Unqualified Offerings

Some recent superhero comics, quickly (though I always say that) recapped:

Marvel Knights Spider-Man, by Hudlin, Tan and Sibal. This issue reveals last issue as Reginald Hudlin’s Spider-Man shakeout cruise – it had its entertaining bits but the ending was so off in tone from the rest of the book as to ruin the whole thing. Also, Billy Tan’s art on the classroom scenes only worked if Peter Parker taught science to midgets. Parker is a high school teacher, but the kids only came up to his waist. This issue is far more surehanded. I’m glad my enjoyment of Hudlin’s Black Panther #4 convinced me to give this book another try. The fun premise here is that, taking a summer job with the Daily Bugle, Peter gets assigned to work with Clark Kent (in all but name) on a Spider-Man expose. Thus you have each trying to shake the other when trouble calls, and for the same reason. We also get crime gang caper action centered around the Absorbing Man that recalls classic Silver and Bronze Age Spider-Man gang wars. With the rapid improvement in this title and the continuing evolution of Black Panther, I’m now officially sold on Hudlin as a comics scripter.

Ultimates 2 #6, by Mark Millar, Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary. The current issue gives you the characteristic best and worst of this title. The “Defenders” subplot is iconoclasm for the sake of faux daring – they’re a group of unpowered wannabes with whom pathetic Hank Pym hooks in hopes of regaining some self-respect and credibility after disgracing himself in Volume One of the series. There’s a severely undermotivated in-joke about the Ultimate Scarlet Witch “flirting” with one of Hank’s robots late in the book. But the last page, where Hank talks to a so-far-unrevealed traitor (or whistleblower) reminds me that Volume Two’s uberplot, the “persons of mass destruction” theme playing out within the possible conflict between Thor and Loki, has been good reading. Me, I think the “traitor” is Tony Stark, but I don’t know yet.

Captain America #6, by Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting and Frank D’Armata. Here, however, we officially learn that this book’s traitor is – for the sake of those who haven’t gotten to this issue yet, we’ll call him . . . “Jason Todd.” Last issue was actually quite good, and I meant to write about it at the time. It put too much effort into foreshadowing the revelation of this issue by foisting an ahistorical reinterpretation on aspects of Captain America’s (and Jason Todd’s) WWII history, but it featured great Michael Lark art and made Cap and the Invaders believable as WWII combatants. Brubaker didn’t try to maintain the absurd fiction that Cap somehow got through a world war without killing anybody; he gave him a soldier’s reactions to the distasteful experience of working with a Soviet officer; and did I mention Michael Lark’s art? This issue we’re back to the far less compelling modern day action, trading chalkily-colored WWII Lark snowscapes for muddy Epting tunnels; trivializing one of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s most outlandish concepts – “The Cosmic Cube!” – into a (partially-damaged) lower-case “cosmic cube”; and, worst of all, letting us know, on the last page, that the Jason Todd storyline is going to drag out for another six months. Years from now, or maybe only months, someone will decide the whole development was a pretty dumb idea. Some writer will be brought in to reveal that it was all “a trick of the cube” or maybe they’ll just ignore it. Heck, by the end of Marvel’s upcoming HOUSE OF M maxiseries/crossover the events of these issues may already be null and void.

You may want to read something other than Captain America between now and then. But if they assign Brubaker and Lark to write a Cap series set in WWII, jump on it.

The Incredible Hulk #81, Peter David, Lee Weeks and Tom Palmer. This one is of critical interest. As Johanna Draper Carlson says, it makes surprisingly appropriate use of the massacres of September 11, 2001, as a, well, a McGuffin. But it works!

In a way. It rings true to us readers. It makes no sense within whatever is left of Marvel’s own continuity. From within Marvel continuity, the vox pop had, long before that day, witnessed Galactus preparing to consume the very life force of the planet. It had seen – oh, lots of other really frightening and apocalyptic stuff. A diegetical killjoy would say that it makes no sense that Marvel Earth’s reaction to the WTC and Pentagon attacks would match the intensity of our own.

For my part, I don’t think we should necessarily be diegetical killjoys. We should hold continuity lightly enough to allow superhero stories to speak directly to our concerns. This fits with my previously stated preference for the superhero comic as fantasy rather than SF, and to John Holbo’s plumping for the “dreamwork” over the “subcreation.”

As to the story overall, I like David’s take on the Hulk, and on the young Banner, but the sands on “Nightmare Isle” shifted too often over the course of the last half-dozen issues for me to get a comfortable purchase on things. If David intended the arc as, at least in part, his critique of Bruce Jones’ run on the title (I liked it until the bad times at the end, David didn’t), I think he failed to see that Jones’ run was grounded in some crucially stable knowns, especially the solidity of the character of Bruce Banner. I’m in for the next arc, though, as David showed me enough to bring me back for it.