Paris I love you but you're bringing me down
A salute to New York, a city Not Hosting A Summer Olympiad
I write to you this week moments before the disaster, though I imagine my bouts of self-doubt will have pushed publication to after the rain (and the opening ceremony) has passed. Paris has achieved its transformation into the corporate police state nightmare the good people at the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy corporation have seen fit to call the 2024 Summer Olympics, and my Quartier Latin haunts are now trapped inside a maze of steel fences and armed guards. It is so bad that now I can’t even get to the store that stocks the good Rockstar varietals (namely, Tropical Guava).
This is bleak (and I haven’t even brought up the ads plastered everywhere), and it makes me yearn for greener pastures. Sadly, all I could get from the week in comics was New York City. Before we get to that, here’s a couple of stray shots at stuff I otherwise might have missed.
Hey, fellow Bendis sickos. I know things have been pretty hard lately, and our numbers are ever so dwindling; what if I told you there are people still making comics like they used to, with snappy dialogue, and bouts of universe-spanning action and intrigue? Well, they do. It’s called Wonder Woman #11, a tie-in to Absolute Power the event itself is whatever, but the tie-in is fun.
Wouldn’t you know it, but The Nice House By The Sea #1, the sequel to The Nice House By The Lake, is bigger, bolder, and hints at a larger world. You know, kinda like a sea is bigger than a lake? Anyway, having done all the big reveals in the first series, it now has the room to do even wilder reveals. Remarkable thing! You already knew that!
Here’s a real baffler: how does NYX #1, the relaunch, in spirit if not in letter, to a comic that was absolutely not worth remembering, in an X-Men line that was 0-2 on bangers (and let’s not even get into everything that came out about Phoenix over the past week), and pushed by an editor so completely baffled by the future as a concept that his big ideas involved both a post-credits scene and a QR code end up my favorite thing to have come from this From the Ashes initiative? I know that the mighty dyad of Kelly and Lanzing are capable of dropping some scorchers, I have also read their Captain America. (This sentence was supposed to name-check their Guardians of the Galaxy but trust me: the first paragraph of the review was not the right place to start a fight) But this one? I think this one is worth studying because it’s a lot more clever than the people quoting it out of context will be giving it credit for.
What we have here is a comic that does several interesting things. First and foremost, rather than telling us that the world has changed in the wake of the death of the Krakoan dream, it’s showing you the changes, through the eyes of the people that are living them, and in doing so, it asks the fairly big question of what the world is remembering of Krakoa. More importantly, this is a comic with a sense of place. It’s not only set in New York City, an actual place with an actual geography and actual landmarks (including that thing on Hudson Yards people kept jumping off of to kill themselves), but it is about New York City, and the connotations that that carries with people.
And already: having that going on makes it a more compelling “Ms. Marvel, but the X-Men are also there” comic than the two previous attempts. There’s nothing revolutionary there; it’s operating on the mode of young adult fiction, all in dialogue that is the exact right amount of clever and all the breezy action and fun mystery you could expect from a modern action comic, but it works, and its clarity of purpose is, somehow, against the backdrop of everything else, absolutely laudable.
But to me, what really makes this one special is the ways in which it revisits some of the old X-Men archetypes, and picks at them using a new cast of characters. For instance: this comic has a Wolverine in it. And guess what? She’s mysterious, brooding like everyone in the world is pissing her off at once, and she loves lecturing people as if she’s the only one out there fighting the good fight. Also: she’s pretty obviously wrong and she’s making a mess of things. It’s in the comic.
Meanwhile, good goddamn, can we talk about the Cuckoos for a minute? Because this is what really sold me on the whole thing. For the whole comic, we follow Sophie as she follows in her Mother Emma Frost’s footsteps as the problematic party girl slash committed activist ready to cry foul at anyone she thinks is lacking, no matter how inappropriate that could be. And for a moment, it feels like the same old same old, an X-Men comic throwing out implications it absolutely did not think through, in the name of a mutant metaphor that has never held up.
However; this is all setup, and the punchline is a final reveal that is plain and simple too good not to spoil. It’s the other four Cuckoos, Empath and Hellion, announcing their intentions to make a new Krakoa in their image. They call themselves the Quiet Council; they’re not. If anything, their blatant display of vulgar hedonism makes them a new Hellfire Club, dirtbags with power and privilege. This is the other side of the Emma Frost coin, and, because of the whole five-in-one thing, Sophie is still fully implicated in it.
And there, we’ve asked several interesting questions at once, haven’t we? We’ve interrogated not just a character in the story, but also the archetype that character is based on. And then, as a bonus, we’ve drawn a line from one group of incontrovertibly evil people to the group of well-meaning but ultimately just as evil people that made the dream of a mutant nation eat itself alive. If NYX can keep making good on this, if it can act as a vehicle for making X-Men fans think about these things; in short, if I’m not fucking hallucinating, then yeah: we’re in for a corker.
As a certifiably old-but-not-that-old man of 32, let me tell you this as clearly as I possibly can: I have no emotional attachment whatsoever to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They were on TV, I didn’t really give a shit. This stuff is most likely just before my time. I had other, better shows to watch. I’m telling you all of this right now just to make it hit that much harder when I say that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1, IDW’s 40th Anniversary relaunch of the comic that fucked up this whole industry by forcing the creation of the Direct Market as we know it, is, in fact, an absolute fucking barn-burner. It’s really fucking good, gang!
The key here lies in what Jason Aaron, who is somehow having a banner year away from the Marvel spotlight, has chosen not to do in his opening argument. He’s not operating in the classic action-comedy mode of Turtles comics past (all you’re getting is a nod and no more). Instead, he’s playing his “Daredevil in Prison” script completely deadpan; the fact that it’s about a giant talking turtle in a red bandana is funny enough on its own. Scratch that, actually: it’s hilarious. It’s a giant turtle man with messed up turtle hands pummeling creeps in prison tunnels. On its own that would already rule completely.
All Joelle Jones has to do in order to make it an instant classic is to deliver some fantastically dynamic ninja violence action, bring out some cool layouts and fill them with impactful action choreography. And guess what? She does! Supplemented by the gritty textures of Ronda Pattison’s colors, her crisp linework makes the fight scenes sing like few comics have been able to sing. Somehow, this is one of the most satisfying action comics you will read all year. I didn’t expect much; I almost didn’t pick it up. I was way beyond impressed.
What? Back so soon? Well thank fuck for discourse, right? Don’t worry, we’ll make fun of the all-new incredibly wide Batman in due time, but in the mean time, Bluesky and also Cohost will have your fix of intrusive thoughts, and if that isn’t enough for you there is always the ol’ reliable: HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!