Comics Then and Now

THEN:

Stan "The Man! The Magical!! The Mystical!!! The Marvellous!!!! The Magnificent!!!!! The Mellifluous!!!!!! The Magnanimous!!!!!!! The Multitudinous!!!!!!!! The Multidimensional!!!!!!!!!" Lee!!!!!!!!!!











NOW:

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnn Mmmmmmmmmmmiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiichaaaaaaeeeeeeelllllllllllll Bbbbbbeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnndiiiiissssssssssssssss.

So my

timely and original thoughts on the back-up text piece in Justice League: Cry for Justice were, it transpires, neither timely nor original; Brian Hibbs said exactly the same thing at Savage Critics last week.

Bastard.

Possibly Maybe

Here's the list of what I'm thinking of getting this week:

Batman #688
Captain America Reborn #1 (of 5)
Dark X-Men Beginning #1
Green Lantern #43
No Hero #6
North 40 #1 (of 6)
Stand American Nightmares #4
Superman World Of New Krypton #5 (of 12)
Unwritten #3
Wednesday Comics #1 (of 12)
X-Men Legacy #226

There are a few titles there I'm not sure about yet. Dark X-Men I probably will give a try, but North 40, which is (I think) a new Vertigo miniseries about a community in America plagued by demons or something (I think), I'm really not sure if I'll buy or not. I'll probably flip through it, see if it's shiny enough to spend money on. World of New Krypton is in the relegation zone if it doesn't buck its ideas up soon, and The Stand is on thin ice too. Not because it's not competently done; it is – it's a very literal adaptation of Stephen King's novel (which I love). There's just one fatal flaw that kills it for me every issue: the captions are in the past tense. That may not seem like much, but it's an adapting choice that pulls me out of the story every time. I don't know if it's something Marvel didn't have any say in, but if they did, they slightly shot themselves in the face. Comics (or at least American comics) have a well established etymology, whereby captions describing or embellishing the action in the panels are written in the present tense, adding to the immediacy of the action. As soon as you go against that dictum, you risk losing that immediacy, and that's what's happened with The Stand. Which is a bugger, because Mike Perkins's art is decent enough, and I'd be happily enjoying the comic if it weren't for that one niggle.

You'll notice that Green Lantern is back again. And yes, I will be buying it. I am mentally unwell.

And in a further illustration of mental illness, Captain America: Reborn #1 actually came out last week, but I bought the John Cassaday limited variant instead of the main Bryan Hitch cover, and now I'm considering buying the Hitch cover as well.

It is a sickness.

Agents of Atlas #7

I tend to sort each week's comics into reverse reading order, i.e., the ones I'm expecting least from at the top of the pile, to be read first, and the ones I'm most looking forward to at the bottom of the pile. Evidently I am a delayed gratification kinda guy. Well, relatively delayed. Anyway, Agents of Atlas has been steadily moving its way down the pile since the ongoing series launched at the start of the year. I liked the original miniseries, but I wasn't expecting too much from the ongoing. I figured I'd give it a few issues, see how it went. It's turned out to be quietly brilliant.

This latest issue is a case in point. We get a main story set underwater and involving Atlanteans, which, as any regular comics reader will tell you, traditionally spells tedium. Here, however, there are great jokes (Gorilla-Man's sarcastic quips), misdirection passed off as tentacle soft porn (the Venusian's fascination with a gigantic plant-creature relates back to his lascivious encounter with an anemone last issue, but is actually something else entirely), and a Namor who, for once, isn't a complete tool. We also get some really lovely art, courtesy of Garbriel Hardman and colourist Jana Schirmer. Hardman's very much in the Born Again Mazzuchelli/Michael Lark/John Paul Leon school: proper drawing, in other words. Writer Jeff Parker also manages to cram in a sub-plot harking back to the miniseries, some great characterization and character interaction, and a back-up story that dovetails neatly with the main feature.

So yeah – Agents of Atlas #7: a bloody good comic.

Reviews!

Well, possibly. Let's give it a go at least.

I've read maybe a third of this week's new comics, and there've been some decent efforts so far (Invincible Iron Man wasn't bad, Destroyer was dumb fun). But the only one that surprised me was Justice League: Cry for Justice. I really wasn't expecting a lot from that, but the artwork was the first pleasant surprise – a striking mix of drawing and painting, with some Jim Lee in there, some Gene Ha... certainly purty enough to linger over the occasional page. So well done that Mauro Cascioli.

On the writing side, despite a significant break from comics, James Robinson still seems to be doing that thing where he emphasizes all the wrong words. That aside, the story was OK, but the second pleasant surprise was the text material at the back, wherein Robinson writes about his reasoning for the characters he's picked, offers hints of what's coming up in the miniseries that actually made me really quite excited in a schoolgirlish sort of way (The Shade! The Shade!), and teases his forthcoming run on the main Justice League title, which, it transpires, Cry for Justice is a lead-in to. And the scant details of that made me a teensy bit excited. (In fact if I were a schoolgirl, I would have done a little wee in my knickers.)

He also talks about a childhood trip to a secondhand book shop in South Africa, gazing upon a treasure trove of old comics and being told by his mum he could have just one (he chose an old issue of The Atom). Robinson's documented his love of the past and of collecting previously (notably in the pages of Starman), but this kind of reminiscence always hits home with me, chiming with my own childhood (and, it has to be said, adulthood) trips to junk shops, flea markets, wherever, in search of comics.

So Cry for Justice #1 turned out to be a bit of a treat. If nothing else, I'll be getting the next six issues for the back-up material alone.

Back Issue Haul

I've been on a back issue kick recently, something I haven't done for a while. And a trip up to London this weekend turned up all sorts of goodies, including the rest of a run of Squadron Supreme (the Gruenwald maxiseries, which I've never read), Marvel Fanfare #40 (bought for its Mazzuchelli cover and short story), a missing Steve Gerber issue (#26) of Defenders, and a bunch of other Gerber things – odd issues of Omega the Unknown and a half dozen Marvel Presents: Guardians of the Galaxy. I dimly recall a passing obsession with the Guardians when I was a kid, in particular Vance Astro. Hmm.

I'm actually

slightly behind in my comics reading. I still have a few comics left over from last week, which I didn't get round to reading because a) last week Marvel published a frankly obscene amount of comics, many of which I'm following, and b) I've been re-reading Mike Carey and Peter Gross' Lucifer, which is my favourite comic series of all time, and which I've been enjoying just as much this time round (the third time round, fact fans), even though I've noticed it does sag slightly in the middle. A bit like me.

Anyway, so before I get to read this week's comics (Green Lantern Corps aside, which I read on the train back from the comic shop), I've first got to finish off the remainder of last week's comics. One of which was Dark Reign: The Hood #2. I read that one last night, in between staring blankly at Celebrity MasterChef and feeling a bit tired as a result of going for a swim at the local outdoor pool (the first time I've managed to do so since moving to the area over a year ago). It wasn't bad. The comic I mean. Not the pool. Although that wasn't bad either.

This Week's Comics

Here's a list of the comics I bought this week:

Agents of Atlas #7
Batman and Robin #2
Captain America Reborn #1 (of 5)
Crossed #6
Destroyer #4 (of 5)
Fantastic Four #568
Greek Street #1
Green Lantern Corps #38
Invincible Iron Man #15
Irredeemable #4
Justice League Cry For Justice #1
Mighty #6
New Avengers #54 (Bachalo Cover)
Savage Dragon #150
Terror Inc Apocalypse Soon #3 (of 5)
Uncanny X-Men #513

I would have also bought the sixth issue of a Vertigo miniseries called Bang Tango, but my local comic shop didn't have it, which was slightly annoying, seeing as it's the final issue, and I've been enjoying its bizarre mix of Strictly Come Dancing/Carlito's Way/Transsexual Beauty Queens 17. As for the rest of the list, the only thing I've read thus far is Green Lantern Corps, and that I bought on a whim because it was billed as a lead-in to the Blackest Night event, which, as mentioned in the previous post, I'm bored of before it's even bloody begun.

See, this is the problem. This is what I'm talking about. I bought the latest issue of a series – Green Lantern Corps – that I'd previously stopped buying due to its utter mundanity, because this latest issue is a prequel to an event that is rapidly losing my interest before it's even started as a result of the convoluted yet tedious storytelling in Green Lantern Corps' sister comic – Green Lantern – which over many months has sapped any interest or excitement I might have previously had about said event.

Still, nice art. In Green Lantern Corps #38, I mean. Patrick Gleason. Nice.













Right. Well then. This new 'blogging about comics' era is off to a cracking start, I must say.

On Addiction

I buy a lot of comics every week. I mean, a lot. At the moment, with Marvel and DC's recent $3.99 price hike, my habit is costing me a fair bit of money each week. And yes, it is a habit, in the addiction sense of the word. Comics to me are like cigarettes – if cigarettes were things that, once you smoked them, you stored in specially made cardboard boxes which you kept in the cupboard above the built-in wardrobe. I try and cut down, to save money, to keep from further cluttering up my already cluttered life. But it's hard to break the habit. I need that weekly story fix, even though much of what I buy is ultimately disappointing. It's something to look forward to every week. It fills a void.

And yes, mostly I buy superhero comic books. This is what the majority of comics fans (as in 'buy comics regularly at a comic shop' fans) buy. Some make pretences to a more literary form of comics, myself included. For example, I genuinely love the comics of Eddie Campbell, Gabrielle Bell, and Kevin Huizenga. But it's the weekly churn of spastic superhero stupidity that I keep coming back to, that feeds the hunger, that scratches the itch. Gotta get the new comics. Over and over, again, again.

Like any addiction, it's a love/hate thing. There are regular cycles of self-loathing, comics-loathing, comics-liking, self-acceptance. Comics and creators often disappoint, but that's balanced by comics and creators who pleasantly surprise. Recently, Geoff Johns's build-up to the Green Lantern event Blackest Night – an event I was eagerly anticipating last year – has bored me shitless. Conversely, Jeff Parker's Agents of Atlas has proved an unexpected gem, and Matt Fraction has come into his own on Uncanny X-Men and Invincible Iron Man.

And even just writing stuff like the previous two sentences I'm thinking to myself, Jesus, this really is fucking sad. And then I'm thinking, is it? Is it really? Or is it something different, a unique form of entertainment, weekly pamphlets of colourful picture-stories, the modern equivalent of how Charles Dickens's novels were originally published, except, y'know, dafter. And this is the conflict of addiction, the constant struggle between denial and acceptance, between disappointment and delight.

This, then, is comics.

Instead of

posting occasional nonsense to my other blog (http://offmessage.blog.com/), which has become impossible to access on Firefox since Blog.com moved to a new system (and I can't be arsed to get into it through Safari every time), I've decided to resurrect this blog, which I plum forgot about until ten minutes ago. But there's a reason for resurrecting it beyond technical hassles with Off Message. I think it might be time to blog about something other than nothing.

See, most of my Off Message posts really are about fuck all. Oh, there's the occasional post about politics, or music, or comics, but generally speaking, most of the posts are navel-gazing nonsense. Admittedly that was always the point of Off Message (and its precursor, the original Existential Ennui). But after four years of that rubbish, to quote Morrissey, that joke isn't funny anymore.

So now I think I'll do something with a bit more substance. Yes, that's right: I've decided to write more about comics.

Brilliant.