The Problem Is That I Am Too Nice, And Cool To Be Around
Over the course of the past year of newsletters, we have established a pattern: when I'm unable to provide you with the commentary and insight you so richly deserve for a week, I come back to you with a half-baked excuse that I use as a springboard into a poorly thought-out comedy bit loosely relating to events that have occurred in the past week of comic book industry news by way of apology. This week was to be no different. However, as I considered all that has happened to lead me to this point in time, an anecdote jumped to my recall, that I simply must tell you if we are to understand one another. Don't worry, it's not very long.
I was six years old back then, and my mother had sent me to summer camp. The camp itself was not all that far from my home; when you go past the first ring of suburbs that surrounds Paris, you can find many areas left untouched by the urban sprawl, large natural spaces that a town like the one I live in acquires in order to give its children a bus ride to a curated bit of wilderness. There, I learned how to build a treehouse from nothing but the wood we found and twine. I rode ponies on muddy hills so steep that I once managed to basically roll down one of the beasts' necks and down on the ground. It's during one of these summer camp outings that I watched the 2003 Lawrence Kasdan film The Dreamcatcher, based on the novel by Stephen King, years before I should have. I was eleven then, and though I didn't remember it that way at the time, I had already experienced horror five years earlier.
I had been kept awake, one night, because one of the camp counselors, in a tent only lit by our dinky little flashlights, had told a scary little story that had actually been taken beat for beat from The Shining, the film, not the book. There was another child, who couldn't have been much older than I was, who asked me if I wanted to walk around in the woods with him. We'd tire ourselves out, we'd go to sleep, it would all turn out fine by dawn. I took him up on the offer, because that is what you do at that age, and so we went. A short while after that, I became tired enough to return to my bed, not paying attention to anything but my own tired body. Any kid would have done that. No one knew, and no one would have known to ask.
The other kid never came back. He had gotten lost in the woods, and accidentally got his leg caught in a trap some hunter left and forgot about during the hunting season. By the time he was found, his horribly mangled leg had bled out all it could bleed, and he passed away before anyone could find him. And obviously I'm not responsible for any of it. As I said: no one knew, and no one asked. To his parents, to the counselors, to the medical staff and to the authorities, he had gone off on his own, gotten lost, and the worst thing that could have happened, happened. He died an extremely horrifying death. And I think about it, sometimes, like it's my fault. I think about it, when there's nothing about the week that's all that interesting or noteworthy, because I sure as hell wasn't going to dignify a book like Fantastic Four #39 with anything but the cold contempt of ignorance.
So yeah, sometimes I don't write the newsletter because I have stared death in the face! That's going to be my fucking play! Thanks Joss! Fuck off forever!
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: JUST SO WE'RE CLEAR THERE'S NOT REALLY A DEAD KID I MADE IT UP FOR THE APOLOGY
I never expected to vibe with Catwoman #39 as hard I did. First, because it has to follow Ram V's Catwoman, one of the most well-realized Big Two in-continuity comic book runs to have been released during this moment in time. Second, because, to be honest, I have never really vibed with a Tini Howard book ever, even when she had a premise as killer as "It's WildCATS version 3.0 in the Krakoa era of X-Men comics." But that was then; this is now, and this week's issue, branded on the cover as the first of a new era, blew me away through sheer force of will. It is the most unapologetically itself book I have read since that first issue of DeConnick and De Landro's Bitch Planet. It is a Catwoman comic. It is about doing sexy heists and looking good doing it, so let's start there, and finally acknowledge in this review how fucking good the action is in the hands of a team like Jordie Bellaire and Nico Leon. It has the heightened staging and the dramatic long shadows of Gotham City's noir, but it is bathed in the hot neon pink of glam, every figure operating on some level of extra. It is setting a new bar for hotness in comics three weeks into January; random flocks of birds adorn some of the most gracious moves you'll ever see in a comic, and it all done with Bellaire's absolutely impeccable sense of texture. On that front it is unassailable.
It is a Catwoman comic. It is about crime, and it is about women. On the most basic level, it is a retread of the single best scene in Mazzucchelli and Miller's Year One, with the sheer terror and the dramatics of a giant bat man coming to dinner swapped for Selina Kyle's usual brand of subterfuge. This is where we find the most interesting aspects of this issue: it is about looking at the great criminals of Gotham by looking at the women who love them, in a way that is fifty percent catty, which is really fun, and fifty percent considered to an almost sociological degree, which is fascinating. It is unabashedly feminist, and it is unabashedly queer. It has a focus on the sensory and the specific which immerses like nobody's business. At last, it's a Catwoman book that acknowledges the developments that took place during Genevieve Valentine's tenure on the book, and that is something that I am very much into. It is earnest, which some will call clumsy. It is opinionated, which some will call shrill. It is itself, in the rawest and most honest way you can be doing mass market comics. Good news everyone: the Catwoman comic is as Catwoman as it can be, and then some.
The day finally came, and the X-Men line officially found itself without a head. It would be unnecessarily harsh to judge the post-Hickman era of Krakoa comics on X Lives of Wolverine #1 alone, but it is Marvel editorial that pushed it as its lone standard bearer, so here we are. It reads like a perfectly fine issue of Ben Percy's perfectly fine solo Wolverine run, picking up on threads hinted at in the perfectly fine X-Force comics Ben Percy also wrote. Joshua Cassara, being a force of nature, draws nice scenes of Wolverine fighting Omega Red in an old-timey house with the heavy impact such an occasion demands. There is some manner of time travel, and overlapping realities of some probable importance. Had this been an issue of Wolverine, I would treat it as I do any aggressively good but not particularly interesting comic, and we would not be here. But Marvel editorial is selling this as a game-changer. They have paused publication on every other book in the X-Men line to run this comic as the first part of a ten week comic book event setting up a relaunch of the line. They have sold it as a game-changer, on par with House of X #1. Well, X-Men line editor Jordan D. White, let me put it like this: I have read House of X #1. I know House of X #1. You sir, have released a comic that isn't House of X #1, not by any measure.
Focusing on the immediacy of the action would be good in an action comic called Wolverine, but it is deadly in the kind of Big Time Event Extravaganza this is being sold as, because there's no room for the big ideas such a setup promises. Maybe you can try, based on the little structure that is being exposed, to guess at what might be, but is that worthwhile? I can't help but put in context alongside The Onslaught Revelation and The Trial of Magneto, other storylines that were better suited for the ongoing books they originated from. I understand the strategy, but it is a bad strategy: if the line is marching at the beat of big events, the individual series get undermined; if the individual series get undermined, the entire edifice of the X-Men line as it had been built so far, the holistic approach that put a shine on every book, even Fallen Angels, crumbles into business as usual. Maybe that's the design, considering how The Trial of Magneto sanded off one of the Krakoa era's many edges. But if that's the case, there's a future in which the X-Men comics become as worthless as they were when Marc Guggenheim was writing X-Men Gold. Considering who the editor was on that, maybe it has already come to pass.
There has never been a better time to launch a new She-Hulk book. There's the television show, obviously. There's the many eager eyeballs ready to see what's next after Al Ewing's landmark Immortal Hulk run, and whatever the hell Jason Aaron did during World War She Hulk. Also: people seem to go fucking wild for tall muscular girls now, based on a quick survey of my twitter timeline. There is plenty in She-Hulk #1 to keep them entertained, quotable panels and gags to be posted all over. The occasional thirst trap thrown in for good measure, to honor the legacy of John Byrne. (It even has feet stuff! They knew what they were doing with that one.) But I have rarely seen a comic so content at its own lack of ambition. Functionally, this is a comic where Jennifer Walters crosses one street, then another street, and then a hallway, before a cliffhanger comes out of nowhere to give the series some forward momentum. It is decompression at its most soul-crushingly banal. In the right context, it could have been tolerable. In a book with "Hulk" in the title, I do expect more. Maybe this is too harsh. Maybe years of bad-faith discourse have weaned me off from comics that are just about people being nice to one another, where doing good is its own reward. Maybe this was a really boring comic. Next time, you tell me, because I have no interest in seeing where this goes.
WOW! What did I have with my cereal? One week away from this and I'm just spoiling to start a fight! Ah well, guess that's how it goes in The Year Of The Hater! If you liked this, please subscribe, and if you've already subscribed, tell a friend! I promise you they're not going to be like that all year, or maybe they will! It's comics and anything goes! That's why you do this! That's why I do this! That's why, whatever happens, you HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!