January
31,
2006
So it turns out that I’m not nearly as uncritically gushing a Spider-Man fanboy as the last entry makes me out to be. Straczynski’s books are, well, amazing compared to Mark Millar and Reginald Hudlin’s Marvel Knights: Spider-Man
and Paul Jenkins’ The Spectacular Spider-Man
.
Millar’s three volumes (collected into one hardcover in the omnibus I bought) actually isn’t bad. It’s competently written and reasonably drawn. The thing is, it’s just a superhero comic. It’s all about fightin’ the bad guys; I realize that a certain amount of bad-guy-fighting is both expected and desirable in a superhero comic, but one of the attractions of Spider-Man has always been that there’s a heavy mix of civilian life in there. The best Spider-Man books (and movies, for that matter) are always about Peter Parker more than they’re about Spider-Man. Millar is more interested in the costume than the guy inside.
Hudlin’s Marvel Knights volume is noticeably better, both in writing quality and plotting. It’s still a bit on the superhero side of the ledger, but not in a bad way. Its main problem, actually, is that a big chunk of the plot revolves around a crypto-Superman character. Yes, he wrinkles up the Superman cliches, but the Superman archetype is so old and so played-with that twists on cliches are themselves cliched by now. Still, this is decent work.
“Decent” is also the word for Tony Bedard’s Spider-Man: Breakout
. It’s a follow-up to the start of The New Avengers, and (inasmuch as there are actual issues of The New Avengers following up to their own start, as well as, e.g., a volume of Straczynski’s Spider-Man work) pretty unnecessary. But as unnecessary books go, it’s entertaining enough. The framework is a minor gang war between two gangs of escaped super-villains, which ends up getting Spider-Man involved. A light, fast read if you’re the sort of person who likes this sort of thing.
That’s more than I can say for Jenkins’ work on Spectacular.
Jenkins’ writing is never better than okay; that’s sub-optimal in
itself, but the bigger problem is that the book he’s writing feels
utterly disconnected from the “real” story going on in Straczynski’s
book. The characters are different (although obviously Aunt May and
Mary Jane appear, but they might as well be different characters for
behaving so weirdly), Parker acts differently, and the general feel of
the whole book is just off. This might be on purpose — I get the
feeling that maybe this title is aimed at a younger market — but it’s
irritating.
And then there’s the art. Oh, the art. It’s fucking manga
style! As it happens, I think manga art is stupid, ugly, and one of
the worst things Japan has ever given the U.S. But even if I were to
grant that it has redeeming merits, I absolutely do not want to see
Spider-Man drawn manga style. Ever. It’s just not appropriate. And
yes, I’m sure that “mash-up” culture would say that it’s ultra-cool to
mix differing styles of art and enjoy the outcome, but that’s why
“mash-up” culture is also stupid. This sort of thing makes me like
the oldest sort of old fogies, which pisses me off even more, so I
really hate it.
On the more positive side, there’s Sara Barnes’ volume of Spectacular, “Sins Remembered”, which is noticeably better than the rest of the series, and even has a decent artist. It follows plot-wise from the Gwen Stacy related developments in Amazing, and does a pretty good job with things. The characters feel like “themselves”, the writing is perfectly decent, and if the main plot has a twist too many, it’s still okay. I’d recommend this volume (but none of the other Spectacular ones) to those who enjoy Straczynski’s run.
Finally, there’s Dan Slott’s Spider-Man/Human Torch: I’m With Stupid
. Slott (whose She-Hulk work I’ve mentioned before) seems to be making a name for himself with lightly humorous takes on Marvel heroes, and this is a great place to use that talent. Spider-Man and the Human Torch have a long history together, and Slott draws on that history, with episodes taking place from Peter Parker’s time in high school (referred to as “ten years ago”, in deference to the weirdly a-chronological advancement of time in the Marvel Universe) through the black costume/Black Cat era through the current day. Better yet, he does it in such a way that these disconnected vignettes end up telling a single story of Spider-Man and Peter Parker’s separately developing relationships with the Human Torch. This is exceedingly well-done work that manages to tell a story in a fresh way while still feeling true to tradition. Highly recommended to anyone who’s read down this far.
And that’s the last of the Spider-Man comics, which leaves me behind my only about a dozen volumes of other comics. I tell you, this booklog seemed like a way better idea when I was reading 800-page epic fantasies most of the time.
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January
11,
2006
When I was growing up, I read tons and tons of Marvel comics; but when I stopped reading them, I never got back into the mainstream Marvel stuff. A few years back, Marvel experimented with putting up free digital versions of some of their comics, and I ended up getting sucked into the non-mainstream-continuity Ultimate universe — but even after I started buying almost every Ultimate title, I stayed away from the mainstream stuff.
Well, just recently Marvel relaunched their online comics, and had a couple of non-Ultimate Spider-Man titles there. I read them, and wanted more, which led to the purchase of J. Michael Straczynski’s The Amazing Spider-Man, vols. 1-10 (again, individual volume titles are on the archive page). While lying sick in bed, I picked up the first volume, and essentially kept reading until I closed the cover on the last, whereupon I went to the computer to order every other Spider-Man related comic I could find.
Which is to say that Straczynski hooked me, but good. To be fair, I’m an easy hookee on this one: As a regular reader will have gathered, I’ve got a soft spot for comics, and especially superhero comics, and especially Spider-Man comics. In the hyper-obsessive world of comics, I surely don’t count as a fanboy of any sort (I don’t even buy the monthly issues!), but I really do love Spider-Man comics unreasonably.
But if I’m an easy mark, I’m still a discriminating one. I can enjoy thoroughly mediocre comics, but I know they’re mediocre. Straczynski’s run is definitely not mediocre. The high concept is interesting: He retcons Spider-Man into a semi-mystical figure with all sorts of mythic resonance (explicit allusion is made to Anansi) in much the same way that Moore did for Swamp Thing. This kind of turn could fail hard if done poorly — it could end up pretentious and grating and silly — but Straczynski makes it work by offsetting the wifty mysticism with Spider-Man’s down-to-earth humor and “regular guy” civilian life.
And speaking of humor, there’s a good amount of it here, which Straczynski writes very well. I was actually shocked by how good the dialogue was, considering that Straczynski is the same guy who wrote the amazingly wooden Babylon 5 and the perfectly dreadful Dr. Strange origin story. Go figure.
Now that I’ve raved on about Spider-Man, it’s time for me to admit that I lied a few paragraphs back: I didn’t really read all of these in immediate succession. The reason for that is that the tenth volume is subtitled “New Avengers”, and takes place after the events of Brian Michael Bendis’ The New Avengers, vol. 1: Breakout
, so I read Bendis’ book in the middle there.
Attentive readers will recall that I despised Bendis’ Avengers: Disassembled, the book that set the stage for the New Avengers. In my review of that book, I said that it felt like “an obligatory exercise that Bendis just wanted to get done with as fast as possible” so that he could start writing the Avengers stories he actually wanted to write. On the evidence of the New Avengers, I think I was right, because this is a much, much better book than Disassembled.
I’ve never really been a fan of the Avengers; they were always a bit hoity-toity and remote. They lived in a fancy mansion with a butler, they had all sorts of contacts in the highest levels of government and at the U.N., and they were just generally a bunch of goddamn Boy Scouts. Bendis’ new group is rather different. Oh, they still live in fancy digs and have government connections, but they’re not as flush as they used to be and the government trusts them a lot less. More importantly, though, the people in the group are a less upright bunch — the streetwise Luke Cage, the tricksy Spider-Man, and the bad boy Wolverine join Captain America and Iron Man this time ‘round (along with the unknown-to-me Spider-Woman and possibly more to come).
People have criticized Bendis for loading up the team with fan favorites — Spider-Man and Wolverine? — and Jim Henley offers a misguided criticism of the team composition (sure, Captain America, Spider-Man, and Wolverine fill much the same niche in terms of powers — but they have deliciously contrasting personalities), but I like the results so far.
Which is good, because that tenth volume of The Amazing Spider-Man turned out to be very thoroughly tied-in to the Avengers stuff. Seeing Spider-Man, the prototypical loner, working and living in a team environment (especially when that team is the Avengers) is fascinating stuff, even more so for the interaction between the characters who inhabit Spider-Man’s world and those that inhabit the Avengers’ world.
The net effect of reading all these comics in quick succession was to immerse me fully into the Marvel universe, and make me want to read more about these people. So, yeah, I’m totally hooked.
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January
11,
2006
Stereotypically, comic books focus on adolescent power fantasies. Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man, vols. 1-6
(the individual volume titles are visible on the archive page, but I don’t feel like typing them here) eschews the adolescent trappings of superpowers to instead explore a world where all the men on Earth mysteriously die, except for the protagonist, who has to make his way through a world full of women. Definitely not the stuff of adolescent fantasy.
Adolescent fantasy or not, Vaughan’s series is pretty darn good for adults. In fact, despite the SF trappings, Y is primarily about people and their relationships to each other — the overall feel is like that archetypal chick-book Strangers in Paradise, but with more coherent actiony bits. Where SiP ends up with this elaborately baroque backstory of secret societies and assassins, Y is able to develop its characters against a backdrop of a post-semi-apocalyptic world rife with story potential and intriguing mysteries.
Obviously, a character-based series doesn’t work at all if the characters are either annoying or poorly-written, but Vaughan’s characters are neither. The protagonist is heavily reminiscent of Peter Parker sans superpowers, and the dialogue is witty and well-written. Despite its praise from mainstream circles (I’m always suspicious of comics that are liked by people who don’t like comics), this is a fine series. Highly recommended to SF readers who like comics, but don’t like superheroes.
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