A Logic Riddle From Detective Wacky!
Introducing the Games section of HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS with a Marvel Comics puzzler for the ages
It was a beautiful morning in mid-April, and Detective Wacky, of the Special Puzzle Division, had been called to the Manhattan headquarters of Marvel Comics. New testimony, in the form of a podcast interview with Miles Morales: Spider-Man scribe Cody Ziglar, had turned a relatively straightforward murder case into a conundrum most confusing, which only Wacky’s unmatched riddle-unraveling skill could solve.
The victim was Kamala Khan, a once-essential character who went from instant media sensation to bona fide star of her own commercially and critically successful solo comic book series, to having her own television show and co-starring in her own blockbuster film. When her body had been found, in The Amazing Spider-Man #26, the case had seemed like an open-and-shut fridging; certainly, her resurrection and new status quo as one of the X-Men complicated the matter, but not by that much. The interview had changed things, pointing the finger at one suspect in particular, and it forced Wacky to reconsider the facts before him.
In order to get to the bottom of this, he had asked all the suspects to testify one more time. He knew that only one suspect could have done the crime in one location and with one weapon. He also knew that every suspect would tell him the truth, except for the murderer. These are his notes:
Zeb Wells, who wrote the comic, claimed he wanted to commemorate the anniversary of The Night Gwen Stacy Died with a shocking development of his own. Detective Wacky also notes that “he hasn’t been the same since the divorce”.
Nick Lowe, who edited the comic, claimed he saw an opportunity to pay tribute to Kamala Khan by putting her in Spider-Man after her solo book was cancelled; he also claimed that keeping Peter and Mary-Jane separated from one another is kinda like Doctor Zhivago, and that is something that is entirely factual, I know this is the “satirical” part of the newsletter so I have to insist on this: he actually said this, it is in one of the ASM letter columns, he really thinks this is like Doctor Zhivago.
C.B. Cebulski, who is Marvel’s Editor-In-Chief, once pretended to be a Japanese writer named “Akira Yoshida” to bypass a company policy on editors taking on writing work; this isn’t related to the matter at hand, in fact I don’t think he’s said anything about this run of Spider-Man, but it needs to be said again and again considering how little impact this information has had on his career.
Kevin Feige, who runs Marvel Studios, may have made the call to turn Kamala into a mutant, like she is in the films, and it’s probably all there is to it, unless you really think he was like “okay so you have to make her a supporting character in The Amazing Spider-Man, she has to get stabbed in the gut by some random-ass Brand New Day-era villain, and then we’ll use the Krakoan resurrection protocols to bring her back, since we’ve established in Judgment Day that they could bring back anyone, and we’ll use this to explain that she’s still a Inhuman, but also she’s a mutant”, which hardly seems like the remit of a “movies guy”, now does it? You’ve fundamentally misinterpreted what Cody Ziglar has said for the sake of a better, more conspiratorial story of why you’re not enjoying a bad comic, and it’s honestly a little sad.
Murdertron 5000 is a giant robot built only for murder, and its programming makes every murder it commits feel incredibly pleasurable; it also loves to lie to detectives.
Can YOU help Detective Wacky figure out who did the bad thing that people really don’t like? If so, send your answers to spideyoffice@marvel.com, and do not forget to mark them “OKAY TO PRINT”. Best submission wins a $20 gift certificate to buy other, better comics!
AFTER THIS, REVIEWS THAT AREN’T PUZZLING SO MUCH AS THEY ARE ENTIRELY BAFFLING
You would think there is nothing of value to write about Roxxon Presents: Thor #1, not just because in writing down the title I’ve given you the totality of its premise — it is in fact a comic where Marvel’s resident evil corporation rewrites the story of Thor to make it fit its own evil corporate ends — but because, in a speech so raw and so pointed it could have been written by Pat Mills and put in the mouth of ur-fascist Nemesis the Warlock arch-foe Tomás de Torquemada, it contains its own critique — obviously, you’re serving Capital whenever you use its tools, even when you’re using these tools to mock or protest Capital — and that should make me entirely redundant. But here’s the thing: this is a comic about comics, and I can use that to put my own twist on the proceedings, because you know what? I’ve read a lot of comics, and I’ve read even more while I wasn’t writing about comics. So let’s do this.
First, let’s give one to the fans of facile comparisons. If The Immortal Hulk was Al Ewing’s Alan Moore comic, all clad in gothic horror and references to The Saga of the Swamp Thing, then it would follow that The Immortal Thor, and its obsessions with story magic, poetry and ripped-from-the-headlines satire, could make for a pretty convincing Al Ewing’s Grant Morrison comic. Viewed through that prism, Roxxon Presents: Thor becomes a pretty good analogue to Ultra Comics, itself a death trap in the shape of a superhero story meant to drive a character to face their own powerlessness in the face of how the sausage is made; and that is a pretty interesting angle to pursue, but the real freaks in the audience will instead bring up Doom Force Special, a ruthless mockery of 90s Marvel and the Image Comics it begat, full of questionable fashions and even more questionable anatomies, of contrived character drama and unearned cooler-than-cool attitude, and confused gestures at global politics lost beneath all the cross-hatching and the action lines.
First and foremost, then, Roxxon Presents: Thor is a farce, and that in itself is pretty interesting, because Al Ewing hasn’t done a straight-up goofball comedy comic since You Are Deadpool, his other tribute to Pat Mills (this time it’s Dice Man). And this comic, the dumb and evil version of Thor, is relentless with the goofs and spoofs, taking aim at our dumbest and most dystopian capitalists and having a jolly old laugh at their stupidest ideas. It starts absurd, and it escalates from there, in ways that would recall modern 2000 AD classic Zombo if it wasn’t for the one-shot’s most critical mistake: it’s a Greg Land comic. I understand the idea on paper: you’re using Comics’ most reviled hack to make a comic that is nothing but vile hackery, but we are dealing here with an artist so entirely thoughtless, so incapable of any kind of awareness that even his self eludes him. And clever writers have tried that particular trick before, including Kieron Gillen in his Iron Man run, to no avail. There are many great jokes in this comic. None of them are served particularly well by the art. Now, I understand that Zombo co-creator Henry Flint might have been busy, what with the recently-completed instant classic Judge Dredd storyline A Better World, a formally challenging work full of iconic imagery and game-changing twists, but anyone else could have done the Greg Land pastiche, and they would have made the jokes land with emphasis.
None of this makes it bad, you understand, but it does make it the week’s second-best single issue where a divine figure is stuck in a false reality taking the shape of a genre pastiche and fights to assert its identity against a narrative that only exists to serve an existing power structure. Sure, Wonder Woman #8 is not as funny, but Tom King knows how to give a horror twist to a classic romance comic, and Daniel Sampere, with inspired color assists from Tomeu Morey, deliver on this, and so much more, in a story so clear in its meaning that the intended targets of its insults fucking hate it. It’s not surprising that I loved it, but it is surprising that I loved it this much. The point is: both comics are good and you should read them, I’m just being a grump.
Finally, a few words about Fall of the House of X #4, a comic that just plain stinks. There are many reasons to hate this comic, whether that’s the bad wannabe-Claremontian narration that fails to give any insight into the characters at the heart of the piece, the fact that Jethro Morales cannot keep up with Lucas Wereneck, or the incredibly stupid developments that seem to pop out of nowhere, despite the fact that this issue picks up exactly where the previous left off, and is accompanied by a parade of secondary series meant to cram context everywhere that is missing it. And some of those are good, even! Dead X-Men, which concluded this week, is shockingly readable!
And all of those would be correct, but here is mine: at the center of this issue is a Charles Xavier gambit, as convoluted and ethically dubious as any Charles Xavier gambit has ever been. The shape that gambit takes is the mutant reserve that you see throughout Powers of X; this is the comic’s idea of being clever. It’s thrown in the middle of a data page, and not really elaborated on, because the issue would much rather show you Nimrod blowing stuff up and gloating, as happens in bad comics. Gerry Duggan’s idea of closure seems to be to take the cool ideas Hickman had laid out, and stripping them of all their context and all their implications, until they can be fit into an X-Men comic so dated and so hackneyed it goes back to the softball field in Westchester so Xavier can lecture Cyclops. This is a comic we thought we had gotten rid of when House of X changed the rules. Well it’s back, and it still fucking sucks.
And that’ll do it! One old-school style newsletter, just like we used to make them! Sometimes you take a months-long journey to land back at yourself, because wherever you go, there you are! See you when I see you, then, and in the mean time, find me on this website, that website or maybe even that website. Until then, keep an eye out, and HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!