All-New Wolverine #12 - A Review

The Inhuman Ulysses foresaw Old Man Logan killing his young clone, Gabby Linney. Somehow, he did not foresee it going badly when SHIELD and Captain America went to take Logan into custody regarding something he hadn't done yet. Now, with Gabby seemingly dead and a berserk Old Man Logan rampaging through New York City, it falls to The All-New Wolverine, Laura Kinney, to clean-up SHIELD's mess.

Alas, not even Tom Taylor's brilliant writing can make the stupidity of Civil War II entertaining. Captain America is horribly out of character here - apparently a major complaint about the crossover. (I, wisely it seems, have been avoiding the special apart from the tie-in issues in the Marvel books I regularly read.) Still, Taylor's script makes the most of a bad situation and Laura's speeches to both Cap and Old Man Logan are pretty damn awesome.

The artwork issues from the past few months continue to be a problem. Ig Guara draws a good fight scene, but his takes on Laura and Gabby appear to be the same age! However, the inking by Walden Wong is consistent and colorist Michael Garland manages a few neat touches, such as using single colors to punctuate key close-ups.

All-New Wolverine #11 - A Review

Laura, Gabby and Old Man Logan are settling into their new digs fairly well, despite having to deal with the most unlucky burglars ever. Unfortunately, SHIELD is concerned about a recent vision by their pet precog Ulysses - one which has predicted Logan killing Gabby in the immediate future!


Tom Taylor weathers the forced tie-in to Civil War II as best he can.  Unfortunately, not even the cutest Gabby scenes can mask the stupidity of the mini-series base concept or the contrivances this issue's plot requires. There is no circumstance in which sending a SHIELD SWAT team to take down a PTSD-suffering Logan makes a lick of sense. It makes even less sense that Captain America would allow that team to accompany him, even if his plan were to try and talk everyone into going along with what the secret spy organization wants. The action scenes are decent enough if you can get past the fact that everyone is fighting for the sake of the issue needing an action sequence.

Ig Guara's artwork continues to be uneven, despite only having one inker to work with this month. There is very little consistency to the characters appearances, with Wolverine herself shifting between looking like a middle-aged woman or like a adolescent girl depending on the panel. The final art looks very strained, thanks to Wong's thin inks and Michael Garlands muted colors.

Superior Iron Man #8 - A Review

Round One between Tony Stark and the "clean back-up" of his mind from several years earlier is over.  Now they are preparing for Round Two, with the back-up Tony heading to the lab to build and plan while the flesh and blood Tony throws an epic party with enough booze to get The Hulk smashed. Who will prove to be the superior Iron Man?


I'd say words cannot express how much I love Tom Taylor's writing on this series, but then I'd have nothing to say here! There's a lot of Taylor's famed comedy in this issue and the Superior Iron Man is the kind of anti-hero/quasi-villain that we all love to hate. Yet Taylor still finds time for some softer scenes, like the subplot involving Teen Abomination.


The art team matches the quality of Taylor's scripts. Felipe Watanabe's pencils look great as do the colors by Guru-FX. And I would never have known that there were three different inkers working on this book had I not checked the credits page!

Why I'm Dropping Green Lantern - A Review of Green Lantern Annual #2

WARNING: This review will get spoilerly and rantish after the first paragraph.  Stop reading after that if you care about spoilers.

Ever since Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi left their respective books, I feared this moment might come.  And now it is here - the moment I can no longer justify supporting the Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps titles.  Understand this - the books by Robert Venditti and Van Jansen have been well-written and engaging.  This annual, too, has a good story and good artwork.  But after reading Green Lantern Annual #2, three things have become apparent to me.

1. You HAVE to read all the Green Lantern family of books now.

Despite being an annual for the Green Lantern book itself, this issue is really meant to cover all of the titles in the Green Lantern "family", including Red Lanterns and New Guardians.  This has become an increasing problem in many New 52 DC Comics titles.  Indeed, it's the reason I dropped Supergirl, which has become increasingly interdependent on a bunch of Superman books I have no interest in reading. 

I can't keep reading two good books if I also have to read two books I really don't care about to know what is going on in the books I enjoy.  I have no interest in The Red Lanterns as a group.  I hate that Guy Gardner - my favorite Lantern in the post-52 books under Tomasi's pen - is now attached to them.  And I really hate that Kyle Rayner has been turned into a Space Jesus messiah figure that has nothing in common with the character I loved 15 years ago.  On that note...


2.  There's No Point To Kyle Rayner Existing Except As Nostalgia Fodder.

And I say that as someone who got into comics BECAUSE of Kyle Rayner.

If you needed any proof that certain aspects of The New 52 universe were not planned at all, one need only look at The New Guardians title.  For the first year, it told the story of an attempt to build a team with one member of each of the various Lantern Corps.  It also showed a slightly different version of Kyle Rayner's original background, with Ganthet giving Kyle some basic instruction into how his ring worked in the wake of Emerald Twilight. 

Then suddenly the word came from on high - Emerald Twilight never happened and Hal Jordan never went crazy and destroyed the Green Lantern Corps.  So why was Kyle Rayner necessary?  Now the story was that he was chosen by Ganthet as part of an experiment to see if one being could harness the power of multiple spectrum energies at the same time. For some reason, this retcon also required them to establish that Kyle's girlfriend Alex did exist in the new reality and that she was stuffed in a fridge... even though Major Force - the villain who originally did the deed - didn't exist in the new reality! And then Kyle was assigned the task of looking after... The New Guardians - a group of the blue-skinned aliens who founded the Green Lantern Corps who had been in stasis while their brothers set about screwing up the universe. 

This issue seemed to give Kyle a heroic death and a point to the sudden 180 that The New Guardians title took.  That lasts a scant few pages before it reveals that - Psych! - Kyle Rayner is alive and an even greater destiny awaits him that The New Guardians have known of all this time, despite knowing very little of the universe and how things have changed until this point.

Kyle should have stayed dead.  And he'd be better off in limbo with Wally West, Donna Troy, Jenny-Lynn Hayden and most of the other heroes of his generation.  Literally none of his background and everything that made him interesting as a character remains.  Now he's just another generic cosmic hero with a destiny.
 


3.  The Wasting Of Relic and The Absolution of The Green Lantern Corps.

I liked the idea of Relic, the scientist from a previous universe who believed that his universe had been destroyed by "the lightsmiths" - his term for the Lantern Corps of his universe - slowly leaching away the energy that held the cosmos together.  It was a brilliant conceit and one that gave the various Corps a common enemy to unite against in the wake of the death of The Guardians.  More, there was the frightening idea - what if Relic was right?  What if it turned our our favorite heroes, good intentioned as they are, were truly causing the universe to become sick even as they were trying to save it?

It's the sort of idea Alan Moore might have spent years playing with, touching on issues of conservation and environmental responsibility vs. the belief in manifest destiny and the idea that such energy would not be there if it were not meant to be used.  Alas, Relic is now dead and his concerns have been rendered largely mute by the sacrifice of Kyle Rayner and the emotional entities.  The only real loss is that a number of the alien Green Lanterns who weren't getting any screen-time anyway have quit the Corps in disgust rather than contribute to the eventual destruction of all reality... which is no loss at all since we still have Hal Jordan calling the shots and he never really believed Relic in the first place.  So really, nothing has changed at all save the Green Lanterns are now based on Mogo instead of Oa and there's no Blue Lanterns anymore. 

The loss of the Blue Lanterns seems an apt metaphor for the Green Lantern books as a whole now  It is a universe without hope.  And that's a universe I want no part of. 

Justice League of Ameica #7 - A Review

As with the previous chapters of The Trinity War, the best moments of Justice League of America #7 are those brief character moments unconnected to the main plot. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the opening scene where Pandora confronts an imprisoned Lex Luthor.  Lex is his gloriously snide self and Pandora is... well, a living plot device with no purpose but to push the story forward.


The action of the issue plays out well enough but the moments readers are most likely to find memorable are the quieter scenes where the characters are allowed to talk and play off one another.  Yet Johns and Lemire do find ways to sneak character-development into the action.  Consider the scene where Question's team of League members confronts Dr. Psycho and Martian Manhunter is given a chance to distinguish himself from Superman in terms outside of his super powers.  


The artwork of Doug Mahnke continues to amaze.  His pencils are clear enough and offer a goodly portion of detail without becoming cluttered in the smaller panels.  The book's inking continues to be it's biggest flaw, with a team of five inkers with differing styles rendering the final look of the book inconsistent despite there only being one penciler.

Justice League Of America #4 & #5 - A Review

WARNING: SPOILER HEAVY REVIEW.


I resisted reviewing Justice League of America #4 last month, during the height of some rather heated discussion during a major controversy.  The subject of "fridging" (i.e. killing off, depowering or otherwise causing bad things to happen to a female character purely to create drama for a male character) had come up and this time the victim was Catwoman - apparently killed in action as she was infiltrating the hideout of the Secret Society of Super-Villains.  I say apparently because I suspected from the start that the death would be some kind of fake-out. 

Why?  Well, I couldn't discuss the clues without spoiling the whole story but there was some cynicism at play as well.  You can't kill off a major character well-known to the public without the comic publisher releasing a press release these days and Catwoman's "death" took everyone completely off-guard.  If they were really going to kill off Selina Kyle, they would have made a bigger deal about it.

I was also reluctant to review the book because I disagreed with discussing the "death" and labeling it as a fridging, because the larger part of the issue lacked the unsubtle sexism that lies at the heart of every fridging I've ever seen.  For the majority of the issue, I thought Catwoman was portrayed as the adaptable badass she should be.  She was able to free herself from captivity easily enough and was continuing her mission without needing to be rescued by the team that was coming in after her.  She even took down one super-villain by herself before superior numbers proved her undoing.


After being captured, Catwoman tried to play off of the fears of her captors, knowing as well as Batman that criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot.   She said that killing her would only bring Batman down upon them like a ton of bricks.  To her surprise, this gamble achieved the opposite of what she wanted..  The leader of the villains said that getting Batman's attention was their entire goal just before shooting Catwoman in the head.

I didn't consider this scene to be a fridging by the technical definition.  While the bad guys said that killing her was a means toward creating drama for a male character (i.e. kill her to make Batman angry) they had just as much reason to kill Catwoman for what she had done and what she had seen as a result of her actions throughout the issue.  Annoying Batman was just a bonus.  

Now, I DID find the artwork and layout of the scene to be incredibly exploitative.  The final shot of a dead Selina was particularly disturbing, being almost fetishistic in how it was drawn by artist Brett Booth. And yet, I resisted writing a review and condemning the book on that point because it didn't add up.  I couldn't believe that Geoff Johns - who is usually so good about avoiding this sort of thing in his writing - would allow the fridging of a major heroine this early in a major storyline.  Particularly given that another major subplot of Justice League of America #4 involved Stargirl's rebelling against her assigned role as the team's poster-girl/spokesperson and sneaking along on an actual combat mission.



As you can see from the above scan, Justice League of America #5 rewarded my faith.  Stargirl kicks major ass and proves her worth to the team beyond Public Relations.  And I shan't spoil how but rest assured that Catwoman is alive and kicking and the rumors of her death have been greatly exaggerated.  I'm still not too crazy about how the fake-out was milked but I must admit some honest surprise at the resolution, despite some foreshadowing that was obvious in retrospect.      


The back-up story by Matt Kindt, focusing upon the origins of The Martian Manhunter is impressive as well.  Kindt has revamped the origin somewhat, changing the specific cause of death for the entire Martian race and giving The Martian Manhunter a new means of traveling to Earth.  Issue #4 gives us a look at a Martian culture that is truly alien yet instantly recognizable and sympathetic once it is lost.  Issue #5 has him following the trail of the killer to Earth and discovering a malevolent telepath who may prove to be his greatest enemy ever.  Issue #4 and Issue #5 have different art teams, but they're both top-notch and incredibly good.



Bottom Line: If you were scared away from Justice League of America because of any fears of sexism, I'd say you should give it a shot.  I'm not happy about how the otherwise skillful Brett Booth laid out the aforementioned scene but otherwise I found his art to be quite good.  Apart from that one Trigger-Warning worth scene, there's nothing objectionable in this book and between Stargirl, Catwoman, Katana and Amanda Waller there's a lot for lovers of strong female characters to enjoy.  Now, if only it had Black Canary too...