This week, I’m letting Assistant Manager and gaming expert Tim pick this week’s comics for review. Who knows? Maybe he has insight into the publishing industry that I don’t and we’ll have a roster that opens things up. Or, he could be a vindictive jerk and give me nothing but crap. Either way, readers, just brace yourselves.
(CC Note: Oh yes. Oh. Yes.)
Star Wars: Vader’s Little Princess (Jeffrey Brown). Starting off the week with a bit of light reading is an optimist’s view of what would have happened if Anakin Skywalker hadn’t been separated from his kids. Among other things, they would not make out.
The book is a collection of scenes between Vader and Princess Leia as she grows from a stubborn child to a fiercely rebellious woman. The imposing and intimidating Vader falls apart quickly when little Leia comes from behind a tractor emitter and starts asking her daddy questions. As she gets older, Vader finds her lack of respectable fashion sense disturbing. Sometimes they’re united against the universe, other times they fight so loudly you’d think a planet exploded.
About the only thing every page has in common is an endearing quality that somehow, in the face of countless continuity slaps, manages to capture the characters and what makes them lovable. Jeffrey Brown’s artwork dominates each page with a simple, deceptively childish, and unmistakable style meant to speak to young and old alike. The linework is uniform, and the coloring is done in crayon (or the digital equivalent, but the look is obvious), yet it works better than some mainstream efforts. When there is dialog, there’s rarely more than ten words per page, yet that’s all it takes to push the message home, whatever that page’s message might be.
It’s a little book meant to amuse, unite parent and child if only for a few minutes, and remember a time when fear kept the local systems in line and no one had heard of Gungans. The worst thing about this is that there’s only one copy this week.
Five Ghosts 2 (Barbiere/ Mooneyham). Next up is a new series that looks like 1930’s era pulp fiction drawn by Joe Kubert.
...PULP COMICS AS IF BY JOE KUBERT?!? TRAMBAMPOLINE! Wait, calm down, calm down. Let’s actually read it before we go crazy.
Fabian Gray is a treasure hunter in the same way that Robin Hood is a welfare officer: he believes in better living through aggressive fundraising. He picked up a trinket a while back in the same way that Doctor Who stole the TARDIS, and now he’s got new abilities and problems. Fabian is trying to find a way to undo whatever happened to his sister, which happens to be the exact same thing that happened to him, only he got a benevolent case of multiple personality disorder, and she got comatose. Allies are few, and while growing in number, their motives are pretty damn peculiar. Enemies are everywhere, even perhaps on the Kryptonian Supreme Court.
This story takes the classic archetypal heroes from the age of pulp storytelling and literally mashes them together with a standard anti-hero type that’s popular today. Fabian’s own motivations are crystal clear, even if the path to make them reality is hazy and convoluted. So far, the creators have done an excellent job of taking all the best elements of pulp stories and leaving the worst parts - like offensive stereotypes and gender roles - out. The first issue simply ignored them entirely, but with a new ally coming into play, maybe things will get more varied.
Mooneyham’s artwork is such a perfect homage both to the style of the story and Joe Kubert’s own work that it alone merits the cover price. Barbiere’s plot is still warming up, but the elements are coming together for something that could be great.
So far this isn’t too bad. Maybe I was worried for nothing?
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe 1 (Giffen/ Mhan). Wait, didn’t this come out a few months ago? It did, but that was a miniseries where the familiar story and characters were brought back into their roles. This is the first of the regular series.
Skeletor and the Sorceress are dead. The land of Eternia is beginning to rebuild itself, eager for a chance to rest after a long, hard war. This is perfect timing for interdimensional hellbeasts to cross over and start invading, or so the animated totem pole of death thinks. He sends his daughter and a few murder squads over to start subjugating the masses, expecting little resistance. Family drama and a man-mountain with a sword prove more than they expected.
Why is this a number 1? One character is introduced, everyone else is in the middle of the cheeriest funeral ever, and the elite of society only just now realize that girls can have red hair. I don’t understand! Oh wait, number 1’s sell better. It’s shameful, but I cannot see any other reason for this.
The writing is a bit disjointed in places - ribbing on the stage of a funeral? - but the lines are clever enough. I caught a smirk forming once or twice on my face. Mhan’s artwork has clearly matured from his days on Spy Boy, and he did good then.
Numerology aside, this isn’t a bad issue. There are a number of very simple ways it could have been better, like give new readers a way to understand what’s going on, but it’s a reasonable addition to the He-Man Canon.
He-Man Cannon is hereby copyrighted by me and will be available in stores this Christmas!
As a side note, seeing as how DC is publishing the He-Man books, I am going to predict, here exclusively on this blog, that He-Man will be the unannounced final selectable character for Injustice: Gods Among Us, out this week. The local Gamestop had a release party Monday night that we gave out free comics at, and everyone had a blast.
Captain America 6 (Remender/ Romita). It’s been a while since we looked in on the relaunch of Captain America, so I suppose we’re due to check back in. When we left, Cap had been kidnapped by Arnim Zola, and while escaping, Cap grabbed a small boy he thought had also been kidnapped and brought him along. Since then, about twelve years comic time have passed, and they have not been kind.
Armin Zola, on learning his old enemy was alive, sent an army to burn down Cap’s new digs, the surrounding village, and everything in between. On learning that his son was also alive, he took the kid back and left Cap for dead, because this time that’ll work. Cap proves resilient. Zola also has a daughter/ warlord that just got her first crush, and she hopes she can figure out how to deal with these new emotions (and considering her upbringing, ALL emotions are new) before they follow her into the shower with a loaded gun and shoot her in the face.
So far, this volume has gone out of its way to depict everything at its worst. It is so far removed from everything we know about Captain America that, aside from some scraps of uniform, it’s hardly recognizable. This reminds me of Punisher: The End, where the world got so screwed up that the only way to end the story was for everybody in it to die. It wasn’t just ugly, it was so damaged and rotten that the only positive takeaway was that nothing remotely human could rise back up and try it ever again. It’s not even the absolute desolation I’m complaining about, it’s the proposal that Steve Rogers’s principles don’t survive under stress when they’ve already proven to survive decades of duress. Considering his role in the mega event that is going on at exactly the same time, it’s a very safe bet that he’ll get out of this situation without major temporal damage and not bring anyone along. No suspense there. There’re other parts of the story that strike me as so tasteless that I’m not going to bring them up, fearing that highlighting them will make them more popular. I didn’t know I had a limit for tastelessness either, but here we are.
There are many books out there that take heroic templates and use them in ways that normally would never be accepted. If Remender and Romita had tried that instead of abducting Captain America, this might be interesting. As a Cap book, this is disgusting.
And that was a Variant Coverage first. I relinquished control of the schedule to management. I’m glad we gave it a shot, it’s always good to try new things. Now I can say with all the assurance in the world that it will never happen again. See you next week!
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