Comic Picks By The Glick

After you’ve written “Amazing Spider-Man” for the past decade, what do you do next?  You start working your way through the rest of Marvel’s A-list characters, beginning with Tony Stark.  Dan Slott’s take on the character isn’t that different than what we’ve seen in previous runs. He’s still the charismatic, fast-talking futurist whose proclivity for getting into trouble is only matched by his facility for getting out of it.  Now he’s running Stark Unlimited and after securing an old robotics rival to join him in his latest venture, setting up a VR world called the eScape, Stark is ready to take on the world. Right after he stops a rampaging Fin Fang Foom from wiping out New York.

This first volume of “Iron Man” isn’t about innovation.  Like much of Slott’s run on “Amazing” it’s about doing familiar superhero stories with enough twists to keep them fresh.  That’s what we get here with the first four issues as they manage a nice balance of telling self-contained stories that also hint towards a larger plot.  Aside from the aforementioned fight with FFF, we have Stark and James Rhodes teaming up to take on a company that has made an assault vehicle using stolen Stark tech, an eScape test-run that’s interrupted by the Machine Man, and a dating program that leads to doppleganger chaos at S.U.  All of the setups for these stories are pretty straightforward, but they’re resolved with the kind of cleverness that I like to see in my superhero comics. That they all feature some superbly energetic and detailed art from Valerio Schiti is a big plus too.

The only outlier here is in the final story which focuses on Tony’s brother, Arno.  Introduced in Kieron Gillen’s run, my gut feeling here says that he’s important to Slott’s long-term plans for the his run.  You don’t give this guy a whole issue to set himself up as a benevolent problem solver only for his sinister side to reveal itself in an episode involving headless cattle.  This all screams “potential supervillain” to me, but it’s still easy to understand Arno’s motivations here. As with the rest of the volume, I’m curious to see where Slott is going with this.  Optimistic about it too.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect going into this volume.  You see, whenever a series does a big “Death of [Insert Character Here]” arc, there’s usually a pretty good chance that we’re talking about death in a metaphorical sense.  The character won’t actually die, but instead come through the storyline with a significant change to their status quo. So even though this storyline promised the death of Jane Foster, I was fairly certain she’d come out of it all right in the end.

Then the solicitations for issues after this storyline started rolling out.  There was a new “Thor” series featuring the Odinson, which was to be expected, but no mention of Jane.  In fact, there wasn’t any mention of her at all in any of the solicitations that I read. Toss in the fact that the follow-up special to this storyline was called “At the Gates of Valhalla” and Marvel actually had me thinking that maybe “The Death of the Mighty Thor” would send Jane off to that great Norse paradise after all.

“Cave Carson’s” first volume was a surprisingly entertaining adventure that displayed an impressive balance of humor, quirk, and action.  Its second volume disrupted that balance by bringing in a bit too much psychedelia and surrealism into the narrative.  This third (and sadly final) volume manages to strike a welcome middle ground by having the psychedelia spice up the narrative while still keeping things focused.  This is how we get Cave, his daughter Chloe, and version-of-a-friend-from-an-alternate-universe Marc going through the cosmos on some crazy adventures. Whether it’s meeting up with larger-than-life rock god friend Star Adam to witness his final days, encountering the Lazer Monks trapped in an endless cycle of betrayal and war, or having an acrimonious reunion with a lost friend while trying to save a protoplasmic prince who’s sustaining an entire planet.

It’s all as deeply weird as it sounds, and a lot of fun too.  Writer Jon Rivera keeps the pace brisk and the tone upbeat for the majority of the volume.  He also creates a believable father/daughter dynamic between Cave and Chloe as they’ve patched up their fractured relationship from the first two volumes, but still have to work through the years of bad feelings prior to that.  Eccentric presences like Marc and Star Adam also help to keep things lively, as does the outstanding art from Michael Avon Oeming. The first two volumes really gave the artist a chance to let his freak flag fly, and throwing him into a cosmic setting only lets him get wilder and crazier.  I’ll admit that sometimes things can get a bit too strange, where clarity is sacrificed for spectacle. These moments are thankfully the exception rather than the rule and the end result is a volume that provides a worthy finish to the saga of Cave Carson and his Cybernetic/Interstellar Eye.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

After Dan Slott’s epic decade-long run on “Amazing Spider-Man” who did Marvel get to follow in his stead as the writer on that title?  None other than Nick Spencer! Yes, that’s right. The writer who previously had a run on “Captain America” that can best be characterized as really controversial and followed it up with the event series “Secret Empire” that went over almost as well.  I wasn’t expecting Spencer to have the brightest future at Marvel after these things, but I’m glad Marvel saw past them -- and likely remembered the writer’s run on underappreciated classic “The Superior Foes of Spider-Man.”  While this first volume of Spencer’s “Amazing Spider-Man” doesn’t break any new ground, it serves up a clever story with sharp writing and some “Invincible” art.

The Good:  We’re introduced to a new character, Inkarmat, whose specialty is fortune telling.  This leads to hijinks both fun, involving Shiraishi and the local racetrack, and interesting, turns out she has a connection to Asirpa.  Kirorake also gets his moment to shine as he winds up racing at the track on behalf of some low-level yakuza who want him to throw the race.  Naturally, Kirorake has other plans. Those low-level yakuza also wind up connecting the volume’s two halves as they have head-y roles in the fight against multiple wild bears.  The “bear standoff” in this volume delivers some of the best action yet in this series as Sugimoto, Asirpa, Shiraishi, Kirorake, and two veteran yakuza have to rely not just on their weapons, but on their resourcefulness as well.  If you believe that any LGBTQ representation in manga is a positive thing then the relationship between the two veteran yakuza, Ichiro and Tatsuya, counts as a plus too.

The Bad:  If you’re looking for positive LGBTQ representation in manga, Ichiro and Tatsuya’s relationship isn’t it.  When their relationship is revealed to the characters and the reader, Tatsuya immediately comes off as a screeching drama queen and his characterization doesn’t get much better through the rest of the volume.  Not helping matters is how their relationship is played for laughs more often than not. One example is when Ichiro comes to everyone’s rescue, he immediately calls out “Princess!” to Tatsuya, while the rest of the cast gives you the impression that we’re meant to take this as a joke.  On a completely different note is that there’s a two-page scene where Asirpa clubs a baby seal to death, skins it, and prepares it for cooking. I imagine there’s more than a few people who are going to have major issues with something like that.

The Verdict:  There are going to be some readers who are going to have BIG reservations with this volume.  I really don’t think mangaka Satoru Noda was trying to trigger anyone as the seal stuff is part of the historical context of the series.  As for trying to add some sexual diversity to the series, the credit he gets for trying is wiped away by his execution. It’s too bad that vol. 7 has these things weighing it down, because everything else around them is exciting and a lot of fun.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

In case you hadn’t heard, Alex “Havok” Summers is no longer a villain.  The former X-Factor and Uncanny Avengers team leader got his moral compass flipped around during the “Axis” event and has been a villain ever since.  It wasn’t until vol. 4 of “X-Men:  Blue” that his personality was restored and now he’s back to being a hero again.  The question now is, what kind of hero is he going to become? That’s what writer Matthew Rosenberg is looking to answer with this installment of “Astonishing X-Men” which gets by on charm rather than good plotting.

When I reviewed the final volume of “X-Men:  Blue” I wrote that I felt confident in saying that it was the better of the two flagship “X-Men” color titles.  I also wrote that I didn’t think this last volume of “X-Men: Gold” was going to be good enough to change my opinion.  After finally reading “Godwar” I can say that it feels good to be right! As has been the case with most of “Gold’s” run, it does a good job of reminding me about the form of “X-Men” stories of years past without providing actual quality to back it up.

Just to reiterate, I was disappointed when I found out that “All-New Wolverine” would be ending and that Laura Kinney would be assuming the name of X-23 again.  Though that was an inevitable backwards step for the character, what with Logan making his [insert adjective of choice here] awaited return, this new “X-23” series feels very much like a continuation of what was being done in that previous title.  Laura’s still going after those who would seek to use mutants as weapons and using non-lethal means to do so. Best of all is that Gabby is still around to provide a light-hearted, irreverent counterpart to her big sister’s seriousness. Gabby actually plays a significant role in the main story of this volume, which initially seems like it’s going to involve Laura tracking down a missing geneticist who was involved in some expectedly shady work with Alchemax.  Things quickly take a turn for the weird when the Stepford Cuckoos get involved and we find out that their current three-in-one incarnation wants to become the five-in-one once more.

There’s some admittedly ropey plotting regarding the Cuckoos’ involvement; specifically, with how their two “dead” personalities are back.  If you can get past that, then the storyline works well enough on its own terms. Writer Mariko Tamaki has a great grasp on Laura and (especially) Gabby’s personalities and the interplay between them is a lot of fun to see.  Even better is that Juann Cabal provides most of the art for this volume and it is fantastic! While he’s good with the overall level of detail and character work, Cabal has an impressive sense of composition to his layouts that are always eye-catching.  His overall work is reminiscent of Frank Quitely’s, only with smoother linework. Cabal’s work is so good that it’s immediately noticeable when Marcio Fiorito shows up to draw part of issue five, and Georges Duarte’s otherwise serviceable work in the fun school infiltration story in issue six looks stiff by comparison.  This may not be the absolute best start to Laura’s latest series, but it’s a lot better than I was expecting when I heard she was going to be X-23 again.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com