Every Day Is Like Wednesday

If you're struggling with the math--or, like me, marveling at how fast time seems to pass once you reach 40--it should perhaps be noted that DC Comics is celebrating the 25 years that have passed since Harley Quinn's first appearance on Batman: The Animated Series in 1992. She wouldn't actually debut in comics until 1993, in an issue of cartoon tie-in comic Batman Adventures, and she wouldn't join the DC Comics Universe proper until 1999's Batman: Harley Quinn special. Perhaps because of the character's non-standard path--originating in a cartoon adaptation of the comics, then gradually working her way into the comics--it's appropriate that the Harley Quinn 25th Anniversary Special tackles various versions of the character.

I'm actually a little surprised at how slim a package it is though, given the character's seemingly exponentially growing popularity. It's just a $4.99 floppy, with four short stories totaling 32 story pages and six pin-ups. In terms of size and number of high-profile contributors, it's not much bigger than any of the many Harley Quinn one-shots and special issues DC put out when it was clear that they had a hit on their hands with the post-Flashpoint, second volume of Harley Quinn (Because DC relaunched all their titles during their "Rebirth" initiative, however, we are now on our third volume of a Harley Quinn ongoing series, although the creators and direction have remained the seam between the second and the third).

Of those pin-ups, my favorite is definitely the one contributed by Babs Tarr, who draws her own hybrid Harley with her old Gotham City Sirens co-stars Catwoman and Poison Ivy.
Tarr's an amazing talent, and particularly good at drawing sexy ladies. The issue is almost worth five bucks for her pin-up alone. The others are by Annie Wu (whose image prominently features Harley's pet hyenas, engaged in helping her wreck a psychiatrist's office), Bengal, Dustin Nguyen and Greg Tocchini, Kamome Shirahama (Looking at these reminded me of the old Gallery one-shots that DC used to publish, but have long since abandoned; I imagine with the price of comics now being what it is, it would be harder to make those seem like they were worth whatever the publisher sold them for, but I used to really enjoy seeing so many different artists' takes on particular characters in 1992's The Batman Gallery, 1994's The Sandman: A Gallery of Dreams and A Death Gallery, 1997's JLA Gallery and so forth).

The first of the four stories is set firmly in current continuity, and is by the regular Harley Quinn writers Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, with Conner also drawing it, something that happens far too infrequently (although, truth be told, the Harley Quinn monthly and its spin-offs have all generally had pretty good art, certainly better than that of your average DC Comic).

I had a hard time getting through this story, having skipped it the first time through the book and having to try two more times before I read it. As much as I like Conner's art, when it comes to Conmiotti's Harley comics, I am not a fan. This one has their character Red Tool--pronounce it "Deadpool," but with an "R" instead of a "D"--right there in the first panel, and when I see him my eyes roll so hard it makes reading comics somewhat difficult for a while afterwards. He is in a two-page framing sequence with Harley, between which is a "lost scene" from their 2015 Harley Quinn Road Trip Special co-starring Poison Ivy and Catwoman, probably most notable for all the great artists who contributed to it (like Moritat and the too-rarely-seen-at-DC-these-days Bret Blevins and Mike Manley).

Killing time before killing some dudes, Harley tells Deadpool Red Tool about how Vegas casino owner Yosemite Sam offered the three of them an ell-expenses paid stay in one of his hotels, and they got thrown out of it.

Harley's co-creator Paul Dini scripts the next story, "Birthday Blues," which seems to be set in The Animated Series continuity, or at least adjacent to it. Rather than being paired with Bruce Timm, the noticeably absent other creator of the character, Dini is working with regular Harley Quinn artist Chad Hardin. It's a pretty fun little story with the meta angle of Harley celebrating her 25th birthday, and how The Joker and Poison Ivy are involved in said celebration. There's a twist within a twist at the end, and as short as it is, those twists serve to pretty perfectly define all three characters and their relationships.

As great as it would have been to see Timm or someone who worked on Batman Adventures draw this, it was actually really interesting to see Hardin drawing the costumes from the TV cartoon, adapting the designs into his own style, which is very different than that of Timm (And, if you've spent as many hours of your life as I have on that show, it's fun picking out which designs from which season Hardin chooses, and to what extent; his Catwoman, for example, is wearing a costume that looks like a compromise between that of the first season and her more recent Darwyn Cooke-designed comic book cat suit. The Joker has the hairstyle and pointy-nose of TAS's redesigned Joker, but not the weird eyes; Killer Croc looks as he did on the cartoon, but with spikes. And so on.)

The most surprising stories are the two that follow. The first of these is by writer Daniel Kibblesmith and artist David Lafuente (a great artist who I really wish I could see more of, preferably on a regular, ongoing basis). Entitled "Harley Quinn & Friends In...Somewhere That's Green!", it is perhaps a little too timely in its reference to a deadly hurricane bearing down on the city (New York here, not Gotham).

Gal pals Harley and Ivy are in a grocery store to get supplies, when Swamp Thing grows out of the produce stand. He needs Ivy's help because of her connection to The Green, and Harley basically invites herself along. The Swamp Thing/Harley Quinn rapport was interesting enough that I kind of wish DC hadn't cancelled Harley's Little Black Book, as I wonder if it was fun watching those two interact because the short space here meant Kibblesmith could squeeze in all the potential good bits, or if the characters really could have the chemistry to carry a whole over-sized comic story.

If nothing else, Kibblesmith gets Swamp Thing in a raincoat and rain hat for a few panels; that's awesome.

As I mentioned, I really liked Lafuente's art, but it was especially good in this story, which had enough of a comedic tone that he could fill the backgrounds with loose, cartoony, caricature-like drawings, and go pretty wild with Swamp Thing. (Colorist John Rauch deserves some props here too, particuarly given his way with Harley's hair.

The final story was probably my favorite, and it came from the unlikely team of writer Chip Zdarsky and artist Joe Quinones, who are more Marvel guys than DC guys at this point (much to DC's detriment, if you ask me!). Entitled "Bird Psychology," this is the first story in the book to involve Batman, and, of course, Robin.

It's set somewhere...unclear-ish. Harley's look here is unique to this story, not lining up with that of TAS, The New 52, or the Margot Robie-in-Suicide Squad inspired "Rebirth" redesign. There's a Robin heavily involved, but the costume doesn't really give us any clues; it looks closer to Tim Drake's original than any other design, but then, the TAS Dick Grayson's suit looked a lot like Tim's comics costume, and the post-Flashpoint Dick also wore a more Tim-like costume...this one has some of the weird elements of Dick's New 52 Robin get-up but, like Harley's costume, is unique to this story (Based on the dialogue, in which Harley intuits that he's an orphan, it is probably meant to be Dick). The Joker and Batman both look like their TAS selves or their post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint selves, but neither of them is too terribly easy placed in any particular milieu by their duds alone. All that said, the red skies, the black buildings and the particular designs and costuming of Commissioner Gordon, Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya all definitely suggest that this is supposed to be a Quinones-ized TAS story.

This is, in broad strokes, a Batman and Robin vs. The Joker and Harley Quinn story, in which the superhero and his archvillain do battle, assigning their sidekick and moll to fight. The Joker underestimates Harley as per usual, and she ends up choosing to do good and play hero on the sly, because as crazy a bad girl as she might be, she's not, like, evil. Harley, and, to a lesser extent, Robin, are the focus of the story.

As well constructed as Zdarsky's plot is, it was the little elements that I really dug; he does a fine job of making The Joker seem like a completely insane criminal without having to, like, dwell on his homicidal tendencies. The story just cuts from The Joker at his work bench, plotting, to his plot already in progress, where Batman and Robin are fighting goons in adult pajamas, The Joker is wearing an old timey night shirt and night cap with sheep oven mitts on his hands, and there's a giant, angry Batman Tsum Tsum with a mouth full of striped missiles...? The creators do a pretty good job of nailing '90s Joker, particularly TAS-style Joker, where he could be menacing, scary and completely insane, without also having to be, like, Freddy Krueger or whatever.

Quinones is a fine artist, and this particular script allows him to pack in all sorts of great details; every available space of The Joker's hideout has an Easter Egg to some previous Joker story from some previous medium in it.

So while I didn't love all of this, the good in it definitely outweighed the bad, and it's certainly a reliable purchase for the casual Harley Quinn fan.

Writer Cullen Bunn and company's between-events event series Monsters Unleashed had far fewer tie-ins than Civil War II. In fact, it had so few tie-ins--just eight--that they could all fit in a single trade paperback collection and that, in fact, is exactly what Monsters Unleashed: Battleground is. Rather than taking over issues of the ongoing monthlies starring particular characters, Marvel decided to publish specially, weirdly numbered issues of those series in which to put the Monsters Unleashed tie-in stories, separating them from whatever the ongoing storylines in those titles might be. So, for example, instead of taking over an issue of the Mark Waid-written Avengers, Marvel published Avengers #1.MU. This was their strategy for the Age of Ultron event's tie-ins as well.

I'm not sure if it's all that great a strategy in terms of sales, as it demarcates these issues as ones readers of participating titles like Avengers need not read if they are not also reading Monsters Unleashed. Particularly since the creative teams are different. These days, the artists changing every arc or so might not be that big a deal, but, for example, Avengers #1.MU isn't written by Waid, nor is Champions #1.MU. In fact, none of these seem to be the work of the regular titles' writers.

I think this strategy likely runs counter to the traditional conventional wisdom regarding crossover events--part of the point of them is to get readers who are interested in the event to check out books they don't already read and might not otherwise have tried--but the mainstream comics market seems so broken, or at least so changed since the days when crossover events still seemed like events, that maybe the publisher has decided it's better for the health of the ongoings not to risk associating them with crossovers, and perhaps prompting readers to jump off...?

While I can't speak to that aspect of the comics, I can speak to the quality of them, and so I will.

It should be noted that the cover is kind of terrible (the cover from the Avengers issue, featuring a bunch of recognizable-ish characters asi t does, or from Spider-Man/Deadpool #1.MU, featuring two very marketable characters and a solid gag, might have been preferable). Ron Lim's drawing of said cover is fine, I suppose, and it does feature Marvel's flagship character alongside some monsters, but the monsters are pretty poorly chosen. They are The Blip, Devil Dinosaur, Orrgo and Tim Boom Ba (I'm just guessing on that last one, but it looks an awful lot like TBB).

Of the four monsters, only Orrgo appears in the comics collected under the cover at all, and Orrgo's appearance is limited to a one-panel cameo. The monsters that the various heroes--The Avengers, The (All-New) X-Men, The Champions, The Inhumans, The Guardians of The Galaxy and Deadpool, Doctor Strange and The (Totally Awesome) Hulk--are engaged in battle with throughout this collection are The Leviathons, the alien monsters invading Earth. Of the Marvel monsters, only Googam and Xemnu have roles within these stories, and you'll note a distinct lack of either Googam or Xemnu on that cover.

Avengers #1.MU by writer Jim Zub, artist Sean Izaaske and colorist Frank D'Armata

Something I hadn't noted until just now that may have been another reason Marvel decided to publish these tie-ins as standalone issues rather than part of the regular series? They apparently upped the price by a whole dollar, so that each of these things ran you $4.99, instead of the customary $3.99. Of course, they are longer than the standard issue--this story is 29 pages--but man, that's a lot of money when one considers how inconsequential the story is (and a good argument for trade-waiting; this thing costs $29.99, but the individual issues would have cost you $39.92...plus tax, probably!).

Writer Jim Zub basically takes a scene from the first issue of Monsters Unleashed, re-presents it so that he and artist Sean Izaaske can essentially do a cover version of it, and than adds in a bunch of filler as a way of delaying the tie-in. It's really an awful lot of padding.

Amazing Spider-Man Peter Parker gets a tip about a mob meeting in Boston, something that he himself notes isn't really the kind of thing he spends too much time on these days ("Nowadays, I usually leave street level stuff to my younger protegee, but for the sake of nostalgia..."), and as he has a flight to catch in eight short hours, he's not sure he has time to deal with it. So he calls in the then-current adjective-less Avengers roster--Captain America Sam Wilson, The Vision, The Wasp Nadia Pym, Hercules and Thor--to help him. They too spend a few panels discussing whether or not this is worthy of The Avengers' time. So while Zub's dialogue might be snappy and clever, it's probably problematic when the superheroes themselves are second-guessing the plot contrivance.

Luckily, there's a supervillain involved, to justify the involvement of a half-dozen Avengers, two of them with god-like powers, and they have to fight The Controller for a few pages. Right where what reads just like a fill-in issue of Avengers should end, a Leviathon attacks. And then another. This passage of the issue--a full 14-pages--is right out of Monsters Unleashed. It's the same scene: Same dialogue, same action, same everything, just staged and drawn differently, and with a few extra panels between the ones it is essentially just recreating from Monsters Unleashed.

Looked at one way, I suppose that's actually kind of interesting, given that Izaaske obviously didn't have time to see what Monsters Unleashed #1 artist Steve McNiven drew, and so one curious about process could look at the issues side by side and compare and contrast how Izaaske and McNiven both approached identical elements in overlapping scripts, but man, I don't know. I read both in trades I borrowed from the library, and basically just felt a sort of deja vu that turned to mild irritation when I realized what Zub was doing; if I paid for the comics, I'd be downright pissed that I was essentially paying for filler plus a repeat.

There's a last page original to this comic, in which Spider-Man suddenly disappears before the others' eyes. It's a very weird sort of tie-in, and while it's fine looking and well-written on a mechanical level, it was basically just a huge disappointment. Given all the "toys" Monsters Unleashed offered, the Avengers tie-in eschewed them all. It is thus unsurprising that the issue isn't much fun.

Spider-Man/Deadpool #1.MU by writer Joshua Corin, artist Tigh Walker and colorist Rachelle Rosenberg

Despite occurring after the opening of Monsters Unleashed, in which monsters are literally falling from the sky, this issue is similar to the Avengers tie-in in that it sets up what reads like it might have been a normal Spider-Man/Deadpool story, only to throw in a Leviathon. After two in a row, I began to wonder if that was an intentional choice, to speak in some meta way about how crossovers are unwelcome invasions of ongoing narratives, as the Leviathons come hurtling from above into stories already in progress and then derail them as the heroes have to rather suddenly change focus (this will be even more apparent in the next issue in the collection). Of course, if that is in intent, then the format--standalone, weirdly-numbered one-shots rather than issues of the regular series--would have helped sell it even better.

Spider-Man has been plucked from the last page of Avengers #1.MU and deposited into Spider-Man/Deadpool #1.MU because a coven of private girls school witches outside of Toronto had captured Deadpool and cast a spell to summon his "heartmate" (they were aiming for his demon wife, but got Spidey instead). The plan was to put the spirit of their dead headmistress into said demon wife, but they have to settle for Spider-Man. While the pair are trying to sort things out, a Leviathon crashlands and starts heading towards downtown Toronto.

Spider-Man fights it from the outside, while trying to stave off his possession by the witch, who is slowly taking him over, while Deadpool tries to fight it from the outside, after he is swallowed whole by it. Eventually, and with some unexpected help, they kill it.

Given the characters, it is appropriate that Corin's script is a little sillier and a lot funnier than the previous tie-in or Monsters Unleashed itself, and given that I haven't yet read a collection of Spider-Man/Deadpool, I enjoyed the chemistry between the two...in large part because it's unusual to see Spider-Man play the straight man, as whenever he's around other super-people he's generally portrayed as the irritating, joke-cracking character.

Tigh Walker's art was nice too. Not only does he do a good job of getting his leads to emote, despite being handicapped by their full face-masks, and distinguishing them rather sharply despite their similar costumes, his monster is cool-looking and his art in general has a slightly quirky look and appealing energy to it.

All-New X-Men #1.MU by writer Jeremy Whitley, pencilers Carolos Barberi and Ron Lim, inkers Walden Wong and Terry Pallot and colorist artist Cris Peter

The "All-New" X-Men team is the one that would become the stars of current book X-Men: Blue. Though this is only a single crossover event back, its team status quo is already dated, as it was an entire X-Men franchise reconfiguration and relaunch ago. The team here consists of the time-lost original X-Men, minus Cyclops and Jean and plus All-New Wolverine Laura Kinney, Oya (although Idie Okonkwo pretty much never, ever uses her mutant name, does she?) and Genesis. They are visiting New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and Whitley basically approaches the story as a Laura team-up with Gambit, in which the rest of the team play the dual roles of supporting characters and time-wasters/space-fillers.

Like her namesake, Wolvie is more interested in going off on her own for a side mission than any sort of tourism or team socializing, and she and Gambit team-up for a swamp adventure. In perhaps the best, most deliberate example of Monsters Unleashed-preempting-a-story, Whitley doesn't even bother to get his story off the ground. The villain who Gambit and Wolverine are tracking, one Doctor Chimera, is in the middle of explaining his plan when a Leviathon crashlands and, within three panels, devours Doctor Chimera, putting an end to that plot (as for how Whitley fills his 31-pages, much of it involves the X-Men who aren't Gambit and Laura running around New Orleans doing fun stuff, until the Leviathon enters and they must all team-up to destroy it. They do.

The Champions #1.MU by writer Jeremy Whitley, artists Ro Stein and Ted Brandt and colorist Frank D'Armata

In keeping with The Champions ongoing's focus on fictionalized versions of real-world conflicts, Whitley has our young, activist heroes showing up at the site of a riot-in-the-making that echoes the protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline (although here Roxxon is involved, making the already fairly black-and-white real world issues even starker black-and-white, given that Roxxon is basically Evil Incarnate in the Marvel Universe). The company has hired a team of young super-people with incredibly dumb names--Crush, Hotness, Might, Panic, Cursed Cass--to provide "security." These mercenaries, who collectively call themselves The Freelancers, are actually there to put down the protests, but, when The Champions get there, they provide someone for the heroes to fight.

In the venerable Marvel tradition, the conflict stops when they are faced with a bigger, more pressing threat: A couple of Leviathons. The first of these looks a little like a gigantic, spider-esque creature made out of lava, and the second is a more traditional giant lizard thing, with acid spit. Some of the more useful/less evil Freelancers help the Champions put down the Leviathons and rescue the many, many civilians who were there.

Whitely's dialogue is mostly pretty sharp, with an emphasis on zingers. The Freelancers are all pretty lame, but in at least a few cases they seem to be lame on purpose. Whitley has Ms. Marvel embiggen to kaiju wrestling-size, which was a nice application of her powers, and ends the tie-in with the team rushing off to L.A. to fight the giant eyeball Leviathon they tangled with in the pages of Monsters Unleashed proper (So props to Whitley for handling his tie-in better than Zub handled the Avengers one).

Doctor Strange #1.MU by writer Chip Zdarsky, artist Julian Lopez, inker Scott Hanna and colorist Frank D'Armata

This is the strongest of the tie-ins, as it abandons the format of the previous ones--a regular adventure followed by pages of Leviathon fighting--and ties into the most appealing part of the crossover series proper, and Monsters Unleashed's mostly unfulfilled promise. It opens in the midst of the big battle outside of San Diego, in which the Marvel heroes and the Marvel monsters fought alongside each other against the invading army of Leviathons.

Our hero is also our narrator, and Doctor Strange is in way over his head, reduced to using magical weapons and items, having been greatly de-powered at the start of his new series (Remember that Monsters Unleashed had five art teams, and Doctor Strange is one of the characters who suffered the most from the various art teams not all being on the same page; his costume design goes back and forth from his current one, his old one and back to his current one. Watch for the change in the color of his cape throughout. Similarly, Star-Lord's costume changes, depending on the artist).

This is the only story in this collection in which the monsters from the Prelude play any role whatsover. Fin Fang Foom and the previously mentioned Orrgo have cameos, and Goom and Googam both have speaking parts, with Googam actually playing a part in Zdarsky's story, which is basically a Strange/Googam team-up.

Googam is somewhat embarrassed by the fact that his dad intervenes to save him from a Leviathon at one point, and when Googam resums his battle against it, Doctor Strange hits it with an arrow that teleports it away, either saving Googam's life or robbing the Son of Goom from his victory, depending on whose take you wish to rely on (that is, either your own eyes or Googam's word). A few days later, Googam strides down New York City streets in a an old school Ben Grimm-style "disguise" of a trench coat and wide brimmed hat--which naturally looks tiny atop his enormous head--and goes to confront Strange.

Rather than fighting him, Strange recruits him for a mission to regain his honor: Helping him track down and put down the Leviathon he had teleported to a random location. Hijinks ensue.

Spider-Man Peter Parker has a few small but key scenes, and it is perhaps noteworthy that one of the strategies Strange employs against this Leviathon is the same one that Deadpool and Spidey used against theirs in Toronto a few tie-ins back. Here it is much more effective, however. I'm not sure if it was in the back of Zdarsky's head when he was scripting this or not, but it echoes the way in which Googam was killed at the end of his first appearance.

Artist Julian Lopez does a pretty superb job here. The monsters and super-characters all look appropriately monstrous and super, but Lopez really manages to sell the absurdity of the clash between, say, Googam and a city street, and to he does a fine job of wringing emotion out of the bulbous-headed monster. The funniest part of the last page isn't what happens, although given the player it happens to, it is pretty funny, but the look on Googam's face as he reacts to it.


Uncanny Inhumans #1.MU by writer Paul Allor, artist Brian Level and colorist Jordan Boyd

Huh. So I think this is the first Inhumans comic I've ever read. I mean, I have obviously read comics in which The Inhumans appear--how could one not, these days?--but this is the first one with the word Inhumans right there in the title.

What's a little weird about it is that the thing people are always saying about how Marvel is trying to make the Inhumans into the X-Men? That is basically what this reads like: An X-Men comic without the X-Men.

The lead character is someone named Swain, who wears a fancy costume that, these being the Inhumans, I can't tell is meant to be a hip fashion statement, or if that's just how pilots for the Inhumans dress. But she's a pilot who has the mutant Inhuman power to touch the minds of others around her; she leaves the superheroing to the other (Medusa, Crystal, Karnak, Triton, not-really-an-Inhuman Johnny Storm and the seemingly identically powered Inferno).

While they are fighting a Leviathon in Italy (as seen in the pages of Monsters Unleashed), Swain is flying civilians out of harm's way in a space ship, but ends up having to try to lead them to safety on foot, pursued by a particularly scary-looking Leviathon. Forced to fight with her powers in a way she never has before, she has to sacrifice a piece of her self to save the others.

It's...fine. I can't say it endeared the characters to me, and I remain mostly baffled by Marvel's insistence on putting them front and center in the hopes that they will someday, somehow catch on. It didn't quite answer the lingering question I have about the Inhumans, which is why they are so front and center in public at the moment, and why they have become what at leas here feels like a traditional superhero team, complete with a member of the Fantastic Four on their "roster."

The art by Brian Level is among the strongest and most distinct in this collection. I mentioned the design of the one Leviathon, but everything here has an interesting energy and a sense of herky-jerky movement to it. I liked the look of it a lot.

Guardians of The Galaxy #1.MU by writers Chad Bowers and Chris Sims, artist David Baldeon and colorist Marcio Menyz

The Guardians story somehow manages to spend all 30 pages around one of their fight scenes from Monsters Unleashed, as the team tangles with a Leviathon at a naval base in San Diego. Well, I shouldn't say "somehow," as I know how. To help fill those pages, Bowers and Sims reveal a connection between Groot and the particular Leviathon, explored in a flashback set on Groot's homeworld when he looked a bit more like he did in the latest Guardians of The Galaxy movie, as opposed to his design here, which is one I'm not terribly fond of (It's the same he had in Civil War II, with the green "hair", and the vines acting as connective tissues around his wooden limbs.

The Guardians' status quo at the time of this one-shot was pretty fraught. From what I understand, they were kinda sorta broken up at this point, and all stuck on Earth doing their own things. They are together in this issue mainly because Marvel decided to publish a Guardians of the Galaxy tie-in issue to Monsters Unleashed, as far as I can tell.

Bowers and Sims do okay with what they have here, but they don't really manage to keep from the readers how artificial the premise is.

Totally Awesome Hulk #1.MU by writers Bryan Edward Hill and Leah Williams, artists Ty Templeton and Jahnoy Lindsay and colorists Mat Lopes and Esther Sanz

The final book in the collection fills its over-sized space in a way unlike any of the previous issues. It is split into two stories, both with their own creative teams, and connected so that one leads into the other. The first story is by Hill and Templeton (whose artwork I didn't even recognize; that guy has a pretty tremendous range of styles, and his work looks good in all of them). Set in Seoul, South Korea, it features Amadeus Cho being called before Korean superhero and apparently government agent White Fox, who asks for his help in finding and stopping a monster. The monster looks like Godzilla wearing bits of armor, and no sooner has Cho beat it up that he realizes that something is wrong, and this whole story must be a dream...which it is!

The second story, by Williams and Lindsay, features Hulk waking from that dream to find its cause: Xemnu, The Hulk Titan. A Marvel monster dating from the same era as Orrgo, Googam and company, Xemnu was left out of the Prelude for some reason...and if he appeared at all in Monsters Unleashed, I have already forgotten it. Like his fellow Marvel monsters, Xemnu is trying to save the world from the invading Leviathons...but he's trying to do it by conquering the world. He has put everyone in Seoul in a trance, feeding them pleasant dreams, until Cho managed to shake it off. The art on this story is particularly good, and there are a few pretty bananas-looking transformation sequences, in which Lindsay is able to illustrate, say, Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk in a single image, varying the sizes of the Hulk's body parts to show him growing.

Then that's followed by...wait, that's three stories, with three distinct art styles. But the credits only list two stories by two artists...

Okay, wait, wait, wait. According to Comics.org, Hill and Templeton did indeed create that first story. The second one is also written by Hill, but drawn by the uncredited (in the collection) Ricardo López Ortiz. That's who did the great art in the Xemnu sequence (Each of the stories has it's own title, by the way; this second story isn't included in the table of contents at all). Then there is a third story; that's the one by Leah Williams and Jahnoy Lindsay. It features Amadeus' younger sister and fellow super-genius Maddy using her genius to track down galactic monster-hunting expert Lady Hellbender and then Oracle-ing her through a dangerous facility in exchange for useful monster intel.

Man. I can't believe Marvel fucked up the table of contents for this book so badly...

Captain America: Sam Wilson Vol. 4: #TakeBackTheShield

Is this the first comic book with a hashtag as a title? It seems like surely someone must have used a hashtag as the title of a comic--or the sub-title, I guess?--by this point, but, if so, I'm having trouble thinking of one right this moment. That particular hashtag is one that we've been told is trending on the Marvel Universe's Twitter, powered by a right-wing, conservative media effort to somehow force the former Falcon Sam Wilson, who Captain America passed the shield and the codename to when he was turned into an old man, to stop being Captain America now that the original is back to being a young man again.

The effort has been just one of the many ways in which writer Nick Spencer has depicted elements of America reacting negatively to Sam's attempts to be a more political, more engaged, more representative Captain America and, of course, simple good old-fashioned American racism. In essence, Spencer has been writing Sam Wilson-as-Captain America as Barack Obama-as-president, at least in terms of the shit he has to deal with while just trying to do his very important, very stressful job. Surprisingly (and thankfully, given how easily a series with such a premise could be sanctimonious and, worse, boring), Spencer has often been able to play the tensions for laughs, as Sam finds himself caught in the middle of an America where he's not left enough to please the left, nor right enough to please the right. Not unlike Obama was.

I'm actively dreading the end of this series, and Sam's resumption of The Falcon identity, which seems to be something that's in the process of happening now...certainly it will already be past-tense by the time we get to the near, already-solicited future. Not only is the premise great and the action/comedy/political tone engaging, but Spencer's constant attempts to craft "ripped from the headlines" stories, like a particularly crazy iteration of the process the Law and Order writing room used to use for story ideas, keeps the series fresh and, well, weird. I know I've been talking and writing about the politics of Spencer's Captain America books a lot lately (here and below), but while one has to parse his other Captain America title, this one defies parsing. There are some stories where the book and/or Spencer don't seem to be taking a stand of any kind, other than to make fun of everyone...at least, that seems to be the case in issue #17, which we'll get to in a bit. There's something South Park-ian about that...which I mean as a compliment, although maybe not-so-much (Please note I haven't seen an episode of South Park since the Bush administration, and that comparison may not be the least bit relevant anymore).

In a somewhat palpable sense, this volume seems to be marking time, waiting for the Captain America: Steve Rogers to complete it's build up to Secret Empire so that the climax of the multi-book, multi-year epic can begins.

Both Captains America team-up to take on Flag-Smasher (Confession: I love Flag-Smasher), a hostage situation that results in a death...and Steve talking to his Hydra cohort Docter Selvig about his villainous plans. Then Joaquin invites Sam and Rage to see D-Man wrestle in an attempt to bring the pair together "through the power of wrestling" after their conflict in the previous volume. Then Misty gets a spotlight issue in which she borrows Cap's shield and takes on The Slug over an extremely weird criminal plot that could only happen in the Marvel Universe, with its superhero reflection of our own world (there's a great visual gag in here featuring Lady Stilt-Man, by the way). And then, in the most bizarre of the stories, The Falcon and Rage team-up to first confront and then save an Ann Coulter analogue politically aligned with the book's Bill O'Reilly analogue, who is given a heavily protested speech about how immigrants are the worst at a college campus.

In this superhero political cartoon, the most vociferous of the Berkeley protesters are played by, well...
And check this out:
Yeah, see, Spencer is kinda hard to parse on this book, isn't he?

What's worse is that while the issue is mostly a superhero action comedy take on real, real-world issues, with The Falcon serving as the exasperated middle between The Bombshells ("Her very presence is damaging to those who have suffered-- --and for that she's gotta die!") and the not-Ann Coulter, it then ends with a resumption of superhero drama, ending with a cliffhanger that threatens the pleasant enough status quo of the issue.

The art chores on these four issues are divvied up between Paul Renaud (Issues #14 and #17) and Angel Unzueta (#15 and #16), the latter of whom gets an assist from Szymon Kudranski on the latter issue.

If four issues seems like too few for a trade, don't worry; there's also a reprint of a classic Captain America comic by Mark Gruenwald, Kieron Dwyer and Al Milgrom. From 1988's Captain America #344, "Don't Tread On Me," it has The Serpent Society attacking Washington D.C., and turning then-President Regan into a snake-man for a time.

Its relevance to the trade will be obvious as you read, given that it features Battlestar and D-Man, and this story is in fact referenced in Sam Wilson #15, right down to Unzueta using one of Dwyer's poses. It's a fun comic, although I imagine I would be annoyed to see it here had I paid $17.99 for this trade collection of just four issues of a $3.99 comic and the reprint, which isn't used a bonus so much as justification for the price point. Luckily, I just borrowed this from the library, so I can't care much what Marvel charged for it.


Captain America: Steve Rogers Vol.2: The Trial of Maria Hill

Writer Nick Spencer did a pretty fine job of slowly unraveling a new, cosmic cube-created origin for Steve Rogers via flashback in the first six issues of Captain America: Steve Rogers while simultaneously revealing Cap's layered agendas, as both a secret agent for Hydra and an agent with his own plans to take out and replace Hydra leader The Red Skull. In this volume, also drawn by Jesus Saiz and Javier Pina, things get much, much more complicated, and maybe not necessarily in a good way.

On the flashback front, Spencer and company are now covering the years 1935-1940 or so, and the limited palette of black, white and red that color artists Saiz and Rachelle Rosenberg were using has now become black, white and Hydra green (They do break out the reds for drama occasionally, though). The years are significant too because the earliest of the revised flashbacks, which occurred when Steve was still a toddler and thus didn't seem to screw around with his previous timeline too drastically, now depict his schooling at some weird Hydra compound (where he makes an unlikely best friend) and then goes on to reveal Steve's life as a young man, his continual rejection from military service in the U.S. Army and his association with "Project Rebirth," which goes very, very differently here. We're now at a point where the previous history isn't just "here's some stuff that might have happened that readers were unaware of" to "Basically What If...? territory".

In the present, both of Captain America and The Red Skull's machinations are approaching byzantine. Skull and Hydra embroil their movement in a sort of civil war that grants them a degree of territory (and which moves their real world analogy away from some sort of weird alt-right/ISIS hybrid into more of an "ISIS, but with Nazi ideology" area), while Steve is engineering some plan involving a massively destabilizing Chitauri invasion and maneuvering between and around Captain Marvel, SHIELD, the Skull and the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the Maria Hill's-in-trouble-for-"Standoff" plotline and the effort to pass a hyper-inflated version of the Patriot Act move forward.

(What's really weird is that the stakes have gotten so high and plot elements now include things like alien invaders and a global force field that we're well beyond some sort of Real World Plus milieu, and yet here in the actually real real world the actual president of the real United States of America is using Twitter to provoke a nuclear-armed dysfunctional nation state, so I guess it's hard to actually accept things like this as "unrealistic" anymore. "Alien invasion" didn't sound any more unlikely than "President Donald J. Trump stumbling into a nuclear war in Asia" like, two years ago, you know?)

Much of the narration is delivered in the form of Cap talking to the person he has stashed behind the forbidden door in his ally Dr. Selvig's lab/base, and while it's kinda sorta a big surprise, the biggest surprise is on the last page, when Taskmaster finds a recording of the shocking moment from the first issue.

While I'm intensely curious as to how we get from this point to events that I am somewhat aware of unfolding in the Marvel Universe at this very moment, and what various players in this drama will do, and, in particular, what Cap's "new" origin will be, and the explanations given for why he was so deep undercover for so long if he's always been a Hydra double agent (like, why not strike during the first Civil War or Secret Invasion or whatever?), I can certainly see why so many Marvel fans might be sick of this storyline. All the plotting that was fairly engaging for six issues is growing tiresome after five more issues, and I still haven't gotten to Secret Empire proper yet.

As for the politics of Spencer's storyline, there were a few bits of interest in this volume. Of some note is a few lines of dialogue near the conclusion of this trade, wherein we see who Cap has been telling his story too, and he says this:

I understand how it all sounds right now--

--You probably think I'm insane. Or brainwashed. Or, maybe you just think the cosmic cube changed me, that I'm the aberration, and not--all of this.

Just Cap being aware of the possibility that Kobik re-wrote him into a Hydra agent seems like kind of a big deal, almost as big a deal as his suggestion that it isn't the cube that is ultimately responsible for his actions...which might be something for fans who care deeply about the character to freak out about, if that were the case. (As I said when discussing the first volume though, Spencer's scripts seem to indicate as bluntly as possible that the cube made Cap a fascist, so I guess if there's a twist of any kind, it will be a big deal.) The fact that the person he's speaking to isn't convinced, however, also makes me question the nature of Kobik and what she/it did to alter Cap and Selvig; did she just change their memories, rather than time itself? (I guess that would be an easier lift, although difficulty shouldn't be an issue for a wishing maguffin...it does make Spencer's job slightly easier though, in terms of having to explain all of Marvel history in this new reality via flashback or whatever.)

The second item is something I'm pretty sure was raised during the online arguments regarding Nazi Cap that I was only dimly aware of. There's a scene set in the past when the cabal of Hydra leaders that have been participating in Steve's revised origin gather to discuss the coming world war, and parts of the scene seem to be written precisely to address the differences between the real-world Nazis and Marvel's Nazi-splinter group Hydra, which has for a long time been little more than a generic bad guy organization.

At a torch-lit meeting, Daniel Whitehall/The Kraken, Elisa Sinclair, Sebastian Fenhoff and Baron Zemo argue the pros and cons of Hydra aligning itself "with Germany and The Axis Powers in the battle to come." Zemo, who was already offered a position with the Nazis, is all for it. He articulates the plan like so: "We will infiltrate their ranks and install our own lieutenants, who will then use their influence to forge a formal partnership with The Reich."

Elisa, who has some sort of limited ability to predict the future, argues that Hitler is not "the one we've been waiting for," as Zemo puts it, but rather just "a power-hungry madman with a blood lust that will not be sated...and if we align ourselves with him, it will consume us as well."

They ultimately outvote her, but the argument is pretty clearly articulated that they are doing so not because of any particular ideological reason, but simply because they think Marvel Germany's military build-up and collection of magical artifacts means they are the safest nation to bet on in the event of world war.

"If The Fuhrer does turn out to be as...unsavory as Elisa suggests, who is to say we don't simply remove him from power when the time is right?" Fenhoff sums up. "Let him build an empire across Europe and then claim it for our own. He is a means to an end."

Given that Spencer was and is writing these chapters on a monthly-ish basis, and thus subject to more-or-less constant input from Marvel readers as well as his editors--it's not like he's unplugged in a cave or cabin somewhere, he's online as he's working on these scripts--it's hard not to read the scene as a sort of response to all the concern regarding Captain America comics or Marvel embracing fascism or Nazi ideology or whatever the specifics of the online arguments about the storyline were and are (And yeah, let me state for the record how insanely fucking weird it is to be reading superhero comics about Nazis and writing blog posts about said super-comics while literally as I type this reports are coming out of Charlottesville about real people dying and being injured as a result of demonstration by actual white supremacists openly carrying and waving actual Nazi flags).

Perhaps I am overthinking it, but the specifics of the scene--the general aim is clearly to demonstrate that Adolf Hitler isn't the one Hydra was waiting for, but that Steve Rogers was--seem to have been written so as to act as a way of distinguishing Marvel's Hydra from Hitler's Nazi party. I imagine, however, that it is a distinction without a difference. Decades of Marvel comics and multi-media adaptations have painted Hydra as simply a fantasy version of Nazis, and that is something that has been ever more pronounced since Captain America: The First Avenger was released. Spencer himself has spent so many issues assuring readers that Hydra isn't just a bunch of green-suited crypto-fascist generic bad guys, like AIM or The Hand with different uniforms, that to suddenly include a scene divorcing them from the Nazis seems a little weird.

Welcome, perhaps, but still weird.



Mockingbird Vol. 2: My Feminist Agenda

The second and, sadly, final collection of writer Chelsea Cain and pencil artist Katie Niemczyk's too-short Mockingbird series isn't quite as good as the previous volume (reviewed at the bottom of this post), but that's not exactly surprising: That first, five-part story arc was pretty damn brilliant, and about as close to a perfect comic book as I've seen Marvel get in...well, pretty much ever, I guess.

Cain, Niemczyk and inker Sean Parsons have some challenges to deal with here, of course, namely that one big problem Marvel's whole line had to deal with: Civil War II. The title character's ex-husband Clint "Hawkeye" Barton played a significant, if random and ultimately kinda pointless, role in that shared setting-reshuffling narrative, and so Cain and company pretty much have to deal with it in some way, shape or form. Cain decides to lean into it.

Bobbi  Morse receives a cruise ticket from an anonymous stranger, along with a message telling her the sender has valuable information that could help the case of her ex-husband, who is at that point on trial in New York City for shooting Bruce Banner to death with a bow and arrow in Utah. Of course she smelled set-up, but she wanted to get out of town anyway.

This particular cruise, on The Diamond Porpoise, is a nerd cruise ("Is there some sort of convention on board?" "Those are the nerds, ma'am") and it's headed for the Bermuda Triangle.

Things get very, very weird very, very fast. Bobbi's informant is disguised by a rubber horse mask, her other ex Hunter (and lots of corgis) are also on board and, by the end of the first issue, the informant is found dead, in what looks like a pretty impossible locked-door mystery (or it would be in our universe; in the Marvel Universe, locked doors only narrow the list of potential suspects by their powers and/or technology). The killer turns out to be yet another man from Bobbi's past, one I had no idea she was ever involved with, and though there aren't asterisks and issue numbers included in editor's boxes, all the information needed to get and/or to enjoy the story is provided. If it seems completely random, well, it's no more so than, say, the guy selling Northstar figurines he carved out of wood, or the myth of the mer-corgis.

As was demonstrated previously, Cain is not only surprisingly, even shockingly good at writing comics (not as easy a thing to master for anyone who has spent a life-time working professionally in an entirely different medium, like prose), but she's better than most Big Two writers as letting the imagery fill in the blanks, finish her sentences and provide her punchlines. There is a remarkable amount of content in these three issues that uses the fusion of words and picture to convey information that is not at all what one might expect from a comic (like the elaborate flow chart for dealing with a particular character that fills up a splash page in the insane last issue of the series, for example, or the excerpt from Hunter's Boy Scout's Field Guide To Tracking, or that restraining order, or the revolving character design sheets for Bobbi's exes, and on and on).

I'm pretty disappointed that this book, which is maybe the ultimate expression of the recent Fraction/Aja Hawkeye-model of books Marvel has been releasing for the last few years, has been canceled. I'm even more disappointed that so much dumb shit, blatant sexism and frankly vile bullying that appeared online about the book and about Cain herself towards the end, apparently because of the phrase on Bobbi's gag t-shirt on the cover of the final issue and, I don't know, maybe because it was a comic book about a lady, written and drawn by a lady? (It drives me crazy when people complain about feminists and feminism, because those people tend not to have any idea what the word "feminism" actually means or refers to, but good on Marvel for using that cover for that of the trade instead of the perhaps more all-encompassing covers for #6 or #7, and, of course, for using "My Feminist Agenda" as the sub-title. That said, the harassment Cain had to deal with is as distressing as it is depressing, and I wish I knew how to fix it; I hate that so many comics fans are so terrible that they drag the industry, or at least some of the more visible parts of the industry, so far down.)

On the other hand, I'm kind of amazed this book existed at all. Obviously the character's appearances on Agents of SHIELD upped her Q-rating to the point that Marvel would want to exploit it (see recent attempts at Deathlok and various Agents of SHIELD comics, all of which were also pretty quickly canceled), and just as obviously Cain is the sort of prestige "get" that the Big Two love to give gigs to, but, man this was just so different from anything else Marvel was publishing--weirder, wilder and more idiosyncratic than any of the many other superhero comedies of late (Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Patsy Walker, Howard The Duck, Unbelievable Gwenpool, various Rocket and/or Groot books, those millions of Deadpool comics).

Because three issues isn't enough to fill a $16 trade paperback, this volume also includes a pair of New Avengers issues from the second Brian Michael Bendis-written volume of the series, circa 2011/"Fear Itself." While these aren't exactly Mockingbird stories, she does play a sizable role in them, although there's very much a feeling of "we now join our story, already in progress" to them (Victoria Hand's around, Carol Danvers is still Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man's in his white Fantastic Four costume, etc). The issues are drawn by Michael Deodato and Howard Chaykin, and they don't make a whole heck of a lot of sense on their own like this. It might have been more useful for Marvel to maybe reprint some the issues that Cain's arc references, but I guess whenever Marvel is in doubt, their reflex is to just stick Bendis-written Avengers stuff in the back of a trade.


Spider-Woman Vol. 3: Scare Tactics

Spider-Woman has got to be neck-and-neck with Invincible Iron Man and maybe the various Guardians of the Galaxy books for the title of "Hardest Fucking Marvel Comic Book Series To Figure Out How To Read."

Let's review. Marvel launches a new Spider-Woman monthly series out of their "Spider-Verse" event; it is written by Dennis Hopeless and drawn by Greg Land. The first four issues, a tie-in to the event, are mostly overshadowed by an Internet small-c controversy about a variant cover provided by Milo Manara. He is an excellent artist, and I suppose there are arguments to be made against and in favor of Marvel hiring him to provide a variant and approving that particular image, as well as his repurposing of some older art as the basis for that image, but whatever one's opinion, I think we can safely all agree that the cover image did not go over particularly well. Those issues are collected as Spider-Woman Vol. 1: Spider-Verse.

For issue #5, Jessica Drew gets a brand-new costume--her first, ever, which is kind of remarkable given the hero's long life and how often superheroes get costume updates--and the book gets a new artist, Javier Rodriguez, as well as a new supporting cast and a change of direction. Marvel has renumbered series for less, but they decided to collect Spider-Woman #5-#10 as Spider-Woman Vol. 2: New Duds.

Then, seemingly at random, Marvel relaunches and renumbers Spider-Woman with a new #1, despite keeping the same creative team, same costume, same direction. The reason was apparently that Marvel relaunched everything following event series Secret Wars. In some cases, even though the serially published issues were being renumbered, Marvel kept the volume numbers on the trade paperbacks, because why make it harder for someone reading these things in libraries or from bookstores to not be able to figure out how to do so? (Think Ms. Marvel or Unbeatable Squirrel Girl). That was not the case for Spider-Woman; Hopeless and company's Spider-Woman #1-#5 is then collected as Spider-Woman Vol. 1: Baby Talk. So now there are two trade paperbacks entitled Spider-Woman Vol.1 by writer Dennis Hopeless.

But wait, there's more! That's followed by Spider-Woman Vol. 2: Civil War II, so now there are two Spider-Woman Vol. 2s, both by the same creative team, and, finally, the series was canceled (shocking, I know!) after the comics contained in Spider-Woman Vol. 3: Scare Tactics.

So, the proper reading order is: Spider-Woman Vol. 1, Spider-Woman Vol. 2, Spider-Woman Vol. 1, Spider-Woman Vol. 2 and Spider-Woman Vol. 3, although given that the first of the two volumes 1 is part of "Spider-Verse" and has little to do with what follows, you could probably start with Spider-Woman Vol. 2; the first Vol. 2, not the second one. Obviously.

In a futile attempt to try and distinguish one run of Dennis Hopeless and Javier Rodriguez and company's Spider-Woman from another, they added a sub-title to the post-Secret Wars title, Shifting Gears. It doesn't appear on the cover of the comic books or the trades tough, just in the fine print and on the spines. Marvel has added these phantom sub-titles to a lot of their post-Secret Wars books to apparently avoid confusion. I don't know how well they work, but my guess is somewhere between "not that great" and "not at all."

This is all fresh in my head at the moment because the night before writing this, I read Spider-Woman Vol. 3: Scare Tactics. It felt like I was missing something, since the last time I read Spider-Woman, Jessica had just discovered she was pregnant, and now here she is with a baby, but I--quite reasonably, in my opinion!--assumed that since the last collection of the series I read was volume 2, and this was volume 3, I couldn't have missed anything. Unless Marvel had started publishing collections with decimal points in their numbering, which is possible.

Anyway: I don't think this should be this hard.

So Vol. 3, which is actually volume five, or maybe four, is dominated by a Spider-Woman Vs. Hobgoblin story, plus a rather cute little epilogue issue. Veronica Fish has taken over art duties, getting an inking assist by Andy Fish, and the color art comes courtesy of Rachelle Rosenberg. Throughout Hopeless' run, Jessica Drew has basically appropriated a bunch of Spider-Man villains and supporting characters, some in pretty original ways--what with villain Porcupine becoming Jessica's sidekick/partner/babysitter/love interest and all--and in this arc, she's forced into combat with a whole mess of even more minor Spider-Man villains, plus one of Spidey's bigger ones. You know, the guy on the cover.

I'm no better at keeping track of Goblins than I am at keeping track of Spider-Women, but this appears to be the original Hobgoblin, whose relationship to the original Green Goblin I couldn't even begin to guess at. He has a slightly cooler costume and a worse color scheme, but he also has all the cool gadgets: The bat-shaped glider thingee and the pumpkin bombs.

While Jessica Drew is out fighting crime--there's a pretty well executed scene where she takes down The Blizzard--and Ben Urich is babysitting her kid Gerry, The Porcupine has a meeting at a bar where various lame-o villains hang-out. The gist of it is that he had made a deal with The Hobgoblin, who has been selling lame super-villain "franchises" in the form of costumes and codenames to bad guys, and Porcupine is there to tell him he wants out of their agreement, as he's planning on going straight now.

Hobgoblin shakes his hand, says no hard feelings, and then, later that night, The Hobgoblin and a bunch of villains arrive on a rooftop to murder Porcupine. It took me a while to figure out who all these villains were, and some of them I still don't know for sure; like the big, bear-themed guy I thought was The Grizzly? He's actually, as Jessica explains at one point, "Bruin, the bear super villain who's not Grizzly." (Who's the guy with the unicorn symbol on his chest? Is that The Unicorn?)

Once Jessica learns what happens, she jumps on her motorcycle, rides to the bar, beats the crap out of everyone there like she was Daredevil in an old Frank Miller comic, and, unsurprisingly, draws the attention of The Hobgoblin. She's in no shape to handle him and his gang of bottom-feeding Spider-villains alone, but perhaps she can with some help from a pair of allies she had thought she had lost (one in this volume, one in the Civil War II arc that I hadn't read yet because Marvel has weird ideas about how numbers work).

In the final issue, Jessica throws a party to introduce her superhero pals to her new boyfriend, The Porcupine (Spoiler alert! He's not dead! And is he the baby's father? I still don't know! I guess I missed those volumes, but seems like!). Carol and Ben help her decorate, and the drama is basically divided between The Black Widow being kind of a B about Jessica Drew slumming as a PI (instead of living up to her full potential by being an Avenger) and dating a D-List Spider-Man villain (or is that too generous a letter for the list Porcupine belongs on?), the Porcupine's anxiety about meeting a whole bunch of Avengers (including Spider-Man) and the baby demonstrating that he has already developed his mom's wall-crawling and venom blast powers.

The sentiment of this issue is pretty sweet, but I have to admit it's a little weird to see so many of these heroes all on the same page on the heels of the events of Civil War II (For example, Ms. Marvel and Captain Marvel are both there; in fact, a lot of people who came to blows with Carol are in attendance). I imagine that the issue was already drawn before the end of Civil War II was known by Fish and/or Hopeless, though. With the exception of Spidey and Black Widow, few of the characters present actually have any lines, so the script may have just called for "a bunch of superheroes," without specifying who should be there.

But, for example, there's a really big lady there that looks like she's meant to be She-Hulk, but she has pale Caucasian skin and brown hair, rather than her normal green (or, now, gray, I guess). She's called "Jen Walters" at one-point, so I guess Fish must have just drew She-Hulk at some point, but they were able to color her not-green before publication...? There's a long-shot where Iron Man appears to be there too, which would, of course, be impossible. Jen's coloring aside, the scene works just fine for the purposes of this book, but likely reads a little weird if you spent too much time thinking about Civil War II and any of its many, many tie-ins which, um, I may have.

This collection contains perhaps the best artwork from Fish I've seen to date. It's always been pretty okay, of course, but it seems clearer, crisper and cleaner than ever before, and it wasn't at all as jarring a switch from that of Rodriguez as I thought it might have been. I already mentioned the sequence with The Blizzard, but all of the super-villain fights are pretty great, and Fish manages to draw all of those charmingly lame super-villains in such a way that there's a sort of stripped-down elegance to their goofy costumes.

Also, 8-Ball is there. I love that character, although it looks like he's a woman now...? Doesn't matter; it's still a great costume. She is shown shooting pool with...actually, I have no idea who that guy is, but he's brave to play pool with someone who has pool-related powers.

Aside from the broad work on the action and the character acting though, Fish has plenty of little moments that are of interest. I really liked that when Spider-Woman first meets Bruin in the bar, he's shown walking out of a restroom with a little white bear head on a placard by it. I guess he and Grizzly get their own bathroom?

Later, there's a scene featuring a "casual" Hobgoblin, with his hood off, and I don't like the way he looks there, like, at all, but it's still an interesting look, even if it's not a great look for him.

...

So it wasn't until after I read this and then spent a few paragraphs complaining about Marvel's numbering of the collections that I saw this collection has one of those weird flow-charts explaining what order to read runs of collections in. "Want to know the best way to explore the Marvel Universe? This guide will show you where to begin!" it reads. I would just like to reply that the best way would be for Marvel to quit fucking relaunching their series with new #1 issues and, when they do, to not also renumber the collections.

Anyway, this chart instructs one to "Follow The Adventures of Spider-Woman In These Collected Editions!" There's a "Start Here" next to Spider-Woman Vol. 1: Spider-Verse, which shows how fruitless this flow-chart is. Remember, that's a tie-in to Spider-Verse, so maybe start there...?

Then you read Spider-Woman Vol. 2, then Spider-Woman: Shifting Gears Vol. 1--Baby Talk, then Spider-Women (which wasn't even on my radar as a comic book I would want to read, let alone need to read to follow the adventures of Dennis Hopeless' Jessica Drew) and then Spider-Woman: Shifting Gears Vol. 2--Civil War II.

I guess the existence of these charts is a sign that Marvel at least realizes that they have a problem and are trying to address it, but this seems like a too-late patch to a problem that would have been easy enough to fix at an earlier point.


Star Wars Vol. 5: Yoda's Secret War

That's right Yoda, despite the fact that this series is set between the end of the original film and the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. Writer Jason Aaron manages this focus on Yoda in one of the more convoluted ways imaginable, and I can't help but wonder why this isn't just a stand alone miniseries. There's just a brief check-in with the ongoing narrative of the series. In the last volume, the special forces team of Stormtroopers captured C3-P0 after the Star Destroyer heist, and hear they rather amusingly discover that the loquacious droid is way too easy to interrogate; the human rebels reluctantly decide to let the Empire have Threepio, as he is just a droid, but R2-D2 commandeers an X-Wing, and essentially sabotages Luke's ship, so he can't pursue and try to stop him from mounting a rescue solo.

That cliffhanger is then abandoned for, like, five issues. Finding himself stuck in his X-Wing, Luke decides to pull out Obi-Wan's journal and resume reading it. In the past, this has provided Aaron an excuse to do short, fill-in like issues starring Obi-Wan, but here Obi-Wan is relating a story that Yoda told him. So, to review, this is the story of one of Yoda's "secret" adventures from around the time of The Phantom Menace, as told to Obi-Wan, who is telling it to Luke via his journal.

Luke has little to do for much of the story, then, aside from sitting in the cockpit of his ship, reading (I wonder if this whole journal idea is meant as a rebuke of Ryan Britt's essay about literacy in the Star Wars universe, in Luke Skywalker Can't Read?). Obi-Wan has even less to do, getting a page or two to remind us that he's telling the story; in one scene we see him meditating on Tatooine, writing the story through the power of The Force, as if he's dictating it to The Force ("Living Force; take a memo!"). Near the end, Luke rather impulsively attempts to follow the clues in the journal to look for the planet the Yoda's Secret War took place at, and there he provides an epilogue, faces The Beyonder and gets a cool new black and white costume that will turn out to be an evil symbiote.
The specifics of the war involve a group of children fighting a group of adults over strange and powerful blue rocks that are somehow extremely strong in The Force, as if they were Force-sensitive living things. Readers should figure out what's going on pretty quickly.

The arc is drawn by Salvador Larocca, an artist whose work I am not really a fan of, given his use of photo reference. It is more pronounced and hard for me to look at in this series, than in, say, Invincible Iron Man or Darth Vader, as there are fewer frozen mask faces and more human characters. For example, there's an early scene in which the rebel heroes debate their options regarding C3-P0, and Larocca gives them the exact faces, expressions, postures and posing of various stills from the various movies, and they don't all fit together (and it's hard not to be distracted by them).

His Yoda is similarly drawn from (over?) images from the films, and Larocca apparently culled images from both trilogies, as sometimes he looks like the puppet from the original films and sometimes he looks like the CGI character from the prequels. I suppose what Larocca does here can be appreciated as some kind of elaborate work of collage, but I can't bring myself to do so. It's cold, sterile and lifeless, and what he does isn't obvious enough to be seen as, like, visual sampling, but goes over like something of a trick.

It's kind of too bad then that Marvel collected Star Wars Annual #2 here then, as it is pretty damn different, and superior in all of the ways "Yoda's Secret War" is inferior. Written by Kelly Thompson and drawn by Emilio Laiso, this 30-page story is about Princess Leia...but only sort of about her. The actual protagonist is Pash "Bash" Davane, a former engineer reduced to crate-hauling after the war came to her home planet and wrecked the joint. Pash is neither sympathetic to the Empire nor a believer in the rebellion, and she's no fan of Leia, the reasons for which leads to the parts of the book that are "about" Leia. She's tried to live on the sidelines of the war to the best of her abilities, but is essentially forced to make a choice between which side to support.

She chooses the good guys, obviously, and the book is basically a team-up between the two ladies. Pash, as designed by Laiso, is a pretty interesting character. She's big--very big--and well-muscled, to the point that when she meets Leia's friends at the end, she's got to slouch and stoop to look Luke in the eye, and she has to tear the sleeves off of one of Han's shirts to have it fit her. There are additionally some pretty fun jokes about how tiny Leia is...she is tiny, of course, not just in relation to Pash, but, well, Carrie Fisher was only 5'1, a full foot shorter than her love interest in the trilogy.

Paired with a smart-ass robot that only she can understand and suddenly woke to the rebellion, Pash seems like a character who might be around to stay...which is a good thing. I'm not as deep into the so-called "Expanded Universe" as many fans, but I've come to the belief that the best such comics and books are the ones that are close enough to the film's characters to seem like they are relevant and therefore matter, but not so close that they run the risk of tripping up the franchises stars or causing narrative problems. I think Thompson gets it exactly right here, and that's not terribly easy; unlike Dark Horse's Star Wars line, Marvel's has been focused almost entirely on characters from various films (Darth Vader, which kinda sorta transitioned into Doctor Aphra, seemed to do the best job of following the films' slipstream without getting tangled, in large part because of all the new characters in those books, and the fact that they were placed in Vader's shadow).

By contrast, I'm not sure how I feel about Luke reading about Yoda, a character whose presence in Empire was kinda dependent on Luke knowing nothing about him other than his name and location. (Personally, I didn't like Yoda's presence in the prequels at all, as, watched in order, the Yoda scene in Episode V is ruined, and he seemed to have aged two million years in the, like, 20 years between Episodes III and V, but whatever.)

Additionally, it was just plain refreshing to see good old-fashioned drawings of the characters, old and new, after 100 pages or so of Larocca's work, to see Laiso's Leia and know that is what the character looks like in a particular artist's style, and the expressions and poses are coming from the artist's hand, not a particular frame from a particular film.


Star-Lord: Grounded

I lost track of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy comic proper just after Secret Wars, with what Wikipedia is telling me was the first collection of the fourth volume of the series (Guardians of The Galaxy: New Guard Vol. 1--Emperor Quill), although by then my grip on the franchise was already pretty loose, as I had barely followed any of the many, many spin-offs, with just about every character having their own title for a while, plus there being a short-lived Guardians Team-Up comic for some damn reason.

As it turns out, one need not know what the hell is going on with the Guardians to read, understand or enjoy writer Chip Zdarsky and artist Kris Anka's Star-Lord miniseries (I don't know if it was advertised and promoted as such--I wouldn't be surprised if Marvel failed to mention that it was a limited series--but this reads like an original graphic novel). All one really needs to know is that Peter Quill and his teammates are all temporarily stuck on Earth following the dumb events of Civil War II (wherein their ship was destroyed when they arrived to help Carol Danvers abuse civil liberties), and he's on the outs with his fellow Guardians.

What is a space-faring, half-human superhero to do when he's stuck on Earth for the first time since childhood? If it were up to Quill, lay around drinking beer shirtless, but SWORD Alpha Flight's Abigail Brand gives him a cellphone programmed with the numbers of his known terrestrial associates (Just Howard The Duck and Kitty Pryde) and makes him go outside.

This proves to be something of a mistake, as he ends up making a scene at a museum, getting in a bar brawl with Old Man Logan and some bad guys and given some 100 hours of community service by New York City prosecutor Matt Murdock. That public service takes the form of hanging out with a particular old man with a secret, while working as a bartender at The Bar With No Name, one of the apparently several (you read the above review of Spider-Woman, right?) where the city's low-level lame-o supervillains hang out.

It's difficult to talk too much about the plot without spoiling any of the surprises, but suffice it to say that everything is connected in a somewhat remarkable fashion, so that Zdarsky wastes almost nothing in the narrative, with even things that seem like minor jokes later playing important parts of the story. Lacking his regular ensemble cast, even in a solo title Quill pretty quickly amasses one, and it includes not only the senior citizen he's hanging out with and said senior citizen's son, but also Dardevil, Logan and so such bar regulars as The Shocker, Diamondhead and 8-Ball (who here is a man; are there two 8-Balls in the Marvel Universe now, or is the one in Spider-Woman Lady 8-Ball...?).

It is funny, but it's also extremely well-written, with the choices that seem frankly random (Logan, for example) eventually coming off as perfectly organic (Tangent: This comic was a particularly good example of how weird it is that Marvel killed off the "real" Wolverine shortly before introducing the one from Old Man Logan into the Marvel Universe proper, as there is pretty much nothing at all differentiating the pair except their hair. This could very easily have been Regular Wolverine; all that would have been different would have been his hair...and maybe Zdarsky wouldn't have made that joke at the end, but, on the other hand, maybe he would have, as both Logans are super-old men, it's just the dead Logan was always drawn not to look so old).

Anka's art is as excellent as always, and is a major selling point for the book. I think it's well worth pointing out that the way he draws Peter Quill, and the situations Zdarsky puts him in, are somewhat remarkable in that they treat him the way superheroines have been treated for years, but superheroes almost never are. Not only is Star-Lord shirtless in this, like, a lot, but often times he is shirtless because whenever he's in a fight, he has a habit of getting his clothes torn off of him. When he's confronted by a villain in his apartment, he's just wearing a pair of very small shorts, and Anka draws him from various angles so you can see all his curves and muscles. Even during a sad scene, when he's taking a shower, the imagery is somewhat exploitative, with steam and water just covering the amount of nudity that would make this a Mature Readers book instead of a "T+" book.

Subjecting a male character to the traditional "male gaze" that, say, Mary Jane Watson or She-Hulk or whoever would get is sometimes played for laughs, sure, but it's also subversive and, well, welcome. Anka is a really good artist, after all. (I imagine this has more to do with Chris Pratt playing him than it does the comic book character's own history, but Star-Lord here is presented as an all-around sexy hunk, not unlike the way Thor Odinson was presented as a hottie in-universe more after Chris Hemsworth started playing him in movies.)

The six-issue, 120-page story is followed by an annual, which is a pretty damn weird thing for a six-month miniseries to have. Drawn by Djibril Morissette and written by Zdarsky, it has a very, very different tone. Quill has crash-landed on a space western planet, which isn't terribly interesting looking compared to the similar setting the characters in Fiona Staples and Bryan Vaughn's Saga are currently spending time in, that isn't quite what it seems. Here's a hint: Bruce Banner is there.

As a "it was all a near death experience...or was it?" story it would be fine, although throwing Banner in there like that kind of colors that take (Hey, this is at least the second time I've seen the Hulk undead since the middle of Civil War II....!). While it is somewhat connected to the main story via a few panels of a nightmare Quill has, it sticks out, being so far removed from the otherwise clockwork tightly-plotted, at least two jokes per page, Anka-drawn "Earth-Lord" story that precedes it.



If for some strange reason you would like to continue reading my babbling about various Marvel collections, I also reviewed Champions Vol. 1: Change The World and Invincible Iron Man: Ironheart Vol. 1--Riri Williams for Good Comics For Kids.

Last week I discussed Original Sin, the eight(-ish) part miniseries by writer Jason Aaron, artist Mike Deodato and colorist Frank Martin that dominated the 390-page Original Sin hardcover collection. Tonight I wanted to look at all the supplementary material included in the collection, almost all of it from the pages of the five-issue tie-in anthology entitled Original Sins...which is only one letter's difference from the main series, because comics are weird and dumb and evil. There are also two issues of Original Sin: Secret Avengers Infinite Comic, which I believe was a digital-first comic, which might offer an explanation for why it has two people (?) named "Mast" and "Geoffo" credited as "storyboard artists" rather than with more typical "layouts."

Almost all of these stories, which range in length from Ryan North, Ramon Villalobos and company's 40-page Young Avengers story to a handful of two-page gag strips, deal with the fall-out of a single event early on in Original Sin, The Orb's use of one of the Watcher's gouged-out eyes as a secret-disseminating "truth bomb" to disorient the heroes gathered to apprehend him and his accomplices.
The scene is actually a very small, not terribly important part of Original Sin, but it is the part that allows for other comics to tie-in to the "Original Sin" brand and try to stretch Aaron's story into something that could—at least theoretically—sustain a line-wide crossover. Original Sins—with an "s"—allowed Marvel the chance to check-in with a bunch of other, mostly book-less heroes and, in the process, give a bunch of other creators a chance to play in Marvel's sandbox.

I can't imagine Original Sins was a very satisfying read if read as it was serially published. Each $4, 20-page issue contained a trio of stories—a 10-page lead feature, 8-pages of the five-part Young Avengers story and a 2-page gag comic. If you wanted to just read that Young Avengers story, you were stuck paying $20 for it, and getting little else that would interest you. If you wanted to see favorite, unlikely creators like, say, Richard Geary or Chip Zdarsky drawing Marvel characters, you'd be paying $4 for 2 pages of comics, and getting a lot of stuff that likely wouldn't appeal to you in the process.

The way they're packaged in this collection, the Young Avengers story kicks off this section, and then the rest seem to follow as they were published.

Let's take them one at a time.

"Young Avengers: Hidden In Plain Sight" by Ryan North, Ramon Villalobos and Jordan Gibson

By far the highlight of the book, I don't want to say too much about this here at the moment (As I talk about it here). The Ryan North who wrote it is the same Ryan North who writes Dinosaur Comics and Boom's Adventure Time comics, and, as with the latter, he includes little alt text like gags along the bottom of most of the pages. It is a very funny comic, but funny within the bounds of the Marvel Universe (that is, no one breaks character or the fourth wall in the way some of the other, shorter, comedic pieces in Original Sins-with-an-"s" do).

Hulkling sees, via social media, that all the superheroes seem to be fighting Noh-Varr's ex-girlfriend in Manhattan, so he texts Prodigy, they go to space to pick up Noh-Varr, and head to Manhattan to see what they can do. The fight is over, but they stumble upon a post eyeball zap adventure that pits the three Young Avengers against The Hood (The rest of the team is present, but they literally text in their appearances).

It's seriously great stuff, and made me wish Marvel hadn't ended the last volume of Young Avengers when its creative team of Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie and Mike Norton departed, but rather kept it going under North and Villalobos.

"Terminus" by Nathan Edmondson, Mike Perkins and Andy Troy

This one is a bit of an odd story out in that rather than checking in with a book-less character, it's a 10-pager starring the new Deathlok, who has a new series, and it therefore seems to be here to remind readers of Original Sin that there's a new Deathlok comic they might want to read.

Henry Hayes, a former soldier who now works for Doctors Without Borders, is accosted by an off-duty SHIELD agent who explains he was there when "The Watcher's eye exploded downtown," and now he knows Hayes' secret. That secret being that he's secret Deathlok, a cyborg assassin who doesn't seem to be half-zombie in this iteration, and who now more closely resembles the one from the TV, I guess. Oddly, Hayes himself doesn't seem to know the secret, so I guess that's the premise of the new take on the character.

Mike Perkins draws this sort of realistic, espionage-style action comic very well, as he's proved in the past, and while there's not much here, and nothing that really piqued my interest in the series, it's a pretty effective pitch for that series.

"Lockjaw: Buried Memory" by Stuart Moore, Rick Geary and Ive Svorcina

At just 16 silent panels over two pages, this is a very fleet read. There's only a single joke to it—Lockjaw suddenly has a memory, and seeks the aid of a Marvel superhero—and it's not that funny a joke, really, but if you ever wanted to see Rick Geary draw not only Lockjaw, but the current versions of Luke Cage, Iron Man, Emma Frost and others, then this comic certainly fulfills that desire.
Kamala "Ms. Marvel" Khan appears in one-panel of this story, as one of the several heroes to deny Lockjaw help, and it constitutes her only appearance in Original Sin, despite being depicted, along with a bunch of other heroes who weren't drawn there by Deodato, at ground zero of the eyeball bomb in Manhattan on the cover of Original Sins #1.

"Black Legacy" by Frank Tieri, Raffaele Ienco and Brad Anderson

Is Marvel Studios developing a Black Knight film, or is he going to appear in the third Avengers movie or on Agents of SHIELD or something...? For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why this story existed at all.

The Black Knight, who I was fairly certain was based in England (I only read the first half of the Revolutionary War trade; am I misremembering his presence in it?), is holed up in his apartment, which he hasn't left in what appears to be a long time, wearing only his briefs and clutching his ebony blade (Should I rewrite that last bit to make it sound less suggestinve? Nah). A writer and expert on the Black Knight legacy and the ebony blade is knocking at his door, saying she knows his secret, which is that the blade is addictive and makes folks who wield it crazy, eventually killing him.

I'm not sure why The Black Knight, who seemed to be in a pretty good place last time I remember seeing him (If not in Revolutionary War, then definitely in Captain Britain and MI:13) is made all Howard Hughes for the sake of a ten-page story which, incidentally, has nothing at all to do with Original Sin except, perhaps, thematically. During my first read-through, I thought the Knight was caught in the blast—which would have mandated his presence in Manhattan, not England—but on rereading, I see that not only was he not in the blast, it's not clear which city he's in during this story. Also, the writer, who knows his secret, knows it from research and inference, not because she was caught in the blast.

So either Tieri's got a Black Knight series on the horizon, or Marvel's got a Black Knight media adaptation on the horizon, or man, this is one out-of-left field page-filler.

"Before Your Eyes" by Ty Templeton and Paul Mounts

Templeton writes and draws this Howard The Duck two-pager, in which Howard finds himself ejected from his car by a faulty—and apparently very powerful—air bag, and his mind races through what he recently learned from "the eye of a dead Watcher".

Howard The Duck's troubled history, and his existence as a sort of flashpoint regarding a big comics company and a creator in conflict over who owns what and who gets and deserves credit and money for what, makes Howard The Duck comics incredibly difficult to read, something that will never change now, given the fact that Howard's creator Steve Gerber has passed away.

I'm a big fan of Templeton's work, and while this isn't really a great example of it—consisting as it does of only 14 panels of Howard in a suit—it ends with a pretty charged, I-can't-believe-Marvel-published-that statement: "You are Howard The Duck. The greatest example of wasted potential in the known galaxy."

I suppose there are a couple of different ways to read that, but there's only one way I could read it.


"Whispers of War" by Charles Soule, Ryan Browne and Edgar Delgado

This is the only story in this book I couldn't read all the way through...I made it onto the fourth page of the ten-page story before giving up. It opens with a spiky headed guy who I at first took to be Iceman, with a goblet in a penthouse hot tub, talking to a trio of faces that are merging from his body, one of which is that of a frog.

I guess this is what The Purple Man looks like now, which was a bit of a surprise, given that the last time I saw him (Alias, maybe?) he just looked like a man. Only purple. On page four, The Inhumans appear, so I then assumed he might have gone through some Terrigenisis mutation or whatever and then I got so bored I had to stop reading.

The cover for the particular issue of Original Sins appeared in has Blackbolt and The Purple Man on the cover, and says there's an "Inhuman" story within, so I suppose this has something to do with the ongoing u series. Lockjaw's in four panels of it, but that's just not enough Lockjaw to get me to give a shit about The Inhumans. Sorry.

"Bury The Lead" by Dan Slott, Mark Bagley, Joe Rubenstein and Paul Mounts

This two-pager is teased as a J. Jonah Jameson story on the cover, and it is. There's only one joke in it, and it's a fairly strong one if you know the character at all from any medium, but that also means I can't really say anything about it here without ruining it. Suffice it to say that it's a fun little piece by a writer and penciler strongly associated with Spider-Man and his supporting cast and, I suppose, that this is another Original Sin tie-in that has nothing at all to do with Original Sin—it involves someone discovering a deep dark secret about JJJ, but not through a Watcher eye-blast or anything like that.

"Checkmate" by James Robinson, Alex Maleev and Cris Peter

This is a Dr. Doom story written by current Fantastic Four writer and drawn by Alex Maleev in his signature realistic, but grittier style. The actual protagonist is a scummy, investment advisor Wall Street type—someone you won't mind knowing gets killed by Dr. Doom, essentially—who learned some of Doom's secrets from the Watcher eye-bomb, and makes elaborate plans to blackmail Doom.

It goes about as well for him as you might expect.

Maleev's Doom is very cool-looking, despite only appearing in the splash pages that book-end the short story. He gives Doom red eyes, which is a small but effective tweak of the design. His protagonist is much less well-drawn, however, and I found myself being repeatedly distracted by trying to place the Hollywood actor he seemed to patterned after in any given panel: Here he looks like Ben Affleck, there Chris Evans, ooh in this sequence he looks like Eric Balfour...interesting choice.

The backgrounds and establishing shots, on the other hand, appear to just be traced or mildly manipulated photographs, which is pretty disappointing. But it's only ten-pages long, so it's hard to get too disappointed in the artwork either way.

"Catharsis" by David Abadta, Pablo Dura and Erica Henderson

This is another two-pager, which thus far has meant a funny story, but there isn't really a joke here, just a premise so unusual that it would only really fit in a gag format strip. Well, I think there's an attempt at a joke in the final panel, but I didn't think it really worked.

This does give a nice preview of what upcoming Unbeatable Squirrel Girl artist Erica Henderson's Marvel work could look like though. Verdict? Pretty nice!

"How The World Works" by Al Ewing, Butch Guice, Scott Hanna and Matthew Wilson

Billed as a Nick Fury story, this is as much a Dum Dum Dugan story as it is a Fury one, and the revelation that occurs in it seems to me to be at least as big a one as any of those regarding Fury in the main Original Sin series (i.e. that he's really old now for real, that he has a small army of super-LMDs of himself as a strapping young man, that he assassinates space monsters in his down time, that he almost blew a hole in Spider-Man's head, etc).

It's also the story that most directly ties in to the events of Original Sin, in terms of content and visuals, with Guice's pencil art, inked by Hanna and colored by Matthew Wilson, most closely resembling that of Deodato. It takes place during the time in which The Orb is in custody, and involves Dugan confronting Old Man Fury about all the shitty things Fury's been doing, only to discover a super-shitty thing Fury's been doing, a sin that seems a lot worse than some of his other sins.

"The No-Sin Situation" by Chip Zdarsky

Probably the best two-pages in the whole book, regardless of how much I might have talked up that Young Avengers story, this Zdarksy strip is billed as starring "Everybody Else." It's only two-pages long, but it has 28 panels in it! It opens with Nick Fury sitting down Gambit in an interview room and telling him that there's a situation where everyone's secrets are being revealed and that "I just want to get aheaed of it and see what we should prepare for." Fury assures the ragin' Cajun that "Everyhing you say here will be off the record and not in continuity."

The rest of the strip then consists of single-panels featuring a different Marvel character, introduced in a narration box naming them and defining them in a manner similar to Original Sin, revealing a deep, dark secret about themselves (The Black Panther and Namor, The Sub-Mariner are exceptions...they get two panels).

They are mostly very, very funny. For example:

I found two elements of the strip striking in that they paralleled Andrew Wheeler's "Original Spin" coverage of Original Sin for Comics Alliance. The first was that Zdarsky introduces The Watcher as "Moon Creep;" the first headline in the first installment of "Original Spin"...? "Moon Creep Murdered! Sex Games Gone Wrong?"

Also, Dr. Strange reveals that he changed his surname to Strange because he wanted to be in a metal band, which also explains his hand gestures. One of Wheeler's running gags for the Dr. Strange/Punisher team-up plotline of Original Sin was that the pair were a "retro psychedelic prog rock" band called Strangecastle.

"Original Sin: Secret Avengers" by Ales Kot, Mast, Geoffo, Ryan Kelly and Lee Loughridge

This is the apparent digital-first comic, referred to in the table-of-contents, where it is misplaced as coming before the issues of Original Sins rather than after them, as "Original Sin: Secret Avengers Infinite Comic #1-2." As I said, I'm not entirely sure what it's doing here; I suspect Marvel wasn't sure where else to put it, but then, the back of a Secret Avengers trade seems like the more obvious place, doesn't it?

It's only tangentially related to the goings-on of Original Sin—odd, since it stars two of SHIELD's "name" characters, one of whom is Nick Fury's namesake—as "The Event" (as the eyeball attack in Manhattan is here referred to) reveals the fact that this scientist guy that this Nick Fury—the young, black one who looks more like Sam Jackson then the old, white one does—and Agent Clark Gregg thought was dead is actually still alive, and he needs to be captured and stopped. Preferably before this guy with a weird face wearing a SHIELD uniform but commanding Hydra, a guy who no one ever names, gets his hands on him. As for the scientist, he developed a way to manipulate the universe through code, which he plans to have go open source. It is all apparently following up on plot points from comics I have never read, so I never really understood the exact nature of the conflict or the impetus for it, but I did manage to read all 32 pages of it, so it wasn't as boring and confusing as that Inhumans/Purple Man story was...