Crushing Krisis

Welcome to 2012 – I am still a comic book geek.

Specifically, the X-Men.

Yep. That's a lot of comic books.

Specifically, I own something like 95% of every X-Men comic book ever reprinted.

On New Years’ Eve I said to myself, “You dashingly handsome scoundrel, how can you use your obsession to aid people who like the X-Men a normal, healthy amount – unlike you?”

The answer? I will count down for you the top twelve collected editions reprinting X-Men comics originally released before 2010. There’s a vast world of thousands of X-Men comics that have been released since 1963, and not all of them are readily available to buy in book format. These reprints mean that hard-to-get, or never-before-reprinted issues can be bought in handy collections with better reproduction of the line art than original issues.

(As for new X-Men material from 2011, that will require a whole new post to cover!) Read more…

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4. Uncanny X-Men Marvel Masterworks, Vol. 7 HC
Collects Uncanny X-Men #151-159, Annual 5, and Avengers Annual 10.

We’d be kidding ourselves if a new edition of UXM Marvel Masterworks didn’t make the list every year, but it’s for a good reason – these are premium quality, carefully preserved reprints of X-Men material that has rarely ever seen reprint in the past.

This edition sees the return of the amazing Dave Cockrum to art duties, and the return of the vicious Emma Frost to the rogues gallery. Plus, the X-Men return to space for the first time since Dark Phoenix, and Rogue makes her debut in the pages of the Avengers! (Not previously collected in full.)

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3. X-Men by Claremont/Lee Omnibus, Vol. 1 HC
Collects Uncanny X-Men #244-269, Annual #13, X-Men Classic #39

Take two parts Chris Claremont, the writer of ever X-Man tale for over a decade. Add one part the savagely beautiful detailed line-art of Marc Silvestri, and one part explosive newcomer Jim Lee settling in for his first lengthy run on an ongoing title. Lee is renowned as the best comic artist of a generation, and here you can see him grow by leaps and bounds with every issue – which seems to also inspire Silvestri to improve his craft.

Many fans have whined that this is really the Anti-X-Men – the book opens with the team dissolving, and it never truly comes back together in this edition. I say, shove it. This disparate group of stories served to lead into the amazing creative crescendo of Claremont/Lee spending an unbroken year churning out classic issues before both of them jumped ship and the X-line got hijacked by constant gimmick events. (Not previously collected in full.)

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2. X-Men Omnibus, Vol. 2 HC
Collects X-Men #32-66, Avengers #53, KaZar #2-3, and Marvel Tales #30.

While Stan Lee and Jack Kirby laid the bedrock of what it meant to be a mutant, it is this volume that presaged the amazing scope and drama of the X-Men stories that would be told over the next forty years.

Here the original five start to transform from teens to team, and we get the incomparable creative pairing of Roy Thomas with Neal Adams. While this was the period that lead to the X-Men going on hiatus, on re-read you can hardly fault the adventurous plots that ensue. (Also collected in HC and TPB Marvel Masterworks.)

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What could be more classic than Classic X-Men, and more beautiful than early Jim Lee? Well, nothing. But the this next book wins just about every other award there is for X-Collections in 2011 – Most Surprising, Best Complete Saga, Most Shocking, Best Run from a Single Creative Team, Most Mammoth – the list is nearly endless.

…and, my number one collection of the year is…

1. X-Statix Omnibus
Already SOLD OUT at Amazon in just two months – try Cheap Graphic Novels or Tales of Wonder. Collects X-Force#116-129, Brotherhood #9; X-Statix #1-26; Wolverine/Doop #1-2; Dead Girl #1-5; and material from X-Men Unlimited #41, I <3 Marvel, and Nation X #4. 

X-Statix is really weird. Do not think of it as an X-Men comic, or even a Marvel superhero comic, as it relies very little on foreknowledge of either.  It is an indie comic about a deadly and incredibly popular reality television show that happens to star a team of lethal mutants with short life expectancies. There are no “villains” to speak of, though the team certainly faces ongoing challenges.

Instead, think of it as something like Reality Bites or Chasing Amy - or even Hunger Games - a self-aware piece of fiction that constantly comments on the real world culture it is woven within. It is a comic dissecting the convention of superheroes, much in the tradition of Watchmen. Except, instead of a dystopian 1984 we get a celebrity-as-reality obsessed modern day with absolutely no overarching plot.

With no villains and no major arc, you might wonder: what is this 1000+ page book even about? Sex, sexual identity, racial identity, celebrity, drugs, suicide, ethics of pharmaceuticals – you know, the same things our lives are about. It just so happens that each struggle is framed in terms of what it would mean to be a superhero struggling with that incredibly common human condition.

(Previously collected as a series of HCs and TPBs.)

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That’s my countdown! Have I left off any of your major favorite reprints of 2011? Chime in with a comment, and tune back in next week (really!)  for 2011′s top 12 collections of new material.

Busty woman have always been a part of the draw of comics, but in the late 80s and 80s it went completely overboard.

Already attractive female characters has their breast sizes increased to the point of physical impossibility as their waists collapsed and costumes became increasingly skin-tight (or, just skin). This trend was perpetrated hugely by Image’s superstar artists, so of course when they launched their own line of books they featured a bevy of those scantily dressed females.

The problem (beyond the obvious objectification) is that when female characters are babes from the concept stage, their origin stories become intertwined with their curves. Voodoo was originally conceived as a regular girl with the super gift of seeing aliens in human bodies … who happened to be an exotic dancer. Her tight outfits, slick figure, and crazy boots were part of her identity.

When a female hero was conceived as a vapid sex symbol, does she really merit their own titles? Like anything else, it has to do with good writing. DC’s relaunch already pilfered a large part of Voodoo’s prior origin – they handed her ability to see aliens walking around in human skin to the rebooted Grifter.

Art previews of the issue revealed many scenes set in a strip club. Did scribe Ron Marz find any other aspects of Voodoo to write about, or are we getting a book about a stripper who … strips?

Voodoo #1

Written by Ron Marz, art by Sami Basri

Rating: 1.5 of 5 – Weak

In a Line: “We don’t need to be doing it from a ringside seat.”

#140char Review: Voodoo #1 wastes intriguing setup & capabilities of Sami Basri art on too many pages lingering in a strip joint. Embarrassing to read. Gross

CK Says: Skip it.

Voodoo #1 is an embarrassing waste of an interesting character concept and an artist who is clearly capable of so much more than nudie pinup pics.

The blame rests mostly on writer Ron Marz’s shoulders. Yes, we get that part-alien Voodoo is a stripper because men can’t resist her and she wants to study their behavior. That doesn’t mean we need to spend an entire issue in a strip club with panels so revealing that I was terrified of reading this comic on the bus.

I choose not to implicate artist Sam Basri too much – he’s just drawing what he’s told. There are only so many non-lascivious ways you can draw a piece of script that must have read, “Voodoo crawls forward on the stage, her bosom practically escaping her skimpy bikini top.” Although, I guess when the background of a panel has a man waving a dollar bill at the ass of a woman hanging from a stripper pole that’s mostly the artist’s prerogative – so I suppose he’s complicit.

When Basri gets a break from drawing cheesecake, his clothed figures are really super – they have the illustrated-from-life effect of the art of Buffy without looking traced from photo references.

There is a story beneath the grossness here, and it’s potentially interesting. A pair of secret agents have been tapped to keep an eye on the clearly otherworldly Voodoo, but one of them is a little impatient to get to the bottom of her mystery.

Unfortunately, the getting to the bottom takes the literal form of a pages long lapdance.

That’s the entire problem with this issue. You can set a story in a strip club without it being disgusting and exploitative. There are panels here that never needed to be seen, even with the script staying entirely intact.

I can’t call this terrible, because of Masri’s engaging artwork and the interesting core concept of Voodoo as a character. I’ll probably check back in for a second issue based solely on that and hope that Marz and Basri have cleaned up their act, but based on this introduction I don’t have a lot of hope for their take on Voodoo.

In Marvel comics it has become an ongoing, in-universe joke that Wolverine appears in more titles each month than would seem to fit into the life of any person, super or not. You’d almost think he shares the super-power of duplication with Madrox, or at least occasionally borrows Hermoine’s time turner.

Batman shares a similar status (eight and counting this month), but his multitude of appearances typically occur in and around Gotham. It’s not much of a stretch to picture him swinging through Batwoman on his way from Detective Comics to Batman & Robin.

Super-scheduling aside, the challenge facing any over-saturated hero is differentiation – how are the appearances different, and appealing to different audiences? Wolverine has it in spades – some books with X-Men, others solo, more with Avengers. Spider-Man gave up on it, and now he’s down to one main title that comes out constantly. There’s a new issue, like, every other day.

Batman is presently supporting three solo titles (four, if you count Robin), and I honestly don’t see much point in that beyond Bat-saturation. Batsuration? I’m definitely Batsurated, and it’s only week three. Why not move to the Spider-Man model?

Batman #1

Written by Scott Snyder, art by Greg Capullo and Jonathan Glapion

Rating: 3.5 of 5 – Great

In a Line: “Are you asking me if you were convincing as a homicidal maniac?”

#140char Review: Batman #1 treads lightly between gory DC#1 & goofy B&R#1 w/a solid mystery & fuller cast. Capullo’s art is perfect. Expect more good things

CK Says: Buy it.

Batman #1 packs a fun meaningless brawl, a portentous business move, and a grim mystery into one tidy debut issue that wisely cedes the “thrill-a-minute” crown to other Batbook debuts in order to sketch a fuller picture of Bruce Wayne and his cast of characters. Scott Snyder hits all the right beats and keeps Bruce in costume for just enough pages.

I love the device Snyder uses to set the tone, with Batman distractingly narrating a relatively rote mission with an editorial about the Gotham Gazette. If it’s a little glib it can be excused for being such an effective device for setting the stage of Gotham, as well as Bruce Wayne’s intentions for it as both a philanthropist and a superhero.

Greg Capullo is absolutely perfect for Snyder’s grim Gotham with a sliver of hope. His textured work never gets too dark thanks to inker Jonathan Glapion and a subdued set of desaturated colors from FCO Plascencia. I might even prefer his monstrous, deranged Joker to the lithe asexual one in Detective.

While villains get tons of line-work and toothy grins, Batman is portrayed simply – black cowl, lantern jaw with a slash of a mouth and a tiny furrow for a chin. The rest of Capullo’s Bat family is all dashingly, boyishly handsome. His version of the cave is expansive, but still claustrophobically hemmed in by columns of rock. His brightly lit ballroom scenes aren’t as striking, but they shouldn’t be – and I got a visceral thrill from the first scene of Bruce back in costume.

It’s hard to make an always grim Batman anything but flat and predicable – the issue becomes about gadgets, villains, and violence. Snyder’s Batman has dimension and a sense of gallows humor. In Detective it was all gallows and no laughs, and in Batman & Robin the latter was all maniacal giggles all the time. Only here does the millionaire playboy turned city defender really come through in the personality of our hero. While he’s not a wise-cracking Spider-Man, that doesn’t mean he has to be a humorless soggy cape, either.

Should you buy Batman #1? I say yes. Detective Comics was more of a classic and Finch might be more of a scorcher on art this week, but Snyder and Capullo find a comforting middle ground that pays homage to all of the versions of Batman we’ve grown up with. Perhaps devout Morrison fanatics will find this too plain-jane in anticipation of the return of Batman Inc, but otherwise it’s sure to please.

In my opinion, the entire endeavor of writing for and reading comic books is about continuity. The comics that appeal to me the most are the ones with the longest continuity. That’s part of why I love X-Men and avoid DC – X-Men refers back to 1963, while DC restarts or erases whenever they hit a tangle.

Given my predilection for continuity, I’m almost universally disinterested in alternate timelines and possible futures. What’s the point if it has nothing to do with the other thousands of comics I’ve read?

Legion of Superheroes presents an interesting wrinkle to my rule. Yes, it takes place in the 31st Century with increasinly less frequent interactions with Superman and Superboy, but it has been around for hundreds of issues – it has its own far-flung future continuity. However, in a wrinkle to the wrinkle, since Legion’s 1958 introduction this is the fifth version of the team.

Sounds way too convoluted. But, more importantly, is it any good?

Legion of Superheroes #1

Written by Paul Levitz, art by Francis Portela

Rating: 2.5 of 5 – Okay

In a Line: “You sure this isn’t a training mission?”

#140char Review: Legion of Superheroes #1 tosses readers in the deep end of 31st Century. Enjoyable, but overload for new readers w/ too few emotional beats.

CK Says: Consider it.

Legion of Superheroes #1 plunges forward with careless glee, its only concession to new readers being a set of attractively designed introductory captions explaining the homeworlds and powers of the many, many heroes we meet.

The story on the ground doesn’t need too much more introduction. Chameleon Boy leads a team to infiltrate a militarized planet that broke contact with the outside world. Levitz offhandedly gives the idea that all Legionnaires are well-publicized, which helps establish quite a few facts about the intergalactic heroes and the culture they operate in. Otherwise, their infiltration mission is fairly rote until they hit an obstacle at the end of the issue.

It’s the B-plot back at the ranch that drags. We meet a slew of people tossing around references that make no sense at all. While introducing tons of heroes on panel helps set the scope of the book and probably delights longtime readers, it was overload for me – especially because many of them barely had a line.

It’s all par for the course for a book with a big cast steeped in continuity, but Levitz makes the critical mistake of tying all of our emotional beats to knowing what the characters are talking about. We aren’t given any reason to care about anyone just based on their action in the present.

From there I quickly turned off to this issue. It’s a rare case where I would have rather watched brawl with less running commentary, as Francis Portela’s art is bold and sure throughout. He makes this set of strangers out to be iconic heroes, but I can’t find a reason to care about any of them. (I was slightly put off by a close-to-verbatim ripoff of X-Men’s Thunderbird/Warpath, but who knows – maybe this costume came first?)

It’s a shame Legion verges on unintelligible for new readers like me, because I think there is a lot to enjoy in this re-debut. This issue could have presented more of a primer on what the Legion is and the purpose they serve in the 31st Century. Without that, I doubt it will attract many new fans.

There are DC heroes I’ve played with as toys, or seen in cartoons, or have some general inkling of the existence of.

Then there is Deadman. I’ve got nothing except for open contempt for writer Paul Jenkins, who seems to have the uncanny ability to let interesting plots lie just beyond the tip of his pen while he jots down page after snoozy page of circular interior monologues.

Even if he upholds his soporific reputation here on DC’s new superhero anthology title, at least we’ll only have to sit through it for a few months.

DC Universe Presents #1

Written by Paul Jenkins, art by Bernard Chang

Rating: 1.5 of 5 – Weak

In a Line: “And so Johnny Foster becomes yet another living brick on my path to enlightenment.”

#140char Review: DCU Presents #1 features Deadman & way too much interminable chatter in the hands of Jenkins, who couldn’t find a plot w/a compass in hand.

CK Says: Skip it!

DC Universe Presents #1 features Deadman in an issue that is totally dead on arrival.

There is recapping a character’s origin, and then there is over-explaining. There is using caption boxes to good effect, and then there is needing an editor to intervene. Welcome to the world of Paul Jenkins. He achieved the same soporific effect on this summer X-Men: Prelude to Schism mini-series.

Despite a witty introduction, this comic is one unending stretch of Jenkins’s dull version of Deadman’s internal monologue. Yet, after notching what is surely the highest word count of every new DC book so far, he doesn’t even manage to appropriately explain what Deadman’s power actually does. Sure, he can inhabit bodies and influence their actions, but is he in complete control? When he enters a body he’s assigned to can he leave willingly, or is he stuck like Scott Bakula on Quantum Leap? I’m not saying a first issue should try to explain everything – I’m just saying a first issue that does this much explaining should try to explain something the readers actually care about.

Instead, we get Deadman’s existential angst, worrying that haunting people isn’t as fun as it used to be, a four page chase scene to introduce a minor plot mcguffin, and a two page montage of previously inhabited bodies that just won’t end.

It’s a pity Jenkins writes this one into the ground, because Bernard Chang’s art is attractive. Or, it would be, if not for the overbearing, too-shiny colors. The colors make Chang’s pencils seem overly glossy, when they’re clearly pretty textured – at points evoking John Romita Jr. Only on Deadman’s otherworldly benefactor do the colors hit their mark.

Maybe Jenkins has a thrilling plot in mind for this opening arc of DCU Presents, but his recent track record points to a probable flatline. I don’t think I could stand to read through another overly-written issue.

Wonder Woman has always been my favorite super hero.

I’m not sure how it got that way. I had her Super Friends toy. I had seen the Lynda Carter show in syndication.

The thing I remember most is a library book. I still have it, actually, on my now bookcase of comics. It was a collection of her earliest strips from the 40s. We had checked it out of the library so many times that I was under the impression it was my personal copy. I suppose my mother finally told them I had misplaced it somewhere and paid the fine so I could keep it.

(Don’t judge her too harshly – It wasn’t so easy to track down obscure books back then! Also, we didn’t really have the money for that sort of thing.)

My love of Wonder Woman never expired, but I’ve never loved her comics the same way, aside from a thrilling mid-90s reimagining by William Messner-Loebs and Mike Deodato, Jr. I know I’ve missed a lot of Wonder Woman comics in the interim, and if DC could get their heads out of their asses on reprints maybe I could catch up on them.

The relaunch is the perfect chance to launch Wonder Woman to the heights she belongs – equal to Superman and Batman, the holy trinity of the DC Universe.

Is her new number one issue up to the task?

Wonder Woman #1

Written by Brian Azzarello, art by Cliff Chiang

Rating: 2.5 of 5 – Okay

In a Line: “Failure… what a horrifying end to an endless life.”

#140 Review: Wonder Woman #1 hints at major myth-heavy plot to come, but has sparse script, hardly any WW in it, & angular, inconsistent art. Just okay.

CK Says: Consider it.

Wonder Woman #1 is an interesting comic book, but it’s simply not worthy of the redebut of one of DC’s holy trinity of heroes when we’ve seen absolutely stellar books from her compatriots Superman and Batman over the past two weeks.

Brian Azzarello’s story is slight on script but full of action, both dramatic and in battle. It features a girl marked for death by a Pantheon of forces, a certain horror of growing centaurs out of horses’ necks, Hermes carrying around a Portkey to Wonder Woman, and a rogue son of a god who makes his own oracles from scratch. The elements hint at the possibilty of spectacular plots to come, but this issue is merely moving pieces into play on a chess board.

I had major doubts about Chiang on Wonder Woman. He acquits himself adequately, but I don’t know that he merits all the many unscripted panels he gets here. His figures have a certain plainness to them that’s half DC animated half hieroglyphic, with thin limbs and angular features. A lot of his edges have a rough, unfinished look, which looks great on environments but can be a little off-putting on characters.

What Chiang does get right is Wonder Woman – to a tee. He lets her look Amazonian while still staying svelte, and manages to convey coyness even when she’s standing bare naked in the middle of a room. The handful of panels of Diana in action will get your heart racing – Chiang is much better on action than conversation. It’s a pity she’s not in her own debut a little more, as whenever she is she’s magnetic.

As for the cover, I cannot bring myself to like it. Diana’s figure is too far left looking off the page – it feels like half of an image.

Azzarello might be the writer to pluck Wonder Woman from the rut she has been in for the past year, but it is going to take him a few issues to get there. Buy this first one only if you have the patience to hang in for the next few months.