MMXXV: THE YEAR OF BETTER
My brain poison, your irregular newsletter about comics, featuring news and reviews about COMICSPRO and One World Under Doom
It was a really good plan: I would take a couple of weeks off, because there isn’t much happening in January anyway, then I would devise a self-aggrandizing manifesto to kick the new year off in the style of someone that has things to say, and then we would get onto the business of writing about the funnybooks, because a great deal of interesting things have been in the pages of every Justice League-adjacent comic, save for Justice League Unlimited, and there was some meat in there worth the bite.
And then, New York Magazine released their exposé of the many terrible things Neil Gaiman had done to several vulnerable women over his years as an award-winning famous writer of comics and fantasy literature, and I felt I had to write about that. And then Diamond filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, and since that was also a story of note, I thought I could look for some type of commonality and that would make for an interesting way of looking at things, that would teach us something to take with us in the months ahead. It didn’t; whatever I thought I had congealed into a limp bit of ill-considered posturing. That wasn’t going to stop me. But you know what did? A little virus by the name of the flu (Family Edition).
That’s right: it took me being barely able to move or breathe, my head and throat flooded with phlegm, for me to acknowledge I had a bad idea, and while I understand that’s nothing to be proud of, it is exactly what happened, so I should get some points for telling the truth. Besides, if you really want to talk bad ideas, well, the COMICSPRO meeting happened over the past few days, and as it turns out the comics industry has plenty of bad ideas of its own, so let’s make fun of those.
THAT NEW, AWFUL, GWENPOOL COMIC
Talk about a dead on arrival premise here: Gwen Stacy, the actual Gwen Stacy, from “The Night Gwen Stacy Died”, that Gwen Stacy, the Gwen Stacy we’ve known as Gwen Stacy for as long as there’s been a Gwen Stacy, is back from the dead, and this time, she’s Deadpool. Not even a good Deadpool or a fun Deadpool. The Deadpool from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with swords coming out from his forearms. So already you know that, even if that book isn’t what it’s claiming to be, it’s going to suck.
The problem goes like this: either it plays the premise straight and you’ve undone one of the most essential stories in the Marvel canon for a dumb and bad comic about a shadow assassin, or, more likely, you’re kicking up a marketing storm by pretending to undo one of the most essential stories in the Marvel canon in order to make fun of a couple of comics that came out twenty years ago, and yes that’s right, both Under the Hood and The Winter Soldier came out in 2005, because time is harsh, and it will kill us all. In any case: you’ve wasted everyone’s time on an obviously lame stunt. Doesn’t seem all that great now does it?
DC SIGNS AN EXCLUSIVE DEAL WITH JEREMY ADAMS
Long time readers of the newsletter will remember my on-again, off-again lifetime beef with Jeremy Adams, based on his bad Flash run, which wasn’t just bad, and it was, but also dumped on a very beautiful and very earnest comic that meant a lot to me for the sake of a very mediocre and very cynical comic that barely meant anything to the people it was supposed to placate. All in all, it was a very Geoff Johns kind of move, and yes, I mean all disrespect.
But obviously, despite being correct in every way and for every reason, this is the minority opinion. You people love Jeremy Adams, and you loved his bad Flash comics, and I bet his first couple of issues of Aquaman blew you away, with how big and important they were. They finally made Aquaman big and important, gang! There’s an omega in there! It’s essential to the All In saga!
Anyway: I think in general, but especially now, these announcements are a very good thing. It’s an especially tumultuous time in the industry, so when a publisher values their talent like that and advertises it, it makes comics a slightly safer place to pursue a career in. It’s a net positive! I just wish it didn’t happen to a writer I don’t care for, because yeah Green Lantern has been fun, but as it has been growing bigger it’s begun to lose that immediacy in order to operate in standard comic book epic mode. Well, at least there was that Alan Scott book, that was good, oh no wait, that was Tim Sheridan. Sorry!
A NEW DC/MARVEL CROSSOVER?
Jeepers, how dire have things gotten if this is on the table again? Is one or both company dying? Is the Direct Market dying? What’s happening here? Apparently the reprints of the first crossover were a great deal of fun but I just can’t bring myself to believe there isn’t something terrible happening.
MATT FRACTION IS THE NEW WRITER OF BATMAN AFTER HUSH 2
Wait stop this rules.
SOPHIE CAMPBELL TAKES OVER SUPERGIRL
again this completely rules, please, give me something I can make fun of
MILES MORALES STARS IN ULTIMATE INCURSION
uh you know what actually pass; I’m gonna pass on that one, we’re all better off if I pass on that one
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So where does that leave us, manifesto-wise? Well, here’s what I learned over these few weeks: you can’t really do much when you’re sick, and it fucking sucked, and I missed being able to fully focus on the writing. I didn’t even have a particular comic in mind that I would tell you about, despite the fact that Mary Tyler Moorehawk is a wonderful delight about the adventure of reading in the shape of a magic trick and a pile of footnotes, whose payload is an iron-clad defense of creators and their acts of creation at a time when the powers of capital are pushing for technology that respects neither. I just wanted to get back to the task of demanding better comics, that themselves would demand better readers.
Never mind all the fake shit, then; fandom is toxic and stupid; pedestals only serve to push people away from the world; if we demand slop then slop is all we’re getting. I’m done with that, and if you’re reading this, I suspect you’re done with that too. In 2025, we will get better, and in turn this will make comics better. This is what we’ve aimed to do when we’ve started this, and we’re recommitting to it in the face of things being as bad as they are. Smarter, cooler, more aware of the world, and fighting mediocrity wherever it shows up. HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS.
Meanwhile, in comics: Jamal Campbell’s Zatanna #1 is such a total joy. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a comic this willing to put on a show, delivering all-out spectacle on every single page, overwhelming your eye with character and detail. It’s not just that this is an incredibly fun tale of magic and show business, which it is, but that it’s using its set up of an old theater and an extravagant ghost actress to take wild swings into different moods and genres, some of which don’t appear for more than one panel on one page. We knew Campbell was good, I even said that his Superman, with Joshua Williamson on scripts, was the standard for superhero action comics on the stands, but here he kicks it up a notch with a generosity of little things that will have you finding something new on every read. I love it a whole bunch and if it was up to me it would be the most successful comic of 2025. This is what it’s all about and you must support it.
I don’t know what to make of One World Under Doom #1 and so I’m going to make it your problem. Some of that is deliberate: despite the shock and awe of its big explosions and ambitious political posturing (this being a comic where Doctor Doom takes over the world and offers free healthcare and higher education in exchange), it’s a mystery story, and the question animating it, besides the matter of what to do about the state of things, is how Doom went from Sorcerer Supreme to having every government on the planet eat from his steely palm. That involves what will no doubt be a series of convoluted plans within plans that the Avengers will spend the next few months raveling and unraveling until Doom himself falls for a plan just crazy enough to work devised with all the gumption and the panache that Earth’s Mightiest can deliver.
All of that sounds very solid, and Ryan North is certainly a writer methodical enough to make a machine this complex run this smoothly. But this is also a Marvel Mega-Event, where the talented and the commercially successful alike end up squandering their promise, crushed under the wheels of contradictory edicts from Editorial. So, it does worry me to see something there that is not as elegant or as heartfelt as the Fantastic Four run this is meant to spin off of. It’s funny and it’s clever, it’s got the snappy character moments you would expect among the cameos from Unbeatable Squirrel Girl favorites, but you can tell it’s straining under the pressure to do so much at once.
Buy you know who thrives in that environment? Why, it’s R.B. Silva and David Curiel, somehow escalating on their work in Rise of the Powers of X. Silva, already great at making his characters expressive and specific, goes to the next level through a superb curation of details, adding texture without ever betraying clarity; all Curiel has to do, and I’m making this sound simple when it so obviously isn’t, is to match him step by step, putting the right nuance in the right place while making everything pop with iconic colors, and blowing you away because there’s just so much of it. If everything that has ever been written about Dan Mora and Jamal Campbell made you wonder who were the definitive artists currently at Marvel, wonder no more: they are the new standard in New York.
It’s a very good comic, and I wouldn’t fault you for finding yourself wanting for more — not to the point where you should pick up Weapon X-Men, especially when the much better Thunderbolts: Doomstrike is right there — but there are things that feel weird about it. Like, why does Doom go out of his way to push for two reasonable and attainable policy goals, that only seem unthinkable because of the current state of American politics? What’s the game here? Is it a “careful what you wish for” thing? A “this is too good to be true” thing? I understand why you’d push into that territory in order to complicate things, but this is supposed to end with the uncomplicated notion that Doom is bad, right? From that point of view, it’s reasonable to see some cynicism in the idea that Doom is a socialist dictator, isn’t it?
Then, and thankfully this is far more stupid, there is the matter of that other story about a villain taking near-totalitarian control of the world while systematically disempowering its superheroes through magic, technology and subterfuge. Sure, anyone with a bit of knowledge of Marvel history will see the Dark Reign at play in this, but you know what company is also revisiting the mid-2000s architect-era Marvel playbook at the moment? It’s DC Comics. I’m talking about Absolute Power. I’m not saying Absolute Power was better, because it isn’t, because Ryan North is a better and more exciting writer than Mark Waid in 2024, but it sure as hell was first, and this wouldn’t be the first time the House of Ideas was looking over at the Distinguished Competition’s homework: New Champions is fine, I just liked it better when it was called Stargirl: The Lost Children.
Where does that leave us? I don’t know, but since this is what Marvel is going to be for the next few months, we’re going to have to keep dealing with it. As I told you before: this is your problem too. Ah well, there’s always everything else. Catch you next time;
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS