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Thursday, February 21, 2008
Comics Roundup
It's the calm before the storm as WonderCon ascends upon the fair city of San Francisco. My coverage will appear on Newsarama and PWCW. For right now let's forget about comics as work and just look at some books I picked up on the radical notion of experiencing comics as enjoyment.
The Amazing Spider-Man #551: When the "Brand New Day" program started I was actually in the middle of Essential Spider-Man Vol. 4. I was a little too uncomfortable with the fact that the Spider-Man comics being published by Marvel today are almost identical to what the company was publishing in 1969. I was going off on this spiel to someone else when I thought "what else are these comics going be?" We've seen so many interpretations of Spidey over the years. Only recently we saw the character "go corporate" with his Iron Spider suit, living it up in Tony Stark's building. Then the character goes dark and brooding with a black costume, itself a retread. Japanese manga-ka have recreated the character. J. Michael Strarczynski tried pulling off the "spider-totem" idea. But like an elastic band snapping back into its original form no matter how hard you extend it the Spider-Man of "Brand New Day," roughly no different than what Stan Lee and John Romita Sr. were giving us during decades ago, is the character that will always be around. The superhero who can swing through New York but is no less a hard-luck schmuck is what works. Why fight it?
Marc Guggenheim and Salvador Larroca's storyline wraps up here. Larroca's an artist I've had my my hesitations about. Reading his recent arc on Uncanny X-Men I became dissatisfied with how stilted his photo-realistic work came across. I don't care how much Storm looks like a real person as much as if there's a rhythm in between the panels. Larroca, I'm happy to say, surprised me by pulling off what's in this story. It's about 80% action, all up front. There's a sparse grace to how Spider-Man and new character Jackpot swing through the sky evading police and hunting down another new character, the supervillain Menace. It works as a counter-point to Guggenheim's busy script.
Not that the script's a problem but ending a three-issue Spider-man story means a lot of exposition from everybody and canny wisecracks from ol' Webhead. Guggenheim balances those requirements well. His Spider-Man is actually funny (I'm thinking of the "whump" bit in particular). The climax of the story features a downbeat ending, not unusual for Spider-Man, but at first I thought it odd that Spidey would be so non-plussed by the tragic incident at the end. Then I realized two things. The first is that Spider-Man's had his fair share of guilt over the course his superhero career and he's not going to start misplacing bad feelings when, as explicitly stated, he knows who is actually responsible. Secondly, and this only intimated at best, perhaps Spider-Man feels he has to appear to stable for Jackpot who has never seen such a thing as this in her shorter stint as a superhero.
The scene in the denouement concerning Jackpot's identity sets another ball rolling in the continuing soap opera that is Peter Parker's life. It all feels very Silver Age and that's without counting the fact that the story's title beings with "Lo, There Shall Come A..." Thankfully, it's Silver Age fun that feels vital and not retro for its own sake. At three times a week it's a fun little book.
Ex Machina #34: If you've been away for a while you can worse than a stand alone issue that spotlights a character whom so far has only been seen in relation with the main character. Brian K. Vaughan gives us the life of New York City Police Commissioner Amy Angotti. We see her as a child, meeting the man she would marry (and, as we learn this issue, divorce) taking on The Great Machine when he was Public Enemy No. 1 and where she was on Sept. 11th, the day Mitchell Hundred saved her husband. Even Jack Pherson from the two Ex Machina specials Chris Sprouse did shows up.
Vaughan keeps the story snappy and emotionally powerful thanks to an excellent utilization of dialouge. It's the word balloons that really lead the storytelling in this series. I view most superhero stories as defined by how artificially theatrical they are (and I mean that as a good thing). Just like in a musical where the absolutely absurd idea of people breaking into song is an acceptable substitute for talking about their feelings, fistfights and other acts of incredible derring-do is how someone like, well, Spider-Man deals with what's bugging him. Ex Machina reverses that. Here the superhero elements of the story have to live by the rules of a more...I guess I'd have to say more modern narrative. Vaughan has a character whom once employed a jet pack but that story elements isn't for granted. People here, like the Angottis, have to sound like actual adults living within a disintegrating realtionship (come to think of it we never truly see the husband and wife happy together). A lot of comics have gone for "realistic superheroes" but Vaughan seems to be one of the few that gets what that means.
Tony Harris's artwork similarly tries to push past the common boundaries of how genre comics works. Every panel starts as a photograph. I've seen Harris speak about his method and I respect the effort he puts into creating a "penciled fumetti." I respect the effort far more than I enjoy it. It's not the same problem I have with Larroca's work. I think Harris is a good director and can keep the action flowing from panel to panel. But an individual comic panel at its best should feel like more than just one captured millisecond, which is what a photograph is. The pages depicting Amy's childhood reads like a collection of the embarrassing faces people make because the shutter always manages to go off at just the wrong time. For a book that depends on people standing around and talking Harris is injecting the needed dynamism with the perfectly rendered figures and the oft-used giant close-ups. But so many times the picture inside the gutters feel lifeless.
Mind you, it's all saved by the last page of the story. Everything that's great about this series is there.
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