Category: Comic Books

The New 52: Wonder Woman #1

Of the DC Trinity, Wonder Woman was arguably the hero who stood to gain the most from a universe-wide relaunch. She’s been mucked-up and un-mucked-up so many times that my head spins a little just thinking about her recent history. Of course, the biggest problem with the series has been the nonexistent but perceived need to update Wonder Woman, who, whether written by a New York Times bestselling author or wearing pants, couldn’t sell more books if doing so would save a besieged Paradise Island. The best two Wonder Woman runs in recent memory, Greg Rucka’s and Gail Simone’s, focused not on her image in relation to modern society, but her place in it. Both modernized Wonder Woman, but in ways slight and not off-putting; Rucka’s Diana was an ambassador to the United Nations, and Simone’s was a modern take on John Byrne’s conception of Wonder Woman as a heroine of gods and monsters for our time. They weren’t looking to sell Wonder Woman as anything more than the protagonist of a great comic book, and now, with the TV series dead in the water and hopes for a non-Batman DC Comics movie doing well quashed by the failure of Green Lantern, Wonder Woman is free from the shackles of consumerist oppression.

The resulting comic book, Wonder Woman #1, is exactly the kind of thing I hoped for from the New 52 initiative, movement in a positive direction for a favorite character of mine. In it, a woman is visited by Hermes, who tires to warn her of an impending attack by a duo of centaur-assassins. The shotgun-wielding woman with a pixie haircut doesn’t believe Hermes, of course, until the assassins beat down her door, brandishing swords and bows. Hermes gives the woman a key, which spirits her off to an apartment belonging to Diana Prince, who you might know as Wonder Woman. As you can see in the picture above, she’s pretty good at protecting those who randomly drop in on her while she’s sleeping. She’s freakin’ Wonder Woman.

What’s most appreciable about Wonder Woman #1 is that it does not question who Wonder Woman is, nor does it treat the reader like an idiot. You don’t need to be a mythology buff or a Wonder Woman fanboy to understand that ancient Greek gods walk among us, and that it’s Wonder Woman’s charge to protect those effected. Sure, one’s appreciation of Wonder Woman #1 likely increases if you can spot Hera (she of the peacock cape) or know who Apollo is (the oracular god of the Sun…hence the three young women he uses as oracles), or have read any mythology where either a) a powerful being is told that he’ll be killed by a soon-to-be-born child or b) a god sleeps with a mortal and is mysteriously absent to deal with the consequences, but these are stories as old as storytelling, they’re familiar, they’re still good, and here, added to them, is our time and place and a superhero.

I was surprised to see this from Brian Azzarello, whose previous DC work beyond the fantastic, gritty crime saga 100 Bullets and other adult-orientated comics includes a shaky run on Batman and two mini-series featuring more “realistic” takes on iconic villains–Lex Luthor and the Joker–that didn’t really do much for me. The story here is solid, updating some gods as one would expect, keeping others as they were, and focusing on Wonder Woman’s heroism, though I suspect one “life changing” factoid or another will be dropped on her soon enough. The art, by Cliff Chiang, is what really pops here, both in its scale and its attention to detail. Despite the fact that the two women at the center of the book are barely clothed, neither is sexualized. Considering the mild controversy that arose over the cover of Justice League #1, where Wonder Woman, as is typical for the female character in a mostly male book, struck a lascivious pose that looked out of place amid the scowly, barrel-chested bros behind her, who somehow towered over Diana despite her being an Amazon.

Chiang’s artwork, if nothing else, shows him as an artist capable of portraying a Wonder Woman of mythic proportion without salivating over her. The art’s dynamic nature is helped in large part by some bold inking and a reverence for the style seen in DC’s classic animation, pioneered by Bruce Timm. I wouldn’t return to Wonder Woman just for the artwork, but, combined with Azzarello’s confident tone, Wonder Woman #1 joins Simone’s Batgirl on a very small list of titles that has me both interested in the direction of a character that I like, and a universe that is open to its own curiosities.

October 18, 2011
The New 52: Hawk and Dove #1

Because I’m an incredibly mature young man, this review was going to consist of nothing but panels from Hawk and Dove #1 where a character has their teeth clenched. About three pages in, however, I realized that that course of action would result in the longest post in the history of this blog, since almost every panel drawn by 90s comic book superstar Rob Liefeld features a man or woman with his mouth agape, pearly whites smashed together. Seriously, more teeth are gnashed in a single page of Hawk and Dove than in a year’s worth of One Life to Live. Instead of posting single images, I’ve mashed all the teeth gnashing into one image. Observe:

The horror…

If you’re a big time Rob Liefeld fan, rejoyce–he’s in full force here, and while his art has gotten a bit slicker since the days of special edition first issues with plated-titanium covers that’ve been preserved and polybagged for future value, slicker inking techniques and better paper quality can’t hide the man’s ineptitude. Liefeld’s cause could have been better helped by Sterling Gates’ script, which sees the titular heroes of the book save the Washington Monument from a terrorist’s hijacked plane (which, depending on your taste, may be a bit too exploitative), but, thinking about it, having an overmuscled action hero and his impossibly proportioned femme-sidekick save America’s favorite phallic symbol makes perfect sense.

What doesn’t make sense, at least to me, is the decision to relaunch an entire freaking universe in an attempt to move out of the past, only to hand one of 52 new books over to an artist who represents exactly the sort of thing comic books, as a medium, need to run away from. Don’t get me wrong–there’s certainly room for a throwback here and there, and I’m looking forward to checking out DC’s western and military anthology books and hope they do well. Hawk and Dove, however, represents DC’s first major fumble. Yes, Liefeld is a magnet for controversy, but it’s not like he’s a creative giant on the level of, say, Grant Morrison, who is controversial in the sense that he at least does something different or interesting when handed the ball. Rob Liefeld’s kind of controversy doesn’t create cash–it drives money away. The guy hasn’t been cool since his Levi’s Jeans commercial and, fittingly, Levi’s haven’t been cool in 20 years, either. Despite all this, Hawk and Dove will probably go on for another five or six issues, ending either when sales drop or Liefeld gets tired of the project and decides to move on to something “new.” And he’ll probably be paid unjust sums of money to do it, too.

October 16, 2011
The New 52: Teen Titans #1

It only took a page, but I hate Kid Flash.

Really, the above frame from Teen Titans #1 is my problem with the idea of teen superheroes in the DC Universe: They are either the emotionally underdeveloped, cocky douchebag kid brothers and sisters of the Justice League, or they’re way too smart, way to poised, way too ready to take on the problems of the world. For all the negativity (rightly) heaped on Frank Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, his take on the DCU’s hero/junior hero dynamic at least tried to make it clear that, no, things weren’t normal, no, they weren’t going to get better, and yes, everything was terrifying. Scott Lobdell’s Teen Titans so far don’t touch on the terrifying nature of the job these kids are doing, though it hints at the underlying metaphor of superpowers-as-puberty. His Kid Flash is an all-swagger jerk. His Red Robin is, as you’d expect from one of Batman’s compatriots, a master tactician. His Wonder Girl, upon realizing that she’s being hunted by a shadowy extra-governmental organization, says that things will never be the same.

Wonder Girl, it should be said, hates being called Wonder Girl. But that’s life for the kid heroes of the DC Universe, either suffering an identity crisis or from a lack of attention from their chosen role model. But they’ve got bigger problems than worrying about their old, idyllic lives racing stolen cars down the Pacific Coast Highway. The shadowy extra-governmental agency is called N.O.W.H.E.R.E., which is one of those acronyms that will probably forever be without explanation, and Red Robin (Tim Drake, for you Robin III fans out there) is a blogger and proprietor of a Wikileaks-esque operation, an anonymous folk hero who knows that he and other teen heroes, so derided in the media, aren’t going to do well on their own. So it’s a race between Robin and the trenchcoat-bedecked leader of N.O.W.H.E.R.E. to track down the teen heroes (Teen Titans, if you will) and create a team out of ’em. Judging from the cover, it looks like Superboy, Starfire, a purple robot and a spider-woman have yet to join.

This issue never quite rises above teen comic cliche, and every Teen Titans comic runs headlong at the monumental task of equaling the Marv Wolfman/George Perez book from the 80s. It attempts to take a similar path as Marvel’s Runaways and Young Avengers, making it clear that these kids either have no ties to the big league heroes, or that their ties are tenuous at best. They’re on the run. They may have issues with their parents. But they’re archetypes, and as a writer myself, I often wonder if there’s any way to evolve a character from there. Will Red Robin always be the leader? Will Kid Flash always make me want to punch him? It’s issue one, which is way too early to tell…but nothing else in the first issue makes me want to come back and find out.

Brett Booth’s pencils are alright, though they’re very clearly in a Michael Turner vein. Lots of teen side-boob and mostly-naked aliens coming down the pipe. This seems like a wrong (read: dumb) move by DC Comics, who’ve somehow missed out on the potential goldmine the Teen Titans property has represented since the Teen Titans cartoon aired on TV. I don’t know if you know this, but comic books used to be very popular with cartoon-watching children. Not only that, but cartoon-watching children are now a vast, mostly untapped market for the medium. Sideboob and near nudity have been available in nearly every comic book I’ve read since I started reading them. The market for sideboob and near nudity is saturated. Why not throw a bone to the under-sixteen set? Why not try to interest new people? Why not offer something flashy and effervescent? It doesn’t have to be a cartoon, but it should probably be trying to attract the old cartoon’s audience. It doesn’t have to be a farce, but it should be different, shouldn’t it?

October 12, 2011
First Issue Collector’s Item: Suicide Squad #1

One of my difficulties in getting into DC Comics (and when I worked at a comic shop and had free reign with my pull list, believe me, I tried) is that the collection of villains faced by guys like the Flash, Green Lantern and Green Arrow are often, well, boring. Even Batman has some rogues that were just impossible for me to get into, as they had, in my estimation, no real purpose. A guy like the Penguin, for example. Great in the old TV show. Great in Batman Returns. Terrible in the comics, where he was a nightclub owner who may or may not have been running guns, who may or may not have been a good source of wisdom. Too often, a member of the Bat Family would drop in on his club, beat up Penguin until he squawked, and that’d be it. Deadshot, one of the main characters of Suicide Squad has kind of the same problem. He’s an assassin, and that’s it. You pay him, he shoots people, he moves on. Oh sure, he’s a talented assassin, and he only misses if Batman screws up his shot, but if you think about the number of superheroes and supervillains in the DC universe…there’ve got to be HUNDREDS of guys just like Deadshot out there, making a pretty good living despite the fact that they’re not dressed in some snazzy armor or carrying a wrist gauntlet gun. What’s so exciting about that?

The Suicide Squad, as created by John Ostrander, has a way of re-contextualizing these villains. Taken from their cells by a secret government agency and fitted with a tiny bomb that will blow up if they disobey orders or drop off the grid, the men and women who make up the team of ex-cons are sent to do some of the DCU’s more ruthless tasks–at the end of this issue, for instance, they’re sent on a mission to attack an NFL-sized stadium with some 60,000 people inside. Not only does it give a nobody like King Shark something to do with his life beyond biting the arms off of passers-by, it gives dudes like Deadshot something to fight for–not only will the agency kill him if he screws up, but they know his secrets and can hurt him that way, too. (more…)

September 22, 2011
First Issue Collector’s : Batgirl #1

I don’t know how damning this is as a comic book nerd, but I’ve never had an affinity for Barbra Gordon, Batgirl. Barbra Gordon as the Oracle being something totally different, in her original form Gordon evolved from a swinging mod-librarian more excited about accessorizing than fighting crime to one of Batman’s many interchangeable sidekicks, only she was the daughter of Jim Gordon, so she had certain advantages, story-wise, that both Nightwing and Robin didn’t have–imagine the chief of Gotham P.D.’s daughter being captured by the police and revealed as a vigilante! Of course, the Joker shot Barbara Gordon in the spine, paralyzing her from 1988 to 2011, a remarkable era of consistency in a medium that resurrects characters who didn’t die violently enough in the past.

With Batgirl #1, that’s over, and all of Barbara’s post-Killing Joke stories seem to have been tossed out the window. The Joker still shoots her, the gunshot still paralyzes her, but after three years she’s able to walk again. Gail Simone doesn’t put much effort in explaining the whys and wherefores of this development in Barbara’s life, but she doesn’t exactly need to. Like Grant Morrison in Action Comics #1, Simone is less concerned with history and more concerned with character building. So it’s not important to Gordon why she’s able to walk again, but what she’s going to do now that she can. The answer, obviously, is to go back out on the streets and fight crime.

Things are hardly perfect on her first night out, however. She’s rusty, prone to error, and almost gets herself and her perp killed. What’s obvious, however, is that Batgirl will soon have more pressing issues than the local murder gang. There’s a supervillain going around town calling himself Mirror. He’s none too pleased with individuals who should have died in random accidents and, like death (the metaphorical concept of death, I suppose) in the Final Destination movies, he takes it upon himself to finish nature’s job. This suburbanite watering his grass, for instance:

A confrontation between Mirror and Batgirl is inevitable (Barbara Gordon is on his list), and when it does happen, we find that Batgirl is very much afraid of what should happen to her if she is shot through the spine again. This…is actually rather shocking, as it’s not everyday that a superhero demonstrates fear of anything, let alone something as practical as a gun pointed at her stomach. Most superheroes, you will recall, have some sort of weakness. Superman has kryptonite. Green Lantern has yellow. Batman is merely human. But these guys charge headlong into threatening situations without thinking twice and, to be frank, it’s a little boring. Barbara Gordon goes into situations where guys have guns even though she’s terrified of guns and, though one is pointed right at her, she wills herself to continue. If every issue has a moment where a bad guy gets the drop on her and she freezes up, it’ll get old quickly, but it’s nice to know that Gordon isn’t just headed back to the field, carefree, like nothing ever happened. She’s got scars, and she’ll need to battle those.

Mirror, though, is kind of a lame villain. Beyond the awful name and his spike-knuckled gauntlets, the guy is dressed in black and kills people in a decidedly 1990s way, with as much violence as possible. This may be Simone’s intent, since, as the former curator of Women in Refrigerators, she knows a thing or two about 90s violence, a lot of which can trace its roots back to Moore’s Killing Joke (and his Watchmen, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns). Looking at the guy stroll through a hospital blasting cops in half is a stark reminder of what I dislike about comic books, and while Simone does it well enough and, I’m sure, is pushing Mirror in a logical direction, something about the later realism of his killings takes a lot of the fun out of this issue.

As far as the art goes, I can’t imagine that Batgirl’s costume stays the way it is for long–the only thing here not covered in intricate line-work is the cape. Adrian Sayf does a good job with it, though, as Batgirl is never portrayed inconsistently. Eventually, though, I suspect a lot of that detail will go away, like when Spider-Man’s costume lost half of its webbing when Steve Ditko left the book. There are moments when the action from panel to panel is so cluttered that the backgrounds melt away into solid color, which is a little annoying, but I suppose that can’t be helped and nothing gets lost along the way.

It’ll be interesting to see where they go with Barbara, who moves out of her dad’s place and into a new apartment with an activist roommate, the Craigslist special. Simone is one of the best mainstream superhero authors when it comes to depicting women (this is a skill many comic scribes lack) and shortcomings, and it’s clear that Barbara has a lot to deal with. If she’s allowed to deal with it, this’ll be a successful book, and one of my favorites of DC’s relaunch. If she’s a free-swinging airhead this time next year, consider it a lost opportunity.

September 20, 2011
First Issue Collector’s Item: Action Comics #1

Yes, Superman is wearing jeans. And a t-shirt. And work-boots. But lost amid the hubub over the Man of Steel ditching the baby blue onesie in favor of a decidedly more working class look is the challenge that comes with taking Action Comics, which has run continuously since June, 1938, stamping a new #1 on the cover and rebuilding the Superman mythos from scratch. This, along with the renumbering of Detective Comics and the rebooting of Batman’s mythos, is the big risk of DC Comic’s push to make its way back into the hearts, minds and hands of America’s children and casual comic book readers, but beyond maybe making a few number-crazy fanboys upset, Superman’s new look and new(ish) mission should come as no surprise–in comicdom, everything is up for revision.

Everything.

Unlike Superman-Red/Superman-Blue, the Clark Kent presented by Grant Morrison and Rags Morales actually seems like he’s able to bring the character into a new era. Rather than spending time on his origins (Morrison has already captured Superman’s birth as perfectly and as quickly as possible in All-Star Superman), Action Comics jumps right into Kent’s formative days as a superhero. His mission is to make sure that the ultra-rich of Metropolis abide by the same laws as the ultra-poor, which makes his choice of wardrobe nothing if not appropriate. With his jeans rolled up and his cape hanging to his t-shirt by the force of will, this Superman looks more comfortable putting in a hard day’s work than being a paragon of virtue. (more…)

September 18, 2011