The Factual Opinion

Comics Of The Weak: "It was a fine cow, but like so many cows it lacked sustained dramatic interest."

Wolverine # 3
Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Renato Guedes, Jose Wilson Magalhaes, Oclair Albert & Matt Wilson
Published by Marvel Comics 

The bad guy in this is The Red Right Hand? Like the Nick Cage song they used in the X-Files movie? Actually, that isn't the funny part of this comic. The funny part of this comic is when you find out that Wolverine has a Calvin and Hobbes style sign on his door at the place where the X-people live.

  
Does anybody put a sign like that on their bedroom door after they get old enough to buy a goddamned lock? 

Batman & Robin # 16
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Cameron Stewart, Frazer Irving, Chris Burnham & Alex Sinclair
Published by DC Comics

There's some cool shit in this issue, some of which was cooler back when Peter Milligan did it, some of which is cool because it means Morrison read some cool Peter Milligan Batman comics so he probably also read the Idiot Root or that hardcover where Batman punches a white female terrorist and says "I'm a fucking ATHEIST, amends DONT MEAN SHIT", but still, Chris Burhham's on board and he doesn't get to draw guts and garters dripping off of Bruce's knuckles? That's a missed opportunity.

This isn't an ending, of course--you have to credit Morrison for his career streak of not writing those--but it still feels like one, and it'll be interesting to find out what the Bruce-break has done for the writer's mood. Will we get some more Batman & Son, international playboy style? Will the lack of Tony "My panels are also tricky" Daniel give comic's only Shaman standing the desire to write something that washes away the still-reeks crap of RIP? And what of little Damian, a character who has only been funny under one hand?

The answers to these questions aren't to be found in these mainstream media promoted pages. But what is here is pretty damn alright--an unlocked door was closed on the irritating Simon Hurt, Frazer Irving finally morphed from a lesser-known darling to a wherever-he-wants headliner, but most of all, a writer who has spent way too long reaping the benefits of suspended judgment proved he could still toss off something pretty special with the best super-hero material there is: Your Motherfucking Batman.

Invincible # 75
Written by Robert Kirkman
Art by Ryan Ottley, Cliff Rathburn, Sheila Saldana, FCO Plascencia & Ivan Plascencia
Published by Image

It's nice and all that there's a creator-owned super-hero title that does more than just eke out survival numbers beyond the reach of DC/Marvel hamburger compound, but you can't exactly wish away content by focusing on industrial uniqueness, and most of the time, Invincible is more impressive as a resume entry. But the comic can be enormously effective, invariably when it focuses on its side characters (Allen the Alien and Battle Beast, specifically), its villains (monstrous riffs on Superman the lot, mustached across the board) or the bedsheets of blood style violence that Ottley and the Magnificent Ambersons Plascencias have long mastered. This issue has all three of those, along with the (hopefully) much welcomed slaughter of the title's second-most obnoxious character, but it's still an underwhelming and overpriced excursion that serves best as an example of what happens when simple pleasures are overthought. There's plenty of extravagance, sure, but none of this comic's two page spreads can compare to the perfection of one, a small panel where Battle Beast--deep in exercise of the murder he loves best--cries out, excitedly, for "more".

Amazing Spider-Man # 647
Written by Fred Van Lente, Bob Gale, Zeb Wells, Joe Kelly, Mark Waid, Marc Guggenheim & Dan Slott
Art by Max Fiumara, Morry Hollowell, Michael Del Mundo, Karl Kesel, Antonio Fabela, J.M Ken Niimura, Paul Azaceta, Graham Nolan, Mark Pennington & Adam Archer
Published by Marvel Comics

If you're in the group of people who liked the way Brand New Day was going, then you'll want to pick this up and sit with it for awhile. Basically, it's a bunch of Brand New Day story arcs that won't get ever get published due to the "give the fucking thing to Dan Slott" parachute that is taking the title over. And sure, those story arcs aren't getting stretched out to their full length, the way they would've been if the Brand New Day wasn't ending, but let's be honest: if you were going to succumb to obligation and read another cringe-inducing potboiler where Flash Thompson and Spider-Man swap inspiration kisses with one another, you're going to be a hell of a lot happier doing it in a scant few pages.

Superboy # 1
Written by Jeff Lemire
Art by Pier Gallo & Jamie Grant
Published by DC Comics

Having failed to successfully turn Adventure Comics into Superboy comics, the character will now get his own series, courtesy of the one "alt" writer that Johns deems worthy of the task. (Or maybe Jeff is the only name he can remember?) As with Lemire's Atom one-shot, there's little here to indicate that the writer is doing anything more than pumping out the same generic pap that any professional might with the role-playing-game style fact sheet DC provides for each of its characters. This is cold-blooded comics, so cliched and dull that it'll be best remembered as trivia quote when someone asks future publishers how they knew the world was prepared to read comics written by digital algorithms.

Captain America Man Out Of Time # 1
Written by Mark Waid
Art by Jorge Molina, Karl Kesel & Frank D'Armata
Published by Marvel Comics

Weird comic. Most of it seems to track, it's another retelling of Captain America's last adventure followed by the big wake-up, but then the Avengers disappear and abandon our laughing boy in the streets of New York, where there is of course a broad daylight extremeo mugging that ends with Cap getting capped by the victim in a fit of too many pistols. Maybe Mark Waid is a gun-control guy? There doesn't seem to be any other explanation here. At least there aren't any parts where the television show Lie To Me is used like it's a factual reference.

Godland Dogland # 33
Written by Joe Casey
Art by Tom Scioli & Bill Crabtree
Published by Image Comics

Godland isn't like most of the comics it shares shelf space with, which is why it's tempting to praise or defend it as being important, even as its creators spend a good portion of their time making it clear that word isn't their holy objective. Entertainment, according to the braying taglines and letters columns, is: and yet Godland rarely achieves the form of that the way its 4th World inspirations did. It's funny, of course, that's never been something Casey had a problem delivering, and it's loudly attractive in Scioli's steadfast refusal to contemporize. But Godland's pleasures are twisted, specific to the disposable chapter, and that's even truer as the series draws towards conclusion. They're discovered in the eleven square panels that bounce across, then upwards, snaking through the page to the words "Madness!" and "Glorious!", from the always welcome sight of bipedal mice in suits and glasses, or a Casey character once again realizing their fictional nature, and stoically committing to see things through to the end. The sweltering embrace, soon to depart.

Brightest Day # 13
Written by Geoff Johns & Peter J. Tomasi
Art by Ivan Reis, Ardian Syaf, Joe Prado, Vicente Cifunentes, Peter Steigerwald, John Starr & Ray Dillon
Published by DC Comics

In an odd reversal of expectations, this issue of Brightest Day zeroes in on the late 90's, a period of time when DC's best answer to "how the fuck are we going to fix Hawkman's continuity?" was responded to with the bizarre decision of making all of the character's previous stories "true", thus beating Grant Morrison to the bar long before anyone could be bothered to cast a trophy. Having built his career thus far on the canonization of the Silver Age, it's oddly inspiring to see Johns challenge himself by embracing stories that, unlike those written before many of us were born, we are all old enough to remember disliking.

Taskmaster # 3
Written by Fred Van Lente
Art by Jefte Palo & Jean-Francois Beaulieu
Published by Marvel Comics

This is a neat comic about a character with a shitty outfit (it's like Skeletor plus Moon Knight). It's drawn well, by the guy who did the last good Black Panther story. Marvel makes these once in a while--short mini-series by talented professional types--but you'd be goddamned if anybody is going to know they exist, because they're always surrounded by a bunch of horrible mini-series about the same three or so characters that the movies-only audience know the names of. If there was a scale of things to cry about, this situation wouldn't be one that got access to the room where that scale is kept. Still, this is one of those times that frowny emoticons were invented to describe.

Avengers Academy # 6
Written by Christos Gae
Art by Mike McKone, Dave Meikis, Rebecca Buchman, Andrew Henessey, Rick Ketchum & Jeromy Cox
Published by Marvel Comics

Basically, it boils down to this: do you dig on super-hero comics that have full page monologues about how to deal with the psychological trauma of rape? Because that's what this super-hero comic has, that's where it gets the dramatic oomph from. And if that's what you want, and you don't mind that the monologue is brought to the table by Tigra as a way to help a young super-hero who has trouble controlling himself when he turns into a red dinosaur, then here you go dude, it's the super-hero comic you were looking for! It also has four inkers, meaning there were a lot of people who could've said "...the fuck are we doing?" and, then, you know, didn't.

Red Hood: Something About Days # 6
Written by Judd Winick
Art by Jeremy Haun
Published by DC Comics

Outside of Penthouse Letters, who fucks their dad's ex-girlfriend when their dad will most definitely hook up with her again? That's grody as hell. 

Bullseye: Perfect Game # 1
Written by Charlie Huston
Art by Shawn Martinbrough & Lee Loughridge
Published by Marvel Comics

Yeah, we all miss Peter Milligan's Human Target. That doesn't mean grumbly one-man monologue comic rip-offs of Human Target stories featuring Bullseye are going to fill the void.

Generation Hope # 1
Written by Kieron Gillen
Art by Salvador Espin & Jim Charalampidis
Published by Marvel Comics

Hey, amateur night on the art front here. If you're going to homage something, why homage something that's in part famous because it's drawn so incredibly fucking well?

Punisher: In The Blood # 1
Written by Rick Remender
Art by Roland Boschi & Dan Brown
Published by Marvel Comics

Who cares?

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Too Many Movies: No Matter The Nation, We Must Drown In The Blood

This week, Joe McCulloch looks into the underbelly of Rakht Charitra while Tucker gets happily blindsided by Donnie Yen's Flash Point.

Rakht Charitra
Vol. 1 (of 2), 2010
Joe McCulloch

In 1998, Paritala Ravindra, an elected representative from Anantapur, the largest district of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, home of the prolific Telugu-language film industry -- as always, not to be confused with the Hindi-dominant, Mumbai-based ‘Bollywood’ -- produced a movie, Sri Ramulayya, on the life of his father, a Naxalite leader assassinated when Ravi was a teenager. The film concludes with high drama, as the beloved communist is shot by swarthy, sneering rivals again and again as he stands, grasps a handful of earth, envisions sunflowers and grass and delivers a defiant-sounding speech until his final breath. A giant rock is smashed over his head; his wife, Ravi’s mother, weeps. The soundtrack wails. A musical coda depicts the (early ‘80s) daylight retaliation murders of the averred assailants as the hammer & sickle is waved and rifles are tossed in military dress before a mighty red column. It’s factionism as bursting entertainment as political propaganda. Ravi himself was gunned down in 2005, having supposedly masterminded a good number of political killings after the bloody concluding events of his own movie producer debut.

Rakht Charitra is a sprawling biopic of the man, coincidentally running nearly the same five hours as Olivier Assayas’ current television miniseries project Carlos, relating to another violent man, although here split into two feature-length films (the second due for release in November). It’s also notable as the latest crime-movie project from director Ram Gopal Varma, of the seminal Hindi-language gangster drama Satya, from which Danny Boyle bit influence for his Slumdog Millionaire. I specified “crime-movie” in that Varma is a hugely prolific filmmaker in general, having directed between one and three feature films per year for the last two decades, excepting only 1994 and 2001. He’s also not adverse to chewing a bit of influence himself, having riffed on The Godfather to great success with 2005’s Sarkar, and later remade the adored ‘70s Bollywood opus Sholay to the precise 180 degree opposite of success with 2007’s Aag, to date the only Indian film deemed worthy of voting to the IMDB Bottom 100 (#13, 10/24/10, 2:42 AM EST).

This new project is purportedly based on interviews with several witnesses to the depicted events, but it remains self-evidently a variation, a work of style best represented by a rasping VO narration suggesting a long evening with a digressive elderly relative well into his cups and intent on freaking you out, you feckless little shit. Rakht Charitra is a violent movie, now so much qualitatively -- you quickly start to notice how little the copious spraying blood relates to visible bodily damage -- but in terms of volume. Everything in this movie directly feeds into a multitude of killings, ranging from a back-masked gang attack on a small apartment to a full-blown armed assault on a police station. One major character is shot down without warning in the middle of an extended scene of dialogue, while the film’s one and only musical number (a wedding celebration) snaps to a halt as soon as another target’s location is identified. There are other songs, often played loud so as to drown out tense dialogue; we can infer all we need from the characters’ expressions, and the prolific mayhem inevitably to follow. Stabbings, shootings, beheadings, dismemberment - rarely as a film so assiduously fulfilled the promise of its title, roughly translated to “a history written in blood.”

Last June, I reviewed a star-studded political thriller titled Raajneeti, which I deemed “a bunch of silly bullshit” - it’s now the fourth-highest grossing film in the history of Hindi-language cinema, unadjusted for inflation, so there goes my career in box office predictions. I stand by my assessment though, particularly its characterization as like a compressed cable miniseries, packed with glossy plots and counterplots and romantic/familial travails. Rakht Charitra is more to my liking, in that it seems utterly unmoved by any aesthetic or narrative concern beyond chasing the irate thrill of rawbone revenge. Action/crime specialist Vivek Oberoi -- whom Varma launched as a leading man with the 2002 organized crime picture Company -- plays Ravi (now “Prathap”) as at best a nominally reluctant educated youth hustled into a massively compressed timeline and howling leadership of a woodland-based gang of guns. An hour in and he’s being compared to god, and by the end of Part 1 he’s preening in immaculate white suits and a sharp politico mustache, delighting in totalitarian control over the fate of law and order.

It’s glamorous, exciting like gangs of shooters in movies can be, and pitched entirely on an oh-man-did- you-read-this-article-holy-shit level that briskly evades the comprehension of these nasty things having happened to actual people in an actually depressed, bloody area. No, it’s gore-spatter title cards and Spike Lee shots where the camera is hooked onto and facing a walking character. It’s the malevolent son of another slain Anantapur leader depicted as this first half’s main heavy, a snorting, weeping, shirtless serial rapist custom-designed to make Ravi’s violence look just a little better, who at one point is described as poisoning a snake when bitten; Chuck Norris jokes are fitting, and while the delivering character is admonished not to speak like reciting lines out of a movie, we all know better, Varma most of all. Ravi too, with his own singing, dancing communist extravaganza, and hey - one of his real-life assassination hopefuls loved the new film. It doesn’t need romance; it’s strife as romance, politics writ in pulp.

Flash Point
Donnie Yen Makes You Wait For It, 2007
Tucker Stone

It opens cold: there's just a man, he's storming into a dark boxing gym. He jumps into the ring, and through the magic of the still-shoddy English dub, shouts "Hey twinkle toes. You're under arrest. You heard me. You're busted!" As clothes are dropped to the floor, a brief battle ensues, grappling and swung fists, our hero--who we now recognize as Donnie Yen--the clear victor. The scene cuts, he's in a room, he's talking to the camera. "Have I ever busted the wrong guy? Hmmmm. That questions best left to a jury." He has one brief moment of physical activity left in these first four minutes, but after that, Donnie won't raise his fists and legs until we're seconds away from Flash Point's hour mark.

It's during that long period that most would fast forward or abandon the film entirely, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong to do so. They'll miss a few accidental moments of humor, courtesy of an overzealous set director giving our secondary leading man way too many empty beer bottles, implying that Yen's hardbody counterpart likes to while away a couple of hours solemnly drinking over fifty separate tallboys, even worse, they'll miss the car chase, thus losing the opportunity to see an elderly female passenger (the bad guy's mom, literally along for the ride) instructed to vomit in the aquarium she's clutching, which she eventually does. But let's be frank about these things: these kinds of movies, the nu-classics of the genre, they're here to serve a purpose, and that purpose is to show us the fighting.

Eventually, Yen (who doubled as fight choreographer) gets back in the game. It takes the sight of a little girl, hurled 20 feet onto concrete, to get him there. But then he does, and it's a fascinating experience that follows. It's a pointed, violent scene--there's never any question that Yen will win, the only question is if he will follow his rage to its logical conclusion. Before we see him decide, the film's music--Indian and Chinese inspired late 90's techno, omnipresent throughout--gives way to synthesized drums, and the camera pulls back, hiding us behind a fluttering plastic curtain, masking the spatter as fists rain downward. It's the middle of the day, a crowd of onlookers has grown even larger, and Yen is methodically beating a man to death.

At this point, it's obvious what has to come next--final battle stuff--but it's how Yen goes about initiating it that pushes Flash Point's late developing value higher. After the requisite "we've got to let this other bad guy go, as we have no evidence", Yen's rogue cop flips off his commanding officer and attacks his newly freed enemy in the street, thus forcing the final kingpin out of hiding. It's an excellent moment, immediate and brutal, with Yen simply picking the man up and throwing him into a steel gate before proceeding to torture him right in front of the courthouse he's just walked out of seconds before.

From there, we've come to our end, with only a brief, machine-gun/sniper rifle/Toyota ramming clear-the-decks scene in our way. Set in a field of bright green tall grass that recalls the colors of Nintendo's Duck Hunt more than it does nature, the brutality reverts to the exploding heads of a chaotic fire mission. And then, there it is. An eight minute fight scene between Donnie Yen and Collin Chou constructed out of Mixed Martial Arts/wushu/tae kwon do that Yen refers to as being "definitely, the toughest scene of my career."

That it's an incredible piece of athleticism should be apparent by description alone, but in the spirit of Christian confirmation, yes, it's very, very impressive work. Colorful, abrasive, and not without a sense of humor--the moment when the dub returns, and Yen's substitute emits a guttural "You are OVER" is eventually bested by a blinking sun, witnessing justice through the leaves--Flash Point's conclusion earns its runtime, ultimately making the argument that less can be more, if the less is compacted into one frenetic battle, waiting behind a marathon of overwrought jokes, posturing, and tight springs of violence. These are wonderful days. The grunting makes it so.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010 

No Pictures: Parker Could've Taken Beckett, Bergman & Cobain, But He Would've Struggled With Hank Shocklee

Nation of Millions
By Christopher Weingarten, 2010

The 33 1/3 series is a lot less impressive when you actually sit down and read a bunch of them, but when it's good, it's an excellent argument for why music criticism is currently outpacing its brothers in film criticism. Part of that might be due to the lack of a universally embraced high art white tower in music writing--this kind of stuff has always been best produced by the outside antagonist, whereas film criticism was built by a club of similarly-toned writers, all of whom initially tried to keep the Farber's and Kael's at arm's length and are currently way too invested in fighting with us no-impact bloggers. Meanwhile, Weingarten's based-in-history, obsessed-with-deconstruction take on a great band's greatest album is the sort of thing that is as unique as the music it's focused on, and a lovely reminder of what people can produce when they stop concerning themselves with bitching about their peer group. Like the other great takes in the series, Nation of Millions is less about getting an audience to agree with it (stop fucking doing that) than it is about using the no-comment nature of print to nail down a deliriously tough manifesto. While some readers will undoubtably fail to separate Weingarten's purposely abrasive public persona with his arguments, their loss is the don't-cares gain. In perfect symmetry, that twist of fate is going to match right up with another audience as well, the one that didn't grasp what they had in their headphones back when Chuck D did this to music the first time; when Hank Shocklee, refused some technical advice and shoot back, "Fuck music!"

In Utero
By Gillian Gaar, 2008

This is basically two things: one, a longform attempt at liner notes for the Nirvana boxset (which the author was a project consultant for) and two, some notes for a far more interesting book on Steve Albini. If there's one thing this world needs to have before it explodes into a caused-by-robots holocaust, it's a two-thousand page book about Albini, who is probably the most interesting musical figure of the last three decades. Even if that isn't true--and hyperbole never is--he's definitely more deserving than 90% of the people that music writers usually focuses on.

Ingmar Bergman: Interviews
Edited by Raphael Shargel, 2007

There's probably some golden nuggets of genius hiding amongst the Conversations With Filmmakers series published by the University Press of Mississippi, so godspeed to the masochist who chooses to read every single one of these things and dig them out. The books are easy enough to find, as they seem to be the number one series every single chain bookstore stocks the film section with. Each one credits a different editor, so it's not a monolithic enterprise, but based off of this one (and a few others I've whiled away some time with), it's a series of consistent disappointment. Some of what's here is of interest, the most notable being the near-my-mortal-end talks where Bergman essentially admits that a big part of his output relied on using everyone around him as emotional slave labor, but most of what you have to read to get to that point is feeble and dull, the product of overly fannish filmmaker types attempting to get the man to nail down a program for them to follow. The starving will find some insights, but nothing that deserves the price they ask for these things, and even less that can't be found perusing the many superior websites devoted to film studies that now populate these god-created tubes.

I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: Samuel Beckett Reader
Edited by Richard Seaver, 1976

Beckett is a lot like Chris Ware, another guy who often gets dismissed because "he isn't funny", even though people who are really into him are always talking about how funny his comics really are. The other criticisms of them don't tread so neatly together--Ware's comics get assailed for being "boring shit" about depressed fat people, while the complaints about Beckett range from the overused "unreadable" over on to the always fun "faggy bullshit". On the praise front, Ware and Beckett are back in lockstep, down a path strewn with extremes. Both have seen (in the deceased Beckett's case, saw) their work referred to as "perfect" while the men themselves were labeled "genius" in many quarters.

The proper thing to do would be to follow up with a "the truth is somewhere in the middle", but I'll be honest: I just don't feel that way about Ware or Beckett. I'm comfortable with outing myself as someone who thinks that these are two people who are straight up better at what they do then those who might be classed as their contemporaries. That doesn't mean that everything they do is amazing; I prefer Ware's work in serialization far more than I do en masse, and I'm universally underwhelmed by Beckett's poetry. But when it comes down to it, there's very few plays as good as Waiting For Godot, very few novels as good as Malone Dies, and there's very comics as good as the Acme Novelty Library. Judge Dredd definitely has the edge on being entertaining, but that's about it.

So what about this book, though? It's a long one, that's for sure, and there's certainly some nice things inside it. The selections made by Seaver--a longtime friend and early supporter of Beckett--are sensible and well-chosen, dealing out a pleasant overview of the man's career. There's the easy stuff--Mercier and Camier, the early poems, Godot and Krapp's Last Tape--and there's a good bit of the tough pieces ('sup, Nohow On?) as well. And yet, the process seems ultimately pointless--Beckett's writing just doesn't lend itself to the Greatest Hits kind of process in the slightest, and the constant string of excerptions almost universally feels more like eviscerations, which can't have been Seaver's plan. It's clear from his introductions (all of which are excellent) that he knows Beckett's work in totality, in multiple languages, and maybe that was the problem. To him, a snapshot is enough to get the memories started, but to the reader, what's left seems unfamiliar and abbreviated. In a darker world, where Beckett's work is out of print and hard to find, the stakes might change. But until that's the case, this is one of those things that no one will ever need.

Deadly Edge
By Donald Westlake, 1971

This is the one where Parker has to deal with home invasion, acid-extreme hippie psychopaths (carved from that great American vein of media panic baddies) and it's the first in a quartet of Parker books that are oft reported to be the darkest ones. It's very, very good. Following a similar pattern to The Seventh, an earlier, underrated Parker book that follows the story of a perfectly pulled-off heist that falls apart when crazed outside forces come after the money, Deadly Edge eventually turns from crime thriller to horror movie in one nasty scene.

"Jessup had gone down on one knee for the gun, but Manny had grabbed up his fork and was poking at the food on Morris' face and then into his own mouth, at Morris' face and into his mouth, fast hard movements, and at the same time laughing and shouting, "Look, I'm eating! Look at this!" I'm eating!" Morris was trying to keep away from the fork, and not fall over the chair lying down behind him, and get the food--it must be stinging him--out of his eyes, and do something about the knife in his side, and stay alive, and none of it was going to happen."

Hell, there's a crucifixion in this one. You know what a crucifixion is? That's where you take a living human being and put nails into their wrists and ankles, and then you leave them somewhere to die. That's one of the things that happens in this book, and the people who do that are the same people Parker ends up going to war with. And even though you already know going into this book's hellish final stretch that our man Parker will survive for more tales of crime 'n woe, that won't do much good at bringing down the tension. This, and it can never be said enough, is how it gets done.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Not A Fine Romance, So Let's Talk About The Avengers

I can't. I can't do it. I wanted to make it a full year, but I can't do it another week. This whole idea of me trying to find "the one", THE comic book...it just isn't working. I found one. I did. And it was great. But nothing so far has come close to The Sword. I thought I could keep this up, these attempts to date some comics - but I started getting bored a few months back. And I just can't do it anymore.

I guess my appetite has changed. I'm feeling a little more charged up - a little more on the prowl for something exciting, something subversive! Yeah....I think I wanna read about...vampires. Yeah! VAMPIRES!

Fuck all this serious business. I want to have some wacky fun. I wanna read comics about vampires. I want to review comics about vampires. I want to compare and contrast them to see which one is the absolute best and then see which one is the absolute worst!!! I think that will be sweet. 

So, with that idea, I picked up Avengers 3. All vampires, all the time! What? Have you read these? Holy shit. Just check out the cover - Hulk the vampire! It's gonna be AMAZING! 

It turns out that what is really amazing about all three of these is how poorly constructed and edited they are. But I don't want you to fix them, Marvel. No no no. They are just too much fun, just the way they are! 

Now let's get down to the nitty gritty. I like vampires, kind of, lately. I like trying everyone's different takes on them and comparing and contrasting mythologies. No, I don't like Twilight. I tried to read it, but the teen angst was so freakin' boring. And I came late to the Buffy Party, and then I left early. Nevertheless, I'm kind of fascinated with other people's fascination with them. And I love the idea that vampires get to have all our worst qualities, but shined up in a way that makes all that badness seem attractive.

Imagine my delight, if you will. I'm thinking that perhaps I'll just go ahead and try as many vampire comics as I can possibly stand, and it turns out there's a whole Avengers series that just started about vampires AND superheroes. Lucky for me, right?

The very first thing I noticed was, honestly, the first piece of text in Issue 1: "What you say you do again, Blade? Hunt Vampires?" I had to read it twice, maybe three times. Is it intentional that she does not say "What DID you say you do again?" Or is it some seriously racist shit going on in the text from minute one? Even if it was, it didn't make a lot of sense to me. Thank goodness, though, the same lack of attention was paid to editing issue 3! That's how I came to believe that this was NOT intentional, but just a case of shoddy proofreading! In issue 3, we have three caucasians talking to each other and one says, "What you doing eating Snickers, Hawkeye?"

Ha! So that's what it is! It's not the writer's choice of "slang" for his characters. No! It's just a lack of attention to GRAMMAR. Oy.

Going back to issue 1, I found the opening first scene with Blade oh-so-awfully-delightful. A group of vampires show up and say something like, "hey, don't mess with our boss!" making it, essentially, a my-dad-is-bigger-than-you-and-will-beat-you-up first-grade tactic. Hilariously, Blade slaughters all of them, including the prostitutes who are, of course, vampire prostitutes sent to "tire him out." Amazing!

But then, as I was reading issue one - I got SO confused. Right after the Blade part, the page one the right depicts an ad for Wolverine #1, which is called "Logan Goes to Hell". And when you turn to the next page, it felt like an entirely different comic had started. I had to flip back and forth. Was issue 1 really short and now they were featuring an excerpt from Wolverine #1? That wouldn't make sense, right?

I had to ask my local expert as to what the situation was. He said, no, that it wasn't a bonus section. Just "poor construction." He seemed irritated that I didn't notice that the art was the same and told me to "keep reading." I told him I would, but that he should try to be nicer.

It turns out that the next section is all about the new Daredevil. I've never read much (any?) Daredevil, so it felt like a crash course. There was enough of an intro to get me tied into him and his trainer "Stick" that I was sufficiently surprised to see Stick die at the hands, or really, the teeth, of the Hulk. Vampire Hulk! The whole picture just scrambled my brains.

And then next thing you know, the new Daredevil gets bitten as well! AAAaaaaaaaaah!!!  What's gonna happen? What can we do? Well, just take a look at the very last page to feel safe and secure. Fist in hand, Captain America promises that they are going to "put a team of Bad-Asses together."

Oh, yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaah 

i think this is going to break my brain

In issue 2 we find out just how Hulk has become a vampire - the somewhat lame and slightly disgruntled Bruce Banner/Hulk clone rebelled and left the compound, and fell right into the hands of the vampires, who turned him. Of course, they did not realize he had a tracking device inside of him. Soon, the whole team is in the sewers trying to retrieve Hulk, and they fall right into a trap - the bait being the new Daredevil acting helpless and scared and then turning on ......The Captain! Captain America gets bit!!!! Oh no?!

Did I mention that the big boss of the vampires is wearing Iron Man's suit? (I thought he was just a creepy robot when he first showed up, but I checked and found out that nope, that's Iron Man.) All the Avengers are like, "Tony? What are you doing?" But it's not Tony, even though this person seem to fully know his way around the gadgets of the Iron Man outfit, and issue 3 opens with him using his force field to deflect the barrage of bullets coming at him from Hawkeye and Black Widow. The rest of the third issue felt a little slower to me than the first two. We have the escape of the vampires from their sewer home, and the Boss (Nick Fury is his name) realizing that all the trouble they've recently encountered is a result of having the Hulk around. And we have a whole slow story line of Captain America being taken back to The Triskelion to be operated on....a beautiful set-up for Blade to break in and shake us all back to our senses!  "Locking Cap up with all these lovely Super People is exactly what the bad guys have been praying for...." Oh yeah! He's right! (Don't ya just love how Blade refers to them as "bad guys"? It's so general and non-descript. Love It.)  Hurry...everyone run - uh-oh. Too late. Vampire Captain wakes up and bites Blade!!!! Now how does that work? He's already half vampire, right? To have that question alone answered is reason enough for me coming back for more! And all these hilarious drawings where each new hero gets bitten. I mean, just look at this picture of The Cap and Blade:

That's HOT, right? Get a room, you two. Just make sure you leave the blinds open!

Oh man. It's so bad it's good. And it goes down smooth and easy - like chocolate. So what if it doesn't really have anything to do with the usual mythology of vampires. So what! It's a hilarious spin on two old things - vampires and super heroes - and it's the exact bloody thing I was looking for.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

-Nina Stone, 2010

Comics Of The Weak: Nice Face You Got There, Trainwreck

Thunderbolts # 149
Written by Jeff Parker
Art by Declan Shalvey & Frank Martin
Published by Marvel Comics

Marvel and DC make crossover and tie-in comics as if their readers are in a committed relationship with the title, as if the audience will just stick it out no matter how creepy the bedroom sanctions have become. And at one point, that was probably true--you could dress Batman up in a football uniform and readers would still clamber into bed, forcibly ignoring how uncomfortable it felt to have flashlight batteries shoved into their labial matrix. But nowadays--uh uh, sister. I'm not wearing that prom dress until you start holding doors, like you did when we first met.

Superman # 704
Written by G. Willow Wilson
Art by Leandro Oliveira, Walden Wong & Rod Reis
Published by DC Comics

Dope shit here. Turns out Lois Lane has been spending some time thinking (always a mistake, when you're a female comic book character), and it's finally dawned on her that she's spent all of her time on a career and not on baby-making, so now she's all kinds of fucked up, the all-kinds that can only be fixed by having her man tell her he wuvs her. And who is it that's responsible for this terrible trip down sad thoughts highway? Why, the single most influential architect in small-town Indiana, that's who! See, this little tart just happens to run a successful architectural firm in a small town populated by stereotypes and be a mom at the same time! Doesn't that just curl your hair? Why it's enough to make a Cub Scout cross-eyed!

Oh, and make a note somewhere: Superman 704 has the deadest eyes you'll ever find. Every single page has at least one panel (and in almost all cases, that one panel is every panel) depicting the most soulless faces comics can produce. It feels like you're standing in the Barbie aisle after the toystore shut down for the night. And while that's totally understandable--the comic is a fill-in issue, the art had to get pumped out on the express rail--it still ends up winning a prize that nobody would be excited to claim.

Fantastic Four # 584
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Steve Epting & Paul Mounts
Published by Marvel Comics

This is mostly wish-fulfillment cutesy shit, but that's pretty much what you're supposed to do with "Ben Grimm has a human body" stories. That way it hurts so much more when he turns back into a hideous freak, hated by God. There's only two blatant problems with it, the first being that Epting draws Jack Kirby as if the King's body is filling in for an off-Broadway version of Weekend At Bernie's (with Stan Lee taking Andrew McCarthy's AND the Single Guy's spot), and the second being the completely blown opportunity for Johnny Storm to have said something awesome like "you go let that girl read Braille off your flesh penis, Benji".

JLA The 99 # 1
Written by Stuart Moore & Fabian Nicieza
Art by Tom Derenick, Drew Geraci & Allen Passalaqua
Published by DC Comics
The French, Regarding The Cover 

Huh. Kind of disrespectful for something like this to be sold in the same hemisphere as Ground Zero. Well, it's like BenRix always says: The shit, for the countries of the shit. Oh look Hawkman has a giant ass growing out of his arm

That's pretty fucked up

Secret Avengers # 6
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Mike Deodato
Published by Marvel Comics

Plaster some breasticles on the variant cover, set the info dump portion during a sexxxy massage sesh, it won't change the simple truth that some people are here for Moon Knight and Moon Knight alone. Sure, there's going to be people who might show up to see how Brubaker deals with the lack of a Fu Manchu license, there might even be an uptick courtesy of the curious Shadowland reader, hungry to find out what crybaby Chi calls himself now that he's lost the "Master" that was attached to his "Kung-Fu", but it's the Moon Knight fans who are keeping this sucker alive. Jesus said it on the cross: don't shit on who brung you.

Justice League Generation Lost # 12
Written by Judd Winick
Art by Fernando Dagnino, Raul Fernandez & Hi-Fi
Published by DC Comics

The appeal of this comic, one would surmise, would be the opportunity to continue reading something that people remember fondly, that something being the Justice League International stuff that got rolling in the late 80's. And while some of this is certainly that (the Rocket Red character still has his Yakov Smirnoff accent, and one recent plot featured cutesy 80's shit like a Voltron-ic assembly of Metal Men), the series now seems to be hewing a lot closer to a comic nobody remembers fondly (if they think of it at all), Extreme Justice. Extreme Justice is notable for being completely ignored (you'll notice that few people ever talk about the period of time when Booster Gold's body was kept alive by an armored suit that had the exact visual punch as a stack of microwaves) due to it being corny and horrible: which would make it right at home here, in a story called "The Cold Truth", which is about how long-time wallflower (WAIT FOR IT) Ice is actually responsible for the death of her father and a good portion of her extended family, had totally forgotten about it, and it all came rushing back when her costume got a requisite Superfluous Hardcore Update. Grimy!

The Bulletproof Coffin # 5
Written by David Hine
Art by Shaky Kane
Published by Image Comics

Yeah, so this thing isn't really going anywhere, but at least it looks nice while doing so. After a fashion, that almost seems like part of the point: appearance wise, format wise, publisher wise, Bulletproof sure looks like it's a serialized comic mini-series of the variety that Image occasionally puts out. And in the way Hine keeps presenting the same characters again and again, deepening some of them and violently removing others, it is. But on every other basic level, it's a comic whose value is in direct connection to how interested one is in looking at Shaky Kane drawings of people wearing poorly-fitted super-hero costumes (in the daylight, for the most part) as they go about the business of failing. Lucky day!

Teen Titans # 88
Written by JT Krul
Art by Nicola Scott & Doug Hazlewood
Published by DC Comics

Finally, after months of anticipation, readers around the world have gotten the chance to see what JT Krul really has to bring to the table. Up until now, you couldn't really tell what the cat could cook with--sure, there was Rise of Arsenal, but when it comes down to it, Krul hasn't been partnered up with anybody on the art details who you could charitably argue was considered "competent", or when he has been, those individuals only handled a few pages of one of his postmodern masterworks. In a neat stroke of the genius that has seen them win the hearts, minds and open wallets of America's comics readers, DC Comics spent the last couple of years destroying whatever goodwill the Teen Titans had left, and it was all apparently to prepare the ground for our man Krul's arrival, who is getting a chance to start off relatively clean. It's as if the restaurant down the block, the one that used to defecate on pictures of your Bible whenever you asked for a sandwich, decided to hire an all new staff. Sure, they still serve human feces, but now they do it faster, with embroidered napkins.

Incognito Bad Influences # 1
Written by Ed Bruabker
Art by Sean Philips
Published by Icon/Marvel

A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack qualities of humanity, hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day.

Detective Comics # 870
Written by David Hine
Art by Scott McDaniel & Andy Owens
Published by DC Comics

Funny thing: if you have Scott McDaniel drawing a comic, that comic can include a massive death toll, and yet it won't seem overly serious or gloomy. Like this, for example. According to the text, nearly two hundred people died in the rioting and fighting that takes up the majority of the comics pages, all of them innocent people and police officers, and while some of those deaths are depicted, it still never seems like that big of a deal. Because...well, let's be honest, it isn't a big deal. When it comes to death, civilians in comics are like Mexicans in real life: nobody can be bothered to care. Happy birthday!

-Tucker Stone, 2010