Sunday Splash Page #390

"X-Terminate the X-Apes," in NextWave #11, by Warren Ellis (writer), Stuart Immonen (penciler), Wade von Grawbadger (inker), Dave McCaig (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)

As a plot description, NextWave was about 5 heroes who find out the top-secret organization they're working for (Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort), and its corporate sponsors (Beyond Corporation), are creating all sorts of dangerous weapons. So they go rogue, stealing a ship and traveling the country, attacking various installations of freaky crap.

In practice, NextWave seemed to be about Warren Ellis giving Stuart Immonen lots of fights between angrily sarcastic heroes and weird and/or cool shit to draw. As one of the caption boxes says after a sequence of kicking and exploding things, "This is what they want!"

The "they" in this scenario I assume applied to the readers. The readers say they want action, they want fight scenes, they want cool one-liners and all manner of weird shit? Well unhinge your jaw, because Ellis and Immonen are jamming a funnel down your throat and pouring in all you can take.

So, of course, the book sold like crap. There were no crossovers! No guest appearances from more popular characters! No event tie-ins, unless you count the cover for issue 11, which proclaimed it "Not Part of a Marvel Comics Event", and featured Machine Man holding a sign that read, "Mark Millar Licks Goats" (Those poor goats.)

It was just a book about five characters running around blowing up stuff like samurai robots, or Mindless Ones summoned by the Dread Rorkannu on behalf of the Beyond Corporation in exchange for $100 and some of those "Suicide Girls." Clearly, it wasn't making any attempt to take itself seriously, even if the characters were (to the extent they were capable of taking anything seriously.)

The best known character was probably Monica Rambeau, formerly Captain Marvel the 2nd, now a grouchy woman trying to use her limited cred as having led the Avengers to ride herd on 4 lunatics. Or maybe original X-Forcer Boom-Boom, who just goes by Tabby in this book, and gets written as a sort of Valley Girl idiot. Actually kind of weird reading that New Warriors Annual last week and she's shown to know her way around computer databases. Not no more she ain't! Machine Man calls himself "Aaron", and is an arrogant, drunk, robot. Ellis turns Elsa Bloodstone from a Buffy knock-off to Hellboy crossed with the Punisher, combined with an acerbic British attitude. The Captain was a new character, and was just some loser from Jersey who got powers from dumb aliens, who he then kicked the crap out of because he was drunk and thought they were leprechauns. His best moment was probably beating Rorkannu's skull in with a toilet.

They argue all the time. Tabby gives Elsa grief about a European Union shirt (which Ellis later uses to mock the, "Do you think this A on my head stands for France?" line from Ultimates. Which, to be clear, deserved to be mocked.) Aaron keeps calling everyone else "fleshy ones", and at one point gets the shit kicked out of him by the 3 women on the team. The Captain's a dope that everyone barely tolerates and no one worries when he gets smacked over the horizon. It's a workplace comedy, but they all really dislike each other. They just hate Beyond Corp more.

It's a very early-2000s style of humor. They're being chased by Dirk Anger, a parody Nick Fury who yells angrily all the time and keeps trying to kill himself through methods like sitting in a chair staring down the barrel of a revolver the size of a tank, as some kind of gag about masculinity issues or repressed homosexuality or something. Beyond Corp throws a bunch of knock-off Avengers at them, including a guy who got Captain America powers because Rogers took a whiz after the procedure, and the super-soldier serum was still viable in that form. Another guy got Hulk powers because he tried to huff gamma-irradiated nuclear waste. They're led by Forbush Man, who makes a lot of proclamations about how mighty he is, especially with the girls.

I can't remember laughing a lot when I bought the entire run at one of the first Cape-Cons. Either I didn't get the joke, or (more likely) I didn't read it as a joke at all. I was mostly just impressed at all the strange things Immonen and Ellis came up with for them to fight. And Immonen draws the heck out of all of it. Forbush Man uses the power of his "Omni-Mind" to send each member of the team into some ugly alternate reality, and Immonen shifts his art style for each. So he draws Elsa's nightmare world - where she wasn't diligent enough exterminating monsters and they've overtaken the world - in a faux-Mignola style. (Tabby was unaffected by Forbush Man's power, because she's too dumb, you see.) Issue 11 has 6 consecutive double-page splashes, including the one up there, of NextWave just tearing their way through things like brontosaurs with optic blasts, or MODOKs that are Elvis (and shoot cheeseburgers.)

Of course, the last one has the tagline, "nextwave: blatantly wasting your money since 2006." But it's only a waste if I feel ripped off. Relative to a Bendis comic where the artist only gets to draw people sitting around talking about nothing that couldn't be handled in 2 pages or less, this was a steal.

Bits and pieces of this series have leaked into larger use around the Marvel Universe. Elsa Bloodstone most obviously. She seems to be getting used in some book, somewhere, pretty much constantly, and it's always Ellis' version. Although I think most writers leave out an element of enjoyment she gets from her work that we see here, in the shooting and decapitating robots with shovels.

I don't see a lot of Boom-Boom these days, but I think the "Valley Girl" characterization kind of stuck. Brian Reed used this version of Machine Man in Ms. Marvel volume 2, but when Jeff Parker added the character to the cast of Red Hulk a few years later, he went back to the classic look and characterization. But it was a Red Hulk book, so who gives a shit, really? Al Ewing used Beyond Corp in one of his Avengers books (I think Luke Cage and the Mighty Avengers), as did the Amazing Spider-Man writers between Nick Spencer and Zeb Wells' runs.

 Monica was part of the cast in Ewing's book, so when Beyond returned, so did the trench coat and "Auntie Monica" nickname. The trench coat was also part of Monica's look when Kelly Sue DeConnick used her in Captain Marvel volume 7. I think most writers who've use Monica since NextWave give her a bit more of a blunt approach. Take no shit, don't defer or get pushed around. So maybe she's a case of gradual bleed into the character, rather than a wholesale revision like Elsa and Tabitha got.

The Captain, I think may have vanished entirely. I guess there's no place for a super-strong, flying idiot in the Marvel Universe. Or, he's not the type to save the day unless someone's cutting a check.

Saturday Splash Page #189

"Escher Dimension," in Secret Avengers (vol. 1) #18, by Warren Ellis (writer), David Aja and Raul Allen (artists), Dave Lanphear (letterer)

Secret Avengers started in 2010, post-Siege, and focused on Steve Rogers, now as "Commander Steve Rogers", the current (temporary) Boss of All Superheroes, forming an espionage squad of Avengers. Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato were the initial creative team, and I did consider buying the book when it started, because Brubaker was going to put Nova on the roster, which seemed like an acknowledgement of Nova's big-time work protecting the universe in all the Abnett/Lanning Cosmic Marvel stuff of the previous several years.

As it turned out, good thing I didn't pull the trigger at that time. Nova was in the book for one story, most of which he spent under the control of the Serpent Crown. Should have expected the guy who just wants to write spy stories and noir stuff wouldn't do right by the sci-fi, human rocket hero. I did buy the book for the last year+ of its 37-issue run, when Rick Remender took over as writer and revamped the roster a bit. He wrote the best Hawkeye at Marvel during that stretch, neither Bendis' kill-happy version or Fraction's incompetent doof. A cocky but principled Hawkeye, not exactly enthused about having Venom on his team. Granted, more for the killing aspects than the part where Hanks Pym and McCoy devised a drug to keep the symbiote - a sentient being - docile and controllable, but you take what you can get. But the story was something about androids and artificial intelligences trying to take over the world? I can't even be bothered to go read my old reviews, and it got excised from the collection long ago. It had potential, but as with a lot of Remender's work, it didn't resonate with me.

What's left is the 6-issue stretch immediately preceding Remender's, that I picked up in back issues maybe 6 months after it ended. Each issue is a done-in-one of a specific mission for Commander Rogers and some portion of his team. In one issue, he may bring along War Machine, Valkyrie and Sharon Carter. In another, Carter, Black Widow and Moon Knight. I think only the last issue - where people are being used as receptacles for some other-dimensional horror babies - involves the entire team.

Each issue is drawn by a different artist (in order, Jamie McKelvie, Kev Walker, David Aja, Michael Lark, Alex Maleev, and Stuart Immonen), with a story tailored to their respective strengths. Aja gets to draw a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, Maleev's issue is the Black Widow trying to use time travel to prevent the death of the team without altering the sequence of events, which involves a lot of panels of her talking to people at different points in the past.

The missions are usually some bit of strange science that could be extremely dangerous - a Von Doom time platform big enough to disappear the city of Cincinnati, matter from a universe where electrolyzed water could turn the Earth into a star, a big rig roaming a war-torn country abducting people to co-opt their brains into an enormous bio-computer - but again, it's an excuse to let the artists go to town. There's never any sense the team is getting closer to the masterminds behind the "Shadow Council", just putting out various fires before they hit critical mass.

Which might explain why the team's first response is invariably, "kill," or at the very least, "severely injure."  The final issue of this stretch is the one where Rogers says he won't use torture, but he will leave the room while Black Widow and Moon Knight use torture. War Machine tries talking with the people being infected by Lovecraftian horrors, then gets berated by the rest of the team for not just killing those innocent victims before they could start to change. I guess cynicism is part and parcel of a book about superheroes doing stuff no one is supposed to know they did.

There were two more volumes of Secret Avengers after this, one following on the heels of the other, both running a little over a year. I bought the second of those (third volume overall), but Ales Kot was being too cute by half with his writing. I didn't even keep it long enough to do one of these posts about it, which is pretty damning considering how many books I've moved to the "give away" pile as soon as these entries were written.

Sunday Splash Page #364

"Brutal Moon Rising," in Moon Knight (vol. 5) #5, by Warren Ellis (writer), Declan Shalvey (artist), Jordie Bellaire (color artist), Chris Eliopoulos (letterer)

The first Moon Knight title I bought was volume 3, the one where Charlie Huston and David Finch brought Moon Knight back as an especially brutal, especially nuts, guy. Cutting dudes' faces off and carving crescent moons in their foreheads. I didn't start buying it until #20, by which point Mike Benson was writing. Mike Deodato drew that issue - involving a run-in with Werewolf by Night, who Deodato drew as roughly 15 feet tall. Then Mark Texeira drew a run-in with Osborn's Thunderbolts, before Benson sent Marc south of the border (drawn by Jefte Paolo).

The only issue of that I still have is the Deodato one, which had no splash page, so on to the next. Except the next volume was the one Bendis wrote, where Marc's dis-associative disorder took the form of Captain America, Spider-Man, and Wolverine. Hard pass.

Bringing us to this, which I picked up several years ago in the cheapest back issues I could find. It's Warren Ellis, so the usual caveats about him being a horrible creep apply. If it matters, and I don't blame you if it doesn't, this book's a lot like Two-Step, in that Ellis seems to provide just enough story to allow the artists (in this case, Declan Shalvey and Jordie Bellaire) to go nuts.

Each issue - there are six before another creative team takes over the book - is a done-in-one where Moon Knight handles some issue related to his role as protector of those who travel at night. A SHIELD agent decommissioned after being badly injured attacks people to steal their body parts and rebuild himself. A little girl is abducted on the way home from school for ransom. In each case, Moon Knight goes after them and brings the violence. Sometimes subtle, he beats the organ thief with with seems a throwaway flick of the wrist when he first enters the room. But issue 5 is basically just Moon Knight tearing his way through the entire kidnapping crew.

Shalvey gives Moon Knight his now-common "Mr. Knight" look, the all-white suit with the mask, but also an armor made of bones that lets him punch ghosts in issue #3, where he has to confront a gang that died decades ago, only for their ghosts to suddenly appear. Bellaire colors the suit in such a way that the reflected colors and lights of his surroundings don't touch the suit. It's white, or the shadows are black. That's it, as though he's something entirely separate from the world around him. Walking through it, beating the shit out of things in it, but not part of it.

Which matches the state Ellis puts him in, where Marc lives alone in a mansion full of stuff he doesn't remember buying. Has a limo that drives itself, a moon-plane-thing that responds to voice commands. His old supporting cast - Frenchie, Marlene - have no contact with him now, which seems to be a mutual agreement. They recognize Marc is nothing but death, and he thinks wanting nothing means he can't lose anything, so he can't lose.

Saturday Splash Page #66

 

"Die Streaming," in Two-Step #3, by Warren Ellis (writer), Amanda Conner (penciler), Jimmy Palmiotti (inker), Paul Mounts (colorist), Ken Lopez (letterer)

So, yeah, Warren Ellis is the writer for this, and he's turned out to be a huge creep, so this may understandably be a non-starter for some people. I mean, if you want to look at Amanda Conner's art, which was my primary reason for picking this up in back issues maybe 10 years ago, there are plenty of other things she's drawn that weren't written by Ellis.

The art would be the selling point here. The story, such as it is, involves Rosi, an extremely popular online personality who films every second of her life as she travels through some future version of London which seems to be a hodgepodge of a dozen different stereotypical cultures. So there's a neighborhood that breaks into Bollywood dance numbers, and Chinatown is filled with John Woo-style gunfight choreography. Conner takes these opportunities to fill panels with lots of details of people going about their lives, often taking advantage of the multiple cameras Rosi employs to show additional angles or details in smaller panels running with a larger panel (as in the above example).

Rosi's bored off her ass by all of it until she crosses paths with Tony Ling, a gangster hired by one gang to steal some sort of oversized, pneumatic cock the leader of a different gang ordered. Rosi tags along and ends up getting hunted alongside Tony. Tony seems to be trying to reach a state of Zen, and is a coolly sarcastic guy in a dark suit who smokes cigarettes and shoots people. In other words, typical Ellis protagonist. Rosi is more wildly dressed, more loudly sarcastic and profane young woman who says things like, 'I hate him so much I can taste it in my womb.' They are at one point menaced by a large young man named Ron, who due to some cyberlink to his eyes, sees people as cars. This is bad, because he enjoys fucking cars. Until they explode.

The sophomoric mania of the book will either work for you, or make you roll your eyes. Or possibly one, then the other. But the Conner/Palmiotti/Mounts art team is a good one, so it looks nice.

Sunday Splash Page #64

"Jumping Between Dimensions Without a Parachute", in Anna Mercury #3, by Warren Ellis (writer), Facundo Percio (artist), Paul Duffield (color artist)

(It occurred to me during the week I should be mentioning you can click on the image to view it full-size. Maybe you'd twigged to that already, but I should say it at least once.)

I only bought this mini-series a month ago. The back issues weren't pricey as long as you weren't picky about which of the fifteen covers you got for a given issue.

There's a story about a bunch of pocket universes of various sizes existing around Earth, that can be traveled to and influenced by Earth. The British have naturally set themselves to trying to minimize any damage arising from that, and Anna is their top agent. Maybe their only field agent? We didn't see any others, and they kept throwing her into the mess with extremely little recovery time.

Ellis is hit-or-miss with me, and while I wouldn't classify this as a favorite, it isn't awful. The story moves quickly. Maybe the sheer number of single-page splashes helps with that. I think there were at least three in this one issue alone. Some of them are cool-looking, but it feels excessive. Anna's almost constantly dodging soldiers, blowing things up, or doing something ill-advised, broken up occasionally by her commander back on Earth doing an exposition dump for the new Prime Minister.

Planetary Volume 1

Rather than shell out for those big collections of Planetary I saw in the solicits a few months ago, I bought some of the trades they released 15 years ago, since used copies were so much cheaper. I'm not too worried about missing out on the various crossover mini-series that I don't think are included in these. Do I really need to see the main cast interact with the Justice League, when Ellis and Cassaday are using various knockoff versions of them already?

(I was going to call them thinly-veiled, but in some cases the veil is practically diaphanous.)

The first trade, containing the first six issues, pretty much set the tone for the book. Planetary investigates strange things, all of which are variations on stuff from our popular fiction. A team of pulp heroes, kaiju, superheroes, etc. Usually things have gone disastrously badly, machines that create universes to search for answers before destroying them, or an endless cycle of murdered Hong Kong cops who become spirits of vengeance.

The book is entertaining. The stories have all been done-in-ones, with a larger subplot taking form in the background. I like the strange ideas in the same way I enjoy them in Atomic Robo (although with a very different tone), and with each issue being a different adventure, it creates its own momentum as I want to see what the next issue will bring. The writing isn't bad; I knew Ellis could do snappy, sarcastic dialogue already.

But it feels light. Like I'm just skimming the surface, playing "spot the reference" and seeing how John Cassaday draws weird stuff. The answer to that second part is, "better than I expected". I thought his style would be a little too stiff or realistic to draw things other than extremely good-looking people, but that actually seems to work in his favor. When he draws the corpse of a giant monster, it stands in stark contrast to the people around it. He can draw gleaming alien structures, and decaying ruins that suggest a long (and probably dark history). Laura DePuy's colors suggest things so bright they're blinding at times, but goes dingy or faded when needed.

The are and the general concept of the book are carrying most of the water. I wouldn't say I particularly care about Elijah Snow, Jakita, or the Drummer. I don't dislike them - well, the Drummer annoys me a little, but he also seems to have gotten the least focus so far - but they mostly serve as a way to get the story to the weird stuff. Maybe provide exposition for what take Ellis is going with as necessary.

It's working for me as an adventure story, which is fine. A good one of those is a pleasure to read.