Comic Picks By The Glick

In the wake of “The Last Jedi” there’s been a lot of talk about how Captain Phasma is the Boba Fett of this new trilogy.  Specifically, in how she doesn’t do a whole lot in the films themselves but has a distinctive look and presence to captivate fans.  I’d also add that in regards to Fett, he came off a lot better after all the effort that was spent developing him in the Expanded Universe.  Consider this miniseries, and the book that was released last year, the first steps towards affording Phasma the same status.  As for the miniseries itself, it’s concerned with addressing a loose plot thread from “The Force Awakens.”  Specifically:  How did Phasma get out of the trash compactor after Han Solo and Finn dumped her in there?

The answer boils down to “by pure brute force,” but that’s only the start of the story.  You see, Phasma’s authorization was used to bring down the shields around Starkiller base and now she has to take care of that as well.  Only a lowly First Order tech accessed the records before she was able to delete them and now Phasma is on the hunt for him with a lowly pilot press-ganged into her service.  The chase leads Phasma and the pilot to a harsh, mostly-inhospitable planet whose seas are riddled with monsters and is inhabited by a dwindling number of colonists.

It’s the perfect kind of hunting ground for this utterly ruthless warrior and the story is a pretty great showcase for that attribute of Phasma.  Writer Kelly Thompson doesn’t give us a lot of insight into the title character’s thoughts or background (I guess you’ll have to read the book for that) and instead focuses on her determination to achieve her goal at any cost.  It’s enough for this four-issue miniseries and I thought it was refreshing how the writer kept the title character efficiently ruthless throughout the length of the story.  This is worth a look for people who have already taken a liking to the character, as well as for the art of Marco Checchetto.  Between his work on “Shattered Empire,” “Obi-Wan & Anakin,” and the first part of “Screaming Citadel” Checchetto proving himself to be the definitive “Star Wars” artist at Marvel.

Jason@glickscomicpicks.com

This latest volume is basically two separate arcs threaded together by illness.  It’s an alien illness brought from the stars because this is the Marvel Universe after all.  When an alien crash-lands on Roosevelt Island and people start dropping dead from a mysterious pathogen, Wolverine is sent in to find out what’s going on because her healing factor will help her survive the experience.  Said healing factor turns out to be even more critical to stopping the outbreak than you’d think and leads to the rare kind of “Wolverine” story that’s more about self-sacrifice than slashing the bad guys.  Writer Tom Taylor doesn’t skimp on the drama or action, however, and artist Leonard Kirk gives the story some crackling energy with its frantic chases and fights through the city.

Kirk ably demonstrates his sci-fi action chops in the volume’s second half as Laura and Gabby (with Jonathan the Wolverine in tow) team up with the Guardians of the Galaxy to track the plague back to its source.  This turns out to be a research base on a desolate moon that happens to be overrun by the Brood.  What follows is a bit more conventional compared to the first half because… well, we’ve all seen “Aliens” at this point, haven’t we?  Taylor and Kirk make it into an effective riff on the formula, but it’s still a riff nonetheless.  We do get an appealingly cheesy development to Jonathan’s character out of all this which is another plus as well.

If there’s one thing working against this volume, it’s the sheer amount of guest stars it contains.  While I’m all for having Wolverine interact with other characters in the other Marvel Universe, the first half alone has appearances from Ironheart, Captain Marvel, Nick Fury, Beast, Peter Parker, Daken, Deadpool, and Old Man Logan.  The Guardians’ presence in the second half just about turns the story into an ensemble piece.  At least the next arc is set to just feature Daken in a primary guest role, which is promising at the least.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

Remember kids:  It may not say so on the side of this volume, but this is actually vol. 2 of the new “Weapon X” series.  Its first volume was a surprisingly entertaining start to what is basically the next iteration of “X-Force” and a prelude to this crossover between “The Totally Awesome Hulk.”  Greg Pak writes both series and while pairing them together may seem like an incongruous move, that actually works in this story’s favor.  While Amadeus “Hulk” Cho isn’t a killer, the “Weapon X” team is and they’re up against a group of scientists who are in the employ of the Reverend William Stryker.  The Reverend’s goal is still the eradication of mutantkind and now he’s got a new way to do it:  Using science to create a Wolverine/Hulk hybrid!

Yes, this is the storyline that gave us the Hulkverine and if you can’t get behind the awesome dumbness of that concept then this volume is definitely not for you.  There are some stabs at seriousness in the way that Pak plays up the “banality of evil” when it comes to the rank-and-file scientists as well as Cho’s efforts to see the humanity in the bad guys.  Most of this volume, however, is pure action-movie mayhem as our… protagonists close in on and go to war with the bad guys, all with maximum loudness.  What sets it apart is that Pak has a great handle on his cast and has them playing off of each other in fun and interesting ways.

The art is generally good, though parts of it clearly have issues.  Mahmud Asrar does the one-shot which kicks off the event and it’s solid work, even if I miss the brightly-colored solid linework he’s demonstrated previously.  The “Weapon X” issues are from Marc Borstel who has a clean, detailed style that occasionally gives his characters a plastic sheen to them and/or bug-out eyes.  Robert Gill’s “Awesome Hulk” work is the best with an appealing roughness that strikes a nice middle ground between the aforementioned artists and is great for showing us the Hulkverine -- I mean, Weapon H -- in all of its glory.  Next up for the “Weapon X” crew is “The Hunt For Weapon H” and I’m all for that after his introduction here.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

Al Ewing’s “other” superhero team book got off to a great start with its first volume, was waylaid by its “Civil War II” crossover and some dodgy fill-in art for its second volume, and looked to be turning things around in its third.  The last of which I never got around to writing about.  My bad.  That volume ended with the revelation of the series’ big bad:  The First Firmament -- the living incarnation of the first iteration of the Marvel Universe.  Now, if you think that turning such a high concept into a workable character and wrapping up this ambitious cosmic saga in the space of four issues (even if one of them is oversized) is an impossible task… then you’re not wrong.  At least this volume still offers some fun stories and ideas to soothe the underlying disappointment.

Vol. 12 may have ended with the promise of a new female shogun dealing with Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan, but that seismic event only plays a small part in the political intrigue here.  Most of the focus is on newcomer Masahiro Abe, the quick-witted Baron of Ise, who rises to the position of Chief Senior Councillor to the eventual shogun, Tokugawa Iesada.  Iesada also plays a pivotal role in this volume as well, even if it happens to be that of a victim.  While mangaka Fumi Yoshinaga finally did readers of this series a favor by writing out the villain Harusada in the previous volume, we’re not done with villainy quite yet.  Iesada’s father, Ieyoshi, is initially portrayed to be a dull, simple-minded fool, yet there’s one aspect to his character which is utterly reprehensible.  This is something else that Masahiro will have to deal with over the course of the volume.  She won’t do it alone, however, as the new senior councillor of the Inner Chambers, a man with a tragic background from a samurai family named Takiyama, has something to prove as well.

Even with the skin-crawling nature of Ieyoshi’s transgressions, Harusada’s depature has made “Ooku” easier to read again.  Even better is that while the series is now without its signature villain and the constant threat of the redface pox it hasn’t lost an ounce of its drama.  I’m not trying to damn this volume with faint praise but the arrival of the Americans actually stands on par with the many other surprising developments here.  None of this comes off as drama for drama’s sake, though.  It’s all grounded in the believable actions of the characters.  Yoshinaga does cram a lot of incident into this volume and it makes for a very dense read, as is usual for this series.  It still manages to maintain the humanity at its core, even as it finds time for some welcome comic asides.  While I think it’d be nice to get new volumes of this series at a pace that is faster than “annual” vol. 13 is yet one more example that the wait between volumes of this series is usually worth it.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

Yeah, I think I’m done with this series.  While there was plenty of early praise for Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason’s take on “Superman” at the start of “Rebirth” I never really felt that it measured up.  With the payoff this fourth volume tries to deliver for the threads that the co-writers have established in the first three, it looks like this series never will.  Things start of promisingly enough with Batman and Robin paying a visit to Superman and his family to discuss the ongoing problems with Jonathan Kent’s powers.  It’s all downhill from there as Batman is captured by evil milk, Jonathan and his dad find out the secret their neighbors have been hiding, and an old foe of Superman’s is revealed as the mastermind behind it all.

My main response to most of the developments here can be summed up as “Was this necessary?”  I don’t think that a good portion of the Hamilton citizenry needed the kind of twist this volume springs upon us, particularly since the cast was working just fine when I thought they were regular humans.  This still comes off as a genius twist when compared against the reveal of the main villain here.  It’s treated as a very big deal, and maybe it is if you’ve got a special place in your heart for Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke’s “Action Comics” #775 where the baddie made his debut.  If you don’t, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ve never heard of this guy if that’s the case, then the big reveal is going to fall completely flat for you.  It may even fall flat regardless because all he has going for him here is Very Eeeeevil Cockney Britishness.

The good news is that Gleason and Mahnke do a pretty good job with the art, even with their contrasting styles.  I also wanted to mention that while there’s one sequence in Mahnke’s work that looks like he had to bash it out in a couple of hours… I actually liked it.  It’s more in line with his earlier, chunkier work and has more personality to it than the slick style he’s adopted for “Superman.”  It’s still better work than this story deserves.

jason@glickscomicpicks.com

After I read the first volume of Jason Aaron’s run on “Star Wars,” I was left with the feeling of, “Where do you go from here?”  “Skywalker Strikes” had the core cast facing off against Darth Vader in a balls-out action story and subsequently featured Luke squaring off against Boba Fett while Han and Leia came face-to-face with the former’s… wife?  Oh, and Jabba the Hutt was in it too.  It was the kind of story that threw all the familiar “Star Wars” things you’d expect at you right away and one that left me worried Aaron’s run wouldn’t have much gas left in it after he brought out the big guns right away.

That turned out not to be the case, for better and for worse.  Aaron spent the next four volumes, and two crossovers, introducing us to new characters and concepts in the “Star Wars” universe.  Sometimes this worked out quite well in the cases of the gang’s struggles against Grakkus the Hutt on Nar Shadda in vol. 2 and “Yoda’s Secret War” in vol. 5.  Then you had things like “Rebel Jail,” which had a good idea at its center but was dragged down by its execution.  For his final volume, Aaron has decided to give us five individual stories featuring the familiar faces we all know and love from the original trilogy and characters he’s created over the course of his run.  They’re a generally good bunch, even if the final one presents a questionable note to end on.

There was a time, back in the days of “Hitman,” where Garth Ennis’ superhero-baiting humor felt transgressive and genuinely funny.  Whether it was Hitman puking on Batman’s shoes, Kev taking the piss out of the Authority, or seeing the Punisher run over Wolverine with a steamroller, there was a time when I genuinely enjoyed seeing the writer make fun of superheroes.  Then time marched on and superhero comics eventually became more willing to laugh at their own conventions and I eventually found out that Ennis’ laughs at their expense came not from a place of love but utter contempt.  “The Boys” still stands as his ultimate statement on the genre, a remarkable achievement in that it manages to be funny and have some insightful things to say about male relationships and superheroes while also revelling in the author’s brand of crass and tasteless self-indulgence.

What does this have to do with “Sixpack and Dogwelder?”  Well, aside from being another great showcase for the talents of Russ Braun, who illustrated the latter half of “The Boys” and several other Ennis projects, it’s another project where the DC Universe gets to take its lumps from Ennis.  It’s also a follow-on to “All-Star Section Eight” where the absolutely awful team of superheroes from “Hitman” tried to learn about what it takes to be a superhero by bothering individual members of the Justice League.  Well, it was really their perpetually sloshed leader, Sixpack, who did the bothering and it was more memorable for the meta nature of his struggle and the really dark turn the story took when Superman got involved at the end.