Wednesday's New Things: Marvel of Marvels, Miracles of Miracles, But Where Does It Go?

There is plenty about Marvel's recent activity on the Miracle Man property, a property that's been dormant since they acquired specific parts of it a half decade ago, that's confusing for me. How did they untangle the rights? What does it have to do with Neil Gaiman selling Angela to the company? What was that all about anyway? Why did they even bother publishing that Golden Age Miracle Man stuff back in 2010? Now that they own the rights, why didn't they change the name back to Marvel Man? Isn't that the most logical thing to do?

Truth is, though, I'm just glad they've finally come around to publishing the damn thing. Between Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and the never ending story of who owned what, who owed what, and who owed whom, this is the only series that's ever entered that mythical, must read space for me; certainly the only one I can think of that I would have felt comfortable pirating, simply because there was no other good way to get it. I guess I just never got around to it. And, now that its here, I haven't been purchasing it, or at least I'm not yet. There's something about launching this particular book in an oversized floppy edition that feels wrong, to me; after having waited so long for this material, it just seems like it should be owned in hardcover. And I wasn't even born yet when the series conceived, and I wasn't talking when it concluded with issue #24-- there have to be people who've been waiting to read this story (that is, if they've bothered waiting) much longer than me. Put simply, it's not something I want to file away in a longbox, it's something I want to put on my shelf.

The thinking behind that choice-- do I put it in my longbox or do I put it on my shelf?-- is something that's long interested me. I can't say I've come up with a coherent solution, although I'll admit that I've tried. What I would like to do, in general, is buy the stories I don't think I'll come back to as floppies, and the stories I do think I'll come back to as trades; ease of access is related to how often I think I'll want to find them. In practice, I return to very little, and mainstream monthly comics even less so; Ed Brubaker's Captain America, Immortal Iron Fist, Phonogram. I can see myself returning to Manhattan Projects, too, and Young Avengers, Saga, East of West, Satellite Sam, and Pretty Deadly, among others. The problem is that I'm buying those last few every month-- I want to know what happens in Saga, I don't want to fall behind. I want the trades, sure, but I don't want to spend the cash on material I already own-- it's why I've never bought that beautiful Criminal omnibus, for example. A few times I've abandoned comics, Hawkeye, Prophet, Fatale, either because I've lost track or because of some wonky publishing thing, and I've decided not to catch up, specifically so I can start over with the trades. Barring those weird situations, though, its a choice that has to do with whether you prefer the instant gratification of the low durability floppy or the long term satisfaction of the higher quality collection; in theory, I'm for the former, but, when it comes to actual purchasing habits, I'm a weak, weak man. And, of course, I'm not interested in comics as a hardcore collector would be, which means that things like variants don't even enter the calculation.

Miracleman's history, though, makes the choice easy. I've waited this long. I'll wait until April for the edition that I want, and then it'll go on my shelf, in between The Manhattan Projects and Darwyn Cooke's Parker books, where it belongs.

Wednesday's New Things: Leaving Things on The Shelf

For the first time in a long time, I'm going to leave books that I want to read on the shelf this week. If I'm still interested next week, maybe I'll take the plunge. But $3.99 is a lot for a funny book, and this week I was prepared to buy several too many. Do I really want to keep up with Avengers World? Does Hawkeye's weird publishing schedule mean I should just be reading it in trade? Consider this a first attempt at a more conscious comics buying policy from this particular blogger. Anyway, three things that caught my eye:

1) I've been looking forward to All New Invaders. I'm not looking forward to Steve Pugh's style-less Greg Land imitation (and this is one of those comics where the interior art is disappointing compared to both the main cover and the variant, above), but a James Robinson book about the original Invaders, set in space? Count me in, I think. At least for right now. To be completely honest, I'd prefer if this book were retro, set in WWII, but I don't think that even this version will sell well. Let's say the over/under on this one is eight issues; in the meantime, I'm hoping to enjoy it while it's here.

2) Did you read the first issue of Black Widow? The dialogue was kind of iffy, and Nathan Edmondson decided he had to justify narration by clarifying that Natasha was talking to a cat. Still, it was pretty good. I bet this second is going to be pretty good too. Check it out, if only so you can gape at Phil Noto's art. 

3) I like tenth anniversary books like this one, because I wasn't really reading comics when they first came out (obviously, at some point that will no longer be true). Still, it's a good chance to track the development of an artist over time. In this case, it'll be neat to see that way that Lost at Sea becomes Scott Pilgrim becomes the upcoming Seconds. 

Chatter: Steve Bisette

BTW, seeing all this go down—and seeing the results, and this initial package—well, it burns my ass in one way. This is proof positive and absolute that corporate Marvel COULD do the right thing, by all its past creators, if it wanted to—Marvel chooses NOT to. MM will never have the enormous revenue streams the legacy of Jack Kirby has—but Marvel, for various reasons, ended up doing right by all concerned for this MM #1 to hit the shelves. Marvel COULD do right by ALL its seminal creators. THEY CHOOSE NOT TO. 

It's a CHOICE. 

Steve Bisette, on Marvel's recent Marvelman reissue. 

Wednesday's New Things: Big Monsters, Big Egos

1) If there's one comic that's not going to get enough press this week, it's this one, from Brazilian cartoonist Gustavo Duarte. I'm very careful about unconditional recommendations, but Duarte's stuff is as close as I'll come. Almost wordless, his comics are carried on the strength of a visual style anchored by clean lines and clean compositions, extraordinarily emotive with neither a line amiss nor a single detail too much. That efficiency belies a particularly expansive imagination, one that values wonder over all else and has to be seen to be believed. I own most of his output in original Brazilian editions, purchased from Duarte at two separate NYCCs. Among those is "Monsters," featured here, a kind of interesting and clever version of Pacific Rim. Also included is a story, "Po," which I haven't been able to get my hands on yet. Originally released as a minicomic, I came to Duarte too late to have acquired a copy on the primary market. That was several years ago; as you can imagine, I'm eager to finally get my hands on it. I'd have preferred the inclusion of the charming "Taxi" rather than the morbid "Birds," but, at, $12.99, the price is right. 

2) Speaking of almost unconditional recommendations, you won't go wrong with Francesco Francavilla's Black Beetle comics. Francavilla is one of mainstream comics' true talents, and you can find his work in all sorts of projects, from After Life With Archie, to the-beloved-by-me Black Panther: Man Without Fear series, to this creator-owned joint. Here, Francavilla writes and draws and, although his dialogue can be stilted, the art, both creative and restrained, should be enough to keep you interested. You can also pick up the collected edition of the first Black Beetle mini, No Way Out. 

3) Look, Stuart Moore's Egos is basically a Prophet knock off, with a slight soap opera twist:  

Years ago, The Earth/Galactic Operatives defeated Masse, a sentient, hungry galaxy—but now Masse has returned, consuming entire planets and killing millions of people. Deuce, an aging hero, decides to reform his old team and go into battle to save the day. But in order to do that, he must cross a line with Pixel, his wife and former teammate, an act that threatens to tear apart the life they've built together. 

I mean, come on, you can't get a whole lot closer than that. Even Gus Storms's (what a fabulous name) art looks a little bit like sometimes-Prophet artist Simon Roy, although the lines are little more direct. Still, there's a lot to be said for looking at the same subject from a different angle, and, with Prophet's end nigh, Egos may be a half way decent substitute. 

Oh, The Inhumanity!

Inhumanity #1 is a not-bad comic book. The story is a little too talky, the art's pretty good, but the talents of both Matt Fraction and Olivier Coipel are wasted, basically, on a book that has two serious issues. The first of these is in kind, the second is in concept. 

The problem with the kind of comic book that Inhumanity is that such books are not comics-- in fact aren't really art-- in a traditional sense, because they doesn't serve their own purposes. Instead, they're merely set up for something else, in this case the upcoming Inhuman series, which once upon a time was going to be written by Fraction, and now is to be written by up and comer Charles Soule.  And, so, Inhumanity #1 is loaded with information; the prehistory and current state of the Inhumans, what exactly went down at the end of Infinity, the unknown status of most of the Inhuman royal family, and so on. For fans of comics with deep worlds and dense mythologies to explore, this is a doozy. But it makes for boring reading. 

So Matt Fraction does his best to keep us interested. He brings in the Avengers. He has a character walk out of a window at the end. But these things are a distraction, at best, from the fact that his job here is to manufacture interest in a story, which brings us to the problem in concept: it's not clear to me that this is a story that very many people are going to be interested in. It's not clear to me that anyone really cares about the Inhumans, a property that has been humming along quietly since its introduction forty years ago. Occasionally, they've been players in Fantastic Four stories, and they have regularly appeared in minor Marvel mini-series every couple of years since the beginning of the century. Every character is somebody's favorite, but the number of people clamoring for a density of books about these characters were likely few and far between.

This isn't to say that I don't think that the Inhumans are interesting, or that I think that Inhuman isn't going to be good. It's not out yet. I can't say. But I do know that Marvel fired Matt Fraction off of the comic, which means that they have certain things that they want done with it, things that Fraction wasn't doing. That suggests that Marvel has big plans for this story. But for those big plans to work, people have to actually care. And the biggest barrier to caring here is that readers actually have to know about the Inhumans, and I'm not sure that many people, particularly many casual readers of comics, do. 

To some extent, Inhumanity is the remedy to that. It's a history lesson, more or less, and it lays out the major players. But, even so, it relies too much on its readers when it expects them to know who Medusa or Triton or Lockjaw (here referred to as "the king's dog," perhaps the blandest possible way to describe a giant mustachioed canine teleporter with a tuning fork on his head) are, or when it expects them to feel something when Karnak, a character with an interesting history that most of them have literally just been introduced to, steps out of a window. In some ways, it seems a little bit like an exercise in erasure, which may actually be the solution to the problem I'm describing. 

The problem, at least for right now, is that you can still see Jack Kirby's chalk on the board.