THE SQUID STAYS IN THE PICTURE: Comics reviews! These are a) not all the comics I’ve read lately–I really don’t have anything to say about Cable & Deadpool except “that was fun!” or Deadpool Classic except “wow, Rob Liefeld is really as awful as everyone said!”; b) not all the comics I’ve read lately–the very best one will get its own post; and c) in order of how well they satisfied the expectations with which I approached them, from least to most. So this is a mix of superheroics, art comics, and in-betweens.

Let’s go!

Iron Man: War Machine. As Edward Gorey says, “About the Zoat, what can be said? There was just one, and now it’s dead.”

I thought this comic was from the early 1980s–you know, the part where it was still kind of the ’70s–until someone dropped a reference to “Hammer Time” and I checked the dates and sat there gobsmacked that this kind of tomfoolery was still going on in the 1990s! The art is action-superhero standard, the exposition is in that awful no-fun place in between Stan Lee wigginess and Grant Morrison/Fabian Nicieza-style pseudo-science macguffinry, there’s just no style or flair to this at all. Also, when they go to Asia? The Japanese corporate type has a carved dragon on his desk. For reals. You can almost hear the gong in the background!

Ultimate Iron Man. Orson Scott Card pens a rather strange origin story, involving genius children (you’re shocked I know) and what I think is a doomed attempt to get around the racial-politics problems of the “Iron Man and his black sidekick War Machine” setup. It isn’t awful, but I don’t think there’s anything here that I want to incorporate into my own personal fantasy version of what an awesome Iron Man origin story would look like. (And Tony’s alcoholism gets a cartoonish “Jekyll and Hyde via pseudoscience” treatment–I’d almost prefer the usual maudlin angst!)

The art is fine. It’s sleek. It’s not great.

The Museum Vaults. A comic commissioned by the Louvre (for real), exploring the nature of art, art history, collection, copying, and similar museum-related concerns. I think they were aiming for somewhere in the Steven Millhauser-to-Borges spectrum, but fell into that trap where people think that because you’re saying something in comics, you don’t have to be as innovative as if you were doing prose–the perception that the medium itself makes something innovative. I don’t think I got anything from this really.

On the other hand, it really did handle a lot of interesting topics, if only glancingly. It’s entirely possible that I was reading this too shallowly, and a more enthusiastic reader would find it more provocative. Maybe leaf through it in your local comicopia and see what you think….

Catwoman: Crooked Little Town. I… had no investment in the Catwoman mythos/brand, going in, and I still don’t. So I’m not sure how to review this really. It did not convert me? If you don’t need that, maybe it’s awesome?

The pictures are faboo, especially the very lovely ladies! Tons of eye candy, in that neato keen animation-y style you can see on the cover. The story is a reasonably satisfying pulp crime tale. There’s one unexpected twist at the end where Catwoman was surprisingly ruthless. (Surprising to me, anyway.) There are bonus lesbians if that helps.

Astonishing X-Men: Gifted, Dangerous, and Unstoppable. This is Joss Whedon’s X-Men, which means if you want to read them you probably already have. I’ll say that they haven’t replaced Morrison as my intro-to-X-Men comics. They’re interesting while they last, and yes, a lot of the dialogue is fun. And I like Emma and Scott as a couple, so that particular aspect doesn’t bother me, although I don’t know that Whedon really gets the most out of the two of them. If you are one of the people who are troubled by the way Whedon dispatches his female characters who aren’t Buffy, AXM will give you a fairly important additional piece of evidence there, via a really startling plot twist which seems to give one X-Woman a truly awful send-off. (This being the X-Men, she might already be back for all I know–I’m not caught up.)

Anyway, for me, that plot twist was definitely not a reason to complain about the series. It was the most memorable thing that happened in these volumes. It’s a shocking twist with a real old-school sf/horror feel to it. So I am going to get over my general unsympathy for Whedon’s work, and especially his brand of feminism, and say that I liked this twist a lot.

That Salty Air. Another one I’m not entirely sure how to review. It’s a deeply personal fable about grieving, set in a poverty-stricken seaside area and on the sea itself. I picked this up because several things about it were evocative for me: the rough-hewn faces, the title (which I really love), the idea of grief as the sea–you have to go out there, you can try to attack it, in the end you must be reconciled to it, and even when you appear to have returned to land its salt and sharpness still pervade your life.

The problem is that I knew all of that going in, and I’m not sure how much the book added to it. Given how personal this project clearly is, I may just have been the wrong person to read it–again, I’d suggest checking it out if you are interested. But for me… the ocean-monster scenes, especially, weren’t unearthly or horrific enough. I didn’t get enough sense of the sea as somehow both familiar and alien, the sea creatures as monstrous and yet not really malevolent. I wanted more squid, is what I’m saying.

I only just now realized, typing this, that the fisherman and his wife in the book stand in parallel to the artist, making a profession of the journey out onto the sea of grief. That’s kind of awesome.

The Order: The Next Right Thing and California Dreaming. The best new superteam since the X-Statix! So, of course, it was swiftly canceled. I hate you too, Marvel.

Anyway, these are two very fun volumes, featuring a California-based superhero team led by Tony Stark’s AA sponsor; Pepper Potts; and a scary PR lady. The situations are fun and interesting, the dialogue improves even cliched storylines (the Britney-a-like who gets empowered [get it? get it?] could’ve been painful to watch, but instead she gets awesome lines like, “Oh my God, I’m fighting a bear, y’all! I’m punching a bear in the face!”), and the characters are extra double super sympathetic. I liked all of them, I think. This comic earns its “ordinary people are the true heroes” shtik. (Also, the AA stuff doesn’t feel fake to me and definitely isn’t maudlin or exploitive–cf. the title of the first volume–which is more than I can say for some people’s comics, Orson Scott Card.)

The art is fine; you won’t notice it, but you definitely won’t hate it.

Mad Night. A ridiculous, creepy romp! Murders are taking place on an isolated college campus, and the only people who can solve the crimes are a foul-mouthed girl detective and her wimpy photographer sidekick! Add in lady pirates, youth elixirs, owls, dungeons, evil puppets, evil children, and really awesome character designs (from the Betty-and-Veronica pinup chix to the shivery warped features of the baddies), and you have a very fun little genre cocktail. Yum yum.