Fascination Place

For one thing, Duncan Rouleau’s art is dynamic and imaginative, with a style not quite like anyone else I’ve seen in comics these days. The story is one of loyalty and redemption, and has a heavy time travel element. What’s not to like?

Well, the story’s also told in 19 small chapters, taking place early in the Metal Men’s career, and at several different points later on. And it’s extremely hard to follow. In addition to the cast of seven Metal Men, plus their creator, Will Magnus, the Metal Men switch bodies at some points, and they have substantially different physical appearances in different time periods. I found it to be too much effort for too little reward to try to fit all the pieces together; I would have been happier with a more linear story with a few flashbacks.

Plus there are several other mad scientists running around, and a host of other unrelated robots, for a cast of characters too large to really work. The story tries to focus on our hero Will, but it keeps drifting around and never really finds its emotional center. The conclusion made very little sense to me, but honestly I’d given up trying to figure out what the heck was going on by then.

The story is credited to Rouleau “based on ideas by Grant Morrison”, and edited by Eddie Berganza. I don’t know whether Morrison provided a story outline that was simply too ambitious, or if Rouleau bit off more than he could chew, or if Berganza should have reined him in and just didn’t, but one or more of these guys ended up making a muddle of what should have been a straightforward and fun story. It’s too bad, because it started off with a lot of promise, but just never found its footing.

Unfortunately the Ross/Krueger-written books suffer the same problem that J. Michael Straczynski’s books do: Too much reflection and dialogue, and not enough actually going on. This issue is at least focused on two different fights, one in World War II and one in the present day, which is a promising start. I bet it ends up feeling like a story that could have been told in 4 issues rather than 12, though. But it already looks better than Project Superpowers (not exactly a ringing endorsement).

Steve Sadowski’s pencils are solid, as always, but the guy could really use an inker who can bring some subtlety to his linework. I’m not sure if he inked himself here, or if the art was reproduced from his pencils, but the lines are so heavy the art sometimes looks like it was etched in wood.

Abnett & Lanning are at the top of their game here, with some witty dialogue as well as a good feel for Nova’s position. Meanwhile Willington Alves returns on pencils. He’s not Sean Chen, but I like his layouts and his use of shadows. Overall I like his work better than Paul Pelletier’s (who I guess is moving to Guardians of the Galaxy in the wake of Annihilation Conquest).

Overall, yet another nifty issue of Marvel’s best title. I hope the second year of Nova sees him establish himself with his own storylines and personal odysseys separate from the “event” crossover series. The book’s got too much promise to be slaved to editorial dictate.

Not that it hasn’t been an enjoyable arc on some levels - there have been some good character bits and the gorgeous artwork - but it’s just not nearly as good as the first arc. I can see that Waid was trying to do something a little different, but I think a multi-character team-up book needs a tight framework in which to operate or else it just falls apart. Indeed, I think such books succeed best when a hodge-podge of characters are pulled together into a very tight, sensical story, but the loose framework of this second arc made it feel much less coherent, and thus much less enjoyable.

Ostrander always made the Squad work because not only was his unflinching in killing off some of the characters - including the occasional major one - but he maintained a careful balance of distrust and respect among the main characters, both heroes and villains, and dug deeply into their motivations. Everyone here has some sort of pathology, as you might expect from people who dress up in spandex to commit or fight crimes. A couple of the heroes attached to the Squad are a little less nutty than the others - Bronze Tiger is arguably the most ‘pure’ of the heroes - but everyone has a point of view of an agenda which brings them into conflict with the others at some point.

Anyway, this story wraps up with a mission - to which Eiling is now attached as a convicted villain - going horribly wrong. Of course, this being the Squad and not the Justice League, a decidedly different form of mayhem ensues, and it all wraps up rather neatly. Nifty character bits abound, especially those involving Deadshot and the new Captain Boomerang, the writing is sharp, and the art is mostly terrific, although inker Robin Riggs pencils a few of the last pages, and they’re noticeably stiff next to those of Javier Pina.

But all things considered, this series is made of win. If it results in a new Suicide Squad ongoing series, I would totally be on board with it.

Basically, the Phalanx takes over the Kree empire, seals it in an impenetrable bubble (dozens of light-years wide!) and starts infecting all beings inside with its technovirus, including Nova, Drax, Gamora, Blastaar, etc. Pockets of rebellion persist, primarily a team of misfits led by the former Star-Lord who seek to bring down the Babel Spire which is generating the field. Meanwhile Quasar - sister of the most recent Captain Marvel - find the High Evolutionary and a resurrected Adam Warlock (again?) and strives to enlist them, but the Evolutionary betrays her and puts the mind of the Phalanx’s leader - whose identity might elicit a groan from longtime Marvel readers, but seems almost obligatory to me - in Adam’s body.

In the conclusion, Nova shows up with the cavalry, Star-Lord’s team makes its last stand, and Ronan the Accuser implements his final solution to the problem of the Phalanx infestation. As grand, “last, desperate hope” climaxes go, this one is pretty good. A lot of people really loved Star-Lord’s strike force, especially Groot and Rocket Raccoon, but I enjoyed the weightier characters, such as Nova and Wraith (I wish we’d seen more of the latter). I appreciate Star-Lord as a sort of tragic hero, having lost all his powers in defending the galaxy from an insane Herald of Galactus, but I don’t think the rest of his team is a very good foil for his character. I guess we’ll see how well it works in a longer form in the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy series, though.

Overall, Marvel’s revitalization of their space characters has been a smashing success, relying on good stories, clever plotting, and well-defined characters who stay in character. The mess which is the rest of Marvel’s line of titles would do well to watch what these guys are doing, because they’re doing it right.

Yet it has nothing at all to do with the issue, whose story goes like this:

1. The JSA having a meeting about who’s going to go after the very powerful Gog.
2. Gog shows up in their meeting room
3. Fight!

Anyway. It’s not so much a bad issue as a “well, let’s get this out of the way” issue. Basically, John and Ross have let us down as far as building dramatic tension and bringing it to a climax goes. In other words, regardless of where the story “They Kingdom Come” is going, it’s going there very slowly and is being boring while it’s going there.

And it turns out that it’s been dragged out this long because now Nova’s going to loop back to where this story started in the conclusion to Annihilation Conquest. Which might seems self-indulgent, but since both series have been plenty of fun, I don’t really mind. (This also explains why Nova’s 4-issue involvement in Annihilation Conquest last year ended so anticlimactically - it was just the set-up for this longer arc which would then tie back in to the mini-series. I guess I shoulda had more faith!)

Oh, and there’s also a hint at the end of the issue that Drax is starting to revert a little to his “big dumb destroyer” form. I wonder if he cycles from weak-but-clever to strong-and-stupid and back again every few years?

This may seem like faint praise, but given the legions of crappy books out there, you could do a whole lot worse.

By the way, if you enjoy Booster Gold, I highly recommend you week out Justice League America #72-75, from Jurgens’ run on JLA in the “post-bwah-hah-hah” era. It’s one of the best alternate timeline stories in JLA history.

But his art here is better than I’d feared; a little soft in the backgrounds maybe, but the figures are quite good. I suspect inker Rick Magyar has something to do with that, as he tends to bring a good feeling of texture and shading to everyone he inks, but it looks like Pelletier will be okay. Maybe he was just mailing it in on FF.

Meanwhile, the current story is coming to a head, and I suspect that next issue may be the big climax. Stay tuned!

This issue does tie the series back to its first issue, so it wasn’t quite a series of vignettes, but it’s not a fully cohesive whole. And it’s clearly a broad instruction to the character, who’s been around for 80 years and thus has a lot of history. Although my feeling is that they could have led with a stronger, more hard-hitting story as the opener, I can live with this.

I do like Scott Wegener’s artwork, though. It reminds me of Mike Mignola, but also of Michael Avon Oeming, yet it seems cleaner and more dynamic and either. If the human characters’ faces were a little more nuanced, then I could really groove on it. (Wegener seems to go for the “a few broad strokes” approach to faces.)

Anyway, I’ll have higher expectations for the sequel, that it will be more than just a pulpish adventure yarn, since as I’ve said recently I’m getting kind of tired of pulpish adventure yarns. Showing how Robo has changed the world - and how the world has changed Robo - ought to be one of the central facets of a series like this. I hope the future holds some character development.

Beautie is a member of the Honor Guard, the foremost group of superheroes in the Astro City world. What she is is a life-sized Barbie doll with super powers - really. She’s actually a robot, who mimics human form but has some frustrating limitations, and not just her problems relating to humans. She also has no memory of where she came from or why she exists, or why there are no others like her, or for that matter why she resembles a Barbie doll (which in the Astro City world is called a Beautie doll). This is the story of her quest to find out who she is, and what happens when she does.

After a fashion, this is the story of a character like Star Trek’s Data compressed into a single issue, and rendered more realistically: Beautie not only has Data’s emotional hang-ups, she also has physical problems which prevent her from blending in. And not only is she frustrated by her limitations, she’s also not quite sure how to truly react to being frustrated. It’s a satisfying tale both emotionally and in its depth, with a little twist before the story’s climax revolving around the fact that Beautie is an android.

This would be a good issue to introduce new readers to Astro City, as I think it embodies many of the best elements of the series. And it’s another fine entry into the ongoing series, which should make longtime readers happy. I know it did me.

I was mistaken, it’s not the conclusion, but it was still a good read.

Rather than wrapping up the story, it instead featured Nova remembering his origin, when he was first recruited into the Nova corps, and also thinking forward to later in life when the restored Nova corps will fight the final battle against the Phalanx, who have completely taken over the Earth. It’s likely that the latter story was simply in Nova’s imagination, but it was still pretty chilling.

In a way this issue is a throwback to Marvel annuals of old, revisiting the hero’s origin, while throwing in some extra stuff on the side. It also explains one of the underlying principles of the Nova corps - they’re not the best and brightest, they’re average citizens empowered to do extraordinary things. It’s a good issue, and makes me wish anew that Nova hadn’t been largely excluded from the Phalanx storyline in Armageddon Conquest. But hopefully he’ll get his own satisfying conclusion when the current storyline ends.

Willingham goes all-out with the brutality here, with minor characters being gruesomely mauled, and showing that the Joker - whom you’d think wouldn’t be in a great position to survive on an alien jungle world inasmuch as he has no super-powers and mainly relies on lurking in the shadows - can adapt with the best of them even among this group of psychopaths. Unfortunately, as much as I like Sean Chen’s artwork, I don’t think he draw a great Joker, and this is especially brought home by Dan Jurgens’ rendition in Booster Gold this same week.

We also get to see what a bunch of bastards the current Suicide Squad are, which seems like a rather simplistic reading of John Ostrander’s nuanced portrayal in Suicide Squad, which also came out this week.

In other words, it seems like Willingham is phoning in the script for this one, as it relies mainly on being shocking and bloody and not much else. So - as the saying goes - if you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you’ll like. Personally, I’m disappointed.

But when you’re John Ostrander, you can go Morrison one better and integrate this idea into your own series, which is what we see in Suicide Squad #4, as Amanda Waller assembles a new Squad and recruits Eiling into it, despite the risks he presents. He also reestablishes the relationship of two of the main characters from the original series, even though one of them is the son of the original one.

Ostrander actually reminds me a lot of Bill Willingham as a writer, in that both of them take very calculated approaches to plotting their stories, and both can be cold and brutal in presenting the ramifications of their characters’ actions. I think Ostrander at his best is a slightly better writer, though, because I think his skill at characterization is deeper: Even his villains have the redeeming or likeable or sympathetic points (unless Ostrander clearly doesn’t want them to, a trait he reserves for only a few characters). And Suicide Squad is Ostrander near his best. Not only does it make me hope this mini-series spawns a new ongoing series after it, it makes me want to pick up the first series and re-read it.

The artwork by Javier Pina and Robin Riggs is also excellent, although Pina doesn’t quite have the flair for facial expressions to make the art really shine. He handles the fantastic visuals and the action scene just fine, though, and you can’t always have everything. Also, Riggs is a much better inker for Pina than the inkers he had on Manhunter, with a much smoother line which enhances Pina’s elegant layouts.

This is a really good series, and I still have no idea what the last 4 issues will be about. But it’s so good despite its unorthodox set-up that I expect it will be terrific whatever it is.

Some elements of the issue left me scratching my head, though: The zombie battle ended with a lack of closure regarding the central threat or the alien heroes he took over. It felt conceptually messy a threat with little reason for being, and Nova at its best (especially the first three issues) has been heavy on exploring reason or the lack thereof for things the hero encounters.

The issue also ends with a sort of crossroads for the series’ direction: Nova is still infested by the Phalanx technovirus, as are some of his former allies. Knowhere seems like a handy location for Nova to try to recreate the Nova Corps (which were destroyed - other than our hero - in the first Annihilation series). 9 issues in, I think it’s time for the series to establish its direction, or risk being the directionless muddle that Ms. Marvel became.

To be fair, the Annihilation Conquest issues (#4-7) were basically a distraction from the overall series, so I’ll be patient and see if Abnett and Lanning get the series back on solid ground. But I usually expect that after a year a series will be delivering on its promise. Nova started with plenty of promise, and by that measure it has 3 issues to start delivering.

B.P.R.D. is a perfect example of “uncompressed” storytelling: It lingers over details, presumably to build up suspense (it is a horror title, after all), but mostly it just feels slow. And since it’s a series of mini-series, it’s rare that anything important to the central story gets resolved. And honestly the individual stories are not very memorable; they’ve started to all feel rather the same.

So why have I been buying it for so long? Well, I knew after the first couple of series that it was going to be a long-haul story, but without having any idea how long the haul would be, I figured I’d keep reading and see where it was going. But there’s no sign that it’ll come to a conclusion any time soon, and I’m running out of interest.

Hellboy started off with a big bang, and as a series of individual stories each of which was inventive and weighty-feeling on its own. But Mike Mignola’s horror franchise has ended up as a very even-tempered series of undistinguished series which feel increasingly undistinguished. I don’t know whether publishing so many issues so regularly has diluted Mignola’s energy and creativity, or if he’s just not as interested in series he’s not drawing himself. Or maybe Hellboy and B.P.R.D. have just run their course.

But at this point I’m mainly buying the franchise on inertia. I’ve certainly done this many times before with other series, but once I realize that I’m doing it, that’s usually a harbinger of the end of the line for me.

Anyway, Salvation Run is loosely based on a decade-old idea by George R. R. Martin, which - believe it or not - has nothing to do with my decision to pick it up. No, instead I was mainly interested in the artwork of Sean Chen (who’s art is the reason I started picking up Nova), and I figured the sardonic writing of Bill Willingham (Fables) might work well with the book’s premise, that being that the United States gets tired of all the super-villains stealing, killing, and generally disrupting society, so it decides to start shipping the repeat offenders out to an alien world, to fend for themselves. A world full of super-villains is sure to be a powderkeg - especially since most villains tend to be men - and the moral question of exiling villains to another world seems worth exploring. Anyway, there seems to be a lot of promise here.

The first issue is okay. Chen’s artwork is dynamic but not as detailed as I think it’s been in the past. The story mainly focuses on the Flash’s rogues gallery surviving on the world for some weeks - it’s a pretty hostile and bizarre place - before meeting up with a large number of second-string villains who have just arrived (plus the Joker). The issue ends with the hint that someone’s been tricked in this whole setup, but leaves open the question of why.

So it seems worth following for a 7-issue run, but I hope they do something worthwhile with it. I suspect it would have worked better in Martin’s original Elseworlds configuration.

Anyway, in the wake of his ill-considered Annihilation Conquest storyline, Nova has ended up at the edge of the universe - literally. Unable to escape, he ends up being stranded on a giant space station, which seems nearly deserted except for a few extremely powerful - and somewhat crazed - super-beings, and a talking Russian dog, Cosmo. Cosmo gets the best line of the series so far: “You have seen end of universe and met space zombies, and talkink dog is what freaks you out? Bozshe moi.”

So there’s something nasty going on on this space station, the station itself has a surprising nature, besides being outside the edge of the universe, and Nova’s powers are significantly diminished because the Worldmind that powers him is still spending most of its energy fighting off the Phalanx’s techno-virus. Our hero looks to be in for a rough time - which means this book ought to be back on track now that Nova’s not dealing with the conquest, which he wasn’t really participating in meaningfully anyway.

I do wish that this book had been used to show Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic how wrong they’d been in their treatment of the Hulk and that they were on the wrong end of the Civil War, but Marvel is inexplicably committed to casting two of their long-standing heroes in the roles of villains, so that was clearly too much to hope for. Oh well.

Volume 1 was the best volume to date, because it seemed primarily inspired by the Justice League, assembling a group of 19th century heroes to tackle a threat. The characters and setting made it very different from a Justice League story, but it still had a solid narrative with a lot of tension and a concrete resolution. It also had a lot of little asides referring to other Victoriana, but they were just bonuses and not central to the story.

Volume 2 was enjoyable, but was a big step down from Volume 1. The core idea of the League dealing with H.G. Wells’ Martian invasion was nifty, but it took a turn into the no-fun zone with its rather explicit sex and its brutal resolution. Plus, while the first volume had a text backup story featuring Alan Quatermain, Wells’ time machine, and some H.P. Lovecraft creatures, this volume had a very self-indulgent and tedious travelogue of the League’s world, filled with lots of references to extremely obscure people and places. Little bits of it were entertaining, but mostly it didn’t really add anything.

The Black Dossier goes for the clever references in spades, with extended text sequences featuring characters like Orlando, Fanny Hill, and various other historical background for the League. And most of that stuff is very, very boring, not least because this is supposed to be a graphic novel, and nothing takes the edge off a graphic novel like throwing big blocks of text into it. Honestly, I didn’t even read the bulk of the text sections for that very reason. Snooze. I agree with Johanna Carlson’s observation that the book feels too much like homework much of the time, and that’s no fun. It feels very self-indulgent.

The core story involved Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray - who have both become young again - capturing the Black Dossier from post-Big Brother Britain (the 1950s) so they can learn just how much their government knows about what they’ve been up to for the last decade or two. The Dossier contains the backstory of the League dating back for centuries, and it is reproduced within the main story and accounts for the text segments of the book. The main story has its moments mainly as our heroes are pursued by James Bond, Hugo Drummond and Emma Peel as they try to escape from Britain, but the end of the book is extremely disappointing, making the whole thing feel rather pointless.

I wonder whether this will be the last LoeG book. It’s hard to imagine the series getting much worse from here, though another festival of clever references would probably do the trick. The series has fallen an awful long way from its promising beginnings, so I can’t say it would be a great loss if this is the last installment. This was pretty mediocre stuff.

Anyway, if unlike me you really enjoy all the references - obscure or otherwise - Jess Nevins has posted his annotations for the book so that should keep you busy for a while. I think the joke is long past its sell-by date, personally.

• A generic “battle” cover which doesn’t occur in the book, featuring a plot thread which occupies a single page of the issue.
• The introduction of some rather nasty supporting characters, who will apparently be the protagonists of an upcoming series - but who cares? (I guess they’ve appeared before, but I still don’t care.)
• Half the issue is spent on four of the separate storylines, not really advancing any of them. (Graeme McMillan notes that he skipped two issues and didn’t really miss anything.)
• A minor supporting character, the Jokester, who joined the world-traveling crew a few issues ago, is unceremoniously killed off for no good reason.
• And it’s still not at all clear why we’re bothering with all this world-hopping in the first place, since it’s been just one random encounter after another.

It all comes down to writing: It’s just not good. There’s no sense of where the story is going (any of the stories), or even if it’s indeed going anywhere.. This is just the opposite of 52 which set up mysteries and adventures, and steadily resolved them. Not every plot thread worked, but as a whole it was entertaining. Countdown is just a messy assortment of stuff. The problem isn’t that the creators aren’t big names, it’s that there’s no direction, and no focus. I suspect this is either due to authorial mastermind Paul Dini not having come up with a good enough framework for the series, or else due to poor editorial direction.

(It’s slightly disturbing that Chen is already being spelled by a fill-in artist for parts of the issues, though it helps that I hardly notice when the pages alternate between Chen and Denham while I’m actually reading the comic. Chen is a terrific artist - I first picked up Nova mainly because he’s on it - so I guess this means Denham’s pretty good, too. I hope Chen isn’t planning on leaving the book, though.)

Bendis’ hallmark as a writer is that he writes copious dialogue. His characters tend to be smartasses, often foul-mouthed and philosophical at the same time. In my opinion, his style doesn’t work at all when he writes for mainstream Marvel comic books, but it works fine in his own world, with its gritty and grimy settings and populace. Oeming’s relatively simple linework seems cartoony at first glance, but it actually works quite well with Bendis’ scripts, conveying the weight of the situations while still leaving room for the gleaming, four-color-style linework for the heroes; in other words, balancing the dark realism with the superpowered sense of awe. Weaving between the two extremes is what makes the book work - that and Bendis’ unflinching ability to keep raising the stakes for his protagonists while still keeping them grounded in their day-to-day jobs.

(My biggest regret about the second series is that Deena’s sunny, smartass personality has been fading under the weight of her burdens. On the other hand, it seems that Deena and Christian are on opposite trajectories in their respective stories, so no doubt this is all deliberate.)

Powers can be brutal and bloody at times, so it’s not for the squeamish. It is, however, well worth following for anyone who appreciates deconstructive approaches to the superhero genre.

(Although this is a good volume, if you haven’t read it before then you’re better off starting at the beginning, or at least the start of the second series.)