Comic Picks By The Glick

Interesting title for this volume, no?  One would think that it’d be a particularly apt title since it sees half of the title’s creative team, artist Jamie McKelvie, absent for the majority of it.  He only contributes a few pages of original art here, but the man had a good excuse --  McKelvie was working on the third volume of “Phonogram” (at last!) during the time these issues were being published.  Working in this title’s favor is the fact that it’s still written by Kieron Gillen, and he and McKelvie are well-connected enough to secure a Murderer’s Row of talent to fill in for the artist here:  Kate Brown, Tula Lotay, Stephanie Hans, Leila Del Luca, and Brandon Graham all contribute here and their efforts are nothing less than captivating.  I almost wish McKelvie would take another hiatus (for another volume of “Phonogram,” natch) after seeing the work his peers offer up.

(Oh, and as noted on the back cover, Chip Zdarsky does draw one percent of this volume as well.  All I’ll say is that the “The Lick-ed + The Divine” porn parody from “Sex Criminals” is now canon after a fashion here…)

Yet either by nature of the fact that half of the artistic team is missing here or by Gillen’s design, the story only advances incrementally.  Much of it is spent picking up on the immediate fallout from Innana’s death and the hunt for his assumed killer, Baphomet.  The narrative twists and turns to offer a deeper look at all of the book’s characters, with the information offered about Odin and Ananke coming off as particularly revelatory.  (It also helps that their issue is a stunning work of re-purposing as McKelvie’s art from previous issues is composited in different ways to tell an entirely new story.)  Even if the story does chase its own tail, the closer look at the cast dos prove to be pretty engaging in and of itself.  The fact that Gillen hasn’t lost a step with writing bitingly funny dialogue -- along with a meat-based pun that will cause you physical pain if it catches you unawares -- contributes a lot to making this volume a worthy follow-up to the previous two.  Bonus points for a cliffhanger that promises a game-changing development as one of the gods prepares to make good on their gimmick for emerging from the underworld.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

Up until this point Saitama has faced off against some pretty bad villains.  But how will he survive the threat of a meteor which threatens all life on the planet?  Or what about the Deep Sea King who has invaded the surface along with the rest of his fishy clan?  Is this a threat that even the…

No I can’t keep it up.  He takes them out in one punch just like the previous volumes.  Yet while writer ONE and artist Yusuke Murata continue to show that they can wring an impressive amount of suspense and drama from the buildup until Saitama does his thing, they also introduce some new tricks and wrinkles here.  The Deep Sea King is the first as he represents the first truly daunting foe to grace the pages of this title.  On one level he’s a ridiculous parody of every seemingly invincible foe to show up in a fighting manga.  You know, the kind who take a hit and go, “I barely felt that,” and then knock out the hero with a well-timed punch or several.

This latest volume of “All-New X-Men” starts off with a pretty good story involving Emma Frost teaching/tormenting the time-displaced Jean Grey in Madripoor over the latter’s reliance on her telepathic powers over her telekinetic ones.  It plays to Bendis’ strengths in character-driven dialogue (particularly with Emma’s bitchy banter), and features some striking art from Mike Del Mundo that is ill-served by washed-out coloring.  Then there are two issues from the massive “Black Vortex” crossover that feature interesting art from Andrea Sorrentino.  There’s really not much more to say about them than that because these issues read just about as well as you’d expect two random issues pulled from a multi-part crossover to.  Last up is the two-part story that this volume takes its name from as we catch up with a random assortment of mutants who have made a new home for themselves in the ruins of the X-Men’s former island base of Utopia.

That’s the least interesting part of the title story.  In fact, I’m sure the only reason it’ll be remembered years from now is because of a revelation regarding one of the original X-Men.  I’m talking about the outing of Bobby “Iceman” Drake.

Charles Soule wraps up his run with this volume, and it goes out on a pretty strong note.  The introduction of the Metal Kingdom, teased on the last page of vol. 6, continues in full swing here as the emergent kingdom finds out the hard way that Alec Holland is not an avatar to be trifled with.  Sensing the need for an avatar of their own, the Metal Kingdom goes looking for someone with an experience and a grudge against the title character.  Hmmmm… is there anyone in this series who fits the bill?  Possibly someone who had their neck broken in the previous volume?  Meanwhile, we also get to see what happens to Capucine when her one thousand years of life are up and Etrigan comes calling to collect on his end of the deal.  Then we get an epilogue with the “Future’s End” issue as we see how Soule ends the “Swamp Thing” saga five years into an imaginary future.

This is something I’ve been waiting to see collected for quite a while.  Here we have one of the best writers in comics with a substantial run on “Batman” that was never collected outside of a couple crossover issues and a four issue sampler from several years back.  What gives?  I figured that it had to do with Brubaker’s defection to Marvel during his tenure on “Gotham Central,” but while reading this volume I started to think otherwise.  Most of the stories here are pretty ordinary.  You have Batman up against Zeiss, a new villain who can see things faster than normal and record combat moves with the goggles that pipe the images directly to his brain.  That rivalry plays out over the course of this volume as the title character also has to deal with a loyal employee who turned to a life of crime, a childhood sweetheart who is now a budding mafioso, new revelations about his father, and Deadshot.  Because why not?

All of this plays out in a pretty straightforward fashion with Batman being knocked metaphorically off balance by these new threats before dealing with them and going on to kick the bad guys in the head.  Even the weirder stuff -- an alien seeks sanctuary at a Gotham church, a Jokerized Santa runs riot through the city, an issue dedicated to exploring Batman’s status as an urban myth -- plays out in ways that solidly conform to the “Batman” formula.  Was Brubaker just unsuccessful in his attempts to find new angles on the character and his struggles, or is this an example of how a good writer can simply phone it in and turn out something decently readable with little effort?  Thinking about it, that’s probably the most interesting question this book poses.

Making more of an effort is the artist for nearly all of the issues here, Scott McDaniel.  He turns in some big, bold, high-energy work here that eschews a lot of the darkness you typically see in most “Batman” stories.  It’s very distinctive work and I can’t help but think that it must’ve driven the noir-loving Brubaker nuts to work with an artist whose style was antithetical to the stories he likes to tell.  The unpolished work from Stefano Gaudiano in the “Our Worlds at War” issue is more in line with what you’d expect to see in a story from this writer.  It also (coincidentally, I’m sure) results in one of the better stories in this volume.  Even so, this is the kind of collection that you’ll enjoy more the less demanding of a “Batman” fan you are.

In which I dive into digital comics and find out that the legendary run by Joe Kelly isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Fran Madaraki just wants people to be happy.  As the greatest creation of the legendary mad scientist Dr. Madaraki, she has the surgical skills to bend science and medicine to her will in order to accomplish just that.  Whether it’s the head of a zaibatsu who wants his son brought back to life, a high school boy who wants to save the life of the girl he just confessed to, a young man regretting the double suicide pact he planned with his girlfriend, Fran is here to bring them all happiness!  She goes about doing this by.  Any.  Means. Necessary.  So if this means grafting a face onto a head that has been reconstructed to hold two brains, or putting a girl into a caterpillar-like larvae to regenerate, then it’s okay as long as everyone gets what they want in the end.  From a certain point of view, that is.

The stories in this omnibus edition of the first two volumes of this series read like a crazed hybrid of Tezuka’s “Black Jack” and “Tales From the Crypt.”  Fran’s desire to bring happiness to the human race is genuine, but the majority of her patients are less-than-upstanding members of it.  So the stories being told here take lots of weird, disturbing, and sick twists along the way.  While Fran’s laid-back attitude does tend to give the stories a whimsical feel at times (even when the surgery and the blood get going), you can usually expect the narrative to take a sharp right turn into horror.  This works really well in the second story, which is easily the best one in this volume.  Yet you’ll be able to anticipate exactly when, and sometimes how, things will go wrong as the stories go on.

Mangaka Katsuhisa Kigitsu does have an impressively demented mind when it comes to thinking up these stories and situations.  As a result, my interest was held throughout this first omnibus even after I started getting wise to his approach.  He does, however, take a very hands-off approach to continuity, so it looks like the series is going to live or die by the quality of his stories rather than any kind of uber-narrative.  The mangaka’s art is also well-suited for the twisted horror stories he’s telling, but don’t be fooled by the cover.  It may make the series look like a surgery fetishist’s wet dream, except that the contents it hides cater to an entirely different (and far more bloody) set of fetishes.

While the solicitations I riff on each month can be found in Previews Magazine, it was recently announced that Image will be offering its own magazine to complement it.  Titled “Image+,” after a similar promotional magazine offered by the publisher back in the 90’s, it will not only spotlight new releases, but offer new creator-focused content in the form of interviews, features, editorials, and preview pages of upcoming titles.  However, the real draw for the magazine’s first year will be a new “The Walking Dead” comic from Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard.  While new “The Walking Dead” content from its creators is always welcome, these four-page comics will tell the origin of Negan.  That automatically makes me interested, even if the whole concept of “Image+” doesn’t exactly scream “must-read” to me at the moment.  Maybe all this additional content will prove interesting and relevant as opposed to glorified self-promotion.  Right now, I’m just hoping that “The Walking Dead” comics will be collected in a one-shot sometime next year.