"No longer like a toad in these foul cellars will I secret the venom of hatred -- for you shall bring me love!" - Erik
|
Home
|
« Comics: June 2006 | Main | Comics: August 2006 » ComicsGood comics week: Ronan, Avengers, ASM Would be great if it weren't for Ronan dragging things down, but even that wasn't as bad as i thought it would be... Ronan The Accuser #4 It started off pretty strongly in the Prologue, with Ronan being falsely accused of treason to the Kree empire, and him having to go off and defend his name (it had nothing to do with the Annihilation wave, but it was a good enough concept that i was willing to go with it). But when Ronan arrives on a planet that has basically been taken over by all of Marvel's "space" women, working for Gamora, who last i read was A) dead and B) a good guy, things got a little weird. Nebula, major bad-ass who has taken on the Avengers multiple times and claims to be the grand-daughter of Thanos, working as a goon for Gamora was really odd. But instead of really going into an explanation of what they were all doing there, we switch over to Glorian, of all people (unless the explanation is that everyone was mind-controlled by Glorian That's what i'm going with, but that's not a very good story). So who is Glorian? Glorain is gold-skinned rainbow boy. He makes your dreams come true. He's sort of the herald of the Shaper of Worlds, who is a pasty white skrull stuck in a box (Amazingly, that's the best picture of the Shaper I could find on the internets. I'll have to scan one in later.) Glorian is tired of being the herald and wants to Shape his own Worlds. So he gathers the necessary energy by, umm, mind controlling people to fight each other. That's cheesey. That's, like, Contest of Champions "let's think of a reason to have fight scenes" cheesey. And it doesn't really go anywhere. Whatever Glorian was up to gets interrupted by the Annihilation wave, rushing in at the end of issue #3 to drag Ronan back into the main plot. Glorian sacrifices his newly created world to defeat the Annihilation wave. Ronan... fights some bugs, and finally hunts down the person who falsely accused him, who of course dies before she can tell him anything. Useless. Ronan decides he needs to warn the Kree about the bugs, which means the point of this mini-series was basically "here's what's been happening with Ronan before he finds out about the bugs". The only way this plot could somehow be relevant to Annihilation is if Annihilus himself arranged for Ronan to be falsely accused, and we don't find out about it until the main story. That's way too much subtlety for the big bugger so i don't see that happening. Which means this story was both bad and pointless. So why do i say that this issue wasn't all that bad? Well, it was basically a big fight scene, with all the various factions fighting the bugs until Glorian's big deus ex moment, and as it turns out, the art is by Jorge Lucas (i did that joke already), who is quite good and detailed in a Future Imperfect George Perez sort of way. Additionally, the coloring is interesting. So from a visual perspective, i liked it a lot, and for a big battle scene, that makes up for a lot, even if the plot isn't very strong. Avengers #22 Anyway, this issue did a lot to make me see it from the other side, and also to make the law look alot more like an MRA than an SRA. Luke Cage, doing nothing but sitting in his home, was to be arrested because he had not registered, simply because he has powers. Which means the law is wrong. Even regardless of that, it was a great issue. Good characterization of Luke, and the relationship between Luke and Jessica. And i like the approach of the New Avengers during Civil War - i don't know if it will continue but it seems like each issue will focus on one of the team members and their reaction to the law. That's a really good way to deal with a crossover, and it lets focus on one of Bendis' strengths - characterization - while the main action takes place elsewhere. Amazing Spider-Man #534 By fnord12 | July 31, 2006, 1:13 PM | Comics | Comments (4)| Link Jim Shooter (from the Comic Urban Legends series on Comics Should Be Good!): By fnord12 | July 28, 2006, 4:00 PM | Comics | Link By fnord12 | July 24, 2006, 5:26 PM | Comics | Link This week's comic review: Nova #4 Eternals #2 Civil War #3 Cable & Deadpool #30 By fnord12 | July 24, 2006, 10:17 AM | Comics | Comments (1)| Link The Elektra film gets a solid "almost OK" rating from me. More ninjas totally flipping out and killing people definitely would have helped things along, but it had reasonably true-to-the-comics versions of Stick and Typhoid Mary, so it gets credit for that. I probably would have liked it less if we hadn't fast forwarded through most of the "plot". Now, i have to be careful here, but Fantastic Four may have actually been "pretty good". I caution you, i had just sat through Man-Thing and Elektra, so it's possible that even Nothing But Trouble would have seemed like a good movie by comparison*, but i actually enjoyed FF. Sure, the Dr. Doom character was terrible, sure the Thing looked absolutely awful, sure the plot made very little sense... wait, was i saying this movie was good? Well, it was a fun dumb action movie, let's just leave it at that. By fnord12 | July 23, 2006, 10:22 AM | Comics
& Movies | Comments (2)| Link If you followed through the links in my previous post, you read about Vibro (if you didn't, you missed some funny stuff), but you may not have read this in the comments: I just read through a huge stack of Denny O'Neil Iron Mans, and they definitely read like that -- here's some interesting and serious stuff about Stark's alcoholism, here's some interesting stuff about Rhodey learning to be Iron Man, and oh, i guess we'd better throw in some lame villain, too. I thought it was just O'Neil bowing to comic book convention. Now that i know it was Mark Gruenweld, king of cheese, forcing those characters on O'Neil it makes even more sense. The saddest part you can tell from the previous issue's teaser and that blurb on the cover that he was really excited about this new character he'd come up, like he'd created the next Magneto or something. By fnord12 | July 20, 2006, 9:13 PM | Comics | Link Bored at work? (i know you are) Go check out Dave's Long Box's Lame-Ass Villian Compendium. And don't worry, they're mostly all Marvel characters. By fnord12 | July 20, 2006, 4:30 PM | Comics | Comments (4)| Link Your opinion solicited: Should the X-Men comics focus primarily on themes like prejudice using the mutant concept as a metaphor, or should they be primarily super-hero comics like, say, the Avengers, that occasionally deal with the mutant theme as an extra layer? By fnord12 | July 20, 2006, 11:57 AM | Comics | Comments (47)| Link Rod sometimes mentions a comic he read where Doctor Octopus stole the Letter H. To illustrate the severity of this, all the Hs in the comic were missing. In the end, Spider-Man stopped him. It would appear that there is one other person in the entire world who has also read that comic. "We've lost our Rs. And we want them back," said Randall Jones, president of Headley Hardware. It wouldn't be so hard for a thief with 4 octopus-like robotic arms, now, would it? By min | July 20, 2006, 10:35 AM | Comics & Ummm... Other? | Comments (19)| Link A Peter David story found on an old message board: Well, before THAT rumor gets out of control, let me clarify that that came out of a discussion I was having with Tom DeFalco while in Jim Owsley's office, and it wasn't serious. Tom--who, by the way, is a good friend and I adore the guy--was illustrating the importance of not writing stories that make it impossible for subsequent writers to continue the series in the same spirit. And he said, "I could write this fantastic story in which we kill off JJJ, and have this heartbreaking death scene with him and Peter in which they finally come to terms, and then JJJ is dead. But what do you do then?" And I instantly said, "Well, I'd have the Kingpin buy the Daily Bugle." And I started rattling off this whole storyline with growing excitement. Poor Tom's standing there going, "No, no, Peter, you're missing the point" and I'm jumping up and down and saying, "Owz! Owz! This could be great! Let's do it! Let's kill off JJJ!" But I was never really serious and it didn't go beyond that. The karmic revenge came some years later when I was at an X-writers' retreat (doing X-Factor at the time) and we were discussing Magneto's imminent return and him facing off against Wolverine. And I said, "Y'know, I don't know why Magneto even bothers with Wolverine. Why doesn't he just rip out Wolverine's metal skeleton and be done with him." And Bob Harras and the guys all looked at each other and said, "What a GREAT IDEA!" And I immediately said, "No, guys, no, I was kidding, it's a terrible idea. Wolverine can't survive that." And they're going, "No, it could work, 'cause he's got a healing factor." And I'm screaming, "Healing factor?!? He'd HAVE NO BONES! He'd be a healed puddle of flesh!!! Are you all INSANE?!?" And they went and did it. My major contribution to X-mythos, and it stemmed from one dumb remark that I tried to recant and couldn't. PAD By fnord12 | July 19, 2006, 3:54 PM | Comics | Comments (1)| Link This week's comic review: Super-Skrull #4 So how to address the "loser villain" issue? One option is to let the bad guys actually win every once in a while. The problem with this is it can distrupt the comic book's status quo in a big way, killing off heroes or conquering a planet or whatever. Unless you're prepared for the villain's win to be a major event, instead of the "villain of the month" story, you can't do that too often. Another option is to let the villain be successful elsewhere - just not when the heroes are around. There's been some evidence that for low level earthbound villains, they generally make a good life for themselves robbing banks and whatnot in the parts of the US where the heroes don't congregate. With a character like the Super-Skrull, who acts mainly off planet, this could have been even easier. He could be a prominent general of the Skrull army who just can't handle Earth's super-heroes (which is no shame - even Galactus, Thanos, etc., get beaten by Earth's heroes). But the writer of the Super-Skrull mini (Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the writer of the TV show Lost, which, for some unfathomable reason, isn't a sequel to The Land of the Lost) decided to not go this route, i guess because he wanted to explore the idea of a loser super-villain who has to now prove himself a hero. It's an ok theme to explore, i guess, and it starts off ok, except for being very, very slow. The problem is, after establishing the Super-Skrull as a ruthless and efficient strategist, it turned things around with a really cliched betrayal plot twist. The betrayal doesn't even make sense from a character perspective - when you have a character speaking to the audience in the first person in issue #2, you can't turn it around and pretend it was all a ruse in issue #4. This issue, showing Super-Skrull developing feelings for the pawns he's been using and then trying to sacrifice himself to save them (i think? I got bored and stopped reading so closely and the art was annoyingly unclear), was just sappy and out of place in a story about one of Marvel's great villains. All in all, some decent moments but ultimately not worth it. As far as advancing the overall Annihilation plot, Annihilus doesn't even appear in this story. The Silver-Skrull managed to destroy the Harvester of Sorrow weapon, but we don't even get Annihilus' reaction to that, so it doesn't feel like it was that important. Silver Surfer #4 X-Men #188 As far as the story goes, the idea is that this team is going to be the "rapid response team," and it's going to be lead by Rogue. Isn't every super hero team a rapid response team? I mean, the idea is that they sit around their headquarters and when they're trouble they quickly mobilize and respond. The other option is the pro-active team that hunts down the bad guys before they do anything, which is a concept i love in theory but which has never really been executed well. I guess you also have super-heroes who patrol, actively looking for bad guys doing bad things, like Spider-Man, and explorers like the Fantastic Four who go to bizarre places and run into trouble with the locals, but i think "rapid response team" is actually the norm. But i think the idea is that this team might be the ones to do the dirty sort of black-ops work that the regular X-Teams might not want to get their hands dirty with. Which is a good way to distinguish them from the other X-Books, and could be a good idea. And it's an interesting group of team members: Rogue, Cannonball, Iceman, and Mystique so far. The little corner box (yay! the return of the corner box!) also shows Cable and Sabertooth. The cover art also shows Aurora (from Alpha Flight) and Lady Mastermind (who i think is a character Claremont created because they killed off the original Mastermind with the Legacy virus). So there should be some interesting dynamics between Cable and former pupil Cannonball, and Mystique and foster daughter Rogue. Also interesting that on a team of 3 former team leaders (Cable, Mystique, Cannonball), Rogue, typically a loner, will be leading the group. Yep, it all could be quite interesting, if only the art wouldn't suck. As it is, i'll pass on this series, unless the artist changes. By fnord12 | July 17, 2006, 1:08 PM | Comics | Link The same person who provided the Civil War scripts also gave me an explanation on the whole Xorn/Magento mess. First thing it is important to know is that the Scarlet Witch has been super-powered by Loki since the beginning of the Disassembled arc, which is how she got her reality alterning powers. Loki was responsible for creating the Avengers and he needed to destroy them for closure as his part of his ultimate plan with Surtur and the forge of Mjolnir was reaching fruition (in addition to keep them from aiding Thor). So he powered up the Scarlet Witch, and tormented her with her father Magneto's death, driving her crazy and causing her to destroy the Avengers. At the end of Disassembled, Scarlet Witch used her new reality altering powers to effectively recreate her father, bringing him back from the dead in his most rational state, and later depowering him to preserve his sanity (since it's known that Magneto's use of his powers affect his mental state). In order to restore his repuation, she also created another Xorn entity, separate from Magneto, thus alleviating Magneto from any guilt over his recent attack on Manhattan. Doom, now attuned to Asgardian energies due to his recent escape from Hell, has been tapping into Scarlet Witch's powers as part of his Project 42 scheme, the result of which is causing some of her creations to become unstable, leading to the recent merging of her House of M energies and Xorn, and Xorn's seeking out and attacking Magneto. One result of Civil War will be Doom's restoration of the Scarlet Witch's sanity and normal power levels as Doom does will not allow such a power to exist on his planet (prior to making a few big changes using her powers that will serve as a red herring that the heroes will fight to reverse while Doom preserves a few smaller changes. But i don't want to give too much away!). By fnord12 | July 13, 2006, 10:12 AM | Comics | Link Last night i was provided with the script for the last few pages of Civil War #5 and the first few of Civil War #6: Suddenly a squadron of SHIELD agents emerge from the pipe. They open fire with machine guns and a flame thrower. The homeless people fall to the ground, apparently dead. The GIANT emerges from the carnage, his rags in flames. He tears them off, revealing himself as the ABOMINATION. He looks at the homeless people, screams in horror, and attacks the SHIELD agents, scattering them. Filled with rage, he is about the kill an agent when MS. MARVEL appears, looking arrogant, with a second SHIELD squad, armed with gamma cannons. The shot moves back, revealing the overall battlefield. In the top left corner of the panel, a shooting star is moving towards the earth. In the next several panels, as MS. MARVEL approaches the ABOMINATION, the comet approaches the earth, and in the last panel there is an EXPLOSION. SCENE: END Book 5. BEGINING Book 6. I guess it takes away some of the moral dilemma by making the pro-registration side bad guys in disguise, and turns the whole Civil War into a typical superhero story, but i can't say i'm disappointed. By fnord12 | July 13, 2006, 10:04 AM | Comics | Comments (1)| Link Ok, that's not quite what Tom B. says, but it's pretty close: It used to be, back when comic books were sold exclusively on the newsstand, that the cover was what sold the magazine. That's why so much attention and effort was spent on the cover image. There was no advertising, no promotion, no Wizard magazine or Previews catalogue or Newsarama to let people know what was coming out months in advance. In fact, other than if it might have been mentioned on the Bullpen Bulletins page, or shown in a house ad, you didn't have any idea that a new book was coming until it arrived. So the cover was a crucial component in making your title sell. We still put crazy amounts of effort into our covers--but one of the unspoken truths of the industry at this point is that the cover is no longer responsible for selling the magazine, and may in fact have a negligible effect on the total sales. Sure, a really good cover may be able to hook a few extra people into picking up the book off the racks, assuming it's there for them to find, but the whole mechanism of our distribution and retail system makes the cover close to superfluous. Retailers order their books months in advance from the Previews catalogue, as do a great deal of the customer base through pull lists. And once you get outside the big coastal cities especially, the amount of display space a given shop has is relatively miniscule. I don't know what proportion of the average shop's books are sold off the rack as opposed to through pull list subscriptions and advance orders, but I'd hazard a conservative guess that it's probably half. There was a time not so long ago when it was Marvel policy that every cover should have a single iconic figure, and no direct relevance to the story in that given issue. And fans far and wide screamed about it--yet it did nothing to hurt sales overall. And now that we've returned to mixing up the cover approach, it hasn't materially affected sales either. I regularly hear from a small group of people who don't like the mostly-iconic covers we've been running on NEW AVENGERS, but those covers clearly have not been hurting the sales on that book--and the more story-driven covers on, say, THING didn't materially increase the sales on that book. The place where cover art can help or hurt your book's sales these days is really the Previews catalogue, the tool that retailers and readers use to advance order their books. So it's not like the cover art is irrelevant or anything. But even within that venue, just having a strong image isn't enough in most cases to sell the magazine--other factors such as story content, creative team, relevance to the larger Marvel Universe, and the amount of coverage given seem to be more important elements in making a decision for most retailers and fans. I'd hazard a guess that, were we to solicit a new ULTIMATE project with, let's say, Brian Bendis writing and Greg Land penciling, but we didn't show any image at all, it would still be ordered quite well--retailers would be very upset with us, because they hate having to take a position on any title without the maximum amount of information they can get, but I expect that most of them would weigh the factors they did have--especially if the story content promised important elements for the ULTIMATE line--and would order acordingly. So, does the cover matter anymore? Well, everything matters. It's just a question of degree. And at this point, the cover no longer has to shoulder the promotional weight that it once did--so it matters perhaps a little less than it once did. Covers have always upset people. Most of them depicted things that never actually happened in the comic. Often they were drawn by a better artist than the one responsible for the interior, which is misleading. Many had word balloons, which Wayne says is an absolute no-no. And lately they've been doing what Tom calls the 'iconic' covers - covers that are just generic pictures of characters that have nothing to do with the plot of the comic. Obviously even the iconic covers take a lot of work - it's just that they can stock them up in advance and use them as needed. I like the iconic covers the least. Every once in a while is ok, but 12 months in a row of "Punisher stands in front of a wall" is too much, and those early New Avengers comics featured characters that weren't even on the team yet (and they weren't drawn by the interior artist, so that matches 3 of the above negatives). But if the thinking is that the cover doesn't affect the sale anymore, then i don't see them changing their policies any. Although for what it is worth, the house ad for Annihilation, showing the four (iconic) covers of the four miniseries, was probably the main reason i decided to get that event. By fnord12 | July 12, 2006, 3:33 PM | Comics | Link |
I mean, i like the Young Avengers and all, but, ummm, where's my Power Pack box set? Where's my Masters of Evil / Thunderbolts double-box set? Where's my Ego The Living Planet? How did these whippersnappers get to the front of the line? I found this picture on 
The Man-Thing movie wasn't very good. OK, it was awful. But you probably didn't need me to tell you that. I guess 