Comic Picks By The Glick

Above-the-Board Recommendation:

Empowered vol. 11

Hey, it’s about goddamn ti--  I mean, it’s great to see another volume of Adam Warren’s consistently great superhero parody/actual superhero series.  Yes, he’s been putting out spinoff miniseries like “Soldier of Love” and “Sistah Spooky’s High School Hell” with different artists, but there’s no replacing the feeling that you get from reading an actual numbered volume in this series.  There may be plenty of times when Warren’s writing makes you want to club him with his thesaurus, but it’s more than worth it to see the expertly balanced blend of comedy, drama, and sentiment that you get with the main series. Vol. 11 promises more of the latter two than the first one after vol. 10 ended on the series’ first-ever cliffhanger.  It was a doozy too: After Emp and Thugboy had an emotional heart-to-heart about the latter’s past, he went and pushed her off the roof. But that’s okay because he was being mind-controlled. What’s not okay is that he was being mind-controlled by the psychic brother of the deceased Mindf--- who’s as psycho as they come in comics. Fortunately Emp has Mindf---’s psychic ghost rattling around in her head to give her an edge in a fight where everyone (and I mean a full Gary Oldman-style “EVERYONE”) in the city is out to get her.  It’s been something of a wait to see this volume, so I’m QUITE EAGER to see how it’s all going to turn out.

That said, it’s a credit to Warren that he’s been putting out new volumes in the series every other year in addition to the spinoffs.  He’s got a long way to go before he dethrones the king of “Taking His Goddamn Time” in my book…

Above-the-Board Recommendation:

Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 1:  The Final Gauntlet

There were a few things that I was considering for this spot.  However, I’d either just mentioned them a few months ago or was planning on issuing a backhanded recommendation, which would defeat the purpose of the whole thing.  So I settled on this (latest) first volume of “Guardians of the Galaxy.” Why? Because it comes to us from writer Donny Cates and artist Geoff Shaw -- the team supreme who gave us “Thanos Wins.”  That final arc of the “Thanos” series may not have lent itself to being easily followed up on, outside of “Cosmic Ghost Rider,” but giving Cates and Shaw the reins of Marvel’s premier cosmic team strikes me as a smart move all around.  What’ve they got in store for this first arc? Thanos may be dead, yet his legacy lives on as someone is destined to become the new Thanos!  This leads to not just the Black Order becoming involved, but a new group called the Dark Guardians as well. It sounds like a lot to take in, except that I’m sure Cates and Shaw have a plan which involves thriving on all the crazy I’m expecting them to have stuffed into this first volume.

One door closes and another opens…

As the previous volume made explicitly clear, we’re onto a new arc in this series.  The “College Arc” to be precise. After settling things with Cartaphilius and managing her curses into a state of equilibrium, things are actually going well for Chise right now.  Which means that the invitation for her to attend the local alchemist’s college couldn’t have come at a better time. Not only will she get a chance to learn even more about the world and rules of magic, but she’ll be able to meet all sorts of new and interesting people at the same time.  You’re not wrong if you think that this is something that Elias is going to have a problem with. Which is why he’s made the decision to attend the college as a teacher.

There’s all sorts of fun worldbuilding to witness as mangaka Kore Yamazaki establishes the cast and curriculum of this college.  From the cats who serve as dorm mothers, to Chise’s status as the rare mage to attend the college, and the predictably awry results of Elias’ first day as a teacher, we get a lot of interesting stuff to take in.  We also get over a dozen new characters added to the cast, about a third of which are fleshed out in any meaningful detail here. Then there’s the hints of potential conflict for this new arc: Students who study Chise with gazes that belie simple curiosity, the Seven Shields of the university who are not all of the same mind regarding what to do with Chise, and the church is now VERY upset with Father Cullum and how he’s been handling Elias.  Even if the rather large expansion of the cast at this point is mostly underdeveloped, there’s still plenty of new and compelling details that come with the story and the setting to suggest that this “College Arc” is going to be a good one.

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In the afterword to Howard Chaykin’s roman a clef about the comics industry, he does his best to explain why he didn’t make it more obvious who the characters were based on -- Stan Lee and Jack Kirby excluded.  He essentially says that the point of the story wasn’t to have it be a game of “Who’s that over there?” but “Who did that and why?” That’s fair enough, but it doesn’t excuse the fact that the majority of the characters in his multi-decade story about the comics industry are barely qualify as one-dimensional ciphers.  The three main characters are only distinguishable by the fact that they’re The African American, The Woman, and The White Guy Who Is Also A Protagonist. The stand-ins for Stan and Jack only manage to stand out because the connection between their real and fictional personas is easy to make, with all of the personality that you’d expect from them as well.

None of the other members of this 20-person cast can manage that, and Chaykin does them no favors by splitting up his narrative into snippets set in 1945, 1955, 1965, and 2001 in each issue.  It’s hard for the miniseries to build up any kind of narrative momentum when the story keeps shifting time periods every six pages. Then again, the fact that there’s no narrative through line to follow between eras beyond the idea that, “Boy the people who created the comics industry sure were jerks/thieves/conmen/morally bankrupt/’all of the above’” doesn’t exactly make for compelling reading.  All we’re left with are a bunch of mostly interchangeable talking heads throughout the years giving soundbites about how awful it is to work in comics.

Chaykin could’ve stood to glean more from “Satellite Sam,” his collaboration with writer Matt Fraction about the early days of TV.  It covered similar ground, but did so with a lot more focus and a cast that was both smaller and more interesting. You’d better off reading all three volumes of that series than spending any money on the dull, joyless slog that is this one.

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Over the course of “The Wicked + The Divine’s” run a series of six specials were released.  They were loved. They were hated. They were finally collected into one volume before the series wrapped up.  All of them, save for one story in the last were written by series writer Kieron Gillen and featured art from many people who weren’t Jamie McKelvie.  Though he did contribute two pages in the last one to canonize the pun-tastic habits of his collaborator, which is the worthiest of all causes.

Gillen has stated that collecting all of the specials in the penultimate volume has been part of the plan since the beginning.  So if you’re going into this expecting this to shed some series-altering insights into what has come before then you’re going to come away from this possibly ever so slightly disappointed.  The historical specials mainly exist to provide some additional context for Ananke’s actions, to flesh out the rules of godhood a bit, and to allow some really talented artists to take a crack at “TW+TD.”  In fact, a better name for this volume would’ve been “Ananke Shapes the Narrative (By Killing Lots and Lots of People).”

There’s a moment early on in this volume that portends the worst for this series.  It involves Lucy Weber, who picked up her father’s hammer at the end of the previous volume to become the new Black Hammer, and how she’s finally remembered everything and is going to tell the cast how they can finally get off the farm.  Just as she’s about to start, Lucy is zapped away to parts unknown. This is done in as straight a manner as possible, without any hint of self-awareness on the part of writer Jeff Lemire and artist Dean Ormston that they’ve engaged in the most obvious and aggravating way of prolonging a mystery.  If this was how they were going to kick off this latest volume of “Black Hammer,” then what fresh hell awaited me within?

The answer, at first, is more DC-centric navel-gazing.  More specifically, it’s DC/Vertigo-centric navel-gazing as Lucy finds herself in the Anteroom a run-down bar that’s a part of some kind of house of mystery.  Or secrets. She encounters a smart-aleck chain-smoking bartender, the Devil himself, a dead man, and “The Storyman” and his family. It’s a constant stream of “Hey, ‘member this?” rather than an actual story as Lucy tries to find her way back to the farm.  Things aren’t much better there as everyone is either spinning their wheels trying to make sense of what happened to Lucy, or dealing with the bizarre turns of good fortune they’ve encountered in their love lives.

What saves this volume, and me from chucking it and its spinoffs into my “to sell” pile, is that the creators eventually move past all this before the end.  In fact, we actually get some genuine revelations regarding the true nature of the farm and what really happened to the missing heroes of Star City. These revelations imply bad things are in store for the world of “Black Hammer” and a final reckoning as well.  It’s enough to get me to come back and see how it all ends in the next, and last, volume of the series.

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This series about the beginning of Darth Vader's infamy is inextricably linked in my mind to its predecessor.  For worse, and for better.

Meiko’s regression to a childlike personality has been an unwelcome yet necessary development for this series.  That’s because in order for the student council to be a credible threat to the Shadow Student Council, she had to be taken off the board.  The good news is that the rest of the cast has been more than ready to pick up the slack left by her current situation and there have been some really funny moments and interesting stories told over the course of the series since then.  Still, “Kid Meiko” has been a drag on the series, serving only to be an albatross around the collective necks of the protagonists.

NO MORE!  With this volume Meiko finally makes her long-awaited return to her former self and it is glorious to behold!  To see her steamroller over all of the student council’s plans is immensely gratifying while the utter ridiculousness of seeing her do it while she’s got Kiyoshi, Mari, and Hana clinging to her is the series at its sublimely ridiculous best.  Giving this a run for its money in the “sublimely ridiculous” department is the ongoing story of the Chairman which is also wrapped up here. Not before the words “That is the ass of an honest man” are uttered and we’re forced to bear witness to the sight of two grown, naked men posing together in something like the shape of a Furby to stave off a bear attack.

This is all great stuff and it’d be even better if it didn’t feel like mangaka Akira Hiramoto was slow-walking us readers to get to it.  Between crises about exposed breasts, pasties, excessive sweating, near-death experiences, Kiyoshi coming down from his manic state in the previous volume, it really felt like the mangaka was trying to stretch out the time necessary to get to the good stuff.  It’s especially grating when it all leads to a cliffhanger ending for this volume. Then again, it could just be that the drawn-out pace of this volume is just Hiramoto trying to keep the good times going for as long as he can. I say this because if what I’ve heard is correct, then the saga of Kiyoshi and friends comes to an end in the next volume and “Prison School’s” darkest secret is about to be revealed.

(Hey, new e-mail for any real people who’d like to comment and discuss what I’ve written or talked about recently!)

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