Posts Tagged ‘JLA’

I have issues

January 31st, 2009 by jason

Comics read since last time:

JLA 70-71
Scalped 12-18
Spider-Man: Swing Shift
PVP (this week)

I’m halfway through The Obsidian Age arc, finishing off the first trade just in time to return it to the library on the due date, and haven’t yet started the second trade, so I’m still not sure where it’ll end up. Our heroes are stuck in the past, and in the present, the alternate JLA is facing the press, in a scene very reminiscent of when Captain America introduces Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. There are questions about where the “real” JLA is, which the Atom fields like a pro, only stumbling when a question gets asked by the reporter with the most invested in the answer: Lois Lane. I love team books, even though you can get pretty tired reading them. You increase the power level exponentially by having all these characters team up, so you need to up the potential catastrophe. It actually gets a little farcical. How does anyone actually get anything accomplished when disaster strikes constantly, the type of disaster that can only be averted by the JLA? And that’s what this new JLA is facing: crisis-level disasters. One of the things I love about team books is the changing roster of the team. I miss the covers with the faces bordering the artwork, showing the rollcall, especially when it was a team-up of teams.

One of the best series to come from Vertigo in a long time is Jason Aaron’s Scalped. Part film noir, part hard-boiled detective story, part police procedural, Scalped continuously amazes me issue after issue. I’ve been reading it in trades, the third trade being the most current. Vertigo has been doing a good job of keeping the trades of their series coming out at a good clip, nearly keeping pace with the single issue releases. Six or seven issues come out and bang, a trade is on the shelves by the time the next issue is released. Along with the recently cancelled Exterminators, Scalped is the cream of Vertigo’s crop–which probably means it’s the next to get the axe. I wonder if we’ll see it get translated to another media soon; I can see it picked up by Showtime or HBO for a series.

I read Spider-Man: Swing Shift, the Free Comic Book Day issue from nearly two years ago. It was the first part of the first trade of Brand New Day, acting as a lead-in to the new Spider-Man continuity. Dan Slott’s stories of Brand New Day are probably my least favourite, as they seem to be a rehash of what he did with She-Hulk, particularly with the love triangles. I’d heard lots of complaints about Swing Shift. I’m not sure what there was to complain about, because there’s hardly anything there. I guess it really is a case of you get what you pay for. But, in essence, it fulfilled its mission; it introduced us to what Brand New Day was going to be.

I caught up on this week’s PVP, mostly one off strips after the arc with Brent meeting the 10th Doctor. Enjoyable as always, although Brent’s new chin is taking some getting used to. It’s interesting to look at the changes in the characters over the years, and how the designs have evolved. The chin is almost a minor change in comparison, but until I get used to it, I’m going to stumble a few times when reading the new strips.

I have issues

January 30th, 2009 by jason

Comics read since last time:
JLA #55-69

Most of the comics I read come from the library, which really is an incredible resource for trades and even single issues.  I champion the library whenever I get the chance, showing people proudly that the trade paperback I’m reading came from one.  “Libraries carry comic books?” they say, incredulously.  “Why, yes!” I reply, telling them that I usually have fifteen or twenty checked out at any given time.  Sometimes, however, that comes back to bite me on the ass, like when I have to plow through three JLA trades in two nights because they’re coming due in the next couple of days, and I’m unable to renew them, because someone else has one of them on reserve.  I grit my teeth, though, and look at the bright side: people are looking for comics at the library, and requesting them.  So while I usually like to read several different series, usually from different companies, sometimes I get quite a long stretch of a single title all at once.

This run of JLA finished out Mark Waid’s time with the team, followed by an issues by Chuck Dixon and Scott Beatty, and now I’m well into Joe Kelly’s run.  Grant Morrison is definitely a tough act to follow.  Waid is decent, following up on Batman’s betrayal, with a storyline developed from a single line of dialogue, with half the league split from their own alter egos, playing off of what seems to be a throwaway line of dialogue.  And another line of dialogue in this storyline becomes the basis for the next one, the return of the white martians.  Waid’s entire run is very tight, practically interwoven together.  Dixon and Beatty’s issue is part of the Joker’s Last Laugh crossover.  I picked up that trade recently from the library, expecting a standalone Joker story, not realizing that it crossed into practically every title in the DCU.  Interestingly, the asterisks had been left in letting me know where I could find some of the other stories that crossed into Last Laugh.  Something which the JLA trades, and indeed most comic trades don’t seem to do.  I’ve always thought this a little weird, as it would be a great promotional tool to get people to buy other trades.  Is it that they figure people will be frustrated at not having the referenced comics immediately at their disposal?  These are comics!  For years, the asterisk was the starting point of a treasure hunt which had us wading through longboxes at comic shops and conventions, and staring longingly at backissues protected by mylar pinned up on the shop walls.  The lack of notes is particularly annoying during Kelly’s run, which ran during DC’s Our World at War crossover.  Events are mentioned about Wonder Woman not being a princess any more, Aquaman vanishing, and for some reason, the artist draws Superman’s emblem as red on black, rather than red on yellow.  But there are no notes telling you where you could read more about what happened.  Again, I feel a little hypocritical complaining about this, especially when I have all of the internet at my disposal to do research, but would it hurt to have an asterisk or some sort of annotation going on?  If you’ve never read it, the Annotated Crisis on Infinite Earths is a joy.  Such scholarship went into that, noting just about every character in every one of George Perez’s drawings.  Kudos to that effort, as well as the online annotations for just about everything Grant Morrison has ever written.

All of that said, I’m mostly enjoying Kelly’s run.  He brings up some interesting themes, such as Wonder Woman’s dependence on her lasso as a source of truth, and what happens when she vehemently disagrees with that truth.  I’m in the middle of The Obsidian Age arc, featuring the Justice League of 3000 years ago.  Here, he’s turning the moral table on the JLA, it appears, making them face what role they have in a completely foreign morality.  It seems a lot like a prelude to Justice League Elite, which he wrote a few years later, again drawn by Doug Mahnke, the artist on these JLA issues.  I wasn’t a big fan of Mahnke in JLE, and I’m still a little disturbed by his proportions and style here.  He does a good job at making people look unhealthy, and he seems a little obsessed with bugs and veins.  From the notes section of The Obsisdian Age, I discovered that Mahnke is from Minnesota.  I wonder if I’ve seen him at any of the conventions around here.

I have issues

January 27th, 2009 by jason

Comics read since last time:

X-Force 1-6 (new series)
Cable 1-2 (new series)
She-Hulk 26-30
X-Factor 30-32 and The Quick and the Dead
JLA 51-54

I have to start off by saying that I’ve never really liked Cable. Not now and not when he led X-Force. Not drawn by Ariel Olivetti and definitely not drawn by Rob Liefeld. I’m also not a huge fan of X-Force, coincidentally most identified with Rob Liefeld. I can’t say that what I’m currently reading has given me any great joy either. Both of the runs I’m reading now are part of the X-Men: Divided We Stand non-crossover. I’m actually being something of a hypocrite, in that I’m only reading them (in trades from the library) because X-Factor crosses into Secret Invasion and since the X-Factor trade I just finished is also part of Divided We Stand, I’ll read the rest of the related series. I say I’m a hypocrite, because when people say that they don’t want to read this series, or this crossover or comics from this company, because there’s too much background, or too much continuity, or they don’t want to have to know the past 50 years of comics, I gently scoff. And now, before diving headlong into Secret Invasion, I’m reading series I have no interest in, just to keep up with what’s going on. That’s kind of what I’m doing with She-Hulk, as well, although I’m more likely to have an interest in continuing on reading the Jade Giantess, afterwards.

Peter David is writing both She-Hulk and X-Factor (maybe he likes hyphens).The two series have a similar theme, in that they both cross into the crime genre: X-Factor is a detective agency, and She-Hulk along with her partner Jazinda (a skrull who currently doesn’t seem to be involved with the invasion) are bounty hunters. I’m definitely enjoying X-Factor more, though, than the “buddy film” adventures that She-Hulk is having.  It’s almost like David is having a better time writing these characters, than revisiting Gammaville.

Coincidentally, I also finished off a JLA trade: Divided We Fall.  As the X titles are all about what happens when Cyclops decides the X-Men are no more, this chapter of JLA is about what happens when DC’s greatest team has an irrepairable rift.  While the X-Men experience their disillusionment in the destruction of both the school and the near-fatal shooting of Professor X, the JLA’s wounds come from within, from Batman’s secret files on the rest of the heroes, specifically how to take them out.  All of that happened in the previous arc, where a villain gains knowledge of these vulnerabilities.  Now, the JLA has to decide whether they’re going to be able to function any more without their inherent trust.  Going back and reading all of this, after having read Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, and everything else that’s come after it, I can see how much has really been building for the past decade in DC.  This is a good example of what I was talking about.  I didn’t have to have read the JLA to enjoy the later stories, and going back now, it show just how much more of a tapestry everything is.  The threads have been there, and my noticing them now, makes it a much richer design.