Freakangels

I'm really enjoying Freakangels so far. It's a post-apocalypse steampunk emo adventure!

Comic Book Resources recently interviewed Warren Ellis about it.

The Return of NEWUNIVERSAL

Newuniversal is set to return with a new artist, Steve Kurth. The pencils on Warren Ellis's post above look great. Kurth has some big shoes to fill but it looks like he's up to the task. I'm going to take this opportunity to highlight three of my favorite pages from Salvador Larroca's run on the book:

Click to Embiggen

Awesome Cover Friday: Thanksgiving!

Since people have been wandering around blabbing about what they're thankful for lately I thought I'd get in on the act. Here are some comic book things I am thankful for and the awesome covers to go with them.

The Authority #12

I am thankful for the alignment of planets that brought Warren Ellis, Bryan Hitch, Paul Neary, and Laura DePuy together for the first twelve issues of The Authority. I can't imagine that story being told without any of those four people being involved.


Astonishing X-Men #2

I'm thankful for Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men. I'm doubly thankful that John Cassaday is drawing it. Sure, it's been slow but each issue has been worth the wait. Whedon didn't come in like the Pro from Dover and assume that he knew everything about Comics. He worked hard and came up with an awesome story. This latest issue had two "holy crap" moments in it that I'm still smiling about.


Immortal Iron Fist #4

Speaking of awesome creative teams, Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker, and David Aja are doing magical things with Immortal Iron Fist. For example, they are sticking to a reasonable release schedule. I kid, I kid. This incarnation of Iron Fist is my favorite comic currently on the stands. Check it out if you haven't already.


The OHOTMU Gadget Issue

I am thankful for the existence of the old-school Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, especially the final issue which was all about the equipment used by the various super-beings of the MU. This thing had cutaway pictures of Avengers Mansion along with specs for Stilt Man's stilts, Wizard's gadgets, and Nomad's discs. Who knew depleted uranium was so useful? The OHOTMU is available as a three-volume Essentials collection. It contains both versions from the '80s and it's awesome.

Finally, I am eternally thankful for the Grand Comic Book Database. Throw 'em some money this holiday season.

Ocean Optioned

The Hollywood Gang has optioned screen rights to Warren Ellis and Chris Sprouse's Ocean which is one of my favorite comics.

I think it will work well on the big screen. Is it too much to hope that the promotional stills will look something like this?

Friday Night Fights: Machine Man!

It's Machine Man vs. Sir Topham Hatt! Yeah! Knock his ass back to Sodor!

Bahlactus is the Ayatollah of Rock-and-Rollah! I can prove this with math!

Friday Night Fights: Bloodstone

Elsa Bloodstone gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "whammy bar". KERRANG!!!

Special bonus fight! Elsa vs. a punk-ass koala!



In other news: Bahlactus is so bad he's his own damn herald!

(Yes, this is a repeat but it didn't make it into the original FNF so this is like the Essential version - except it's in color.)

When Linkblogging Attacks!

Added to the sidebar: When Fangirls Attack. Of course, according to the latest stats three quarters of the readers of this blog now come from there so, "Hi!".

Warren Ellis wins a huge pile of Eagle Awards. See, I told you Nextwave was awesome! Both trades are out. If you haven't read them yet, go get them. See also: Global Fequency, Fell, Planetary, Transmetropolitan, the first twelve issues of The Authority and many more.

Also, here's a wicked cool picture of George Pérez:

Eagle Awards

Here's what Dirk Anger has to say about being nominated for an Eagle Award for "Favorite Comics Villain":

GO VOTE!

Quick Thoughts on New Comics

Well, mostly new. Two of these are from last week's pull but they're still on the shelves.

Helmet of Fate: Zauriel #1 - DC (2007)


I've always had trouble reconciling the Christian mythos with the DC Universe. Apparently, so does Steve Gerber. It's like he can't decide whether to play it straight or to camp it up or to make a statement about faith, dogma and reality. There are elements of all these things in this issue and they add up to a diffuse mess. Peter Snejbjerg is a good artist but his work on this book isn't helping Gerber's script. It doesn't seem to fit with any of the attempted tones and, in fact, confuses things further. The horror elements did not come off as scary and the "people exploding messily" section had no emotional impact. I liked all the other Helmet books but this one felt empty.

X-Factor #16 - Marvel (2007)


This one deals with Christianity, too. Sort of. It has a tense, touching story about Madrox retrieving one of his duplicates. Also, Siryn and Monet blow up big chunks of Paris. You could read the Madrox part of this without having read the previous issue. Good stuff from Peter David and Pablo Raimondi

Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #27 - DC (2007)


This title seems to have lost its focus since Supergirl showed up but it's still a fun read. This issue has more superpowered beings than you can shake a Durlan in the form of a stick at. Lots of stuff blows up and robots turn on their fleshy masters.

Newuniversal #4 - Marvel (2007)


Holy crap, this title is good. Warren Ellis is at his best when writing science fiction. This is an epic tale of people suddenly burdened with powers and technology beyond their current understanding. I know that's also the plot of countless superhero stories back to the beginning of time but this one leans heavily toward the SF end of the spectrum. They have let Ellis run with this storyline and it kicks ass.

This issue moved more slowly than I wanted it to, however. Some of the scenes could have been compressed. I have no complaints about the story itself. I am intrigued and entertained.

And Salvador Larroca's art! It is so beautiful and it fits the story so well that I can't say anything more. It's simply beautiful. Check it out below. Larroca's just painting a bedroom there. A goddamn bedroom! And it's one of the finest pages I've ever seen in a comic book.

Nextwave #12 - Marvel (2007)

It says something about the current state of Marvel that the titles I like the most are the ones which make fun of current events. Nextwave doesn't just make fun of Marvel continuity it takes it into the alley and puts a bullet through its neck. You know all that stuff from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe that made you slightly insane when you read it? Warren Ellis takes all of that, throws it in a blender and gives it a bottle of tequila. Then he makes it fight all the other weird stuff. He made Forbush Man sinister, for God's sake!

Stuart Immonen. Damn. His art is always good but he knocks this out of the park. He doesn't just draw Nextwave he designs it. Check out this page. Immonen (bless his li'l Canadian heart) is the perfect choice for Ellis's fucked-up script. The action and character design both have the right combination of cool and wacky. There is no disconnect between word and picture here and that's the highest praise I can give to a creative team.

This is the last issue of the run but there are solid rumors that Nextwave will live on as several miniseries. It ends the way it began: with explosions and expletives and other things that begin with "ex". The first trade is out and the last six issues should end up between two covers in the near future. If you didn't read the singles on this (shame on you!) pick up the trades. Unless you're, y'know, allergic to fun.

Yesterday's Comics Today!

Here's a quick rundown of my opinions on my latest haul. It was a light week so there aren't many.

New Universal #3 - Marvel (2007)

Salvador Larroca's art continues to blow me away. Warren Ellis is giving Larroca some really good things to draw. This issue establishes more of the history of the world and makes it even cooler than the first two issues did. The extended infodump/argument partway through the book was the only speedbump.

Behold the art!



Johah Hex #16 - DC (2007)


Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray are the new Giffen and DeMatteis. They are an awesome writing team with incredible range. They are this close to being on my "I will buy anything by these guys" list. This new story is your typical "woman with incredibly bad life becomes a one-eyed badass" tale and it's off to a damn good start. The art is spectacular, as well. The only thing that keeps me from completely enjoying this book is the way they write western accents. I have no problem with dropping all the final g's but the frequent use of "yore" for "your" is getting on my nerves.


Fell #7 - Image (2007)

This issue has Ben Templesmith's best art yet. Check out the cover:



The interior has more of the same.

Speaking of more of the same, Warren Ellis's writing on this issue is just that. Which is to say it's good. We learn a little more about Snowtown, a little more about Fell and we get to see him out-clever himself. Good stuff all for a buck 99!


Astro City: The Dark Age Book 2 #2 - Wildstorm (2007)


This book gets better with every page. The Apollo Eleven show up and everyone freaks out. Well, as much as anyone in Astro City is able to freak out anymore.

"Another giant spectral figure, you say? Is this one setting anything on fire? Then let it be."

The "everyman" reaction to superhero antics has been done many times but the way the two main characters are hooked into the action makes for a compelling read. Excellent art, too.

Nextwave #2 - Marvel (2006)

I love Nextwave like an illegitimate child who showed up on my doorstep with a suitcase full of twenty-dollar bills and porn.

Nextwave is funny.

It is also a damn good action comic.

These things are to be expected from Warren Ellis and it's nice to see them coming together in this manner. Stuart Immonen isn't just drawing this thing he's designing it! His style for this book is sort of a Bruce-Timm-Meets-Jerry-Bruckheimer thing that works really well with the mescaline trip that is the storyline.

Wade von Grawbadger's inks are spot on and enhance the pencils beautifully. The colors by Dave McCalg are vivid and over the top just like everything else about this book. Also, I will take any opportunity to type the words "Grawbadger" and "McCalg".

I am having so much fun reading this. So is Mike Sterling. If two comics bloggers agree on something it's officially a movement, you know. Perhaps we should have chosen something more earth-shaking than "I'm really enjoying this comic". Eh, we'll do better next time.

If you missed the first issue you can still pick this one up and, thanks to the Primer on the first page, catch up on the story, such as it is. Really, all you need to know is that Nextwave (led by Monica Rambeau, aka Photon, aka Capt. Marvel) is fighting Fin Fang Foom.

Yeah, this guy:



Ellis and Immonen are really kicking ass on this book. If you're the type who takes comic continuity too seriously, stay away from this one. If you like to laugh at the many quirks of this hobby of ours, check it out. It's lowbrow, violent, irreverent and hilarious. Ellis has put three of my favorite characters from Marvel's history (Captain Marvel, Boom-Boom and Machine Man) on a team together blowing lots and lots of stuff up. Also, he takes a much-deserved stab at the "Scarlet Witch goes bonkers and kills, like, everyone" storyline and then uses it as the setup for a dick joke.

Genius!

It's like The Authority mixed with a frat party.

I will now refrain from using the term "high-octane" in this review.

Damn.

Ultimate Extinction #2 - Marvel (2006)

OK. Lousy Cover^*. I mean, seriously, The Thing as depicted above looks worse than Michael Chiklis's makeup in the FF movie:



Which, as you can see, is pretty hard to do.

Despite that cover the interior art (ostensibly by the same person) kicks ass. The writing's good, too. Warren Ellis has introduced Ultimate Moondragon, Ultimate Silver Surfer and Ultimate Misty Knight. Now, those of you who have been watching the show so far know that "Ultimate" before someting usually means that that person goes up a few notches on the badass scale. Ultimate Hawkeye, for example, is someone I'd actually be intimidated by. Regular continuity (or "Earth-616" to those of us with no lives) Hawkeye often came off as a goofball. Sure, he had his cool moments but for the most part he wasn't someone that, were I a criminal, I'd be too worried about.

HAWKEYE: "Stop or I'll plug you full of arrows!"

ARCH VILLAIN: "Big deal! I've got adamantium armor! What are you gonna do? Strap Ant Man to one of them?"

Anyway, Misty Knight is one of the coolest characters Marvel ever came up with. She's an ex-cop, bounty hunter cyborg! And she dates Iron Fist. Badass! Ultimate Misty Knight hasn't met Ultimate Danny Rand yet but she is even badass-er than her counterpart in the 616. Also, since she's being written by Warren Ellis, she gets much better lines. She goes toe to toe with Ulimate Silver Surfer (cosmic badass!) and survives. Day-um!

There's a good "Revenge of the Geeks" moment between Reed Richards and Nick Fury. Ellis is playing up the whole "smart guys rule" angle very well.

The story is moving along nicely with no slow spots or padding. Gah Lak Tus (who turns out to be some sort of hive mind) is moving inexorably towards Earth and everyone who is aware of it is freaking out. Good stuff.

As I mentioned above, the interior art is good. In fact, it's excellent! Brandon Peterson (inks and pencils) does a great job of conveying the action as well as the quieter moments. He's a good fit with Ellis's writing on this book. It turns out I forgot to put this in either of my local hold boxes. This will be corrected with all due haste.

*Speaking of covers have you seen the latest Vanity Fair cover? WARNING: NOT WORK SAFE!!

Now that's the way to do a cover right!

Jack Cross #3 - DC (2005)

I really want to like this comic book but each issue makes it harder and harder. I enjoyed the first issue but the second didn't do much for me. The primary complaint I had about the comic as a whole is that Gary Erskine isn't conveying the action scenes well at all. His compositions are static. There's absolutely no sense that the people are moving. They look like they're posing for a photo comic.

Issue #3 has more action than the first two issues combined. It's one big action scene with a little dialogue thrown in as connective tissue. Which, unfortunately, means that this issue falls the flattest.

Splat.

There's a scene involving a couple of helicopters which would have been very exciting if I could have figured out what the hell was going on. Same thing goes for the fight scene depicted on the cover. Flat.

Jack Cross is written to be a man of action. Literally. He sees what needs to be done and he's not afraid to do it. There is no separation between thought and action for him. That's what Warren Ellis intends to get across, anyway. He gets no help from Erskine.

Not that Ellis is completely off the hook, here. I am one hell of a Warren Ellis fanboy. He's one of the reasons I want to write comics. I want to make people feel about characters I create the way he has made me feel. However, this story and these characters haven't hooked me. It's issue 3. This story just isn't my cup of tea and the slow art simply isn't doing it any favors.

I'll pick up #4 to see how the story ends but after that I'm dropping it from my hold box.

At least Desolation Jones and Fell continue to rock.

Ocean and Matador: Two Future Trades Which Have Pleased Me

Ocean #6

A great ending to a good series.

Expect to see Nathan Kane in a future installment of The Badass Files. I had to read one section twice to make sure I understood what was happening with the action but none of it was as bad as the "BUMP" incident from an earlier issue where the cause of a certain effect was not explained until the following page.

Chris Sprouse's art is good and Kane does what Warren Ellis characters often do: He kills lots of bad guys by being smarter and more ruthless than they are. The supporting characters are awesome, too. I'd like to see a screenplay by Ellis but knowing what I do about Hollywood it'd get watered down by all the committees who'd get their hands on it.

Matador #3

Wow. Oh wow!


Young Avengers is full of what I read superhero comics for. Matador is what I read "mature" comics for. This is a damn good story, well-told. Brian Stelfreeze's art gains momentum with each issue. When I go back and look at individual panels I say, "Damn! That there's a fine piece of art" because I become a cowboy when faced with aesthetically-pleasing things, apparently. However, it's not the kind of awesome art that distracts me from the story. It's the kind of awesome art that tells the story.

Speaking of the story, Devin Grayson is a purty good writer, yeehaw! Dang, I've gotta stop that. Anyway, Grayson is doing a great job with the writing. I think one of the reasons Stelfreeze's art works so well with the story is that he's got a story credit on this miniseries so he's got more of a connection to it.

And now it's time for the Noetic Concordance Trade Paperback Rant

The threes of you who read this blog regularly know that I have a deep loathing for anything which has been put through the business end of the procrustean bed of the six-issue trade. Matador may continue to live because, so far, it looks like it's actually a six-issue story. Unlike House of M (which I'll get to in a future reveiw) Matador is moving along at a pace that matches the number of issues it has left. (See also: Ocean)

Hey! I found a reason to read Millarworld

Warren Ellis did a Q&A on the forums.

Millar and Ellis have been friends for quite a while and there are some good Qs that Ellis As.

Mark Millar Doesn't Suck

Mark Millar is not a bad writer. I think the things he chooses to write about are very well-written. He's good at the craft of writing. I don't think he's a good storyteller, though. Grant Morrison is a great storyteller. His sense of pacing and the interactions of his characters are both top-notch. Morrison can write some stuff that at first seems to have the consistency of a fever dream but he usually pulls an excellent and interesting story out of all of it. For example, Morrison's Zatanna mini-series really has me hooked. It's got a cool, well-told story and compelling characters such as the girl who is tagging along with the title character.

Millar seems to have an idea of where his story arcs are going but, to me, it looks like he gets lost along the way. He's got Points A and Z thought out but there's not much of a sense of the path between those points. Many things just seem to happen. He has dropped some hints about future events (such as the Vision android) but the introduction of said synthetic being just seemed incongruous.

In Ultimates 2 Millar is definitely going somewhere with Pym as well as with Captain America & The Wasp but I get no sense of an arc or of any compelling elements which tie any of the parts of this story together. I have no problem with a comic that tells a self-contained story in each issue but Ultimates 2 is obviously on an arc.

Another thing that good storytellers do well is suspense. Allan Heinberg is doling out the information about the main characters in Young Avengers with an eyedropper. And I love it. We are several issues into the series and we just found out something very important about Hulkling. Heinberg is keeping me interested and I actively look forward to each new issue. This is, no doubt, something Marvel would be thrilled to hear.

Millar, however, has not captivated me with the mystery of the Ultimate Traitor. Ultimates 2 #6 ended with another tease showing that Pym knows who the traitor is but we, the readers, don't yet. It also ended with a cliffhanger that in the hands of a better writer would have made me say, "Woah! What the hell? I can't wait to see what that's about." Instead, because the events of the cliffhanger have had no build-up, I don't care. That's something Marvel doesn't want it's readers to say.

The opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference.

I think the main reason that Millar's writing bounces off me is that he doesn't seem to care for the characters he's writing about. Allan Heinberg does. Joss Whedon does. Giffen and DeMatteis do. Let's take another writer who does.

Warren Ellis.

This allows me to make a direct comparison between the two writers because they both worked on The Authority. Ellis writes cynical, smart, bastards who have seen too much. Some say he writes those characters too often but that's fodder for another essay. Jenny Sparks and the rest of the Authority are willing to do extremely violent things to make the world a better place for the majority of its inhabitants. They are not amoral but they do not abide by any law that keeps them from doing their jobs. This is one of the core premises of The Authority.

As written by Ellis, The Authority were a bunch of bastards but they were Bastards for Justice. They were also sympathetic. There were several moments in the first twelve issues of that comic which moved me and one or two that nearly had me in tears. Millar never did that. When he took over The Authority became assholes. Just assholes. I no longer cared about these formerly fully-realized characters. And I don't think Millar did, either.




EDIT: The distinguished commentor makes a good point. I could tack on some specific examples of the differences between Millar's and Ellis's Authority work but it will take up quite a bit of space and this post is plenty long, already. So, STAY TUNED for part two wherein I go on at length about that comic book.

No one will be seated during the thrilling Hegelian Dialectic scene!