Gregory L. Reece Comic Reviews

Oh man, this is good. I know we critics always say this but this time I mean it. This time it comes from a sober heart on a Sunday morning coming down. I'm writing this with the moral clarity, the guileless innocence, of a man who woke this afternoon to face the day as a newborn babe, a man whose transgressions of the night before have been washed away by forgetfulness. I really mean it. I've never seen anything like this before. This is perfect.

Why wouldn't I be? H.G. Wells' invading menace is back, this time to be met by a different sort of Invaders. Plus P.Craig Russell is back and Killraven is just around the corner.

I am left wanting more. So far, there is nothing heretical going on here, but there is development and complexity. So far, it doesn't feel as if the story is being remade, updated for a new age, but rather explored, mined for details and angles that we all might have missed over the years. This is a good approach. The old tales have held up just fine. If Slott and Prez continue as they do in this inaugural issue, they might help us to see that fact even more clearly than we did before.

And, along with artist Ramon Rosanas, Spencer tells a story in this first issue that I am convinced would indeed make a fine film, even without all that bombast that we've come to expect from Marvel movies. This story has all the Ant-Man stuff, all the ridiculous shrinking, all the ant armies under mind control. It has snarky humor. It has action. It has fun.

Don't get me wrong. There are things to like here. I really enjoy seeing these old characters brought back to life. I find some of the parody on target and a couple of the jokes really work. I could probably even overlook the lack of depth in the story and the underdevelopment of the characters. With each re-reading of this issue, however, I am more disappointed with the recitation of the tired old gender tropes that Archie Comics has for so long perpetuated. I was hoping for better.

You should probably stop whatever it is you're doing and read it. Right now.

Simone is leaving Batgirl, gritty and dark, and Batgirl is returning without her, in a new costume and with a lighter touch. In her final issue, Simone points the way from here to there, from dark to light. She provides the space for the character to go, to start over.

This is an exceptional first issue. I hope it has a long run. In these women-in-prison-in-space dramas, it's usually all about building to the violence, building to the breasts and the butts. It's about making you endure the story in order to get the big payoff. DeConnick and De Landro have given us all that in the very first issue, all that payoff and a real story as well.

Things are set in motion in Black Panther #1, set in motion and little more. We don't know where a nation filled with shame and rage may finally go. But right from the start, Coates' has a steady hand, steady and sure.

It is a strange story that Si Spencer introduces in Bodies #1. The tale is organized and structured, but it is still very strange. Six pages by artist Meghan Hetrick tell of the body found in London today; six pages by artist Dean Ormston tell of the body found in Victorian England; six pages by artist Tula Lotay show us where the body is yet to be; six pages by Phil Winslade return us, not quite so far this time, into the body's past, into a world at war. The artists match the feel of the times; their work embodies London present, London future, London past. They allow Spencer's written corpus to take on flesh, like the Word itself.

Captain Marvel and the Carol Corps is a solid addition to Marvel's big-deal summer crossover event, "Secret Wars". This far in, it doesn't yet feel as "out there" as some of the other books, like Planet Hulk or Ghost Racers, and it doesn't seem as central and important as others, like Infinity Gauntlet or Guardians of Knowhere. It is, however, a lot of fun, a solid story, and an interesting ride.

Chrononauts is a thrill ride that embraces the time travel genre while turning it on its head. It is big time fun, consequences be damned.

I suppose that Plastic Man and the Freedom Fighters #1 is a fine book, as far as it goes. John McCrea captures the gloom and despair of a New York City that is ruled by Nazis. And Simon Oliver provides a somber little story about failed heroes at, almost literally, the end of their ropes. But there is nothing special here. Nothing that we haven't seen a million times before over the last forty years. It all seems pretty wrong for these characters; and it is disappointing that so little of their pre-crisis, pre-DC spirit found its way into this book.

Now it all comes back to haunt youYeah, it comes back anytime it wants to

Manupal and Buccellato allow the damp decay of Gotham City to permeate every panel in this third installment in their "Icarus" storyline.

And for heaven's sake don't let God read it. God would hate God Hate's Astronauts even more than he hates astronauts.

I do have a problem with the gratuitous use of the gun on the cover, however, even if I understand that it was probably intended to signal to the reader that this is a spy story rather than a superhero story. But, of course, this isn't just any spy story. This isn't James Bond; it isn't Jason Bourne; it isn't Ethan Hunt. It is Dick Grayson; and Dick Grayson, Nightwing, Robin the Boy Wonder has no business brandishing a gun and especially no business pointing it over the shoulder of the reader at the innocents I happen to know are back there.

Somebody is playing with the clocks. The wind-up kind, especially. There is nothing I can do about it, can do about it. Ain't it funny how time just slips away?

I thought it pretty brave when Hickman and company decided to tell a story with Doctor Doom in the role of God. It seems even gutsier to play that out to its logical end and to tell stories of faith and of doubt. If they are going to do it, I have thought from the very beginning, then they had better do it well. They had better show the depths of faith's comforts and challenges as well as the thrill and terror that both reside at the heart of doubt's promise. I never would have guessed that could be done in just one page. One page. Eight panels.

Not-so-loveable loser? Can't be happy even when things go his way? Stumbling from one thing to another? Kind of guy that attracts friends like Kate?

That is not to say that issue #3 is not a good issue, however. Things start to look up a bit for Banner, and the Hulk's battles with the reanimated corpse of Abomination are rendered magnificently by Bagley. But it is telling that the best scenes are not ones that involve the Hulk or Banner. The issue is, instead, carried along by S.H.I.E.L.D. director Maria Hill and the visiting Avengers. (Despite the cover by Jerome Opena and Dean White, Hawkeye is not one of the guest stars. Nor does Hulk wear his Hulk armor. But I suppose mistakes like that happen, especially when a book is in transition.) The final panel is also pretty great. But, once again, we are left with a Hulk book in which the guest stars, villains, and supporting cast are more interesting than the main characters. Here's hoping that Duggan will remedy the situation by following up on Waid's rehabilitation of Banner in the Indestructible Hulk while imbuing his alter-ego with a bit more personality as well.

Three issues in and I'm duly impressed. From a horror thrill ride that left my heart racing to a science-fiction family adventure, The Infinity Gauntlet is now on the verge of becoming something much more: a gospel of sorts, a bit of the Word made flesh.

All in all, I really like what is going on here. I am a fan of Burroughs and of John Carter. I don't need anyone to change things up to make them more appealing. And I can't wait to see how all of this is resolved, how John Carter along with Dejah Thoris, Tars Tarkas, Woola, and their new companion, a great white ape, manage to save their world from the invading hordes of the Kahori and the madness and vengeance of Captain Joshua Clark, Union soldier and veteran of Manassas, and Sherman's March, and Appomattox, and the Indian Wars.

For most of this book things simply don't work, but for just a moment there, just at the very end, this house almost felt like a home.

Just keep moving, folks. There is nothing to see here, especially nothing scary. This Klarion, this Witch Boy, is a lot more boy than witch.

I'm a big fan of Dan Abnett's Korvac Saga. At least I sure hope to be. There's quite a bit to go yet. But it's two issues in and I'm having fun. It's just what I expected.

But Lindsay and Gieni get it right. What is true of the misadventures of the 4077th is also true of this little comic book. I suppose it might just also be true about life.

I'm struck by this quirky, scruffy little book by Simon and Jenkins. Neverboy is like no imaginary friend I ever had, like no superhero I've ever seen. Simon and Jenkins tell a tight little story that begs to be read twice, that holds a mystery not yet revealed.

In New Avengers Annual #1, Frank Barbiere, writing his first story for Marvel Comics, and artist Marco Rudy present a terrifying tale of Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme. It is a Doctor Strange story unlike any other that I can remember.

Then imagine that thrown into the mix is the biggest, baddest dinosaur from Jurassic World , a dinosaur whose hide has been burned to a blood red scar.

Curt Pires and Jason Copland delve into the mysterious origins of pop stars in their new miniseries from Dark Horse Comics, Pop. It seems that Justin Bieber and his ilk really do have no histories, at least not the kind of normal, human histories that the rest of us share. Instead, they are, as some shrewd observers might already have guessed, created by design, developed in a laboratory, grown in a test tube, produced for one purpose only: to have their fifteen minutes, or fifteen seconds, of fame and to demand our attention just long enough to line the pockets of their investors.

I'm already anticipating the next issue. I'm going to read it the day of its release, panel-by-panel.

Not that this is a perfect Hulk story. It does not break new ground. It does not raise important issues. It does not plumb the heart of the characters. But, frankly, who cares?

There is a lot going in the pages of Savior. Death and mystery and anger and grief. It is a big story about human suffering and the nature of faith. Planes fall from the sky. God walks the Earth. For all of that, it is story told in moments, human moments. Death. Anger. Faith. Doubt. In a way, I suppose, the moments are all that really matter.

Monsters can be heroes and heroes can be monsters. 

Right from the start of Secret Wars #2, it feels like gravity is reversed. Like up is down and down is up. And though I didn't get my bearings as quickly as Alex Power and Dragon Man, I did get them. This feels big. This feels important. This feels new.

Hickman and Ribic have given us something that we probably don't deserve. Here, in the very heart of what is arguably the biggest crossover event in Marvel Comics history, they have given us a character study. In an issue that serves to advance the plot and elaborate the cosmic events at the heart of this big, world breaking, storyline, Hickman and Ribic take us to the heart of the matter and tell a story of pain and grief, of truth and lies. Just when I was expecting sound and fury they give us quiet conversation. Just when I was expecting gods and superheroes, they give us real people cowering before the majesty of faith and of doubt.

I like Soule's and Pulido's She-Hulk. I think they should make it into a TV show. A quirky legal drama. With superheroes.

This week he told me a story, he told me a lot of stories, about that blooming bloody spider, about all the blooming bloody spiders, on all the blooming bloody webs under all the blooming bloody suns who may fall under the blooming bloody rain but always climb up the web again.

I suppose that if I lived in a mirror universe, one where I had never watched Star Trek on television as a child while huddling against impending storms, one in which I had not watched "City on the Edge of Forever" at least a dozen times, then I might have had a different experience with this book. If I could travel back in time and alter my life story so that I had not watched Shatner and Nimoy in these roles so often that I know their faces better than I know my own, then I might have enjoyed this book more. But of course, I don't and I can't. That is my confession. When I read a story like this, one that I know so well, one that has shaped my sense of self, it is like looking into a mirror. I am bound to see myself looking back.

If I had read Strange Sports Stories #1 as a ten year old kid, I think that it would have helped to warp my mind in the way that "Foul Play" warped the mind of the generation before me. Of course I managed just fine. Comics might have been fairly tame in my day, but there were plenty of other sources of depravity for a kid who wanted it badly enough. But still, comicbooks were special, intimate, in a way that movies and television were not. And the "Mature Readers" warning wouldn't have kept me away. I can imagine hiding under the bed sheets, reading the story by flashlight, hoping that my parents wouldn't find it, shivering and then reading it over again, thinking all the while that it proved what I always suspected about the horror at the heart of sports, especially dodge ball.

This Superman is one of us. This is important because we need Superman to remind us that an alien can become an immigrant, and that an immigrant can become a citizen and a friend. We need Superman to remind us to greet our fellow travelers, not with walls and soldiers, but with torch-lit liberty. We need Superman to remind us that among the poor and the tempest tossed sometimes come the fleet and the strong, that among the huddled masses come the heroes that will save us all.

This is the New 52, a new Aquaman, a new Swamp Thing, a new universe. I miss the old, from the time before, but I like it here too. I like Aquaman's menace. I like Swamp Thing's ambiguities. I like the way the colors pop on my new high resolution tablet screen: Aquaman in green, yellow and gold; Swamp Thing in green and black, with hints of blue. I miss the old days, but I like it her too.

Thanos Annual #1 is not a perfect book. It is limited by its purpose and its design as an introduction to something coming that promises to be bigger and better. It is, however, something to behold, a look inside the mind of an all too Godlike human character, a man burdened by his divinity, a madman challenged by moments of sanity. Thanos: Infinity Revelation is coming. I can't wait.

The cosmic metamorphosis, the universe-altering event, that unfolds in Starlin's story looks on the surface like any other crisis across infinite worlds, like the same sort of cosmic reordering that comic book readers have grown accustomed to over the years, the same sort of galactic show-down with god-like powers that Starlin himself has given us so many times before. But, as is sometimes the case when Starlin is at his best, the revelation here is personal before it is cosmic. The personality, and the madness, of Thanos and Warlock shape reality itself; the universe, like the nothingness that came before it, is desecrated by their self-awareness. And as it turns out, the greatest transformations in this story occur not among the stars, not in the above and beyond, not in the court of Infinity and Eternity, but in the characters themselves. For a cosmic-themed comic book like this one, that is truly a revelation.

But, and this is important so I'm saying it again, just in case you missed it the first time. It is the most important thing that I have to tell you, a secret I learned one summer long, long ago, a secret the gives me hope and courage, a secret that I sometimes forget but that I was reminded of this week as I read this comicbook.

Overall, the The Multiversity has been a compelling series, stronger in its individual installments than in its overarching storyline. Though I, for one, would have liked to have seen more of the band of heroes featured in this issue, would have liked for it to have been more of a story and less of an anthology.

It is hard to know what is going on in The Multiversity: Guidebook #1. It feels as if I have missed something, as if I have been dropped into the middle of things. It's like picking up a comicbook halfway through a storyarc. You're not sure who the players are, not sure what has gone before. In that way it is like life, I suppose, into which we find ourselves plunged without preparation, forced to spend our days putting the pieces together, connecting the dots, drawing conclusions on the wall.

Mastermen is a masterwork.  A perfect 10. The greatest issue yet in this stunningly good series. Bravo, Mr. Morrision! Bravo!

So. I admire this comicbook. I respect this comicbook. But I cannot love this comicbook.

"I sometimes wonder," says the Immortal Man, "how we all might have turned out if we'd never had to fight a war."

All I know, the only clue that I have as to how to read these stories, is found in the fact that the comicbooks in Morrison's tales are dangerous things. They contain a threat and a challenge to every world in which they appear. The virus they contain is more dangerous than any techno-virus, any Bizarro-virus. They contain the most dangerous thing of all.

I never got that Captain Marvel action figure. But Morrison's "Thunderworld Adventures #1  makes that fact a little easier to take.

But this reads more like philosophy than like satire. And maybe it is meant to be a philosophical trick, like Wittgenstein's, who wrote philosophy in order to dissolve philosophical problems and make philosophy finally go away. But what makes for good philosophy can make for a bad comic book. And, all things considered, this is a bad comicbook.

But Squirrel Girl is a breath of fresh air: funny, charming, quirky, strong, brave, unbeatable.

There is a lot riding on Jason Aaron's latest Thor story arc. This is serious stuff. I hope he knows this; I think he does. Just in case he doesn't, let me say this...This Halloween, if she wants to, my daughter can dress like her favorite superhero. Not just as a girl dressed like Thor. She can be the real thing. She can be Thor with red cape and Mjolnir. It will be a good fit.

There was always something more than wacky about those Saturday cartoons, something down-right weird, maybe even menacing. Wacky Raceland puts that weirdness and menace on display.

Aaron and Del Mundo had me, Weirdworld had me, right from the start.

I'm intrigued by where this may be going. Will the Amazons be back? I sure hope so. And Ryall promises Mermen. Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons vs. Mermen? This could turn into one big joke. But, somehow, I don't think so. My only worry is about the humans. Humans do have a way of spoiling things.