Comic Picks By The Glick

Between the two sales-challenged manga series that I routinely talk up, “Vinland Saga” and “Eden:  It’s an Endless World!,” it looks like the former is getting a reprieve later this year.  Kodansha U.S.A. announced at the Emerald City Comic-Con that vol. 8 of Makoto Yukimura’s excellent historical viking action series will be coming out later this year.  The appearance of future volumes on these shores was not confirmed.  So if you want to know more about the adventures of Thorfinn and Einar in the New World you’ll have to buy a copy of vol. 8 for yourself, and one more for a close friend (which would be Steve in my case).

As for “Eden…”  Hope continues to spring eternal there.  If the two-and-a-half year schedule between publishing new volumes holds, then we’ll see a new volume later this year.  Maybe we’ll get lucky and Dark Horse will publish the last four volumes in two-in-one editions.  Or maybe we’ll get nothing at all.  Anime Central is in four weeks and that’s when most of the company’s big manga news broke last year.  If they have any more announcements like “I am a Hero” or new volumes of other series that have been on hiatus, it’ll be there and I’ll have commentary after it happens.

I’ve been spoiled for the mystery behind the new Thor for quite a while now.  So the drama behind the big reveal falls pretty flat.  I was expecting that, however, and the three-part story leading up to the reveal by writer Jason Aaron and artist Russell Dauterman still manages to be pretty entertaining in and of itself.  We’ve got the new Thor throwing down with the Destroyer, who has been sicced on her by Odin and his brother Cul.  The Odinson’s ongoing detective efforts to find out who this new Thor is are interesting enough, but worth it for the hilarity that ensues when his results are revealed to have come to naught.  There’s also Roz Solomon “Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s” continuing campaign to bring down Roxxon and its CEO Dario Agger, who spends most of his time here bonding with Malekith and becoming a little more rounded as a character as we learn more about his backstory.  Dauterman draws the hell out of all this, with the high point being a fantastic mostly-female battle royale against the Destroyer.  It’s only three issues, but this small run satisfies and portends good things for the title’s future.

Rounding out the collection is an Annual featuring two good stories and a pretty great one (along with an old issue of “What If?” which shows that the idea of Jane Foster as Thor is not a new one).  Aaron teams up with Tim Truman for a story about Old Thor’s birthday and how his three granddaughters try to find him the perfect gift.  Truman’s rugged style is a perfect fit for the character and the story which winds up being a welcome extension of what Aaron has been doing with the character.  “Nimona’s” Noelle Stevenson teams with artist Marguerite Sauvage to show us how the new Thor won the trust of the Warriors Three.  It results in a fun bit of high adventure that would’ve benefitted from being told in a longer format.

Best of all is writer C.M. Punk’s story of a most epic night of boozing involving Young Thor and Mephisto.  The former wrestler acquits himself decently here as a writer with an enjoyably goofy story that has Marvel’s Not-The-Devil encountering a rare situation where he doesn’t come off as the smartest man in the room.  I think Loki’s meddling and the ending don’t come off as well as they could have, but what really makes this story great is the art from “Chew’s” Rob Guillory.  Punk’s story is pitched perfectly to the artist’s skills as a cartoonist and the art is simply a joy to behold from beginning to end.  Yes, Guillory’s contribution likely set production on “Chew” back a few weeks.  Much as I love that series, I’d say the results here were worth it.

“And I’d like to go on record as saying this is the dumbest idea in the history of Gotham City.  Now where’s my damn Batmobile?  Let’s go have some fun.”

With those lines I completely bought into the idea of Commissioner James Gordon taking over for Batman in a robot Bat-suit.  Yeah, I’ll admit that I was a little skeptical when I heard about this change.  It’s not that much stranger than the other times Bruce Wayne has been replaced, and writer Scott Snyder has earned enough trust in my book after several years of mostly stellar work on this title.  The end result is that Gordon is right.  If you can buy into the premise behind this volume then you will have fun (but not a damn Batmobile).

I should hate this series now.  After all, this volume finally breaks the one thing I really liked about the early volumes.  That would be the “Magneto-esque” morality behind Sato’s actions.  Clearly a skilled killer, his actions against the government were somewhat justified in light of the ruthless experimentation and testing being performed on other demi-humans like him by the powers that be.  Even when he crashed a plane into a building full of people, you could still make the argument for ambiguity as the Master of Magnetism has done stuff just as bad in his various campaigns against humans over the years.

However, after we learn more about Sato’s childhood and history in the military, any illusions about his motivations here are stripped away.  The man is nothing more than a thrill seeker who only started this campaign for the challenge it presented.  Now that the government appears to be caving in the face of his attack, he’s bored by it all.  With this, Sato has become a villain and not an antagonist in this series.  Any hints of the moral ambiguity in this conflict that would’ve at least elevated “Ajin” to the level of “X-Men” are firmly quashed.  This is just an action series where the good guys are pitted against the bad guys for survival and all the marbles.

Even if that’s the case, there’s no denying that it’s a story that mangaka Gamon Sakurai feels comfortable telling.  The action scenes have always been the most entertaining parts of this series and that continues to be the case here.  Even if one of them is an awful dream-sequence fake-out, we’re set up for an intense floor-by-floor fight between Kei and Sato’s groups with lots of intense gunplay and bloody hand-to-hand fighting with the demi-human’s IBMs at the end of the volume.  I can at least get behind that.  In fact, I’d probably be more excited about things here if Sakurai had started this series off as a straightforward action series with good guys and bad guys, and no shades of gray.  Now I just look back at the earlier volumes and see their “hot mess” aspects stand out all the more along with lots of wasted potential.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

I really enjoyed what writers Becky Cloonan and Brenden Fletcher did with the first volume of the series, along with the art from Karl Kerschl.  This naturally led me to anticipate vol. 2, which has turned out to be a letdown.  It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong here as the smooth, engaging storytelling from the first volume has been replaced by something more disjointed and hyperactive.  Take the opening story, which features Maps teaming up with new arrival to the school, Damian Wayne, to solve the mystery of the Inishtree Quill that has bound them together and is causing her friends to act crazy.  The mystery is hazily developed with drama coming from how members of the cast suddenly start acting wildly out of character.  I will say that Maps and Damian make a good team, and I was looking forward to seeing how the latter would interact with the rest of the series’ characters.  Unfortunately, he was only guest-starring for that issue.  If this was the plan all along, then why was his appearance set up at the end of the previous volume?  I was expecting bigger things from Damian’s role here.  At least the issue had some tremendously appealing art from Mingjue Helen Chen.

Kerschl returns for the following issue and maintains the high standard he set for himself in the previous volume.  The problem is that now he’s illustrating a haphazard collection of stories that has Olive, Maps, and co. dealing with the likes of Tristan the Man-Bat, a werewolf, the drama club, one of Batman’s B-list rogues, and a field trip to Gotham City.  Things jump around so much that it’s hard for the narrative to build up much interest or momentum, even when it has the overarching mystery of Olive’s mom to tie everything together.  We do learn more about this deceased(?) supervillain, but not enough to make for a satisfying read in the end.  There’s one more volume of this series scheduled to come out before it takes a several-month hiatus to return for “Rebirth.”  Hopefully vol. 3 will get things back on track and show me that the quality of vol. 1 wasn’t any kind of fluke.

I’ve been eagerly anticipating this volume since it was announced back in 2012 as we’re helpfully reminded by its backmatter.  I won’t begrudge creators Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie for taking so long to get back to it, particularly since we got “Young Avengers” and “The Wicked + The Divine” in the meantime.  As those series showed, they remain one of the best creative teams in comics and there was every expectation on my part that this third volume of “Phonogram” wouldn’t disappoint.  Spoiler Warning:  It didn’t.  “The Immaterial Girl” may not hit the sheer heights of fun that “The Singles Club” did, but it winds up being an immensely satisfying conclusion for this series.

Rick Remender’s creator-owned output through Image can be charitably described as “uneven.”  Though he’s clearly a skilled writer, he needs to find a new approach beyond simply tossing his characters into hopeless situations and then starting to grind them down.  It’s an approach that has worked on “Deadly Class,” is on the verge of breaking “Black Science,” and managed the impressive task of getting me to quit “Low” after one volume.  Now he’s back with a new title that shows him to have ever so slightly tinkered with his established formula.  If that was the only thing “Tokyo Ghost” had to offer then it’d be easy to write off.  As the art comes from the enormously talented Sean Murphy, I’m actually thinking about sticking with it.

Myron joins us to talk about the Heroes in a Half-Shell's history while I talk up the new comics from IDW.