Welcome to the 9th installment of the new Leave Your Spandex @t the Door! Wednesday is Comic Book Day in the U.S., and LYS@D is here again with this week’s Early Bird Reviews, so you can catch up on what rocks and what flops this week before you head to your local LCS! I’d like to thank Travelling Man Manchester for providing me with the advance look copies for review!
Apologies for the delay in posting the reviews this week, but I’m still struggling to recuperate from my wild weekend in London. I had travelled there for a very special talk in Tate Museum: Alan Moore discussing William Blake as a special guest for the “Gothic Nightmares“ exhibition. You can learn more about the exhibition by visiting the official website of Tate Britain.
I am not well versed in the work of Fuseli or Blake, so I will do my best to recount Alan Moore’s talk, so will the art buffs in my audience please forgive any discrepancies. This is what I, as a ‘casual’ audience, absorbed from the talk. Moore was a magnetic presence in the packed beyond capacity pink room entitled “Superheroes”. I wonder who had thought of that little ironic wink. He was comfortable and verbose with the enormous audience from the start. He was always polite, even to some annoying fanboy types in the audience who thought it an appropriate question after the end of the talk to ask Moore to sign their Promethea copy (to ensuing booing and hissing from the rest of us).
Alan prefaced his talk by humorously trying to rationalise why they invited him to discuss Blake. Is it because he had included him as a character in From Hell? Is it because of the comics connection? He went on to explain how Superman fit in with Blake’s Romantic theory by recounting a story from Alan Swartz’s autobiography. How real is Superman? If he is just a comic book character, how can his idea dictate to writers how he can or cannot be written? And how different is he from the aboriginal gods, when (in the most amusing of Moore’s real event anecdotes in the talk) his spirit too can be as easily summoned by a shaman in an hour of need?
Although Blake and Fuseli’s work has similarities as one had acted as the othe’s inspiration, they had lived different lives. Fuseli after the success of his Nightmare had rested on his laurels and produced work in the similar vein as Nightmare to guarantee him a safe and luxurious life. In Moore’s mind, this had hindered his artistic progress, as opposed to Blake who was happy to live a life of poverty while serving only his art.
At the end of the talk, he has implanted some vital questions in my mind: Blake recognised two realities: the material reality around us and the reality of our thoughts; which is more real? The chair under our bum originated from someone’s thought of a chair and what we perceive as our inner voice was once regarded as a god talking in our head.
Afterwards, Moore invited some questions from the audience although obviously exhausted from the strain of standing this long despite the stress on his back. The most interesting came from my friend (and www.comicdom.gr columnist) Vassilis Sakkos. It lead to Moore recounting his perception of life and death: every moment we live doesn’t just pass, but it exists forever and can be revisited. When we die we are reborn into our own life as babies. Reliving our lives is our own personal heaven, and also our hell. For a more precise recounting, check out the last issue of Tom Strong, where Moore realises his theory through the end of the world as the Strongs know it.
On to this week’s reviews! Marvel has gone full throttle this week, but none of the books I read made it beyond ‘below average’.
Uncanny X-Men #471
Marvel
Writer: Chris Claremont
Artist: Billy Tan
Review content: It was a struggle this week to decide which was Bottom of the Heap: Uncanny or FF. In the red corner, Claremont churns out another forgettable fight issue. I haven’t read the previous issues, but it seems like the Shi’ar are after Marvel Girl for some reason or another. So they come after her with a pack of new characters that would honestly look fresh and appealing if not for Billy Tan’s sluggish and boring pencils. (I’ve seen them on previous covers and they did look cool. Tan has just sucked all the fun out of them.) In the end they fight, a huge gun is fired, a predictable stunt is pulled and one team wins while noone reading it cares one way or the other.
Regardless of how nice that preview cover from Brubake’s run looks, I can’t believe Tan will pull an 180 and produce some worthwhile art. If he actually can and is the Jim Lee renaissant, why is he hiding his talents from us and pretending to be the new Mark Pacella? That’s not nice at all, mr Tan! Claremont’s stories are readable lately if you allow yourself to drift into the art and ignore the wordy balloons and captions. In this issue, I kept bouncing between the two, not being able to focus on something mildly interesting to get me through the issue. Is F really the lowest grade I can give?
Score: F
New Avengers special: Illuminati
Marvel
Writer: Brian Bendis
Artist: Alex Maleev
Review content: The best issue in the previews bunch from Marvel, but still admittedly weak.
So Marvel U’s big heads (not necessarily brains: Reed Richards, Dr Strange, Professor X, Namor, Black Panther, Black Bolt and Iron Man) got together right after the Kree-Skrull War to talk shop. And they decide to make a super-secret/can’t-even-tell-Sue society of super-Egos to make big decisions for the planet as a self-assigned superhero royalty noone knows about. Although the absurdity of this and other decisions and behaviours is addressed in the story, it still doesn’t excuse this out-of-character behaviour. Poor Ironman has been saddled with the role of Marvel’s @$$hole, since Bendis must have felt the vacuum when comparing DC’s successful bastardisation of Batman in the last years.
No credible explanation is given as to why only these lunkheads got invited to dinner while equally capable characters were left out: no Avengers leaders Captain America and Wasp (well, no females at all, thankyouverymuch), no Magneto and Dr Doom (although a leader of nation and equally as villainous as Namor ever was), no other leader of nation since only these yahoos were spandex to work.
So, anyway, these guys get together, they talk and they fight and of course they punch each other so we can take a breath from the repeating portrait shot talking heads. Then they part their ways, and get back together after House of M. Since the number of mutants worldwide has been decimated (in Earth Marvel’s Wikipedia entry it means 198 left out of millions), the government is afraid the new reduced number of mutant terrorists and criminals calls for immediate action and they intend to pass a bill requiring all superhumans to unmask, register and show up in the morning at SHIELD headquarters for work. Yeah, that will go down well, I’m sure.
In between all of that, the big heads decide enough is enough, and they should exile their old drinking buddy Bruce Banner to space”¦ So they ask for his help with something, lure him into a satellite and ship him to another planet. Gee, how nice. I’m sure they even expect it to last.
After all this, what actually annoyed me most about the issue? Ironman’s gruelling monologue, in which he makes a prediction about future events. The monologue isn’t as annoying as the fact that it is so bluntly accurate concerning the events of Civil War #1 (previewed in the back of the issue) that it immediately has the reader questioning Stark’s familiarity with the Time Platform and then wishing bodily harm on Bendis for falling so low as a writer to include this in the issue.
Score: D
Fantastic Four #536
Marvel
Writer: JMS
Artist: Mike McKone
Review content: Ah! The Blue corner! See that spiffy cover: Dr Doom’s hand grasping the fallen Mjolnir! Oh the suspense! The agony! The questions! The”¦
“¦
wait
Does this scene even take place in this issue? Oh, right: it doesn’t! The cover actually depicts what happens in the opening page of next issue after this one’s great surprise ending splash page revealing that Dr Doom and Mjolnir are back! Oh shock!
So how can this issue contest Uncanny X-Men as the worst of the week? The writing is really equally bad. And while UXM at least featured the (boring, ok) culmination of a storyline, this FF issue was just filler and hype for Civil War. It follows straight from the Illuminati special, and even reprints a page from the special in the middle of the story as some sort of lazy man’s flashback. I found it terribly off-putting, and I dread we will be seeing that stupid page in every Marvel issue this month.
So, Reed comes home after guest-starring in the Illuminati special, we get the page reprint, and then the FF race to fight a bunch of Doom droids before the real doctor shows up and we get the next issue blurb. Oh, and apparently the Thing and Torch hate each others guts, with JMS instilling some aborted comicbook wittiness by having the Thing essentially telling his buddy to F**** off while he’s been knocked down by the enemy they’re fighting.
This issue could be worse than UXM, but at least it still has pretty art. Still, the grade is the same:
Score: F
Lucifer #72
DC/Vertigo
Writer: Mike Carey
Artist: Pete Gross
Review content: Thank heavens (or reasonable post-apocalyptic facsimile thereof) for Mike Carey, my ray of sunshine in the week of stagnant Marvel darkeness. (please don’t knock me for the Marvel hate this week. Check out previous weeks, they actually have some other stuff I enjoy!)
This is the mother of status-quo shattering issues! God/Yahweh is kaput, and Gabriel’s bastard daughter Elaine Belloc is the newly appointed Creator. So she now toils to create a new Universe in Her image. Meanwhile, Lucifer does the nasty with Izenami, the Death goddess of another realm. Of course, Lucifer, being an angel of his former grace, has no genitalia, so Izenami’s recounting of the event later is rather enjoyable and caustic. Both Izenami and Ellaine’s stories ran back to issues 4-9 of the series, so I don’t see how any new readers could approach this title now, 4 issue before final curtain, but the pay-off for long readers is well worth it.
Following her whoopee with the ex-Devil, Izanami undergoes a transformation to set up the final confrontation of the series. The biggest shocker comes from the meeting between Lucifer and his former lover (again, how?) and general, Mazikeen. Unexpected, shocking and touching the change in Mazikeen literally turns the tables on what I was expecting from the series finale.
On the art front, the book staggers from the departure of Ryan Kelly (over to a successful solo career on LOCAL) as art assist to the talented Pete Gross. Gross and Kelly had an amazing synergistic artistic relationship. As they had described in an older interview, they would both work on every page not in a strictly penciller/inker dynamic, but each drawing different aspects of the page, with Kelly usually setting the scene. With Kelly’s replacement, the new inker fails to bring out Gross’ dynamic line, and the end result is more thick-lined and blunt. Still a minor complaint in my overall enjoyment of the issue.
Score: B
Aaaaand that’s a wrap for this week! I’m waiting your comments and feedback through email to Manolis@gmail.com. If you self-publish your own comics or represent an indy comics company, add me to your press release list, and I will run your news in this space every week.
Manolis Vamvounis
a.k.a. Dr. Dooplove
