Yesterday, I popped in Dead Head Comics, my ever-friendly local comic shop, and caught up on a few titles. It was a slight culture shock to read American comics again after being exposed to la bande dessinée on my recent Paris trip (more on that later), but I found a few things I liked.
The Ultimates 2, #4-#5
Mark Millar’s revamped Avengers is occasionally entertaining — largely due to Bryan Hitch’s consistently gorgeous artwork — but on the whole it’s hit and miss. Millar is an energetic writer with lots of ideas, but he can’t do subtle (not that The Ultimates, a bastard child of superhero comics and a Hollywood popcorn blockbuster requires subtle, byt anyway). The main characters tend to speak in expository, stilted sentences that makes me yearn for the Silver Age.
The action scenes — when Millar and Hitch eventually get around to them — are spectacular, though, and the current storyline about the Ultimate version of Thor (possibly the son of Odin, or maybe just a lunatic Norwegian ex-nurse with a big hammer) losing his mind (is he? or isn’t he?) is more intriguing than the last volume’s big alien invasion. And I like his version of Captain America, a WWII soldier out of his time and able to communicate with the modern world only by hitting it, innocent and brutal.
Seven Soldiers of Victory: Klarion the Witch Boy #1
I think Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory is the best thing going in American superhero comics at the moment. Morrison keeps a lot of balls in the air with this torrent of seven interlinked miniseries about obscure DC characters, reimagined with vigor and spectacular displays of imagination. All the Seven Soldiers so far (The Shining Knight, The Manhattan Guardian, Zatanna and Klarion the Witch Boy) have been completely different and refreshingly self-contained. They’re also fast-paced, packing a heady dose of action into each issue’s 24 pages.
Klarion is a witch-child living in the beautifully surreal Limbo Town, a lost city inside a vast cavern, ruled by the stern Submissionaries (who look and talk like Puritans, except that they’re actually Satanists). A glimpse of an object from the world above and growing tensions in his community lead him to rebel against the rigid rules of Limbo Town, and he embarks upon a quest for his lost father.
I believe Limbo Town and the main baddie in this issue are supposed to be references to some really obscure enemies of Etrigan the Demon, but I don’t really care. Frazer Irving’s artwork with its pallid Puritan witch-people and shambling zombielike Grundies (a reference to the recurring, mysterious DC Hulk stand-in, Solomon Grundy) is gorgeous, and Morrison knows that hinting at something tickles the reader more than exposition. And while the theme of teenage rebellion is not exactly original, the setting is sufficiently twisted to make it work.
Morrison seems to be hitting his stride again. I was blown away by the Invisibles, entertained by his JLA, nonplussed by his New X-Men — but recently he’s been producing stuff which is just pure fun: the brilliant We3 (Disney animal journey movie meets killer cyborgs) and the ongoing Vimanarama (Mahabradata superheroes meets Anglo-Indian romantic comedy) are the kind of stuff mainstream American comics need if they’re to survive. I’m looking forward to Morrison taking over the reins of Superman, although I think these limited series are the proper playground for his drug-fuelled chaos-magic creativity.
Ocean #3 - #4
I’m a big fan of Warren Ellis, although outside Planetary, Transmetropolitan and Global Frequency his work has been plagued by certain stylistic ticks lately: sarcastic, chain-smoking, badass main characters and pop science idea dumps. I have no problem with these. More worryingly, all his recent mini-series have been very decompressed: it takes a lot of time for stuff to happen. It may be that comparing Ocean to Morrison’s pyrokinetics, I’m just particularily sensitive to this, but I can’t help feeling that the first four issues of Ocean could be easily packed into one.
Still, there’s never too many sci-fi comics around, and Ocean is by no means bad: the story of a future UN weapons inspector uncovering ancient alien weaponry in the ice oceans of Europa has a lot of sense of wonder going for it, and Chris Sprouse’s clean-lined art suits the atmosphere spot-on.