Kick-Ass # 7
Written by Mark Millar
Art by John Romita Jr.
Published by Marvel Comics
Jesus, that John Romita Jr. can draw his fucking ass off, can't he? Look at these fat guys:
Damn, those fat guys are beautiful, you can feel just how much they love their life, every child-killing minute of it. That's some Joie De Vivre right there, and when's the last time a comic had pure Joie De Vivre? And it's like they're looking right at the reader! Wonder if that MEANS something.
Okay, yes: this comic is pure Millar, dumb as shit, dumber probably. There's very little of the "gay people fart" shit this time, but it still doesn't have any overt racism, or invert racism...you know, it isn't racist. It should be, it's just more proof that Johnny Ryan should try writing a script for a guy like Jim Lee to illustrate, something about how Captain America farts on inner city black kids while saying "Candy apples for future felons", but Millar's only willing to impart sarcasm towards whatever segment of the population he feels sure is most uninterested in his comics, and since that's whatever "fuck you"--like, sure, never mind that the specificity of the offense makes it seem like, shit, dude is scared of gay people? Look, retard: Ennis already showed you how it works--you flip off everybody, race/creed/where they like dick, that's how us proles know you're kidding. Kick-Ass is still a comic that goes pretty far with its joke, that's always been its one winning quality, it goes pretty far--not as far as manga, but hey, manga has fucking courage and individuality, this is American comics, we're a bunch of children when it comes to anything but violence--but, like before, as always, Kick-Ass doesn't go far enough. Maybe it will at the end, although Mark Millar has never written a good ending in his life, not once, so unless he's able to convince Romita Jr. to draw a teenager fucking a child on top of a pile of corpses--which can only gross you out if you've been just as grossed out by said teenager and said child committing mass slaughter on a last-six-issue-basis--it probably won't. It'll be some more anti-you, Romita, and then we'll move onto Prison Pit and another shitty Nicholas Cage movie. By next year, it'll just turn into an Example of How Comics Writers Don't Respect The Fans. Which--well, you can't say it's not a good thing. Because--hell you read Titans right? Fans suck.
Titans # 17 Written by Pat McCallum
Art by Angel Unzueta, Wayne Faucher & HI-FI DESIGN
Published by DC Comics
The buzz around this fucking thing has been spectacular! Nobody seems to like it, and that's a survey that really has to dig for responses, because nobody seems to buy it either. It's just a fucking loser, right out of the gate! But you read it, and it's just more low-grade whatever--the same "comics readers suck" joke that's in Kick-Ass, the same "your hair used to look dumb" writing that is in Adventure Comics (because it DID look DUMB, and EVERYBODY knows that, because these characters are OLD, get it, don't you REMEMBER, you READ those) and then it's the same "let's squirt out some talk therapy" moments that are in Batman...hell, even the art is just there, but it's bad-by-blandness instead of bad by "look at this shit it's awful". The only thing that really sticks with your mind when you read this is that the main character--Garfield Logan, he's the green one--is a total loser who sits in a convention hall, but he's thinking he should mentor the Teen Titans, which makes the Teen Titans hilariously worse (and they already suck, apparently) because they would benefit from the presence of someone who is a complete shit-for-brains. So it's like Kingpin? (Not the fat guy. The bowling movie. Where the old lady makes the cunnilingus face.)
The Marvels Project # 2
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Steve Epting & Dave Stewart
Published by If You Can't Tell You're The ProblemYou get these chapters in books once a month, and sometimes you say "I'll wait for the trade" and sometimes you mean "I'll never want to read this" but sometimes you mean "This isn't going to be good in monthly installments" and sometimes, if you talk too much, it means "I have a set amount I spend and things are things and people are people and i read an article about health insurance". That's what happens, and that's fine, but sometimes you check in with a book that comes out and its a whole section of that Under The Hood thing Alan Moore wrote (which was a fake excerpt in the first place) but now it's a full comic story, with a break for Nick Fury teaching you about where Captain America came from, again, for the 900th time, while Frankenstein (The Torch) hangs out in the woodshed where the mafia tortures people by not using cheesily accented speeches. "You'll talk, you spice-y meat-ball-a, you'll talk-a good." Which is...well, it's not
wrong or anything. (See: life.) But it's not really that good, it's sort of like when Gotham Central said "hey, I'm not fucking cheesy, why am I being published? Put the Spectre inside of me. Spectre
always sells really well." (See: bad at job.) "Wait, that didn't work? Shit, people must have wanted me to take the Spectre inside my body at the very beginning." Which--that was Brubaker, sort of, although he'd left for solving problems by then, but here, at Marvel, this is all his. It's what again? Capes and domino masks? Errol Flynn mustaches? Is Alex Toth still dead? He is? Oh, then nobody else should draw Errol Flynn mustaches. Shouldn't, because Toth owned mustaches. He didn't even take credit for them at the time. He couldn't, but still. Didn't.
Blackest Night Batman # 2
Written by Peter Tomasi
Art by Ardian Syaf, Vincente Cifuentes & Nei Ruffino
Published by DC Comics
Whereas Blackest Night is the horror movie that isn't scary, Blackest Night Batman is that other kind of "horror-but-not-really" movie, the action-with-gore kind. Old men yell "empty!" and get new shotguns thrown to them from their cripple daughters, people hide out in rooms and listen to unnamed side characters die in pain, somebody gets a drill shoved into their chest, reinforcements show up out of nowhere in giant machines, guns blazing...it's all very fast, a story that takes place in minutes. Even though it's a Batman title, it's an off-brand Batman title, and since DC has learned that the best way to keep people happy is to admit that these sorts of comics are just straight cash grabs that prey on Peter Tomasi completionists, nothing of consequence happens in it. (Consequence meaning that the story can be ignored completely if one just wants to read Batman comics, or if one just wants to read the Blackest Night story.) It's got bad guys like the Trigger Twins & Blockbuster, the references are to old Devin Grayson Nightwing stories, it's a pure Wikipedia read. It shows Batman, Damian & Tim Drake shooting monster types with flamethrowers on the cover. It's a gory action movie with Batman in it. One's appreciation for it is based around whether or not they think Devils Rejects would have been better if William Forsythe's character had been played by Christian Bale.
Five Panels From Ultimate Comics Avengers # 2
Written by Mark Millar
Art by Carlos Pacheco, Danny Miki, Justin Ponsor, Dexter Vines, Crime Lab Studios and it just keeps going on and on, because...you're supposed to bring up Kirby or something, we usually just complain about Photoshop. Whatever, nobody seems to give a shit about it, it's just accepted that it takes a small squadron of people to finish the art on comics even though it still looks like all the old people have these weird scratches drawn on their carbon copy faces.
Published by Marvel Comics
Same joke from All Star Batman, same as it was in Watchmen. Probably more attributable to Watchmen, since Cap's mask is drawn like Nite Owl's. Either way, doesn't add anything to the story but another "here's something else you already read" moment.
Whoever came up with the blue lines in the background--that was a good choice. Scene is still grotesque, but it is the origin of the Red Skull, and his origin isn't one that should really be very pleasant.
Question: whose fault is it that Hawkeye is the only cool one? Answer: the person who wrote the comic.
Same scene was in Civil War--open with an Alan Moore reference, close with a reference to one's own work. It's an old Ruben Bolling trick.
Punisher Frank Castle Max The # 74 Written by Victor Gischler
Art by Goran Parlov & Lee Loughridge
Published by Marvel Comics
There's four pages in this comic that use a panel size that isn't a widescreen cinemascope rectangle. Since it's extra long, that means the other 30-odd pages are all stacks of rectangles, pages of them. It can't build any momentum towards it's true conclusion, because it's just boring, repetitive design. There's only four panels in the entire issue that use a perspective that isn't eye-level, excepting about five that consist of a character looking down at something near their feet. (Which is eye-level, just downcast eye-level.) That's the visual qualities available for the entire comic. Earlier in this storyline, the artist was given the opportunity to draw a giant alligator ripping a live man in half, for the enjoyment of a bunch of sister-fucking redneck cannibals. This issue, a giant mongoloid cradles a stuffed animal, and the Punisher breaks a woman's neck with one hand right after saying "Say goodbye to crazy." That's pretty much exactly what is supposed to happen in a Punisher comic book, and so it does, and seriously--Adventure Comics, Ultimate Comics Avengers, more than half of the Big Two comics that came out this week--or any week, really--are stuck in that same boring panel design. There are splash pages, sure, splash pages that deliver the "fuck yeah" moment, or the writer/artist interpretation of whatever the "fuck yeah" moments are. But it's still the same fucking rectangle pages, over and over again.
And yet--Goran Parlov, the artist for this particular issue--used a lot of rectangular panels when he was illustrating the Ennis run on Punisher, and it wasn't problematic then. In all probability, it only seems problematic because this comic happens to arrive at the same time one is reading multiple issues, all by different creators, and seeing the exact same storytelling techniques over and over again, regardless of the content of the book or the characters used. (The fault for the panel where a character's eyes are missing from their face rests on the art team and their editor, sure, but the fact that at least three other new comics use the exact same visual structure isn't on the Punisher guys, who actually created a decent conclusion to the only good Punisher story since Valley Forge, Valley Forge.)
But that panel structure asks a pretty damning question: what kind of content do you want in your same-y pages? You want a couple of idiots talking about comic book continuity? You want a scientist getting his brains smashed in? You want to see the Punisher teamed up with a scrawny black kid who, in the smartest visual bit of the story, is wearing a t-shirt with a gigantic letter on it, so that he looks like he's Robin by way of Daredevil, especially when he and Frank have to jump off a pier? Because if you want interesting panel design, or you want interesting drawings, or you just would prefer--you know, comics that are trying to live up to something, as opposed to this safe ass pudding school--you can't read these things. They don't have it on a regular enough basis to make it any more reliable than a lottery ticket, and very few of them are drawn by somebody half as interesting as Goran Parlov. But if you just want to read something on a computer--or a PSP, or an iPhone--it's pretty clear that DC & Marvel are getting you ready for it. All they have to do is give up completely, and they're more than halfway there.
Adventure Comics # 2
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato
Published by DC ComicsWhereas Superman was created, sort of, because a couple of kids had some crazy ideas and a lot of love to give, Superboy--this one, at least--was created during the shitty old days at the "buy ten copies, polybagged for anal protection" processing plant. Hell, if more people had given a shit about the one who wore sunglasses, he would've gotten his own series too. He kinda did.
That fucking cover-man, that's something. Stupid as fuck, but that's
something. That actually happens, just so you know, the dog actually picks up the picnic table so that Superboy and Wonder Girl can share a really chaste kiss E.T. style. The issue itself is just as moronic, it's mostly a conversation postponing the question of whether or not these two characters are going to fuck each other again--a bad idea, since that's the most interesting thing they're capable of doing. The Girl cries because she kissed another boy after her boyfriend died in a fire--the kiss happened in a graveyard, which continues the Geoff-Johns-comics-with-graveyard-cameos contest of 2009--and then the dog lifts up the table while Ma Kent (who looks like Ultimate Spider-Man's Aunt May now?) watches through a window. Oh, and Lex Luthor has teamed up with Brainiac, just like in that Alan Moore comic.
Wait, three people "paid homage" to Alan this week? Doesn't that mean something?
Oh, that's every week, isn't it.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
"these sorts of comics are just straight cash grabs that prey on Peter Tomasi completionists"
I like the idea that this person actually exists. Or, wait, that's not right. Hate. I hate that idea.
Posted by: Paul DeBenedetto | 2009.09.14 at 08:13
I think that person exists, and his name is Tucker Stone.
You know what bugged me about the "I want you to keep it on" panel? The very next panel shows him taking it off. What a dick.
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.09.14 at 14:21
Peter Tomasi actually used to be a very good editor back in the 90s, working on some very good comics like Hitman and the Demon. It's sad, really.
Posted by: Tim O'Neil | 2009.09.14 at 17:50
I read this essay once, or maybe it was an interview in Playboy or something, where somebody brought up the idea that if Superman fucked Lois Lane, his jizz would possibly shoot all the way through her body and kill her. They should make a comic where Clark and Lois talk about that. Like, seriously, they're married. So do they fuck? Does she give him blowjobs but he's invulnerable and can't feel them? Maybe she rubs Kryptonite on his wiener? And what about in the butt?
My point is that Superboy sure ought to fuck Wonder Girl.
Also, when they invent cameras that can film the past, time-travel cameras, they should film when Johnny Depp was going steady with Winona Ryder. They're both good-looking, or were anyway. I'd watch that.
Posted by: John Pontoon | 2009.09.14 at 19:37
I was kind of kidding you but the show looks really good and I am in the neighborhood, my job has been pulling me into a lot of night overtime and who knows if I can make it. You should advertise stuff like that more shamelessly on the blog, it's good to hear about it.
Posted by: nrh | 2009.09.14 at 19:37
That comment is meant for the Martin Brown post, dammit.
Posted by: nrh | 2009.09.14 at 19:41
Good stuff. Good fucking stuff.
Posted by: Kancer | 2009.09.17 at 23:04
That's only for Silver Age jizz, John. With Post-Crisis super-spunk anything goes.
Posted by: moose n squirrel | 2009.09.18 at 22:25