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'Round the Horn Reviews

X-Men: Xavier's Secret #1 Alex Paknadel, Diogenes Neves, and co.

This one-shot consists of two digital first comics, taking its title from the second one. In the first, Jean Grey and Scott Summers share a night at a hotel in Alaska during the period of time in-between the Krakoan Age and From the Ashes. The interaction between the pair before Grey goes off on her out of space adventure really works for me, a long time fan of both of characters. A ghost seeking the body of his beloved (he believes she died climbing a mountain) interrupts the pair's night together by possessing Summers and other men, compelling them to dig and look for her. Grey eventually gets involved and we all learn a lesson about how men should not be possessive about women (she successfully climbed the mountain and married happily). As much as I enjoy the superhero genre, sometimes the conventions really get in the way of the story. There is enough drama going on here between the lead characters without inserting needless action just because. Still, I liked the story overall. Now the second story stars Sally Floyd. Yes, the Sally Floyd who berated Steve Rogers for not watching NASCAR. Ben Urich hires her to dig into Xavier and the crimes he committed at the end of the Krakoan Age, which I swear are already being downgraded to him killing 12 people on an Orchis shuttle. Twelve murders is a lot in the real world, not so much in the 616. Floyd a drunken disaster in the book, but she eventually gets in touch with Xavier, who reveals the 12 people were Orchis employees he genetically altered and stuck on the shuttle. And she's figured this out multiple times before with Xavier wiping her memory each time, which has made her alcoholism seem even worse to her (now ex-)fiance and Urich. This one is awful.

Falling in Love #137 by Jack Oleck, Win Mortimer, Kurt Schaffenberger, Rick Estrada, and co.

This was published in 1972, more than 18 months after Kirby's New Gods started (where DC directly used his name to advertise), and DC still wasn't putting credits on its romance comics, apparently. Frankly, I cannot blame the writers (comics.org only has one of three writers, Oleck, identified) for not wanting their names on this dreck. Even by 1972 standards, these stories are incredibly retrograde and sexist.

In the first story, “Winner Take All,” a champion tennis player, Holly, meets a young up-and-comer , Lisa, and decides she wants her boyfriend. The asshole dates both of them regularly, but Holly gets it in her head that he will propose soon. She softens herself to get him more into her, but he breaks up with Holly after she annihilates Lisa in a tennis match. Holly decides to train Lisa, and turns her into a better player than ever, which somehow wins the empty stud back. Mortimer's art here is simply gorgeous, but it feels dated for 1972. This could have been pulled out of drawer from a decade earlier.

The second story, “Look Before You Love,” clocks in at only five pages, which might be why it probably offends modern sensibilities the least. Janet is bored of her boyfriend and goes off on a hotgirl summer. When she returns, her beau reveals he cheated. She laughs, says it is fine and they get back together. Thank Kirby for the Schaffenberger art!

Finally, “Too Smart to Love!” pretty much gives away the root problem with it in its title. No guys want Glory in college because she is too smart. After school, she gets a job working at the UN, and upon arriving in New York City, she She's All Thats herself, complete with getting contacts and starts acting dumb around men. She plays the field for awhile, but finally finds a guy she likes... who dumps her because she lacks brains. She decides to stay for their date, but resolves to subtlety reveal her intelligence... by using chopsticks. It totally works! Ric Estrada's work here does not work for me as well as Schaffenberger or Mortimer's; his figures and faces feel a shade too elongated. It is hardly bad penciling, just less appealing to me.

Superman: House of Brainiac by Joshua Williamson, Mark Russell, Rafa Sandoval, and co.

Sigh. Previously, I mentioned how inconsistent Joshua Williamson is as a writer. My favorite comics by him, easily, are his Robin run and the beginning of his Superman run. In that context, House of Brainiac makes for a big let down. And yet, I cannot fully fault him, as once again, DC's collections department screwed up. Six issues by Williamson, three each of Superman and Action Comics, make up the core of crossover, with tie-ins in other books. This volume includes the six main issues and the House of Brainiac special, which includes two ten page stories by Williamson and one 20 page tale by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh. The first explains where the Czarnians in his employ came from and the other stars Amanda Waller is part of the run up to Absolute Power. The Russell tale focuses on Bibbo Bibbowski and the mayoral race in Metropolis. This fits perfectly into Russell's wheelhouse and has clear real world parallels. Anyway, DC's collections department, in their infinite wisdom, decided to stick these three-side stories and between chapters two and three of the main crossover, And then Part three, from Action, has a back story breaking momentum again. The back-up to part five does need to be between five and six, but the special and the back-up from part 3 should have been moved to the back of the book to not break up the narrative flow.

Trying to ignore the poor mapping of the book itself, the main story clearly tries to capture the feel of early 90s Superman crossovers like Panic in the Sky or Day of the Krypton Man. Williamson manages that well enough, but Sandoval's art on the core storyline hews closer to the Image founders than Dan Jurgens or Jon Bogdanove. Which is fine, it just contributes to my muted reaction to the comic.

It's Jeff!: Infinity Paws by Jason Loo, Nao Fuji, and co.

Usually, Kelly Thompson and Gurihiru craft the Jeff the Landshark comics. Loo and Fuji do a fine job of following in their footsteps here, depicting a tale where Jeff and several other marvel pets wind up transported to Knowhere by the Space Gem. Cue adorable hijinks involving the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Grandmaster. While the Jeff comics do usually aim at younger readers, this one feels even simpler than Thompson and Gurihuri's work; I mean that not as a criticism, just an observation. This likely would make a great first comic for young children.

I, Tyrant #1 by ee zann and Godfarr

Yes, zann punctuates his name like ee cummings. The comic, of which zann is the sole listed copyright holder, takes a legendary figure from Persian mythology, Zahhak, which I am unfamiliar with, and places him into a metafictional narrative. Hafez, a creator of Iranian birth living in the United States, has visions of Zahhak urging him to tell his story and change the ending of it. Another man, Reza, had similar visions in 1967 while starring in a play about the same myth. Much of the comic cuts non-linearly between Hafez meeting with his therapist and his home life with his parents, who are disturbed by Hafez's comics work. Zann, for his part, crafts an interesting story that I look forward to seeing more of for the collected edition. Unfortunately, I find Godfarr's artwork less impressive. Most of the artwork seems heavily photo referenced and stiff, with poor panel-to-panel transitions. The first two-thirds or so of the comic reminds me of nothing else, visually, so much as Dave Sim's Glamorpuss, which the Strange Death of Alex Raymond sections aside, consists mostly of, well, photo referenced drawings without a real narrative. One section has a different look though, and not in a good way. Hafez, in his kitchen (which Godfarr does not draw at all) gets an overwhelming feeling where Zahhak enters and manipulates his body (this strongly reminds me of Philip K. Dick and his pink beam of light). Godfarr concentrates on the body horror aspects of the scene, likely using stills from John Carpenters The Thing (1982) for photo reference for one panel. A few panels during this sequence though, they look less photo referenced and have a certain... sheen to them. Godfarr's bio at Simon and Schuster claims, “Godfarr traded the lecture halls of Tehran’s art academies for the storytelling trenches of American comics.” I can find no other credits for them (despite claims of other work in that bio), no Instagram, no Bluesky. So despite wanting to like this comic, I am left with a very uneasy feeling about its artist.

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Apocalypse Now

Memetic: the Apocalyptic Trilogy by James Tynion IV, Eryk Donovan, and co. In a word: prescient. Well, two stories out of the three, anyway.

The collection consists of three thematically linked but separate three-issue mini-series: Memetic, Cognetic, and Eugenic. The titular story essentially functions as a plussed-up zombie story-- an artist creates a visual meme which destroys humanity within 72 hours. Anyone who sees the meme, after 12 hours, becomes a “screamer,” essentially a violent, yelling zombie. He releases it just after 7:00AM Eastern time, and it immediately goes viral. Too many have seen have seen it before the first screamer appears, and most of humanity is doomed.. Over the next day, the screamers start becoming grotesque, still-living, still-screaming flesh towers. The screams eventually turn into an aural meme, infecting even the blind. In the end, the sound from the towers attract gigantic, Lovecraftian beings.

Tynion focuses on two characters. The first is Aaron, a college age, young gay man who is color blind and partially deaf. The other is Colonel Marcus Shaw, a retired former pentagon official familiar with the concept of memetic warfare with macular degeneration. Aaron's path allows Tynion to depict the on-the-ground experience of the disaster. Shaw returns to action at the Pentagon, letting him show the government's response to the disaster, including uncovering what caused it. As with the general narrative, this is solid work that does not break the mold, though Tynion does balance the two haves of the narrative well.

In Cognetic, at the dawn of human civilization, aliens crash on Earth. Several humans eat the brains of the dead aliens and become more than human, capable of spreading their consciousness into the minds of other people, taking them over. Eventually, they turn on one of their number, and attempt to imprison him 2300 years ago. In the present, he returns and quickly falls into conflict with his sister. She lives two lives at a time, taking bodies from people who were dying anyway. Her brother makes his way to the top of the Empire State Building, where he constructs a throne and giant, fleshy tendrils made of people (recalling the towers from Memetic). Eventually, both are controlling thousands, if not millions of people, and even make giant bipedal bodies out of humans. She drops a nuclear bomb on New York City in a attempt to destroy him. A third member, who 2000 years ago moved into sea creatures, approaches the sister to berate her for giving humanity too much of a chance, that no other species is as individualistic as humanity. Meanwhile the brother, at other locations, has his controlled bodies sing and summon... something from beyond to destroy humanity. So again, similar to Memetic. Once again, Tynion uses conformity and sameness as the ultimate form of horror.

Eugenic employs a much more ambitious structure than the other two stories, which some flashbacks aside, mostly tell straightforward tales about the end of days. It opens in 2037, not long after Dr. Cyrus Crane created a vaccine to cure the Mississippi Delta Virus, which killed 700 million people in 15 years (so two years off from predicting the year of a global pandemic). In addition to that, it rendered anyone who caught it unable to have children. Halfway through the first issue, someone who took the vaccine has a child for the first time, and the result looks monstrous. The same happens to more births. At an emergency meeting of the pharmaceutical company where Crane works, he reveals that this was quite intentional. Inspired by his boss yelling at him that he “didn't care if every new baby had four fingers instead of five,” he realized, “I had been looking at the equation all wrong. I was trying to get humanity right back to where it was. With all its ugly blemishes. With all its hate and fear […] I could change all that. I could strip all that out of the species, once and for all.” With that new goal, Crane sought to remove the “imperfections” from humanity like autism, boost intelligence and athleticism, and make us all look identical.

The next issue jumps forward 224 years, to a world where humans live in ghettos under “numanity.” It follows Rebekka Fernandez, who is recruited to reveal the truth about the genetic testing that allegedly pulls the most genetically special out of the ghettos. If you have encountered any 70s sci-fi, you can guess how this goes. The most interesting part of the issue are the little touches, like people people on the subway wearing make up to try and duplicate the askance eyes and mouth of the numen.

The final issue moves forward another 225 years and follows Clayton, the numan curator of the final Human Remembrance Projeckt, a museum dedicated to their predecessors. Humans do still exist, as pets, but only “purebreds.” Humanity clearly is more than just a job for Clayton, as his home is full of human artwork; he listen to Queen's A Day at the Races on vinyl and switches to an iPod for his walk into work. On his trip, he stops to talk to a friend about Harper's Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (which the friend could not understand) despite being an hour late to open the museum. A child, Mary, wanders into the museum, and Clayton explains to her the non-sanitized version of history of how numans wiped out humanity after “Bekk's Rebellion.” The last non-purebred human died 80 years ago. Mary questions, “why would anybody want to know this?” Much of their subsequent exchange is worth quoting at length:

Clayton: To get better, Mary! Hell... do you know when the last novel or film was created by an actual living being and not a machine? The last piece of art that was made because somebody felt something so hard they needed to express it to the world? Mary: What's wrong with what I grew up watching? I don't care if it was a person or a robot or whatever... I'm just looking to feel nice. Clayton: None of us are nice! That's the whole point! We're all complicit! […] Mary: I don't need to listen to anything I don't want to listen to. And I don't want to listen to you anymore. You told me all this junk, but I don't know why I'm supposed to care about it.

This entire discussion neatly encapsulates issues at the time of original publication (2017) regarding critical race theory and how siloed streams of information that led to the initial election of Donald Trump, but it also anticipates the current debate regarding generative AI and the media literacy crisis. In the discussion, Clayton seems to represent the more thoughtful side of humanity while Mary stands in for for the masses. However, Tynion IV complicates the reading in multiple ways. Clayton argues not with a peer or equal, but with a child. More importantly, his reason why Mary should care is that the museum contains live samples of mutated forms of the Mississippi Delta Virus, which when it opened were kept under locked guard, but now anyone could just grab. The comic ends with Clayton releasing them in a crowd, telling his friend from earlier, “I need to do something... something in my power.” He comes off as a mass shooter, lashing out at the world because of his own self-loathing. This undermines Clayton and makes the reader question the depiction of numanity in the work. Clayton undoubtedly is different from the other numans, something that allegedly could not happen with Crane's genetic tampering. The genocide of humanity by the numans also forces a reckoning on the part of the readers with humanity's own history; after all, humanity has a history of doing everything ascribed to numanity in the comic. What, ultimately, is the difference between us?

While Tynion grows as a writer across the three comics, Eryk Donovan feels like he regresses. His art starts off amateurish, but OK, and feels like it loses detail and specificity as the trilogy progresses. The flesh towers of Memetic, while lacking in fine detail, still are more visceral than the tentacles and bipeds of Cognetic, which barely seem like bodies joined together by comparison. Similarly, the horrors Fernandez discovers in the middle chapter of Eugenic look dashed off. This feels like an odd complaint; I am not a gorehound, but these sections seem to best exemplify how Donovan's art seems to degrade.

I apologize for discussing Eugenic so much more than the other two works. They feel like juvenalia while Eugenic sees Tynion truly blossoming as a complex writer. Memetic does make for an interesting genre story but does not amount to much more than that. Cognetic, sadly, is the weak link of the trilogy, the one that feels like it has the least to say about the world. Still, Eugenic is so strong I find myself compelled to recommend the volume as a whole.

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The Old Teen Titans Pt4

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Titans #42-50 by Tom Peyer, Barry Kitson, and co. And this series somehow ends even worse than it began, which really disappoints me, given how much I usually enjoy Peyer's writing. In #47, the Titans headquarters, mostly destroyed by Epsilon beck in #37, keeps falling apart, acting as a metaphor for the state of the team. Titans has a letters page through #44. The following issue runs a page long, but in #46 (cover date December 2002), DC replaces letter columns throughout their line with “DC in Demand,” a page featuring the next issue blurb, a company hotlist, and a company wide editorial by “Your Mole at 1700” pushing certain DC titles. The entry for #48 opens with “Let's clear up all outside rumors regarding The Titans and Young Justice 'cancellations'” and proceeds to detail Judd Winick's Graduation Day mini and the subsequent relaunch of Teen Titans by Geoff Johns. It certainly seems like this caught Peyer by surprise, as he never gets a chance to repair the team and his final trilogy is obviously rushed to conclude in #50.

Peyer begins, however, by picking up Faeber's Donovan/Breegan alternate Earth plot. He has the Titans leave Garth to keep the portal Donovan used to return home open while they putter around for an issue, arguing about whether or not they should actually help Breegan or not. Meanwhile, Breegan in his home dimension discovers time passes more slowly in the main DC universe, and his bosses, including Hallucinatra, essentially kill him for having superheroes agree to help him. They send troops to the portal who arrive essentially at the same time the Titans finally return. They get through the portal just in time, but one of the troops stabs Garth with a needle, injecting something into him. Fortunately, Wally West also shows up, and gets Garth to STAR Labs the next issue for treatment.

The storyline seems loosely inspired by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Donovan used to rule this dimension, feeding the populace drugs that applied a small bit of mind control but boosted their potential (not unlike the supplement he sold on Earth). Hallucinatra and the Pharmocracy (really) overthrew Donovan. They subsequently replaced the relatively benign drug he supplied with something much more addictive and destructive but that also produced a euphoric high. As a result, their world is now a planet full of rich haves and an underclass desperate for drugs. The trooper at the end of #42 injected Garth with the same drug, addicting him to one not available on his Earth. Two outside consults, the Others Brothers cure Garth of the addiction, but Karen Beecher-Duncan (Bumblebee) warns Lilith not to trust them just before they succeed. This plot gets dropped with the cancellation of the series.

As for the Titans on the alternate Earth, most of them fall under the control of Hallucinatra, except for Monetti, who has immunity due to Donovan's supplement. Nightwing, prior to venturing to the dimension, realized the same compound he and Batman use against Johnathan Crane's fear gas would work against Donovan's mind control, and it does the same to Hallucinatra's. They eventually run into Donovan, who has a giant capsule full of a gas that will eventually permeate the atmosphere of the world and render the populace unaffected by the Pharmocracy's drugs, denying them the high but also free. Hallucinatra assassinates Donovan, which kills all the people from the DC Earth under his thrall, and steals the capsule. Harper shoots the capsule, releasing its payload over Grayson's objections. As much as I appreciate the attempt at social commentary by Peyer, this feels quite inept, more like the appearance of trying to offer something to say about rise in prescription drugs to help the neurodivergent than actually doing so. It certainly does not work at all as a commentary on illegal drugs, since both sides in the conflict on Donovan's world supply them.

Peyer follows that up with a two-parter where Grant Emerson requests help with some suspicious ghosts on the Navajo reservation he has been living since Devin Grayson's run concluded. Initially, the Titans only send Chambers to help him. It turns out the ghosts are shape shifters, the Phantasmagoria, who claim to be an immortal, offshoot-branch of humanity more in touch with their spiritual side than humans. One of them has gone mad and they need help dealing with it. After the Titans leave however, this is all revealed to be a ruse, and they have countless ghosts (Joseph Wilson, Hitler, Abe Lincoln, Conan the Barbarian, Hank Hall, and Dawn Granger among them) trapped in tubes. And nothing else ever comes of this.

In the final arc, Peyer brings back Starfire, who seems to engage in a spree of destruction while wearing a literal tinfoil hat. Chambers and Troy eventually catch up to her and learn that she is trying to stop an invasion of Earth by a powerful race of aliens called “The Consensus.” They begin their invasion by taking control of the population via communication satellites and such, hence the destruction and hat. Starfire began too late, however, and other than Troy and Chambers, everyone falls under the thrall of the Consensus. A lead ship arrives on Earth, the other Titans are free, and they break into the ship, only to discover that there is only one alien, working via illusion and telepathic powers. The entire last issue, but especially the last few pages, feels incredibly rushed and choppy. Whatever point Peyer wanted to make gets lost in the mess. Given the time when the story was published and the name of the alien race, it might be aimed at the post-9/11 consensus that the Bush Administration used to launch the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, pass the Patriot Act, and establish ICE, among other things. However, in practice, it feels like Peyer draws more from older, post-Red Scare satires about conformity and demagoguery, such as Richard Brooks's adaptation of Elmer Gantry (1960) or Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957). Needless to say, he fails to approach those works.

In the end, I have no great point to make about this particular series of Titans comics. Nothing here is a lost gem. The Faeber portion makes for the best reading, but 25 years on, has aged poorly. It makes sense why this series was ignored, even at the time. That it ran for so long seems even more amazing after reading it.

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The Old Teen Titans Pt3

Part One. Part Two. Titans Annual #1 by Ben Raab, Geoff Johns, Rick Mays, and co. Titans Secret Files & Origins #2 by Jay Faeber, Ben Raab, Geoff Johns, Paul Pelletier, and co.

The beginning of Geoff Johns's comic career stands as rather unique and odd. He instantly got his own solo series with Stars & STRIPE at DC, and only a couple issues into that wrote one of DC's annual fall crossovers (Day of Judgment). Following that, for some reason he became paired with industry veteran Ben Raab on a Beast Boy mini-series and these two issues. The annual is part of the Planet DC non-event, where DC mandated that new international characters debut in each annual. Johns, Raab and the guy we will not talk about debut Bushido, a Japanese character that sure seems to play into several stereotypes. Johns kills him off five years later during Infinite Crisis. Gar Logan travels to Japan with Bette Kane, who he is (platonically) living with, to Japan for one of her tennis matches. Logan acts incredibly gross towards her before a fight between Bushido and a goblin trashes their hotel. I know Logan has a history of being a sex pest, but the way Raab and Johns write him here seems particularly noxious, never mind that it is not the early 80s any more.

Johns and Raab write the majority of the non-files part of the Secret Files issue, which include a story where the second Terra is confirmed to be genetically identical to the original but her brothers hides this from her, a tale of Vic Stone moving out west to live with Logan, an update on where other Titans are, and most prominently, a a story where Logan and Kane's other roommates hold tryouts for Titans West. The tryouts amount to a party for mostly B-list heroes. It devolves into chaos even before Duela Dent attacks it, mad that she did not receive an invite. Logan is still gross towards Kane, and Terra, for some reason is jealous. Interestingly, early in the story the Brain Trust, original villains from Mark Waid and Alex Ross's Kingdom Come make what appears to be their sole mainline DCU appearance.

The issue opens, however, with something of a palette cleanser between the Grayson and Faeber runs. He and new artist Paul Pelletier have the other veteran Titans (and Jesse Quick) surprise Dick Grayson at home, where they interrupt a night in with his landlord/love interest, Bridget Clancy. They stay and have a good time, despite Jesse Quick fuming and Harper blatantly hitting on both her and Clancy. Sigh. Faeber also continues the plot of Harper's nanny hating Cheshire because of her Quraci heritage, as she begins working with a Quaraci terror cell. This makes for a perfectly fine new beginning, even if Harper still disappoints.

Titans #21-41 by Faeber, Pelletier, Barry Kitson, and co.

While far from perfect, this era greatly improves on Grayson's tenure as writer. The characters actually seem to like and tolerate each other. They have conflicts and disagreements, but they are not constantly at each other's throats. Grayson explained some of that away with her Gargoyle story, but her final four issues really did not see things improve in that regard. He also does a better job balancing the characters, despite a larger cast. If he neglects anyone, it is Donna Troy, who gets a spotlight storyline in #23-25 and then recedes into the background, and Rose Wilson, who becomes Harper's new nanny after the betrayal of the previous one. Faeber's writing here has a Claremontian quality, weaving together multiple long-running plot strains, some of which sadly he does not get to finish before he leaves the book. He can also be a little sloppy at times. His run starts with a two-parter focusing on the lead up to Cheshire's trial, which will occur in the Hague, but when he returns to the plot later, her trial is held in Washington DC. Toni Monetti (Argent) sees a women shove her tongue down Epsilon's throat in #31, but when she kisses him for the first time in the two issues later, she asks him, “you have kissed a girl before, right?” Given where that plot would go, Faeber likely meant it as a clue to the situation with Epsilon, but it seems poorly written in context. A few other examples like this pop up during the run, though none as prominent.

Other than Cheshire, Faeber's major ongoing plots are: a group of five super-powered kids who escape from a Department of Extranormal Operations orphanage and decide to live with the Titans; Epsilon, a man who planned to destroy the Titans but undergoes a major personality shift before he can pull that off; and finally, a man named Garret Donovan creates a supplement which can generate superpowers in some users. Donovan assembles such users into his own private metahuman team. Monetti also takes the supplements, which seem to amp up her powers a bit, but also cause her to talk like an infomercial for the supplement from time to time.

The kids were not happy with how they were treated at the DEO facility, hence them escaping to live with the Titans. Eventually, the Titans begrudgingly accept this, seeing them as possibly being a new generation of heroes. During a visit from the West Coast, Logan even takes them out on a mission and gives them costumes. Eventually, however, the kids return to DEO custody (they swear to do better) after Epsilon destroys the Titans' headquarters, leaving the team without room to house them. Additionally, the truth about Epsilon does not go over well with the team, especially Monetti. There was a sixth member of the orphans, a thirteen-year old boy named Kevin using a wheelchair but with the ability to posses other people's bodies. Epsilon was also a resident of the DEO orphanage, but had left some time previously. Since then he had become a criminal, partnering with Theta (the woman who kissed him in #31). Monetti's father hired them to destroy the Titans; the plan was for Epsilon to pose as a hero in New York, gain their trust, and destroy them from within. After his colleagues left the facility, Kevin took possession of Epsilon's body for months, associating with the team and dating Monetti, until his own body began to fail from the strain of doing so for so long. When Kevin loses control, Epsilon is inside the Titans' HQ, and he attacks them. Not long after, Epsilon and Theta both attack the DEO orphanage to get revenge on Kevin. During the attack, Kevin possess Monetti and kills Epsilon. Theta flies off with his body into comic book limbo. The strain of all this kills Kevin, which Monetti (understandably, without even taking into account the supplement she is taking) reacts quite coldly to.

Faeber clearly gets across how violated Monetti feels by dating someone who lied about his very identity to her. She also abrades Kevin with words that good be seen as directed an audience prone to idealizing women and not treating them as people, calling him, “A little kid must've thought he was real smart, acting out every geek's fantasy with me as just another prop” and when Kevin defends himself, saying how into him she was, “I asked for it? I can't believe I'm hearing this.” Unfortunately, this plot line does have some flaws, first among them being Monetti's shallowness. Faeber never writes any deep connection between her and Kevin/Epsilon, she is just immediately struck by his handsomeness and that he is close in age to her (I believe Grayson established that she turned 18 prior to the beginning of this volume of Titans). Much of the relationship occurs off-panel (Kevin alludes to intimate talks about her past), so we do not actually see anything develop between the two of them. She does have Lilith read his mind after the accusation that her father hired him to destroy the Titans, but Lilith only detects that he is altruistic in nature and Monetti believes him just calling Theta “crazy” to explain the kiss and her killing him “lover.” Monetti bears no responsibility for the violation that occurred, but the comic would be stronger seeing more of a genuine connection develop between the two characters.

Faeber's final issue reveals the overlap between the orphan plot and Donovan. One of the orphans, Nikki, is portrayed as a person with non-verbal autism. In the final issue, it is revealed that this is not the case at all, rather she has a man named Breegan from another dimension stuck inside her head after he tried to read her mind (comics!). According to Breegan, Donovan is a rebellious criminal who ventured to the DCU via an illegal dimensional portal. He followed through to bring Donovan back, tried to read Nikki's mind (the first person he saw) and became stuck. Faeber ends his run with the Titans promising to return with Breegan to fight against Donovan and save the army of metahumans he cultivated on Earth. To call this resolution uncomfortable would be an understatement. Nikki's powers did a lot to protect her, but turning them into an outside entity, which also caused her autism is just an odd choice. Faeber launched Noble Causes well before exiting Titans, and he did not stop working for DC after this, so the sudden exit coupled with the beginning of a major new arc adds to the disquiet.

One last plot line I would like to look at is Jesse Quick's main one. Devin Grayson, back at the beginning of her run, portrayed Chambers as consciously single. She clearly built up a romance between Chambers and Nightwing despite not having full control over the latter. Faeber's first solo story, as noted above, features Chambers fuming over Nightwing's relationship with his landlord. In the main title, Faeber has Libby Lawrence reconnect with her daughter to introduce her to her new fiance, Philp. In #35, police find Philip's nude body with a broken neck in Lawrence's bed. Both mother and daughter become suspects, as at some point, Chambers started an affair with Philip. A friend of Lawrence's, Lance Gallant, killed Philip after discovering the affair. Well, apparently his dead brother did, because comics. I wanted to discuss this arc as a way to highlight how more sexually charged themes worked their way into mainstream superhero comics during this era. Obviously, that is also at play with the Monetti/Kevin/Epsilon plot, but Faeber leaves unsaid exactly what transpired (possibly due to the ages of those involved). By contrast, he shows Philip on the phone bragging to friends about sleeping with two super heroines. This story appeared around the same time Wildstorm launched its late, lamented adult Eye of the Storm line and a year after Marvel's MAX line debuted. On the more negative side, I have to raised an eyebrow that Faeber's two most sexual plots involve female members of the team. Grayson's run is a bit more egalitarian in this regard given the relationship between Troy and Harper.

In terms of Art, Pelletier provides his usual DC-house style workman-like art on most of #21-31 with a variety of inkers (though I swear his female figures are a tad more narrow-waisted than usual here). The twenty-fifth issue features pages by a variety of artists from throughout the Titans' history such as George Perez, Nick Cardy, Terry Dodson, and more. The issue looks great, albeit in service of a story that makes Donna Troy even more confusing. Peter Grau and Mike Collins split time as guest pencillers on #30 and #32-36, filling the gap between Pelletier and Kitson in solid if unspectacular fashion. As for Kitson, well, he mostly delivers his usual excellent artwork, although his attempts to depict the orphans makes clear that he cannot draw children. He also gives Monetti a different, frizzier hairstyle I do not care for, but eh.

Normally, I do not talk lettering, but I very specifically need to talk about the it in #24 by Bob Lappan. The most important thing for lettering is that it be legible. Something amazing that integrates lettering into the art like Dave Sim or ambitious like Todd Klein's work is nice, but first and foremost, the reader needs to be able to make out the text. One of the bigger lettering failures in recent memory happens during Dark Nights: Metal, where Steve Wands establishes the Batman Who Laughs as speaking with a red font against a black background. Lappan, a 16 year veteran at this point in time whose career lasted until at least 2005, letters this book like his hand was shaking the whole time. It is legible, but only just. I can only conclude that the book was running incredibly late, otherwise I cannot imagine why DC shipped the book out looking like this.

[joegualtieri-blog]

The Old Teen Titans Pt2

Part one here. Titans #1-12 by Devin Grayson, Mark Buckingham, and co.

The part of my brain that often chooses to read lesser comics instead of the unread works by Moore, Morrison, or King has a lot to answer for with this particular decision. These first twelve issues, written by Grayson alone, while better than the Technis Imperative, are still a mess. Her ability to pace a story a story and weave plots across multiple issues makes Dan Slott look skilled at it. She really cannot balance the 10 person team. Argent and Damage might as well not even be on the team, outside of #5. The first issue, after opening with the Titans fighting HIVE, flashes back to the before the Secret Files story, to the original five deciding to restart the team. Nightwing explains, “it's time to give back-- by setting an example for the next generation of young heroes, and even by picking up some of the slack on the training.” When the original five each picked a member for the new team, Nightwing picked Starfire. Wally West put forth Jesse Quick. Those are not characters in need of training. Only two characters, Argent and Damage directly fit into the mission statement of the team. Grayson also contradicts this scene later when Nightwing reveals that Cyborg cannot quit the Titans, as the team reformed to keep him from being imprisoned by the JLA. So why was Nightwing arguing against reforming the team in #1? Continuity often makes for a contentious topic when discussing superhero comics, but I firmly believe that writers need to keep their own continuity straight.

Grayson attempts to weave two different ongoing plots through these first 12 issues. In one thread, Damien Darhk and “Mother” (Adeline Kane, Slade Wilson's ex-wife) reform HIVE with a plan to destroy metahumans. In the other, Vandal Savage forms a team called Tartarus consisting of Titans villains. Savage's plan involves getting the blood of Kane, and use it to create an immortality serum (he can use hers but not Wilson's because she has type-O blood). Issues 10-12 bring both arcs together, as Wilson teams up with the Titans, fight HIVE, and then team up with HIVE against Tartarus for awhile until Starfire kills a brain-dead Kane. The fight scenes in these issues, especially the over-sized finale, again show Grayson's inability to juggle large fight scenes. Wilson just... does not do anything in the comic after Starfire kills Kane on page 18. Unless I missed him in the background, he does not even appear or speak again until page 38 (holding her ashes and crying). Savage stabs Cheshire (his own teammate) to throw off Harper, she bleeds out for pages and pages, Harper eventually decides to leave to take her to a hospital, then turns around to stop Savage from shooting Troy on the next page. A lot #12 basically consists of of everyone standing around and talking, someone getting stabbed or shot, a brief flurry of activity, then more of the same. Then there is also an all-time too-much-happens-in-too-short-a-time sequence where HIVE drops an nuclear bomb from their floating island base, but Nightwing has enough time to talk to Starfire, have her race him to the edge of the island, have a conversation with her there, and then leap off the floating island towards the bomb while it has barely fallen from the base. Yes, this is a comic where all sorts of fantastic science fiction and magical things occur, but gravity does still exist.

These first dozen issues do possess some virtues. While Grayson's casual tone works as a detriment in fight scenes, it does provide an air of mannered rhythm to a lot of the interpersonal scenes between characters not unlike you would find in 90s indie films. In the first issue, she introduces a gang of nihilists (Joel and Ethan Coen's The Big Lebowski released the year prior) robbing a bank including Justin and Tonya. Damien Dahrk (as best as I can tell, he only appears in the Secret Files and #1-12 of this run before the Arrowverse rescued him from obscurity) recruits them into HIVE, where they function as a sort of Greek Chorus until #12. There Darhk kills Red Panzer III and Savage sticks the Panzer helmet into Justin's hands and proclaims him the new Red Panzer (to his credit Justin does question wearing a Nazi uniform). She also does a decent job mixing in continuity bits from other books, such as the Dark Flash from late in Waid's Flash run or Donna Troy's... Donna Troy-ness causing her to resent Wally West's idealized image of her and start up a relationship with Harper as a sort of self-destructive acting out. On the other hand, her conception of Harper and his relationships with Troy and Cheshire comes as juvenile and gross at this point in the series. Her version of Harper is pretty awful in general, actually; cast in the role of the gruff bad boy on the team, he acts antagonistically towards everyone except Troy (and even her, he seems ready to leave at a moment's notice for Cheshire, a genocidal supervillain) and is a negligent parent to Lian.

Buckingham (mostly with Wade von Grawbadger on inks) pencils nine out of the 12 issues covered in this section. The comic looks like fine, like a standard late 90s DC superhero comic, but is not anything special, visually. Buckingham did better work in the past (Miracleman, Death) and future (Fables, Spider-Man, Miracleman again). The lack of anything like the dizzying layouts of the Technis Imperative during this run kind of implies that Jimenez did those on his own, rather than at Grayson's urging. Ale Garza draws the ninth issue, and it seems like early work from him. We do not need to discuss the other fill-in artist.

Titans #13-20 by Grayson, Jay Faeber, Brian K Vaughan, Buckingham, Adam DeKraker, Patrick Zircher, and Cully Hamner

After the season finale feel to #12, the book gets a bit unstable. Faeber, who contributed to the Secret Files issue, co-writes #13 and then #17-20. Grayson exits at that point and he takes over full-time. Vaughan, still quite in early in his illustrious career, co-writes #14. Buckingham, clearly exhausted by the the over-sized #12, takes a break for #13-14, draws #15-16, and then leaves the book for his classic Spider-Man run with Paul Jenkins. DeKraker, an unfamiliar name to me, seems to have spent a decade as a pinch hitter for DC. His work here is competent but unremarkable.

The team falls apart in #13-14, with the fallout of #12 exacerbaring wedges between members to an extreme degree. With #15-16, Grayson reveals that an old foe of the team from the 60s, the Gargoyle, has been physically manipulating the team for some indeterminate period of time. So it was not poor writing!

Grayson laid the groundwork for another longer story in the background of these issues, and it unfolds over three of her final four issues. Starfire leads a smaller team of Titans (no Nightwing, Speedy, or Damage) to help her brother and other Tamaraneans fight against the Gordanians, one of the species that enslaved her people. However, she lied to her teammates, and the Tamaraneans are actually in the process of conquering the Gordanian homeworld. Eventually the truth comes out, the two species decide to live together with Starfire staying behind to lead her people. This three-parter works much better than the overstuffed trilogy in #10-12. Whether that is due to the smaller cast leaving less for Grayson to juggle or Faeber's input, I could not say.

In the background of that trilogy, Grayson and Faeber play around with a budding romance/friendship between Nightwing and Jesse Quick while Harper and Lian take Grant Emerson (Damage) camping, where he reveals that his foster father abused him. Leaving him with the Navajo tribe that raised him instead of having him around the “family” that the Titans supposedly are to sort through things definitely seems like a good idea! Sigh. Cyborg gets another new body #20. And that ends this tumultuous period. Hopefully the Faeber era will be better.

[joegualtieri-blog]

The Old Teen Titans Pt1

Welcome to a new series looking at the ignored even at the time Titans run largely written by Devin Grayson, Jay Faeber, and Tom Peyer. To my recollection, the Jurgens Teen Titans reboot at least received a big push from DC. This version, which restored something resembling the New Titans by Wolfman and Perez did not. Yet it somehow lasted more than four years, until the 2003 mini-series Graduation Day by Judd Winick and Ale Garza ended it and launched the Young-Justice infused version of the Teen Titans by Geoff Johns became a huge hit.

Upfront-- I do not like most of the the comics I have read written by Grayson (which includes the most infamous one) the exception being the Black Widow mini-series with JG Jones. By contrast, I consider Faeber and Peyer to be quite underrated. Faeber not long after this period created Noble Causes, an incredibly fun soap opera superhero comic. Peyer wrote the Legion of Super-heroes for about 50 issues plus all sorts of other things across Marvel, DC, and indie publishers.

JLA/Titans: the Technis Imperative TPB by Devin Grayson, Phil Jimenez, and co. This series came eight years into Jimenez's career. He had mostly worked at DC to this point, on books like Team Titans and Guy Gardner, but then found himself on the Invisibles with Grant Morrison for four issues. The series relaunched with a new #1 and a more action orientated slant. The pair clashed on some issues, however, and Jimenez left after #13. Aside from putting King Mob in bowling shirts, Jimenez's artwork on that series is impeccable. JLA/Titans looks like an assignment given to him by DC to break him into more of the mainstream. It certainly succeeded commercially, as comichron has the series debuting at 16 on the sales charts with over 80,000 copies sold. JLA, at the time, was red hot and the DC One Million event had just happened (and is referenced in the opening pages of the Technis Imperative). Creatively? This series is an awful mess.

Jimenez and Grayson each receive co-plotter credit, while she provides the dialogue. As such, the blame for the incredibly poor layouts seems to belong to Jimenez. He constantly draws pages where the eye cannot coherently flow. During the being fight between the JLA and Titans (because we must have that, of course) two pages with Batman and Nightwing mirroring and talking to each other with the action happening in-between them.. and below that Cyborg recruits more Titans. Worse, despite the mirroring Batman and Nightwing panels bordering each page, the panels with that do not mirror each other. The worse pages by far fall on 98-99 of the trade; this two page spread consists of eight two-panel scenes, each paired with a caption spoken by Oracle stating the location. At the center of each page is an Oracle logo face. In between the top and bottom set on each page is Beast Boy talking the Cyborg. The center of the spread are three images of Cyborg, two as human paralleling the Beast Boys, and in the dead center, one of him in his current Technis form. This spread defies easy reading; it is only towards the end that the reader can see that Grayson and Jimenez meant for it to be read all across the top row and then the bottom panels.. or maybe if Grayson's dialogue was arranged differently it could have worked as reading one page and then the other. Either way, it is just a shocking low for Jimenez.

Grayson and (Jimenez) clearly struggle with making it worthwhile to have so many characters in the comic. Every Titan ever to this point appears, even if just via Cyborg's file systems for the then dead ones. For good measures, some allies like Magneta and Deathstroke (reformed at the time) appear to pad out the character count. Nothing else is as egregious as the cameo the Mike Baron version of Hawk and Dove (who have no connection to the Titans except for using the names of former Titans members) save for Catwoman. Grayson was the current writer on her book at the time, but seems to be here just to get a literal catfight between her and Titan Pantha. The endings for many of the characters )specifically Prysm and Fringe) at the conclusion of Jurgens are undone, for little reason other than to cram the characters into the story. Even what characterization makes into the comic does not necessarily work. Grayson writes Kyle Rayner and Wally West as not getting along, as opposed to the friendship they developed in Morrison's JLA.

The basic plot of the event is Cyborg returning to Earth in his new, giant, living-planet like state. He takes over the Moon (including the JLA Watchtower), establishes a beachhead on Earth, and all this causes major disasters all over the planet. The JLA and Titans pretend to argue over how what to do about Cyborg to distract his systems to get a core group inside of him to persuade him to reclaim his humanity. Truly, a groundbreaking plot. I appreciate the attempted subversion of having the heroes fight trope, but the fight still occurs regardless of the reason. The mini-series close out with an epilogue drawn by the initial regular series artist, Muck Barkingham. Notably, Young Justice appears during this sequence and whine about “if JLA's the ultimate team, and the Titans are family, what are we?” Superman replies, “Your time will come.” Apparently that time would be in just over four years.

The collected edition closes out with the lead story from Titans Secret Files & Origins #1, but in keeping with too-common practice for DC at the time, it omits other strips, to say nothing of the “files” part. Illustrated by Pelletier and written by Grayson, this has the original Titans Roy Harper, Wally West, Dick Grayson, Garth and Donna Troy each pick a recruit. None of the characters actually approach their own recruit. Grayson feels uneasy talking to his ex-Starfire, which leads to the others switching off too, and them refusing to let Harper be the one to approach Argent due to her age, which is really creepy. That aside, this level of personal interactivity works far better for Grayson than the big action of the Technis Imperative. I feel really bad for poor Bette Kane sitting by the phone waiting for the Titans to call.

Titans Secret Files & Origins #1 (remainder of issue)

Grayson writes a text interview with Wally West. Her voice for West here feels too formal and stilted compared to Mark Waid's contemporary classic run, or even how she writes him in actual comics. She also provides captions for “Repose: A look at Donna Troy's Photo Album.” Someone, likely Marv Wolfman, long ago established Troy's career as a photographer. This brief section consists of hyper-detailed drawings of the original five Titans (plus) Lian. As much as I normally love Guice's work, I do not care for most of these images, especially the one of Garth where he looks like Michael Madsen (42 in 1999). Wolfman and Mike McKone have Donna Troy recount the origin of the Titans team to Lian Harper in a two-page story that fulfills the “origins” part of the title. Dan Jurgens writes and draws a strip where a young Toni Monetti (Argent) encounters the New Titans and is particularly taken with Starfire's costume. It is fun and a bit silly. One of the staples of the Secret Files & Origins issues is a “Lost Pages” section. In the case of this one, it clearly does not seem to be that, instead it is an original strip by Jay Faeber and Rick Mays (a fun artist who never seemed to catch on) that seems to retcon the ending of the Wolfman-era Titans, suggesting Roy Harper intentionally broke the team up.

[joegualtieri-blog]

Strange Fruit

Fruitvale Station by Ryan Coogler and co.

A masterpiece from its first frame, Coogler's debut film never makes a misstep. It opens with real cellphone footage of the death of Oscar Grant on New Year's Day 2009, 11 years before the murder of George Floyd, with countless deaths in between, before, and after. The films dramatizes the final day of Grant's life, played by Michael B. Jordan. He fights with he girlfriend (Melonie Diaz), takes his daughter (Ariana Neal) to school, tries to get his job back at a grocery store but fails. While there, he helps a woman find out how to do a fish fry just because. He considering selling drugs, but decides not to do so. He witnesses a dog being killed by an indifferent driver (off camera, thank goodness), and comforts it in its final moments (Yes, that is clearly A Metaphor). He attends a New Year's Eve party with his family. Finally, he and his girlfriend meet up with friends and go into San Francisco to try and see fireworks. Aside from the bit with the dog (which works quite well), these are all mundane events,and that is the point.

While Oscar and friends make their way home on the subway, the woman from the grocery calls out to him, which causes someone Oscar was in prison with to attack him. Authorities are called, and meet the train at Fruitvale Station. The first two officers are belligerent and awful, manhandling Grant and his friends. They call for back-up, and things escalate. Officer Caruso (Tony Durand), places his knee on Grant, choking him. For anyone watching this now, the parallels to Floyd's death in 2020 seem unmistakable, but that is not how Grant dies. Instead, another officer on the scene (Chad Michael Murray) shoots Grant while he is in this position. To Coogler's credit, he keeps the film going, showing the attempts to save Grant's life at the hospital, how his mother (Octavia Spencer) blames herself because she told him to take the subway to stay safe, and how his girlfriend struggles to tell their daughter. The film cuts to footage of the Grant's real daughter at a 2013 memorial, and then a title card informing us that's Grant's killer served 11 months for manslaughter after claiming he mistook his gun for his taser. No mention is made of Caruso facing any consequences.

Every choice by Coogler and his crew, including the mostly handheld cameras, humanizes Grant. They make him a real person for an audience likely consisting of mostly white people like me who constantly dehumanize African Americans and side with the police over those they harm. Further, he does not try to smooth over Grant's flaws, he paints him as a complicated individual, not a perfect victim. That makes him no less deserving of humane treatment, something this country has not learned in 16 years since Grant's death and 12 years since this film was released.

[joegualtieri-blog]

Some 2025 Eisner Nominees Pt6

Welcome to what should be the final installment of a look at the 2025 Eisner Award nominees. I do have a few more in the Great Unread Pile(s), but I am unlikely to read the entirety of Ram V's Detective Comics run or Tom King's Wonder Woman before Friday. As it is, I have repurposed a Facebook post about Charles Burns to round out this entry. I write here for myself, but it is nice to receive likes and reblogs, and I find it slightly disappointing that none of the Eisner posts have received such things. Ah well.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. “Spaces” by Phil Jimenez, Giulio Macaione, and co. from DC Pride 2024

In the mold of Kevin Conroy and J. Bone's “Finding Batman” from DC Pride 2022, this Eisner nominated short story sees Jimenez exploring how his queerness intertwined with his love of superheroes and drove him to become a comics professional. While the actual experience of creating comics for Marvel and DC might sometimes compromise what he wants to do, he still sees it as a way to inspire others like him to create a better future. It's a lovely story, well illustrated, but I do wish Jimenez had penciled it himself. The rest of this particular DC Pride, feels lacking compared to past installments. They come off as light stories in the vein of DC”s all ages GN line, which might be just as well. The only exception, other than “Spaces,” is a story by Calvin Kasulke and Len Gogou starring Circuit Breaker that ties into Simon Spurrier's Flash run.

Sunflowers by Keezy Young

Beautifully illustrated, Young uses the comics medium to try and explain their bipolar disorder for a general audience. They write, “Bipolar isn't a relatable illness for most people. And even when it is funny, it's either somebody laughing at me, or somebody laughing uncomfortably [their emphasis].” Most of the brief comic is less relating anecdotes (though they work in a few), rather Young tries to convey their experience of Bipolar visually alongside their description. Most dramatically, Young depicts the comedown after a manic episode as just five black pages.

The comic is lovely overall and I plan to seek out more of their work. They have a few comics available digitally. Their first GN, Taproot, does not seem like something I would enjoy, but they have a horror GN, Hello Sunshine due out later this year.

Kommix by Charles Burns The Final Cut by Charles Burns

The collected version of Charles Burns's Black Hole came out back when I was in grad school, and it really did not impress me as a story or as "comics' David Lynch." I was probably too harsh on it at the time.

Burns's figure work though has intrigued me since first seeing it on cans of OK Soda back in 1993. Actual artists would probably tell me I'm insane, but he and Dan Clowes feel really similar in terms of everything except how they finish their drawings.-- one trending towards mundane and ugly, and the other slick and gorgeous, albeit with a penchant for wriggling horror.

Burns has two new books out this year in the US-- Kommix and Final Cut.

Kommix is not (mostly) sequential art; rather it is a collection of covers to non-existent comics. There are a few recurring characters and slimy creatures, but there's no story. It is gorgeous work though, and enjoyable in the same way as an Adam Hughes sketchbook.

The Final Cut first saw publication in France as Dedalus. I like the English title better, it feels like a better thematic fit, as the French one really prioritizes one of the two lead characters over the other. They are Brian, an artist who works with his friend Jimmy on making amateur short films, and Laurie. We never find out how Jimmy met Laurie, but she's the lead in their next film. The book probably does spend more time with Brian, who is more your typical alt comics protagonist, but it spends a fair amount of time giving you Laurie's perspective, and to emphasize the tentative connection between these two, the inner caption boxes switch between them with no indication. At first, I didn't care for this and it tripped me up, but as you get used to it, it works fairly well.

The book is set in the 70s or 80s, sometime after Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show released (Brian goes to see it at a run down revival house theater). Biran and Jimmy's movies are made on actual film, with what looks to me like a Super 8 camera. The comic contrasts Brian's imagination, which draws from sci-fi films like Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but looks more like, well, Lynch's Eraserhead, with what they're capable of doing. Really, what makes the book work aside from Burns's gorgeous artwork is how it explores Brian and Laurie without going into the cliches of the genre. Reading it in 2024, there's a lot of imagery in here very familiar from Kommix. It's hard not to think a lot of the covers in that book was in fact rough work for Final Cut/Dedalus.

Going back to the two titles, Dedalus makes the book sound like a Bildungsroman and/or a tragedy in a particular way. There are tragic aspects to the story, but not of the sort the title implies. If the book has a flaw, it's that Laurie maybe could have used a little more fleshing out. She appears in Brian's life and we never really find out anything about her past before that moment, as much time as Burns spends in her head. We don't necessarily need it it, but it's the one shortcoming it what otherwise feels like the masterpiece Black Hole was praised as.

[joegualtieri-blog]

Yet More Short Reviews

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton Despite the multi-part series here looking at the 2025 Eisner Awards, I do not usually go gaga over them. I save that for the Oscars. Sure, I pay attention but until this year, I have never sought them out the way I do Oscar nominees. That being said, there are two occasions where I read a comic and concluded it was going to win an Eisner award. The first time happened with Hawkeye #11, “Pizza is My Business” by Matt Fraction, David Aja, Matt Hollingsworth, and Chris Eiopoulus. It took home Best Single Issue, Best Cover Artist, and Best Penciller/Inker. The other time I felt that way was Zoe Thorogood's It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth. While Thorogood took home Best Newcomer, she lost both Writer/Artist and Graphic Memoir to Beaton's Ducks. Frankly, I do not think an awards show decision hurt that much since finding out Annie Hall beat Star Wars for Best Picture, and that happened years before I was born. Fortunately, Ducks is much better than Annie Hall (or at least high school age Joe's conception of Annie Hall).

Fresh out of art school, Beaton leaves Nova Scotia to join in on the Albertan fracking oil rush, hoping to quickly earn money to pay off her student loans. Spoiler: the plan works, but at a high price. The comic touches on the cost to the environment, to indigenous, people, and to the men doing the bulk of the work. Primarily, however, the comic deals with the relentless harassment Beaton and other women working at the oil sites face, which escalates into a pair of sexual assaults. Ducks could be shelved “horror” as easily as “memoir” due to how constant the awful behavior is. While Beaton and her friends discuss many times if oil camps somehow make the men like this, the comic makes clear that it exacerbates issues already there, as other women, including Beaton's sister, shares tales of sexual assault at college, and harassment occurs even outside of the the camps. The book derives its title from an incident that made the front page of the New York Times: a flock of migrating ducks landed in the wastewater produced by fracking and died. The women and men working the oil fields are the ducks, and hope to get out before they drown.

One bit in the comic does not work in 2025 (and probably would not have in 2023 either). Beaton, for over two pages, draws and transcribes a 2008 Youtube video of Celina Harpe that “cut through my ignorance and my coddled perception of myself and my participation in an industry the towered over her existence” (afterword np). Post-Pandemic, getting information like this from Youtube, well, I think we all know that it's “I do my own research instead of listening to scientists” coded. Based on this afterword, Beaton relates what truly happened in the scene here, but it just does not work.

As I said back in part in part one of the 2025 Eisner nomination series, awards for art are bullshit, but they have value as marketing. Pitting Ducks and It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth against each other serves no purpose, but highlighting works people not otherwise pay attention to is always worthwhile. Despite knowing Beaton's earlier work, I likely never would have picked this up without that Eisner win, and that would have been a shame.

Superman: Action Comics Superstars vol 1 by Jason Aaron & Josh Timms; Gail Simone, Eddy Barrows, Danny Mick, & Jonas Trindade; Rainbow Rowell and Cian Tormey

Sigh. Once again we need to discuss poor decisions made by DC's collections department. This collection includes three stories originally published over six issues. The Aaron/Timms story has no problems. For some reason, DC reprinted the other stories as they appeared in single issues, with part of Simone and co's story followed by part of Rowell's. This makes no sense other than laziness. Free of the constraints of single issues, each story should have presented in unbroken order. The two stories have nothing to do with each other, save for cast of characters.

As for the comics themselves, well, I rarely care for Aaron's work, and that applies here. It's a Bizarro story where Bizarro uses magic to try and turn Earth into a new version of Htrae and possess Superman. Simone's story pays homage to the work of Denny O'Neil and Neil Adams, specifically Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. Unfortunately, it hews too closely to the source material and reads poorly as a result. Barrows's work is inked to evoke Adams, and it just looks bad and muddy compared to his usual style. Rowell and Tormey's tale, set in the contemporary continuity, centers on Lois Lane, currently editor and chief of the Daily Planet, removing Clark Kent from his beat, where he often covers Superman stories due to the conflict of interest. It breaks no new ground, but it is a solid take on a fundamental issue with the general Superman set up.

Psylocke vol 1: Guardian by Alyssa Wong, Vincenzo Carratu, Moises Hidalgo, and Fer Sifuentes-Sujo

I am loathe to try and explain the whole Psylocke/Betsy Braddock/Kwannon mess, which ran in comics from 1989 until (somehow!) 2018. Started by Chris Claremont an Jim Lee, it actually helped a mid-tier X-Men character become one of the most popular team members despite not having a prominent role in TV or film until 2016. Suffice it to say, it left the character and code name tainted, and resulted in a bizarre situation where the name and look are attached to character different than the one who made them famous. They have belonged (extra-diegetically) to Kwannon since the early days of the Krakoan Age, and this ongoing series by Wong and their artistic compatriots represents her first solo series with the name.

During the Krakoan Age, Kwannon regularly appeared in Fallen Angels by Byran Edward Hill and Hellions by Zeb Wells, both series focusing on characters searching for a sort of redemption. She also had a reconciliation with Betsy Braddock in Tini Howard's Excalibur. After the Hellions series, she becomes one of the Great Captains of Krakoan (essentially a field general) and she started a romance with John Greycrow during the Hellions series.

Despite this growth, I thought the character still felt a bit like a cipher, so the idea of giving her an ongoing series during the From the Ashes era seemed like a decent enough idea. Wong does a decent idea of driving home how Kwannon has changed since her introduction by Fabian Nicieza and Andy Kubert more than 30 years ago. She genuinely wants to help people, young mutants especially, and is committed to not killing people (great use of the psychic knife throughout the series), but still feels somewhat alienated from her fellow X-Men. Wong makes one choice in the series that really takes away from the focus on Kwannon though, and that is the decision to give her an Oracle-type character for her the non-X-Men missions she undertakes. Devon Di Angelo, a college student, could scarcely be more a stereotype of the “guy in a chair” trope and their verbosity takes over the book at times. The artwork, most by Carratu with Hidaglo filling in for one issue and part of another, works well for the book and (mostly) avoids the gratuitous fan service typically associated with Psylocke. The coloring by Sifuentes-Sujo deserves special mention for generally working with a purple/violet tinted color pallet throughout the comic without making it overwhelming or obvious. It makes for a nice touch.

Green Lantern (2023) vol 3: Power of Will by various You cannot see me right now, but I assure you I am pushing my glasses up my my hand and rubbing the bridge of my nose. I was dreading the Absolute Power crossover hitting this title, and I was right to do so. This book is essentially three stories in one. The first section consists of advancing Jeremy Adams's Green Lantern run while tying in Absolute Power. The second reprints the back-ups stories of #4-7 of said run, introducing Sinson, allegedly the son of Sinestro, by Peter J. Tomasi and David Lafuente. It really does not seem to have anything to do with the main title and I do not feel like reviewing it. I am aware that Tomasi's Supersons book was very popular, but I never read it, as it spun out of his Rebirth Superman run which I loathed.

Finally, the volume ends by reprinting the Zero Hour 30th Anniversary Special by Dan Jurgens, Ron Marz, and a host of artists associated by 90s DC. DC likely included this here because it ends with the Parallax entity freed, somehow. The block of the story works quite well as a tribute to the original Zero Hour. Jurgens and Marz kind of elide the set-up going on in Adams's GL title, with Rayner in narration saying he was sent to a planet and just somehow wound up “here.” “Here” in this case is a pocket dimension largely reflecting the DC Universe in the early 90s created by a splinter of Hal Jordan as Parallax from the climax of Zero Hour. It is interesting but largely unremarked upon that this is hardly the personal heavens Jordan tempted characters with during Zero Hour. Barbara Gordon Batgirl is not injured here, but Bruce Wayne never recovered from Bane breaking his back. Coast City still stands, but Superman and Barry Allen are dead. Donna Troy replaced Diana as Wonder Woman. The JSA only exist in the past (but Jack Knight makes a rare appearance!). The pocket universe is in the process of being destroyed, consumed by whiteness as in the original Zero Hour. Eventually, we learn it is because the Parallax shard that created the pocket dimension has run out of power. This works well enough as a tribute to a particular era of DC, but other than nostalgia, there is not much of note to it.

Going back to the lead part of the volume, in addition to three issues of Adams's GL run, it includes one of Task Force VII, an anthology tie-in series to Absolute Power with a different writer on each issue. Together the four issues make for a choppy read, as the series switches been following Carol Ferris, Hal Jordan, Alan Scott, Nathan Allen Broome (Ferris's former fiance), and Waller's Amazo robot in various permutations as they meet and separate from one another. Add-in the GL series back-ups. two of which concentrate on Adams's over-plot of the take over the United Planets while one has John Stewart and Steel teaming up, and one Sinestro appearance where he gains a Red Lantern Corps ring, and even for a crossover book, this is delirious, abrupt storytelling. Most of it entertains, especially when given more room, though Hal Jordan without his ring taking on Waller's forces is a bit much, this is basically is what everyone fears from crossovers. That story dominates the book and everything feels disjointed.

White Widow: Welcome to Idylhaven by Sarah Gailey, Alessandro Miracolo, and co.

Gailey perfectly captures the cadence and personality of Florence Pugh's portrayal of Yelena Belova in the MCU. I find it quite uncomfortable how much the comic version of the character has changed to reflect her MCU counterpart, and Gailey's writing... I honestly cannot tell if they are trying to underscore the divide between the two versions, or if they are just hammering a square peg into a round hole. Belova, while initially more of an in-between character in her first appearances, eventually became a full-on supervillain during Brian Michael Bendis's Avengers run. She is still an assassin, but all the superheroes she meets (Gailey opens each issue with a flashback where Belova encounters a superhero) treat her more like someone slightly misguided than a stone-cold killer. In the present day, Belova takes some advice from Wolverine, of all people, and instead of working directly as an assassin herself, takes on a role as a mentor for young assassins. A company called Armament interrupts her pseudo-retirement to Idylhaven, as they buy up the town to turn it into a training ground for assassins working for them, with town residents as targets for them to practice on. If you do not think this plot makes much sense except as a satire of hyper-capitalism, I agree entirely. The covers for this series are outstanding, but the actual comic, unless you're desperate for perfectly written version of MCU Belova, has nothing to recommend about it.

Hallows' Eve by Erica Schultz, Michael Dowling, and co. I might have liked this more had I read the Beyond Amazing arc of Amazing Spider-Man. A lot of it deals with Janine Godbe's grudge against the Beyond Corporation, but it just feels like a generic evil corporation here. Turning Godbe into a superpowered character still feels like an incredibly weird choice, but at least she has a fun an different power set. Most of the plot falls into motion when Godbe tries to rob a bank, and while using her werewolf mask, inadvertently turns the security guard attempting to stop her into a werewolf. Beyond goes after him while Godbe wants to try and turn him back to normal. Along the way, she is deeply moved by the home life of the guard and how he seems to be a genuinely good person she hurt, which just increases her desire to help him. While the series is average overall in terms of story and art, there is a kernel of something with Hallows' Eve.

Blood Hunters: Mean Streets by Schultz, Robert Gill, Chris Campana, Cam Smith, and co.

Speaking of Hallows' Eve... Spinning out of their debut during Blood Hunt, the Blood Hunters... break up at the end of their next adventure. Dagger turns some vampires back to human, but not all of them (she fails to revert Miles Morales). The team argues because Elsa Bloodstone wants to just kills vampires despite Dagger being able to possibly heal them. Schultz, like Gailey, writes a Belova influenced by the MCU, but not nearly as well. The team keeps getting beaten up by vampires, but is fine to rally a few pages letter with no real rest. The original story is kind of fun, but this is just blah. At least Godbe is still fun.

[joegualtieri-blog]

Some 2025 Eisner Nominees Pt5

Another look at 2025 Eisner Nominees. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.

Birds of Prey v3 by Kelly Thompson, Sami Basri, Juan Cabal, Adriano Lucas, and co.

Lucas replaces Jordie Bellaire as colorist with this volume, and it makes an immediate difference. Lucas's colors here seem to be a bit duller than on say, Nightwing, but compared to Bellaire's muddy work on the title (see part 3 above), it shines brightly. Once again, the volume contains two stories, the first a four parter where Cassandra Cain goes undercover to help rescue Amazons being experimented on by a wellness company. Sami Basari's art really depends on the inks, as he does that himself on the first two issues and only part of the second two. Vincente Cifuentes gives Basari an Extreme Studios look not otherwise there. Cabal's work is new to me, and upon first seeing his first page, I assumed his work was Barry Kitson's with a new inker. The difference became clearer after turning the page, but Cabal does clearly take something from Kitson for how he draws faces and bodies; his action layouts feel quite different though. Thompson's writing remains incredibly fun. This is a fun book, now that you can see it.

Wally Wood from Witzend: Complete Collection compilation and commentary by David J. Spurlock, design by Patrick K. Hill

Fantagraphics printed the complete Witzend back in 2014, somehow finagling the rights to everything in Wally Wood's early creator-owned anthology comic. With that hefty volume long out of print, last year Vanguard, the company working with Wood's estate (run by Spurlock) to publish his creator-owned work, opt to print just Wood's material in this handsome hardcover volume. The volume actually includes a good amount of extra material, including the rarely reprinted EC story, “The Spawn of Venus,” the original version of “Space Search Seven,” which Warren butchered in Eerie #60, and a cornucopia of sketches, covers, and other rarely seen treasures, all well explained by Spurlock's commentary. As for the material itself, well, Wood is Wood. Both his more realistic and cartoony work fill the book. The material is often full of nudity, quite sexual, with sexual assault being as common as in Alan Moore's work, but treated less seriously. He often goes up to the edge of taboo breaking between animal-like characters and women, but never actually crosses it. His female characters are often dumb or manipulative, if not both (to be fair, his male characters are often quite naive, too). Early issues of Witzend included mediocre doggerel poetry by Wood. Three chapters of the original version of his World of the Wizard King appear, which instead of being comics are illustrated prose, and said prose can be painful. Ninety-nine percent of people reading this book will do so for the art though, and how could it disappoint? This is Wood shaking off the shackles of doing work for someone else, without having to censor his art and the results dazzle.

Department of Truth: the Complete Conspiracy- Wild Fictions by James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, Steve Foxe, and co. I do not know what this book is. Well, let me rephrase, I know what the end product is (an about 165 pseudo-novel with the Bigfoot issues of Department of Truth reprinted afterwards), but I do not know where the prose portion originated. It “collects Wild Fictions Case Files #1-27” but nothing within the book indicates if this was originally back matter for the comic's single issue form or if it was bonus material released on one of Tynion IV's websites. Comics.org entries for the singles do not indicate the former, nor do the solicits for the series preserved via online retailers indicate the presence of the Wild Fiction Entries in the single issues. It also seems like Steve Foxe, often an editor on Tynion IV's creator-owned horror work, including on the Department of Truth, may have written the novel, as he is credited as “Field Researcher” prior to the table of contents, while Tynion IV and Simmonds merely receive co-creator credits.

Regardless of source and authorship, the resulting work delights, especially if one had a cryptid/ufology phase growing up. The bulk of the novel consists of entries, ostensibly written by a new recruit to the Department of Truth, about cryptids, ghosts, and aliens of various levels of tangibility. Each entry consists of a full page illustration, a map showing where sightings are common, a typographical range, a brief physical description, a date of first encounter, and then a three to four page (a few are longer) description of the history of the thing, and how the department should deal with the subject, should it become a problem. These write-ups blend, to my recollection to my days being interested in these topics, “fact” with the fictional reality of the world of the Department of Truth. This results in a fun, nostalgic read. The illustrations combine some comics greats (George Pratt, John McCrea, Erica Henderson, and clear Simmonds influence Bill Sienkiewicz, among others) with others whose work I do not know, but they usually look great.

I wish the book did not inexplicably include the Bigfoot issues (which are now doubled in the Complete Conspiracy editions), but I get wanting to include some actual comics content in here. The book does conclude with an immersion breaking afterword by Foxe discussing the difficulty in researching the Wild Fiction entries, and explaining why two obvious cryptids (Nessie and the Jackalope) did not receive entries. He also uses “we” discuss writing them so maybe more than one person wrote the entries. Regardless, if you enjoy the main series, this makes for a fun pick up.

Helen of Wyndhorn by Tom King, Bilquis Evely, Matheus Lopes, Clayton Cowles, and co.

This lovely mini-series received seven Eisner nominations-- Best Limited Series, Best Writer, Best Penciller/Inker, Best Colorist, Best Letterer, and two for Best Cover Artist (Tula Lotay for a variant in addition to Evely for her main covers). King remains one of the most controversial figures in comics, but also one of its best writers. That said, Helen is not his best work. It feels incomplete on the writing end. Lopes's colors and Cowles's lettering perfectly complement Evely's art, as she is the true star of this book. She shot to fame as the artist on Supergirl: Women of Tomorrow after toiling away, first at Dynamite, then on various DC books for years, most notably the later part of Greg Rucka's Rebirth-era run on Wonder Woman and a revival of the Dreaming with Simon Spurrier. Her work on Supergirl marked a definitely improvement, but her work here truly stuns. The combination of a fantasy world and a gigantic, old manor perfectly suit her style even more than the sci-fi setting of Supergirl. Every page is a masterpiece.

The comic itself contains a multi-tiered narrative. It opens with Thomas Rogers interviewing Lilith Appleton, the former governess of the titular Helen. Rogers is researching the life of CK Cole, a once-forgotten pulp writer who committed suicide in 1935 at 35 years of age, leaving behind his sixteen year old daughter (King is loosely using Robert E. Howard as a model). Most of the comics's narrative consists of the tapes Rogers recorded of his strange interview with Appleton. Barnabas, Cole's father, hires Appleton to first retrieve his granddaughter from a town near San Antonio, Texas where she finds Helen jailed and hangover.

The journey to Wyndhorn takes five days; King does not specify where it is located. Out of curiosity, some idle googling turned up the state of the art train Pioneer Zephyr making a record non-stop “dawn to dusk dash” between Denver and Chicago (about 1000 miles) in a single day. Snow falls on Wyndhorn in a latter chapter, so it likely is not in the South. Boston, Portland ME, and Seattle are all about 1800 miles from San Antonio as the crow flies. Really, Wyndhorn seems more like an English country estate than anything else. Appleton makes no mention of a boat trip, so the Northeast (home of the other most famous pulp writer, HP Lovecraft) seems like the most likely location, as much as it could be anywhere.

Anyway, upon arriving at Wyndhorn, Joseph, the butler (and more), introduces both Helen and Appleton to the massive house. Barnabas, he reveals, is away until the end of the month. The tour ends when Joseph shows the pair the wine cellar, which Helen promptly begins removing bottles from. She will hide them all over the house before Joseph locks her out of the cellar. The first night, a drunken Helen leaves her own room and crawls into bed with Appleton, claiming she saw a monster. This pattern repeats every night until the one where Appleton hears Helen screaming from outside. She ventures after the girl, and a large, werewolf-like creature chases them. Barnabas appears and slays it.

It turns out that CK Cole's lurid pulp tales are less fiction, and more accounting of his father's adventures in magical realms accessible through the grounds of Wyndhorn. Appleton's own recollections to Thomas rarely contain firsthand experiences with the fantastic, rather she relates second-hand tales from Helen about accompanying her grandfather into that other world. King does wonderfully the difference in perspective, as Helen is quite conscious in her tales of lacking her father's gift of breathless prose. Metaphorically though, the reality or lack thereof of Appleton's narration to Thomas matter less than how King and Evely use it convey the story of young girl, who becomes an adult during the story, traumatized by being raised in poverty with only her father, blossoming into her truest self, and while doing so, getting her grandfather to shed some of his stoicism and guilt over his son's fate.

A few pages of each issue are also devoted to tracing the tapes of Thomas's interview with Appleton, and with it the rise and fall of Cole's popularity of an author. Thomas himself briefly loses them in his home. After his death, his partner sends them to an auction, where everything related to Cole is expected to fetch a high price. From there, they go to a seedy convention, then the basement of a Cole fan, whose mother rejects his interests, and finally to her garage sale to get his things out of the house.

If I was not so unsatisfied by the ending, it would be easy to praise King's writing, but it feels so incomplete. Appleton leaves the Wyndhorn estate in 1941 to serve as a nurse during World War II. What happens in the interim? Thomas asks her at one point if Helen is still alive and receives no response. Despite being her governess, Appleton reminds Helen several times that she is not that much older. A relationship between the two may be inappropriate, but well, Joseph trains Helen into a gifted warrior by the end of the book (over a year), which seems to even out any power imbalance. So are Helen and Barnabas still off having adventures? What happens to the tapes? I honestly do not think I have wanted to know what happens next in a story so badly since Fox canceled Joss Whedon's Firefly (2002), and yet I doubt King and Evely intend to ever answer those questions.

[joegualtieri-blog]

The Undiscovered Country

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever by Ryan Coogler & Co.

One of the key differences between professional and amateur criticism is the that the former engages with the work as it is, while the latter has a tendency to critique based on what it wants the work to be. One major exception to this however, comes with William Shakespeare's Hamlet. For centuries, critics have tried to resolve why Hamlet does not take the throne following his father's death. The favored text has Hamlet as 30 years old, which should certainly be more than old enough to become king. Debate has centered on how to actually read the text, the different versions of it, theories of Denmark using a matrilineal line of succession, to interpretations that modern readers would definitely recognize as fanwank about how Claudius took the throne behind the scenes.

So with Wakanda Forever, I am left wondering why after T'Challa's (Chadwick Boseman) death his mother becomes ruler of Wakanda instead of Shuri (Letitia Wright). About two thirds of the way through the film, after her mother (Angela Bassett) dies, Shuri refers to herself as “a child.” Coogler introduced Shuri into the MCU in 2018 with the original Black Panther film. Until the Russo Brothers' Avengers Endgame (2019), the MCU films occurred in the year they released. Endgame pushes the timeline forward five years from its preceding film to 2023 (Please note: I am looking only at evidence within the films and not any non-diegetic sources of dubious canonicity). After its opening scene, which can take place no earlier than 2023, Wakanda Forever skips a year. It skips another year for its final scene, meaning the one where Shuri calls herself a child occurs no earlier than 2024, six years after her introduction in 2018. Wright was 25 in 2018. There is of course, a long history of twenty and even thirty-somethings playing teens, but the idea that Shuri in Black Panther is supposed to be any younger than 12 in the first Black Panther is absurd. So why did she not become queen when her brother died?

Of course, the line of succession in Wakanda seems more complex than most to begin with, what with how the throne and mantle of the Black Panther intertwine, the council having to approve of their monarch, and their challenge system. Still, this movie clocks in at 161 minutes; Coogler really could not slip in something to better explain how Ramonda became sitting monarch after her son's death than a brief line, unconvincing line about Shuri's age? I do not think she defeated M'Baku (Winston Duke) in trial by combat, but maybe she did!

Wakanda Forever has more than just questionable lines of succession in common with Hamlet, as both are very much about grief dealing with the death of a loved one and both involve an outside military force threatening the kingdom. Unfortunately, I do not think the acting quite holds up for dealing with the former theme. Wright just does not feel like a great dramatic actor to me, and so much of the film rests on her shoulders. She was passable in a support role in the original Black Panther film, but here, she has a much more complex role, and it seems like her performance is rote and mediocre. The film requires her at different points to be depressed and lost in grief, or angry and vengeful, but none of it truly comes across. Compare her performance to Angela Bassett, Oscar nominated for playing Ramonda, and the difference becomes stark. I did not love Bassett, finding her too bombastic and exaggerated at times, but she definitely conveys her character's emotions better than the reserved Wright. Similar to Wright, I really did not care for Dominique Thorne as RiRi Williams. Her performance felt flat, but admittedly the script does her no favors, as the character feels completely shoe-horned into the film, especially after the first act.

On the subject of flaws, most of the film looks terrible. Marvel overworking its effects teams became a hot topic a few years ago, and while Peyton Reed's Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), released three months after Wakanda Forever, seemed to come in for the most criticism, Wakanda Forever's effects generally look far worse. The whales used by the Talokan seem like bad CGI from 20-25 years ago. Williams's Ironheart suit at the end of the film looks like a cartoon, a severe downgrade from Iron Man's armor in the first MCU film 14 years prior. Worse though is the cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw. Any of the underwater or nighttime scenes (of which there are many) recalls Fabian Wagner's infamous cinematography in “The Long Night” (2019) episode of Game of Thrones, where viewers could barely see the episode because of how dark it is. It is very hard to believe the same person shot this and Coogler's Sinners (2025).

In terms of plot, the film is fine. However, I do think, with its massive length, it roughly compares to another recent superhero film of gargantuan length, Matt Reeves's The Batman (2022), which is even longer than Wakanda Forever at 176 minutes. The Batman very much feels like a TV mini-series stitched together. Wakanda Forever does not quite feel like that, but given the complexity of its story, a longer running time and being split up into episodes likely would not have hurt it. At times it feels like some events, such as Shuri's time in Talokan are just washed over. Ramonda seems to teleport halfway across the globe, at times, and oddly unaccompanied by bodyguards, even after Namor (Jose Tenoch Huerta Mejia) threatens her. Namora (Mabel Cadena) and Attuma (Alex Livinalli) are all but complete ciphers in the film. The reinvention of Namor and the Atlanteans as the heavily Mayan influenced Talokan is interesting and visually striking. I can hardly believe that he got to keep his ankle wings from the comics. Still, it makes them feel very much not like their comics versions.

Overall, Wakanda Forever is just a disappointment, but the film had a lot working against it. Coogler had a nearly impossible task placed in front of him with Chadwick Boseman's death. It's hardly a bad film, but it follows one of the best superhero films ever made and Coogler's next film (Sinners) seems like an instant classic, which magnifies the missteps.

[joegualtieri-blog]

In Defense of Man of Steel

Man of Steel by Zach Snyder & co. Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice by Zach Snyder & co.

The recent release of James Gunn Superman (2025) has brought with it yet another round of discussion about the DC Extended Universe that ran from 2013's Man of Steel through James Wan's Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023), though you would be forgiven for thinking it ended with Andy Muschietti's The Flash (2023) five months prior. Thanks to release dates being pushed back due to the pandemic, the DCEU, widely viewed as a failure by 2023, had five films released over the last 15 months of its existence. That popular view is richly deserved. While some of the individual films have merit, the series as whole is riddled with philosophical and thematic flaws that undermine it. Most of those flaws belong to Zach Snyder applying a deconstructionist lens to DC's biggest cash cows in mass release films. Those familiar with comics history likely know the story of how Alan Moore conceived of Watchmen as a revival of the Charlton Comics heroes (Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, Peacemaker, etc) recently purchased by DC. Part way through production, someone at DC realized that Watchmen would render those characters radioactive and unusable in the future. Someone in Warner Brothers' film division needed to realize that same issue during the production of Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), which is where Snyder's deconstructionist tendencies overwhelm things. He does so by steering into the main criticisms of Man of Steel. None of those issues, despite the hysteria surrounding the film in some quarters, were necessarily fatal to the DCEU until Batman vs. Superman.

To begin with, we need to briefly discuss the DC film series immediately preceding Man of Steel, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy. This series is particularly relevant, because Nolan and David S. Goyer (credited on all three films) also created the script and story of Man of Steel. The first film of the Dark Knight Trilogy, Batman Begins (2005), though widely praised, has numerous fatal flaws, which are off topic here. What does matter, however, is that it strives to show Batman early in his career, one who makes mistakes and is still figuring out how to operate as a vigilante. Batman Begins performed well for Warner Brothers, but its sequel, the Dark Knight, became a critical and financial phenomenon. It cemented Nolan's status as a filmmaker at WB (at least until the Pandemic) and likely led the company being willing to use a similar approach to Superman.

Man of Steel obviously tries to show Clark Kent's journey to becoming Superman in the same way Batman Begins traces Bruce Wayne's path, but whatever reason, audiences refuse to accept a learning curve for this character. One area where this plays out in Man of Steel comes with Jonathan Kent. Now this version of Jonathan Kent breaks severely from any previously existing versions, with his suggestion that maybe young Clark Kent should not use his powers to rescue people, and how he pushes Clark to not save him during the tornado scene. However, in the context of what Nolan and Goyer do in Batman Begins, this decision makes sense. I understand fans who reject this take on Jonathan, but they sacrifice him (somewhat literally, given the tornado scene) to try and humanize Clark and show how he struggles with doing the right thing. This goes wrong in Batman vs Superman when Snyder (with Goyer and Chris Terrio writing) double down on the scene with Martha Kent echoing Jonathan's ambivalence in even stronger terms. By that point, Superman should be certain of his morals and actions.

No where does the audience's rejection of Superman learning on the job rear its head more than with the controversial climax of the film where Superman kills Zod. Mark Waid rather infamously related his story of seeing the film for the first time:

Superman wins by killing Zod. By snapping his neck. And as this moment was building, as Zod was out of control and Superman was (for the first time since the fishing boat 90 minutes ago) struggling to actually save innocent victims instead of casually catching them in mid-plummet, some crazy guy in front of us was muttering "Don't do it…don't do it…DON'T DO IT…" and then Superman snapped Zod's neck and that guy stood up and said in a very loud voice, "THAT'S IT, YOU LOST ME, I'M OUT," and his girlfriend had to literally pull him back into his seat and keep him from walking out and that crazy guy was me. That crazy guy was me, and I barely even remember doing that, I had to be told afterward that I'd done that, that's how caught up in betrayal I felt. And after the neck-snapping, even though I stuck it out, I didn't give a damn about the rest of the movie.

The problem with the reaction of Waid and many others, is that Superman does kill. Especially Zod. In the theatrical cut of Superman II by Richard Lester, Superman appears to throw a depowered Zod down a bottomless pit in the Fortress of Solitude. More importantly, the final issue of his Superman run, John Byrne has Superman kill a depowered Zod, Ursa, and Norn. The three of them has massacred an entire alternate Earth, and swore they would do the same to the regular DC Earth if they ever got their powers back. So Superman killed them with Kryptonite. While Byrne left, the other members of the Superman family creative teams (Jerry Ordway, Roger Stern, and others) dealt with the fallout, which led into the fan-favorite Exile storyline. Essentially, Superman suffers a mental break because of his actions in Superman #22, and eventually swears that in the future he will always find another way. And that is where Snyder fails the material in Batman vs. Superman. We never get Superman really addressing the issue, never swearing off killing again. Without that follow through, then Superman killing Zod does actually betray the core of the character in the way Waid fails.

Finally, I want to discuss the destruction in Man of Steel. Cities, buildings, and everything else get destroyed in superhero stories. The trope has existed within the genre for essentially the duration of its existence. One of the most popular scenes of Superman in any media comes in the final episode of Justice League Unlimited, “Destroyer” (written by Dwayne McDuffie), where Superman and Darkseid engage in a massive brawl through buildings in the heart of Metropolis, destroying many buildings in the process. Man of Steel echos this scene with its fight between Superman and Zod in the same location, which set a standard for live-action superhero fights. Unlike its predecessor in JLU, however, people reacted negatively to the massive destruction when presented in live action. To reuse a quote from Scott McCloud, “The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe” (McCloud 31). McCloud's words are mainly aimed at arguing for how cartoony images allow for a wider swath of the audience to identify with a protagonist, they also point to why the live action destruction affected the audience so differently than in JLU or comics. The more realistic world of Man of Steel feels specific and concrete to audience the way than a cartoony one. In that context, they reject the trope that unless the story specifically calls attention to someone dying in the narrative, no one died. Crucially, Man of Steel does not show anyone being killed (indirectly) by the destruction of the Superman/Zod fight. Snyder literally opens Batman vs. Superman by returning to this fight from the perspective of Bruce Wayne and showing many, many people killed as the result of the battle. As much as any of the issues discussed here, this is a result of Snyder deconstructionist mentality. Instead of allowing the trope to stand, he follows the lead of Moore and John Totleben in Miracleman #15. So again, this is not such much Man of Steel, but its sequel. By explicitly breaking with the tropes of the genre, Snyder steers the franchise towards the issue DC had with Watchmen in 1986, where it risked poisoning the Charlton characters.

I am in no way arguing that Man of Steel is a perfect film, but I hope that by examining the context within which Snyder, Nolan, and Goyer created the film, some of those flaws are understandable, and that some of the objections people have to its content is actually unreasonable. Nothing within Man of Steel itself fundamentally broke the rules of the genre, it represents a genuine and earnest attempt to recreate Superman within a certain framework for the current era. Additional Works Cited: Johnston, Rich. "Controversy Over the Climatic Battle of Man of Steel." Bleeding Cool. 6/14/2013. Retrieved 7/14/2025. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Tundra Publishing, 1993

[joegualtieri-blog]

Review Roulette

Uncanny X-Men #104.5 [sic] by Chris Claremont and Salvador Larroca

This recent one shot from Marvel reprints a story by Claremont and Larroca that originally appeared only in a limited edition hardcover published in 2021 by a third party of Claremont's work. It also includes a few of Claremont's essays introducing the issues included in the volume, the original Days of Future Past two-parter by Claremont and Byrne (because that needed to be reprinted again), and a few pages from Claremont's original script to Uncanny X-Men #141. Frankly, for die-hard fans, the latter element justifies the cover price alone.

As for the new(er) story, it is not good. As befits Claremont reuniting with his X-Treme X-Men artist Larroca, it feels more like that than his classic original X-Men run or even his slightly better third stint writing the X-Men. Conceived as bridge between a tale set in the Days of Future Past timeline in New Mutants #18 and the original two-parter, it tries to reconcile the different versions of Rachel Summers presented in each story.

Avengers Academy #1 by Anthony Oliveira, Carola Borelli, and Bailie Rosenlund

As someone who does not care for reading comics on a screen, I am so glad that Marvel has started physically printing some of their digital comics (now if only they would do that for the Krakoan Age ones...). This new version of Avengers Academy features Brielle Brooks (Blade's daughter), Kid Juggernaut, the Captain America of the Railways, Normie Osborn as Red Goblin, Escapade, and Moon Girl (with Devil Dinosaur, of course). Other than Carol Danvers as headmaster, so far this book really only has more established heroes making cameos, unlike Christos Gage's original Avengers Academy or Skottie Young's Strange Academy. It also feels much more modern and contemporary than the latter, not the least of which is because at least three members of the core cast of six are LGBTQIA+ identifying.

This physical issue reprints six of the online ones, and that provides enough room to shine a spotlight on each member of the team. The highlight so far is Cap of the Railways volunteering at an outreach center, coming across a legacy version of Mysterio robbing a pharmaceutical company of HIV drugs, teaming up with him, donating said drugs to Night Nurse, and not hiding at all what he did from Danvers the next day. Hopefully, Marvel will print more of these, and they find their way into the hands of younger readers who need them.

Captain American's Bicentennial Battles #1 by Jack Kirby and co. Kirby and co. use the Bicentennial as an excuse show Captain America bouncing through America's history after encountering “Mister Buda” and learn a lesson about how the spirit of America is in people who get things done! In the past, I have defended Kirby as a writer. The Fourth World is wonderful, as are 2001 and Machine Man. This, however, might be Kirby at his worst. He fills the book with ethnic stereotypes and its philosophy feels conservative and facile compared to the Fourth World. Unless you desperately need to see Kirby draw Cap meeting Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross or witnessing the explosion of the first atomic bomb, avoid this one.

That last one is pretty awesome though. It's got Kirby Krackle for days.

Uncanny X-Men vol 1 Red Wave by Gail Simone, David Marquez, Javier Garron, and co. As with the above review, Red Wave stands as proof that even the best creators falter sometimes. I am old. I remember before Simone wrote comics, when she first came to attention writing You'll All Be Sorry! for Comic Book Resources. Seeing her transition to comics was exciting, and she's been great at it. This might be the worst book by her I have ever read. To be sure, the art does not help. I do not know what happened to Marquez's art, but his work, especially the faces, has become overly scratchy, like Whilce Portacio at his most decadent, but without the charm. One splash page gets used as frontispiece, and it is truly awful, with scrunched and alien faces, a weird pose for Ransom, and other artistic crimes. Not every panel has these flaws, and Rogue usually looks great, making the poor work standout all the more. Fill-in artist Garron started on the X-Books during the Krakoan Age, and before that had a long run on Miles Morales: Spider-Man and on Jason Aaron's Avengers. His work looks off to me in here, for reasons I cannot quite but my finger on, other than him drawing an almost comically broad Wolverine.

Back to the writing, Simone really leans into Rogue's Southerness in a way not seen since Claremont, and it feels like a step back for the character. Having Wolverine call Rogue “Moonbeam” all the time now seems quite odd, and has me racking my brain for why that nickname and coming up empty. Simone does do a great job with the relationship between Rogue and Gambit, and of showing most of the X-Men as traumatized by the events of the Krakoan Age.

The relationship between this new X-Men team and the private entity run by Doctor Corina Ellis (formerly a celebrity podcaster) feels quite weird. The X-Men, for some reason, turn the monstrous new villain Sarah Gaunt over to them at the end of #5. Then, in the very next issue Ellis's organization kidnaps Jubilee and one of the new team members. That leads into the first crossover of the From the Ashes era (see the next entry). Gaunt has a cult following her when she attacks the X-Men, one member of whom is a mutant she corrupted. With these resources, why is she working with Ellis? Why does Ellis keep her imprisoned after the X-Men returned? Where does the cult go? Why do they not try to break her out? There is something to be said for mystery, but all of this just feels sloppy, opaque, and not planned out at all.

Several of the new mutants Simone introduces also do not seem to be mutants at all. Ransom was born without a heart. Deathdream died shortly after birth and revived himself (repeatedly). Mutant powers usually kick in at puberty, not birth, though it does happen (Madrox, Nightcrawler). Introducing two at once seems odd. I cannot help but wonder if it was playing off of Jed MacKay introducing late bloomer mutants in his X-Men book. Calico was told by her mother that she was not a mutant, and her surviving family informed Ellis's organization of the same thing in Raid on Graymalkin. Hardly proof (especially since the family has immense wealth and paid Ellis to release Calico), but these comic take place in a world with plenty of mutates, and her power set (psychic bond with her horse and flame creation/pyrokinesis) seems a bit odd for a mutant. While all three characters might actually be mutants, I would really like to see someone actually check all of them for the X-Gene on panel. Non-mutants can be X-Men, but it would be nice to have it confirmed, especially with Calico.

X-Men: Raid on Greymalkin by Jed MacKay, Simone, and co.

Despite being a four-part, numbered crossover, this has the feel of older, earlier crossovers, where events would overlap and be shown from different perspectives in each tie-in. There is enough original material that Marvel could not just collect X-Men and Uncanny with its respective book, but it comes close. This volume contains five issues (three X-Men and two Uncanny) but has six credited pencillers and eight inkers. The result is a mess, visually.

It feels way too early for this crossover. Ellis's organization takes over the X-Mansion and turns it into a vault-level super prison where mutants get turned into a variation on Hounds pretty quickly. Both groups of X-Men seem OK with Ellis doing (though it is much more part of the plot in Uncanny) this right up until she kidnaps members of each team, and in the case of Rogue's team, this comes right after trusting her to imprison Gaunt. This crossover further muddies the issue of Ellis's motivation. If she is a bigot who hates mutants (which would make sense), why does she sleep with Scurvy? Yes, she uses him afterwards, but he is not her prisoner, rather part of her team.

The plot of the actual crossover is pretty terrible-- both teams want to attack Graymalkin to rescue their teammates. Cyclops tells Rogue both groups should not do it at once, as it would be too many X-Men. She does not listen, and then Scurvy manipulates the two groups into fighting each other. Psylocke and Nightcrawler break Xavier out of prison, who has a psychic duel with Scurvy, who reveals that he, Xavier, and Harvey X (who died in Simone's first issue) are three of five “avian” mutants, all of whom are powerful psychics with brain tumors. Simone already described Gaunt in her first arc as being beyond omega mutants, and now this. Sigh. At least the collection ends with an issue of MacKay's book where he outmaneuvers the local head of O.N.E. spectacularly.

Scarlet Witch #1-4 by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, John Higgins, Mark McKenna, and co.

Considering the talent involved, this book looks horrible. This did not exactly come either in the careers of Higgins or McKenna, either. Both the figure work and layouts are poor throughout the book, the latter of which cause letterer Jim Novak to struggle with balloon placement throughout the series.

In terms of plot, Abnett and Lanning do a decent job, but nothing special. Wanda Maximoff has nightmares about being hunted and killed by demons. She contacts Agatha Harkness, and the two venture together to New England (very specific there guys!) to look in a library for information. There, the two separate, and Master Pandemonium attacks Maximoff. After battling off and on with Pandemonium, she finds a book that discusses the Nexus beings of other realities, each of whom possess a different type of magic power. Someone named Lore hunts and kills them, explaining the vision that opened the comic. While this happens, someone attacks several of Maximoff's Avengers teammates, and turns them into monstrous versions of themselves who get transported to New England to join the battle. Agatha Harkness responds to the Avengers West Coast headquarters to answer Maximoff's call. She sees the signs of the Avengers being taken, and heads to New England. Do you see the issue? I am fairly certain the Harkness that went to New England with Maximoff and separated from her is meant to be Lore, but that comic never comes out and makes that clear.

Lore eventually reveals herself to be behind everything, and that she looks like Maximoff. Together with Harkness, Maximoff turns the Avengers back into human, makes Lore physical, which lets them fight, and Lore winds up destroying herself by summoning the spirits of the nexus beings she killed for power. Those spirits turn on her, there is a big explosion, and the last page looks like the ending to Victor Fleming's Wizard of Oz (1939). Surprisingly, Maximoff's teammates do not tell her it was all a dream. Frankly, that feels like a last minute change along the lines of Duke surviving the end of Don Jurwich's GI Joe: the Movie. Between this and the disappearance/reappearance of Harkness, one kind of wonders what happened behind the scenes.

[joegualtieri-blog]

You Will Believe A Man Can Fly

Superman by James Gunn Spoiler Free Review It's good! Please note, I said the same thing after seeing Man of Steel (the biggest problem with it is Superman v. Batman steering into every criticism of it). It mostly feels like a blending of the Donner films with the late 80s/early 90s post-Crisis version of comics. The film actually balances its gigantic cast fairly well. All of the supporting players feel like they get fair shake, minus a couple of a planet staffers. David Corenswet excels in his lead role. Rachel Brosnahan seemed like perfect casting as Lois and is; she embodies both the tough as nails reporter and someone falling for Superman, but not sure if she wants to do so. She stands alongside Margot Kidder and Delany as one of the best screen versions of the character. As Lex Luthor, Nicholas Hoult provides a more physical version of Luthor than usually appears on screen, and does so without a green and purple battlesuit. Again, this Luthor and Lane really draw from that early Post-Crisis era, though Luthor does get a touch of modern techno-Messianism added on top.

Most of the side characters also fill their roles ably, especially Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner. Jimmy Olsen, played by Skyler Gisondo, draws from more contemporary versions of the character, especially Matt Fraction's take (though seems to lack that versions wealth). Maria Gabriela de Faria has a large role as the Engineer, but sadly does not get to actually do too much beyond physical stuff, which as a huge fan of Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch's Authority disappointed me. The script works, but in the third act, Luthor and Superman both have a tendency towards speeches that probably good have been cut down with another draft. Overall,any Superman fan that isn't a die hard fan of Snyder's deconstruction vision should find something here, all the more so if you like the specific era of Superman it uses as its primary sources. There are mid and post-credit scenes.

[joegualtieri-blog]

Say You Want a Revolution

Andor Season 2 by Tony Gilroy and Co.

I disliked Rogue One (2016). Yes, yes, it stands today as arguably the most popular Disney Star Wars film, but majorities can be wrong, just look at the 2024 election results. The production of the film, like nearly every Disney Star Wars film, was a mess, with Gilroy brought in to fix whatever Gareth Edwards apparently messed up in the eyes of Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy. He did not. The resulting film is a tonal mess, with uncompelling characters that despite being pitched to audiences as something different within the Star Wars universe, still devolves into the same old giant space battle by the end. When Disney announced the Andor TV show with Gilroy at the helm, I scoffed, and had no interest. Then not just critics, but friends whose judgments I trusted started singing its praises, calling it the best Star Wars ever. It took about a 18 months after the first season finished, but I eventually watched it, and it blew me away.

Most of the second season is just as good, if not better than that first season. Gilroy apparently planned Andor for five seasons, but the realities of streaming TV production caused a change-- instead of four more seasons, season two of Andor would consist of four three episode arcs, each taking place a year a apart. Frankly, this means they did make four more seasons, albeit British-length ones, with any fat cut out. As much as I love that first season of Andor, it is a very slow burn; season two cannot afford that due to its structure. Of the four arcs, three of them are superb, the last one has issues, and as such I want to discuss that one first.

My issues with act four of season two of Andor begin with the ending of act three. Andor's (Diego Luna) lover Bix Caleen (Adria Aronja) leaves him to make sure he stays and helps the rebellion. The scene wrenches the heart, and feels directly analogous in language and meaning to the famous ending of Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), where Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund separate to better serve the war effort. And yet, this does not end act three. Instead, it keeps going to show the awakening of K-2SO (Alan Tudyk), a damaged droid Andor liberated who in Rogue One has a very sarcastic sense of humor absent from Andor to this point. This winds up feeling like a harbinger of what's to come. It should be noted that Andor season two has three directors (Ariel Kleiman on the first two arcs, Janus Metz the third) and three writers (Gilroy on one and three, Beau Willimon on two). Season four is directed by Alonso Ruizplacios, whose pre-Andor filmography lacks anything spectacular, and written by Tom Bissell, primarily a critic and best known for co-writing The Disaster Artist (2013) about the making of Tommy Wiseau's The Room (2003), which was later adapted into a film (2017).

The tenth episode of the season, part one of act four, “Make It Stop,” stands head and shoulders above the rest of the arc. While the backstory it provides Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard) and Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau) feels unnecessary and runs afoul of the problem George Lucas created of a short timeline between Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Star Wars (1977), it along with Rael finally discovering the existence of the Death Star provide the highlights of the arc.

Unfortunately, the cracks begin to show even in that episode, as possibly for the first time in the series, characters start to act stupid to hit plot beats, as opposed to the Imperials just being incompetent. For example, quite a few of them run past Marki, during her hospital infiltration to kill Rael, despite the floor he's on being sealed. In the finale, the squad looking for Marki has strict orders to arrest her alive, and yet they use techniques that nearly kill her. Markai herself, while in the room with Rael, takes the time to close the blinds to the room, stare wistfully, have a flashback, and kill him slowly by disconnecting the machines keeping him alive instead of just shooting him. Yes, yes, “It's not that kind of movie kid,” to go with Harrison Ford's famous line to Mark Hamill, but to this point, Andor never felt like that kind of movie.

The final act also disappoints on the promise of that Casablanca-evoking goodbye from Caleen. The Cassian Andor who debuted in Rogue One felt rough and on edge, something like the original version of Han Solo before the Special Edition edit and certain films that need not be mentioned. The prospect of Caleen leaving Andor and hardening him makes sense given his personality in Rogue One, but instead, a year a later, when Andor reappears in “Who Else Knows,” he has stayed on Yavin 4 and generally become friendlier with the people there; he was even about to be promoted before taking off to rescue Rael and Markai. The fate of Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) also underwhelms. One of the best villains in Star Wars history, her story apparently ends with her in the same prison Andor was in back during season one, arrested essentially for ambition outstripping her rank. She deserved better. Worse still though, comes in the final scene of the show. It returns to Mina Rau, the planet where Andor and his makeshift family lived during the the first arc. B2EMO (Dave Chapman) plays happily after being left behind. And then we see Caleen, holding a young child. Again, this feels like a betrayal of the ending to the third arc. She did not leave Andor so they could each play their role in the Rebellion, she left to raise his child in a “safe” (they left the planet because of the Empire cracking down on it. Why is it OK now? Again, plot convenience in act four) place. Throughout the series, Caleen demonstrated that she could be just as capable in her own way as Andor. To reducer her to this, well, it seems like women have not advanced much in society since Casablanca's release more than 80 years ago. Isla Lund needed to go with her husband over staying with her true love Blaine not to actually aid the anti-Nazi cause in any concrete way, but just keep him, an important man, happy. Both Caleen and Andor should have been working for the Rebellion, separately. Finally, the last arc tries to play Ben Mendelsohn's Orson Krennic as some sort of scary heavy, despite him debuting in Rogue One as a prissy fop. By contrast, his earlier appearance in the first arc felt more in line with that original take. The fault lies not with Mendelsohn's performance (which is quite good), it is the audience's knowledge of the character from Rogue One making it feel incongruous.

Anyway, with that all out of the way, we can talk about the good parts now...

OK, sometimes talking about why something dazzles you is harder than why it frustrates you. Each three episode arc builds tension towards its conclusion impeccably. The middle two arcs center on the Empire's conspiracy to strip-mine the planet Ghorman of a material necessary to construct the Death Star's super laser while Meero joins said conspiracy in the first arc. Andor himself opens the series by stealing an experimental TIE Fighter, going to meet up with his contact on what's later revealed to be Yavin 4, only to find the contact killed by another group of Rebels. That group itself winds up splitting in two, serving as a microcosm of the rifts between Rael, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), and the more mainline Rebellion led by Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reily) and Bail Organa (Benjamin Bratt). Or real world revolutions and leftists. Meanwhile, Andor's found family on Mina Rau work as immigrants, awaiting his return, but an Imperial immigration crackdown threatens their safety. Frankly, this section is so incredibly timely in the US for reasons I hope I do not need to explain. It helps underscore how what the actions of the current presidential administration follow a script established by others, it is not new and those who screamed about what would happen were not being alarmist. One of my few criticisms of the first season of Andor was that despite Mon Mothma, a figure in Star Wars media since Richard Marquand's Return of the Jedi (1983), being a main character for arguably the first time ever, I still did not care about her. That changes in the opening act of Andor season two, as you can feel her frustrations and sacrifices for the Rebellion, and it finally humanizes her after decades of her just being this aloof, largely authoritarian figure who seemed to exist just to be a boring character in the Rebellion/New Republic to contrast with the big name heroes.

The second and third arcs depict Ghorman under Imperial occupation and how the Empire manipulates the Ghorman resistance in order to justify their crackdown on the rights of the Ghor, Again, this material feels incredibly timely, presaging events that happened in the United States barely a month after the episodes aired. The three episodes from these arcs, “What a Festive Evening,” “Who are You?,” and “Welcome to the Rebellion” might be the tensest episodes of TV I have ever seen, which is particularly a neat trick for the last of those, as the audience knows Andor and Mothma will escape Coruscant. While Meero's fate disappointed, Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) gets one of the best deaths in Star Wars. He finally realizes the horror of the Empire, breaks up with Meero, and wanders out into the situation in Palmo's central square just as years of fomenting the situation are about to pay off for the Empire. And then he spots Andor. His anger takes over, and the two have a bloody brawl of the sort rarely seen in the franchise. Karn actually wins, and is about to shoot Andor when Carro Rylanz (Richard Sammel) kills him from offscreen instead. While Rylanz does not appear again after this episode, Sammel deftly conveys how devastating this event his for his character, for the year plus of in-story time the audience has known him, he has advocated for non-violent resistance. Just before the massacre, he realized how Karn had duped him and the Ghorman resistance by working as an Imperial mole, but Rylanz's focus stayed on trying to save everyone. In 24 episodes of mostly superb quality, Karn's death might be the single best moment, encompassing all of the show's themes about how rebellion and fascism bloody everyone's hands, and how events can so easily spin out of control no matter how well someone plans for things. It is also immensely satisfying to see one of key figures of the Empire realize the cost to others of his actions, that it is not merely some largely benign force for order in the galaxy. It destroys people, just because it can.

“Star Wars was always political" has become something of cliche, even if true. That being said, it has never before been as political, as forceful about it as with Andor. It has also never felt more timely than with this second season. Despite the flawed final episodes, it stands as a towering achievement, and one everyone should watch.

[joegualtieri-blog]

A Little of This, a Little of That

Grixly #51, 53, 55-60, 62, 63, 64, 67-69 by Nate McDonough & co.

I enjoyed the two issues of this series I previously reviewed, so I bought out McDonough's online store of each available issue, and he was kind enough to include a few extras. Unlike those two issues, there are no strips drawn by others, though there are pin-ups, covers, and the occasional bit based on someone else's recollections. As with those other two issues, the focus on the comic remains McDonough's experiences buying and selling comics. Issues 56, 68 and 69 have a bit more slice-of-life outside of comics elements to them than the others mixed in. Some highlights from the series include a discussion about the role eBay plays in McDonough's chosen profession and how packing tape seems to suck up all hairs in #53. In #62, McDonough deftly discusses the pandemic-era speculation bubble. A lurid fantasy of dying in a car crash while holding an issue of Alpha Flight highlights #64. I felt personally attacked by McDonough's admission to shipping comics via media mail while calling people like me who follow the USPS rules on the issue, a “crybaby, pedant, volunteer cop, rule worshiping nerd, fucking loser.” Despite this vicious assault on my character, Grixly remains a tremendously fun read.

Battling Hate #1 edited by Albert Fuzailof

This comic was available exclusively at Cosmic Con this past February. Behind an original cover of either not-Clark Kent or not-Steve Rogers, it reprints a couple of comics relevant to the topic, along with a few essays. “Paintings for the Angel of Death: the Story of Dina Gottliebova Babbitt” by Rafael Medoff and Neal Adams recounts the story of young woman who painted a mural of Snow White to try and calm children at Auschwitz. Nazis took notice of it, and Mengele ordered her to paint Romani interred at the camp as, “He believed [photography] failed to capture aspects of the [Romani's] skin tones which, he claimed, helped demonstrate their racial inferiority.” Gottliebova survived the Final Solution by doing this, eventually moved to the US, worked as an assistant animator, and married one of the Disney animators who worked on Snow White, Arthur Babbitt. Thought lost, some of her paintings were rediscovered, and never returned to her by the Auschwitz Museum before her death in 2009. Thought wordy, Adams's realistic style (supposedly inked by Joe Kubert, but uncredited) serves it well, as does the decision to only color in Adams's version of her paintings. The second story in the comic is a reprint of an appearance by Kismet, the Man of Fate, credited by Roy Schwartz's intro as the first Muslim superhero. Omar Tahan, apparently the pen name of Ruth Roche, a Jewish Woman and associate of Will Eisner with an extensive comics resume. The comics itself relays a fairly rote WWII-era propaganda story. Flame, a femme fatale, and Bruta venture from Hades to help Hitler out because he “is making a mess of the job.” Upon meeting the duo, Hitler literally starts eating a carpet at Flame's feet which... sure is something. They brought a secret weapon for him to use, a cigarette holder that can turn men to stone (until exposed to fire). Kismet sees this from outside. Kismet is turned to stone, is the centerpiece at a Nazi dinner, and after a candle falls on his foot. He's about to use the cigarette holder on Hitler when an allied bombing raid hits the building they are in. The story stinks, but the art is oddly clean for the Golden Age. It looks like Battling Hate reproduced it from the original pencils (you can see white out marks).

Nightwing: Fallen Grayson vol 7 by Tom Taylor & Bruno Redondo Taylor's superb run concludes and sticks its landing. It may feel a bit rote, at times, but it pays off work these two masters spent 40 issues building. It does contain one really fun bit though, wear Bruce Wayne becomes Nightwing II while Grayson journeys to Nanda Parbat. Redondo gets in one last iconic splash of Grayson leaping to confront Heartless, the villain of the run, and it is still just as breathtaking as the first one. I wish this run had lasted longer.

Painkiller Jane & GI Zombie #1 & 2 by Jimmy Palmiotti and Juan Santacruz

Paperfilms, the company owned by Palmiotti, Amanda Conner, and Justin Gray is the most reliable Kickstarter publisher I have yet to encounter. Exempting the Pandemic, they hit their estimated ship dates, if not deliver early. Their work rarely breaks new ground, but it never fails to entertain and always arrives well packaged. Painkiller Jane & GI Zombie fulfills those expectations. Somehow, despite being a fan of Palmiotti's writing, this is the first Painkiller Jane story I have read, though I am generally familiar with the concept (ex-cop gains fast healing and immunity to pain). GI Zombie, Palmiotti and Gray created original for the post-52 DCU, but his rights reverted back to them (Alan Moore must be jealous). This story marks the character's return to action after a decade.

The first issue opens with Jane and girlfriend hired two kill two defecting Russian scientists while the US government entrusted Jared Kabe (the titular GI Zombie) with escorting them safely. Kabe offers Jane triple her fee to help him, which she readily agrees to do. The remainder consists of fairly standard spy escort mission stuff, until Russian agents blow up the plane at the end of the issues. Only Jane and Kabe survive, and barely in the case of the former. She awakens after a week on a deserted island. The pair can see lights on another, larger island some distance away. Together, they swim there over the course of the day and discover that, frankly, it is Epstein Island with the serial numbers filed off. Cue even more gratuitous violence and nudity as they free the children from the clutches of not-Epstein.

Overall, this is a fun book, like most Paperfilms comics, but I will say that this might be the crudest Palmiotti comic I have read since the run on Deadpool he co-wrote with Buddy Scalera more than 20 years ago.

[joegualtieri-blog]

Some 2025 Eisner Nominees Pt 4

Another look at 2025 Eisner nominees. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang & Leuyen Pham

Though aimed at tween/teen readers, Lunar Year Love Story provides an excellent high school romance with strong art that makes it worth reading even for those beyond that age group. Valentina “Val” Tran grows up with her dad, believing that her mom died soon after her birth. She has an imaginary friend, Saint V, a cherubim shaped spirit that delivers her Valentine's Day cards every year. Before high school, she loved Valentine's Day and would hand-make cards for her entire class. She carries that tradition into freshman year. Her older classmates do not react positively to the cards and the day gets even worse when her grandmother arrives. Val and her father have not seen her for years, due to a fight between the adults. Val's grandmother seriously upends her world by revealing that Val's mother did not die, but abandoned Val and her dad. While Val reels from this, Saint V turns into a frightening statue with haunted, black eyes.

Two years later, the story proper begins. No longer into Valentine's Day, Val reluctantly agrees to a romantic date with her boyfriend, which ends in disaster, compounded by her father getting drunk, as her mother married that day. Desperate for help, Val calls her grandmother for the first time in two years. Val's grandmother provides aid, and reveals to her that no one in their family has ever found a happy relationship. Shortly after that, the frightening version of Saint V returns, and offers to take Val's heart so she never has to deal with heart break. The two decide that she will accept that deal if, within the next year, she does not find true love.

Predictably, she meets a boy in pretty much the next scene, when her grandmother takes her to a Lunar New Year festival. The boy is Leslie Liu, the son of a rich yogurt magnate and cousin of Jae. Jae was in Val's freshman year homeroom, and threw out the valentine he received in front of Val. Jae's father died around the time of that incident, and his mother subsequently crawled into a bottle.

If you suspect a love triangle between these three, well, yes. The narrative breaks no new ground here in that regard. The three bond over traditional lion dancing; Liu's father sponsors a team the cousins are on, which Val joins in short order. She and Liu become partners in a lion costume and more, but not too much more, as Leslie wants to keep things casual, despite referring to her as “My Val.” Lots more drama occurs involving Val's mom, her best friend, and such. Eventually, Val travels to Rom with her grandmother, and a fun reversal of the rom-com cliché airport chase transpires, where Val has to make it back from Rome in time to see Jae before he leaves for Korea. The comic sings less because of its plot than how strongly Yang and Pham define all the characters. They all have some depth to them.

For most of the book, Pham's art works within a certain common aesthetic for comics aimed this market. Her style is cartoony, but slightly more grounded than, say, Colleen Coover. The sequences with the dark version of Saint V are quite creepy, with the very page turning black in his presence. Pham's work really comes alive though during the lion dancing segments. The panel borders break down and disappear during them, the movement too much to be constrained by anything beyond the border of the page. When two dancers are particularly in sync, the colors also run together, and turn a bright shade of red, the dancers a white blob at the center. Lunar New Year Love Story is remarkably chaste; Val's grandmother even describes her mom becoming pregnant as her parents “sweetheart too much” (59). Val and her love interests never do more than kiss on panel. The lion dancing sequences work exceptionally well to suggest a deeper connection between characters while keeping things appropriate to the target audience. Pham's lettering also dazzles, always matching the mood of the scene and more expressive with the more supernatural elements.

DC Comics Style Guide by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Dick Giordano, Paul Levitz, Joe Orlando, Neal Pozner, Mary Yedlin, and others. Edition by Hamish Smyth and Jesse Reed

For Generation X and older Millennial fans, the 1982 Style Guide might be the single most nostalgic DC item of all-time, despite not even knowing it exists. As detailed by Paul Levitz in his introduction, in 1982 DC President and Publisher Jeanette Kahn also gained control over the company's licensing division. She understandably wanted to update the division and create a more consistent look among licensees. The result was the 1982 DC Style Guide, a loose-leaf document designed to provide licensees with art to use and, well, guide, anything not using the pre-done art. Garcia-Lopez drew nearly the entire project, with inks by Giordano. The resultant work would be used for well over a decade, on everything from toys to t-shirts to valentine cards. I absolutely handed out the latter to classmates in elementary school. Essentially, if you grew up in the 80s or 90s and were aware of DC licensed products, you almost certainly saw Garcia-Lopez's artwork from this guide. For decades, these guides have passed hands on the comics secondary market, selling for hundreds if not thousands of dollars. More unscrupulous individuals even bootlegged copies. In the end, DC did not bring the work out for the masses, instead Standards Manual, a design company, reprinted it this year. The resulting book is a beautiful hardcover, incorporating some of the update pages DC sent to licensees to add to the book, Levitz's intro, and a preview interview with Garcia-Lopez and Yedlin. Smyth and Reed arranged for copies (from 1982 and 1984) they purchased to be scanned, and used those to create the book. It justly received an Eisner nomination for Best Archival Collection/Project-Comic Books.

That said, the execution has some flaws. The book was solicited as a “facsimile edition,” a term with specific meaning within comic circles these days, as such reprints, which only differ from the originals in terms of price and indica, have inexplicably become popular. This obviously does not fit the current expectation by comics fans for a facsimile edition, most obviously with it being a hardcover volume and not loose-leaf and the inclusion of supplemental material. Given that, the amount of paper wasted in the volume seems excessive. Likely trying to reproduce the feel of the original Style Guide, nearly all of the 384 pages only have printing on one side. Even the supplemental materials typically have blank-back pages. Given the lack of absolute fidelity to the original, the size of the book could have been nearly cut in half by printing on both sides.

The guide itself consists of an intro section explaining how to use it (including notes on the term “super hero,” then a jointly held trademark by DC and Marvel), and then several sections divided by character family. They are, in order: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Shazam, Justice League of America, Teen Titans, Plastic Man, Super Powers (logo only), Super Jrs (I have no idea if this was ever actually used anywhere, nor do I want to know), and “combination designs (various team-up images). At the end of the JLA section, there are pages dedicated to Mr. Freeze, Cyborg and other characters from the rare final wave of Super Powers action figures. It seems weird to find these in the JLA section, rather than Batman, Titans or Super Powers, but DC did use a pagination system. Based on that, they belong in the JLA area. I wonder if the copies used to create this edition were missing pages, as Darkseid is conspicuous by his absence, despite being the main villain for Super Powers. The Plastic Man section solely consists of the turn around of Plastic Man, colored and in black and white. The intro to his section mentions his sidekick, Woozy Winks, but no image of him is here (nor for that matter, any characters from his cartoon that ended in 1981). Only Darkseid and Winks are named in the intros without getting at least some sort of image. Several characters also appear on the cover without pages on the inside: the Spectre, Travis Morgan, Huntress, Saturn Girl, Lightning Lad, and Cosmic Boy. Hopefully DC simply never produced these pages, rather than the copies used to produce this volume being incomplete.

The Department of Truth: the Complete Conspiracy vol 1 by James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, , Adiyata Bidikar, and others.

Technically not the issues nominated in 2025, this volumes contains issues published from 2020 through 2023 which received nine nominations, including for Best New Series, Continuing Series (three times), Best Letterer, and Best Writer (three times). After receiving no nominations in 2024, in 2025, it is once again nominated for Continuing Series and Best Writer. Because the Eisner Awards nominate the entire body of a creator's work for that year, I suppose you could quibble with attributing those to the series, but given how it keeps getting Continuing Series nods, the nominating committee clearly seems to think it ranks with Tynion IV's best work. Unfortunately, I have to strongly disagree. Too often, the series reads like illustrated lectures on conspiracy theories and magic. Now that is not to completely dismiss such things, as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison's respective bodies of work both have a tendency in that direction (especially the former), but it follows in their wake, and the material will come across familiar to anyone who has read their work. What can save a didactic comic drawing upon, well, I do not want to say “common,” but common within a certain niche is the execution and characters surrounding that presentation. Unfortunately, none of the characters in The Department of Truth particularly compel. The lead character, Cole Turner, is the neophyte recruit with ties in his past to the Department; to this point, he feels like a rough sketch for the more fully drawn Michael Schmitz of The Deviant. His partner, Ruby, remains a cipher. Older agent Hawk Harrison seems like the Eagle from Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz's Brought to Light as a human. Curiously, “Doc” Hynes and Director Lee Harvey Oswald receive more character development in the Deviation issues than the main cast does (though they have feet planted in both realms). Unlike Morrison and Moore, Tynion IV does bring an American perspective its topics, but it hardly feels that different. What truly makes the Department of Truth worth reading is Tony Simmonds's art, and it baffles me that he has yet to receive an Eisner nomination for it.

I like all sorts of comics art, I hope I have made that clear over the brief history of this blog. If you asked me to pick one comics artist as the single best, not favorite, but just the most talented, I would go with Bill Sienkiewicz. To a lot of recent fans, they may only know Sienkiewicz as that weird, scratchy inker. Back in the late 1980s, he was to comic art what Moore was to writing comics. I have not read his Moon Knight run with Doug Moench yet, but by accounts, during it he morphed from a Neal Adams clone to something more. The earliest work of his I have read is New Mutants with Chris Claremont, which is bold and blotchy. It was nothing compared to what he did on Elektra: Assassin and Daredevil: Love and War with Frank Miller, Brought to Light and Big Numbers with Moore, or on his own for an adaptation of Moby Dick and Stray Toasters. Sienkiewicz's work during this period was mixed media, and not just in the sense of mixing painting and drawings. No, he was doing some of the same things that Dave McKean would do on covers (i.e. creating three dimensional works) to Sandman covers, but for interior art pages. I have never really seen anything else like it within comics until Martin Simmonds's work on The Department of Truth (I may have let the point get away from me a bit there).

Sienkiewicz's work on those late 80s books clearly informs the style Simmonds uses here, but I suspect unlike the old master, Simmonds crafts his art digitally. In the opening pages of chapter six (#8), he draws twelve panel grids, with the cut-up words of the Pledge of Allegiance filling the gutters. As best as I can tell, the gutters stay exactly the same on each of the pages done this way, which likely would not be the case if Simmonds created each page individually. I bring this up not to take anything away from Simmonds's artistry, but merely to point how things have changed in 35 years. Sienkiewicz had to create such incredibly complex and intricate art by hand, in a physical space. It has taken all this time for someone to be able to create something similar using new tools.

Simmonds does not draw every issue of the series. Tynion IV takes a page from the “Times Past” issues of Starman, and assigns other artists to draw “Deviation” issues, which flashback to the past of the Department of Truth. This volumes contains six such issues, Some work in more traditional comic style s (Elsa Charretier, Tyler Boss), others less so (Allison Sampson). Unfortunately, the art by John Romero in #15 is the poorest in the series, and is probably the closest to Simmonds's style in the Deviation issues. Tynion IV mostly presents that issue as files from the Department, illustrated by Romero. Where Simmonds's constantly displays elan and inventiveness, Romero's images are stiff and unreal in an uncanny valley way. That works for the unreal visitor, but not so much for the human members of the Department.

I would also like to praise the work of letterer Adiyata Bidikar. His work integrates to the page so well, that until examining the credits, I assumed Simmonds must have at least handled the task on his issues. All of the word balloons in present day issues appear almost mis-struck, with the black outline of the white balloon not matching the the standard balloon shape, and have angles instead of smooth curves. The pentagram-faced killer haunting Turner's life goes a step further, His word balloons, ironically, have outlines that better match, but red straight lines outline the pitch black bubbles emanating from his mouth. Bidikar switches up techniques for the Deviation issues, which often feature more traditional lettering. The intertextual nature of the book though sees him also creating letters, typed reports, and so much more. Rarely can you call a comic other than Dave Sim's Cerebus a tour de force of lettering, yet The Department of Truth manages to be exactly that.