written by Joe Kelly
illustrated by Ed McGuinness (pencils), Mark Morales and Jay Leisten (inks)
colored by Jason Keith
Between an increasingly busy schedule, the inability to pick up my comic books on time and a general disenchantment with pop culture these days (something I'll explore more in a future post), I've found it harder and harder to review forms of entertainment that used to be a staple of this blog.
In the last couple of weeks, though, I've read comic book storylines that, even though the single issues are several months old, will only just start coming out in trade paperback form lately.
One such story line is "Itsy Bitsy," the second and final story by series creators Joe Kelly and Ed McGuinness, which features an old familiar face to Deadpool, and a brand new psychopath cobbled together by infusing an anonymous small-time crook with Spidey's and Deadpool's abilities. Unfortunately this new villain gets it in her head to make the world a better place, by murdering pretty much everyone in sight who, to her mind, is making it a bad place. It's a pretty intense story, one that sees Spidey being pushed yet again to the limits of his own personal code that stops him from killing bad guys, except that what he doesn't know is that this time, someone is counting on him to cross that line. Ironically enough, it's up to the mass-murdering gun-for-hire Deadpool to stop Spider-Man from killing someone.
As much as this book is billed as a team-up, it's really mainly told from Deadpool's point of view. In the first arc he agonized over his contract to kill Peter Parker, which he fulfilled but ultimately undid through some black magic. In this arc, while a lot of focus is on how Peter is basically going off on the deep end, it's Wade that faces the moral quandary of whether or not he should let Spidey cut loose or do everything he can to stop him. The ending can reasonably be described as predictable, but as with most stories nowadays it's the journey that counts, not the destination and both Kelly and McGuinness have given fans a story that, to my mind at least, will go down as a pretty memorable one. Kelly even managed the trick of milking something useful out of the much reviled "One More Day" storyline.
Considering that Kelly has written a number of Spidey stories prior to this one, though, the real star here is McGuinness, who was apparently as excited to draw the character as fans were excited to see him work on Marvel's single most iconic character. I'm so happy he did it that it's actually an item ticked off my bucket list; now all that has to happen is for Jim Lee to do even just a brief stint on a Spidey book.
Following this book over several months was a distinctly jarring experience considering the repeated delays and fill-ins, but it was to Marvel's credit that they didn't let any other artist step in to work with Kelly on this book, and reading the issues from start to finish is a much more pleasant experience, and I'm certain it will look spectacular in trade paperback form. I won't bother grading the individual issues anymore, but suffice it to say that as a whole, this arc is a more than decent read and a good addition to the Spider-Man canon (which the only canon I'm really familiar with as I don't follow Deadpool quite as much).
8/10
Friday, June 30, 2017
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Truly Worth Championing: A Review of Champions Volume I
written by Mark Waid
drawn by Humberto Ramos (pencils) and Victor Olazaba (inks)
colored by Edgar Delgado
Following the events of Civil War II, three of the All New, All Different Avengers, Spider-Man (Miles Morales), Nova (Sam Alexander) and Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), have all quit the team, disillusioned as they are with their former idols and mentors. Rather than just go their own separate ways, however, at the insistence of Ms. Marvel, the three of them try something else altogether: they form their own team. Together with Totally Awesome Hulk (Amadeus Cho), Viv Vision, daughter of the Vision, and the X-Men's Cyclops (Scott Summers), they are the Champions!
These kids aren't keen on slugging it out with supervillains of the day, though; they fight decidedly more mundane, "real world" threats like human trafficking, religious extremism in South Asia and even small-town racism. Even more notably, rather than just save the day by punching the bad guys, they do something even more remarkable; they help people find the courage and determination to help themselves.
This may sound like hyperbole, but I think I've been waiting for this comic book my whole life.
As much as I loved reading the adventures of Peter Parker and various other Marvel superheroes as a kid, it dawned on me fairly early just how different I was from the heroes whose adventures I read, beginning with the color of my skin as opposed to theirs.
It also occurred to me, early on, that the problems that my heroes faced, while occasionally were the sort of thing I could relate to, like Peter Parker's money problems, were, by and large not really the kind I or anyone I came into contact with on a regular basis faced every day. Over time, while I still enjoyed reading their adventures, the fact that the concerns they faced were far removed from the experiences in the world I lived in made it increasingly harder to read out of anything more than habit.
Also, as I got older I found myself increasingly annoyed by the tokenism I was seeing in entertainment in general, whether it was in the comics I read or the movies or television shows I liked to watch. Asians (when I was growing up) were virtually nonexistent in American pop culture, save for a few Chinese, Japanese, and the occasional Korean character, and it was perhaps this rarity that caused me to gravitate more towards African American characters, and even then, with few exceptions like Will Smith and Denzel Washington in the movies, I observed that entertainment was still largely a white man's world. In comic books, leading black characters were exceedingly rare and the few that showed up in Marvel Comics, like War Machine or Falcon, were usually sidekicks. Asian characters were virtually nonexistent, and the only Filipinos in the comics I read were the ones who drew them. After a while, I just gave up and decided to just read the darned things with no expectations.
In fact, so jaded had I become over the years that, even when Marvel started introducing a more ethnically diverse line of superheroes like the African American Spider-Man Miles Morales, the Latin American Nova Sam Alexander and the Pakistani American Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, I was almost entirely dismissive of them, thinking that they were nothing more than "PC" bait. I was relieved to find that the stories told by creators like Brian Bendis, Sara Pichelli, David Marquez, G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona and Takeshi Miyazawa were quality narratives and about far more than some ham-handed effort at tokenism.
There was something different about Wilson's Ms. Marvel stories, though. As a female Muslim-American, Kamala Khan represented two key demographics that were not only underrepresented in mainstream comic books, but who continue to suffer a great deal of discrimination in the real world. Her stories, to my mind, even if they weren't about racism or Islamophobia or hate crimes, paved the way for a book that could address these questions head-on. Her character had the potential to be a lightning rod for controversy, but because of some really quality storytelling by Wilson and her team of artists, she instead became a rallying point for the kind of superhero fans didn't realize they needed: a non-WASP, non-male protagonist.
For all of that, though, her stories stayed conspicuously safe.
Leave it to comic book veterans Mark Waid and Humberto Ramos to finally grab the bull by the horns and tell stories that, all things considered, can only really be effectively be told with this cast of characters.
In the Trump era of reinvigorated racism, this book is as important to the pop-culture landscape as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's X-Men were to the civil rights turmoil of the 1960s. Waid is surely aware of the era he's evoking, here, as I have a feeling his inclusion of Cyclops in the lineup is a nod to that earlier advocacy. Sure, the stories being told here are a bit of a blunt instrument, but considering how dim a lot of Trump-loving comic book readers are, these stories may be exactly what the doctor ordered. Yes, the stories are preachy and without any subtlety whatsoever. No, this isn't Waid's best work by a long shot, but it is some of his most ballsy.
And yes, Ramos' work here is, well, as can be expected. It seemed to me that he was trying to refine his approach to Spidey when he rebooted The Amazing Spider-Man back in 2014 with Dan Slott, but here he's pretty much gone back to the big-eyed, gangly figures for which he's best known. The good news is that when he draws kids this way, as he did back in 2008 when he did a stint on Runaways, it works somehow. I'm still not a fan of his dubious take on human anatomy, but I must say he's got a good storytelling sense here.
I applaud Marvel for putting this book out every month. I'm glad they've decided to roll the dice with these characters, and that they've rankled the fanboys who think comics should be the way they always were.
I don't know how long Marvel will be able to continue publishing this title, but as long as they're publishing it, I'm buying it.
8/10
drawn by Humberto Ramos (pencils) and Victor Olazaba (inks)
colored by Edgar Delgado
Following the events of Civil War II, three of the All New, All Different Avengers, Spider-Man (Miles Morales), Nova (Sam Alexander) and Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), have all quit the team, disillusioned as they are with their former idols and mentors. Rather than just go their own separate ways, however, at the insistence of Ms. Marvel, the three of them try something else altogether: they form their own team. Together with Totally Awesome Hulk (Amadeus Cho), Viv Vision, daughter of the Vision, and the X-Men's Cyclops (Scott Summers), they are the Champions!
These kids aren't keen on slugging it out with supervillains of the day, though; they fight decidedly more mundane, "real world" threats like human trafficking, religious extremism in South Asia and even small-town racism. Even more notably, rather than just save the day by punching the bad guys, they do something even more remarkable; they help people find the courage and determination to help themselves.
This may sound like hyperbole, but I think I've been waiting for this comic book my whole life.
As much as I loved reading the adventures of Peter Parker and various other Marvel superheroes as a kid, it dawned on me fairly early just how different I was from the heroes whose adventures I read, beginning with the color of my skin as opposed to theirs.
It also occurred to me, early on, that the problems that my heroes faced, while occasionally were the sort of thing I could relate to, like Peter Parker's money problems, were, by and large not really the kind I or anyone I came into contact with on a regular basis faced every day. Over time, while I still enjoyed reading their adventures, the fact that the concerns they faced were far removed from the experiences in the world I lived in made it increasingly harder to read out of anything more than habit.
Also, as I got older I found myself increasingly annoyed by the tokenism I was seeing in entertainment in general, whether it was in the comics I read or the movies or television shows I liked to watch. Asians (when I was growing up) were virtually nonexistent in American pop culture, save for a few Chinese, Japanese, and the occasional Korean character, and it was perhaps this rarity that caused me to gravitate more towards African American characters, and even then, with few exceptions like Will Smith and Denzel Washington in the movies, I observed that entertainment was still largely a white man's world. In comic books, leading black characters were exceedingly rare and the few that showed up in Marvel Comics, like War Machine or Falcon, were usually sidekicks. Asian characters were virtually nonexistent, and the only Filipinos in the comics I read were the ones who drew them. After a while, I just gave up and decided to just read the darned things with no expectations.
In fact, so jaded had I become over the years that, even when Marvel started introducing a more ethnically diverse line of superheroes like the African American Spider-Man Miles Morales, the Latin American Nova Sam Alexander and the Pakistani American Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, I was almost entirely dismissive of them, thinking that they were nothing more than "PC" bait. I was relieved to find that the stories told by creators like Brian Bendis, Sara Pichelli, David Marquez, G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona and Takeshi Miyazawa were quality narratives and about far more than some ham-handed effort at tokenism.
There was something different about Wilson's Ms. Marvel stories, though. As a female Muslim-American, Kamala Khan represented two key demographics that were not only underrepresented in mainstream comic books, but who continue to suffer a great deal of discrimination in the real world. Her stories, to my mind, even if they weren't about racism or Islamophobia or hate crimes, paved the way for a book that could address these questions head-on. Her character had the potential to be a lightning rod for controversy, but because of some really quality storytelling by Wilson and her team of artists, she instead became a rallying point for the kind of superhero fans didn't realize they needed: a non-WASP, non-male protagonist.
For all of that, though, her stories stayed conspicuously safe.
Leave it to comic book veterans Mark Waid and Humberto Ramos to finally grab the bull by the horns and tell stories that, all things considered, can only really be effectively be told with this cast of characters.
In the Trump era of reinvigorated racism, this book is as important to the pop-culture landscape as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's X-Men were to the civil rights turmoil of the 1960s. Waid is surely aware of the era he's evoking, here, as I have a feeling his inclusion of Cyclops in the lineup is a nod to that earlier advocacy. Sure, the stories being told here are a bit of a blunt instrument, but considering how dim a lot of Trump-loving comic book readers are, these stories may be exactly what the doctor ordered. Yes, the stories are preachy and without any subtlety whatsoever. No, this isn't Waid's best work by a long shot, but it is some of his most ballsy.
And yes, Ramos' work here is, well, as can be expected. It seemed to me that he was trying to refine his approach to Spidey when he rebooted The Amazing Spider-Man back in 2014 with Dan Slott, but here he's pretty much gone back to the big-eyed, gangly figures for which he's best known. The good news is that when he draws kids this way, as he did back in 2008 when he did a stint on Runaways, it works somehow. I'm still not a fan of his dubious take on human anatomy, but I must say he's got a good storytelling sense here.
I applaud Marvel for putting this book out every month. I'm glad they've decided to roll the dice with these characters, and that they've rankled the fanboys who think comics should be the way they always were.
I don't know how long Marvel will be able to continue publishing this title, but as long as they're publishing it, I'm buying it.
8/10
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