Not So Marvelous

I've been enjoying Marvel's new Captain Marvel series, but for the book's run so far, my enjoyment has been largely in spite of the art. Dexter Soy has never seemed like a very good fit for the book's tone, and it was sometimes hard to follow the action, but I was getting used to it by the end there. I just read Captain Marvel #9 though, and I kind of wish Soy was back.

There's a definite stylization to Filipe Andrade's art, which could make the book more expressive and dynamic, and that's almost certainly what they're going for. It'd work, too, if it weren't quite so inconsistent. The character work is really ugly, with characters eyes sliding around their faces and whatnot. Most of the close-up shots are actually quite good, so I don't know if he was just rushed or what, but some panels make Carol look like a flounder or Sloth.

Andrade's art, at its best, reminds me of Humberto Ramos, and at worst, like the late Carlos Meglia, whose work on Superman in the early 2000s was some of the worst professional comics pencilling I can remember seeing. It had the same problems as Andrade's: inconsistent, deformed characters, unclear perspective (there's a panel in this Captain Marvel issue where Spider-Woman looks like she's been shrunk because there are no indicators that Capt. Marvel is meant to be closer to the reader), and visual continuity errors (besides the dramatically shifting size of Carol's tablet/phone in the early pages, there's the issue that since the redesign, Carol has had notably and intentionally short, and not flowing butt-length, hair).

To add insult to injury, on the last page Carol is told she has some kind of lesion on her brain, a ticking time bomb. And, well...

Look, it's a minor thing, but there's a writer, a letterer, and two editors working on this book. Somewhere along the line, someone should have noticed that a bomb is defused, not diffused. The goal with a bomb is to remove its fuse (literally or figuratively) so it won't blow up, to de-fuse it. The last thing you want is for it to be spread evenly throughout the area; in fact, diffusion of the bomb is what you're trying to prevent.

Altogether, the sloppy art and editing error make this book look rushed, which isn't totally surprising given Marvel's wacky scheduling antics. I can't speak for everyone, but I'd certainly be more happy with one polished issue a month than two or three that were rushed to meet an unreasonable deadline. Especially when they end up with the same cover price.

The Sad State of Things Today

Comics that are not currently available from the DC Digital store:

• The comic where Superman and Wonder Woman realize that they wouldn't work as a romantic couple.
  
• The comic where Clark Kent proposes to fiancée Lois Lane.
  
• The comic where Clark Kent reveals his true identity to Lois Lane.
  
• The comic where Clark Kent and Lois Lane get married.
  
• The comic where Superman and Wonder Woman fight for a thousand years in Valhalla, but Superman won't break his vow against killing or his fidelity and love for Lois Lane.
  

Comics that are currently available from the DC Digital Store:

• The comic where Clark Kent lectures Lois Lane on proper journalistic integrity.
  
• The comic where Clark Kent lectures Lois Lane about her love life and how he doesn't really want to be just friends with her.
  
• The comic where, five years after she entered Man's World, Wonder Woman gets the idea of a secret identity from Clark Kent, who takes her out for her first real date despite the fact that she dated Steve Trevor for an extended period of time.
  
• The comic where Superman beats Lois Lane, his pregnant wife, to death in space.
  

Happy 75th anniversary, Lois and Clark!

Let the Power Return!

I don't talk about it very often on the blog, but my early online life was dominated with He-Man. Very shortly after getting my very first AOL account, I signed up for the He-Man Mailing List, which I eventually became the head of (and...kind of let die when I stopped using my AOL account). I cut my argumentative chops on the He-Man.org message boards, fighting conspiracy theories and the obviously mistaken notion that "Grayskull" is properly spelled with an e. So when I heard that there were going to be new He-Man comics, I was pretty thrilled.

And then they were...not so good. The main story was a weird 'Lord of the Rings' pastiche, and the one-shots were generally awful. This was back in the early 2000s, which also gave us such disappointing 80s-revival comic ideas as "WilyKat and WilyKitt are sex slaves!" and "Pat Lee should take credit for someone else's Transformers art!" I understand that there was a lot of interference from Mattel in terms of what kinds of stories the folks at Image/Crossgen/MV Creations could tell, and it's not like they weren't big fans of the franchise. Heck, several of the people involved in making the Masters of the Universe comics were folks I'd chatted with for years on the mailing list and message boards. But in the end, it might have been better for some seasoned comics writers to be working on the series, or for Mattel to give some creative latitude. The failure of those comics, and the weird toyetic costume and focus change on the cartoon, really helped to kill my interest in He-Man. To date, there are still a bunch of episodes and issues of the 2002-era Masters of the Universe series that I haven't seen. Though, of course, I own them all.

About my only outlet for He-Fandom is that I still buy the occasional awesome, overpriced Masters of the Universe Classics figure, and sometimes I'll annoy my wife by turning on She-Ra reruns while she's trying to sleep. But I still love the property and the characters and the mountain of He-Man figures I have in my brand new basement. So I approached the new "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" comic series with cautious optimism.

I've picked up the main series since it started, breathing a bit of a sigh of relief when James Robinson left and Keith Giffen took over. Robinson's been more than a little hit-or-miss for me, especially of late, but Giffen is always good.

The main series has been all kinds of mediocre. The main story is decent enough--Skeletor has finally won, taking over Grayskull and erasing all memory of his hated foe, and the driving conflict of Prince Adam trying to set things right has been a good idea.

A side-point: when it came time to create the spin-off She-Ra cartoon, the writers (most of whom had worked on He-Man as well) made the smart choice to put the protagonist in the position of fighting against a dominant enemy. Skeletor and his henchmen came off looking like buffoons not only because they were, but because the status quo left them as the underdogs, fighting against King Randor's rightful government, and constantly losing. Making the Horde a dictatorship occupying Etheria meant that even though every She-Ra episode ended with Hordak's forces losing, they still ruled the world, making them seem a whole lot more dangerous.

The execution has been somewhat lacking, however. The art is...I don't know, sloppy? Rushed? It just feels unfinished, and redesigning all the characters to be even more naked than usual leads to a lot of that same uncomfortable sexualization that plagued the ThunderCats reboot ten-ish years ago.

I'm curious to see where the ongoing series will go, but so far it's very much a book I'm buying out of nostalgia rather than any considerable interest.

In the last few days, though, I checked out the digital series. I'd downloaded a couple of issues already, but only really skimmed them. With the wide variety of creative teams, it's an understandably mixed bag. Geoff Johns' indulgent tale about his original character Sir Laser-Lot was mostly fine (even if it doesn't appear to have gone/be going anywhere), and I liked Mike Costa's Cringer/Battle Cat story (even if the person at the end--Teela? Queen Marlena?) was completely unrecognizable because apparently Eternia was besieged with an anti-redhead spell. But boy, Costa's story about King Randor fighting zombies and slaughtering Leech was awful, and representative of the same "let's add blood and ultraviolence" mentality that typifies these misguided attempts to rehabilitate children's media by making them more "mature." The "kids' cartoon character was an old soldier who fought zombies" was dumb when it was Kup in a Transformers: Spotlight issue, and it's doubly dumb here. And while I liked Kyle Higgins' story about Man-At-Arms, I could have happily gone my whole life without seeing Evil-Lyn screwing a guy to gain his loyalty.

Sex! Blood! Violence! Look, I understand that He-Man has always been more than just the FILMation cartoon. I understand that those early comics and minicomics were a lot heavier on the horror-fantasy art (thanks mostly to Alfredo Alcala) and straight sword-and-sorcery concepts. I understand that the cartoon was mostly goofy, and was hamstrung in terms of what it could do and show by watchdog groups and a group of companies who were reticent to do anything that might result in a reversal of the law changes that allowed the show to exist in the first place. I wouldn't expect a new, more free version of He-Man to feel beholden to the tone and rules of the '80s cartoon; I'd expect to see people getting punched and cut with swords. But, you know, I'd also expect to see some attention given to the things that make He-Man...if not actually unique, at least not Conan.

The thing that really sets the Masters of the Universe um...universe apart is that it's a mashup of a relatively typical fantasy world with kings and princes and magic and an evil skull-faced wizard sorceror, with a hi-tech sci-fi utopia of spacecraft and lasers and cyborgs. And then there's the occasional guy with a robotic elephant head, or a villain whose power is his overpowering odor. That's the stand-out element, and often the one that gets pushed to the side in favor of more by-the-numbers fantasy/barbarian storytelling. Without the fantasy/sci-fi meshing, He-Man is just Conan + Captain Marvel.

Of course, DC isn't doing any better with Captain Marvel either.

There's only one issue of either series that I've read so far that feels anything like the He-Man I grew up with, and that was Jeff Parker's brilliant Orko-centric issue. It could have ended with a moral and a wink at the reader, for crying out loud (and basically did). It embraced the goofy, silly, cartooniness of He-Man, while the other comics (while nearly all DC Comics) have avoided it out of a pathological fear of looking silly.

Look, the MOTU Universe is one where 90% of the inhabitants wear furry underpants. Two of the main characters are a magic floating laundry pile and Scooby-Doo's tiger cousin. The main character's name is He-Man. If it's not at least a little silly, you're not doing it right.

But that's the problem with so many comics. There's this notion that "silly" is going to cause comics to lose all that mainstream respect and regard they gained in the '80s and '90s, that if comics were to embrace the old-school goofiness, somehow Watchmen and Maus would vanish in a puff of smoke, and newspaper headlines would start reading "Bam! Pow! Comics are Only for Kids Anymore!"

The thing is, comics were at their most successful when they were silly, when they were for kids. Comics aren't going to draw any new attention by racing away from all that as fast as they can, and as fast as they have been. The readership has shrunk for a variety of reasons, but one of the major ones is that there are so few comics for kids being sold where kids can get them, and at kid-friendly prices.

Publishing a He-Man comic where the Sorceress's costume now features cleavage and a navel isn't going to draw any new readers or new attention to comics. Publishing a kid-friendly one probably wouldn't either, but it also might not just blend into the background noise of comics as a whole so easily.

And unfortunately, that's all this He-Man revival has been, mostly--one more entry in the long list of comics that instead of being an all-ages book is full of the same boring blood and sex and scantily-clad characters that every other book on the shelf is full of. Only the names are different.

Resolutions

The last week and a half have been seriously stressful. Mostly just work (and a good deal of procrastination and disorganization coming back to bite me in the butt), but it's left me with almost nothing even resembling free time. Certainly not time to write, and barely even a few stolen moments to watch old Star Trek episodes or read a comic or two. I'm three months behind on Action Comics. Action Comics!

That said, I want to do more writing, and I've been doing a lot of thinking (about comics, naturally). I even thought about trying a daily posting thing for January called Jan-u-Arrah, where I'd post something about Element Lad every day, but at this point I'm just glad I didn't.

All that said, I'm going to start budgeting my time differently just as a necessity, so I'm going to try to start posting here more often. I'm setting the goal at once a week or more, which should be fairly easy by this time next week. And since it's Superman's 75th anniversary this year, I'm going to make this an even more Superman-focused blog than usual. My new tablet, loaded with comics, should make that fairly easy (and has already given me lots of ideas).

So hopefully you'll be seeing more of my writing in the near future. I've got something percolating that should be interesting, if I can get it off the ground. Check back here soon!

Pretty sure this ends with Spock kicking the Galileo Seven out of the back of the Enterprise

Shamelessness

ComicsAlliance has some info on 2013's Free Comic Book Day offerings, and among them is this, from the bizarre outfit that is Antarctic Press:

ANTARCTIC PRESS
ACTION TIME BUDDIES

(W) Robby Bevard (A/CA) Fred Perry

Kid the Adventurer and Bro the Kung-Fu Pegasus are back in an all-new story for Free Comic Book Day! The fan-favorite best buds will face fierce forests, soaring snakes, nincompoop ninjas, doofy dinosaurs, and vile villains all in the name of fun! Don't miss out on this growing hit!

Did this come out before? Like, ever? Because I've certainly never heard of it. But it's nice to see such a shameless ripoff of "Adventure Time" with a dash of "My Little Pony" thrown in there. Antarctic Press was already a strange duck with its biographical comics, and then there was the attempt-to-cash-in-too-late-on-Internet-memes Honey Badger comic, but now it seems like they're branching out into the Asylum Studios of the comic book world, putting out cheap knockoff comics that someone's grandma might mistake for the real thing.

Stay classy, Antarctic.

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Looks like I confused Antarctic and Bluewater. So I guess ignore the bit about biographical comics and my points still stand.

Some recent random comic thoughts

I'm going to make a bit of an effort to do more blogging here, even if it's just the sort of microblogging stuff I do elsewhere. Here goes!

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I love "Action Comics" (vol. 1) #775. I bought it for the fourth (fifth?) time today, in digital form, because I wanted to finally watch "Superman vs. the Elite," and wanted to re-read the story first. I probably wouldn't have dropped the $1.99 if I remembered that it was downstairs in the easily-accessible "Superman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told" trade, but I didn't.

The story is admittedly preachy. The metatext of it becomes explicit in more than one place. And frankly, I don't mind. In fact, I'd feel it was kind of hypocritical to mind; what's preachier and more metatext-as-text than Grant Morrison's "Animal Man," which I love? Superman stories have some leeway in terms of preachiness, I think. Moralizing is part of the character, and I don't think that's a bad thing. Superman should be the moral center of the DCU (and Captain America, for the Marvel Universe), and with that comes a bit of preachiness, a bit of allegorical storytelling.

It helps, of course, that I largely agree with the allegory. But you know, people have been clamoring for more violent, take-no-prisoners heroes for decades, and other people have been responding to it in kind for the same amount of time. There's a big part of "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" that's this same kind of statement, and it's the subtext underlying the whole "Death and Return of Superman" story. That's leaving aside the "Astro City" story with Supersonic, or "Knightfall," which are saying similar things.

And considering that two of the main characters in the original Authority are riffs on Superman and Batman, it's not like the pastiche and allegory began with Joe Kelly.

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"Superman vs. The Elite" was quite good. I love George Newbern's Superman, and I wish he didn't get such short shrift on the character in favor of Tim Daly. About the only problem I had with it was the animation, which just felt kind of weird. The places where it tried to ape the grittiness and brutality of Mahnke's original art fell fairly flat. Otherwise, the stylization was fine, but it was just weird to see the disparity between the two styles.

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Today, I finally read through "Superman: The Secret Years," a series I've owned for some months now without managing to read. It's an interesting take on Clark Kent's college years (and the awkward transition from "Superboy" to "Superman"), melding classic Silver Age elements with the social consciousness that comics tried (to varying degrees of success) to adopt in the '70s and '80s. And it's all topped off with Curt Swan art, which fits better than I might have suspected.

One neat thing, though, is how it deals with Clark's relationship (whirlwind though it may be) with Lori Lemaris, where it's clear that he never even considered looking at her with his X-ray vision, or he would have learned her secret (spoiler: she's a mermaid) on day one. Clark Kent, paragon of virtue.

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Read, for the first time (except maybe in "The Phantom Zone"), a comic with Dr. Xadu and Zeda, the telepathic Kryptonian villains with the Cosmic Power-Grip. There's a cool couple of villains who deserve to make a resurgence in the DCU.

Of course, that could be said about a lot of villains.

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Oh, hey, the Man of Steel trailer hit today. I'm as disappointed as anyone about another origin story, and I'm not thrilled at all about Deadliest Catch Superman, but a lot of what's there looks pretty snazzy, and hopefully the other two hours of the movie contain a decent amount of excitement, and maybe Superman punching some people/things.

Putting the puzzle together

You've probably heard that Gail Simone was rather unceremoniously fired from "Batgirl."

There's a crossover--"Death of the Family"--going on in the Bat-books right now, promising to end with an "unspeakable tragedy" that puts Batman on the brink of "losing his humanity." Nightwing also loses "so much," according to solicits.

When Mike C. Nelson tweeted Gail "did you not put enough women in refrigerators or something?" she responded, "Funny you should say that."

So putting it all together: what character, probably female, is dying in "Death of the Family"?

After reading that Batman solicit, I would have guessed Alfred, and I still think that's the most likely situation. Who else's death would have such a major impact on Batman and Nightwing? He's not exactly a woman in a refrigerator, though, except in a very metaphorical sense. Unless Joker actually stuffs him in a fridge.

The other person that makes sense is Commissioner Gordon. He has the stronger ties to Batgirl, but what would they do in the wake of his death? We've barely seen any other GCPD characters, so it's not like there's someone they're grooming to take over. Still, might make sense that Gail would have something to say about this decision.

It might be Barbara Gordon, Sr. instead, which makes the most sense from a Gail-off-Batgirl perspective, if not a big-Batman-crossover perspective. Neither Bruce nor Dick have much connection to her, but Gail's been building her up as a supporting character in "Batgirl," and she's definitely "family." I can see where "oh, hey, we're killing Barbara Sr." might lead to some friction. But if Barbara Sr. is one of several casualties, it actually makes the most sense.

If not for the solicit that explicitly said Barbara was alive and confronting her brother, I'd guess that Barbara herself would be dying, in part as a "be careful what you wish for" to those annoying (to DC, anyway) Cass/Steph/Oracle fans.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it sure looks like this is the direction things are headed. Someone is dying in "Death of the Family," probably multiple someones, and the result is Gail Simone being kicked off a book that owes its popularity largely to her presence. Apologies to Ray Fawkes, but I don't think I'll be following his tenure on the character.