Recent Roundup: Heroes, Robots, and Something Screwy

Continuing my look at some comics that have hit the stands lately that I think are worth talking about…

Avengers Academy #1: Marvel relaunched their Avengers franchise with a new first issue… heh, just kidding. That’s FOUR new first issues. Actually, six if you want to include miniseries. But I digress. I decided to sample each of the new ongoings to see which, if any, I would want to continue reading. Not surprisingly, the one I enjoyed the most was the one written by my favorite writer in the group: Avengers Academy by Christos Gage. With the Initiative camp shut down, a group of Avengers is given the job of training superpowered teens that were recruited under Norman Osborne’s regime. In the first issue we’re introduced to our core group of six young would-be heroes and the team of Avengers responsible for their training. There’s a lot to like about this issue — the inclusion of Speedball among the trainers not the least of those things. I absolutely despised it when he became “Penance” after Civil War, and bringing him back into the fold this way is keeping true to who the character really is without just ignoring that part of his continuity. The six new characters are well-shaped, well-developed, and each with their own distinct personality. Gage also finishes off the book with a pretty stunning revelation about our young cast. It’s a nice surprise, one that reminds me of the classic reveal at the end of Thunderbolts #1. (It’s not the same reveal, that wasn’t a spoiler, it just gave me the same sort of jolt.) This title has a wealth of potential, and I can’t wait to see what Gage does with it.

Rating: 4.5/5

Batman Beyond #1: Ever since the Batman Beyond TV show went off the air, fans of the character have been waiting to see him get some love in the DC Universe. A couple of years ago, we did get a glimpse of one of DC’s 52 Earths where he seemed to exist. Finally, after a tease in Superman/Batman Annual #4, Terry McGinnis is back in his own miniseries. If you didn’t watch the show back in the day, the premise is simple. We’re in the Gotham City of the future, a “Neo-Gotham,” where Bruce Wayne has gotten too old to continue the fight as Batman. Terry is the heir to the throne, a young man Bruce is training as he once trained his Robins, only this young man has taken on the mantle of the bat. In this first issue, someone has murdered one of Bruce’s old enemies, and as Terry races to save another, it turns out the perpetrator may be someone no one would ever have suspected. The last-page cliffhanger here is fantastic. Adam Beechen has plucked Batman’s most potentially dangerous adversary (even more than the Joker) and put him front and center here. It’s also nice to see a nod to the TV show, with Micron of the new Justice League again trying to get Terry to join up. I hope to see more of those characters as the series continues. Ryan Benjamin‘s style is interesting. It’s not a dark, gritty sci-fi comic, but it doesn’t have the animated feel that the original series did either. It exists somewhere in an in-between place that helps to ease the story into the DC Universe. Great first issue. I can’t wait for the rest of this arc.

Rating: 4.5/5

Fantastic Four #580: Also part of Marvel’s Heroic Age soft reboot, Jonathan Hickman‘s Fantastic Four has become probably their best ongoing title again (as it should be). Reed Richards has assembled a group of child geniuses to be his new apprentices, a group that includes his daughter Valeria, but doesn’t include his son Franklin. (Frank is potentially the most powerful mutant in existence, but doesn’t share Dad’s genius. Johnny Storm instead takes Franklin and his pal Leech to a toy store, where they encounter a pair of old adversaries — the mischievous Impossible Man and the murderous Arcade. Franklin and Johnny’s story makes up most of this issue, and it’s a good one, but what really knocks this issue out of the park is the conclusion, where Reed’s young geniuses decide on a class project, something they can do to help the world. What they decide on is something totally unexpected, something that can actually have a permanent effect on one of the members on the team. There’s something wonderful and brilliant about it. This has always been the book that housed my favorite Marvel characters. I’m really glad that, with Hickman writing it, it’s also a book that finally lives up to the name “The World’s Greatest Comics Magazine.”

Rating: 5/5

Sea Bear and Grizzly Shark #1: Sometimes it’s worth it to just do something silly. Artists Ryan Ottley and Jason Howard, best known for their collaborations with writer Robert Kirkman on Invincible and The Astounding Wolf-Man (respectively), were at a convention last year, throwing around some crazy ideas. One of those ideas, the idea of a bear and a shark getting “mixed up,” somehow stuck and turned into this one-shot. In Howard’s Sea Bear story, we watch as a young man undergoes terrible personal sacrifice to destroy the ferocious sea beast that killed his family. Grizzly Shark, on the other hand, follow a group of hunters that delve deep into the forest to try to hunt down the ferocious killer. Both stories are bizarre, crazy, and bloody as hell. They’re also a lot of fun. The stories themselves are somewhat ridiculous, and the one-page origin tale written by Kirkman to explain just how “they got mixed up” is even sillier. But it’s an awful lot of fun. The giant-sized book gives you two complete, full-length comic book stories for your money, and you’d be hard-pressed to find two crazier, more enjoyable stories on the shelves of recent comic books.

Rating: 4/5

Wall-E #7: This issue wraps up the “Out There” story arc, in which an astronaut named Andy (a nice little nod to Toy Story, I imagine) has returned to Earth to find it empty of human life, including his wife and children. With Wall-E’s help, Andy has been trying to repair his spacecraft, and he just may be on the verge of doing it. This was kind of a low-key ending to this arc… kind of quiet, even a little anticlimactic, but it actually sort of fits in with Wall-E and the desolate world he inhabited before the events of the movie. It’s a bittersweet story, and a highly appropriate one for this title. Bryce Carlson and Morgan Luthi have done a good job with this arc. Carlson’s story is sad, but hopeful, while Luthi’s artwork is a little grimy and dirty, which is absolutely perfect for a story set on the BNL-ruined world that we met in the motion picture. Whether or not the next arc (or any future arcs) will be set after the movie, I don’t know, but I hope they get to that part of the timeline sooner or later. I think there’s a lot of potential there for different kinds of stories than we’ve gotten in this comic so far.

Rating: 4/5

Wonder Woman #600: The 600th issue of Wonder Woman’s title (if you add up the three volumes) arrives with a bang. Outgoing writer Gail Simone and legendary Wonder Woman artist George Perez start off with a tale about an invasion force that only has the power to control men. Diana’s solution? Round up a team of DC’s greatest female fighters to take them out. This story really does the job of showing the position that Diana holds in the DC Universe — who she is and what she means to the other female heroes. There’s also a much more personal half to the story, where we catch up on a forgotten member of Wonder Woman’s supporting cast, someone who first showed up in George Perez’s legendary run on the title. In the second story, Amanda Conner writes and draws a team-up between Diana and Power Girl (with a little Batgirl thrown in). It’s a nice “girl’s night” story that’s very cute, but actually seems to fit in more as a chapter of the Power Girl title Conner recently left than a Wonder Woman story. Louise Simonson and Eduardo Pansica give us a Wonder Woman/Superman team-up, which isn’t bad, but is fairly generic.

The last two parts of the issue get more into the real meat. Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins (doing some work that’s very different than his usual style, but in a good way) provide a story that delves a bit into who Wonder Woman is and how people don’t realize her importance. This serves as a sort of prologue to the last part of the story, the beginning of writer J. Michael Straczynski and artist Don Kramer‘s Odyssey storyline, in which Wonder Woman finds herself in an alternate reality where Paradise Island is in ruins and she never became the warrior we know her to be. This is also the story that introduces Wonder Woman’s much-publicized new Costume. I actually rather like the new look (although, like many others have said, I don’t care for the leather jacket), but I also recognize that it’s most likely a temporary change. Even if it doesn’t go back when Wonder Woman inevitably succeeds in restoring the original timeline, she’ll go back to the classic costume sooner or later. It’s an interesting starting point for a story, and I sincerely hope it does the job it promises to do — show people why Wonder Woman is so important, not just to the DC Universe, but to the culture of comic books in general. She’s been severely undervalued as a character for years. I don’t know if Straczynski is the man to change that, but I’m willing to give him a chance.

In addition to the stories, the book has an introduction by TV’s Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter, a cover by Perez, and an avalanche of pin-up pages by the likes of Adam Hughes, Nicola Scott, Ivan Reis, Greg Horn, Francis Manpul and many more. Some of these are just okay, but many of them are great. It’s a solid issue, and a fitting anniversary for comics’ first female.

Rating: 4/5

What I’m Reading: Catwoman #83 & Power of Shazam! #48

All this month, DC Comics is bringing back canceled titles “from the dead” for one-issue Blackest Night tie-ins, and we got two more of them this week.

Catwoman #83: Although Selina Kyle still stars in a monthly book, Gotham City Sirens, she’s the co-star of that title along with Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. When I heard that her now-defunct solo series was one of the books that was coming back, I figured we’d get a solo story to go with it. I was surprised, but not unpleasantly.

Writer Tony Bedard brings back the late Black Mask, once the top crime overlord in Gotham City, until he pushed Catwoman one step too far and she put a bullet in his skull. (Catwoman, it should be noted, may be a thief, but she’s no killer. It took an awful lot for her to get to that point.) When he rises from the dead as a Black Lantern, he decides to torture Selina for a while before taking her heart, and how better to do that than make her watch while he tortures her beloved sister? To save Maggie Kyle, Selina, Ivy, and Harley take off to face off against an undead menace.

This was actually a really good issue, although it could have fit in pretty easily as an issue of Gotham City Sirens. The girls are all in character, and Black Mask’s scheme is just sadistic enough to work, if that makes any sense. The book even lays out a plot thread that could easily be picked up by another writer later (or Bedard himself if he does more work with these characters). There are four different artists on this book, and while it is a bit noticeable when the styles shift, it’s not so bad as to ruin the book. And DC gets bonus cool points for getting original series cover artist Adam Hughes back to handle the cover of this one.

Rating: 8/10

The Power of Shazam! #48: I’ve always been a big fan of Captain Marvel and the Marvel family, and when I heard their title was coming back as part of this event, I had two reactions:

1. Woo-hoo!

2. Wait, why isn’t Jerry Ordway doing the book?

Not that I’ve got anything against Eric Wallace and Don Kramer, but Ordway made that book what it was. Not having his involvement in this new issue didn’t feel right, and as it turns out, neither did this issue. It wasn’t a bad story, exactly, but it didn’t really feel like it deserved the title Power of Shazam. Billy and Mary Batson, currently powerless in the DCU, make only a cameo appearance. Instead, the book focuses on Osiris, one of Black Adam’s own “Marvel Family” that was murdered back in 52. Osiris and his murderer, Sobek, have both risen as Black Lanterns, but something about the magic of Shazam seems to maintain the connection between Osiris’s body and his soul. While most of the Black Lanterns are dead bodies being manipulated by rings that have “downloaded” the memories of the host, Osiris seems to be the real thing riding shotgun in his Black Lantern body — and that means he’s going to want to come gunning for Sobek. It’s an interesting conceit, and it helps set this title apart. It’s not just another “heroes face the corpses of their loved ones” story like many of the tie-ins to this series have been. At the same tie, I miss the Marvel Family. I suppose when DC inevitably brings them back, they’re not going to want to do it in a one-shot tie in (that would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it, bringing back Captain Marvel in a one-shot that’s only vaguely related to the event whose title it bears?), but somehow, I just feel this book should have had a different title. I dunno, I’m probably just nit-picking. Never mind me.

Rating: 7/10

Also this week…

Secret Six #17 is part two of the three-part story begun in last week’s Suicide Squad #67. I gave this particular book the full review treatment over at Comixtreme.com, so I won’t duplicate my efforts here. You can click on over there to see my full thoughts about the issue. And while you’re there, hunt around the website. There’s plenty of cool stuff there. Besides my own Everything But Imaginary columns and 2 in 1 Showcase podcasts, CX is the home to some of the best commentary, humor, reviews, and forums on the web. Chat about current comic and pop culture events, argue who would win in a fight between Galactus and Ms. Lion, sign up to join in a Mafia game — there’s a lot of cool stuff over there, and I don’t think I give the site enough props around here.