiness, kind of like Metalocalypse is for metal except less blatantly comedic.

[Guy Smiley]

I like Phonogram. One of the things I like about it most is that the Punisher won't come shoot anybody in the face. That kind of comic I can get from Marvel, which publishes, what, two a month, or DC, which publishes about five a week under the "Blackest Night" banner.

I also like the art and Gillen's dorkish enthusiasm for music. Since comics are usually a venue for dorkish enthusiasm about comics (Barry Allen is BACK!) (!!!), which is not a mystery to me, it's interesting to be on the outside of that enthusiasm yet able to appreciate what these guys are doing with it.

Gillen seems to want to deal with a slice of life -- the relationships of the kinds of folk who populate this pop music scene -- in an interesting way, and I think he's approaching the stories with more on his mind than cranking out a decent alternative take on magic fantasy semi-realism, for lack of a better term. When I don't like some of the characters, I find it's for the same reasons that I didn't/don't hang out in their milieu in the real world.

Is there a bit of preciousness attached? Maybe so, but moreso than I'd get from watching Dan Didio's tree fort boys club relive the early 80s, or the stereotyped indie creator moan about being broke and not getting laid? Nah. And the art's better.

Hm. If I had any internal editor, I'd have just posted that last paragraph ...

[Tim O'Neil]

I didn't say I wanted the Punisher to show up because I thought it would make for a more interesting comic, I think it would be good because I want everyone in the comic to die. The thing is, it is a 100% accurate representation of a certain subset of people I know well, partly because I could be mistaken for one on a really bad day. It doesn't draw enough blood: in order to fully encapsulate my utter profound hatred for the kinds of characters on display in Phonogram, they would need to be teleported into the heart of the sun.

[Tucker Stone]

I think Phonogram suffers under the same problem that gets ascribed to Pitchfork reviews, which is that you can go full dork fanatic for music in person, but in text, it comes across too solipsistically, like you're sitting in a room wanting to take part in the discussion, but you can't, because you've got your mouth taped shut. And the guy won't shut up about late New Order albums, and he's WRONG, he's so GODDAMN WRONG. People who want to read extravagantly passionate music criticism--or in this case, a comic that's basically a fictionalized version of that culture--want to participate in it.

None of the back and forths I read in Phonogram (mostly in the text stuff) are that different from the type of wack-a-doo conversations one has with one's pals. But presented so baldly, so frankly, it reads a bit ridiculously--because nobody really gives a shit about music criticism anymore unless their own voice, their own point of view, is being included. It's the same thing that motivates any and every blog or writer on anything: nobody thinks they have bad taste.

The solution seems to be that one can dive into the message boards surrounding the issues and debate/discuss this stuff, but that's a whole lot closer to the sort of Standard Attrition/Newsarama type of creator worship than I personally find comfortable.

On the preciousness--i don't know, I think that problem is a whole lot easier to dodge than people want to claim it is. There's nothing precious about Pluto or Grotesque, and both of those are comics that have a hellish amount of baggage and potential for lame-o attached. Pluto's a love letter from a huge fan written under the loose supervision of the creator's family, and Grotesque was published by Fantagraphics.

[David Allison]

I like Phonogram, punchable characters and all.

The solopsism Tucker identifies is definitely one of the big themes of the comic, something that's coming across better in the second series than it did in the first, probably because you're not locked to one very vocal protagonist.

So while you're still all taped up and silent, this time there are several conversations battering into your ears instead of just one. Which, actually, doesn't sound like a good thing when you say it like that!

Anyway, with The Singles Club, the big gaps between everyone's perception of the same events are starting to get really obvious and vivid. Which... it's not exactly an original point, but this examination of social solopsism is definitely very on point so far.

Also: 'Atomic!' Fuck yeah.

But then, I'm a pretty punchable wee music geek, so what the fuck do I know? Would my story be improved with the addition of some hot Punisher action?

"Did I die? Reader, I nutted the fucker!"

Phonogram's definitely a bit precious, but as with Umbrella Academy and Casanova I'll forgive that for now because the creators seem to be improving their game at a scary-fast pace.

I've still not read any Pluto. Need to sort that out next time I'm in town...