Comic Picks By The Glick

Before this year started, Seven Seas wasn’t on my radar as a manga publisher.  Even though they’ve been around for years, nothing they had published ever really caught my eye.  I’ve picked up four of their titles so far this year.  The quality has ranged from god-awful (“Freezing”), harmless (“Pandora of the Crimson Shell”), “jury’s still out” (“Haven’t You Heard?  I’m Sakamoto!”), and really great -- which brings us to the subject of this review.  The first volume of “The Ancient Magus’ Bride” was a very welcome surprise in how it skillfully set up its modern fantasy world and introduced two intriguing and complicated protagonists.  Vol. 2 brings more of what made the first one great, while also unpacking the questionable relationship mangaka Kore Yamazaki has in mind for her leads.

Getting the collection of one-shots in “Empowered Unchained” earlier in the year was nice.  The fact that this latest volume of the main series is excellent even by the title’s normally high standards is better.  Things start off by picking up on the fallout from Emp and Sistah Spooky’s trip to Object 524 as the former is brought before a superhero tribunal to answer for her actions.  In addition to resolving some plot points and setting up more for payoffs later in the volume (and further down the line), we also get a vindictively fun flashback sequence as Emp tells a cape named Ghost Writer exactly what she thinks of his plans for a book about her exploits that focuses on her most humiliating and degrading moments.

That’s only setup for the meat of the book, which has the title heroine bouncing from supervillain to supervillain as they try to secure the location of Object 524 and its ultra-powerful cache of alien weapons for themselves.  What follows is a thrilling and near-perfect mix of action, comedy, and drama as Emp uses her wits and acquired knowledge of the supervillain community to turn every situation to her advantage.  All of it leading up to a climactic moment where we finally find out just what happened to young, terminal, supervillain-in-training Manny and dWarf/Fleshmaster after they disappeared at the end of vol. 4.  While all of these sequences require at least one moment of Emp getting captured and tied up, it’s still uplifting and terrifically entertaining to see her triumph over so many different bad guys all in succession.

My only misgiving about all this is that the only reason she has this advantage over her captors is due to her persistent status as victim.  It’s interesting to see creator Adam Warren spin this as a positive, but I’m still hoping the endgame for this series has Emp finally outgrowing that role.  Some might also take issue with that breakdown she has at the end.  I don’t.  We’ve known from the start that she’s not a scarily competent badass that can shrug off any trauma.  The fact that she needs some reassurance from her boyfriend fits right in with her established character.  Plus, who wouldn’t be on the verge of tears after a day like hers that also included a run-in with Death Monger.  All of this is excellently put together by Warren and will just make the wait for the next volume (Hopefully dropping in late 2016?  Maybe?) that much harder.

He’s back from “Spider-Verse” with three issues and an annual to kill.  However, Peter Parker is still trying to get a handle on the whole “running his own business” thing.  Though he’s still committed to having Parker Industries build a super-prison, our hero is constantly being distracted by his other responsibilities as Spider-Man.  His two worlds collide when rival Tiberius Stone hires the Ghost to break into Parker Industries and sabotage their prison plan.  Lots of action, and witty banter ensue.  Regular writer Dan Slott is joined by frequent collaborator Christos Gage for this arc, as well as the backup stories in each issue which detail the Black Cat’s ongoing descent into outright supervillainy.  This story isn’t the sharpest thing they’ve ever written, but still well within their established threshold of quality.  Having Humberto Ramos illustrate things does liven it all up quite well and gives the proceedings the energy they need to hold your attention.

Most annuals these days are pretty much filler.  This one is no exception, but it at least manages to be quality filler.  The lead story is from writer Sean Ryan and artist Brandon Petersen, and it involves Spidey trying to return a couple’s lost phone during a very busy night.  It might seem like a trivial act, but it fits naturally with the character’s do-gooder persona.  Ryan keeps the action fast-paced with a fun comedy-of-errors vibe as our protagonist keeps getting distracted with errant disasters and supervillains.  Peterson’s art serves the story mostly well, even if his work comes off a bit stiff at points.  It’s followed by an amusing two-page “silent” spread from Cale Atkinson which serves as an amusing showcase for Aunt May’s powers of persuasion.  Rounding out the issue is “The Quiet Room” from writer Jai Nitz and artist Ron Salas.  The story has several D-list villains (and Dr. Bong, clearly working with what he had) facing off against that rarest of sights:  A silent, all-business Spidey.  Before you start thinking that he’s become “Superior” again, you’ll see that it’s all clever setup for a joke.  Even though this annual was clearly included to beef up the page count, it still manages to represent a product of surprising and welcome quality.

Inanity about the numbering of this volume aside -- it’s the first and ONLY volume in this run -- it actually makes for a decent wrap-up to Rick Remender’s run on this title.  In the wake of “Axis” and the revelation that Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were not Magneto’s kids, the two Avengers head to Counter-Earth to get some answers from the High Evolutionary.  Naturally, the rest of the team, made up of Cap, Rogue,Vision, Brother Voodoo, and Sabretooth, follow in their wake.  What they find there is the High Evolutionary’s latest attempt to create utopia -- genetically engineering his own species and then murdering them by the billions when they fail to live up to his lofty expectations.  While Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch hook up with the local resistance, the rest of the team is split up and left to fend for themselves.

It’s fun seeing the various Avengers struggle in their various situations -- Rogue winds up as a mad scientist’s test subject, Brother Voodoo negotiates with the victims of the High Evolutionary’s experiments, Cap winds up as a plant zombie -- and things end with a solid win for the team.  We also get some great art from Daniel Acuna, who makes the diverse and stylized realms of Counter-Earth look imaginatively stylish.  Granted, even Remender’s imagination can’t make the “Now 75% More Wolverine-Like” Sabretooth interesting or really get met to care about the generic resistance on the planet.  His work also can’t make me forget that the main reason this story exists is to retcon the origins of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch so that they’re no longer mutants (and now fully under the purview of Marvel Studios).  If you can put that out of your head, you’ll likely enjoy this more than I did.  It’s still mainly of interest to people who have stuck with “Uncanny Avengers” this far and want to see how its original writer wraps it all up.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

The first volume of "The Complete ElfQuest" belongs in any serious comic fan's library.  Now if only Dark Horse would get around to reprinting the rest of what came after so I can actually enjoy "The Final Quest."

My procrastination pays off once again!  For the past year you could only read this series through the digital copies for sale on Viz’s website.  Then they announced a few months back that this excellent superhero manga would be receiving a print release.  No doubt to cash in on the upcoming anime adaptation.  That has wound up being a move that has paid off for them handsomely.  As for me:  The wait was worth it.  These two volumes of “One-Punch Man” are consistently entertaining as they embrace and make light of the conventions of superhero comics and shonen manga.

Marvel’s “Star Wars” comics are doing very well for them.  So well, in fact, that the numbers for those comics alone are nipping at Image’s heels in the direct market.  Image sells more actual comics, after taking in ALL of the titles they publish, but the “Star Wars” comics make more money.  However, even when the “Star Wars” collections start coming out, it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be a dominant force in bookstores or give “The Walking Dead” juggernaut a reason to lose sleep at night.  Also, “Star Wars” and “Darth Vader” writers Jason Aaron and Kieron Gillen have their own Image comics as well.  Even with these numbers they still stand to make more from “Southern Bastards” and “The Wicked + The Divine” even though they don’t even sell a tenth of their “Star Wars”-related work.  In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that the reason these creators are doing this kind of high-profile work on licensed titles is simply to get their names out their to people who wouldn’t have heard about them in any other way and maybe get them to check out their Image work.  I hope that’s working for them.  Still, it’s kind of a fucked-up situation where the writers of these best-selling titles are making less from them than their lower-profile creator-owned series.  You’d think it’d be the other way around, but that’s not how the industry works right now.

Word has been going around for a while now that Marvel is promoting the Inhumans as a replacement for the X-Men as the film rights are still owned by Fox.  That situation isn’t going to change anytime soon, and it’s clear that someone at Marvel sees inhumans as a viable alternative to mutants.  Why else would they be getting such a push in the form of becoming a significant part of the plot on “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” an upcoming movie, and several new “Inhumans” and Inhuman-related comic launches in the next couple of months.  Meanwhile, the X-Men are facing down either death or sterilization as a result of the terrigen mists which give the Inhumans their powers and have spread throughout the globe.  Regardless of his intentions, “Extraordinary X-Men” writer Jeff Lemire has his work cut out for him in making this plotline not feel like a ham-fisted attempt to subjugate one of its best-loved and most enduring franchises.

I’m at least going to take some solace in the fact that most of the new “Inhumans”-related comics will likely find themselves on the brink of cancellation within a year.  Nobody has cared about the “Inhumans” for years and throwing all these comics at readers isn’t going to change things now.  The one currently published title that people do like (“Ms. Marvel”) owes none of its success to its title character’s status as an Inhuman.  If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how Marvel decides to prop up these titles to show that its fans care about the Inhumans enough to make them the next big thing.