Comic Picks By The Glick

Grant Morrison and Dan Mora’s revisionist take on the “Santa Claus” mythos was one of the best comics I read back in 2016.  This follow-up volume, which collects the two extra-sized one-shots the creators have released in its wake isn’t in the same league.  That’s because both are the rare Morrison-written projects where he puts his crazy mad ideas first at the expense of grounding them in a relatable human story.

“War Thor?”  More like “Edgelord Thor” as he’s presented here.  This new Thor, brought into existence after a certain person picked up the Mjolnir of the Ultimate Universe, is all about anger, rage, blood raining from the skies, and vengeance to be visited upon the Queen of Cinders for the deaths she’s caused in the burgeoning War of the Realms.  This is a Thor that means business and he’s not about to let anyone stand in his way when he comes to bring justice to those who have committed awful crimes during wartime. Especially not the current Thor, Jane Foster, who’s dealing with some long-delayed personal drama of her own. You see, she’s finally let the Odinson know that she’s the new Thor and he’s taking it about as well as could be expected…

I’m only partially kidding about this “Edgelord Thor” business as his characterization is over-the-top in a way that’s more distracting than endearing when it comes to Jason Aaron’s writing.  However, his actions are just about barely justified by the fact that I can actually believe that this normally jolly character would be traumatized into acting the way he does as a result of what happens to him in the first issue.  In fact it’s honestly kind of touching to see how Thor deals with him after the initial round of fisticuffs is over. It almost makes up for how Ultimate Mjolnir is described as conjuring unmitigated rage in its user. You might think that it’s Aaron offering a kind of commentary on the Ultimate Universe, but there’s nothing in the storyline to back it up.  It’s just been reduced to a plot device here.

Rounding out the collection is the “Generations:  The Unworthy Thor & The Mighty Thor” one-shot, which has Young Thor teaming up with the current Thor to help some vikings take on Apocalypse and his clan in Egypt.  It’s a fun but largely inconsequential story that has Thor teaching Young Thor some lessons about worthiness and some really dynamic art from Mahmud Asrar. Backing up a bit, even if the main story is somewhat uneven and overdramatic, it’s still very nice to look at courtesy of Valerio Schiti’s art (with regular artist Russell Dauterman pitching in for a couple scenes).  If this isn’t the best lead in to Jane Foster’s “final” story as Thor, it at least doesn’t completely derail the series’ momentum.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

It should be immediately obvious to anyone reading this that without Stan Lee’s contributions to superhero comics this site and podcast would look markedly different.  “X-Men,” “Avengers,” “Spider-Man,” “The Fantastic Four,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “Iron Man,” “Daredevil,” and the list goes on. The characters Stan Lee co-created with artists like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby have proved time and time again to be enduring as they’ve adapted to changing times and tastes and he co-created so many of them!  That all came down to the fact that he had a genius formula for creating superheroes: make them relatable and fallible, human in other words. With his only real competition at the time being DC, Lee and his artistic collaborators were in the right place at the right time in order for their approach to go over like gangbusters and eventually earn them pop-culture immortality.

John and I tackle a "Batman" story that does a lot of interesting things, but doesn't really take any of them far enough.

While the main goal of Sugimoto and co. right now is to get to Asirpa’s father in Abashiri prison, this volume shows that the series is in no hurry to get there as it splits itself into two halves.  The first is about our group of protagonists and how they make their way to Sapporo and wind up staying at a hotel there. I know that doesn’t sound all that interesting, except that the hotel is home to one of the tattooed convicts who also happens to be a serial killer.  Oh, and the ultra-burly Tatsuma Ushiyama also shows up to make things more interesting. Take this highly combustible gathering of characters and put it in a hotel filled with secret passages and trap doors and the end result is some top-notch screwball kineticism and the best action the series has seen so far.  The only things dragging it down are that it does feel like something of a sideshow to the main story, and there’s some arguable transphobia attached to the killer’s motivations.

As for the second half, it takes things in a completely different direction as the series’ oldest badasses, Toshizo Hijikata and Shinpachi Nagakura, find themselves playing out a riff on “Yojimbo.”  If you’re not familiar with the film, it’s about a samurai who plays two warring gangs against each other to help free a town. Toshizo and Shinpachi’s motivations are far less pure as one of the town’s gangs has managed to get their hands on a tattooed convict skin and they’re looking for the fastest way to get their hands on it.  Especially after lone-wolf sniper Hyakunosuke Ogata shows up looking to claim the skin for himself.

The storyline gets by on the appeal of the concept rather than the strength of its execution.  While it’s fun to see Hijikata and Nagakura show that “aging gracefully” can also mean “still kicking ass and taking names after all these years” the story jumps around in a chaotic fashion that’s more distracting than involving.  There’s some solid action in these parts as well, but that chaos does diminish their appeal somewhat. Vol. 6’s back half at least makes a decent case for giving the series’ old-guy antagonists their own shot in the spotlight. Let’s hope for some sharper execution the next time it swings their way.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

At the end of most Marvel events is a series of epilogues setting up the next big event.  DC got into doing that kind of thing with “Metal” which set the stage for this miniseries, which in turn set up the three current “Justice League” titles.  While I understand the need to keep the momentum going from one big event to the next, I do expect the main story of each event to be a satisfying one before it gets down to the business of setting up the next one.  That’s where “No Justice” fails big time.

I’ve written before about the long and mutually beneficial series of crossovers between “Usagi Yojimbo” and the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”  In fact, you should go back and read my review of their last crossover since my thoughts on it haven’t changed in the intervening year.  Though the story wasn’t all that great, it did feature some fantastic color art and was apparently pushed the amount of crossovers between the two series to critical mass, resulting in this “Complete Collection” that we’ve been graced with.

Having all of the Rabbit Ronin’s adventures with the Heroes in a Half-Shell is undeniably handy.  If it also gets new fans to check out Usagi’s adventures then that’s even better. However, if you’re a longtime “Usagi” reader like me, then you likely already have the comics that make up the majority of this collection in your library already.  That makes this collection more for completists than anyone else, though the couple of stories I haven’t read before are not without interest.

Ah, it’s a new creator-owned series from Rick Remender.  Will it be the kind that relentlessly grinds down its protagonists to the point where it starts being fun (“Deadly Class”), to where you start sympathizing with the antagonist (“Seven to Eternity”), or just plain grinds them down (“Black Science”).  If nothing else the answer is still unclear by the time we reach the end of this first volume of Glory’s adventures. The title character was raised off the grid to be resourceful and fiercely protective of her freedom by her father, Red, who is now dying of liver failure.  Though Glory doesn’t have the funds to get him the medical treatment he needs, she does have a plan to get them: Robbing her scumbag of an ex-husband who works with a surgeon-cum-butcher named Korean Joe in one of the shadiest kinds of businesses.

That this plan goes all kinds of sideways shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it does lead to a reasonably entertaining spectacle of colorful criminals and car chases.  Though the characters don’t have much depth to them, Remender and artist Bengal try to compensate for that by layering on the style. It’s quite successful from an artistic perspective as Bengal serves up some impressively emotive characters and slam-bang action scenes.  Remender’s writing facilitates the action quite well and even if the characters are shallow, they still have some quirks to help define them.

Where he starts to lose me is in his glorification *ahem* of Glory’s off-the-grid lifestyle as the “right” way to live as opposed to how everyone else does.  I’ve seen Remender embrace that kind of moralizing before (looking in your direction “Tokyo Ghost”) and it’s not handled any better in this series. Still it’s impressive to see a first volume (or any volume, really) from the writer end the way it does here.  I hope he didn’t hurt himself writing that kind of ending because, flaws and all, this first volume did get me interested in seeing where Glory’s story goes from here.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com