Comics Of The Weak: No More Tangles, No More Fucking Tangles

Marvel Adventures Super Heroes Captain America # 3
Written by Paul Tobin
Art by Ronan Cliquet, Amilton Santos & Sotocolor
Published by Marvel Comics

The second issue of this supposed-to-be-for-kids title was called Marvel Adventures Super Heroes Thor, and the word "Thor" was the biggest thing on the cover, helping to indicate that the dude on the cover with the hammer and the hair was, in fact, the guy people know of as "Thor". But when it came time to read the comic, or, if you're the kid it is supposedly for, to look through the comic a bunch of times before going back and reading it, then you were treated to a 22 page comic where Thor is featured twice, in two small ass panels, both times from far away, and only once was he's doing something Thor-ish, i.e. swinging his hammer over his head. So that's that, a comic that, one can only assume, is designed to introduce young comics readers to the very real potential super-hero comics have for spitting out covers that lie to them about the contents they're advertising. Thankfully, the third issue, which is called "Captain America" and features the Captain of America on the cover, actually does feature the character, and this time he's featured in panels where he does Captain America type things like block shit with his shield and bark at people. He's still a minor supporting character--the main plot is about how the Vision doesn't like being treated like a robot, despite the fact that he's-a-fucking-robot, and how Nova gets upset when somebody (chicks, apparently) tries to steal one of his shitty arch-villains away from him. (He only has three or four, since this comic is set in a Marvel Universe where Nova hangs around New York all the time instead of going to space and going all Worldmind rampage.) In essence, it's just your regular reminder: fuck children.

Gravel # 19
Written by Warren Ellis
Art by Mike Wolfer
Published by Avatar

For some reason, this comic--which has to be near the bottom rung in Ellis' financial ladder--is the only thing he's been able to get out on any sort of regular basis for the last few years. A portion of that blame can be laid at the feet of his artists, there's a healthy share for the publisher, but when there's so many "late-as-fucks" and "whatever-happened-to?", and the one across-the-board credit is one specific dude, eventually the problem is no longer shareable. Of course, Gravel isn't very hard to put out, as it's just Hellblazer rip-offs that leave three or four pages silent so that Mike "Master Draftsman" Wolfer can fill 'er up with confusing trivialities, and all of the comic's characters are carbon copy clones of the four or six archetypes this writer is capable of putting in action. In this issue, a creep gets treated meanly, and he decides he wants revenge. Accents ensue.

Outsiders # 30
Written by Dan Didio
Art by Philip Tan, Jonathan Glapion & Pete Pantazis
Published by DC Comics

You gotta hand it to Tan, guy knows where his bread is buttered. Most of this comic looks weird and shitty in that way that you know somebody digs on the art and you can't help wondering what else they're digging on, like maybe they're one of those people who can't help calling Breaking Bad "really boring" when Deadline mentions the show has a fourth season coming, but Tan is clearly putting more work into his Outsiders pages than he did his brief run on Batman & Robin. It's a oddball choice--probably good for his industrial please-my-masters career, not so good considering there's a lot less people who will ever see what he's doing on Outsiders, and even then, the fact that he's trying a teeny bit harder on his backgrounds and delivering decipherable layouts isn't going to win him a whole lot of praise anyway. Of course, it's not like any of this matters, nobody gives a fuck about the art on these bottom rung titles anyway, it's all about getting story points delivered in the quickest manner possible. And besides, the real draw to this issue is pure self-punishment stuff, because hey! new black guy in the DC Universe! brought to you by the guy who, according to the physical evidence, stays up late throwing fart darts at everything that doesn't say Old White Guy!

There's not much to say about him. His name is Freight Train, he's "more powerful than a locomotive", and he can blow himself up like a balloon. To be mean, he refers to Owlman as "hootie". He doesn't seem to be the sort of thing anybody was clamoring for. But hey, who knows? According to what Fan Culture tells us, absolutely every single character, no matter how lazy, derivative, and uninteresting, was at one point the inspirational hero of some oppressed small child who turned to comics instead of human contact. (For that argument to make sense, one needs to understand that the common definition of the word "oppression" has been expanded to include absolutely every connotation of human being imaginable.)

Heralds # 2
Written by Kathryn Immonen
Art by Tonci Zonjic, James Harren, Nathan Fairbairn & June Cheung
Published by Marvel Comics

You want to give a chance on something because nice guys say nice things, and then on the first page, the recap page, the word "suddenly" gets misspelled, which--look, it's a pain in the starfish when blogger shitcocks mention grammar things, because...bloggers, we're a goddamn cancer, agreed. But still: Marvel Fucking Comics! They're supposed to be the pros, right? Hell, half the staff seems to spend 43% of their time giving bloggers (cancerous!) advice on how to break into comics, and at least 13% of that advice is tied into things like "please don't misspell where you got your Bachelor's in Star Trek from or deliver pitches while wearing a homemade costume".

"Suddenly". That isn't a Word-Of-The-Day! It's not a ten dollar word!

Wait, the comic. What's the deal with She-Hulk? She looks really gaunt. Wasn't it the redhead who was sick?

That newscaster's face will never ever be on the news. And if that face was going to be on the news, it's a hell of a lot more likely to happen in the real world a lot sooner than it would in a Marvel comic book.

Robert E. Howard's Hawks Of Outremer
Adapted by Michael Alan Nelson
Art by Damian Couceiro & Juan Manuel Tumburus
Published by Boom Comics

Wow, Robert E. Howard sure loves it when pageboys let their hair get all party in the back, huh? That's what they call a "telling" fetish. There's a couple of nice parts here, and it's probably source material honest that it reads like a time-jacked Conan, and then it ends with a fat nobleman catching an axe in the face, and his eyeball goes squirting out of the socket--sure, whatever. There's no way a book version of this story would be tolerable. Are all these stories about being intimidated by domesticity, or is that just specific to this one?

Secret Six # 22
Written by Gail Simone
Art by Jim Calafiore
Published by DC Comics

The previous issue's money panel involved dudes-through-glass, and this issue features a guy ripping another dude's face off with his teeth and then spitting out his eye. Or eyes? There's also a backstory about how Catman used to be fat, and how used-to-be-fat-feelings made him kill his mom and dad. Something along those lines. Secret Six is supposedly the one that makes the decadence work, that's what the comment sections say. Maybe that's true, but the comic seemed a lot more interesting when it was constant double entendres between Deadshot and Catman.

Avengers Academy # 1
Written by Christos Gage
Art by Mike McKone & Jeromy Cox
Published by Marvel Comics

Simple editing thing: don't call a girl flat-chested who has, at the very least, B-cups. It doesn't make any sense, and it's a weird thing to do. When you do it twice, and the comic is short, it turns the talk-about-tits portion of the reading experience into a primary focus. It's too bad, because while this particular comic has the least to lose out of the recent Avengers relaunch--due to the fact that nobody expects anything out of it due to the non-Bendis/Bruabker thing--it actually has the best hook so far, which is that Steve Rogers has picked the most mentally unstable Avengers as supervisors over a bunch of kids who are all mentally unstable. It's not a recipe for a long run, but then again, it never is when Marvel hires Christos Gage.

Predators # 1
Written by Marc Andreyko & David Lapham
Art by Gulherme Balbi, Jose Verissimo, Garry Henderson, Mariano Taibo, Gabriel Guzman & Michael Atiyeh
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Movie tie-in bullshit, in two parts For Your Pleasure. The first is a dopey straight-to-dvd pre-sequel to the upcoming film, whereas the second one is the tale of Adrian Brody, brought to you by David Lapham, who seems hell bent on making Stray Bullets the pinacle of his career simply by never trying again, ever. The second story is still more interesting than the first--not because it's good, because it isn't--but because Gabriel Guzman seems to be getting off on making Adrian Brody greedily stare at starving Africans before teaming up with the warlords who starve them. Brody's a clown, and while he's not averse to shitty buckets of shit, he's not weird enough of an actor to play a scene set in some African hellhole with a look that indicates a brain listening to a Meow Mix commercial played on loop, ad infinitum. This comic will be your only chance! Unabashed admiration for criticizing Niccolò Machiavelli at the end though. That guy's the hedge fund trader version of Noam Chomsky, he can do with a burn.

Batman # 700
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Tony Daniel, David Finch, Andy Kubert, Frank Quitely & Scott Kolins
Published by DC Comics

There's plenty of info out there about the story to this one, and yeah, it's stronger than the other crap lately, who cares. Mainly it's just a non-stop reminder of your own feelings: hey, look, this is that crap I didn't like, look at it, and then oh yeah, it looked like this but not-long-enough, and then aw shit it could've looked like THIS, and then there's that part where DC goes "check out your new girlfriend we got from Marvel that we got you" and she's...she's covered in sores! She looks like Alan Greenspan, only covered-in-sores! And then it's a bunch of fucking pin-ups, which--Daredevil 500 got pin-ups right. Not that hard to get them right! You go and get some artists that people haven't seen before and a few they don't see enough, and boom, let 'em surprise you. No, this, instead, picks out the exact same guys that you can see all the time. Batman 700: it's a timely reminder of why the club is small. They're running empty on t-shirt material.

Daredevil # 507
Written by Andy Diggle & Anthony Johnston
Art by Marco Checchetto & Matt Hollingsworth
Published by Marvel Comics

While the merchandise is a scant few weeks away from being overvalued, with Marvel turning the too-many-comics, not-enough-talent business model cannons away from the Hulk and over to Daredevil, this is one of the best looking pieces of Murdock ephemera in a while. The title has been in hiding lately, showing up only a few times this year, but when it has, it's certainly been pretty to look at. This issue, like the one's before it, brings a decent bit of confusion, treating Matt Murdock's old lie detector trick as something he conveniently forgets to turn on when people are plotting against him. (The best part is when he stands around with a bunch of people who are lying to him and says "something in my gut doesn't feel right". Turn your ears on, weeping boy!) Whether or not this story works--it's still meandering around, and it doesn't really make sense--it looks great, and Murdock hasn't lost a girlfriend in at least five issues. Looks like you're still in for another decade of brooding, but hey, you can always fuck right off to the ice cream truck if that's a sticking point.

Red Hood: The Lost Days # 1
Written by Judd Winick
Art by Pablo Ramondi
Published by DC Comics

Winick gets a lot of shit, heaping pounds of it, but you can bet he'll get a reappraisal whenever somebody actually gets around to reading all those James Robinson comics. Some of its deserved, but the guy can't fake his out-of-proportion-to-need love for Jason Todd. You can see it, every time: this guy loves Jason Todd. Not the red-haired Morrison remix, but the Batman New Adventures Jason Todd, the real one, the tire thief who killed a wife beater. That kid. It's kind of great how much he loves him. It's like paying to go see a live drone show: you can't fake being into that kind of music. The comic itself doesn't have much of a chance--it's a fill-in-the-continuity-blanks kind of comic, and DC doesn't seem to love the writer the way they once did--but it's still a Jason Todd comic. Too bad Mahnke's price range went up.

Dust Wars # 1
Written by Christopher "Mink" Morrison
Art by Davide Fabbri & Domenico Neziti
Published by Image Comics

So here goes this:
 
Just to clarify-the guy's name isn't "slacker", his CO is being mean to him.

The whole comic is written like that, for some reason. If the oddly worded introductory page is accurate, this comic exists as a prop to supplement a collection of pin-up drawings of a girl who fights robots. She looks like this:

Whatever floats your boat, but I can't see how that outfit helps when you fight robots.

X-Men Forever 2 # 1
Written by Chris Claremont Bitches
Art by Tom Grummett, Cory Hamscher & Wilfredo Quintana
Published by Marvel Comics

You get that there's bodies underneath the floorboards, right? You don't have to wait for him to pass away to investigate.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[Cody]

"Marvel Fucking Comics! They're supposed to be the pro's, right?"

The grammar mistake in the section bitching about proofreading mistakes is all meta and shit, right?

[LurkerWithout]

Ellis also consistently gets his webcomic "Freakangels" out. Also, "Outsiders" is still being published? Huh...

[Tucker Stone]

See Cody? That's what I mean about being a cancer!

[Dru]

"he can blow himself up like a balloon. To be mean, he refers to Owlman as 'hootie'."

You're giving me a sinking feeling that this guy was created solely so Didio can make a bad "Hootie and the Blowfish" joke at some point down the line.

[Tucker Stone]

Man, i feel like a prize fool for missing the Blowfish connection. You're right of course, that has to be coming up in the next issue.

[Matthew J. Brady]

The whole "flat-chested" thing depends. I've read enough manga to know that there are degrees of chest-flatness, and depending on who's doing the insulting, it can be levied when the chest isn't actually flat. You know, some Power Girl cosplayer laughs at the pathetic attempt of Miss Tiny Tits to look good next to her, kya ha ha, ooh she's so mean. That's just somebody being a bully, and a chance for readers to get on the heroine's side, because there's more to somebody than the size of their breasts, right? Or, maybe she's just insecure, especially when comparing herself to her busty friend, who always seems to attract the boys' attention; why don't they recognize my winning personality it's not fair. These are IMPORTANT ISSUES, man, don't frivolize them.

Of course, if it's some dude just checking out the chicks and comparing cup size, that's just creepy. Wait, that's what I'm doing right now! *head explodes*

[Tim O'Neil]

Yeah, maybe I'm too forgiving, but I read it as sort of the whole female "let me fixate on my least favorite feature and exaggerate its perceived suckiness" thing.

Or, the artist is simply incapable of drawing a woman who doesn't have nicely shaped breasts even when the script explicitly calls for very small breasts.

Alan Davis and Adam Hughes draw lots of large breasted women, but they also know how to draw small breasted women as well. That's a True Fact.

[Chris Jones]

Does the script specifically call for the character to have very small breasts?

That's fucking creepy.

[John K(UK)]

R.e. David Lapham never, ever trying again , ever? I'm not trying to be argumentative but: Young Liars? No love for Young Liars?

Anyway still making me laugh, still making me think. I don't tell you that often enough. But you know in your heart it is true.

Seriously though, no love for Young Liars?

[AComment]

Dude, Comic B-cups means you built like a European runway model, all skinny as fuck for the delectation of pederast fashion designers. Comics have fucking creepy children.

Did you read Heralds #1? And the art beyond those wierd panels? And, uh, the writing, beyond that typo?

If everyone else loves it like Jesus you can't won't keep you Angry Comicbook Reviewer Cred by going all metasmokescreen. Step it up!

[Comics Weekly]

Isn't there a line in the comic after she's been Osborned that her body was "augmented" or some shit and the suggestion is she got be-titted? I mean, after Spider-Woman - Marvel has a precedent for this kind of shit. It stood out to me when I read/skimmed that comic too, but it's comics, you know? It's like in SAVED BY THE BELL when they would have that one "ugly" classmate. They don't hire ugly people.

I have absolutely no sympathy for spelling mistakes any more. The odd mistake? Fine, I can blame that on a lapse or a letterer or whatever. But this is still publishing, right? Not copyright protection? You are still publishing words. And seeing as "ensuring continuity", "making story suggestions" and "working with other editors and writers" are no longer within the purview of editors - I would think their only job now is to check spelling. If that's not the case, is their job now just to open envelopes and berate fans online?

[moose n squirrel]

"In this issue, a creep gets treated meanly, and he decides he wants revenge. Accents ensue."

This is the best, most succinct description of late-period Ellis I've ever read.

[Ken Kneisel]

"Maybe that's true, but the comic seemed a lot more interesting when it was constant double entendres between Deadshot and Catman."

I know, right? Also when it was still drawn by Nicola Scott.