Review: Uncanny Avengers #3

I'm beginning to worry a little about Rick Remender. The difference in quality between the first two issues of Captain America and this most recent one is bizarre, with the first two bordering on excellence and that other one, well, dithering around the saccharine muck of what I imagine Remender thinks is inspirational.* Then, there's Uncanny Avengers, the first two issues of which were basically unreadable and but were followed up, with this third issue, by utter, if problematic, brilliance. Maybe Remender can only contribute to one good book a month? If Uncanny Avengers and Captain America have to enter a cage match to the death for his attention, which one wins?

Frankly, I suspect Captain America is Remender's for the long haul, while I'd be surprised if Uncanny Avengers lasts through 2013. Alex Summers (whose not even the other Summers brother!) leading an Avengers team just seems so purposeless, particularly since whoever cooked up this half-cocked idea for a series apparently couldn't decide if what they wanted was to appeal to nostalgia ("hey, it's an Avengers team with Cap, Thor and Scarlet Witch!") or novelty ("hey, that's two former Evil Mutants, one of whom was formerly very dead, and one guy who they actually had to send into space to get rid of on an Avengers team with Cap, Wolverine and Thor!"). If Remender can't figure out how to consistently write Captain-America-as-Avenger and also stop avoiding some of the melodrama that's plagued the series so far, I'm not sure I can keep with it, no matter how much John Cassaday begins to draw like his old self (more on Cassaday in a minute). It doesn't help, either, that the mutants-as-hunted-minority thing isn't exactly new, and that the specific metaphor Remender wants to draw about the possibility of madness in crowds isn't either. I suspect he's trying to add a little bit of ambiguity to what's been a paint-by-numbers plot at Marvel since the mid-Sixties, but, in inverting a very traditional superhero origin story ("a bad guy murdered my family and now I dress in a uniform... FOR JUSTICE") he doesn't make the the Red Skull's S-Men flunkies sympathetic so much as he makes the comic regressive, seeming to justify the brutality of the whole episode and therefore excusing its violence.**

Still credit where it's due: Remender finally manages to squeeze some genuine menace out of the new Red Skull, who is, for this issue at least, truly and persistently terrifying. There is some kind of mad pulp genius in getting a racial ideologue to bind himself to that which he hates, that is, in bringing that particular spent trope about expressive racism into camp, and doing it with a goofy scifi beat--brain grafting--that's probably been a cliche for half a century. Even so, this particular iteration of Captain America's archenemy just hasn't been convincingly villainous, instead seeming more like a poorly timed joke. Now, though, Remender's got the Red Skull really hamming it up, monologuing, "YES! Rise Up! STAND AND BE COUNTED!," as a mob of brainwashed Manhattanites led by his S-Men wander around destroying Manhattan, brutally killing mutants, all the while holding a glass so his manservant can pour him a tipple.*** It's, somehow, both chilling and delightfully ridiculous.

To the extent that the comic isn't problematic or exasperatingly overwrought, though, it's a lot of fun and Remender's relatively good day has a lot to do with that. Perhaps more importantly: John Cassaday's gotten his groove back. I know that he's gone after the next issue (he's a very slow artist and I'm not sure why Marvel thought they were going to be able to get their new flagship monthly out on time with him at the board), but the Drummer really outdoes himself here; his hallmark has always been the way he ties his figure design to distance, and, two issues in, he finally has the right ratio going. When he's close up, he works in an almost photorealistic mode, but, as he positions himself further away, everything becomes increasingly stylized, not-quite-cartoony, as if his understanding of the panel developed such that each one is only able to hold a certain amount of information before it loses something, and so he came up with this kind of relative style to maximize the effect of each. On the page, this translates into a very particular type of dynamism, and it makes his work, at its best, ultra-legible despite its incredible complexity. I want to stress the importance of that, so I'll rephrase: comprehending John Cassaday's artwork simply isn't very hard, even though his compositions have many things to say, by themselves and to each other. If Rick Remender can manage to figure out a similar trick for his writing, or if he can at least untangle himself, Uncanny Avengers might be a breakout book yet, even as its artist, back at the top of his game, steps aside.

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*I know, I know, I'll write about it sooner or later.
**This is itself actually an inversion of one of the tropes of superhero deconstruction, the crucial distinction between justice and revenge, but, since Remender doesn't appear to be interested in pursuing this theme, I'm not sure that it was intentional.
***That man servant, by the way, is named Honest John The Living Propaganda, and he feels like the natural conclusion of some of the stuff that comes out in Ed Brubaker's Captain America work. I think that the character is more than a little brilliant, and I hope he sticks around for awhile.

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.

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.