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?

And, NOW!: Iron Man #1

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

Let's get one thing straight: Greg Land is not a bad artist. He's not a good artist, either, but I think I've been hyperbolic about his work in the past and I just wanted to clear this up. Although I'm not attracted to his artificial style, which is a stiff and lightboxed parody of photorealism, I am willing to admit that his lines are solid and that his characters have a certain boldness, a kind of magnetic density that draws the eye towards them and away from the rest of his compositions, which, themselves, merely suggest scene dressing.

Part of the problem with that kind of composition, though, is that individual panels often closely resemble one another. To avoid a repetitive page, then, Land is forced to pull the reader a great distance in between panels, effectively slowing any natural movement from one to the next by forcing the reader to close more space than he or she should have to. Since the relaunch of Uncanny X-Men, a year ago, though, he's been doing a few things that ease the reading experience, like varying compositions in interesting ways and, most importantly, allowing panels to interact with each other through the gutter. In the sequence below, for example, the cell phone flies out of one panel, up and over the gutter, and into the next one. The move between individual compositions is kind of awkward, the first indicates movement and while the second is still, but the airborne phone suggests, very deftly, how the character in the white shirt moves while the reader is in the space between.

All of this to say that I'll defend Greg Land, yes, but only up to a certain point-- his human characters all have exaggerated soap opera facial expressions that leave much to be desired. Like Sal Larroca before him, though, his style lends itself to the drawing of machines, so that his version of the Iron Man armor is dynamic in the same way that his drawings of people are stilted, at least in terms of the individual panels. This seems to make him a perfect choice for Iron Man and he may indeed prove to be, but only if Kieron Gillen does his damnedest to keep Tony Stark in the suit rather than leave him out of it.

Basically, its up to Gillen to write for his artist's strengths, in a way that Matt Fraction didn't always manage to do when he was writing for Larroca. Reading this first issue, it seems likely that this will be the case, since Gillen is eschewing Fraction's fascinating corporate espionage angle in favor of a more traditional man-of-action faces down terrorists kind of plot, one that will require Greg Land to draw more than one kind of armor. For his part, the writer does a pretty good job, even managing to relatively concisely explain a piece of information from an old Iron Man arc, even as he's placing it at the center of his own story. It's a masterful example of how good shared universe writers can relay enough information to keep new readers in the loop while still managing to keep old ones interested. Gillen has experience with this particular kind of counterterrorism story, often pulling it out during his Uncanny X-Men work, but much of that stuff was sort of out there and I expect that he's going to play Iron Man much more traditionally.

I think Fraction and Larocca's work with Tony Stark is probably definitive for the next little while, but if Gillen can keep it up, and if Land can behave, then we may very well have another classic on our hands. 

Marvel, Then: Intro

I'm hunkered down in my apartment*, waiting for Hurricane Sandy to pass me by. Happily, this means that I am catching up on months worth of reading I have piled up next to my mattress, but I also figured that it was a good time to quickly intro something I'm going to be doing over the next few months, in conjunction with the House of Ideas' Marvel NOW! yearly culling of established ongoing series in order for the company to replace them with new number ones in an attempt to temporarily raise sales relaunch, namely, the consideration, first, of the books whose era has just ended (Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca on Iron Man, Ed Brubaker on Captain America, Jonathan Hickman on the Fantastic Four, and so on) and then of the books that are replacing them.

In some ways, this series started last week, with my review of the initiative's not very good flagship title, Uncanny Avengers #1. That was sort of a false start, though, since the first few posts, which I've not very cleverly titled "Marvel, Then," are going to focus on what's ending, rather than what's new. Because of the staggered roll out of new titles, though, some of those posts will run concurrent with the posts, titled, again very cleverly, "Marvel When?" that deal with what's new NOW! that an era that's a decade old has come to a close.

That time frame, of course, is the same one in which Brian Bendis has been writing The Avengers. His work on that franchise over that span, while hardly the greatest superhero comics produced in the period, made possible the existence of some much better work. If he hadn't brought Luke Cage to the forefront of the Marvel universe through sheer force of will, for example, it seems unlikely that Immortal Iron Fist would have happened. I have a feeling, too, that his use of the Thing in New Avengers is partially responsible for the success of Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four. Bendis's move to other projects, which would have presaged a monumental change even if Marvel hadn't cloaked it in a line wide changing of the guard, presents by far the most important questions of this new era, at least when we think about Marvel as a business: can he replicate his Avengers success with All-New X-Men? Will his high word count writing style, the superhero board room approach, translate well to a much different kind of series? How about Guardians of the Galaxy? Is it going to be any good? Given that it mostly exists to gin up excitement for the movie adaptation, could it possibly be any good?

While Bendis's contributions are important, and while his arrival at Marvel marks the beginning of a renaissance for the publisher, I don't want to minimize how important, maybe even how much more important, I think Hickman, Fraction and Brubaker are to the company's artistic success over the last decade. Before them, too, were people like J. Michael Straczynski and beyond those three there are people like Kieron Gillen, each of whom helped to make Marvel's recent production stronger than anything from the Big Two comics companies in quite a long time. So, for the next few months, besides posts on the new Iron Man, Thor and Captain America series, you can expect commentary on the old ones, as well as whatever else piques my interest during this most fascinating moment in the history of the House of Ideas.

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*Although this is posting Tuesday, I wrote it on Monday after I was sent home from work.

Review: Uncanny Avengers #1

I desperately want to like Uncanny Avengers #1, although mostly for sentimental reasons: I've been reading comics with the word Uncanny in the title since I was a seventh grader, when I started buying them off of a spinner rack near the counter of a Waldenbooks at the mall. Although I look back on those years, Chuck Austen was writing the book, with more than a little disdain, I liked it then because Nightcrawler was leading the team, and I just kind of stuck with it, only stopping for about a year in my senior year of high school and then again in college, for about six months and in protest, during THE SECOND COMING X-crossover.

So, yeah, I'm attached to the adjective, and I want to uncritically love this new use of it as much as I loved the last one. It should have been so easy to do, too, since it has, in Rick Remender, a competent writer and because it is being drawn by John Cassaday, one of the industry's brightest talents, finally returned from an exile in the Desert of the Cover Artists. Alas, it was not to be-- Uncanny Avengers is vulgar and incomprehensible.

It doesn't help, of course, that Marvel's bloated Avengers v. X-Men event, out of which this new series springs, ended as messily as it did, basically returning the Marvel Universe to a status quo ended when Brian Bendis undid all of Grant Morrison's New X-Men work in the pages of House of M (a story that Marvel's characters are, sort of inexplicably, now referencing every few pages).* Mutants, all of the sudden, are back, and they're popping up all over the place, in Beijing, in Cyclops's cellblock, everywhere. The premise of this book is simple: those mutants need help, and Captain America is determined to be there for them. His first order of business is to find them a leader (doesn't anybody at Marvel realize how condescending that is?), and the list of those who are unqualified is quite long. Scott is, obviously, out. Wolverine's past is checkered. Xavier is dead. Magneto used to be a terrorist. Who knows where Hope is. Onto this scene, from the pages of X-Factor, waltzes Alex Summers, first to admonish his brother, at this point a matter of course for a Marvel good guy, and then into the company of Steve Rogers and the mighty Thor who tell him, without prompting, that he is the leader that his people need. Cue the requisite hemming and hawing and then...

Cut to a fight scene, in which Captain America, Thor and Havok are on hand, out of nowhere and from across town, to fight a lobotomized Avalanche. This is how this book moves, with little regard for plausibility and continuity; from there, we're shuffled along to a moralizing internal monologue from the Scarlet Witch, kneeling at at the grave of Professor X. Rogue doesn't take kindly to this, and they prepare to fight when, out of nowhere, there's another completely illegible, although much more mysterious, fight scene. All of this is, of course, followed by a big, wacky reveal at the end. At this juncture, I think it's important that you  keep in mind that I'm talking about a story in which a man who dresses up in a flag and throws a round shield at things is teaming up with a Norse god and a man whose "x-gene" gives him the ability to blast things with powers he gets from exposure to sunlight to fight someone who, in the first page of the comic, has his frontal lobe removed and replaced with a computer and can cause earthquakes-- and it's the mode and mechanics of the storytelling that I'm finding implausible.

This is particularly hard to take, since the book has a lot of other things going for it. Remender, for his part, just stuffs it with interesting ideas, from the suggestion, at the beginning, that Havok might be the one to step up as a leader for mutantkind to the reveal, at the end, of a returned Red Skull, who needs Professor X's brain for some nefarious scheme for the destruction of that same people. Look, this could have been very good stuff, like a Matt Fraction story with a legacy villain and an occult twist. Rather than aping the slowburning plotter of Invincible Iron Man, though, Remender has picked up on the hyperactive tendencies of certain parts of The Mighty Thor, introducing too many big ideas to bring any of them to a satisfying resolution, at least on the level of this individual issue.

Remender's inability to pick one subject and stick with it is particularly galling because it wastes John Cassaday's considerable talents. Cassaday, who hasn't published any narrative work since the release of Planetary #27 in 2009, really does deserve better than this because, while Uncanny Avengers isn't the best thing he's ever drawn, it is an excellent reminder of why he's one of the few artists I follow faithfully, wherever he may go. His style, because it seamlessly transitions from photorealistic to cartoony and back, often in the same panel, feels natural, almost real. More than any other artist, I'm struck by how easy Cassaday makes it for a reader to suspend disbelief. This only works, however, if the narrative that he is drawing is, itself, natural, that is, if it flows comprehensibly. Uncanny Avengers does not.

Some of this, certainly, could be forgiven; Cassaday's art is good, and it's nice to see a writer as excited about his own ideas as Remender. Unfortunately, the book's dialogue is too often either reheated sermonizing from the end of AvX or stilted and manufactured, much like the conflict between Rogue and the Scarlet Witch, and that's just too much to take. If Marvel wants this to be a successful series, and since it's the flagship in a new era for the company, I'm going to assume they want it to sell well, they would do well to do some actual, honest-to-goodness editing here, if only to pin the writer down. There's too much good stuff here to let it get away like this again.

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*I think there's probably something to be said for the fact that Marvel is starting its NOW! era with a recursive move-- the company's stories are stagnant even when it makes an explicit attempt at moving them forward. At least the idea is a good one, one that should never have been abrogated in the first place.

Some Idle Marvel Now! Speculation

Reading both the new Fantastic Four issue and the new AvX installment today, I had two thoughts about possibilities for those new books Marvel's been teasing for the insipidly titled post-AvX relaunch MARVEL NOW!, which is coming in October. Spoilers in this one, ladies and gents, so stop reading if you care.

Firstly, Fantastic Four #608 strongly hints that there's a new Black Panther comic coming. The book itself, for what its worth, is kind of mediocre. Although the art team of Giuseppe Camuncoli, Karl Kesel, and Paul Mounts put in an effort I'm going to go ahead and call generally rad, Jonathan Hickman is trying to tell two related stories at once, but ends up with too little room to properly tell either. One of them, sort of vaguely depicted on the cover, is a battle between the current Black Panther, T'Challa's sister Shuri and the Egyptian death god Anubis. Shuri gets help from Ororo and Sue Storm, and it's not quite clear what goes on or quite how the conflict is resolved, just that there's some fighting and that Wakanda's Panther God, who, T'Challa tells us, is actually Bast, ultimately decides to eat Anubis. I think. In the meantime, (incidentally, I think the ability to be two places at once is an advantage of deityhood that no one ever talks about) that very same Panther God is having a conversation with T'Challa and Reed Richards, asking the former about what he wants, making vaguely prophetic remarks to the latter, and, ultimately, giving the mantle of Black Panther back to T'Challa while indicating that Shuri is also going to hang on to the title and be queen of Wakanda. How can there be two Black Panthers?! Easy! T'Challa is going to rule in the country's Necropolis and be its KING OF THE DEAD. Which does sound pretty cool.

But the whole thing is sort of convoluted, and I don't quite understand what's going on or exactly what it's supposed to mean, but then again I'm not sure I'm supposed to, since, apparently, the reason Wakanda is going to need two Black Panthers (one to lead the country, the other to save it, so says the Panther God) is because first the country is going to have "a great fire in the sky" and then "the fire will bring great flood." Well, the since the fire is obviously the Phoenix (you know because the panel accompanied by the "great fire in the sky" text-box is the Phoenix, look right) and the "flood" is obviously Namor's attack on Wakanda (shown in today's AvX ish #8! -ed.), it seems pretty clear to me that the whole thing is going to be better explained in a new Black Panther series, written, hopefully, by Hickman.

Given that the last comic to star T'Challa was, although one of the highest quality books published by any mainstream comics company in the last few years and despite the presence of one of contemporary comics' great talents and a pretty significant not-comics writer, less then a best-seller, and that the one before that was even more poorly received, one wonders at the likelihood of a new book's success. But, then again, since Marvel appears to be doing all it can to sync up its movies with its comics, and since it appears that there's the possibility, however slight, of a Black Panther movie in the relatively near future, it's not a particularly surprising move. This new king of the dead status quo, though, seems like it might be a pretty good idea, particularly because it veers particularly close to one of my favorite elemants of The Immortal Iron Fist, namely, that Danny, as the Iron Fist, was the recipient of wisdom and history from every Iron Fist before him. T'Challa was always consulting his ancestors, but that aspect of the character is now being brought to the fore, with the Panther God having actually integrated all of their experiences into all of his personal experience. If I'm right, and only the people on the inside know if I am, and whoever does end up writing the book, if it isn't Hickman, who I think it must be, does a good job of developing and fully explaining what this new knowledge means, and then goes on to tell good stories with this new direction, then, who knows? Maybe the book will get a fair shake.

Oh, yeah, secondly, speaking of Danny-- does anyone else think that all of the K'un-L'un that we're seeing in AvX means there's going to be a new Iron Fist solo book? A man can hope, right?

Nick Fury, Agent of Silly Brand Synergy

So I was looking at that MARVELNOW! preview image when it came out last week, and I was all "who is that guy in the Super Soldier outfit with an eyepatch who looks like Movie Nick Fury/Ultimate Nick Fury, because isn't the adjectiveless Nick Fury a white guy with an eye patch, as opposed to Sam Jackson with an eyepatch?"

Nope. Via Wikipedia:

Ok, so Nick Fury had a secret son whose name is also Nick Fury but is called Marcus Johnson by everyone who knows him. Ok, I'll buy that. I've seen James Bond. International Men of Mystery have illicit affairs on a pretty regular basis. The law of averages says sooner or later there are going to be babies sired via such International Men of Mystery. Sometimes people have their names changed, or their children's names changed, so I guess that makes some kind of sense.

Nick Fury's (secret) son is African-American? Cool! Diversity is good! There aren't enough black characters in comics!* Oh, he's been described as looking like Sam Jackson? Eh. I dunno. How many times has Marvel rebooted the Ultimate universe, in which a Sam Jackson looking Nick Fury existed well before Sam Jackson played Nick Fury in the movies which, admittedly, works? How many times have they asked for a mulligan on that one? Three? Four?

Wait! In the course of Battle Scars (which, full disclosure, I can't comment on as text because I haven't read it), the Sam Jackson looking secret son of Nick Fury loses an eye, so now not only does he vaguely resemble his father, or, at least, he has the same iconography as his father, since icons are the only way that people resemble other people in comics, but he more specifically resembles not only the most well-known Nick Fury, but also the Nick Fury in the other comics?


Sigh.

Look, I get that Marvel is trying to use its wildly successful and popular movies to boost sales of its less than wildly successful and popular comic books. I also understand that, if Marvel stopped publishing comics tomorrow, it would remain a profitable brand for Disney for however long that company continued to make movies based on Marvel properties, and probably even for a few decades after that. Does the company really think, though, that it's going to sell more comics by retiring one of their best characters? Keep in mind that best and most popular are not the same. Remember that the nineties happened. 

Now, it's also true that Nick Fury hasn't had an even moderately successful ongoing series in decades (you know who would be perfect for that book? Ed Brubaker and David Aja.) He's barely appeared at all since that last Secret Wars series. So maybe the time is right for a new Nick Fury (it's not, but bear with me). If that's the case, where is he, this new guy? I read a lot of comics, not all of them, but a lot, where is he? 


The last issue of Battle Scars, and one issue of a Scarlet Spider comic that I didn't even know existed.

I think this strategy could have worked. I really do. I really think that, if Marvel had wanted to, they could have published a new volume of Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D in the wake of the Avengers movie, and, you know what, I bet it could have been good. Hear me out. Guy discovers who his father is, and then inherits the family international spy business, but makes a whole lot of mistakes doing it because he hasn't been a spy since the mid-forties like his father. Seriously, a little bit of humor, a little bit of espionage. It could have been great! Get Brubaker to write it and Aja to draw it. Marvel would sell fifty-thousand copies, easy. Hell, want to sell another twenty-five thousand? Replace Aja with, say, Olivier Coipel, and it's done. The book wouldn't look quite as good, but it would still be fantastic and would probably appeal to a broader audience, particularly an audience of people who saw the Avengers movie and walked into their friendly neighborhood comics shop because wasn't that movie awesome and do I really have to wait three years for more stories like that?

That helicarrier, though, has sailed. It would have worked, maybe, if they had done it in May. The movie's already been out for a couple of months. Everyone who was going to walk into a comic shop on its strength probably already has. Maybe a few of them discovered the magic of comics, and stuck around, and maybe a few of those will discover Jason or Jordan Crane and realize that comics are art, dammit, and not just white men in tights. The people who wanted the Nick Fury from the movie, they've picked up an old Ultimates collection or something because there were no accessible regular universe Marvel comics with a one-eyed guy resembling Sam Jackson in them, and they probably read it and kind of liked it and then they saw Prometheus or remembered that they were playing fantasy baseball and that was that.

They aren't going to pick up whatever books has the new Nick Fury in October, when Marvel is NOW! (it's not NOW! now, but it will be) because they're gone and they're not coming back, at least not until the next Iron Man movie comes out, when we'll repeat the process and maybe those poor saps will buy another copy of the trade paperback they've forgotten is under the bed. And Nick Fury, a character with a history and with fans, a character who will sell some comics, although probably not very many, has been replaced by a Nick Fury who's not going to sell any at all, because no one cares.

I've argued before that comics are stagnant because comics fans (and the people who make comics are also fans, don't ever doubt that) are resistant to change, and celebrate a return to an old status quo whenever it happens. I still think that that is true, and I still think that fresher, newer stories with fresher, newer characters will sell more comics. But new characters (or the return of an old one) has to have a better reason than "there's a movie coming out." There has to be a new story to tell, and the new Nick Fury is not a new story, not really, just an old one that's been repackaged.

I'm setting the over/under at Nick Fury Sr.'s unretirement at 12 months. Unless, of course, that's him, in that picture up there, in the middle of the very left hand side, but it could also be Cable, it's hard to tell.  If it is the old Nick Fury, though, what was the point of the new one, exactly?

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*Unless Nick Fury's secret son is secret because he's black. That's the opposite of cool.

Welcome Back, Drums.

The Drummer's back!

Or, at least, the man who modeled the Drummer on himself is back, for the Rick Remender written Uncanny Avengers, one of the new series from Marvel to follow the conclusion of AvX.  Of the various announcements about the relaunch the company is calling, sort of insipidly, MARVEL NOW!, this is by far the most exciting. Cassaday, who has been absent from regular comics interior work since he and Warren Ellis finished up Planetary nearly three years ago, is one the Modern Age's great talents, an artist who has managed to meld almost photorealistic figures with an energy and movement usually lacking in a style that is mostly attended by an unfortunate stiffness. It'll be good to see his work on a monthly, or at least semi-monthly, or anyway regular, basis again.