I start fires.
Wait, that sounds bad. Lemme try that again: A lit fireplace can be one of the most comforting sights ever. It’s warm and it’s not dangerous so long as you’re aware of it. It’s a source of light, energy, life. It’s also a great place to get rid of inconvenient evidence. Whatever your reasons, we’re getting into the time of year where a lot of people are starting more and more fires.
Yeah, that’s WAY better. The books this week lit a fire for me this week, one way or another. Read on and you’ll get what I’m typing about.
Warlord of Mars 30 (Nelson/ Lanhellas & Abreu): There are five titles right now beating the dead horse that is Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series, and as soon as you look at one of the regular covers for this issue, you’ll understand why it stood out and practically demanded review.
Yep. That. Involuntary body piercing at best, horrific butchering of a sentient, living being at worst. If you can look past the torture, you’ll notice that Dejah Thoris’s reaction to being hooked to the ceiling like one of Jason Voorhees’s afterthoughts is something that looks like constipation. Oh, and the color palette somewhere between puke and poop.
Yep. That. Involuntary body piercing at best, horrific butchering of a sentient, living being at worst. If you can look past the torture, you’ll notice that Dejah Thoris’s reaction to being hooked to the ceiling like one of Jason Voorhees’s afterthoughts is something that looks like constipation. Oh, and the color palette somewhere between puke and poop.
John Carter’s picked himself up a green man hitchhiker (How many thumbs did that guy use? He’s got four options.) to escape the clutches of the yellow man army. I can only assume the rest of the rainbow will get attention at some point, but I digress. They get chased into a dead-end chasm and it would seem the yellow army will claim victory and corpses until an airship armada comes out of the sky so fast, you’d think someone used a cheat code.
The story is barely worth talking about, but I’m not ready to go back to the cover issue yet, so I’ll talk about the story. The artwork, a dirty, unfinished assortment of lines and colors, depicts a humdrum story with racism, a deus ex machina, and an after-school-special lesson at the end that has the audacity to pretend at being funny.
Okay, I think I’m ready. The saying goes you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to comics, that’s just not possible. Covers have always been an integral part of the book. Once upon a time, they previewed the interior with exposition and even panels that heightened readers’ appetites. Today’s covers tend more toward wordless splash images, but still bear the responsibility of reflecting what will be found inside somehow. Having said that, let’s take a look at the other regular cover:
Alright, it doesn’t stand out as much, but we’ve got a pattern at least: Dejah Thoris features if not exclusively, then at least prominently, on the covers. By rights, she should be the main subject of this issue. So how does it make you feel knowing that she’s not seen at all in this book, not even her name is mentioned?
Alright, it doesn’t stand out as much, but we’ve got a pattern at least: Dejah Thoris features if not exclusively, then at least prominently, on the covers. By rights, she should be the main subject of this issue. So how does it make you feel knowing that she’s not seen at all in this book, not even her name is mentioned?
When hipsters, doomsday critics, and blatant haters call modern comics out for abandoning all forms of quality just so new material appears on shelves, they’re talking about books like this. Burroughs produced some enduring pulp-style stories that had merit. Warlord of Mars 30 has none of that merit.
Infinity 6/6 (Hickman/ Cheung): The latest Marvel crossover event wraps up this week! Thanos’s quest to eliminate his bastard offspring has led him to Earth to confront the new Inhuman Thane while the heroes fight through an armada and a planet-breaking bomb.
Thanos’s armada, at one point overwhelming every major power in the galaxy, has been broken. Only Earth is occupied, and the united fleets bear down on it with grim determination. On the surface, Thanos is ready to eliminate his bloodline and commemorate the occasion by blowing up Earth. The first team through the blockade hits Thanos before he can finish Thane off, but Thanos hits back.
Thanos’s armada, at one point overwhelming every major power in the galaxy, has been broken. Only Earth is occupied, and the united fleets bear down on it with grim determination. On the surface, Thanos is ready to eliminate his bloodline and commemorate the occasion by blowing up Earth. The first team through the blockade hits Thanos before he can finish Thane off, but Thanos hits back.
This storyline has some very crippling plot holes in it, like “Why does Thanos want to kill his kids?”, “Where does he find these followers when history clearly says he’ll kill anyone that bothers?”, and “What’s heroic about giving your own planet a self-destruct device?”. Individual characters don’t end up having changed much at all, but the last few pages make clear what the purpose of this event was: to change the galactic landscape. As if political stage-setting wasn’t enough, the final message reads like something out of a goth kid’s philosophy-class notebook – the universe tends toward entropy, we’re all dying anyway.
But really, what hurts the most is that, when it came time to make the big plays that shut the bad guys down, the premiere heroes were barely involved. New players and guest stars showed up to take care of business while the characters we pick up these books to read about were off taking care of other things. It’s one thing to promote a series with “a threat even the combined might of the Avengers can’t handle”, but proving the heroes just can’t get their job done? I don’t want to read that.
Thanos completionists can pick this up fairly secure that they can relax for a while. I don’t know who else would want to, honestly.
Saga 16 (Vaughan/ Staples): Regular readers, personal friends, and hermits within earshot of my favorite mountains will know already that I love Saga. Everything Vaughan and Staples have done has been great so far and I expected that opinion to never change, but something happened this issue that I really need to call attention to.
Our starcrossing couple, Alana and Marko, is brainstorming ideas on how to make money while the old fogies chuckle at their own cleverness. Soap operas are just as popular and mind-numbing in the Saga-verse as in ours, but they also pay under the table. The action and threats are actually focusing on the bounty hunters tracking our protagonists down, and one of them has come down with a mild case of knife-to-the-throat. Parties come together rapidly, and no one thought to hire a caterer.
Our starcrossing couple, Alana and Marko, is brainstorming ideas on how to make money while the old fogies chuckle at their own cleverness. Soap operas are just as popular and mind-numbing in the Saga-verse as in ours, but they also pay under the table. The action and threats are actually focusing on the bounty hunters tracking our protagonists down, and one of them has come down with a mild case of knife-to-the-throat. Parties come together rapidly, and no one thought to hire a caterer.
Lying Cat is at once the best and worst thing about this book. Over the previous three issues, an idea was teased that The Will was being haunted by his former love into a life away from violence; only in the last issue was the truth revealed. This issue started another thread of that same story, and put it to bed before the reader could turn the page. Lying Cat destroys any chance for an unknown to stay unknown. It can ferret out the truth behind any fiction, delusion, even a chemically-based hallucination, and in effect resolve three issue’s worth of ambiguous drama in two panels.
With any other book, this would mean the creators start hunting for some other way to pad a story, but instead of that, Vaughan and Staples use the extra room for more twists, action, revelations, and awesome. Lying Cat will destroy comics as we know them like your favorite curtains or your child’s homework. On those tattered remains, Lying Cat will build something greater than our feeble minds can comprehend.
Long live Lying Cat.
Adventures of Superman 7 (Lapham, then Seeley/ Norton): This issue of a title I don’t normally read actually gave me mixed feelings, as in two very strong reactions mixed together to form some kind of combustible substance. I hope you’re wearing protective gear.
When Superman doesn’t have kryptonite-powered baddies to thwart, he saves people from more pedestrian threats, such as themselves. This is fine until a cult built around the Man of Steel decides to prove to the world theirs is a true god by forcing him to do the impossible: save two-hundred suicide jumpers across the city of Metropolis at the same time. Sound impossible? Superman agrees, and it also sounds a bit too well put together, especially the part where the cultists all donate their money and possessions to the same, brand-new charity. A back-up story follows a Russian orphan that likes to climbing trees more than talking. Superman manages to give her a pick-me-up between global threats and fights with Darkseid.
When Superman doesn’t have kryptonite-powered baddies to thwart, he saves people from more pedestrian threats, such as themselves. This is fine until a cult built around the Man of Steel decides to prove to the world theirs is a true god by forcing him to do the impossible: save two-hundred suicide jumpers across the city of Metropolis at the same time. Sound impossible? Superman agrees, and it also sounds a bit too well put together, especially the part where the cultists all donate their money and possessions to the same, brand-new charity. A back-up story follows a Russian orphan that likes to climbing trees more than talking. Superman manages to give her a pick-me-up between global threats and fights with Darkseid.
Here’s what every Superman comic these days tries to show you:
PANEL 1: Forgoing a utensil, Superman eats a cake at impossible speeds. By the time he’s done, he hasn’t just eaten the cake, he’s eaten the idea of a cake. People all around the globe can’t remember what cake is, that’s how completely Superman ate it.
PANEL 2: Superman still has his cake! He ate it so fast that time looped backward and the cake is back on the plate! The globe hails Superman as the inventor of the cake! Sales of cake mix bring the global economy back to pre-crash levels! Batman smiles! A golden age dawns!
If any character in fiction is going to find the hidden “All of the above” solution, it’s going to be Superman, fine. If that’s the ONLY kind of story we see featuring him, that’s boring. Not every problem is a Sophie’s Choice scenario. Superman using his super breath, a wrecking ball, and a sewage pipe to reinvent the gun is neat, but it doesn’t need to be paired with a cyber cult and questioning how to place value on life to be neat.
Careful readers may notice one detail: the red undies are BACK! That means, by law, DC has to pay the estate of Jerry Siegel royalties for the design!*
So here’s your very own impossible decision, readers: do you pass by a comic with mostly flat art (Norton [regular artist of Revival, also new this week!] does the back-up story’s art and it’s good) and an average-at-best story, or do you support the family whose ancestors helped give us superhero comics as a genre?
No matter what books you pick up this week, we hope you don’t throw them into a fire. They’ll burn up fast, it’s true, but burning ink is sometimes toxic, and there’s probably something better to get rid of close by, so use that instead.
Also, you may have noticed Christmas is getting closer, and Hanukkah starts this Thursday (the next time it does that, we’ll have probably switched to a different calendar system)! If you need to shop for a special someone, come in on Blackest Friday when we’ll be hosting a raffle for over $200 in merchandise! We hope to see you then!
*The lawsuits between Siegel, Shuster, DC, and Time Warner are so many and the rulings so varied that I can’t be sure what’s legal to print in comics anymore.
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