Comics Of The Weak: There Are Too Many Butts In This Room!

Slam Dunk Vol. 6
By Takehiko Inoue
Published by Viz

Slam Dunk Vol. 5 ended with one minute on the clock in a four point game. Although just an exhibition match, the contest had already seen bloodshed. After dealing with the game in the best fashion possible (a loss), Volume Six turns its focus to the other thing that the Dunk drops on the regular: page upon page of purposeless violence between angry first year high school boys. Multiple teeth are lost, the human bodies of the weak are thrown and swung like weapons, girls eject fountains of tears while screaming for their champion's success, and then it's back to the court, time for some one-on-one. There are immediate personal fouls.

This cycle will continue for another twenty-five volumes.

Haunt # 1
Written by Robert Kirkman
Art by Todd McFarlane, Greg Capullo & Ryan Ottley
Published by Image Comics

This is a comic birthed out of somebody yelling at Todd McFarlane during a comic book convention, which is pretty terrifying because it means that people who yell shit at comic book convention panelists now actually can use that behavior as a precedent for "how to get a job in comics", which is even worse to think about when you realize "how to get a job in comics?" is the thing that at least 75% of convention attendees write in their dream diary the night before Fetish Creeps, Movie Trailer & Be-My-Friend Party 2010. For some reason, comics still look upon Todd McFarlane--a hacky, shit artist who used his limited time creating awful Spider-Man comics as leverage to create a toy company/Spawn-production sweat-shop--returning to comics as the sort of thing that still engorges penises, if Robert Kirkman's back matter claim of "my best-selling book ever" is to be believed. (All this after the election of a black man as President? What did we march in Selma FOR, anyway?) Here's what Haunt is: Kirkman's best attempt at copying every crap Image comic book ever, a mercenery and his chain-smoking, whore-fucking brother (who is a priest!) teamed up across the mortal river to form a semen ejecting rip-off of Venom+Spawn. In the back of the book, Robert Kirkman writes about how awesome it is that McFarlane did things like "look at the color and make sure they wuz done right" and "look at the letters and make sure they wuz done right." In other words, his job, but hey: everybody deserves a pat on the back sometimes. Legacies are a bitch to live up to.

Cable # 19
Written by Duane Swierczynski
Art by Gabriel Guzman, Mariano Taibo & Thomas Mason
Published by Marvel Comics

Cable and Bishop are a couple of old X-Men characters that saw the opportunity to escape the doldrums of whatever X-Men: We Will Never Be In A Movie offshoot comic they used to appear in, reached across the fictional world they live in and got themselves cast in a never-ending science fiction movie. While Strange Tales has pretty much answered the question "How far will Marvel let creators go" with a "Too boring, even for MOME inclusion" answer, Cable, the series, has the most potential for being THE subversive/anti-comics comic that Marvel publishes. Not right now, no--right now it's just a stupid rip-off of an Aliens rip-off, a science fiction mash-up that ignores Ridley Scott in favor of Stargate: SVU for influence. But the basic concept: a black man chases a white man through space and time while wearing lots of pouches? That kind of simplicity has got some history to it. The Krazy Kat comparisons just write themselves.

Spider-Man 1602 # 1
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Ramon Rosanas
Published by Marvel Comics

Of course, even the separation of four-hundred years can't keep a Marvel comic's plot from being Norman Osborn: Cocksucker. Here, old Norm turns out to be the guy responsible for that whole "giving smallpox blankets to the natives" thing, and then he shoots Spidey's latest girlfriend in the neck just to drive the point home. And that's mean and all, but it does give Peter a chance to re-enact the beginning of Bambi, since dead girl is a nekkid shape-changer. Serving as another brick in the nothing-makes-sense anymore wall, this is a particularly well-illustrated piece of Spider-obscurity, made all the worse by the fact that it just looks so much fucking better than its Amazing Spider-Competitor. Look--that doesn't even make sense. Anybody who gives a shit about something as obscure and horrible as "four dollar spin-off mini-series to a shitty Neil Gaiman comic from six years ago" is really fucking unlikely to care about how the goddamn thing LOOKS, the requirement for entry is already so specific that "the art" couldn't even make the top ten. Meanwhile, the regular Amazing Spider-Man comic has panels that only make sense if you can get a Marvel editor to email you a copy of the original script. (Which is a lot easier than it should be.)

Star Wars Invasion # 4
Written by Tom Taylor
Art by Colin Wilson & Wes Dzioba
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Occasionally, there's some moment when churlish shitheads complain about the lack of true comic book journalism--sometimes this is because there's a lack of substantive technical anaylsis regarding business decisions, but most of the time it's because A) shitty comics get treated like shitty comics and B) people whine, because they suck. Every once in awhile, it's because something happened in a comic book that is maybe kind of a big nerd deal, and yet no one really acknowledged said big nerd deal. Like, for example: Chewbacca is dead? Somebody killed Chewbacca? And now Han Solo has a grizzled beard and won't talk to his kid? And Leia has an ugly haircut and an ugly hat, and she wears a football uniform with a cape? And Luke has a wife who wants to have sex with him, and they live in a Mayan ruin? What are we not paying those news sites for anyway? That's the sort of information you shouldn't have to go searching to find.

Batman and Robin # 5
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Phillip Tan, Jonathan Glapion & Alex Sinclair
Published by DC Comics

Most of the time, the best way to talk about a Grant Morrison comic book is just to say "It's the G-Mo, bitch" and then stick a fork in the speaker, Thurston Moore style. After all, the guy did write Doom Patrol AND Doom Force, and those fucking comics are basically cranked out crank, Spank Rock comics, and Spank Rock was a fucking kid when they came out. Then, Grant started rolling deep, dropping comics on such a regular basis that something kinda normal happened: they weren't all great anymore. Not that they weren't great at all, he still has hits, but now he's got misses too. It's problematic, because if you read books, watch movies, do basically anything, people do that shit all the time: like, shit. They do shit. Batman and Robin--hell, it's got some moments. The line "no backstory" is pretty clever, Damian has had the best character moments Morrison has come up with since Xorn held a finger to his missing lips, and yeah, so on. There's stuff that's likable. But the rest of it? It's horrid. Frank Quitely's art has been replaced by somebody who would be better served on a Whilce Portacio comic book. It's a missed note, it's a Hail To The Thief, a Mystery Play. And if it were movies, it would just be a "haw haw" in the parking lot, a "oh man, how about when he realized that she was his mom" conversation over coffee. That's what this one is, and that's all: bad times on the way to the next one. Good thing it's cheap.

Batman Annual # 27
Written by Fabian Nicieza
Art by J. Calafiore, Mark McKenna & Nathan Eyring
Published by DC Comics

Since there's no such thing as too much shitty Batman, here's an annual that leads into another annual, which will eventually lead to a series. The first part came out earlier this year, in a comic book that is only remarkable for wasting the time/talents of Frazer Irving. The story continues here, remains terrible, now has a different artist, he can't fix it, and there will be more coming later, in the form of a monthly comic book about a character who dresses like an early 90's rapper.

Please don't emphasize your violence due to your youthfullness. No penis, don't.

War Heroes # 3
Written by Mark Millar
Art by Tony Harris & JD Mettler
Published by Image Comics

Using Planetary # 27 as cover, War Heroes sneaks onto the shelves a year after the last issue arrived. Like a lot of 2009's Mark Millar comics, it's gross, kind of ignorant, loud. Unlike a lot of 2009's Mark Millar comics, it's confusing and hard to follow, with an entire action sequence devoted to a character who destroys things Tasmanian Devil style without actually depicting the character in anything correspondent to physical movement. It's just a bunch of panels of a stereotypical Muslim infidel (the model seems to be any of those Aladdin type movies where the entire cast consists of white people in greasepaint) posing next to destruction. It's enough to make one think that the draw of comics like Kick-Ass and Old Man Logan might be completely tangled up in the art. That would be really, really weird.

Planetary # 27
Written by Warren Ellis
Art by John Cassady
Published by Wildstorm Comics

This is that comic that took a long time to come out, but it's not like the book would've been served very well by a stunt fill-in: this was John Cassady's book to be lost, and while he isn't given the same opportunity to shine here--with a "boring, nerdiest episode of ER ever" script, as one individual put it--his work will live on in the eventual collection, which is the only place that Planetary can hope to find its home. But Cassady's art--clean, pretty, somewhat predictable--can't conceal the one thing that ten years of comics taught, which is that Warren Ellis has one voice, one tempo, and a Trending Topics library to pull from. Someday, people will just go ahead and read James Gleick and the rest of the high bookshelf types who have struggled to bring top tier physics to the armchair--one can imagine that's what Ellis was hoping they'd do all along, god forbid it couldn't have been "read more super-hero comics", which is the other general attitude--and then one can get around to praising Planetary for the only thing it really deserves praise for: sometimes, it was pretty to look at.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

Comments

[Jonathan Baylis]

Fucking hilarious:
"Using Planetary # 27 as cover, War Heroes sneaks onto the shelves a year after the last issue arrived."

[Matthew J. Brady]

Too many dicks on the dance floor.

The reason you hadn't heard about Chewbacca dying on any comics news sites is because it happened in the novels, as did all the other stuff, I assume, like Luke getting married and founding a Jedi school in a Mayan temple (that is, the Rebel base from A New Hope) and Han and Leia having kids and getting old. Man, I used to love those, back when I thought Star Wars was the tits (literally; I was a weird teenager who was probably more interested in Jedis than actual boobs), although I stopped reading them before Chewie died. I only heard about that one secondhand, and what a sad day that was. I poured one on the curb for that hairy motherfucker, and then cried myself to sleep. But then I fantasized about Luke's hot wife (the love of tits had caught up with the love of Star Wars by this time) and everything was okay.

[david brothers]

"(literally; I was a weird teenager who was probably more interested in Jedis than actual boobs)"

I refuse to believe this is true for anyone.

I forget the name of the author who wrote the novel where Chewbacca died, but Star Wars fans sent him a gang of death threats after that.

[LurkerWithout]

R.A. Salvatore (the drizzt guy) wrote the book where Chewie buys it. By having a moon dropped on him...

[Matthew J. Brady]

Christian abstinence indoctrination can do strange things to a person. Also, yes, most of what I said there was made up.