Gilbert Hernandez is a cartoonist of extremes. Just looking at his work related to the Palomar/Luba set of stories, he ranges all the way from the joyous porn of Birdland to the (equally joyous, in very different ways) kid-friendly stories from the turn of the century about Venus.
Venus also appeared in stories that aren’t kid-friendly, which could make sharing a book like Luba and Her Family (which has the bulk of those Venus stories) with an eight-year-old somewhat problematic. But, luckily, there is a just-the-kid-stuff Venus collection:The Adventures of Venus.
As far as I can tell, this small book — it has half-size comics pages, and less than a hundred of them — entirely consists of stories also in Luba and Her Family, so most people will not want to buy both of them. (Some people, naming no names, might have bought both of them thinking they were different things.)
The long, weird story about the “blooter baby” was original to this book, which otherwise collected all-ages material by Hernandez from the late-90s comic Measles. (It was a multi-author anthology, so he had just one Venus story each issue.)
Venus is fun and spunky, but these are mostly the lesser stories about her — concerned with normal kid-activities like soccer and with her social interactions. The other Venus stories, the ones not specifically aimed at kids, give her more depth and make her more interesting, though they probably are unsuitable for this age range — she’s exposed to knowledge of a whole lot of the illicit sexual pairings going on in Hernandez’s work in that era. (Including her own mother.)
So this is a perfectly nice book for a young audience. The only place it leads, though, is somewhere its target audience can’t follow, which could be a problem for a household that combines inquisitive young readers and copies of those other Hernandez books. And anyone older than that should just get Luba and Her Family, which has all of these stories and a lot more.
Andi Watson, I think, started off expecting to tell stories of action and adventure in comics, with a fantastic flair, but kept finding those stories turning more personal and character-focused as he told them. (I could say “more mundane,” but that sounds like an insult. It isn’t: life itself is mundane. But it sounds that way.)
That happened on a large scale with his first major series, Skeleton Key, which I re-read earlier this year. And it happened on a smaller canvas with Geisha, the four-issue series that he created in between the main run of Skeleton Key and the four-part “Roots” coda in 1999.
The Complete Geisha is the 2003 book that collects all of the Geisha work up to that point — I think there might be some later short stories, but this could be it. It collects the main four-part story from the fall of 1998, a one-shot follow-up from 2000, and a few short related stories.
There’s no geisha in the book — at least, not any obvious one. Jomi Sohodo is an android raised in a human family — this seems to be rare, if not unique — who wants to be an artist, even though it’s heavily hinted that her line was designed as sexbots. She doesn’t want to work in the family bodyguard business, as her three human brothers do, but it’s paying work, and she has a hard time selling her paintings, so she ends up, over the course of the original story, in the family business. And that leads to drama and complications, as the body she guards is a top model with an angry ex-manager/boyfriend and her new art patron is a nasty gangster.
I don’t know if Watson expected to tell a story of androids in human society, or if the sexbot thing was ever supposed to pay off. But Jomi is the only android we see, in a society that I think is supposed to be full of them, and he seems less interested in the running around and bodyguarding than he is with Jomi’s struggles to get into the art world and the compromises she has to do along the way.
The one-shot, two years later, is in Watson’s softer mature style — and I could mean both the art and the story. There’s more shading in the art, rounder edges , and very little “action” in the usual comics sense. And it’s about Jomi as a person, particularly her relationship with one brother starting a new band, rather than anything plottier.
So this is transitional Watson, starting from the story he thought he wanted to tell (or that he thought the market wanted, or someone told him to make for that market) towards more individual stories like Love Fights or Little Star. Transitions are quirky, individual things, and Geisha shows some of that in its shape, but it’s still a good Watson comic about art and family and finding your place in the world.
I’m pretty sure this has been published in one volume, at least once. But the current edition is two volumes, and that’s what I read. (Long before that, it was published as fifteen comic book issues, and I had those as well, before my 2011 flood. But all things must pass.)
“This” is the first volume of Matt Wagner’s epic transmuting-his-life-into-heroic-adventure trilogy Mage. Mage: The Hero Discovered was one of Wagner’s first major comics projects in the 1980s and was followed by The Hero Defined at the end of the ’90s and, eventually, by The Hero Denied, planned to wrap up by the end of this year.
Since that third volume is about to finish up, and I expect to read it, I thought I might as well go back for the first two: when a creator takes 15-20 years between installments, you can do him the favor of reminding yourself of the old pieces before coming to the new ones. So I re-read Hero Discovered this month (Volume One, Volume Two), plan to hit Hero Defined next month, which should get me ready for the first Hero Denied collection…which I see was published a few days ago. (I doubt I’ll be able to hold off until the second half of Denied is published as a book in February, but I did skip buying all of the floppies, so maybe I will. As I get older, the appeal of story-pieces has gone down precipitously.)
Very early in the life of this blog, I had a breathless review of Defined, which I’m linking here for completeness’s sake — I really hope you don’t go back and read those burblings, which I am now embarrassed by. Otherwise, I’ve mentioned it, but not gotten into any depth.
It starts with overwriting two guys meeting on a city street — one may be drunk, and pretends to be happy, and one may be a bum, or pretends to be one. (Their dialogue is wince-inducing: if you decide to read Mage, you need to remember that it was nearly the first thing Wagner did in comics, and that he got better quickly — though ponderous unbelievable dialogue is an occasional hazard throughout the Mage stories.)
The not-drunk guy is Kevin Matchstick, who is so sad because he’s all alone. The not-bum calls himself Mirth, and he’s the mage of the title — there will be a different one for each series. Right after their conversation, Kevin sees a man attacking an actual bum in an alley, and surprises himself by running to intervene. He’s even more surprised to find the assailant is a hairless pale-skinned humanoid with sharp points on his elbows and that Kevin suddenly has super-strength and speed. The bum dies; the humanoid gets away.
And Kevin goes back to his apartment, confused, to find Mirth, who starts the official Hero’s Journey by explaining (well, a little) who he and Kevin are. Mirth is the World-Mage, opposed to the evil Umbra Sprite and his sons, the Grackleflints (the humanoids), who do the usual evil thing of corruption and destruction. Kevin has another fight with three (of five) of the Grackleflints in a subway car before he gets the next round of explanations from Mirth.
I’ll be blunt here, though Kevin doesn’t find this out for a long time: he’s The Eternal ChampionKing Arthurkind-of King Arthur, in that he’s the latest incarnation of a mythic hero and was once little Wart. He will gather allies — a teenage girl with a bat and a dead public defender — and, together, they will help him battle the Umbra Sprite and all of the supernatural creatures that the Sprite can summon and throw at him. The Sprite is searching for the Fisher King — another reincarnation, though not a hero — and if his Grackleflints can kill the Fisher King, it will bring a new era of death and destruction to earth.
And that’s the story of Discovered: this is explicitly a Hero’s Journey book, so Kevin learns bits and pieces of the setup over about four hundred pages, punctuated with fights against dragons and giants and redcaps and other mythical beasties, and occasionally broken up by attempts to actually figure out what the forces of evil are doing, where they’re headquartered, and how to stop them.
Before the end, there are major sacrifices so the Hero can stand alone, quite a lot of epic fight scenes, and a surprisingly nuanced view of the relationships among the forces of evil. Wagner started this series a little shakily, but it had great bones right from the beginning, and both his drawing and writing skills got stronger very quickly. It’s unfortunate that the two very worst pages in the whole Mage saga are the first two, but at least you can know that going in.
Somewhere along the line, the original 1980s-era coloring disappeared and was replaced by a more modern treatment by Jeromy Cox and James Rochelle — I think this is from the Defined era, but don’t quote me. I should also note that Wagner is inked by Sam Kieth, starting with the sixth (of fifteen) chapters, and that lines up with one of several leaps forward in the strength of the art. (So it’s not all Wagner, as the cover makes it seem — very few comics are that much of an auteur medium; there’s always some collaboration going on.)
Mage is a strong urban fantasy story in comics form, clearly in a mythic vein but with a lot of individual touches. It’s classy enough to have titles from Hamlet (and never say so, or explain them), and street enough to be about the reincarnation of King Arthur beating up monsters to save the world. And, if you’ve been waiting for the whole Mage saga to be done, you are nearly in luck.
Now, I know that I tend to focus on the negative, even when the positive is much larger and objectively more interesting. I usually blame that on “editor brain” — when you spend years pulling apart stories for a living, it forms a habit that you just can’t break.
So let me say up front that Finder is pretty damn awesome, a smart series of graphic novels with real character depth, a quirky and involving world, tricky plots, and sharp people-oriented art. But it’s got some elements in its SFnal setup that people like me obsess about and complain about more than they deserve.
I’ll try to keep those quibbles minor, since they are minor. This is a great world that basically hangs together; it just has a central flaw that’s very common, very understandable, and yet often very annoying (to people like me who can’t just let it go).
Finder is supposedly set a few thousand years in the future, on an Earth hugely depopulated, devoid of any obvious larger governments than pseudo-zaibatsu “clans,” with people either living crammed into domed cities or roaming the outside wastes as nomads very much modeled on the American Indian in ways that are deeply unlikely. It’s not clear if massive numbers of people left the planet in the meantime, if there was at least one apocalypse to kill billions, or if population just dwindled for a long time. (The current society seems to above replacement rate, and so growing, but maybe only slowly.) And popular culture is, as far as we see, primarily devoted to digging up ephemera of the 20th century.
So, yes, to tick off the obvious SF-geek issues: that feels like much too far in the future for the focus on modern pop-culture; there’s no clear path from here to get to this world; there doesn’t seem to be any infrastructure to feed those people, let alone provide them with industrial goods; and the lack of any structure to society outside/above/between the clans seems unlikely at best — how do clans resolve conflicts, living together in their tight little cities?
Let me stipulate all that: those are issues with the world-building, and maybe creator Carla Speed McNeiltackles them eventually. In the first three storylines of Finder, collected as the 2011 omnibus The Finder Library, Vol. 1, though, she doesn’t. This book has what was the first 22 issues of Finder the print comic — sometime later it turned into a webcomic — originally published between 1996 and 2001 and then collected into the first four trade paperbacks. (Sin-Eater, the first storyline, took up two books.)
Sin-Eater introduces the world through Jaeger, a roguish “finder” from one of the many tribal “Ascian” cultures that live nomadic lives in the Empty Lands between those domed cities. He has a lot of strangeness of his own, for a 20th century reader, but he’s an outsider in the city of Anvard, so he’s our viewpoint for the strangeness there.
Jaeger is the on-and-off lover of Emma Lockhart Grosvenor, a married woman in Anvard. That is to say: she lets him live with her when he’s in town, but he’s only in town randomly, at long intervals, and utterly without notice. McNeil does not show Jaeger having similar arrangements in other cities — and I think she finds him more appealing than I do — but I see no reason why a man like him wouldn’t have a semi-regular fuck-buddy in all of the places he wanders through.
Emma is part of a mixed marriage that went bad. She’s from the artistic, ultra-feminine Llaverac clan; her husband Brigham Grosvenor is from the military/police clan Medawar. [1] Brigham was a military leader who took his family to the frontier outpost where he was stationed (and where Jaeger was something like a native scout and Brigham’s aide/pet) and there descended into what Finder doesn’t actually call paranoid schizophrenia. Emma got away with her three “daughters” — all members of Llaverac are referred to by feminine pronouns and tend to present as female in public, even if they are biologically male — Rachel, Lynne (who is male), and Marcie (Marcella) with Jaeger’s aid a few years ago, and has been hiding from Brigham since then.
Sin-Eater is the story of how that hiding eventually falls apart, how Brig finds his family again, and how it affects all of them. Jaeger, in what I think is his usual style, is both too clever by half and has a a strong restless tropism to do stupid random things, so it’s all mostly his fault. It’s also the story that introduces the world and explains, as much as McNeil wanted, how it works and what these people do.
The second story here, King of the Cats, is more self-contained and focused more tightly on Jaeger. He’s worked his way to another city as an armed guard on a giant armored bus — the wilderness is quite dangerous, with all of those native tribes and no farmlands — carrying members of the Steinehan clan to an amusement-park city (unnamed, as far as I can find), and wants to get inside mostly because they won’t hire him or let him inside. Jaeger is motivated, as always, but spite and whim as much as anything else.
Camping nearby is a large group of Nyima, an intelligent non-human race with pretty serious sexual dimorphism — the females are lion-headed humanoids and the males a a big question mark. (We learn that most males are semi-intelligence quadrupedal lion-types, but each group has a King, whom all of the females are “married” to, and who has bipedalism and increased intelligence because of a specific intervention by the females. This seems unlikely to be stable or natural, but I can only shrug.) They have an onerous contract with the unseen owners of the amusement park, which they can’t fulfill without destroying their culture and becoming essentially slaves there for the rest of their lives, and which they can’t break without incurring massive financial penalties. (Again: this is a warlike group of nomads in a world with no apparent larger government. McNeil makes the dilemma plausible, but the heavily armed and well-positioned Nyima appear to have a much stronger hand than the weak, unarmed locals.)
Jaeger, in his meddling way, solves the Nyimas’ problem, answers his own curiosity, causes a larger amount of trouble than usual even for him, and leaves at the end, happy and ready for another opportunity to meddle somewhere else.
And last in Volume 1 is Talisman, which I read before a few years back
. This is Marcie’s story: she’s growing up from the little girl we saw in Sin-Eater, and I won’t repeat what I said then. (This post is long enough already.) The background details do make more sense if you come to Talisman in series order, though. Talisman is a story about the youth of an artist, which many artists are compelled to tell — McNeil does a good job of it, and her quirky world makes it specific and individual.
The most important thing for me to note at the end here is that I’m going to be actively seeking out Finder Library, Vol. 2. Some of the world-building might annoy me, but that always happens. McNeil’s people are real and have complicated flaws, her world is big and intricate and clearly is full of details she already knows that might never make it into a story, and her drawing is crisp and evocative and sophisticated. It’s good, real SF in comics form, which is rare, and it’s SF focused on people (often women) in a complex world, which is even rarer.
[1] How can there be a clan that specializes in “police” if there’s no government above them? They’d just be the street gang that runs the town, from their monopoly on violence. I’m hoping McNeil eventually explains the governance of this world, because so far I see nothing to keep one clan from eliminating another, or any mechanisms other than violence to solve inter-clan disputes.
Some historical moments date much faster than others, and that can be deeply amusing if you lived through them. Y2K is the great recent example: it was a huge deal before it happened, and was forgotten and ignored almost immediately afterward when the popularized apocalypse failed to actually happen.
Kyle Baker’s graphic novel I Die at Midnight is one of the small breed of Millennial Thrillers, set on New Year’s Eve of 1999. Amusingly, it was even published in a Y2K style, with a big “V2K Vertigo” imprint at the top left that everyone has since forgotten that DC’s Vertigo ever used at all. Interestingly, it has a copyright date of 2000, which makes it a late entry in this derby: most of your Millennial Thrillers came out in 1997-1999 to capitalize on the hype beforehand and promise horrible world-ending terrors on that fateful night.
Baker, though, is working on a smaller canvas: I Die is the story of one man, one evening, and the race to get an antidote to the overdose he just took.
Larry is that man: Muriel left him recently, and so he’s going to end it all on New Year’s Eve. But then she returns to him, right after he swallows the whole bottle of pills. And since nothing can go right in a comic thriller — which is definitely what I Die at Midnight is — he can’t get those pills out of his system until it’s too late, and his only hope is to meet up with a doctor acquaintance with that antidote before midnight, when it will be too late to save him. Midnight, of course, is only forty minutes away. And the only way they can meet in time is right in between where they are…which is, coincidentally, Times Square.
There are other complications, of course. There have to be. They are funny, and at least plausible, and they keep this story barreling forward exactly the way they need to. And the story ends the way it needs to.
I Die at Midnight is not a major Baker work. But it’s fast and funny and full of amusing moments and Easter eggs in the art. (Times Square in particular is awash in billboards for various Baker properties, mostly but not all in their imagined movie versions — I wished the book was physically larger so I could get a better look at all of the goofy stuff there.) And it will be funnier the more you remember the Y2K hoopla.
Here’s a lesson I could stand to learn: if I pick up a book in a field I’ve been following reasonably closely for my entire adult life, and that book came out during my adult life, and I can’t remember hearing anything in particular about it, it’s very likely that’s because the book is not actually all that good.
But let me pretend to change the subject!
Today I’m here to talk about American Century, a Vertigo series from around the turn of the millennium, written by Howard Chaykin and David Tischman and with art by Marc Laming and John Stokes. I found the first two collections of this series randomly a couple of months ago, and, since I’m reading everything I can get my hands on for this Book-A-Day run, they went into the hopper before too long.
I had, as far as I could remember, never heard of American Century. Now I know why.
Our Standard Chaykin Asshole this time is named Harry Block, and he’s the usual mid-career Chaykin hero: unsatisfied with his quiet suburban life in 1949, cheated on obviously by his mouthy, demanding, hot-to-trot wife [1], and called up for the growing conflict in Korea. So he bugs out, and American Century sets up to be the story of how he wanders through various unpleasant episodes in history over the next however-many years. In the end — I see from looking it up on the Comic Book DB
— there were twenty-seven issues, but only the first nine were collected into these two books.
And that’s probably because this is dull, difficult-to-follow, and boring. Harry Block should have been the American Harry Flashman
, but Chaykin-and-Tischman aren’t Fraser, and even pure Chaykin would probably have gone in the same direction.
In the first one, Harry changes his last name to Kraft and flies planes for smugglers in Guatemala during a simmering civil war between the American-backed government and Communist insurgents, with a side order of the evil profiteering US Fruit Company. Chaykin and Tischman make this boring, and Laming and Stokes manage to make a naked woman look unrealistic, which I thought was impossible for a mainstream comics team.
Hollywood Babylon brings Harry back to the states, to LA obviously, and to more Chaykinesque intrigue, this time among movie stars and a US Senator and a gossip columnist. This is also dull, and Harry only peripherally involved in any of it. (He also doesn’t narrate the stories as strongly as I think he’s supposed to: his voice isn’t distinctive and it isn’t pervasive.)
You’ve probably never heard of American Century. There’s a reason for that. I recommend you let it be forgotten once again.
[1] Remember that all of those things are bad in Chaykin-land: women should do what men tell them to do, and only be sexpot with the hero when he demands it.
2011’s installment of Love and Rockets was very much the continuation of the year before: Jaime finishes up “The Love Bunglers” here, in four devastating chapters, and Gilbert continues to circle Hollywood with his characters Fritzi and Killer in two stories, one of them “fictional” within the world of Love and Rockets and one of them “real.”
That’s a good question, though: what is real? I still have my questions about the end of “Love Bunglers,” which has an element that I’m afraid is not exactly real.
(From poking through The Love and Rockets Companion, I’m guessing it is real, but I’m still withholding final judgment until I actual read later stories. It is so parallel to the end of L&R Vol. 1 that I don’t trust it. It’s also so much a wish-fulfillment for both characters and audience that it’s deeply out of character for Jaime’s work.)
I’ve written about “Love Bunglers” twice recently in this series — just last week and when I read the revised version in Angels and Magpies a few weeks before that. I don’t have much new to say about it this time, though it lays out interestingly in this book: Part Three opens with a one-page vignette about two unnamed long-married characters — I don’t think we’ve ever seen them before, or are meant to recognize them — with the woman’s thought overlaid as captions. And that moment is strongly parallel with the end of the book, a scene with Maggie and Ray. That’s not as obvious when the whole story is collected, and speaks to how Jaime planned the effect of the stories in a particular serial installment of L&R.
On the Gilbert side, “King Vampire” is another movie presented in comics form. Confusingly, it seems to star Killer as the young vampire wanna-be and Fritzi as an older vampire in a parallel plot, but the other Gilbert story in this volume, “And Then Reality Kicks In,” is a discussion between Fritzi and an unnamed guy about “the vampire project,” which won’t happen until she gets out of her current seven-year contract. So “King Vampire” is a movie from the future of Gilbert’s continuity, or something.
“King Vampire” is pulpy, violent, and full of sex, of course — that’s generally the point of Gilbert’s “movie” stories.
“And Then Reality Kicks In” is quieter, showing one long conversation that’s about more than it shows on the surface. If I remembered who that guy was, it would probably be a bit more meaningful to me, but I find the men of this era of Gilbert’s work to be pretty colorless and interchangeable.
Next week I’ll have a full book Love and Rockets stories from 2012 that I’ve never read before: this one was half-new, but from here forward it’s all stuff I haven’t read. It’s weird how you can realize you haven’t read one of your favorite comic series for close to a decade….
Anyone who does a graphic novel about his father’s secrets and history has a long shadow to contend with. (It’s art spiegelman’s Maus, in case you’ve forgotten.) The closer that father was to WWII, the clearer the parallels. If the father was Jewish…even more so.
Now, a creator doesn’t have to engage with that at all: it’s probably best if they don’t, actually. But it’ll be there in the back of every reader’s head, just like any story with a whale will evoke Moby Dick and a guy wandering around Dublin Ulysses.
Michael Kupperman’s father Joel was a child prodigy, nationally famous at the age of five for appearing on the radio show Quiz Kids. He was shoved into it by a domineering mother, and basically lost his childhood to performing as a child genius. And, once he got out, he tried to ignore it for the rest of his life, never talking about his time in show biz. And, obviously in retrospect, Joel Kupperman was guided and “controlled” in his career as a boy genius in part because it just made a good story and partly because he was Jewish.
Michael always wondered about that history, and finally dug into it in the last few years, as his father retired, slowed down, and slid into dementia. All the Answers is the result: as much as he could pull together fifty years later from the memories of a reticent, failing old man, from yellowing hidden scrapbooks, and from his own research.
Kupperman has a stark, almost blunt art style, with a look of being based closely on photos and other reference. That gives a documentary air to the proceedings most of the time, though he draws himself subtly differently than the other characters, with hooded, staring eyes. (Is that just how he draws himself? Or is a particular metaphor for this book? I’m hoping the latter, since it’s a subtle, ingenious device if deliberate.)
There’s a framing story set in the current day, but most of All the Answers tells the story of young Joel during WWII and the years right afterward. Since Joel never did talk about those days, Michael was left to piece it together from news reports, family stories, and the scrapbooks he discovered while searching his father’s office. That also adds to the documentary feeling: this isn’t a story Joel is telling us — he couldn’t tell it to anyone, and spent his life trying to forget it — but a story that had to be figured out by others. This is a reported story rather than an eyewitness story.
What Joel had seems pretty nice from the outside: adulation, minor fame, hobnobbing with the famous and glamorous. But he seems to have hated it almost from the start, and did any of it purely because of his mother. And then there’s the whole question of how honest any of those early quiz or game shows were — Quiz Kids seems to have been on the relatively honest side, which is to say they didn’t actively hand answers to the kids they preferred. But all of those shows had things that were more important than honest games — making a good show, excitement, promoting the right kind of people — and even Quiz Kids fell into that.
All the Answers isn’t the story of who Joel Kupperman was as a kid: that’s lost forever. It’s not personal; Michael Kupperman had to pull this all together from secondhand sources. Joel is himself the hole at the center of his own life, the thing his son is trying to fill and understand. So this book will tell us what happened, and something of what it might have meant. But it can’t tell us what Joel felt; there’s nothing in the world that can tell us that anymore, since Joel himself is incapable of it.
But this book will tell us what we can know. And that’s going to have to be enough.
This is not a collection of the Squirrel Girl comic. Somehow, in 2016, while I think they were also putting out the regular comic monthly, creators Ryan North (words) and Eric Henderson (pictures) also created this unpaged-but-clearly-at-least-a-hundred-pages-long OGN as well.
I’m not totally clear on where it fits into continuity, if you’re looking to read it in sequence with the regular comic — I came to it after Vol. 5, which feels a little late. (Doreen’s newish friend Brain Drain is completely missing, through Koi Boy and Chipmunk Hunk are here.)
What is this thing? Well, it’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe, and SG’s tone is much closer to Fred Hembeck than the Punisher in the piling-up-the-bodies-on-the-cover competition. (Deadpool, as usual, wants to have it both ways: to be gritty and funny.)
And there is an asterisk: it’s not our Squirrel Girl, the indomitable Doreen Green, who beats up all of the heroes in the MU, but her evil twin.
Well, maybe not evil twin. Will you accept misguided? Single-minded? Squirrel-obsessed? Well-meaning but unwilling to compromise? Maybe all of those things.
Anyway, that’s the deal: there’s a mysterious science artifact, which of course Tony Stark is poking at, since that’s what he does. And it sucks in our heroine Doreen Green and spits out two of her.
Foiling the usual expectations, they both know which one is the original: the one on the right. (Because they both remember being the one on the right, and one of them is now on the left.) Similarly, the duplicate, swiftly calling herself Allene from their shared middle name, is not obviously evil, and the two of them joyfully team up to fight crime…and then hatch an even bigger plan to use squirrels to make the world a utopia, using the language of computer programming.
(It all makes sense in context, trust me. Though the context is “a Marvel Universe book substantially sillier and more obsessed with computer science than its peers.”)
But, inevitably, Doreen and Alleen fall out over means and ends, as good and evil twins always must. And Alleen is possessed of all of the spunk and gumption and unbeatable-ness of the original, so she does — as the title promises — defeat ninety-nine-point-something-or-other percent of the heroes in the MU and send them into the Phantom Zone Negative Zone. And all seems lost.
But all can’t be lost for the heroine of an ongoing series, so you know it works out right in the end, with all of the MU folks brushed off and returned to their rightful places in time for the next issue of their own comics, never to speak of the time they were banished to the Negative Zone by Evil Squirrel Girl.
This is a pleasant exercise in the “my character can beat up your character” derby, but the superhero-furniture stuff (oh, no! all looks blackest before the dawn! how can I manage to defeat {insert overwhelming villain here!}) has always been the weakest and least interesting part of Squirrel Girl, and that’s the core focus of this book. We don’t get a lot of characterization of the main cast, since Ryan and Henderson have to shoehorn in every MU character they were approved to mention, and the book is a long collection of short fight scenes.
They’re funny fight scenes, granted. Beats Up is amusing in the Scintillating Squirrel Girl manner; it’s just not as good as the heights of the regular book. It’s just that we’ve seen this “everybody fights” plot so many times before, and there’s only so many changes North and Henderson can ring on it.
If you like Squirrel Girl, grab this in the middle — I’d suggest trying it after Vol. 4 of the regular series. But it’s not the place to start and it may be faintly disappointing.
This will probably be the last time you see me grumble about Ms. Marvel. I just checked the local library system, and they do not have the next volume — the NYPL might, since it is vast and contains multitudes, but I don’t have the easy access to that system that I had when I actually worked in NYC. [1]
And that’s fine, because Ms. Marvel seems to have lost whatever was particularly distinctive about it in the beginning, aside from the bare fact that the heroine is brown and Muslim. (And even that is mostly stated at this point, rather than actually being germane to the plots and characterization.) Yes, Kamala Khan is officially a teenage Muslim girl from Jersey City, but the stories here don’t feature her family at all, her community is shown in very generic ways, and it’s leaning much more into the teenager-ness than anything else — which, as you know Bob, does not particularly distinguish Kamala from other teen-genius heroes like Nova and Spider-Man.
Anyway: Ms. Marvel, Vol. 7: Damage Per Second. Written as always by G. Willow Wilson, and collecting issues 13-18 of the 2016 series, with art by Mirka Andolfo (#13), Takeshi Miyazawa (#14-17) and Francesco Gaston (#18).
In which the stretchy Jersey girl drives voter turnout (in an issue cover-dated January 2017?), battles the ultimate Internet troll, and then briefly cedes the spotlight to her former best friend Bruno Carrelli.
That first story…well, it means well, I suppose, but it is very comic-booky in all of the bad ways, from a transparently villainous plot by transparently villainous actors to a happy ending based entirely on the fact that Kamala is the title star of the book. And its message — that you can stop all of the bad political things you hate and get the perfect snowflake candidate you absolutely love — is stupid and wrong-headed and entirely contrary to the actual world of real politics. But, yeah, vote for the librarian who has no chance of winning if a girl in a mask tells you to….
The long title story is one of those standard superhero exercises: how do you fight someone you can’t punch? And for a girl who is supposedly really smart and going to a super-sciencey school, Kamala has a really hard time coming up with any strategies to fight this new dastardly villain (a sentient computer virus, basically). Of course it all works out in the end, and of course it will have no effects on anything — it is a superhero story.
And then the book wraps up with a solo adventure of Bruno at Golden City Polytechnic Prep, Wakanda, where he is apparently both the token White Guy and the token Dumb Guy. Sadly, this issue tends to argue against my fervent hope that Bruno will turn up in another dozen issues as a super-villain with a gripe against Kamala, but I suppose I can keep hoping for a lucky lab accident. Instead, he learns Lessons About Life, mostly that every important character in a superhero comic is rich, powerful, connected, or some combination thereof.
With this volume, we see that Ms. Marvel can be dull and mediocre even without a crossover, which had been the initial source of the dullness in the title. I suspect, at this point, the stories inherent in this setup have been exhausted, and it’s time to actually let life move on for Kamala and her friends and family. But, since this is a Big Two comic, I’m sure instead we’ll get a Shocking Reversal, with someone dead or depowered or Superhero No More! or gender-swapped. But it’ll have to happen without me; I think I’m done here.
[1] I do still have a NYPL card, because every self-respecting reader knows that you never give up a library card unless forced to.
