The parade of odd would-be world-conquerors continues in this collection of Squirrel Girl’s exploits — I almost said “latest collection,” but I’m still running almost two years behind, so it’s not. She hasn’t turned grimdark in the meantime, has she? That would be sad.
Anyway, in the five issues from late 2016 collected in (deep breath) The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 5: Like I’m the Only Squirrel in the World (exhale), our intrepid Squirrel Girl, Doreen Green, spends three issues battling a supervillain who breaks apart into smaller versions of himself when punched — something which makes it very difficult for the heroes of the Marvel Universeto apply their usual problem-solving heuristic [1] to.
Doreen occasionally uses other solutions to problems — oh, she can punch, too, she wouldn’t last long in a Marvel comic if she couldn’t — so this becomes her problem to fix. Also, it’s her comic, but that’s pretty meta.
(By the way, this is volume five — I’ve written about the first four here
and here
and here
and here
.)
And, yes, she does save the world: that’s the point of a superhero comic. She does get some help from Ant-Man — the ex-criminal one, not the movie one, or any of the three or four dozen others — but more fun is Brain Drain, her friend/protege/sidekick/coincidentally also an ex-villain, who is a brain in a jar in a robot body and who is more nihilistic than anyone in a Marvel comic is generally allowed to be.
Well, that takes up three of the five issues collected here. What else? Doreen fights the Taskmaster — whose power of “understanding how to do something perfectly by seeing it once” is always vastly overrated, since he doesn’t actually get the superpowers to fly or shoot eyebeams or punch someone through the side of a building [2] — in an issue entirely from the point of view of her cat.
And then issue #16 is the amazing 25th anniversary celebration of Squirrel Girl. And, since it’s a big anniversary, it’s entirely taken up with a retelling of her origins…well, actually, her entire career, more or less.
It’s all fun and amusing in the Stunning Squirrel-Girl Manner, but it’s all the same kind of thing as previous Squirrel Girl stories by writer Ryan North and artist Erica Henderson. [3] It’s still somewhere in that nebulous middle ground between “like a normal Marvel comic, only funny and not entirely serious” and “science and girl power for parents and their pre-teens,” and it does manage to avoid any crossover events that might have been cluttering up its universe at the time.
It’s just more of the same: that’s what I’m saying. If you liked it before, you’ll probably like the reprise. But, at some point, you might want to hear a different song. [4]
[1] Is opponent attacking? Then punch. Is opponent resting? Then declaim. Is opponent defeated? Then monologue about justice.
[2] Squirrel Girl defeats him because she has a tail, which he can’t replicate, and that would be cool if we didn’t see him on previous pages fighting Hulk (superstrong), Iron Man (flies, shoots force beams), Spider-Man (shoots webs), and Ms. Marvel (stretches), every single one of whom can do at least one thing Taskmaster cannot replicate. But none of them is the star of this comic, which is Doreen’s real superpower.
[3] Thought I was going to forget to mention then, didn’t you?
[4] HA! I may be overly optimistic here: eighty years of superhero comics, and the neckbeards are still obsessed with their one song.
I debated whether to categorize this post as “Horror.” At the moment, I haven’t, but maybe I’ll change my mind as type. Let’s see how that goes.
Fran Krause has been making a comic called Deep Dark Fears online called 2012, working from the submitted worries and fears of mostly anonymous contributors. (He’s also an animation teacher at Calarts.)
There have been two collections of the strip — the first one was Deep Dark Fears (unsurprisingly) in 2015, and a second book, The Creeps, came out in 2017. I’ve been reading the strip for a few years — I’m not sure exactly how long — but I missed the first book, and just read the second.
Each comic is generally four panels in a grid, with text underneath each panel — he’s illustrating the fear, in something like the words it was submitted to him.
And everything here was the worst fear of at least one person in at least one moment — something that person needed to share right then, when prompted. Not all of it was scary to me, not all of it will be scary to you — and none of it is designed to outright frighten you. There are no jump scares here, no fake-outs. Krause is illustrating things that other people are scared of…and seeing that, or thinking about that, may turn your mind down those paths.
So the title is is a good choice: these are comics more likely to “creep you out,” to make you feel uneasy, to make you think, than to actually on-purpose frighten you.
The Creeps also includes a couple of longer stories, also based on fears and stories about fears from contributors. They’re laid out with more flair, taking advantage of the full book page here. (I suspect the format of Deep Dark Fears is partly driven by how the individual panels will appear on various social platforms, especially on mobile. [1])
Krause has a simplified but sophisticated art style for these stories: people have dot eyes, limbs are close to rubber-hose quality, ears and noses are mostly geometric shapes with blocks of color, and backgrounds tend to be minimally sketched. He pulls it all together with blocks of subdued colors — I think primarily watercolor, and occasionally has a larger page-like structure underlying the four panels — but, usually, they’re designed so each one can stand alone in a string. (And, in fact the book plays with that: sometimes having two strips on facing pages, sometimes having one strip on the right and the title on the left, and sometimes running one strip across a spread, two panels on each side.)
Deep Dark Fears is an interesting and diverse crowdsourced comic, focused by Krause’s art, his selective eye, and the relatively narrow subject matter. It has the pared-down simplicity of the best comics or Zen koans, a sense that these are the fewest, most precise words to express this particular feeling. And it is quite likely to give you The Creeps.
[1] Can I be a Luddite for a second and mention that mobile has blown up a lot of good, sophisticated design on the web? There’s no going back, since you have to go where the users are, but a desktop window is a better platform for many media — any video with a decent quality, long-form text, comics with any kind of page design, etc. — than a mobile screen is. Oh, well — grump, grump.
When we first met Archie Andrews, he was the prototypical American teenager when being a teenager was a new concept. The idea of teens having free time was also new and mandatory attendance at high school was just a few decades old. It was a perfect place to explore what it meant to have leisure time to pursue personal interests be it the opposite sex or cars or sports or whatever.
The Archie comics have endured largely through their universality and their gentle humorous antics. Wisely, the company belatedly acknowledged the changing times and revamped the look and feel of the characters with the brilliant Mark Waid/Fiona Staples run which brought national attention and increased sales to the company. (Their digests continued to display the “classic” material.)
The universality and humor was retained but introduced more contemporary themes and issues. This got television interested and the ubiquitous Greg Berlanti convinced the CW that Riverdale was the next great thing. He partnered with Archie’s creator guru Robert Aguirre-Sacasa and they desired that Archie didn’t have to be relatable or funny or anything resembling the comics. Instead, it was propelling the characters and town into uncharted territory: darker in tone, with dollops of premarital sex, illicit affairs, conspiracy and murder.
Purists detested it but you can’t argue with success. The ratings were stellar and the short first season earned a renewal and fans were delighted with a full 22 episode second season. Out Tuesday is Riverdale the Complete Second Season from Warner Home Entertainment. You may judge for yourself if this is how you want to enjoy the characters.
The melodrama has become a guilty pleasure with a rabid audience, skewing mostly to females from 10-35, which may explain why I find this a bad adaptation of the source material and overwrought drama.
While the comics were purely white bread in makeup, the series gets plaudits for being far more multicultural in their casting, more reflective of America today. They also amped up the adult parts so the teens can be contrasted with their parents in addition to a more thorough exploration of the class warfare that was always present in the comics.
That said, the casting is atrocious in that none of the “teens” look like they belong in high school, spoiling the whole feel. Had they changed it from Riverdale High to Riverdale Community College, it might work but then Veronica would have already been sent off to a private college. Archie was always intended to be the everyteen, earnest and klutzy, sincere and unable to control his raging hormones. With newcomer KJ Apa learning to act while playing the part, he’s all hunk and no subtlety. And forget humor, apparently, that was the first thing to go when bringing this from print to screen.
We open the season with the repercussions of Fred Andrews (Luke Perry) being shot and end with Betty’s (Lili Reinhart) dad Hal Cooper (Lochlyn Munro) locked up behind a pane of glass and Archie arrested for murder. In between we see Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse) and Betty become a thing while he adjusts to running his father’s biker gang. Veronica Lodge (Camila Mendes) is dragooned into learning the family business, which backfires when she takes Hiram Lodge’s (Mark Consuelos). lessons and saves Pop Tate’s diner. Haunting them all was a killer (or killers) dubbed the Black Hood (a nod to Archie’s comic book origins) in addition to the shady world the adults seem to prefer living in with questionable moral choices, making them lousy role models for their offspring. Hiram has gone from the big business tycoon in the less offensive Trump mode to being Don Lodge, head of a shadowy crime family that tries to seduce Archie with offers of easy cash in exchange for easing of morality. Yuck.
Aguirre-Sacasa has made much of the tonal shift from the mystery of who killed Jason Blossom in the 13-episode first season to the serial killer threat in season two. Death is still death and really, the issues confronting teens today, including incredible peer pressure and fully packed schedules, is totally absent from the show making it a funhouse mirror reflection of being a teen today.
The darkness grabbed hold of the cast, especially Betty who veered between innocent crusader and sexual being, complete with black wig. She had to confront this dichotomy and her struggle was perhaps the best character arc of the season and it was nice to see her smile at the end.
What’s to come in season three, arriving October 10? We’re told “Tales from the Darkside”, S2E7, offers some clues.
The Season is sold widely as a DVD box set although a Blu-ray edition can be ordered from Warner Archive. The DVD transfer is fine and looks just as it on broadcast TV, with an equally good audio track (important since the music is sometimes more enjoyable than the plotting).
There are just a handful of special feature, starting with the behind-the-scenes Caught between Two Worlds: The Darkness Inside and Making the Musical: Riverdale. The requisite Riverdale: 2017 Comic-Con Panel is on hand along with a Riverdale Pop Quiz! There are Deleted Scenes for just about every episode (some interesting, some easily left out), and of course, the Gag Reel.
Suppose you were a lawyer. (Don’t worry, this is just a thought experiment. I wouldn’t wish that fate on my worst enemy; only on myself.) Suppose also, that you told your significant other you wouldn’t get married until you had established yourself as a lawyer. Suppose further that you couldn’t establish yourself as a lawyer, because you kept losing all your trials. And, finally, suppose you continued losing trials until your significant other became a super hero and secretly helped you win them. What would you call yourself?
Self-centered would be a good start. Then you could move on to lucky your significant other was so understanding. Calling yourself a bad lawyer goes without saying, but you should probably say it, anyway. Finally, you could call yourself Jean Loring, because that was her character arc in 1961, when she was introduced in the comics.
Jean’s not like that in the comics anymore, but let’s not go there. (Aw, c’mon, if we go there, Amazon gives us a cut! –Ed.) Instead let’s go to the world of the TV series Arrow, where Jean Loring is just a bad lawyer and hasn’t become an insane murderer. Yet.
I’ve spent twocolumns so far writing about the Arrowepisode “Docket No. 11-19-41-73.” You know, the one where Oliver (Green Arrow) Queen was on trial for violating Star City’s anti-vigilante law and some assorted homicides and assaults. So far, I’ve only covered the prosecution’s case. Now, to have Jean paraphrase that Get Smart episode when Max was on trial for murder, “For the past two columns, I have sat idly by while my worthy opponent, the prosecuting attorney has stood up here and made a complete jackass out of herself. Now it’s my turn.”
Two state’s witnesses – John Diggle and Dinah Lance, both of whom are secretly costumed heroes who work with Ollie on Team Arrow – lied under oath. They testified that Ollie was not Green Arrow. If Jean were to get information that Ollie was the Green Arrow, she would be ethically required to report their perjury to the court. Moreover, Jean would also not be able to question Ollie or any other witness, if she believed they would lie under oath and testify he wasn’t Green Arrow. That would be suborning perjury.
So the last thing Jean would want to do is ask Ollie, “Are you the Green Arrow?”Naturally, it was the first thing Jean did. Did it before she even put on her first witness. And Ollie told her he was. Because he’s the hero, he wouldn’t lie. He wasn’t under oath yet.
Once Jean knew Ollie was Green Arrow, she suggested their best tactic was jury nullification; that is admit to the jury that Ollie was Green Arrow but argue that the jury should still find him not guilty, because of all the good he had done as the Green Arrow. Basically, you asking the jury to nullify the law by ignoring it and returning a verdict that is contrary to the evidence and the law.
There were a few minor problems with Jean’s jury nullification plan. First, lawyers aren’t supposed to do it. You can’t ask the juries to ignore the law, you’re supposed to ask them to obey it. Second, because jury nullification is not permitted, when judges see lawyers engaging in jury nullification, they put a stop to it. Third, Judge MacGarvey, the judge presiding over Ollie’s trial, was corrupt and under the control of Ricardo Diaz, the crime boss who ruled Star City and who wanted Ollie to be convicted and rot in prison.
Did I say minor problems? A bar serving under-aged drinkers has minor problems. This plan had major problems; more than the 4077th.
Jean was trying a case in front of a judge she suspected had a vested interest in making sure Ollie was convicted and her plan was to hope he’d allow her to assert an improper defense he had every reason – both ethical and financial – to stop. It’s a good thing the 2017 Cleveland Browns didn’t fire their head coach after that 0-16 season, because with those strategy skills, the Browns would have snatched Jean up in a second.
Ollie rejected jury nullification, so Jean went with a more conventional defense. Her first witness was Felicity Smoak; Ollie’s wife and Team Arrow’s resident computer hacker. You know one of those characters who’s constantly typing on a computer and are contractually obligated to say,“Hack into the Pentagon’s computer. They’ve got the most sophisticated security in the—”
“I’m in.”
Felicity testified as a computer expert that a photo of Ollie as the Green Arrow was a fake that had been digitally altered. Which it was. So Felicity was telling the truth. Had Jean stopped there, everything would have been fine.
She…. didn’t stop there.
The code of lawyer ethics has a protocol for lawyers who believe a witness is going to commit perjury. Ethically, the lawyer can’t ask the witness questions and elicit lies. That’s suborning perjury. But ethically, the lawyer can’t refuse to call witnesses the defendant wants called, either. It’s the client’s defense. Defense counsel is the defendant’s advocate and is supposed to do what the client wants. So when the defendant wants the lawyer to call a witness who will commit perjury, the lawyer is supposed to call the witness and then just say something like, “Tell us what happened in your own words,” and let the witness give a narrative account That way, the witness testifies but without the lawyer asking any questions that elicit any lies.
Yes, that solution splits more hairs than Floyd the Barber shortly before the big Mayberry Founder’s Day Parade. But it’s the compromise the profession set up to cover the problem.
Jean, being a bad lawyer, didn’t do that either. She asked Felicity, is Oliver Queen the Green Arrow and Felicity answered no. Jean was pig-headed and did things her way. Which raises the question, was that suborned perjury or stubborn perjury?
Jean compounded the subornation with her next witness, Oliver Queen. She asked him whether he was the Green Arrow knowing he’d say no under oath and he played along by saying no. So far we’ve had four witnesses who committed perjury, a defense attorney who openly suborns perjury, and a prosecutor who didn’t interview any of her witnesses before calling them. Could this trial get any more preposterous? Of course it could.
Right after Ollie’s testimony, the episode had an act break. It needed a hook to keep the audience from changing channels while the network hawked some new drugs whose side effects always seem to be lymphoma, heart failure, kidney infection, death, loss of life, and diarrhea.
So just before that act break, the episode decided to insult our intelligence by having a surprise witness drop into the courtroom through the courtroom’s shattering skylight. A surprise witness wearing a Green Arrow costume.
And what was this surprise witness’s testimony? Wouldn’t you like to know?
Actually, I presume you would like to know. So I’ll tell you. But I’ll tell you next time. Just as the show needed an act-break hook, I need a this-column’s-too-long-and-needs-to-break-until-next-column hook. And as hooks go, a mysterious, skylight-shattering surprise witness works better than a pirate’s prosthetic.
First up: I’ll repeat what I said when I looked at a Nancy volume
by John Stanley, also part of “The John Stanley Library”: these are handsome, well-designed packages that badly fail at telling the reader where they fit in the overall picture. This is the third Tubby volume in the series, but that number 3 only appears in small-print “indicia” on page ten; this book doesn’t even have a copyright page.
(Also, they have comics pages reproduced with a yellowed, age-faded look: I don’t know if that’s a deliberate design decision or forced on them by the age and condition of the materials they have to work from. So I’m not going to complain about it, but I will note it: I always find it distracting, and it is often used as a design decision to show that “this stuff is old.”)
Anyway, if you dig down to that tiny type on page 10, you’ll discover that this book is actually Tubby, Vol. 3: The John Stanley Library and that the stories in it were all written and laid out by Stanley, and that some of them were drawn by Stanley and some were drawn by Lloyd White. You will also learn that these stories originally appeared in issues 9-12 of the Tubby comic — and you’d have to do other research elsewhere (on the Internet, perhaps) to find out that the comic’s title was actually Marge’s Tubby, that “Tubby” started off as “Joe” in the syndicated Little Lulu strip by Marge (the professional name for Marjorie Henderson Buell), and that it was Stanley who turned him into a major character in his Little Lulu comics in the early ’50s, which is why Tubby got a spin-off.
This all annoys me, because reprints of archival material are supposed to explain stuff like that — at least quickly in an editor’s note somewhere. This book is going to sit on the shelves in a thousand libraries for possibly dozens of years, and who knows how many people will stumble across Tubby through this book? A publisher has a duty to explain the basics. (Drawn & Quarterly is usually really good about the publishing stuff, but their Stanley books have basic information entirely missing.)
Anyway, Tubby is a fat, scheming kid, living in that vaguely utopian post-war suburbia that so many comics/movies/TV shows presented for twenty years or so. Kids have lemonade stands, there are zoos and live theater and woods within walking distance, and the kids mostly live in their own world — there are parents and other adults, who get involved now and then, but there’s no serious demands on these kids’ time. So the stories are about clubs that keep girls out, and birthday parties, and liking that one girl who likes the rich boy better, and low-key fighting, and similarly low-key playing tricks or schemes on each other. Oh, and then there’s Tubby’s miniature alien friend who can do just about anything plot-driving with his tiny ray guns, because it was the 1950s.
Stanley is good at keeping these stories moving and making them funny, but they are all very frivolous and low-stakes, even within their own world. Tubby’s not in danger of getting spanked, or grounded, or seriously beat up — just of being embarrassed by being seen in public without his pants or kicked out of his boys-only club by taking his beloved Gloria on a canoe ride.
I suspect it all would seem like very weak tea to the Younger Generation — and I count myself and most of Gen X in that category. Oh, it’s definitely funny, but it’s the kind of funny based on an artificiality that we’ve seen an awful lot of for a long time.
Your mileage may vary, though — and these are definitely squeaky-clean stories, so appropriate for readers of any generation or current age. (Assuming they don’t consider the title fat-shaming, which I guess could happen.)
We’ve been a big fan of Gabrielle Union and her work for some time so we’re thrilled to partner with Universal Home Entertainment to offer one lucky reader a Combo Pack (Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD code) of Breaking In – Unrated Director’s Cut.
If you missed it, the film is about Shaun Russell (Union) who takes her son and daughter on a weekend getaway to her late father’s secluded, high-tech vacation home in the countryside where the family soon receives an unwelcome surprise from four men who break into the house in search of a hidden safe. After managing to escape, Shaun stops at nothing to turn the tables on the thieves and rescue her two children being held hostage in a house designed with impenetrable security. No trap, no trick and especially no man inside can match a mother with a mission. The film was directed by James McTeigue (V for Vendetta, Sense8), and also stars Billy Burke ( Twilight series), Aijona Alexus (13 Reasons Why, Acrimony), and Seth Carr (Black Panther).
To enter, all you have to do is tell us about your scariest family trip experience. We need your entries received no later than 11:59 p.m., August 7. The contest is open only to readers in North America and the judgment of ComicMix will be final.
BONUS FEATURES on BLU-RAYTM and DVD
Alternate Opening –The Gas Station with Commentary by Director James McTeigue and Scriptwriter Ryan Engle.
One Bad Mother – Gabrielle Union shows that there is no limit to what a threatened mother will do to keep her children safe, and why a woman on a mission should never be underestimated.
A Filmmaker’s Eye – The crew explores what makes Director James McTeigue’s vision and style uniquely valuable when it comes to creating the right mood for the film.
A Lesson in Kicking Ass – A behind-the-scenes look at how physically demanding the role of Shaun was for Gabrielle Union, and the steps production took to ensure the most convincing execution of the stunts throughout the film.
A Hero Evolved – An inspiring account of how leading roles are shifting to embrace the qualities that more diverse actors can bring to the table.
Deleted and Extended Scenes
Feature Commentary by Director James McTeigue and Scriptwriter Ryan Engle
FILMMAKERS Cast: Gabrielle Union, Billy Burke, Richard Cabral, Ajiona Alexus, Levi Maeden, Jason George, Seth Carr, Christa Miller Casting By: Nancy Nayor CSA Score By: Johnny Kilmek Costume Designer: Jason Sky Bland Film Editor: Joseph Jett Sally Production Designer: Cecele M. De Stefano Director of Photography: Toby Oliver ACS Executive Producers: Jaime Primak Sullivan, Jeff Morrone, Valerie Bleth Sharp Produced By: Gabrielle Union, James Lopez p.g.a., Sheila Hanahan Taylor, Craig Perry p.g.a., Will Packer p.g.a. Story By: Jaime Primak Sullivan Screenplay By: Ryan Engle Directed By: James McTeigue
TECHNICAL INFORMATION BLU-RAY™ Street Date: August 7, 2018 Copyright: 2018 Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Selection Number: 61197295 (US) / 61198427 (CDN) Layers: BD-50 Aspect Ratio: 16:9 2.39:1 Widescreen Rating: 16:9 2.39:1 Anamorphic Widescreen Languages/Subtitles: English SDH, French Canadian and Latin American Spanish Subtitles Sound: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1/Dolby Digital 2.0, French Canadian and Latin American Spanish DTS Digital Surround 5.1 Run Time: 1 Hour 27 Minutes/ 1 Hour 28 Minutes
TECHNICAL INFORMATION DVD Street Date: August 7, 2018 Copyright: 2018 Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Selection Number: 61197294 (US) / 61198426 (CDN) Layers: DVD 9 Aspect Ratio: 16:9 2.39:1 Anamorphic Widescreen Rating: Rated PG-13 for violence, menace, bloody images, sexual references, and brief strong language. Languages/Subtitles: English SDH, French Canadian and Latin American Spanish Subtitles Sound: English Dolby Digital 5.1/Dolby Digital 2.0, French Canadian and Latin American Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 Run Time: 1 Hour 27 Minutes/ 1 Hour 28 Minutes
But that miniseries was itself explicitly a throwback to the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League series, which launched in 1987 — so that’s another fifteen-ish years further back, for a total of thirty-one years.
So we’re looking back at something that was itself looking back; revisiting a throwback.
The ’87 Justice League was a reset: the previous series had gotten serious in ways that weren’t resonating as well with the audience, and the core membership of the League had dwindled to a bunch of characters who couldn’t be called third-string only because they were invented for that series and didn’t have much of a life before or after it. Writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis got permission to use at least some of DC’s bigger characters — Batman, most notably, plus Captain Marvel in the Big Boy Scout role usually reserved for Superman, and the Green Lantern no one liked, Guy Gardner. Otherwise, this League consisted of more also-rans and never-wases, like the Martian Manhunter (whose claim to fame was that he was always in the JLA), the lightly rebooted Doctor Fate, the brand-new Doctor Light, the freshly arrived from lands of Charlton Blue Beetle, and always-seemed-like-he-should-be-bigger-than-he-ever-actually-was Mister Miracle.
Giffen and DeMatteis gave their adventures a somewhat lighter tone than was common at the time — or has been common since — which worked very well, and the series was very popular. And Maguire cemented his status as a hot artist by showing an equal facility for broad comedy and standard superhero action.
(Honestly, the tone was more an update of the standard Silver Age goofiness of a whole swath of DC Comics than anything entirely new — DC has always had a silly streak a mile wide — but it seemed new and different, and that was what mattered.)
It was successful enough that a lot of characters were part of that version of the League — everyone from Animal Man to Captain Atom to Tasmanian Devil.
But eventually it became the ’90s, and the Giffen/DeMatteis Leagues — there were separate teams for America and Europe by that point, plus a one-off really jokey Antarctica version — were getting passe. Grim and gritty was in, also pouches, also gritting your teeth really hard, and artists who couldn’t draw feet. And so the goofy era of Justice League ended, as all things end, with a whimper and the birth of something much sillier in its own way.
But everybody’s nostalgic for something, and enough people remembered fondly the bwa-ha-ha era of the League that the old band got back together for a reunion concert not quite ten years after they broke up. And this is the souvenir tour CD of that concert.
The story is set in something not quite congruent with then-current DC continuity; Maxwell Lord, the once and future businessman/leader of the JL, is seen here as his old pleasantly conniving self while he was simultaneously gleefully murdering superheroes and getting killed in turn in Identity Crisis.
But that’s just fine: this continuity is better than the “real” one, anyway. And the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire team hit the ground running from the best of their old work and don’t let up — this starts from as silly as the old series got, but basically stays on that level the whole time. Again, it is a more-or-less serious superhero comic, with worlds being saved and all that jazz, but they’re all odd people, who bicker and complain and obsess about things like normal human beings do.
Giffen and DeMatteis make the dialogue sparkle and pop, like the world’s least likely screwball comedy. And Maguire’s crisp linework and knack for expressions sells the action — his people are deeply physical, and not just in the usual superhero punching-people way. They shrug and raise eyebrows and smirk and gloat and pace and sigh. (Inking him this time out — and, as one credit box implies, drawing all the backgrounds, is Joe Rubinstein.)
There is superhero stuff, as there should be, but the story here is one-half “putting the band back together” and one-half “and then unexpected stuff derails your plans.” Again, a lot like life.
This is not high art. It might not even count as “great comics.” But it’s fun, and funny, and if superhero comics were more like this more of the time, I’d still read ’em like I used to in 1987.
I don’t know if superhero conflicts are required to be based on the stupidest possible interpretation of premises, but it certainly seems that way. Subtlety or nuance don’t exist in superhero universes; in a world where people can punch each other through brick walls, that’s the only way to do anything.
Ms.Marvel Vol. 6: Civil War II is another piece of crossover, which means it’s substantially stupider than a standalone Ms. Marvel story. I’m not claiming they’re brain-teasers in the best of situations, but they generally consist of believable characters doing understandable things for plausible reasons.
Before I go on to talk about the story, here’s who brought it to us: writer G. Willow Wilson continues as usual, with original series artist Adrian Alphona taking the first issue and flashback scenes in the next four, Takeshi Miyazawa doing the non-flashbacks for those issues, and Mirka Andolfo drawing the last one collected here.
Those first and last issues (numbers 7 and 12 of the 2015 Ms. Marvel series, for those of you scoring at home) are standalones, and I’ll get to them later.
The main story here spins out of the big dumb [1] crossover Civil War II, which apparently triggered when someone discovered a new Inhuman — yeah, they were still on that kick in early 2016 — named Ulysses, who, well, I’ll let Captain Marvel [2] do the honors:
It’s more like mathematics — he can determine, to within a fraction of a percent, the probability that certain events are going to take place.
As described, this covers any event, of any kind. And, since it’s a superhero power, it’s declared to be absolutely, totally reliable all of the time. Extremely improbably, Ulysses is not already the richest man on Earth from stock-picking or craps or sports book. Nor will his powers be used to, oh, predict earthquakes and hurricanes for the betterment of all mankind. Nor to fiendishly predict the weak spots in other nations or corporations for the power-enhancement and enrichment of his friends and bosses. Nor to turbo-charge scientific development by focusing attention on the areas most amenable to breakthroughs. Nor to do a million other things that you need to actually take five minutes to think through.
No, instead Ulysses’s vast powers will be used to predict street-level crime in Jersey City, New Jersey so a group of teen vigilantes can go beat up people a day before they would have done something bad, and/or vaguely “citizen’s arrest” them, holding them down until after the time they were going to do the thing they were just stopped from doing.
Mere human language cannot adequately convey how deeply, utterly stupid an idea this is, nor now vastly it undervalues Ulysses’s powers. I am in awe of the weapons-grade idiocy here, and wonder if Ulysses is actually some idiot-savant who is just endlessly shouting out things like “John Smith of 331B 25th Street, New York, has a 37.562% chance of shoplifting a fun-size Snickers bar from the Sunny Day bodega on the corner of 24th and Market at 4:52 PM local time today.” The story would almost make sense if he had no control of his power and was psychologically focused on stupid minor crimes close to him for some plot-sufficient reason.
So, yeah. Ms. Marvel, the girl of stretch, is brought in by the senior Marvel, Carol Danvers, to supervise a random group of gung-ho crime-fighting teenagers in her neighborhood, because of course that’s how serious government projects work. (The other crime-fighting teens are all people we’ve never seen before, and probably mostly people we will never see again: utterly plot furniture.) They get random updates from Ulysses, run off, and punch people generally mere moments before they’re about to do something naughty. These updates only come in when they’re not in school or sleeping or doing homework — they’re foiling convenient crimes.
Their MO is wildly inconsistent: one actual supervillain who stole a government tank is told he’ll be held for fifteen minutes until the unfoilable super-security system blows up the tank, because they apparently can’t arrest him for stealing a tank, or driving it down a city street, or attacking civilians, but only could stop him if it blew up with him in it when he didn’t realize it would. But then when an otherwise honor-student teen boy might — Ulysses’s supposed “fraction of a percent” predictions are never actually cited; everything is a sure bet every single time — cause a power surge the next day that would start a fire, they grab him and throw him into some kind of black-box high-security private prison.
This makes no fucking sense. Not for a second. Ulysses isn’t providing percentages for anything, and the focus on teenagers in Jersey City is deeply ludicrous. And the outcomes go so far beyond arbitrary and capricious that they turn into the opposite of anything reasonable. Even assuming crime-fighting was the best use of these powers — and, again, it totally isn’t — this is quite possibly the single worst way of doing so.
But wait! The whole stupid plot seems to be designed to make our Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, realize that, hey, y’know, maybe beating up people and locking them up without due process just might be a bad thing…as long as it’s purely based on something they haven’t done yet, of course, since doing that to people otherwise would be totally fine! And that realization is purely to fuel her break with Danvers, the current Captain Marvel.
Danvers is a former military test pilot and big fan of the chain of command…except when an ill-defined group is using a random superhuman for bizarre crime-fighting activities, but it’s her ill-defined group, and crime-fighting is the only thing these caped lunatics know, so let’s go with it — and so barks out the kind of cliche conversation where she talks down to “junior” superheroes and calls them things like “soldier” using random Army jargon picked up from Full Metal Jacket.
Because military people in comics are all about “shut up and do as you’re told,” since the question of legal and appropriate use of force never comes up in fictional universes. Obviously.
So The Lesson Kamala learns here is that your idols sometimes assholes who aren’t going to do what you want them to, and also that semi-fascist panopticons are not as cool an idea as they might seem. I know! Who would have thought! (Presumably somewhere in the actual Civil War II series it all ended when we learned that Ulysses’s powers can’t handle vibranium, or he’s a Skrull spy, or some such stupid bullshit, so everything could go back to normal.)
Oh! Also another Lesson: it is your fault if your best friend does something you warn him is really dangerous and gets seriously injured, because you are A Superhero and should be able to make everything nice all the time. (Well, maybe there’s also a bit of “You went along with something that didn’t smell right and it turned out horribly and crippled your best friend.”) But, as a bonus, Wilson is totally setting up ex-best-friend to return as a supervillain in another 5-10 issues. So we have that to look forward to.
This book also contains two single issues untainted by crossover, and so therefore relatively intelligent. The one up front is a cute science-fair story, with a side order of Millennials Have It So Much Worse Than Other Generations (Even the Ones That Had to Go To War and Stuff) Because Student Loans, and guest appearances by Spider-Man and Nova, to underline how much they are all basically the same damn character.
And the closing story sees Kamala take a trip back to her native Pakistan. This seems unlikely to happen during the school year for a student as much of a grind as Kamala, but it’s not clear when any of these stories take place during the year, so maybe it’s suddenly summer? And there she Learns Things, though she doesn’t notice that her new friend is also totally that local superhero she runs into. Oh, and the local society is corrupt and riddled with bad actors in multiple ways, but she shouldn’t be judge-y about it! Let the locals deal with it!
I’m beginning to think I only read Ms. Marvel because the different ways it annoys me amuse me. It may also be that I had all the superhero bullshit I could stand about twenty years ago, so even “good” superhero comics are so full of crap they make me break out in fits of swearing. Either way, my relationship with this comic is not particularly healthy. Luckily, I just get collections of it from the library about two years late!
[1] I haven’t actually read anything else from Civil War II, so it’s possible that I’m maligning its intelligence. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
A couple of weeks ago, writing about the previous Gilbert Hernandez Love and Rockets book Human Diastrophism, I said that those stories came from a ten-year span, because Hernandez was busy with other things as well during that time.
Well, Beyond Palomar collects two of those things between one set of covers: two full-length graphic novels originally serialized in Love and Rockets, both of them related to the “Palomar” cycle of stories but not directly part of that main stream. First up is Poison River, originally appearing from 1988 through 1994, which tells the story of Luba’s life up to the point she arrived in Palomar in Heartbreak Soup. Then there’s Love & Rockets X (from 1989-1993), which is more complicated: it was the first of Gilbert’s stories to show some of his Palomar characters in Southern California — traditionally his brother’s Jaime’s turf [1] — but also featured a mostly new cast, most of whom would not return in any of his later stories. (Though two of them, seen in minor and mostly-comic roles here, turn up both in the not-exactly-canonical pornographic miniseries Birdland (from the same era) and then, a little later, as Luba’s sisters in stories collected in Human Diastrophism.
That’s a lot to unpack. It’s probably best if I tackle the two stories separately.
Poison River is substantially longer: a seventeen-part, nearly two-hundred-page cross between a family saga and a gangster epic. And it is very much the story of Luba’s life up to her mid-twenties: it opens with her as a small baby, at the point where her official father — the rich man her mother Maria was married to — realizes that Luba is actually the daughter of the field hand Eduardo. (Presumably, this is more obvious because Eduardo is Indio — native or mostly native — and the unnamed rich guy is of purer colonial stock.) Maria is cast out, with the baby, Eduardo, and her maid Karlota. They take refuge with Eduardo’s family, and live in semi-happy poverty for a while until Maria gets fed up and runs off.
(Maria is a deeply self-centered sensation-seeker who is never satisfied; she would have run off eventually. That’s just who she is.)
Luba bounces around the fringes of Eduardo’s family for her childhood, as part of the underclass of whatever Latin American country this is. (Hernandez deliberately keeps it unclear, but there are echoes of El Savador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and so on — it could be any of them, or a fictional melange of all of them.) And then, as a teenager, she meets the middle-aged conga player Peter Rios, who falls for her hard and marries her impetuously — right at the moment he gives up playing music and goes into managing a club.
The club is owned by gangsters, and Peter’s ambitions push him upward into their ranks — along with his former bandmate Blas, who follows him into that world for reasons that seem murky to begin with. The bulk of Poison River is the intertwined stories of the various power struggles among those gangsters, mostly having to do with their unreasoning hatred of mostly-unseen “leftists” who they fear will take over and ruin the country and with conflicts over sexual partners [2], and Luba’s growing up and sexual acting-out.
Well, everyone is sexually acting out, so she’s not alone. There’s a lot of sex and violence before Poison River is over. Hernandez combines them occasionally, which may upset some readers, but the sex is mostly consensual, even if often in secret between people whose partners will react horribly when the secret comes out. It’s also all R-rated sex; Hernandez was making Birdland around the same time, and that story is full of insertions and fluids and really bizarre combinations. Poison River is more cable-TV than porn: we see some flaccid penises, and we can tell people are having sex, but we don’t see body parts interlocking.
All of those plots eventually link back to the past — Maria was part of the same circle of gangsters a generation before, until she fled with that rich husband, and she slept with more than one of them during that time — so we get flashbacks and various realizations of whose daughter Luba is and an occasional view into Maria’s life in the “now” of Poison River. (“Now” covers, if I had to guess, from Luba’s birth around 1950 to her entry into Palomar in the late 1970s, with most of the gangster plot taking place in late ’60s and early ’70s.)
The body count piles up, as it usually does in a gangster story. And, in the end, Luba is alone with her infant daughter Maricela and cousin Ofelia, about to enter Palomar for the first time. Poison River is entirely an origin story: telling us the secrets behind the things we already knew. It’s sordid and occasionally nasty and full of bad people doing bad things, but Hernandez makes it compelling.
The back quarter of Beyond Palomar, though, is less serious. The sixty-page Love & Rockets X takes an Altman-esque collection of overlapping plots (not that different from the Palomar stories, though each individual story there tended to be a bit more linear) to tell a less serious story of teens, rock bands, spoiled rich people, racial tension, and various love triangles (and more complicated shapes).
It does loop back to Palomar eventually, so we see a much older Luba and her growing family, but the most important Palomar character is a grown-up Maricela, who fled to Southern California with her girlfriend Riri. The two of them get caught up in the various plots — which are mostly driven by white Californians, particularly those connected to a lousy garage band called “Love and Rockets” — that all collide at a “big Hollywood party” where Love and Rockets is supposed to play.
This is Hernandez mostly in a lighter mode, though he still takes all of his characters seriously — and some of them have real problems. (At least one eating disorder, some white-power terrorists, Maricela and Riri’s relationship problems and worries about La Migra.) But, even in lighter mode, there are undertones: this seems to take place in 1989, but the racial tensions hint at riots to come and one character ends up in Iraq, which is explicitly mentioned. Love & Rockets X is an example of that old saying: if you want a happy ending, you have to know when to stop telling the story; all endings are sad if you go on long enough.
So we have two major Gilbert Hernandez stories here, either or both of which would be decent introductions to his work. Poison River gets quite plotty and continuity-heavy, but it’s all continuity within the one story, and that’s what he does anyway — if you don’t like that in Poison River, you won’t enjoy a lot of Hernandez’s work. Love & Rockets X might be an even better first Hernandez story: short, often funny, full of quirky characters, enough sex to keep it interesting, and that basically happy ending.
[1] Though, if you recall that Jaime’s main character Maggie was mostly in Texas during this time, you could work up a silly theory about geographic coverage and brotherly competition.
[2] This gets really complicated, with basically hetero men, openly gay men, and men who seem to mostly have sex with the presenting-as-women-but-physically-male dancers at Peter’s club, and I couldn’t begin to map it out or guess how they would all identify themselves. I couldn’t even tell you if those dancers — some of whom are quite important to the story — think of themselves as women or men or trans or each something different. Oh, and Peter himself has a fetish for bellybuttons, and not a whole lot of interest in “normal” sex, which frustrates the hot-to-trot Luba.
If, as it has been said, a fish rots from the head down, then Team Arrow, from The CW’s Arrow, must be a twenty ton whale shark that’s decomposing from the head, Oliver (Green Arrow) Queen, down through the rotting body that is Green Arrow’s support group, Team Arrow. Why I call them rotten is something we’ll go into as “The Law Is a Ass” continues to suffer the migraine that is the Arrow episode “Docket No. 11-19-41-73.”
Ollie, a super hero in Star City was on trial for violating Star City’s anti-vigilante law and for some homicides and assaults occasioned by the fact that on occasion he shot people with arrows. I started writing about Ollie’s trial last column. I didn’t get too far. I covered the facts that Ollie’s trial was in Judge McGarvey’s courtroom; that McGarvey was under the thumb of Ricardo Diaz, the crime lord who rather openly ruled Star City; that Alexa Van Owen was the prosecutor; and that Jean Loring was defense counsel. I mentioned that Alexa called John Diggle, who was secretly the second-in-command of Team Arrow, and that John, with Ollie’s full knowledge and approval, perjured himself by testifying Ollie was not the Green Arrow.
I pointed out that Alexa wasn’t doing a very good job, because she called witnesses she had not interviewed before trial, so did not know what their testimony would be. I think the second thing they teach you in law school is don’t call a witness about whose testimony you’re uncertain and don’t ask a question whose answer you don’t already know. (The first thing they teach you is how to find the Tuition Office.)
So did Alexa’s job performance improve as the trial went on? Is the Dalai Lama Catholic?
Alexa’s next witness was Dinah Drake, a detective in the Star City Police Department, and also secretly the super hero Black Canary. And guess who didn’t lock down Dinah’s testimony before calling her as a witness?
Did you guess the prosecutor who didn’t know in advance that Dinah was going to perjure herself and testify that Oliver Queen wasn’t Green Arrow. How do I know that Alexa didn’t know what Dinah was going say in advance? Logic and the Rules of Evidence.
If Alexa had interviewed Dinah and learned Dinah was going to say Ollie wasn’t Green Arrow, then Alexa wouldn’t have called her. Not calling a witness whose testimony will contradict your case is so basic that not even Dr. McCoy would have quibbled over the logic. If, on the other hand, Alexa had interviewed Dinah and Dinah had told her Ollie was Green Arrow, then Alexa would have had a prior inconsistent statement from Dinah, which she could have used to impeach Dinah’s testimony.
The Rules of Evidence in most states allow a party in a trial to impeach its own witnesses. When the party calling the witness wants to impeach it’s own witness with a prior inconsistent statement, that party must first show that it was surprised by the testimony and that the testimony has affirmatively damaged its case. Or, put in language that even Cousin Vinny could understand, “Hey, Judge, I didn’t know da witness wuz gonna say dat, and it hoits my case.”
If Alexa had a prior statement from Dinah saying Ollie was Green Arrow, she could have argued to Judge McGarvey that Dinah’s testimony both surprised her and hurt her case. After McGarvey agreed — and even this bleeding-heart former defense attorney, agrees Alexa could show surprise and affirmative damage – Alexa could have impeached Dinah with the prior inconsistent statement. That Alexa either didn’t either know what Dinah was going to say or failed to impeach Dinah only shows that she didn’t interview Dinah before trial.
Oh, Alexa did impeach Dinah, but her method of impeachment was just as incompetent as her tactic of not interviewing her witnesses before trial. Alexa asked Dinah, over objection, whether she had murdered a drug-dealer named Sean Sonas. (Dinah had; trust me. I’ve seen all the Arrow episodes so I saw her do it.) Dinah declined to answer on 5th Amendment grounds.
Courts have held it’s improper to call a witness you know will invoke his or her 5th Amendment rights, because it is an attempt to build one’s case out of what the jury will infer from the witness’s invocation of the 5th Amendment. It’s just as improper to impeach a witness by asking a question you know will cause the witness to invoke the 5th Amendment. The jury will infer the witness must have committed the crime that the witness refuses to testify about and disregard the testimony of a witness it infers to be a criminal.
When Alexa asked Dinah whether Dinah murdered Sonas, she violated this principle. Not only should she never have asked the question, Judge McGarvey should have sustained the objection and never allowed the question to be asked. But, like I said earlier, McGarvey was a Black Friday judge; bought and paid for at bargain basement prices.
Alexa’s next witness was Rene Ramirez, secretly the Team Arrow member called Wild Dog. Rene originally planned to follow Team Arrow’s putrescent perjury party line and say Ollie wasn’t Green Arrow. (Meaning, once again, Alexa probably didn’t interview him before trial.) Rene changed his mind when Diaz threatened to harm Rene’s daughter, if he didn’t testify “properly.”
So for the first – and only – time in her trial, Alexa had a witness who did testify that Oliver Queen was Green Arrow. Then Alexa got to the heart of the various homicide and assault charges leveled against Ollie. She asked Rene if he ever saw Green Arrow kill or maim people. Rene testified that he had, but there were too many occurrences for him to estimate how many people it was.
With that triumphant testimony, Alexa rested her case.
And promptly lost every homicide and assault count leveled against Ollie. Or should have, anyway. This is a TV trial, remember, so we can’t expect it actually to follow such things as burden of proof or proof beyond a reasonable doubt. We can hope, but we shouldn’t really expect it.
See, in a trial for homicide and assault, it isn’t enough for a witness to testify that he saw the defendant kill or maim lots of people. The witness has to testify that he saw the defendant kill or maim the specific victims named in the indictments. Or, if not that, how about the testimony of the medical examiner that he pulled green arrows out of the corpses of people Oliver Queen was charged with killing? Something, anything, to prove that Ollie killed the people named in the indictment as opposed to a general murder of murder victims.
Had a competent defense counsel moved for a verdict of acquittal on the homicide and assault counts because the prosecution failed to offer any evidence that the defendant actually killed or assaulted the named victims, it would have been granted. Naturally Jean Loring, didn’t even go through the motions by making the motion. After all, where would the drama in the episode be if a prosecutor as inept as Alexa Van Owen were facing a competent defense attorney?
So after spending a couple of weeks describing what a lousy prosecutor Alexa Van Owen was, is it now time for me to write about what a lousy defense attorney Jean Loring was?
No.
Next time will be.
Meaning this column has run out of what the newspaper game calls column inches. We’ll have to talk about what a lousy attorney Jean Loring was next column. And probably the column after that. There was so much barristerly balderdash in “Docket No. 11-19-41-73” that I’m afraid we’re in for a long haul down the halls of justice.
