The Year Of Learning To Fly (Not Gonna Explain That One, Just Feel It)
Fall with grace, trust the wind, HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS
I know that, since they're not gonna have an Eisner for comics journalism this year, I don't have to try and make the newsletter any good. Still, I'm terrified at the thought I could write my worst review twice, so, before we go any further into this review of Ultimate Spider-Man #1, a quick word of warning: I'm not going to go into the subtext. I'm not even going to try to read anything into what may or may not been there. I am not getting caught up into the singularity of The Amazing Spider-Man #26 discourse ever again; I have been burned before, and every day I hate myself for it. So, nothing up my sleeves, let's just play this one as it's dealt.
Good gravy, what an obviously good comic. With supreme confidence, it opens on three Big Statements about the new Ultimate Peter Parker, delivered in exactly as many pages. First: this Peter Parker is old, and his tragedy is one of meaninglessness and unfulfilled potential. Second: this Peter Parker is married, and against my better judgment this is something that I am forced to acknowledge. Third: this Peter Parker has kids, and the kind of home life that anyone could have, if it hadn't been for the lifelong dedication to comics getting in the way. Obviously, this is all taking place in a near-future dystopia robbed of its heroes and handed over to a secret cabal of the world's most powerful and most deluded, responsible for Peter's biggest losses, but the comic keeps it at ground level, relatable and approachable through and through, which is the way these things ought to be, isn't it?
But it goes bolder than that: it's a Spider-Man comic without the Spider-Man of it all, tripling down on the character drama of it all. Essentially, it's a romance comic, except the Green Goblin is also there. This is a context in which Marco Checchetto absolutely thrives, his soft linework knowing where to insist on the emotion of a moment and where to hang back and let Matt Wilson add the texture and the detail; as a repeated motif, he puts in panels with everything removed except for one character's face, and every single time, there is an intensity to it that few comics have ever been able to replicate.
All of it is as cleverly written as anything Johnathan Hickman has ever written. From the evocations of Spider-Men past, to the fun little subversions that lead into the big ones, the subtle but ever-present foreshadowing making you see intentionality in just about everything, and on top of it all, the knack for genuinely fun and funny dialogue, superbly woven into cute little callbacks, there is very little here that isn't as good as you expected it to be. Which, in some ways, is the comic's greatest problem: it feels great by default, saving the risky parts of its story for later. That is a nothing complaint. This is a book that everyone can enjoy. It's a great start, but then again[NOPE I AM NOT FINISHING THIS SENTENCE]
Many haters, myself included, were wondering just what the hell Jason Aaron, fresh off a total dud of an Avengers run and an absolutely repulsive Punisher maxiseries, was going to do at DC Comics, and how bad things were going to get. As it turns out, the answers were: "a loving tribute to the British Invasion bolstered by some of the best artists in comics", and "actually pretty good through and through". Batman: Off-World, drawn by the ever-excellent Doug Mahnke, has all the lightly-satirical sci-fi world-building, hard grit and cool violence you would expect from an Alan Grant comic, and in recasting Batman as an outsider shunned for his ways, recalls works on the level of Strontium Dog, which is just about the highest praise any comic can get.
But in Action Comics #1061, Aaron, paired with fully-fledged superstar John Timms, goes for the hardest Alan of them all, and somehow he succeeds there too. Taking his cues from Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?, he delivers what is essentially a Silver Age premise firing live rounds. Enter Bizarro, sadder, angrier and more powerful than ever, ready to punk Superman across a whole comic full of the weird found poetry of kooky old comics, the ever-so-edgy hints at deconstruction through exposing the Kryptonian's limits, and yes, raw gooey humanity at the heart of it all, like any good Superman story. It's cool! It's flashy and dynamic in all the ways you want an action comic to be flashy and dynamic, and I want some more of it! Also I want to read more Strontium Dog but the newsletter is already late enough as is.
What are we mourning when we are mourning the Krakoa era of X-Men comics? Is it just a few very good comics, and all the other comics that could have been, or is there something more? And for that matter, why are we mourning anything at all, when this should be an apotheosis, the resolution to four years of intrigue that took us from a park bench to the end of all life on Earth, with many little detours on the way. It is in the shadow of these pretty big questions that we will consider Fall of the House of X #1 and Rise of the Powers of X #1, in which Marvel Comics' best and brightest attempt to close the loop by going back to the very beginning, except for the part where they aren't, not really.
For instance: House of X #1 was an immediate statement of intent dripping with instantly iconic imagery laying down a vision of the X-Men playing to win in the struggle for co-existence, and Fall of the House of X is none of that at all, despite Lucas Werneck's best efforts at providing big time blockbuster visuals, with a side of reimagined X-Men designs for good measure. But this is the finale of Gerry Duggan's X-Men run through and through, picking up all the plot threads it could incorporate in the mutants' last stand, and using the fact that some version of the band is being put together to play the standards, including the extended discussion of the "fastball special".
Where Hickman was imagining an X-Men story past the immediate existential threat, here are mutants as hated and feared as they have ever been, and if you think that all those cover versions of things you've read before aren't the most original thing to be put in an X-Men comic, you probably feel the same way as I do about the whole exercise. It's not bad, I have been in admiration of Duggan's ability to put together an action-comedy comic many times over the course of this newsletter, but it's not as good as it should be either, and the failures as the same as they have ever been. Which, in that particular context, does make things worse.
And all of this is a shame, because meanwhile, on the other side, Rise of the Powers of X is terribly exciting. First and most obvious, getting R.B. Silva to remix his own imagery works better, and his wonderfully cartoony take on Nimrod is still a complete joy to behold. Second of all, it's plainly more interesting: summing up the action that was and making its stakes clear through a clever issue-long misdirect, Kieron Gillen delivers a wonderfully grim timeline of competing doomsdays, and its joyfully violent climax, loaded with grandstanding and backstabbing and all that good old-fashioned fun. It does all of that, and it puts a neat little map on top of it, in order to make a case that is as cold and as cynical as anything that has ever been presented in New Avengers. I loved it a lot.
Still, there is something amiss; the sum of these parts forms a whole that is lesser than the one formed by the opening statement made nearly five years ago. In trying to recapture the magic Marvel made two mistakes: first, HoX and PoX existed on their own, the one and only thing happening to the X-Men at the time, while FotHoX and RotPoX exist in the middle of a cacophony of spin-offs, epilogues and codas. Second, and more important: those comics, as good as they may be, don't carry any kind of promise that they might change anything to the way Direct Market comics are made and sold. They reproduce the form, with prose and data visualizations galore, but the most important sentence was removed. In the final analysis, we will find that the most exciting words pronounced in the last ten years of X-Men comics weren't "You have new gods now". They weren't even inside the comic proper. They were on the final page, and they went "TWO SERIES THAT ARE ONE". They promised a paradigm shift, where all of the line mattered, because it was all part of the same story. This is what we mourn when we mourn Krakoa. In truth, we have been mourning it long before the Fall of X, and we have been mourning it long before the departure of Johnathan Hickman. And we will keep mourning until someone else makes an attempt at devising the future of superhero comics.
WOW! Ending the first newsletter of the year on a stone cold bummer huh! Welcome to 2024! We're gonna try being good at this, for a change, and maybe also a bit more regular. Also, I'm reading way more old 2000 AD stuff, and maybe I'll do something with that? The only way you'll find out is to keep reading! In the mean time, subscribe, follow me on the good website, the okay website, and the website with pictures, and until then, happy new year and HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!