It seems the intended impact of the reveal at the end, which may have worked if it wasn't all over the newsoblogosphere, was removing the mask to reveal a non-white kid, but I kind of hope this was not the case. Especially with as many eyes turned to diversity in comics as there are right now, that we have a non-white character to be carrying his own book, especially as high a profile character as Spider-Man, regardless of universe, is inarguably a good thing, unless you are a Horrible Person. However, to make the reveal "Oh we have a (half-)black Spider-Man, BET YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING" (although I think everyone did) smacks of sensationalism and glamour, and putting that diversity up on a pedestal strikes me as more of a public relations move. Maybe that's unavoidable right now, but I think artist Sara Pichelli said it best, "Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal." In the meantime, it's a talking point.
What I did actually like, however, was the age. He definitely looks young; I believe it was announced that Miles is thirteen although I couldn't really source that beyond Miles' own unofficial Twitter account. That would probably place Miles in middle school, substantially younger than Peter ever was in any iteration of the character, I think. If accurate, how Bendis uses this is one of the aspects of the story I'm most interested in; it'll certainly be a fresh take on the character and how he manages to pull off the superhero lifestyle.
And while on the subject of diversity in superheroics, I really have to question what I read versus what I saw in Flashpoint #4. In this issue, Element Woman, aka Emily Sung, joined the team of freedom fighters. As far as I'm aware, Sung is almost exclusively a name of Korean or Chinese origins. To look at her in the issue, she does not appear particularly asian:
Flashpoint #4, written by Geoff Johns, art by Andy Kubert, inks by Jesse Delperdang, colors by Alex Sinclair, letters by Nick J. Napolitano
Granted, I'm just going on the name, and for all I know she's not meant to be, or she is meant to be and I'm just interpret ting the art wrong (speaking of Kubert specifically here but she still looks similarly Caucasian to me in Jim Lee's JLA promo art). That weirdness aside, I do like this character so far and hope she retains her manic personality through the relaunch. And hell yes, I want a juice box.
Now, onto the Best Whatever I Read This Week:
The Other Most Startling Spider-Man Reveal This Week:
Moon Knight #4, written by Brian Michael Bendis, art by Alex Maleev, color by Matthew Wilson, letters by Cory Petit
And One More Most Startling Spider-Man Reveal This Week:
Spider-Cat #01, written by Skottie Young, art by Dave Guertin and Greg Baldwin, letters by Clayton Cowles
Cats Are All Well And Good But Where There Any Cute Dogs?
Secret Six #36, written by Gail Simone, art by J. Calafiore, colors by John Kalisz, letters by Travis Lanham
Best Week To Be A Villain:
Secret Six #36, written by Gail Simone, art by J. Calafiore, colors by John Kalisz, letters by Travis Lanham
So the one recurring theme I noticed this week was a lot of books turned their focus to the villains, with more than a few of them being given the chance to play (pseudo-)hero. Thunderbolts and Secret Six, obviously, had their share as ever. Hulk featured very little Ross (once a villain in his own right) and instead focused on MODOK and Zero/One in the middle of Blitzkrieg USA's Manhattan arm, while Herc had his ragtag team of Raft escapees backing him up in Brooklyn. And Red Skull: Incarnate continued to offer a chilling look at a young Schmidt.
Best Cover This Week:
THREE-WAY TIE! GATES OF GOTHAM, JONAH HEX, MOON KNIGHT
Gates of Gotham #4, cover art by Trevor McCarthy
Jonah Hex #70, cover at by Ryan Sook
Moon Knight #4, cover art by Alex Maleev
Okay, so I got a bit indecisive this week. Nothing really stuck out to me as a clear winner like last week, but there were a few really good ones. Noticeably although maybe not understandably, the three with the warmest colors were the front runners. Trevor McCarthy's Gates Of Gotham covers, which have been solidly awesome since the series began features an awesome moment mid-combat between Batman and the Architect, clashing over imagery of death, destruction and Gotham's founding fathers. On Hex's, the titular character hanging back with a very haunting Hex-ified girl in the foreground, sunlight behind her, planting hearts in the ground, a very strange, striking cover with beautiful art from Ryan Sook. Maleev's Moon Knight is similar, set in front of a full moon set in a deep orange sky, the shadowy figure and his perch stark against the background. All of these do a great job of catching the eye, which is of course what a cover should be accomplishing.
Best Art This Week:
PUNISHER
Punisher #1, written by Greg Rucka, art by Marco Checchetto, colors by Matt Hollingworth, letters by Joe Caramagna
I picked up this book mostly on Rucka's pedigree, I was mostly unfamiliar with Checchetto by name. However, as much as I enjoyed Rucka's writing on the book, I ended up enjoying the art just as much. Checchetto, along with Matt Hollingsworth on color, do an amazing job making the atmosphere of this book grim and dark and generally unnerving, as it should be showing Frank Castle at work. There is a two-page spread in here of Frank shooting up a bar, lit only by external light and muzzle-flare, that is just as beautiful as it is violent. The only complaint I have, as it's a bit of distraction, is his use of photo reference for some of the characters. Or, character, specifically, as Detective Clemons is very obviously "played" by Morgan Freeman, almost as if he was transplanted directly over from Se7en into the role.
Punisher #1, written by Greg Rucka, art by Marco Checchetto, colors by Matt Hollingworth, letters by Joe Caramagna
Best Digital This Week:
SPIDER-CAT
Spider-Cat #01, written by Skottie Young, art by Dave Guertin and Greg Baldwin, letters by Clayton Cowles
Being Marvel, ComiXology made this only available through iOS devices, so I had to slum it back down to the iPod to read this one, but it was worth it. An excerpt from Spider Island's I Love New York one-shot, specifically the chapter written by Skottie Young about a cat who has spider-powers, who goes off and fights symbiote birds. It's short, but I've paid for less awesome books than this and this one was free to boot. And while my original hesitation to the story was that Young was writing and not drawing it, Guertin and Baldwin really won me over, they had some awesome art on this piece.
In addition to Spider-Cat, ComiXology put up the next chapter of All-Nighter, which answered some questions and raised a whole lot more. As of writing this, they're also holding a sale over on their DC store for their Eisner-winning titles, at 99 cents per issue on titles such as American Vampire, Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love, iZombie, Tiny Titans and more. Specifically, the best deal I can see is Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon's Daytripper, the entire series of which you can pick up for $10 during the sale. This is an amazing, touching and above all unique story, and easily one of the best books I've read this year.
Over on Graphic.ly, they just added volumes 1 and 2 of Stuff Of Legend, a beautifully-told tale of toys trying to save their owner from the boogeyman amidst World War II. The volumes are four issues each, at 99 cents each for the first volume and $1.99 each for the second.
Best First Issue This Week:
PUNISHER
Punisher #1, written by Greg Rucka, art by Marco Checchetto, colors by Matt Hollingworth, letters by Joe Caramagna
You know what, spoiler alert, this got Best Comic. Just head down there, I'm only going to write this up once.
Best Last Issue This Week:
SECRET SIX
Secret Six #36, written by Gail Simone, art by J. Calafiore, colors by John Kalisz, letters by Travis Lanham
I am of several opinions on the new DC coming in September, good and bad, but am I of one opinion of the end of the old order this month: losing Secret Six is a god-damned tragedy. Gail Simone has written an amazing run on this comic, and it's only appropriate she writes an amazing ending to the series. You can feel some of the pressure to wrap the series up this month, there is a lot in this issue and parts feel a bit rushed, but once it hits it stride near the middle this becomes a powerful book and, knowing this was a last hurrah for the characters, I really had no idea which way it was going to go, not with the usual promise of a happy ending or return to the status quo by the end of it. The strength of the book has always been the characters, and here we're seeing them pushed to their end, tempers flaring but in the end still together. It's a situation we've seen before in films and television (and video games, I got flashbacks to the end of Red Dead Redemption, which itself was a powerful end to a wonderful character), but I think it's fairly unique to comics, and certainly rarely done so well. It wasn't a perfect goodbye, although I can't really discuss my issues without going into spoiler territory but it was a great book and actually given a chance to end, which is more than a lot of its ilk can say. And so long as Simone is still writing at DC, there's always hope for the future, in some form or another. And in the meantime, the trades are still out there. Unless Didio actually IS coming to our houses and torching our back issues.
Best Event Tie-In:
HULK
Hulk #38, written by Jeff Parker, art by Elena Casagrande, colors by Bettie Breitweiser and Jim Charalampidis, letters by Ed Dukeshire
This week's Fear Itself tie-ins were only tangentially connected to Fear Itself itself for the most part, but I think I enjoyed Hulk the most out of them, and I really didn't want to give this to that issue of Flashpoint. I'm pretty sure the titular character of this book spent most of its story soaring through the air over upstate New York into New England. Instead the focus was placed on the villains. Namely, the new MODOK and Zero/One and crew come into contact in the first time while pursuing their common quarry, in the midst of Sin's siege on Manhattan. And in a twist that genuinely caught me off-guard, the two traditionally detached megalomaniacs not only get along, but totally hit it off. I've felt the Fear Itself tie-ins (not just for Hulk) have been treading a lot of water until Nothing Is The Same Except It Totally Is again, and while in two issues not a whole lot of advancing has gone on, but this issue was just really cute and fun on top of being action-packed (and beautifully-drawn by Casagrande) and leaves me excited for whatever it's setting up between these two, as Zero/One is one of the better new villains created in Marvel, in the Big Two, in superhero comics in general for quite a while, and Parker's new spin on MODOK is intriguing to say the least, still the character we all love but at once creepier and more menacing than his campier predecessor. I'm not sure how long we'll have to wait to see this team-up in action, though, as the next issue preview promises that the long-heralded Omegex finally "cometh".
Hulk #38, written by Jeff Parker, art by Elena Casagrande, colors by Bettie Breitweiser and Jim Charalampidis, letters by Ed Dukeshire
Best Comic This Week:
PUNISHER
Punisher #1, written by Greg Rucka, art by Marco Checchetto, colors by Matt Hollingworth, letters by Joe Caramagna
I already discussed how much I liked Checchetto's art, but that was really only half the equation for this book. Despite adopting the logo for the site, I've never been a huge Punisher fan beyond Ennis' run (and probably Aaron's, once I actually read it), so I don't approach this with the same bias I might on a Spider-Man book, say. I say this so you understand when I say how good this book was, it's not coming from a squeedly little fanboy place inside me. Rucka writes an amazing first issue here. Traditionally, Punisher has been a character we've seen from the inside out, hearing his crazy-person monologous thoughts and reading his War Journal. Rucka's introduction here inverts that completely, as an entire issue goes by without Frank saying a word, let alone any narration boxes. We don't even see Frank out of the shadows until most of the way through the second half of the issue, when the story jumps to a police officer being interviewed about a shoot-out at the Cloisters (which, after the assassination attempt from Spot a couple of weeks ago in Daredevil, is really starting to seem like a dangerous place). Done entirely external from Frank, the book instead focuses on the cops working around Frank as he does his business, specifically one Detective "I'm not the guy from Kiss The Girls" Clemons and his new partner Detective Bolt, the latter who seems to be working an additional, off-the-record partnership with the Punisher as his inside-man. The conceit, appropriate enough, is very similar to what the excellent Gotham Central, also written in part by Rucka, did, in that you saw how the law enforcement worked in a world where Batman does his thing. But while conceptually similar, the two books are very different. Tonally, this is much darker, far more violent and as grounded in the reality of the situation insomuch as a comic in the Marvel U may be allowed to be. The separation from the character paints Frank more as an animal or an elemental part of this world, blowing in to clean out some of the evil in the world; while Frank has perhaps always been a character of deep-buried wish-fulfillment of vigilantism taken to the extreme, a far more final answer to comic-book villainy than the Spider-Mans and Batmans out there, this book helps remind us how brutal and horrifying the character can be as well. Again, I personally find good Punisher stories few and far between. This is definitely one of the good ones.Best Comics I Didn't Talk About:
BEST OF THE REST
And now, the super-quick reviews of the books who didn't quite make the cut. Should I really call this "Best of the Rest" if I didn't like some of them? Probably not, but it rhymes.
-Flashpoint #4 (Geoff Johns, Andy Kubert): I think I've come to the conclusion that, contrary to the way they have to be released, Event Comics have to be read all at once to be enjoyed. I did not like Fear Itself issue-by-issue, but when I actually went back and reread the first four all in one go, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. That was also how I read the first three Flashpoints, and I enjoyed those two. Issue four on its own? Not so much. Up til now, I had been able to enjoy it self-contained, but I felt this one fell back on information from the tie-ins too hard, and not reading the vast majority of those I felt a little lost at points, uninterested at others.
-Ultimate Fallout #4 (Brian Michael Bendis, Sara Pichelli, Jonathan Hickman, Salvador Larroca, Nick Spencer, Clayton Crain): This was basically a four-dollar catalogue for three different books, and of them two I didn't find particularly compelling, especially as I was already committed to giving the new Ultimate Spider-Man a shot when it came out, and, being what I bought the book for, there was very little of the new Spidey to tide me over. Hickman's Reed Richards story did very little to catch my interest. The real surprise came from Spencer's Valerie Cooper chapter, in that its sting intrigued me enough that I might pick up whichever book that was teasing, increasing the projected number of Ultimate titles I intend to read by a whopping 100%.
-Herc #6 (Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente, Neil Edwards): I'm pretty sure the book was heading this way regardless of Fear Itself, which this was really only superficially touched on,but the first story arc of Herc wraps up with all the fun and excitement you'd expect it to have coming from Pak and Van Lente. And that last page is just amazing, any chance of getting a poster of that?
-Batman: Arkham City #4 (of 5) (Paul Dini, Carlos d'Anda): Maybe it's because I've been reading the shorter digital chapters too, but it feels like they stuck a lot more going on in this issue than the previous ones. This has been a pretty fun series, but it's hard to read it and forget it's just marketing for the game rather than a solid story being told.
-Thunderbolts #161 (Jeff Parker, Declan Shalvey): While other books have been weighed down or shaken off course by their being tied in to Fear Itself, I feel like Thunderbolts, who have perennially been a part of Marvel's events for a while now, have come through it with a great, action-packed story (even as a couple of their own ranks got sucked elsewhere during the course), while still maintaining the independent plot lines from outside of the mandate. Overall, this has become one of my must-get Marvel books whenever it comes out, and this continues to not disappoint.
-Batman: Gates of Gotham #4 (of 5) (Scott Snyder, Kyle Higgens, Ryan Parrott, Dustin Nguyen, Derec Donovan): This has been a strong series so far, with a Bruceless Bat-family coming together to stop a new villain threatening to blow up half of Gotham. It's a bit of an adjustment to lose McCarthy on art this far into the series, and a little jarring to switch from him to Nguyen, and then in the same issue Nguyen to Donovan and back again, if only because their styles are all so different, but it didn't honestly cause much of a hiccough on the initial read-through and only really stuck out when I was going back over the issue. And, especially thanks to the three of them taking a crack at the armor, the Architect's design is really growing on me. I'm a bit sick of the steampunk scene, but the Architect, aside from some errant gears thrown on there, boils it down to a very simple, subdued version of the aesthetics, in imposing black instead of faded sepia.
Batman: Gates of Gotham #4, cover art (left) by Trevor McCarthy, interior art (center) by Derec Donovan, interior art (right) by Dustin Nguyen, colors by Guy Major, letters by Jared K. Fletcher
-Red Skull: Incarnate #2 (of 5) (Greg Pak, Mirko Colak): Not unlike what I was saying about Punisher #1, this book continues to be a book telling a story of the Marvel Universe but ultimately more concerned with being grounded in reality, a stark contrast to Marvel's usual fare. It's grim and unnerving, as we continue to watch the seeds of the monster-that-will-be sprouting and taking route in a boy who is, at least at this point, not wholly irredeemable. That inevitability, set against a backdrop of the real strife Germany had to suffer through leading up to World War II, makes the book that much harsher. An excellent series so far if you're in the mood for something a little more serious.
-Jonah Hex #70 (Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Ryan Sook, Diego Olmos): Like Secret Six, this run of Hex coming to its end is a damn shame, although unlike S6, Gray and Palmiotti will be returning to Hex immediately in September when All-Star Westerns kicks off. This doesn't make this any less a potent final issue, though, as Hex is haunted by visions of past, future and the surreal. It's a trippy send-off of the book, simultaneously a recap and a wrap-up to the series and the character himself.
-Moon Knight #4 (Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev): Bendis has a pretty storied history at Marvel, but this book has been some of my favorite work he's done. The first half of the book is very chatty, as is his wont, but here it actually seems natural. Marc Spector, and his mental co-pilots, feel like the kind who would talk at great length about hot dogs and espionage. Which is another aspect that works so well: Marc Spector is a pretty awesome character, and Bendis' handling of him is fairly atypical for a superhero book. Calm, cool, spy-like demeanor, saddled with the fact that he's absolutely insane, this is our protagonist. It only gets better with Maleev's art, which fits both the talky bits and the fighty bits and, to paraphrase Marc's mental Steve Rogers, he can draw quite the handsome woman.
Man-Thing of the Week:
MAN-THING
Thunderbolts #161, written by Jeff Parker, art by Declan Shalvey, colors by Frank Martin Jr. and Fabio D'Auria, letters by Albert Deschesne
With a last minute arrival in Thunderbolts, we got a li'l bit o'Man-Thing this week. Starting to wonder how long I can keep this up. If people want to submit any Man-Things of their own, I will gladly showcase them on here.
... NO, WAIT. You know what I mean.
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