The Doom That Came To San Diego Comic Con
Comics? At the San Diego Comic Con? What next? Comics in stores? X-Men comics? You people will come up with anything
I’ve been feeling feelings about San Diegos Comic Cons for a while now, and gang: this one got me feeling some pretty interesting feelings. That’s not been the case in the past couple of years, because most times the Big Two save their big announcements for cons on their home turfs (Wondercon in Anaheim for DC, and New York Comic Con for Marvel). Not this year, however! This year was a big buffet of news, and a lot of it has already been digested, so let’s pick at some leftovers.
THE NEW OLD DC COMICS: NOTHING CAN STOP ME NOW (‘CAUSE I DON’T CARE ANYMORE)
While the biggest (and I don’t just mean in terms of Batman width) announcement out of DC Comics had leaked months in advance (and could be found at the place every industry leak can be found), there was still some news left to news, and some of it even involved the Absolute Universe which we had known about for years.
Biggest and most important will obviously be the return of the 1976 Milton Glaser DC bullet logo, brought back under the impulse of DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Safran. It’s a very good logo, obviously, and I’ve seen many people be happy that it’s being brought back, but I can’t help but feel like we’re gazing inward into a vortex of nostalgia when that might be the last thing that comics need. Can you really build the future while so intently looking at the past? Are we doomed to try and sell superheroes to an aging audience increasingly desperate to keep its own personal development arrested? I don’t know! Maybe that should worry me! Maybe that should worry you?
Still, under the stewardship of Marie Javins, DC Comics is being run like a serious publishing concern, and there is plenty to be excited about when looking at the many series published under the All In banner. Even the announcement that Scott Snyder would return to the universe-shaping business by way of a new Darkseid story, which could have been a tedious retread of his slightly-too-aimless Justice League work turned out to be an alley-oop, with the superlative Dawnrunner team of Ram V and Evan Cagle waiting under the rim with an all-new New Gods series. How fun is that? The answer is “pretty fun”. Plus Al Ewing is in effect and you will never read a bad word about him ever, in this or any other newsletter. Also, that Creature Commandos show looks pretty fun!
MARVEL COMICS: LOL; LMAO
They’ve announced a new Dan Slott Spider-Adjacent comic.
Okay, so maybe Marvel didn’t have much to announce, or, for that matter, much that they needed to announce, since the new Ultimate Universe is the biggest thing going on in comics at the moment. Guess what by the way: all of that is still happening. Still, the relative lack of effort is a story in and of itself. There’s a new and utterly confusing TVA comic waiting in the wings, and a new and utterly doomed teen superhero comic ready for its 8-issue run, but what then?
Well, there’s Doom. Capital D, referring to the character, at least for now. Kang the Conqueror, the people and the legal system have spoken, and they’ve resoundingly said “Thanks, but no thanks”. And so, we’re in the Victor Von Doom business now. There’s a big event on the way, which might or might not have an effect on whatever books you’re currently reading (Jed MacKay’s X-Men? Might! Spencer Ackerman’s Iron Man? Might not!) and then, there’s that big dumb and expensive announcement for that big dumb and expensive movie.
But again I ask: who knows? Maybe the return of Robert Downey Jr., in a film by Joe and Anthony Russo, will not be as lame and as desperate as it seems. Maybe Disney will get their money’s worth out of a film that isn’t a last-ditch stunt meant to remind you of older and better movies that people liked. (And good god, if Avengers: Endgame is your older and better movie you’re fathoms deep below sea level) Could you imagine if that were the case? If things turned out good and worthwhile? I kinda want to see it. It would be fucking hilarious.
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Score-keepers of the world, here is where we left the From The Ashes era of X-Men comics at the end of last week: 2-2 duds to non-duds; turns out I rather liked X-Force, a wholly unpretentious vehicle for cool action thrills with a clear mission statement, strong character voices, and just a dash of cynicism to make it go down smooth.
But the stakes for this week’s The Uncanny X-Men #1 are bigger than putting another W on the board. First and most obvious, this is a comic called The Uncanny X-Men #1, and that carries with it a bit more meaning than a comic called NYX #1 would. Second and more important, this is the second of the three tentpole titles around which this relaunch was built, alongside X-Men and Exceptional X-Men. In other words: if this one doesn’t work out, it might be time to consider the whole initiative a failure.
So let’s start with the good news: David Marquez is still one of the best artists currently working in comics, and Matthew Wilson is an ideal partner for a style which combines richly expressive and finely detailed character work, powerful and colorful superhero action, and an incredible sense for staging, which creates pictures perfectly communicating scale and grandeur, alongside certifiably definitive visuals. It’s a great looking comic, and on that criteria alone you would get more than your money’s worth.
The problems begin once you realize you also paid for the writing. Gail Simone, one of the most self-aware writers there has ever been, has the entirely correct instincts about what is required from her in this moment. This comic knows it has to earn your trust, and it is practically begging for it. It promises you it has plans for years of fun, and it even gives itself something to come back to 12 issues from now. It features almost as many new mutants in its pages than there are in every other current X-Men comic combined. If it could make good on all of this, and be a comic entirely dedicated to being bold and fresh, it would be as fine a flag-carrier as the line had ever seen.
It’s not, and the responsibility for that lies in the fact that most of this comic is actually about Wolverine, Rogue, and Gambit, except none of what it has to say about these characters feels particularly new or interesting. Would you believe it? Wolverine is an old man who’s seen too much fighting. Could you believe it? Rogue is a troubled young woman who fears her abilities might cost her everything that she has ever loved. Is it even conceivable? Gambit is a fast-living man whose debonair ways mask how much darkness he’s trying to keep at bay. These are the characters you know and love, especially if all you know about them is X-Men ‘97; it doesn’t get any more complicated than that.
The novelty resides in the new, post-Krakoa, context they find themselves in. And this is where things take the potentially lethal turn for the worse. The “hated and feared” thing is bad enough on its own (it was already hack and unoriginal when Gerry Duggan brought it back with a vengeance during the Fall of X), but carrying the torch for Team Fascism is Warden Ellis (get it?), a copy of a copy of a copy of a dozen better and more compelling anti-mutant zealots, whose irksome and overwrought pettiness doesn’t offend me as much as her loose grasp on the politics of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn does.
And then, just as a bonus, it’s lousy with continuity errors (fun fact: the mansion in Westchester was essentially left to rot during the Krakoa era) (even more fun fact: Nightcrawler was never a Catholic priest), which, in addition to being annoying to the cadre of X-Men pedants I’ve been a part of ever since I started writing about these books for an online audience, betrays a lack of care from all parties involved in this exercise in regression.
And where usually I would dismiss such thoughts as idle speculation, I can’t, because you and I know that Tom Brevoort has a newsletter, and that every single week, he uses it to loudly advertise the fact that he doesn’t really know or understand the particulars of the X-Men comics published before his tenure. That’s pretty bad. And it’s pretty obvious in the work too. So, score-keepers of the world, here’s the count: 3-2 duds to non-duds, 0-2 on the cornerstones. I’m about ready to call this one done.
I know that every other critic worth their salt has already told you how good The Power Fantasy #1 really is. And they’re absolutely right, and their work is absolutely illuminating and worthwhile, but here’s the thing: I didn’t get a review copy, and I’m very jealous and insecure, so you’re going to have to deal with my late-to-the-party take. It’s fucking amazing.
The easy, and altogether pretty cliché, way of putting it is that it’s Immortal X-Men with live rounds. Which is true; it’s a comic about impossibly powerful people having to bargain with one another with billions of lives in the balance of each argument. But there’s more to it than that, and not in the way you think if you’ve been reading Kieron Gillen first issues for a hot minute. For once, I’m not talking about a comic that lays out its premise as clearly as possible and then drops a second beat to shock and surprise you, although yeah, it does do that. I’m talking about the fact that this is a comic whose second half takes place in 1999, a.k.a. the year The Authority came out, and that said second half involves a group of superpowered beings announcing themselves to the world. Get it? This is a comic from the team that made Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, and superstar designer Rian Hughes is there too, because it’s kinda nuts and I had no room to acknowledge it elsewhere.
While we’re on the topic of Caspar Wijngaard, let’s take a moment to enjoy his ascension as an all-time king of imaginative ways to stage action and represent superpowers. It’s a natural evolution from the kind of stuff he was pulling off in Home Sick Pilots, to be sure, but it is such a spectacle to behold! This is a book that swings wildly, from the pastel 1960s to the bunkers in various shades of red alert, from the mundane to the utopian, and it all looks so well realized you know all of it is important.
It’s a great comic, and I dare not spoil any more of it, save for the fairly obvious fact that it’s got your daily allotted portion of heady conversations about power, Empires, the shadow they leave and how they have shaped our imaginations, and the bargains we make every moment we live in their world. It’s a spectacular book; I don’t know that it gets any better than this, but I’m sure as hell gonna hope it does.
You know how Venom has been pretty hard to follow, for the same reason why every other Al Ewing comic at Marvel is hard to follow? (Namely, an unfathomable amount of crossovers, tie-ins, annuals, specials and one-shots that means every plot thread comes with its own colossal reading list, before we even get to the jungle of references that each given issue might contain?) And you know how every single time, the payoff has, some way somehow, been completely worth it?
Well, here’s Venom War #1, a comic that is all of those things and even more. Don’t worry too much if you’ve missed previous issues: this is a summer crossover comic book event, in the noblest sense of the term, and, as an added bonus, it operates under the rules and the logic of pro-wrestling, so if you’re conversant in any of that, you’ll pick up what it’s putting down in no time.
This is a “fathers and sons” comic. This is a comic about violence and how it is passed down from generation to generation. This is a comic about the world all this violence will leave behind. To anyone that’s a little bit cooler than most, those themes will ring familiar. Yes, friends and 2000 AD readers, this is an outright Wagnerian comic, and no, uncool people, I don’t mean Richard. I mean John. (Get it?) Of course, it delivers on the action thrills like nobody’s business. Eddie Brock puts someone in a Boston crab. Don’t worry about it.
Ewing’s tag-team partner in this endeavor, the great Iban Coello, absolutely gets it, not just because he’s amazing at doing all the weird and gross Venom stuff everyone loves, but because he can keep up with the sub-textual (notice here how many panels involve someone looking at a hand, for instance). This is an extremely smart extremely dumb comic. It is fun as hell. It’s got the best Spider-Man you’ll read all year in there. Get in, get rowdy, get wild.
This one is packed enough as is, so, I’m not even gonna get into Gotham City Sirens #1, a delightfully poisoned wild action comics that’s equal parts X-Terminators and the later seasons of Westworld. Just know they made this comic for me and me alone and therefore that I’m not about to say anything bad about it. And that’s it! That’s all there was to say about comics this week! Until next time, find me on Bluesky and Cohost where I yell a bit more. As for you, there’s no escaping what must be done, so HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!