Hi, everybody! No, this isn’t Dr. Nick, this is Ryan with another installment of Variant Coverage! We’ve got three beginnings and an ending to look at this week, and with a side of metatextual content to spice things up. Let’s get right to it!
Brother Lono 1 (Azzarello/ Risso): 100 Bullets ended years ago and left a distinct impression on its audience, an impression that some may still feel. Now, the original team behind that series revisit one of its central characters with the miniseries Brother Lono.
Lono’s in jail. He’s perfectly fine staying there, and when word of work comes up, he’s perfectly fine doing that. While he’s moseying around Mexico, others are looking to set up more aggressive means of employment for themselves, moving things like drugs and corpses. Even the nicest involved, those who befriend old travellers and take in orphans, are involved in the dirty deeds of evil men in some way.
Lono’s in jail. He’s perfectly fine staying there, and when word of work comes up, he’s perfectly fine doing that. While he’s moseying around Mexico, others are looking to set up more aggressive means of employment for themselves, moving things like drugs and corpses. Even the nicest involved, those who befriend old travellers and take in orphans, are involved in the dirty deeds of evil men in some way.
Lono seems like the most average character in the book, and when you consider this man walked away from multiple gunshot wounds, that’s something of a new role. Aside from his presence in the book, I honestly can’t say how this is related to 100 Bullets. What I can say is that, while it’s not clear what’s going on in this series yet, the characters get established quickly, and they’re very distinct from each other. The stakes are set high, even if it’s unclear what the game is yet.
New readers should really enjoy violent noir stories if they’re going to invest in this. Fans of 100 Bullets have no reason not to pick it up.
Wild Blue Yonder 1 (Raicht/ Howard): The friendly skies aren’t always friendly. Excess luggage isn’t a concern to every flyer. Security is a concern, though long waits through a checkpoint don’t have to be the least convenient aspect to it. If you ever wondered how riding an airplane could be made even worse after all the changes we’ve seen, there’s now a worst-case scenario: Wild Blue Yonder.
In a world where the surface is toxic, everyone moves upward just to survive. The ultimate home is any airplane, and the ultimate airplane is one that doesn’t need fuel. There’s one such airplane, the Dawn, and it is being aggressively househunted. Society has broken down into classes of flyers or miners, where the former live in a constant state of hunter-or-hunted for precious resources, while the latter work painful hours in dangerous conditions hoping that they can find enough fuel to allow the planes overhead to move on and not carpet-bomb them. Cola, a flyer, likes recruiting new crewmen from the miner ranks, and finds a down-on-his-luck man called Tug to help her out. His first day is more than he bargained for.
In a world where the surface is toxic, everyone moves upward just to survive. The ultimate home is any airplane, and the ultimate airplane is one that doesn’t need fuel. There’s one such airplane, the Dawn, and it is being aggressively househunted. Society has broken down into classes of flyers or miners, where the former live in a constant state of hunter-or-hunted for precious resources, while the latter work painful hours in dangerous conditions hoping that they can find enough fuel to allow the planes overhead to move on and not carpet-bomb them. Cola, a flyer, likes recruiting new crewmen from the miner ranks, and finds a down-on-his-luck man called Tug to help her out. His first day is more than he bargained for.
There’s a bit of Indiana Jones, Waterworld, and Star Wars in this. The leader character likes brown leather jackets, headgear, and ignoring basic protocol, this version of planet Earth is only habitable in tiny amounts, and a kid yanked out of his dusty boring life and thrown onto a mythical roller coaster. It’s got all the ingredients a growing story needs, and plenty of room to grow as well.
Wild Blue Yonder takes some classic, well-known elements and puts them together not in a very new way, but in a competent way.
Extinction Parade 1 (Brooks/ Caceres): The world is preparing itself for World War Z, the story of the very fantastic zombie outbreak and the very down-to-earth way the planet tries to confront it. The mind behind that story, Max Brooks, figures that if one species of undead could exist, it’s not much a stretch that another one could get involved.
Not all undead are created equal. Some are slow, stumbling, and insensate, and then there are those that stalk the night, philosophize, and shun light and gravity. Vampires and zombies don’t coexist so much as they trip over each other. Zombie outbreaks have been happening off and on for millennia in this reality, but never more than a small area, contained and put down almost before the larger world notices. They passed through quickly enough that the world thinks zombies are a myth, and so slightly inconvenient that vampires think they’re a joke. But when the “subdead” somehow decimate the human population (AKA the vampire food supply), the joke stops being funny.
Not all undead are created equal. Some are slow, stumbling, and insensate, and then there are those that stalk the night, philosophize, and shun light and gravity. Vampires and zombies don’t coexist so much as they trip over each other. Zombie outbreaks have been happening off and on for millennia in this reality, but never more than a small area, contained and put down almost before the larger world notices. They passed through quickly enough that the world thinks zombies are a myth, and so slightly inconvenient that vampires think they’re a joke. But when the “subdead” somehow decimate the human population (AKA the vampire food supply), the joke stops being funny.
In one sense, this is another monster mashup: Undead A vs Undead B in an eating contest. In another sense, this is a “Tortoise and the Hare” retelling with a contemporary twist. In a competition between two predators, the quicker and more clever should win every time, the only exception being if the quicker one doesn’t start competing until the race is already over. In a “published by Avatar” sense, this is a gorefest complete with heavy lines and dark palettes, nightmare-borne scenes of decay, and a few lovely ladies (if you can look past the spatter).
If for no other reason than a tribute to the son of the man that brought us Spaceballs, you should give this a very serious look. This has more than enough quality elements in its own right to merit study as a spin-off story to one of the most elaborate zombie stories in this generation, though it will prove too much of a niche book for most people.
Age of Ultron 10 (Bendis/ Various): The event of the year, in which Ultron launched a full assault on the world from a few years in the future, comes to a resolution in this issue. What calamities the heroes managed to avoid are in fact traded for new conundrums that they deem unworthy of breaking the space-time continuum to undo. This is customary. What’s not customary is the revelation of what the whole event was really about, but more on that in a bit.
Sue Storm and Wolverine return from their little errand into the past, not accomplishing what they set out to do in the first place, but getting the result they wanted anyway. This issue flashes back and forth between the newly-saved present and the very recent (and quite screwed) past, when Ultron first arrived on Earth after his little adventure in space, with artistic license exercised. What at first would appear to be a consequence-free win becomes something else, something much more chaotic than the ordered global fire Ultron was trying to orchestrate.
Sue Storm and Wolverine return from their little errand into the past, not accomplishing what they set out to do in the first place, but getting the result they wanted anyway. This issue flashes back and forth between the newly-saved present and the very recent (and quite screwed) past, when Ultron first arrived on Earth after his little adventure in space, with artistic license exercised. What at first would appear to be a consequence-free win becomes something else, something much more chaotic than the ordered global fire Ultron was trying to orchestrate.
Events like this rarely work for me. More often than not, they change nothing except to get rid of or add characters that executives want to move around for marketing purposes. Age of Ultron doesn’t just continue this tradition, is puts on boxing gloves made of ham and gives the reader’s face a rough fisting. It’s the kind of offense I didn’t expect from Marvel and was all set to hate on them for it, but then I realized just WHY it was so out of character, and now it made total sense to me. It actually helps redeem the event altogether.
DC absolutely LOVES this kind of event, the kind that allows them to amend their own universe. Kryptonians punches reality, Superman’s foes try to break Earth, Flash delights in his personal attempts to mimic Dr. Emmett Brown, and the Lantern Corps gets agricultural by digging up graves and negating the finality of death. Sometimes, something good comes out of it, but the usual reaction to such things is a lot of resentment from long-time fans for their favorite characters being fixed when they weren’t broken. Minor scandals have been effective at keeping this kind of behavior in the limelight, and in all that time Marvel has stayed pretty quiet. But now we have a mega-event involving time-travel, a malevolent artificial intelligence, and the unpredictable disruption of the natural order. Marvel is reading from DC’s playbook and has given their audience a greatest-hits compilation.
As a crossover event, Age of Ultron is one of the worst things Marvel has ever published. As a satire of their biggest rival’s standard practices, Age of Ultron is one of the most biting commentaries ever published. I want to smack the people behind this and give them a medal at the same time.
Happy Summer, everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment