In Review Of: Powers #25 by Bendis and Oeming

Man, it seems like a long time since I've done a simple comic review.

See, heres the deal. I liked Powers, I really did. I recommended it to my friends and enjoyed the stories as being, really, my favorite Bendis work.

I'm getting a little tired of the reboots on the series. It’s starting to feel like the X-Files, and nobody wants that.

... and yet the current storyline is still working for me, in an odd little way. And I'm not sure why.

Oeming's art is something that I continue to enjoy, enough that I picked up a couple pages from him a year or two. Really nice stuff, bold in a non-derivative of Mignola way, which is something that many artists can't pull off. Mike's work, while it has certainly changed over the years, continues to be an interesting draw for me.

I almost dropped the book an issue or two ago when a promising storyline, with Queen Nior killing the other members of her team in ways that protagonist of the movie Seven would have approved, when the ending devolved into a simple wrap-up with a demon from hell. (And only in comics would that be considered a simple wrap-up, even a cop out really.) There was nothing clever about it, and it annoyed the hell out of me, because I really liked the build-up from the preceding issues. Nothing has a comic fan scorned like a simple ending, like having, I don't know, Elektra be a skrull or something.

Did I just say that out loud?

In any case, issue #25 promises all new story (which it starts, continuing the rest of the subplots from the earlier issues), a new format (with a different paper, which is really nice) and more pages, which is never a bad thing on a comic that you like. Especially when plenty of us are getting used to the longer reads in the trades, so extending your work beyond the usual 22 page fare is a good way to go.

End result? A nice issue and I'm staying with series for a while longer. I'm not quite sure about the two page sex scene, which comes off as terribly gratuitous, but the rest of it is solid and entertaining. I'll be waiting with patiently for the next, oh, say 6 months, til the next issue comes out.

In Review Of: Avengers #3 by Bendis and Cho

I know what you're thinking, "Why does he keep going on about this book if he doesn't like Marvel's offerings?" And the oddity is that I do want to like this book, despite all the odds. I loved the Avengers, and the little kid in me really wants to see a kick ass Avengers book on the stands to buy.

Unfortunately, we're so deep into post modern deconstructionalism, that I doubt that anyone can come along and do a straight forward "Marvel-style" team book for the next year or two. (When it finally does get done, it will be hailed as "a refreshingly modern twist on old skool team books"). All that aside, I keep wanting to see this team do some interesting things. I like Carol Danvers, always did, and seeing her get front and center is fun. The Widow actually acts like the Natasha that we know and love, and Ares is just a genius stroke of fun. I hope that Bendis gets all Englehart on his ass.

Two great moments this issue: Carol telling Ares that he's the God of War, to back off and make a plan to win the war, and the moment that Ultron takes over the Helicarrier's computers, and projects his old, original, evil ultron face, a moment that I want to believe shows us that no matter how he may be reforming himself into a facsimile of Janet Van Dyke, he is a robot who knows who he really is. Interestingly, the skitzo Ultron makes complete sense in the Jocasta context. Genuine Fanboy Chill.TM

Unfortunately, hate dealing with the negatives as well: the terrible cover, the over-reliance on the ass shots (tigra especially), the strangely tepid action shots that Cho doesn't do so well, the knowledge that this book has been so reviled for the idiocy of Ultron being made into a nude, metallic version of the Wasp, that I doubt I could ever even make a public admission of "Heck, its a guilty pleasure". the pacing isn't exactly what I would wish for: it takes a little too long for things to happen. Powers can continue to decompress all it wishes to, but the Avengers needs to have stuff happen and happen now. What, hasn't anyone see Pirates 2?

And, yes, the little kid in me loves the appearance of the original grey iron man on the last page. Its a cliffhanger that only a member of the MMMS or FOOM could love.

OK, you got my money. For now. And you haven't had that in a long time.

In Review Of: The Mighty Avengers by Bendis & Cho

Haven't we moved beyond this?

I just read the first two pages of the new Avengers series so I'm reacting on instinct here, not on a reasoned and long thought out review of the two issue old series.

But, you're rebooting the Avengers, and you're picking and choosing which toys you want to play with like a kid drunk on children's sudafed running loose thru Toys-R-Us.

And you pick the Ultron doll.

I love Ultron, who has been a neurotic butt-kicking adamatium robot and supplied plenty of thrills, whether done by Roy Thomas and a young Barry Smith or Jim Shooter and George Perez, and I want to see him done right.

What I got, however, is an arbitrary decision to make Ultron a nude human female for the sake of cheesecake. And, in this day and age, to have to resort to the stupid little wisps of smoke over the nipples seems silly. If you want to make him a nude female, do it in a book that can have nudity, if not, then design a different female Ultron body, one with seams and lines, and keep the coloring consistent from page to page, so that you don't have to do the coy Gypsy Rose Lee cover-up.

I hope that this is going somewhere new, because we've seen Jocasta and we've done this story. And I have to say that while I dislike some of what Bendis is doing with the book, overall I enjoyed the set up of the new team, and think that putting Ares on the team is a hoot. Sentry, on the other hand, is annoying, and had better be leading to something or it will be a huge waste of time.

Can you believe it, I'm actually commenting on a mainstream Marvel book. Didn't think that that would happen.

Storytelling Decisions: The moment or the moment before

Away from the scanner, so I'm not going to pepper this with any images, but the verbal will have to suffice.

So there are more than a few thoughts on the art of storytelling that I have as I work my way through the story of Pistoleras. And I recall an article by Jim Steranko many years ago, accompanied his pre-production painting from Raiders, where he made a point that while other artists preferred the moment of the balloon exploding, he prefered the moment just before the balloon exploded, the pregnant pause.

I've thought a lot about this over the years, and nowhere is it more interesting that trying to decide how to use a panel that shows a passage of time, perhaps during a conversation. I think that usually we see a panel isolate a moment in time, where Peter Parker expresses an opinion to Mary Jane, but there are other examples where, in a two shot, the Ben Grimm will ask Reed Richards not to do something, and Reed Richards will press the button opening the negative zone anyway. Fairly straight forward, but the image will be of Reed pressing the button. So we, as a reader, are asked to ignore the right side of the panel with Reed pressing the button and we need to read left to right and only pay attention to Ben gesticulating in the right side of the panel. Kirby was the master of making sure that we could read across properly to "get" the pacing of the story. Eisner was great about that as well, obviously.

So how much do you compress the story, and how much do you expand?. Bendis is considered the king of decompression in these modern times, a storytelling method that I tend to find almost a "tick" and stylistic choice, and one that I enjoy in Powers tremendously. The compression inherent in, say, the early Justice Leagues by Sekowsky and Fox, is so tight, that it almost offends my modern sensibilities. Hey, the original Starro attack on the JLA would at least have been worth two issues of the Avengers as layed out by Kirby and drawn by Heck.

I enjoy the decompression of the Manga that I get in Genshiken (my favorite manga of all time), but it would be foreign to me in, say, Spider Man or Fantastic Four. Pistoleras is as much a story of place to me as much as it is the story of the four girls and feminine empowerment. I want people to feel the heat of the desert of Mexico, and the crash of waves. I want them to get as much as they can in black and white and grey.

There are as many approaches to this as there are stories. Given a little more time and my scanner, I'll post some different examples. Any thoughts?