The X-Axis – 23 May 2010
At last, I am up to date with my deliveries! And with two especially heavy weeks behind us, there’s an enormous pile of books awaiting my comments. So, we’re going to catch up with the X-books and the major new releases. Believe me, it’s going to take us long enough.
First things first, though – if you look down a couple of posts, you’ll find this week’s podcast. Download, listen, you know the drill.
Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #1 – The second book from Marvel’s new Astonishing imprint, which seems to be intended for stories that are more or less self-contained, or at least semi-detached from the rest of continuity. This story is by Warren Ellis and Kaare Andrews, and essentially it’s a rebranding of Ellis’s Astonishing X-Men. Except that Ellis’ much-delayed Astonishing X-Men arc is some months away from finishing… so effectively, Marvel are following DC’s lead here by shrugging their shoulders and moving on to the next arc anyway. Mind you, considering that the book is already lagging some way behind X-Men continuity (it’s set before the “Utopia” crossover), you can understand why they want to get it out there.
Basic premise: there’s a small town in Africa where kids are being born with weird powers. Obviously this is of interest to the X-Men, since these people sound suspiciously like mutants (though for some reason the story goes out of its way to debunk that idea fairly early on, on grounds that don’t really hold up). So it’s off to Africa we go. And… um, that’s basically the synopsis of issue #1. This is certainly a book with a relaxed pace, featuring as it does a double-page spread of an uneventful village, a full-page establishing shot of the X-Men’s headquarters, a full page without dialogue devoted to the X-Men putting on their clothes, and another splash page of some nice wildlife. Mind you, at least this means artist Kaare Andrews has plenty of space to do his thing – though it has to be said that, even allowing for tongue being firmly in cheek, his petulant Emma Frost kind of misses the point of the character.
On the plus side, it’s nice to look at and at least it’s trying to use a setting that we don’t see much of in superhero comics. But it’s decidedly slow and talky.
Atlas #1 – Jeff Parker’s Agents of Atlas has always struggled to convert its online fanbase into sales. So there must have been a temptation to throw in something populist with this latest relaunch. But thankfully, Atlas sticks to its guns, devoting an issue to introducing the 3D Man to its cast. Admittedly, he got a major role in Avengers: The Initiative of late, but he’s still the 3D Man. The main story sees him investigating a mystery that obviously has Atlas connections, while the regular cast remain very much in the shadows – a nice way of playing up their gimmick as a team who keep themselves hidden away. But there’s also a back-up strip explaining some of the story from the regulars’ point of view, so the title characters do at least appear. Gabriel Hardman’s an interesting choice of artist – you’d think that Atlas might go for somebody self-consciously retro, but instead they’ve opted for a solid and atmospheric storyteller. Smart move; Atlas works because it plays its cast of 50s obscurities straight, rather than being self-consciously jokey about them, and makes them quirky outsiders instead of just a nostalgia act. I doubt this story will change anyone’s mind about the series, but hopefully the relaunch will at least encourage a few more people to try it.
Avengers #1 – See the podcast for plenty on this. Brian Bendis and John Romita Jr unveil the new core Avengers team, which is more or less the roster from early issues of New Avengers with a couple of swaps. Which is fine by me. It’s a Kang story, and what that means is that Kang shows up halfway through the issue to tell us that a bad thing will happen, albeit in a temporally confusing fashion. Bendis is really more of a character writer than a plot man, and there are other books that would he’d be better suited to. The frustrating thing about his stories is that he usually has solid ideas but they’re often unnecessarily undermined by ropey plotting. If you didn’t like his earlier Avengers stories, well, there’s no real reason to think this will be any different. I do like the basic idea, and I like the art; there’s some decent character work with the main players, as you’d expect. But something tells me Bendis is also the sort of writer whose tendency to gloss over tedious plot mechanics will make for painful time-travel stories. It’s a decent enough debut issue, but there’s nothing really to suggest that this series will steer clear of the problems that tend to plague Bendis when he’s writing this sort of thing.
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1 – God, this really doesn’t interest me at all. This must be what the X-books look like to normal people. Having enjoyed the early issues of Batman & Robin, I’m now starting to be reminded of why I dropped Grant Morrison’s Batman run in the first place. Bruce Wayne isn’t dead, he’s just stranded in the past. From the look of this, it’s going to be Bruce coming through time and (presumably) fighting Vandal Savage in each era. Which is fine, I suppose, except that I don’t really care about Vandal Savage and a bunch of cavemen hitting each other kind of leaves me cold. It’s got art by Chris Sprouse, so it looks the part, and it certainly gets its idea across well enough… I just have the sinking feeling that I’m not very interested.
Birds of Prey #1 – Yes, yes, I know, I always whine when DC revive an old property just for the hell of it. But I’m playing my Hypocrite Card for this one, because it’s Birds of Prey by Gail Simone and… well, okay, Gail Simone and Ed Benes, whose art was never my favourite feature of the book first time round. Actually, though, it’s fine here, and relatively light on the eye-rollingly glaring cheesecake stuff that used to interrupt the story from time to time. Oracle get her old crew back together to deal with a baddie who specifically demands it, and the reunion scene is nicely played in a way that tells us it’s kind of a big deal for the characters without going over the top. And just to stop you thinking this is going to be a complete retread of the original series, it’s also got Hawk and Dove (hence the Brightest Day crossover tag, as Hawk is one of the characters revived for that storyline – there’s no sign of any other plot tie-in, though). Once you get past the bird theme, Hawk is of course a singularly unsuitable member of the Birds of Prey, which is precisely why I’m looking forward to seeing Simone write him.
Booster Gold #32 – Along similar lines, Keith Giffen and J M DeMatteis are reunited as co-writers on Booster Gold, who was one of the main comedy figures in their legendary Justice League International run. It’s not branded on the cover, but to judge from the last page, this is going to tie in with the Justice League: Generation Lost series (also co-written by Giffen). This first issue basically sees Giffen and DeMatteis picking up the status quo that they inherited from Dan Jurgens – Booster as a deliberately obscure time-travelling hero who goes around sorting out the timeline – and superimposing their style on it. If you’ve read the earlier stories then you know the schtick, and it’s basically along the familiar lines, but it’s still an amusing read, complete with a supervillain who’s just a little too keen to hammer home her “obsessed with a giant eyeball” routine. Artist Chris Batista turns out to be a fairly good match for them – it’s bright, happy stuff, maybe more comfortable with the action than the comedy, but still fitting the material.
Dark Avengers #16 – The final issue of the series is basically a Siege epilogue and it’s actually quite satisfying. Norman Osborn has been defeated, so all that remains is to put an end to his ersatz Avengers – um, except for Daken, who has his own book and has to escape. With him out of the way, though, this issue makes an effective job of providing a sense of resolution. One of the things I like about the wrap-up of Siege is that there’s no attempt to segue into the next story – the bad guys are defeated, the good guys won, and that’s an end of it. I’m not sure Bendis ever quite reached the full potential of his take on Norman Osborn – part sincere hawk, part maniac – but the closing scene with him in jail is lovely.
Frenemy of the State #1 – There being a big pile of these still to go, I’ll refer you to the podcast for proper discussion. This is Oni’s new ongoing series about, well, a sort of society heiress who’s secretly a spy. It’s a bit light on rounded characters, but the idea has some potential.
Justice League: Generation Lost #1 – DC’s other biweekly series, written by Keith Giffen and Judd Winick with art by Giffen and Aaron Lopresti, seems like it might be a better read than Brightest Day is turning out to be. Maxwell Lord is back from the dead, and he has a plan to use his mind-control powers to set the world to rights. (Which is his scene from Brightest Day #0 – this issue explains what he was after.) Maxwell Lord is terribly, terribly dangerous, and so all the heroes are desperate to stop him… until everything ends up falling on the second-tier heroes from Justice League International. This isn’t a semi-comedy book, but it does seem to be making an attempt to rehabilitate Lord as somebody who started off well-intentioned, and I really quite liked the closing twist. Might stick with this one for a bit.
New Mutants #13 – Chapter 7 of “Second Coming” and, uh, let’s see, what happened in this one again? Let’s see… plot point, plot point, token scene with the title characters, subplot setting up the X-Club’s tie-in one-shot… Ah, here’s a rather good scene with Dani and Hope, where Zeb Wells does probably the best job yet of showing us that the X-Men’s extended cast resent the amount of effort that the X-Men are putting into protecting this allegedly vital character. Yup, liked that bit. Other than that, it’s one of those crossover stories that has a lot of plot to chew through, and ends up leaving the New Mutants themselves with nothing much to contribute.
Wolverine #900 – The mind boggles, doesn’t it? A Wolverine #900 one-shot? Are there really people in Marvel so dumb that they didn’t understand that Deadpool #900 was a joke? This isn’t a comedy issue at all, in any way shape or form – it’s an anthology of Wolverine shorts, titled by somebody who has heard of humour but never really seen it in action. It opens with a vignette that’s really little more than an opportunity for David Finch to draw Wolverine (and hey, if you want a few pages of David Finch drawing Wolverine, here they are). Dean Motter and Greg Scott contribute an atmospheric noir piece, incongruously drawing on the plot of Jason Aaron’s tongue-in-cheek Wolverine: Manifest Destiny miniseries. It’s not bad at all. Todd DeZago and Jason Craig’s “Desperate Measures” is a 90s throwback dusting off Marrow, of all people, in order to make a point about the body as a weapon. Sound idea, art’s a bit rough. Marc Bernardin and Pow Rodrix’s “One Night Only” is competent anthology-fodder (it’s one of those “character X does this every year even though you’ll never hear it mentioned again” things), while Matt Yocum and Jake Bilbao do a decent strip with Wolverine helping a Delightful Little Girl through the power of violence. Oh, and there’s a couple of reprints to round off the package – one is the disappointing back-up strip from Wolverine #50 (presumably because it’s by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness, which might interest a few people), but the other is a rather good Spider-Man/Wolverine story by Zeb Wells and Paolo Rivera which probably passed largely unnoticed on its original appearance in Amazing Spider-Man Extra #2, and which genuinely merits another printing. On the whole, not bad as these anthologies go.
X-Factor #205 – You’ll be shocked to learn that the entire cast are not, in fact, dead. This is the second part of the “Second Coming” tie-in arc, which interrupted a bunch of storylines in progress. Peter David makes a reasonable job of turning that to his advantage – so, for example, poor Baron Mordo’s evil scheme was coming along nicely until the anti-mutant maniacs showed up to start shooting everything. Mind you, it’s still an attempt to accommodate an unnecessary crossover, and one which feels more like a belated hangover from the original Bastion crossover, “Operation: Zero Tolerance”, than anything much to do with “Second Coming”. It’s not a story that the book really needed, but if you’re going to do this sort of tie-in, at least Peter David and Valentine de Landro are making something of it.
X-Factor Forever #3 – In this issue: fighting! And exposition! At the same time! Yes, it’s authentically late-80s. If I’m being honest, there’s an element here of a relatively thin plot not advancing all that much, but being fleshed out with fight scenes. But against my better judgment, I don’t really mind – I liked Louise Simonson’s run on X-Factor, and on a more contemporary level, I’m enjoying Dan Panosian’s energetic, angular artwork. I can’t honestly say I’d recommend it to people who don’t have affection for the original series, but that’s hardly a major problem for a book which is unashamedly going for the nostalgia market.
X-Men Forever #23-24 – And that wraps up the first year of Chris Claremont’s X-Men Forever. I’ll try to find time to do a full review of the closing arc, but basically this is the pay-off for the Consortium arc, which climaxes in yet more plot twists that Claremont would never have been allowed to do in the regular Marvel Universe. But that’s fine by me; while X-Men Forever long since diverged from the notional idea of “what Chris Claremont would have written if he hadn’t left in 1991”, it is delivering a series where Claremont doesn’t have to worry about accommodating anyone else’s stories and can cheerfully do his own thing. And that gives the book a genuine feeling of enthusiasm which overcomes a lot of sins. It’s not an all-time great story, but it’s told with commitment. Issue #24 is a funeral story serving an epilogue for the season, and it’s fine as one of those pause-to-reflect issues that a superhero book needs every so often.
X-Men Legacy #236 – “Second Coming” part 8. Bastion puts a big red globe over San Francisco and traps the X-Men inside. Along with the population of San Francisco. But hey, you can’t make an omelette and so forth. It’s a bouncy little superhero story, but the art’s very much hit and miss. As so often, Greg Land veers between genuinely effective splash pages and faces that seem to have been pasted in from random sources with awkward expressions. Colourist Justin Ponsor makes it all pleasantly bright and shiny, though.
X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back #4 – I’ll come back to this miniseries in a later post. I’m not quite sure what I think of this one, to be honest. It’s certainly different, and it makes quite good use of the teenage characters. But I’m not sold on the overhaul of Pixie herself. Okay, they’ve already linked her to Limbo, so I can see the logic in giving her some other magical connections… but the Mastermind stuff seems a bit unnecessary. Still, a visually interesting mini with its own voice that actually had a story to tell about its title character, and that’s always a good thing.
Zatanna #1 – And once again, see the podcast. Zatanna, a retro stage magician who’s also a real sorceress, is a minor-league DC characters who I’ve always quite liked, but giving her an ongoing series seems a bit optimistic in the current climate. Still, she’s got something different, and Paul Dini and Stephane Roux do a good job here setting up the premise. It’s not so much that the plot is out of the ordinary. It’s more that Dini throws random magical elements into the real world to give the murder scenes a darkly absurd quality, and that’s where the book gets to be distinctive.
In case you didn’t know (and didn’t just not mention it in the pod), Dini is married to magician Misty Lee and Zatanna now seems to be drawn to resemble her.
Anyone know if the story that Dini met his wife while she was cosplaying as Zatanna is true?
And by “random sources,” we of course mean “pornography.”
Paul, did you read the Siege Fallen Sun one-shot? I was hoping to hear your thoughts on the revelation involving Rogue and the Sentry.
All right, I was fairly certain already, but with these reviews I’m definitely off New Mutants. As a very occasional buyer of comics, these endless tie-ins to stories I won’t read are a tedious waste of money. The last trade was made up entirely of two different tie-ins, with reference to a third and the promise of a fourth in the “next issue” announcement at the end. And now you tell me that the stars of the comic are barely even in the most recent story. This is why I stopped buying superhero comics in the first place.
I love the idea that Batman’s not really dead, he’s just living thousands of years ago. It’s like saying “William Shakespeare isn’t dead – he’s alive in the 16th century!”
Maybe the end of Batman’s adventure in the past hasn’t been published yet (didn’t read the issue, don’t know if it ends with him in the present or still in the past) but one way or another, it’s already happened from the point of view of someone in 2010. Maybe it ends with Bruce dying to be reborn later, becoming immortal, going into suspended animation, travelling forward in time, whatever, but “still alive in the past” isn’t an option that makes any sort of sense.
On another note: if you haven’t read the script at the end of Xenogenesis, it’s worth a look. I, for one, find it interesting to see which of the writer’s ideas didn’t really make it to the page. For example, the plants and wildlife in the first few pages are supposed to be obviously mutated and/or alien – I though that was just how the artist drew normal plants and animals. There’s also a part I found amusing, where the script mentions Emma leaning on the back of Wolverine’s in the middle of the conversation on the plane implying she’s supposed to be coming up from behind him, but she’s drawn in front of him instead, requiring a row of seats to disappear in the middle of the conversation so Emma can lean forward to put her hand over Wolverine’s shoulder. That’s the kind of thing I find fascinating on a “behind the scenes” level.
(By the way, that’s supposed to say the script has Emma “…leaning on the back of Wolverine’s seat…”)
I was a little surprised in a Second Coming book from last week (reiterated in this week’s book) to find that Karma’s leg was amputated. When it actually happened a couple of weeks back, it really just looked like she got stabbed in the leg, and I didn’t pick up that it was any particularly serious injury. Imagine my surprise.
Also, it just seems stupid to me to maim a character for pretty much absolutely no reason.
Is there really any big online cry for Agents of Atlas? I admit that I don’t frequent the major comics board and sites, but I’ve seen nothing online like the support for Spider-Girl or Priest’s Black Panther run. I have, however, run into people wondering why Marvel is so intent on pushing Atlas.
“Atlas” is one of their better books and Parker has done a good job on it. Marvel said before even the first volume ended that the book would be back and the backup + mini method was just a way of drawing attention to it and its characters. Now, if the book succeeds, Marvel has another way of gaining and promoting interest in books if they don’t hook readers right out the gate. If it fails, well, that’s just another quality book out the window because it didn’t feature popular A-listers like Wolverine and Spider-man.
As for Karma in X-men, her situation is hard to track. They made it seem like a major issue when her leg was damaged, then in Uncanny, she’s smiling and being a sarcastic pain in the butt. When and if Elixir shows his golden face, Karma will nothing to worry about because those are the type of issues he can fix. If Elixir is still missing in action after this event, Karma will probably have a metal leg or something. She’ll be edgy then, right?
Is it just me, or does this Batman thing sound exactly like what Marvel did with Captain America? Not really dead, just reliving the past? I think that’s an impressively ridiculous way of backing out of a death.
As for Karma, I do suspect we’ll be seeing a metal leg, although I guess Elixir should technically be able to regrow her leg. He did regrow David Alleyne’s heart.
Actually, speaking of Karma, where are Leong and Nga? They never turned up in San Fracisco or on Utopia, did they?
“Paul, did you read the Siege Fallen Sun one-shot? I was hoping to hear your thoughts on the revelation involving Rogue and the Sentry.”
Yeah I was wondering myself. The web has been alight with righteous indignation over this, and I do think it’s kind of warranted. To have something so major in Rogue’s life be tossed into a story that’s nothing to do with her, and is just about ‘studding up’ Sentry (and reduces her to a notch on his Mary-Sue bedpost) is really quite insulting to Rogue’s character.
Worst though is that it’s impossible, canonically, and by Jenkins’ own writing: There is no way her dialogue can refer to a time AFTER Rogue already had sex with Gambit, and since Sentry returned well after that, it must have been in some distant past before Sentry’s memory loss thing happened and he disappeared.
Sadly Jenkins already established in Sentry #4 that he disappeared while the original 5 X-Men were still the only ones. He was gone before even Logan or Kurt join the team and he specifically doesn’t recognise neither them nor, specifically shown, Rogue. So by Sentry’s own tale, it CAN’T happened then either. He never met her before he disappeared.
(Not to mention the fact that in those days Rogue would’ve been what, 14-15??)
A foul up of rare proportions…
“in those days Rogue would’ve been what, 14-15”
I’ve only seen scans of that first appearance, but she sure looks like she’s aged Mork-style since then.
She was probably a sprightly seventy-five back then. But they always say that they built them stronger in those days, by gar.
//\oo/\\
From the look of the previews for this week’s X-Force, Elixir is going to be kept busy regrowing limbs for the forseeable future…
Paul, did you read the Siege Fallen Sun one-shot? I was hoping to hear your thoughts on the revelation involving Rogue and the Sentry
From last week :
“Oh, and before anyone asks, no, I haven’t read the Sentry story, and no, I’m not planning to. It does sound god-awful, but it’s the sort of god-awful which gets quietly forgotten after a fortnight, so who cares? Perhaps it’s an ironic meta-twist: for the Sentry to save the Marvel Universe, everyone must forget him again, and to achieve that, he strives to appear in the sort of stories everyone would prefer to pretend they never read.”
Mammalian Verisimilitude:
Judging by the pictures on her website, it would appear that Misty Lee cosplays as Zatanna as a matter of course…
http://www.mistylee.com/gallery/
“Oh, and before anyone asks, no, I haven’t read the Sentry story, and no, I’m not planning to. It does sound god-awful, but it’s the sort of god-awful which gets quietly forgotten after a fortnight, so who cares? Perhaps it’s an ironic meta-twist: for the Sentry to save the Marvel Universe, everyone must forget him again, and to achieve that, he strives to appear in the sort of stories everyone would prefer to pretend they never read.”
Ah, apologies, I never saw that. Not dignifying this with a review or even a read is probably best. It was every bit as awful as it sounded.
But then the Sentry should’ve stayed in his Marvel Knight Mini where he was just a not-necessarily-canonical neat superhero idea. Bringing him to the mainstream marvelverse was a big mistake.
Does Zini mention or make use of Zatanna’s recent miniseries by Grant Morrison? Come to think of it, has it even been acknowledged by anyone at DC?
I’m surprised you didn’t talk about what’s really notable about Astonishing, given that it’s really the only book that you’ll see Storm anywhere, and that she, along with all the other characters, are drawn completely ridiculously. Granted, that little bit of entertainment can’t make up for a book that is cliche and repetitive at best and borderline racist and offensive at worst.
As for The Return of Bruce Wayne, it’s funny that you find it terribly boring. I, for one, have never read a modern Batman comic; I’ve always wanted to, and ever since he “died”, and I picked up an issue or two of Batman and Robin, I realized that I would never want to unless it had the man himself, Bruce Wayne in it. So I picked up this, knowing next to nothing about the storyline, except the basic premise. I wasn’t disappointed, it was an issue of Bruce Wayne acting Batman-y back in caveman times. Purely what I expected. Decent action, decent plot. I can’t say that it inspired me to pick up the regular series et al, given that I can’t really afford more comics, but I just wanted to provide another perspective of a non-regular Batman reader on this singularly insider series.
I’ve been picking up the trades for the pre-Final Crisis run as and when possible – the bloody paperback schedule is agoravating – and I’ve enjoyed most of what I’ve read. Couple of bits of plot chaffle that seem needlessly overcomplicated, and I am past the end of my tolerance for this…holographic approach to backstory, but I am digging it like Carousel.
(I’e been up for about a week. It does not work. I do not care.)
Is Batman: Riff! Iam! Pow! out yet in paperback? JUNE THE BASTARD SEVENTEENTH. DAMNIT, JOHN.
– – the point being, I’m looking forward to reading all this other stuff as well, and as soon as this ridiculous schedule makes possible.
//\Oo/\\
“Is it just me, or does this Batman thing sound exactly like what Marvel did with Captain America? Not really dead, just reliving the past?”
Except that Batman was revealed to be in the past at the end of Final Crisis #7, which came out at the beginning of 2009. Captain America Reborn came out much later.
i can see how karma going through another traumatic experience goes with the plans wells seemed to be having for her before the crossover began.
i think the whole thing could have been handeled a bit better, though. in NM #12, it looks like she only got stabbed. in the following issue (legacy #235) she is drawn with one leg, but you only see it if you pay attention (and who wants to pay that much attention to greg lands art). they could have milked it for some more drama.
— Dark Avengers #16 and New Avengers Finale were both quite good, but I’m not terribly interested in Avengers #1; Bendis isn’t just a character man, he’s a flawed character man, and that seems weirdly at odds with the tone the Heroic Age is going for.
Siege itself…well, it was as good as a Reset Button series is going to be, I suppose, though typically ropey in the plotting. On a side note, Bendis’s latest interview makes it clear that he and Thor writer Kieron Gillen weren’t remotely on the same page regarding Loki’s motives.
— Suspiciously similar as the plot ideas are, Return of Bruce Wayne differs slightly from Captain America: Reborn in that Steve Rogers was reliving his own past, while Bruce is bouncing through the millennia before his birth.
The series really seems to be about plugging Batman into various “historical adventure” genres. So we get Cave-Batman, Solomon Kane-Batman, Wild West Batman, etc.
I don’t know where the idea that Batman will fight Savage in every time period comes from, by the by. I’d expect someone like Klarion to turn up in the next chapter rather than Savage, for example.
— Why would Dini need to reference the Zatanna mini? Didn’t its events amount to giving her back her old setup and status quo before they were screwed up by Identity Crisis?
As to Misty Lee…she’s an actual stage magician; she’s not cosplaying as Zatanna so much as Zatanna’s costume is based on traditional stage magician outfits.
Is there an interview or article out there that actually sets forth what they’re going for with “The Heroic Age”? I don’t really follow the comics press, so I’m not sure if they’ve really set forth the ground rules of what they want.
I know what _I_ would like (basically to see the classic setup and storytelling style for a while), and I’m pretty sure that’s not what Marvel is going for.
I was really hoping that the big reset button would at least restore Stark to “smart guy that puts on a suit of armor,” but it looks instead like we’re getting “movie Stark personality, and he’s barely human anymore, with some kind of liquid metal armor that oozes from his pores.” So much for that…
On the New Mutants front, I can *barely* remember what the book is supposed to be about and why it exists outside of nostalgia purposes. This is what happens, I suppose, when Marvel decides to do 3 events one after another. New Mutants purpose got tossed by the way side and had to slow its progression to accommodate events it didn’t have much of a reason to be associated with.
I want the same thing from Heroic Age. Give us decent, old-school with a new-school twist super-heroics. Like the Avengers we got out of Heroes Return years back. And Marvel’s hype made it sound like that’s what we would be getting. But, nope, same old Bendis Avengers.
Bendis lately has inherited some really annoying traits, like Millar’s sledgehammer of subtlty, telling you how cool and awesome and super amazing his story is by having all of his characters completely flip out and speak in the same voice. Secret Invasion was unbearable, with somebody yelling “Oh My God” or “Oh no… No!” every two minutes. What transpires on the page rarely portrays the tone that Bendis is aiming for. And this was the writer that used to get praise for his compelling dialogue.
Another thing that annoys me is when every Bendis character has that same smart-ass buddy cop dialogue, cutting the other person off and finishing their thought. Example:
Character A: “He didn’t”
Character B: “He did”
Character A: “You mean he..”
Character B: “Yeah, don’t ask how.”
Character A: “How?”
Character B: “I said don’t ask how.”
Character A: “Wow.”
Character B: “That’s what I said.”
Just insert any combination of Cage, Wolverine, Jessica Jones, Stark, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, etc. in there, add a few “Oh My Gods” here and there and you have your basic Bendis comic.
And like Claremont before with Sage, Bendis has his Maria Hill. A character who has barely shown anything more then a one-dimensional personality in all the time she has been around. He obviously sees something in her that many readers don’t, I groaned when she showed up in Avengers #1.
Wow, that probably the most negative thing I’ve written, rant over.
Indeed, something like a Heroes Return return to basics was what I was hoping for, but having Bendis stay on as the driving force of the line (with basically the same team of Avengers) killed my hope for that pretty quickly.
I can tolerate Bendis’ dialog quirks in something like Ultimate Spidey, but having everybody in the Avengers talk as you described above is getting more and more annoying to me. I don’t know if I’m just noticing it more or if Bendis’ tics have gotten worse over time.
Hooooooold on. You guys liked Heroes Reborn? AND you want it again? Because that is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard! Heroes Reborn was awful!
As for Stark, I think Fraction’s run on Iron man has been completely inspired, and probably the best work that’s ever been done with the character. I really like the idea that Stark has managed to engineer his body into, essentially, a machine.
And has Bendis really used Maria Hill all that much? He created her and used her as a villain, he eventually had her transfer power to Tony Stark, and between then (Civil War) and now (Siege), the only person using her was Matt Fraction. He’s actually only used her in two books (three if you include her small role in Secret Invasion). In any case, I’d say her appearances in Invincible Iron Man have established her as much more than a one-dimensional character.
@Lambnesio:
Heroes RETURN, not Heroes REBORN. Huge difference.
Return: Busiek/Perez
Reborn: Liefeld
OH! My mistake. Yikes. Okay. Yes.
Fraction’s Iron Man has its moments, but the “turning his body into a machine” is mostly Ellis, and a whole lot of the last two issues setting up the new status quo are treading over old ground (Stark wants out of the weapons business, Stark is having to rebuild from nothing, etc.).
I really liked the Bendis-vengers for a while, but I was hoping for something more like Busiek’s run now as well, it’s what got me into the Avengers in the first place.
Atlas and Incredible Hercules give me that fix now though, so having tried #1 I’m going to skip on Avengers until someone else takes over.
The personality of Tony Stark from the movies (and by extentsion Millar’s ULTIMATE version, which I do not think is unconnected) is far and away more interesting than the comic book version has ever been. Fortune and IQ aside, MU-616 Tony’s always been fairly generic. If more of that personality’s turning up in Fraction’s run I’m glad to hear it.
I do agree that the body-interface idea unnecessarily complicated the character, however.
And the digital/machine Tony is itself a retread from Len K’s run around IM 300 anyway…
Oh, thank God, someone else who can’t stand Sage. I feel the world is a sane place again.
I sort of did like Sage before Claremont went completely insane with her. She was definitely a usable character circa the first few arcs of X-Treme X-Men.
I actually see/saw a lot of potential in Sage, but when she moved away from the X-Men any forward momentum seemed to disappear.
By the way, everybody go out and read “Secret Avengers” which is Avengers done right! It doesn’t make Bendis’s stuff look bad, per se, but definitely highlights how much of the frachise’s potential he’s been squandering.
The thing that always bugged me about Sage was that I actually liked Tessa. I know she had so little character development that her sourcebook entries had to resort to flagrant speculation to say anything about her beyond her name and affiliation, but I liked the idea of her as basically the Waylan Smithers to Sebastian Shaw’s Monty Burns. She never came across as a bad guy, just fanatically loyal to someone who was a bad guy.
And then we find out that she was an Afghani freedom fighter or something that Xavier met literally the day his legs were first paralyzed and somehow that never came up before, and he decided that the best use for a mutant with actual combat training and superhuman organizational abilities and the power to trigger other mutants’ powers was to send her AWAY from the X-Men to go undercover as a villain’s secretary in Victorian lingerie (though sending young girls with no combat skills and passive powers, like Kitty Pryde and Karma, into combat was just fine) in which position she not only did nothing to hamper the Hellfire Clubs various plots but apparently never saw fit to actually WARN Xavier about them (or if she did, he never passed that on to the X-Men – or, for that matter, mentioned to people like Wolverine that maybe they shouldn’t kill her if things got ugly).
Is it so much to ask that retcons make the damn tiniest bit of sense?
And that’s not even getting into Claremont’s “let’s just keep giving her new powers until the readers think she’s as cool as I do” phase.