Comic Picks By The Glick

When two super-characters decide to tie the knot, the one thing you can expect to come from that decision is drama.  Even if the two characters involved have no superpowers to speak of. So with Batman and Catwoman set to get married in two volumes’ time they’ve got to get their houses in order.  Actually, it’s really just Batman who has to do that. He is the one whose ex is the master of the League of Assassins after all.

I go back to our first podcast to give a full accounting of this strange and fascinating series that's maybe a bit too hopeful for its own good.

I go back to our first podcast to talk about some of the best licensed comics around.  Mostly in the first omnibus.

The previous volume teased this one as promising the most “taboo” content yet.  Given how this series has played out so far, that came off as much of a threat as a promise.  While it’s hard to say whether or not this is the envelope-pushing-est volume of the series to date, following one that focused on a child serial killer is a tough act to follow, it did deliver a few scenes that managed to get under my skin due to their sheer unpleasantness.  That takes a lot to do these days but the problem here is that the scenes in question don’t add a whole lot to the story at hand.

Maybe I should just stop bothering with Garth Ennis’ comedic works.  “Sixpack & Dogwelder” was awful, “Jimmy’s Bastards” best bits didn’t involve comedy, and now “Dastardly & Muttley” looks to have been hamstrung by its association with DC’s “Hanna-Barbera Universe.”  I may be being a bit generous with that assessment because there are parts of this miniseries that make it seem like it would’ve been a better body-horror story than comedic satire.  That’s because it’s all about cartoon logic leaking out into the real world and the chaos that erupts as a result. So you have scenes where a man’s eyes bug out of his face and he can’t get them back in, the president taking a big cartoon hammer to a political opponent’s head and caving his skull in (off-panel), and then running into a harpsichord to escape only to emerge in slices seen for the horrors they actually are.  DC’s other “Hanna-Barbera” titles have shown a willingness to go into some crazy places, and it’s disappointing that this one didn’t fully commit to its horror leanings.

So what are we left with?  The story of two military pilots, Col. Richard “Dick” Atcherly and Capt. Dudley “Mutt” Muller, trying to stem the cartoon chaos as the former turns into a cackling mustache-twirling villain and the latter deals with becoming a human/dog hybrid.  As protagonists they’re sympathetic enough, particularly with Muller’s desire to become normal again to be with his family, but they spend the majority of the miniseries at the mercy of the whims of the plot. Which isn’t all that interesting as it hinges on the MacGuffin-esque element known as unstabilium that allows all that cartoon logic into our world.  I at least get the feeling that Ennis is trying to do something interesting with this material, but he can’t quite pull it off. Or even stick to the “Hanna-Barbera” cartoon character canon if that’s important to you.

Artist Mauricet does deliver some lively cartoonish art that I probably would’ve enjoyed more in a different setting.  The problem is that as the artist’s style has a lot of cartooniness in it already, Mauricet struggles to sell all the more cartoonish elements creeping in on top of it.  What this miniseries needed was either an artist who could do serious and cartoony at once (someone like Mike Allred) or a colorist who could clearly delineate the two separate realities colliding here.  So the art, like the story, just can’t commit to the most interesting parts of this setup leaving the whole thing a confused mess that’s unlikely to appeal to anyone.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

For this second volume Charles Soule and Giuseppe Camuncoli set about giving the title character some actual power and showing us the subsequent fallout from that.  Things pick up with Vader asserting his dominance over the Inquisitorius and taking a personal interest in their mission to hunt down the remaining Jedi. One such Jedi, a teacher named Jocasta Nu, has been marked for special interest by Emperor Palpatine himself.  Such is her importance that Palpatine doesn’t want Vader to kill her, he wants his apprentice to bring her to him alive. This results in a story that works well enough, but probably would’ve benefitted from being cut down from four issues to three or even two to keep the pacing tight.  It still has some good action scenes and a lightsaber shotgun thanks to Camuncoli and some delicious tension in the interactions between Vader, the Inquisitorius, and the poor Imperial officers who cross his path. That said, I hope this is the only story in the Soule/Camuncoli run that deals with the increasingly tired trope of Palpatine wanting to find a replacement for Vader.

This initial arc also brings up an idea that plays out more fully in the second and offers further proof that Soule was onto something when he picked the post-”Episode III” period to set this story.  While we all know Vader’s deal and why he’s not to be trifled with, the Empire at large has no idea who this strange armored man is that Palpatine has suddenly decided to elevate for no reason. It’s an act that’s going to upset some higher-ups with enough power to take matters into their own hands to see this upstart dealt with.

That’s why the second arc kicks off with Vader, accompanied by the delightfully surly Inquisitor Nith Sister, walking into a trap while searching for more Jedi.  While the evidence he finds suggests that Palpatine may have had a hand in the attack, Vader displays some surprising restraint and presence of mind when he confronts his master.  This leads to his formal introduction to the Imperial rank-and-file, some of whom won’t survive the experience. Still, the thought of a conspiracy within the ranks to destroy Vader does have potential and I’m interested to see where Soule is going with this.  That this series is turning out to be a solid read in spite of the very high bar set by its predecessor is a pleasant surprise indeed.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

There’s one great moment in this crossover between “Amazing Spider-Man” and “Venom” where the villain Maniac gets his hands on a symbiote and starts spreading it around to build his own criminal empire.  It comes after Spider-Man is captured by him at one point and winds up getting mind-controlled by a bit of symbiote to go on a crime spree at Maniac’s bidding. This is noted by the Daily Bugle whose publisher, Robbie Robertson, isn’t about to print a story painting the wall-crawler as a menace after the paper has done it so many times before and been burned by it in the past.  Then Spider-Man shows up at the Bugle to brag about his crime spree at the Bugle itself. At which point Robbie notes the “new mask” and remarks that mind-control is the reason Spidey has been acting out of character all night. Robbie’s observation immediately cut off my fear that the title character was going to take the blame for these crimes, further turning the city against him and predictably re-establishing the status quo.  That he’s self-aware enough to recognize what was really going on just about made my day.

As for the rest of the crossover, it’s almost completely lacking in that kind of self-awareness.  It mainly comes across as an excuse for Spider-Man to mix it up with two of Venom’s hosts, Eddie Brock and Flash Thompson, and to see those two get into it as well.  There’s lots of fighting, thanks to Maniac’s symbiote mind-control gimmick but none of it really comes across as interesting. This is in spite of the best efforts from artists Ryan Stegman and Gerardo Sandoval to invest the proceedings with as much energy as they can.  Yet this energy is sapped by the predictable plot and a boring villain who loves to hear himself talk but rarely has anything interesting to say. There are some notable changes by the end of the volume: Flash Thompson is now Anti-Venom, and the Black Cat is no longer a crimelord.  I would’ve issued a “spoiler warning” before letting you know about these things, but I think saving a potential reader from spending $20 on a crossover that’s mostly filler was more important.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

No one writes “Punisher” better than Garth Ennis.  His initial run with Steve Dillon brought the character back to basics and showed that he could work in dark comedy situations just as well as straight up action scenarios.  Then the MAX run followed and the shift to a mature readers format allowed Ennis to take the character in even darker directions and resulted in some of the best comics that I’ve read from Marvel.  Since the conclusion of that run, Ennis has only returned to the character occasionally: A “War Zone” miniseries with Dillon that returned to their comedic interpretation of the character, a guest-starring role in the third arc of the “Fury:  My War Gone By” maxiseries, and now “The Platoon.” While one might think that diminishing returns would be setting in at this point with a character who has been written for so long by one writer, “The Platoon” shows that these days when Ennis dials back his comedic sensibilities and focuses on a telling a grounded story with human stakes he’s still capable of delivering greatness.