And, NOW!: The Indestructible Hulk

And, NOW! is a series of posts about Marvel NOW!

The Hulk is probably one of Marvel's more confusing characters right now, certainly much more than any of his teammates from the Avengers movie, all of whom have had relatively stable comics versions for some time. There are the colored Hulks, for one, and Banner and Hulk were separated for a while and didn't he spend some time off of the planet, or something? All of that should be set to change, though, with Marvel's best under-the-radar writer teaming with one of its favorite artists to handle a character who seemed to get a particularly favorable response from audiences last summer.

Look: Mark Waid's main idea for Indestructible Hulk is fabulous. We've got Banner and Hulk together again, which is great, and we've got a Banner with a real personality and a certain amount of ambition, which is nice to see. The good Dr. is intent on using his time as himself to save the world, and he's decided that he's going to manipulate his greener half for destruction that's both necessary and controlled. I love that Waid has, finally, written a Banner who is  comfortable in both who he it is that he is and in what it is that he can become. I love that, finally, we get a Banner who understands that he is, as he tells Maria Hill, incurable.

Given all of this, Indestructible Hulk should be a great comic. But its not. This is Lenil Yu's fault. I know a lot of people like Yu, but I'm not sure why; to my eyes, his work looks sketchy, half-finished, like he just kind of churned it out. Many of the panels use a grey or green gradient as the background which, as a time saving idea, isn't so bad, except that the lack of any distraction behind Yu's figures mean that there's nothing to distract from the fact that his figures are stiff and over dark. When something does happen in them, it doesn't really make sense; this issue's second half is devoted to an utterly incomprehensible fight scene, six or so pages that don't come together coherently and which do their best to suggest that, imagine this, fighting is chaotic, without giving any actual idea of who's winning or what's going on.

Even when less complicated movement is required, Yu is apparently unable to suggest sensical spacial relations. Take, for example, the panels to the right, which are essentially the crux of the book. Banner, having pitched his services to Maria Hill, asks "What it'll be?" and both of them are turned towards the  storefronts in the background. In the next panel, though, things fall apart: as the Dr. asks "In or out?," he appears to be turning away from Director Hill, apparently so that we can get a good understanding of her answer. I think we're supposed to assume that she picks up the two-by-four from the boarded up storefront so, leaving the problem of how she grabbed it so fast aside, why is Banner all of the sudden facing away? That doesn't make any sense either physically or emotionally-- isn't this a moment when he should be looking her right in the eye, particularly since he's just barged in a top secret S.H.I.E.L.D mission? Even if he was bashful about this proposal-- which he obviously is not-- why would he put his back to her rather than simply turning his head to the side? Why would he turn all the way around and then finish his question? Just so Hill could hit him? This is not a panel that makes very much sense. It's too bad, too, since this moment could be the book's emotional center rather than simply the point at which the plot turns.

And, holy hell, that isn't even the worst sequence in the comic! No, no, that particular honor goes to this marvelous disaster:

I just want to be clear about this: I love panel interaction. Panels that don't interact are the sign of a staid, traditional cartooning style that forces a reader to completely close the space between panels himself. Those artists who make their panels talk to each other, that is, those artists who suggest a way of reading to the reader are often much more interesting and their work is often a lot better for it. This here, though, is a heavy mess. First of all, how do you bump a sitting person in the middle of their back as you walk by? You'd have to be walking sideways to manage it, particularly if you're walking across their body and not towards it. That unlikely movement is insignificant, though, compared to what that guy's hand is doing: is he patting Maria Hill on the head? It certainly looks like he is, doesn't it? Is there anyone, in the whole of the Marvel Universe, who could get away with that? What makes this guy so special? To make the whole thing even sillier, the panel on the left is a medium shot while the panel on the right is a close up of Hill, so a guy who has a bicep as big as Banner's face appears to have tiny, tiny hands and S.H.I.E.L.D's director apparently has a big, big head. I don't even know what to make of it-- how do sequences like this ever get published? Is anybody actually looking at these comics before they go out?

Here He Comes, In A Suit Made of Swagger and Red Spandex

Once, a long time ago, people thought of Matt Murdock as a swashbuckler. Hot shot blind lawyer by day, man without fear by night, he was Errol Flynn, protecting Hell's Kitchen (and, briefly, San Francisco) from villains and criminals of all spots. And then, one day in 1979, a man named Frank Miller put his pencil to paper and drew Matt Murdock, and then, later, Miller started to write Murdock, and the character went from romantic lead to ninja, and his stories hit the grim n' gritty gutter. That's the way he's been ever since, through last year's wacky Shadowland event.

For a lot of that time, and certainly since I started reading comics, Daredevil was the best Marvel book that no one was reading; Ed Brubaker's run was a heavy crime story, with the tights almost gratuitously drenched in a noir sensibility and the long standing Daredevil-as-Job motif stretched almost to the breaking point. Andy Diggle would, after Brubaker, take the punishment too far, managing to break Matt Murdock, but his stories were pretty good and they resulted in a silly-yet-satisfying mini drawn by David Gianfelice at the beginning of the year. Now, finally, Matt Murdock is back in New York and, satisfyingly, he's put his throwing stars back on the wall and picked the foil back up. Daredevil, the man without fear, is back. And boy I hope he stays.

Mark Waid apparently pitched this reborn Matt Murdock as having been to the brink and back, and so as a man with nothing left to fear. For Waid, the character lives entirely in the moment, and, from the comic's opening pages, nothing could be clearer. Brubaker's Daredevil (and certainly not Diggle's) never would have taken pride in being able to discern a perfume from a hundred yards; he never would have cracked a joke about it, either. But there's Matt Murdock, on page two, doing just that. And that the villain in the prologue is not the Godfather whose daughter is getting married but, instead, is a goofy cape like the Spot? Mark Waid's goal is so well telegraphed, so unsubtle, that heightened senses are hardly required; for the first time in years, Matt Murdock is having fun, and his comic is all the more exciting because of it. This doesn't mean that Waid has given up on nuance, though. Even though the first scene climaxes with DD (in costume!) locking lips with a mob princess, the cavalier mask hides a deeply concerned attitude. This Murdock, though self-assured, knows he's made mistakes, and he's out to fix them, but with a sense of a humor and little bit of a smile.

It helps, of course, that the deeply cross-hatched and dark look of the last volume of the book has been replaced by the clean and clear, almost European, lines of Paolo Rivera and the flat, bright colors of Javier Rodriguez. If Marvel wanted to clarify that this was new #1 was a throwback, I'm not sure there was a better way to do it than this; Rivera's art is retro and he has a penchant for visual puns, so the form follows the function. The old Daredevil is back, but in a brand new way, and that the art is as much fun as the writing is nothing but a boon.

With intrigue, and the promise of an old school superhero clash in the next issue, I'm left only with the words of Stan Lee: 'nuff said.

New Life for Daredevil.

The new volume of "Daredevil" has been announced. And it looks like pretty damn impressive work.

Marcos Martin and Paolo Rivera (@PaoloMRivera) will share the art duties (hopefully allowing Rivera to meet a monthly schedule) on scripts written by Mark Waid (@markwaid). They've come up with a very Sixties stylistic visual way to depict Matt Murdock's ability to smell, hear, and feel things with his heightened senses. [See above.]

[via Dean Haspiel's Facebook account! via ComicBookResources.com exclusive interview]

Supremely talented comicsmith Dean Haspiel (@deanhaspiel) posted the link to CBR's exclusive interview with Waid and Rivera. Underneath he joked "I just quit comics."

I think that says a lot.

~ @JonGorga

I carry with me at all times a near-perfect recipe for making new comics readers:

Good comics.

That is the best way to convince people this stuff is worth their time. By showing them. But a random confluence of events has brought together some particular comics in my shoulder bag. These comics together represent many of the talking points I think might help people to recognize comics as the separate, viable, wonderful art medium it is. And as I walk the streets of New York City I thought I would share with you what they are and why I think they might work as somebody's 'first comic'.


Some of these I bought just recently, some of them were given to me as birthday presents, some of them I have because I'm reading them, some of them because I am or was reviewing them, or both the former and the latter:

"Electric Ant" #1
From Icon (an imprint of Marvel Comics), David Mack's and Pascal Alixe's adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's prose novel

Opening a comic such as this one can lead to thoughts like: Oh, a smart adaptation of a prose novel? It's really not a new edition is it? Comics isn't just illustrated prose. It's a different experience of the same story. Not a translation, an adaptation. Just the idea that a book can become a comic in the same way a book can become a film encourages one to think of it as smart mass media entertainment instead of junk. And it's by David Mack (@davidmackkabuki), of "Kabuki" fame. So you know it's good.

"Captain Swing and the Electrical Pirates of Cindery Island" #2
From Avatar Press, Warren Ellis' and Raulo Caceres' steampunk crazy time

Well... This one's crazy and perhaps not great for most new readers. Shocking an old lady with bloody violence and guns that shoot tiny light bulbs for bullets probably won't endear her to my beloved sequential art. But someone who digs steampunk, someone who likes things off the beaten path. Pirate ships flying on electric oars? They should see this stuff. The imagination owned by Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) has few equals in the field of comics. The evidence of vibrant imagination in the art-form is priceless to an argument that it should be appreciated. I bought issue #1 on a whim and I'm glad I did.

"Superman: Earth One"
DC's experimental graphic novel written by J. Michael Staczynski and drawn by recent L & S interviewee Shane Davis

This one has blown not only individual brains but the entire industry straight to the ground. A depiction of Superman as a 20-year-old young man with the problems of the average modern American 20-year-old: what the fuck do I do with my life? how the fuck do I do it? why am I doing it? To see a superhero character made so simply and easily relatable would no doubt be a major eye-opener to many who see superheroes (most particularly ones like Supes) as dumb jocks in a cape. No, the main genre found in the medium isn't only punching and explosions. My review of this just went up days ago.

"Captain America: Man Out of Time" #1
A new series from Mark Waid and Jorge Molina about one of Marvel's first superheroes

Speaking of recent comics re-telling a superhero's story from their own point of view, this is another great-looking work. Captain America is, in the perception of the mainstream, probably the only more prissy superhero than Superman. But, as usual, the mainstream is missing the new trees because it is expecting to see an old forest. I was sold on this issue the moment I saw the way Waid (@markwaid) brought Cap from World War II through his frozen state to the present in two successive splash pages. Someone who doesn't know what mainstream superhero comics are actually like will be amazed to see so 'goofy' a character as Captain America presented with such imagination and gravitas.

"Amazing Spider-Man" #648
With a three-year debacle behind him (mostly) Marvel's Spider-Man moves on to the "Big Time" with Dan Slott and Humberto Ramos

Well... I haven't read this yet. But it ISN'T "Brand New Day". So it might be more new reader-friendly than Spider-Man has been for a few months to a few years, depending on your point-of-view. Dan Slott (@danslott) has a great ability with humor. Anybody with a funny bone would probably enjoy Slott's writing and thus prove that the Joss Whedon style of dramedy can be found in comics, further proving that it's capable of anything.

"Falling for Lionheart"
A glorious mash-up of the two worlds of American comics by Ilias Kyriazis, released on the same day as "Superman: Earth One" from IDW

Not having actually read this, I can only comment on what it looks like. But it looks like one of the best graphic novels of the year and maybe the best 'first readers' graphic novel I have ever seen. It tells the story of Lionheart, a super-powered man on a state/corporate-approved team of superheroes. It is also the story of a man who feels that something about this life is hollow and chooses to make autobiographical mini-comics to express his ennui. None of that is new material (superheroes beholden to centers of authority, characters who make comics about their lives), except of course the brilliant twist that these men are one-and-the-same! Yes, "Falling for Lionheart" is about a superhero who is also an underground comicsmith. A tortured artist superhero love story. The two strongest arms of American comics re-introduced in one slim volume. I'm going to LOVE it. Look for a review soon.


I hope this silly list serves a few purposes for you, dear L&S readers:
1. I hope it has laid out just a little bit more of the incredible variety available in the medium of sequential art.
2. I hope you now know that you can ask me for reading material, if you ever see me on the street!
3. I hope you have some ideas about how to get that special STUBBORN someone in your life to give comics a chance. Lord knows there's plenty of them left out there...

~@JonGorga