marlowe1 | Entries tagged with ms marvel

18. Rick and Morty volume 1 by Zack Gorman & CJ Cannon - This is some first season bullshit. As much as everyone wants to claim that Rick & Morty lost its mojo and that it's just not as fun as it used to be, the fucking show didn't even get women writers until season 3 and that's when we got Pickle Rick. So this comic is pretty much what we got the first season without any of the despair from the second season. Both characters are basically Justin Roiland, Morty is Justin's mentality as the perpetually masturbating Morty and the fantasy of being a drunk loser asshole who gets declared a genius in Rick. The rest of it just feels like a series of bits with the loosest excuse to change the subject and segway into a new story. So what is going to happen with all the time cop stuff in the Morty makes billions off the time manipulated stock market including the whole maze designed by Rick? Who the fuck knows. We got clones. And then we get a rebellions. And then we get the Dreamverse because Scary Terry was fun. I remember the second volume having a better story but this one seems like outtakes from season 1.

19. Marvel Rising by various including Ryan NOrth and G. Willow Wilson - So this is basically the World's Finest of the 2010s. A comic book company takes its two most famous characters and smashed them together in one story. Instead of Batman & Superman, we get Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel. Only both those characters owe their popularity to their writers and well having North and Wilson write each other's characters seems like a good idea. This seems like a rushed story where a new super powered being shows up and she's bullied so she bullies back. And in the end Arcade shows up because we haven't seen that guy in awhile (and he's a bit of a nothing villain. I mean his whole thing is to put people in a series of games that is meant to kill them. But they always survive). So this is forgettable and rather a shame considering how much both these characters are great on their own. Still no one else not even each other can write them well which is why no one cares about either nowadays because their new writers just don't get the appeal.

21. The Cartoon History of the Universe vol 1 by Larry Gonick - I re-read these books all the time. Yet I don't look up my assumption that the book on the history of Greece from after the Persian War to Alexander was written first. The inking and the drawings are so different that it has to have been the chapter the inspired the rest of the book. Nominally I'm a little sad that Gonick hasn't done more cartoon histories since he could definitely focus on more material, but this is the standard "Western" history (after the first two chapters on Evolution and early civilizations to the collapse of the Bronze Age) and as such, it's going to talk about the history that you get in the average suburban high school - except for the Bible stuff which has too much baggage (see every rant I ever go on about the Bible being great literature hobbled by idiots who praise it without actually reading the fucking thing. Or buy my books). Yet, it still colors in a lot more than you would ever learn in high school. I'm actually still happy that he includes the Philistines getting hemorrhoids. Discovering that there's butt humor in the Bible made me want to become Jewish. Ok, that's not the reason I gave to any rabbi or annoying Shabbos guest. Anyhow I don't know what else to say except I definitely will read it again.

22. The Umbrella Academy vol 3: Hotel Oblivion by Gerard Wray (Way?) and Gabriel Bo - speaking of reading a book again, I didn't get this one. I mean I liked it and the plot is simple enough. Everyone has to come together because somehow all the Hotel Oblivion prisoners get free and cause some shit. They are rescued by the Sparrow Academy which is the alternate academy. But there are many details that I just don't get. Why is Rumor giving dollhouses to her daughter and seemingly forgetting about them? Who are all the side characters? What are the regular characters planning?

MOstly I'm wondering if this got more complicated or if it was always complicated but in the first two volumes I had the television show to provide a basis. THe television show departed a great deal from the comic but at very least the broad strokes were there. This one is just out there and I need to read it again.

23. Ms. Marvel: Stormranger by Saladin Ahmed, Minkyu Jung and Joey Vazquez - I finally like Saladin Ahmed's writing on this thing. In the first few stories, he seemed to be floudering and trying to do things with the character that didn't quite work, including a cosmic adventure that suggested that Kamala was the chosen one but turned out to be a regular Kree thing that she kind of fit (so like Dune where Paul Atreides was the Chosen One because the Bene Gesserit planted the prophecies in the Fremen culture in order to ready them for Bene Gesserit travelers) but it was a lot of meh. The first story in this one made me think that he was trying to copy Wilson with more stories about tech douchebags and old enemies who were mostly fellow teenagers who were misunderstood.

But when it came time for Dr. Strange to operate on her father it became something special. I think maybe I'm saying that because my mom died last year and I do have a great deal of experience dealing with ailing parents, but it also felt like he was digging into the characters. Granted, the operation is supposed to be the B-plot subservient to a repetition of the black costume story from SPiderman where the new suit is a Kree weapon that she has to stop (there are different details and she actually works to stop it instead of just trying to get rid of it). That's fine, but definitely the family stuff and the Bruno plot are the heart of the story.

So cool. Saladin Ahmed is getting the hang of Kamala Khan. Makes me hopeful for her in the movies.

Crossposts: https://marlowe1.livejournal.com/2322125.html

9. Ms. Marvel: Destined by Saladin Ahmed, Minkyu Jung, etc. - Can Ms. Marvel stay a great character without G. Willow Wilson? This is a tough question since almost every writer that has tackled Kamala Khan has missed the mark. I get the feeling that Wilson put so much of herself into Khan that it's almost impossible for anyone else to work with her. What makes this worse is that as an Orthodox Jews, Khan is the best representation for me that I didn't even think I needed (seriously straight white guy - not really hurting for representation here) but when I read a comic book story where Ben Grimm (Thing) gets a Bar Mitzvah and his Ba Mitzvah portion is the Book of Job and his best insight is "well I guess times are tough for people" I'm noticing how un-fucking-believable some writers can be when it comes to faith. Marvel Comics is in fucking New York City. You think those writers could have gone out and asked someone what a bar mitzvah is like.

I digress.

So how does Saladin Ahmed do? Not bad. I don't feel like Kamala Khan is a charactiture. He leans heavily on her family including her father disapproving of her superhero gig. The main story is about her going to a planet and dealing with a chosen one narrative that is happily not a real chosen one so much as her costume looking like the Kree woman that liberated the planet from the slaver robots and beasts. It's fun and it's light. I don't hate it.

The emotional weight comes at the end when we find out that her father has a rare disease. Talking to Tony Stark on a building is pretty neat. So first Saladin Ahmed story - pretty light on the emotional payoffs but definitely delivers by the end. Definitely looking forward to more.

10. No Longer Human vol 3 by Usamaru Furuya - I'm starting to think that "No Longer Human" is the Japanese equivalent of the Bell Jar or Catcher in the Rye (or Sorrows of Young Werther if we want to be historical), being that book that hits a certain part of the population (young, confused, angry, possibly mentally ill) in a deep and profound way to the point where once they read it they can't shut up about how amazing it is and how it really gets them. This impression comes from the fact that this version ALSO has a framing device of an outsider obsessed with the story of Yozo Obo seeking him out. Granted, I think that there might be a bit in the actual book that goes outside the main character but it's still interesting seeing how we are not just with this poor fucker but we are also with the man who wants to find him, figure him out, see him in his final broken form.

I've already read the Junji Ito and the pushed the body horror. Another reviewer condemned that version as being grossly misogynist by turning all the women into monsters and even using an ambivalent depiction of his wife's rape. In this one, it's obvious that his wife is being raped by his editor but everyone around it is suspect. Why does his friend bring him down to the crime instead of stopping it? I can see how Junji Ito can be criticized but I still have affection for Ito and his body horror.

This one is more subtle (ok that's the dumbest critique ever - more subtle than Junji Ito? What isn't) but it definitely brings about the tragedy of the poor protagonist as he falls into despair and alcoholism. The decision to set it in the modern day is strange but not terribly distracting. Mostly it brings us back to the same character wandering lost and having lost what he considers to be humanity.

The main difference is that this one has way more scenes of the main character trying to work and shoot up heroin. He does a lot of heroin. Junji Ito puts you in his head. Furuya puts you outside him watching him destroy his life until finally we see the outsider seek him out.

11. A Noble Profession by Pierre Boulle - author of Planet of the Apes and Bridge over River Kwai!!! Before I review this book, I am going to note that apparently his book for Planet of the Apes has the Tim Burton ending. No really. That fucking stupid ending where Mark Wahlberg gets on a rocket ship, goes back to Earth only to find out that on Earth everyone is also an ape - that's the original ending. Tim Burton was actually truer to the book than whomever did the Charlton Heston movie.

And like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton made a shit movie by staying truer to the book.

But I digress.

So I put this one in the other authors entry because Boulle is in every way writing a John Le Carre book. The strength of Le Carre books is in the fact that they are high stakes games done by low stakes people. No one is a master spy in Le Carre. They are functionaries and bureaucrats. They do their jobs and sometimes they do them badly. Most of the time they fuck up in big ways and the only thing that keeps them from giving everything away is the fact that the other side fucks up just as much.

This book reminds me of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold not just because it's short and it tells a small intense story with people trying to work with major stakes but also because it's main character is a bit of a weasel. Actually he's much more of a shit than the poor bastard from Cold.

Anyhow, this character is one of those gentlemen spies that were so popular in early WW2 (and so fucking useless as a best case scenario) who gets into spying for the thrill and then as soon as he's about to get tortured gives everything away.

The rest of the book is the Hitchcock bomb under the table as the British spy agency puts him back into the field. But why are they putting him back in the field? Certainly they can't think that he's trustworthy. He claimed that his radio guy gave everything away and only one psychologist seems to trust him. Certainly his co-spy, the sister of the radio guy, does not trust him. And the Germans seem to already know.

So this isn't a book of will they find out but when will they find out.

It's quite fun in its own way and the main character is a hilariously shitty person who won't stop thinking of himself as the hero.

I definitely recommend this one.

63. Battleworld: Star Lord & Kitty Pryde by Sam Humphries and Alti Firmansyah - Checking out comic books from the library can be a strange experience when you don't keep up with the titles on a regular basis. Marvel comics has gone through a Secret War, Civil War, Civil War II and a story where Captain America went full Nazi just as America elected one of the most odious pieces of shit to the White House (by the electoral college, not the popular vote). So Secret Wars apparently was a combination of Crisis on Infinite Earths and the original. It's Crisis in terms of bringing together all the alternate universe characters in one big story in order to work out some kinks from the original format (primarily for giving Miles Morales to the Marvel Universe proper). Like Secret Wars in that the format is fairly simple as everyone is on one planet fighting it out with Doctor Doom as god emperor (just like the only interesting twist in the original miniseries).

So Peter Quill and Kitty Pryde are a thing in the Marvel universe proper (as opposed to the film Marvel universe where the multiverse comes down to Universal, Sony and Fox). Only Kitty Pryde is nowhere and instead we get the Kitty Pryde who was an agent for Apocalypse in Age of Apocalypse. There's even an issue from Age of Apocalypse which reminds me of my initial impressions which were - cool concept, love the art and who the fuck wrote this thing? It's awful. Anyhow the main story of Quill and Alternate Pryde in a heist is about as low stakes as you can get and putting them together in the next story with Quill asking Pryde to marry him is just kind of dumb.

64. Sage vol 3 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples - Ok, now this makes a little more sense. Not much since the story mostly could start here with the one-eyed fictional version of Samuel Delaney puking on the baby. Yet, I know the characters a little better. I'm more sad that the author dies and see the stakes a little more clearly. Still love how the opposite of war turns out to be fucking. War & Fucking is a Russian novel we would all want to read.

65. She-Hulk: Deconstructed by Mariko Tamaki & Nico Leon with Dalabor Talajic - She-Hulk without She-Hulk. Just Jennifer as a lawyer with a case of a woman with a monster in her apartment and a landlord that is creepy enough to try to evict her for being not so hot anymore. She-Hulk is fresh off of Civil War II which was the one where Captain Marvel was an idiot, Bruce Banner died and there was a lot of talk of fascism. Anyhow she's got severe PTSD so the whole story is about getting herself right with herself and accepting her transformation into She-Hulk again which is something she does under duress in this case. The story is tight and full of mission statements over what She-Hulk can be, even if I think that the fun She-Hulk of Hell Cat is not really going to be around.

66.The Walking Dead vol 30: New World Order by Robert Kirkman & Stefano Gaudiano - I can appreciate the fact that the Walking Dead is more of a spiral than a circle. I can appreciate the fact that even though it looks like there's only one story going on with Rick and friends finding safety only to lose it, that there's a greater narrative about rebuilding society and bringing us back to the social order. That doesn't mean that I don't find this latest iteration of the gang finding a new place to live any more interesting. Ok, so the new place is a big city of 50,000 people where the issue that arises comes on pretty quickly. If I didn't know that this struggle was the last one and that the whole series just ended, I would have guessed that this is where things were going. In fact, the story of the spoiled brat son of the matriarch was already on the television show. I don't properly remember if it was in the comic as well, but it might have been. Either way Negan kills the brat so a new world order based on what people were like before the fall kind of throws things in the mixer. So this is a pretty dull affair. Negan is gone. The new safe place is bigger but it's got many of the same tensions. The last thing anyone says is to reference New World Order. I suppose the series ending is the best thing for it.

67.Uncanny X-Men: Survival of the Fittest by Cullen Bund & Greg Land - Speaking of boring, this is one of those stories that deals with the fact that Marvel was trying to push the Immortals as the new X-Men in the most blatant way possible. The meta-story of Marvel being pissed that they couldn't do mutant stories in the regular movies while the boring X-Men movies chugged along in the Fox banner is more interesting than any story coming out of it. So that's your answer to "Why isn't Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel just a mutant?" And in universe the teragan cloud goes and kills the mutants and activates the Immortals and in this story we got Magneto fighting to save the mutants with a group trying to kill off the heroes. Also Genosha gets blown up, one of the saddest metaphors for South Africa (then Israel) to ever appear in comics gets a "I planted bombs to kill off these guys" send-off. Oh poor mutants. You will never get another Claremont.

Crossposts: https://marlowe1.livejournal.com/2309438.html

91. Ms. Marvel No Normal by G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona - This is the storyline that introduced Kamala to the world as Ms. Marvel and while the first issue is taking great pains to establish the character (she's a Muslim. She likes to smell bacon. Her parents are strict. Her best friend wears a hijab but by choice. Someone gives her alcohol and she gets angry when she finds out) that sometime seem a little overwhelming, all the wonderful stuff about Ms. Marvel was already in that first issue as blatant as the story was about establishing most of her personality (the fan fiction stuff and the fact that she wanted the big boot version of Ms. Marvel costume are wonderful and they never lost their charm under Wilson - although there's a Spiderman comic where it seems forced). So what else is there to say about this comic beyond how much you really should read it? I don't know, but I do think that Marvel is having a bit of a renaissance with character driven story telling instead of the old fashioned fight the bad guy superhero stuff and I rally think that this is the title that started it.

92.One Punch Man vol 2 by Yusuke Marata - In between reading this book and writing this review, I caught the show on Netflix and damn, it's great. Can't believe I missed this book until now but that's fine. I get to catch up on it. So this starts out with the story of the secret genetically modified group that Saitama just trashes and then realizes that he missed bargain day at the supermarket. Also the anti-work terrorist group makes up the end and they seem like broad parodies of student groups and a little too broad. It's fascinating in the same way that watching old 70s shows about "women's libbers" is fascinating. The conversation is entering society but people are purposefully missing the point (and this is the conversation about why we all have to work so fucking much. And apparently China is getting into the game as well as Bojack Horseman is popular among the "funeral culture" that considers Pepe the Frog in his original peeing all over himself form as an icon). Anyhow there's a super awesome killer dude who destroys that group and then Saitama just wants to stay out of it. That's the plot. The big faced crazy bug eyed fighting is also the draw but you can get that in a lot of manga. This is special.

93. Moon Knight: Lunatic by Jeff Lemire & Greg Smallwood - Just because I said that Marvel is going through a bit of a renaissance doesn't mean that they aren't putting out shit. This one came out last year and it's that old fucking trope of the main character waking up in a mental institution and being told that he's totally schizophrenic and everything in the series is just bullshit. It can be done well I think or I suppose or maybe theoretically you can see all the characters in a different light, but it's fucking old. It was old when Buffy did it and disgustingly inane when Smallville did it and there was a superhero vs. zombie series where it was kind of fun but only because I hadn't read the rest of the series. And this time I don't give a fuck about Moon Knight. There are some comic book characters that are established as part of the universe but weren't really famous when I was reading comics. When I was a teenager I think there was an attempt to start a Moon Knight comic and I think it was in the cool trippy shit genre of story telling that Marvel liked to do alongside Moonshadow and Blood, or maybe it was just normal. Anyhow I don't remember Moon Knight so this is supposed to sell me Moon Knight.

Instead it gave me some bullshit about Moon Knight being a dude who had a very elaborate fantasy life but is really a mental patient. But oh no, wait, he's actually Moon Knight and he's being fooled. Because that's the way these things always go.

94.Spiderman: Miles Morales by Brian Michael Bendis & Sara Pichelli - Like Steve Moffat, I sometimes defend Bendis but it's usually a weak defense that goes along the lines of he's not THAT bad. In both cases, there are enough great moments and stories to appreciate him when he's good. Bendis was great with Powers but utter shit with Civil War. I think that Miles Morales was his character when he was doing Ultimate Spiderman and it's fun to see Miles Morales in the Marvel Universe but please for the love of G-d LET SOMEONE ELSE WRITE THIS CHARACTER!!!!

I didn't mind this titles until the grandmother showed up. I even liked the fat friend who knows his secret identity and is his best friend. That seemed to be the character from the new Spiderman movie like revamped Peter Parker went and stole Miles Morales' best friend in the movies. There was even some great stuff about him trying to balance school and work and even the changes in illustration styles from realistic to cartoony were pure joy, especially when Morales meets Parker Spiderman and wants approval.

Only these good points made the crappy parts that much crappier. A blogger gets really excited that Morales is black because his costume ripped and while that echoes the diversity discussions we've been having about genre, it still seems like it's way too obvious to really be done well. Ok ok ok Bendis, you are writing a minority superhero and you've been doing it for a long time. Take your cookie and make the story work.

And then we get the broadly stereotypical Hispanic Grandmother who is trying to whip her grandson into shape with tough love. She could have been a decent character in another writer's hands but Bendis just feels lazy like she's completely one note and just there to get in Miles' way. Even when Kamala shows up to see if he wants to patrol (a clumsy cameo if there ever was one since what the hell is she going all the way out to Brooklyn to "patrol" with Miles? And no, nothing I've seen in either characters makes it believable that she's got a crush on him and wants to date him) she's just kind of there to support his Tough Hispanic Grandmother. And then she disappears - back to Jersey City. I read another story with Kamala in Spiderman that's even worse when it comes to capturing the character but I think that Bendis' weakness is even more obvious when you realize that Morales comes off as a much more interesting character when he shows up in Ms. Marvel than he does in his own title. Not even going to compare cameo Morales to cameo Kamala because cameo Kamala is the worst, but G. Willow Wilson should find many equally talented writers and just take over the whole damn company.

Crossposts: http://marlowe1.livejournal.com/2280008.html

76.All New Captain America: Fear Him by Dennis Hopeless, Rick Remender & Mast & Geoffo - In the 80s, superhero comics found their adolescence. So many heroes were angsty and trying to do the right thing and living in a world with very clear messages. The messages seemed pretty deep if you were a teenager but were pretty blatant is you weren't. By the 90s superheroes regressed into the power fantasies with way too many damn mutants all over the place and Superman running out of stories so they decided to kill him. Somewhere in the last couple decades, they finally grew up and started telling stories that went beyond the power fantasies.

Ok. I'm still a little surprised that I like superhero comics again. Who knew what a little character development could do?

So anyhow, this one has Sam Wilson fighting a supremely silly villain who might as well be a clone of the Scarecrow villain from Batman. He even has the silly mask and the freakout juice. The heart of the comic though is Sam and Steve's son (who is Nomad, I guess) running around the sewer systems and finding a colony of runaway kids. The part where Sam agrees to leave them alone while tripping balls on the fear juice is quite great.

77. One Punch Man 10 by Yusuke Murata - There's a joy in One Punch Man fucking around with the narrative tropes of the genre. No matter how dangerous or nasty the villain becomes, the ending is right there in the title. This is the first one I've read and I immediately put the rest of the series on hold at the library. Sadly, they don't have them past this collection yet so I will have to wait awhile to find out how our hero fares in the big martial arts contest where he's in disguise. But the first part where Garo is the monster who is beating all other heroes is the best setup until he just runs into our hero at a grocery store and Saitama goes "what are you bothering me for" and knocks him out as if it's no big thing. This joke might get old but not yet.

78. Powers: Gods - One of the insights into Raymond Chandler is that his mysteries are often not mysteries at all. No matter how much corruption Philip Marlowe digs up, the answer the to mystery is often just the client or the daughter of the client. The world is still a mess but the mystery itself is simple. Most of the Powers stories fall into these patterns. There's someone dead at the beginning, a lot of investigation that hints at a huge world of corruption and conspiracy, and then the killer is just some guy. Sometimes there's a big world changing event (like the Superman character killing a bunch of towns) but mostly it's a simple solution to a mystery with complex implications. The first few series were about superheroes as rock stars (including one where it turns out that the superhero just had a heart attack while fucking a groupie) but after the series went to Marvel the rock star metaphor went to a straight detective story.

So this one is totally a Raymond Chandler type with the background of superheroes who are powerful enough to be Greek gods, or at least they claim. Damocles is dead and the rest of the gods are not forthcoming. Hades is fucked up and Hecate is living in a church. There's a lot of talk about how gods can be superheroes as this is a takeoff on the Marvel titles. Artemis dies and who the fuck knows what's going on. And then a couple of humans who took the superhero juice that makes them crazy were super pumped and killed the rest of the gods. For revenge. For a rape. And a cover-up.

The epilogue seems more like an afterthought to lead to Bureau than an actual ending. Everything is done and then the last goddess alive in the pantheon gets pissed and tries to flood Chicago. All the big heroes disappear and the cops become FBI agents.

79.Captain Marvel: Rise of Alpha Flight by Michele Fazekas & Tara Butters - I just looked up the writers and found out that they were the producers on Agent Carter. They also wrote Dollhouse episodes. This was still pretty dead. I don't really like Captain America that much and putting her on a spaceship to negotiate with a kill spaceship that recognizes her as Kree because of her symbol and then gets all genocidal is too Babylon 5 for my taste. Interesting to see Alpha Flight but they got boring since I was reading the John Byrne run.

80. Ms. Marvel: Generation Why by G. Willow Wilson and Jacob Wyatt - Kamala Khan is the best. Actually Ms. Marvel is why I am trying to read Captain Marvel and being bored all over again the Carol Danvers. Maybe Ms. Marvel is why I don't like Captain Marvel because damnit Captain Marvel screwed up as a mentor. This continues the Inventor/Mr Edison who is half-bird and also using millennials as batteries there are plenty who think that they are useless (political points tend to be obvious in the comic just because they are still looking for teenage audience). But the sight gags are great. The part where she gets Lockjaw to protect her and she's hugging him for her parents is adorable. And how many superheroes run into Wolverine and start talking about their Wolverine fan fiction?