Posted in: Comics | Tagged: catwoman, Comics, fables, shazam

Last Week's Comics In Nineteen Panels

Published Wed, 26 Sep 2012 02:46:53 -0500

Last updated Mon, 15 Oct 2012 09:47:23 -0500

Dr Manolis V writes;

The internet's most opinionated and greek comics column. This week: the all-new all-obnoxious SHAZAM, Guillem March's answer to the Catwoman #0 debacle, Princess Amethyst and a whole mess of Robins and retcons (they do seem to go hand in hand).

THE POWER OF SHA-CHING

The Captain Marv- er, SHAZAM back-up strips have been the best part of Geoff John's JUSTICE LEAGUE series this past year. #0 is then by default the best issue so far, completely devoted to finally transforming punk-ass 15-year old Billy Batson (the DCNu version that even Jason Todd would call obnoxious) into, well, a punk-ass obnoxious Captain Marv-er, SHAZAM (Damn you Marvel, I just can't do this).

As Billy himself explains to the Wizard in this issue, the search for a "pure good" champion would be infeasible in today's world (unless he had gone straight for his sister, Mary, or any of his brothers I guess), so this thieving, proud, greedy little shit with the occasional glimmer of kindness will just have to do. The resulting new Captain Marv-ohfuckit, the resulting new CAPTAIN MARVEL is a kid trapped in an adult Superman's body with every intention of totally exploiting his powers until the eventual moral-aligning life lesson comes along in a few issues. Heck, his first order of business as soon as he's on the streets is buying booze and charging for his hero-services.

This is going to be fun.

TOTALLY PROVING A POINT

So DC had Guillem March redesign his much-parodied CATWOMAN #0 cover . What was his answer to the controversy? Repeat the same pose BY FIVE for the cover to NEW GUARDIANS #0. Rayner is seriously channeling the sexy there. Oh and hey, the Star Sapphires finally get a decent costume design that does not scream Vegas stripper!

SWORD-SLINGIN' SEVENTEEN

I may not myself be a female young adult – even though I've ever so often been "accused" of behaving or thinking like one (and we certainly seem to enjoy some of the same literature on occasion) – but if I WAS, SWORD OF SORCERY: AMETHYST #1 would be the kind of comic I'd take a fancy in. It seems geared towards that demographic, without talking down to it, and it reminds me in some ways of Crossgen's MERIDIAN and Vertigo's much-missed MINX line of books.

I've never read any Amethyst books before so I won't judge how heretic or not this new version is. "Amy" is a gothy teenage girl who spends her days fighting off bullies, moving between schools and training in sword-fighting (!?!) with her mom outside their trailer park home.

She also happens to be the long-lost heir to the throne of some Sword & Sorcery mystical dimension. The sword-fighting bit should have been a clue really, but she's too busy freaking out over suddenly turning Bombshell Blonde.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO KATE KANE

Simply put, BATWOMAN #0 and Kate Kane's recounting of her life from childhood to the loss of her mother and sister, her service, her alcoholism and her intense training (and inhumane harships) around the world make Batman look like a goddamn chump. Kane does come off looking like a total badass, but the narration itself (VERY text-heavy as you can see from the sample here and mostly "confined" to a rigid six panel grid) is intimately personal, an unsent letter (one of many) from Kate to her dad, opening herself to him and exposing both her vulnerabilities and her harshness towards him.

QUICK ROUND!

The rest of the week went a bit like this:

ANY LAST WORDS OF – OH NEVER MIND

SPIDER-MEN #5 wraps up one of the year's best series, as the adult Peter Parker bids goodbye to Miles Morales. Bendis has penned the best superhero comic of his career here, and the best damn crossover book I can bring to mind. Instead of chaotic battle scenes and quips it focused on the people who loved Ultimate Peter, the hole in their lives after his death and the ripple effect from meeting a fully realised version of everything the young man they knew aspired to become.

PERFECT WASTE OF GOOD WALT SIMONSON

Take my last comments on Bendis and reverse them for AVENGERS #30. So much waste of good space to vacuously tie in to AVX and a big fight scene to cover (stretch out over an entire issue) "the relationship talk" between Spider-Woman and Hawkeye.

BEETLEMAYA

For DC's obsessive edict against legacy heroes and the compressed five-year superhero history, there's SO MANY legacy heroes popping up in the #0 issues this month. BLUE BEETLE #0 introduces the Mayan Empire BB and later retconned as the cruel Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. I think he's the one who gave us the cocoa beans, so he can't have been all that mean.

WHEN IN CRETE…

WONDER WOMAN #0 is such a fuzzy-wuzzy Minotaur-slaying journey back to the fun and frollicking Golden Age as 12-year old "Wonder Girl" trains under the god War in the ways of the sword. Cliff Chiang's art is simply delightful under Matt Wilson's warm colours, evoking a brighter and more innocent age.

TENTACLE LOVE

Kinda creepy phrasing it like that though, Doug. I wouldn't wanna know where that tentacle's been. Mutated Giant Evil Ruler of the Future Octopus Doug Ramsey is putting some serious tentacle moves on Dani Moonstar, in the big conclusion of the "Dark Cypher" storyline in NEW MUTANTS #49. No offense to DnA but as a kid of the 80s myself, I'll only accept Kitty as Doug's "one human love".

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A TWELVE-YEAR OLD?

Bruce was such a clutz with his secret identity back in the early days, especially during that fateful night at the circus. That's TWO teenage boys that instantly figure out who Batman is from the events of that night. Of course Tim had to do some snooping around first, Dick in NIGHTWING #0 simply reads his nervous ticks. I'm also a bit disappointed that the "Robin" moniker is now completely attributed to the bird (Dick's mom's favourite) instead of Robin Hood.

MIND THE SPOILERS:

Final warning people!

A PLANT IN THE FAMILY

There's an even bigger retcon (or is it rebcon now?) in RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS #0 concerning Jason Todd. The Joker breaks the fourth wall to reveal he set up young Jason to fall onto the Batman's lap so-to-speak (although with the alarming amount of teenage boys he's amassed in only five years, the whole situation is creepier than ever) as a… practical joke of sorts? Who knows how the guy's mind works.

This is not half as confounding as the rebcon (it's growing on me) of Jason stumbling onto Batman as he's stealing some drugs from Leslie Thompkins' office, instead of the classic post-Crisis origin. Jason having the audacity to try and steal the tires off the Batmobile right in the middle of Crime Alley spoke a lot to the nature of the character and it was a very iconic moment in Bat-history.

KYLE RAYNBOWER (I'M SO SORRY)

I see a LOT of colour in Kyle Rayner's future, as evidenced in the flashfoward sequence in GREEN LANTERN THE NEW GUARDIANS #0. Guess we'll finally see a male Star Sapphire after all this time!

The beautiful interior art is by the guy I'm already calling as the next big name superhero artist, Aaron Kuder. He shares the same larger-than-life heroic exaggerated design traits as Frank Quitely, Rafael Grampa or Guillem March, while keeping his own recognizable stylistic identity.

(Interestingly enough, this is the only #0 book that had NOTHING at all to do with flashbacks or superhero origins, instead simply setting up the new direction of the book following the abysmal last year of stories)

MASTERS OF EVIL ACADEMY

That's one of the Avengers kids crossing over to the "dark side" as the always morally neutral (or maybe just uninterested) Finesse graduates to murderer in AVENGERS ACADEMY #37. It's a chilling, but not wholly unexpected turn of events.

NOW YOU SEE ME, NOW YOU DON'T

-or, well, maybe you never really did. In DAREDEVIL #18 someone is messing around with Murdock's radar sense, making him register "phantom" experiences, events or even people. This new series had made a big point of showing us how much DD depends on his radar sense and how he perceives the world around him with it. Previous storylines examined a Daredevil who had to fight without the benefit of it. What if he now has to fight AGAINST it? Mark Waid simply won't stop challenging the character at every possible turn.

A REDHEAD BY ANY OTHER NAME

Theresa Rourke-Cassidy has been a busy busy girl. She had recently gone from her original "Siryn" codename to adopting her late father's "Banshee" callsign, and now in X-FACTOR #244 she "ascends" to the power and responsibilities of the irish goddess of death, Morrigan. PAD has put Terry through a constant barrage of hardships, loss and mourning through his run on the book, this is the next logical step in her Emo-lution (again, SO sorry for the puns today).

CATWOMAN RETURNS

Someone at DC must have thought Selina's origins from Batman Year One (a dominatrix inspired by an encounter with Batman to become the protector of Gotham's East End) were too old-fashioned (or risque?) for the DCNu. Instead we get the far more realistic "shoved off a roof and licked back to life by kittens" origin from Tim Burton's Batman Returns. This time Selina even fashions her (leather) outfit from the outline she made on the tarp (!) as she fell threw it. Huh? Read CATWOMAN #0 at your own risk.

CONTINUITY WTF MOMENT OF THE WEEK

Yeah, this is a big one, from SUPERGIRL #0. You'd think if they were planning on re-re-retconning Superboy as a Kryptonian clone created by Supergirl's dad (thus somehow a THIRD legitimate Kryptonian survivor), they would have done it in last week's SUPERBOY #0 (where it was explicitly stated he's a human/Kryptonian hybrid) instead of as a mysterious guest-appearance shoehorned into his cousin/sister's origin. The other big surprise from that issue is that her dad was the one who designed that new crotch-stamp costume for her. Truly an evil guy.

BIG BAD WHITE QUEEN

FABLES #121 marks the merciful end of the CUBS IN TOYLAND storyline, the most depressing and cruel saga in the book's history. Thankfully this issue manages to find the light of redemption after the truly horrific events that have forever transformed cute, vain, spoiled little Therese into the adult queen of Toyland.

THE TALLY

Lots of bittersweet farewells and Bat-rebcons (Batcons?) this week.

SPIDER-MEN, NEW MUTANTS and the Dark Cypher Saga, AVENGERS ACADEMY and Final Exam, FABLES and Cubs in Toyland, these books gave us some of the best stories of the year and they all wrapped up this week. It will be extremely sad to see NEW MUTANTS and AVENGERS ACADEMY cancelled next month, especially since the only teen/young adult book announced so far to replace them will be one where favourite teen heroes are seemingly hunted down and killed each issue for fun.

As for the rebcons… The new CAPTAIN MARVEL (I'm sticking to my guns here) origin has been tremendous fun and a complete departure from the original. From what I gather from wikipedia, AMETHYST was a bit of a departure from the previous versions as well.

Is it a coincidence that these daring new origins are working better than convoluted messes like whatever is going on in the Bat-family of books as a large group of writers and editors are struggling to shoehorn existing bits of continuity and a large family of black-haired acrobatic teenagers into a tight five-year timeline.

As more time passes from the reboot, it's evident that an "Ultimate Marvel"-type of total continuity cleanse would have worked better for all titles and enabled readers and writers to start fresh from Day 0 ( as this month's books are attempting to do) instead of constantly having to consider this decades-spanning five-year gap and having to awkwardly and hastily reference events from books published before the reboot.

This week's top ten books: