The Secret of the Wednesday’s Haul — Wherein the author reviews a few comics, occasionally puts out a podcast and now and again muses on other stuff

July 2008
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links for 2008-07-09

July 9th, 2008-- by Scott Cederlund -- · No Comments

Osamu’s Black Jack Preview

I just added this to my DCBS order for July.

(tags: manga)

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Venoms, Dooms, Skrulls! Oh, my! A review of Mighty Avengers V2

July 8th, 2008-- by Scott Cederlund -- · No Comments

The Mighty Avengers feels like it is supposed to be the “widescreen” version of The Avengers. After Brian Michael Bendis has spent the last few years redefining the team in the pages of New Avengers, Mighty Avengers feels like it should be the big action, larger-than-life team that New Avengers really never was. There’s no Luke Cage or Spider-Man on Mighty Avengers and, therefore, no controversy about the lineup. With Wonderman, the Wasp, Ms. Marvel and even Black Widow, it is a fairly conventional Avengers lineup and it is taking on the larger than life threats such as Ultron in the first volume and now Venoms and Doctor Doom in the second collection, Mighty Avengers: Venom Bomb.

There are a lot of things happening in Venom Bomb, starting with the apparent defection of Spider-Woman from the New Avengers to the Mighty Avengers, with a Skrull corpse in tow. Before the Mighty Avenger can fully decide on accepting their new member, New York City is under attack as the population of the city turns into Venom creatures. But that turns out to be a diversion from what appears to be the true threat and the cause behind the Venom bombs, Doctor Doom. Venom Bomb has so many details crammed into it that it’s difficult to figure out what the focus of the book is supposed to be. Is it a Venom invasion story? Is it a Skrull invasion story? A time travel story or a Doctor Doom story? Well, in fact it’s all of those and it’s nominally an Avengers story.

In the early days of New Avengers, Bendis usually balanced the action with character moments, giving such non-Avenger characters like Spider-Man and Spider-Woman time to define themselves within the larger team structure. For some reason he’s avoided that with Mighty Avengers, which could probably be called “Iron Man and the Establishment Avengers.” Sure, Wonderman and Ares get the occasional spotlight during a fight but neither is given much more than a superficial reason for being part of the team. How do these characters reconcile the Registration with the fact that one of their own, Captain America, is dead after fighting the registration? How do they feel actually working for SHIELD and the government when another group of people calling themselves Avengers is running around? Bendis doesn’t have the time or space to confront these questions because he’s got bigger issues to deal with– Skrulls. Venom Bomb and actually the whole Mighty Avengers title suffers from being crammed in between Marvel’s two big events, Civil War and Secret Invasion. This book could serve as a nice look back at the ramifications of Civil War but it spends too much time having to set up Secret Invasion to do really do either properly.

The multiple aspects of Venom Bomb could easily have supported their own stories. The idea of using the Venom symbiote as a biological weapon is fascinating and chilling, especially when the heroes themselves are vulnerable to the Venom virus. The Skrull threat could fill up its own book (hey, it is– Secret Invasion #4 on sale next week!) and anytime the Avengers take on Doctor Doom should be a huge battle. Unfortunately the five issues that originally made up this storyline just weren’t enough to give each story the room it needed. The Venom invasion is over before it really begins and it’s not until later in the book when Doctor Doom has to play Doctor Exposition and weakly explain what really happened through the new-fangled Bendis thought balloon. On top of that, the Skrull threat is reduced to Tony Stark looking at everyone and thinking “you may be a Skrull but I don’t know.”

Mark Bagley joins Bendis for this storyline, producing some old school, John Buscema-like artwork. Unfortunately, Bagley’s artwork doesn’t flow as well as Buscema’s ever did so the book ends up looking old school without any real style to back it up. Bagley is a workman artist but is hardly known for any design sense or excitement on a page. Battles between Iron Man and Doctor Doom that should feel powerful and threatening feel staged and easy. The book also clumsily plays with the art styles, changing it up a bit in the second half when it changes up time periods. When Doctor Doom travels back to medieval Europe, Marko Djurdjevic steps in to provide some lovely painted artwork. But when the story jumps to a 1980-ish Marvel time period, the coloring changes to resemble the older, cruder coloring used before computers and printing advancements. Unfortunately, those periods scream “look at us and how clever we are” and the stylistic change is only a surface change and doesn’t really mean much.

Venom Bomb is stuck between two massive storylines and suffers greatly for it. None of the different story aspects have the space to properly breath or develop in anyway other than on a purely surface level.

Mighty Avengers: Venom Bomb
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
Penciled by: Mark Bagley
Inked by: Danny Miki & Crime Lab Studio’s Allen Martinez & Victor Olazaba
Additional Art by: Marko Djurdjevic
Colored by: Justin Ponsor & Stephane Peru
Lettered by: Artmonkey’s Dave Lanphear

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Best use of Stephen Hawking in a comic– a review of Atomic Robo V1

July 7th, 2008-- by Scott Cederlund -- · 3 Comments

Is it wrong to criticize a collection because it feels like six smaller stories strung together? Atomic Robo Volume One isn’t a bad book, but it is a collection that just doesn’t read well.

In an age of six issue storylines that fit one story nicely into a trade paperback collection, Atomic Robo and the Fightin’ Scientists of Tesladyne is a bit of an anomaly. It’s a collection of four or five short stories that slowly build up the world around its main character, Atomic Robo. Atomic Robo is a robot built by Nicola Tesla and now working for the U.S. government and the United Nations, tackling the strange and arcane to protect the world. He battles Nazis, giant ants, moving Egyptian pyramids, and Nazi brains that have been implanted into Nazi robots. Atomic Robo even travels to Mars thanks to NASA, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. Each part of the book is enjoyable and entertaining but the overall book lacks much cohesion if you’re expecting a complete story.

In many ways Atomic Robo is like reading Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, complete with a unique protagonist (robot vs. demon.) Of course, one is dealing with the occult and a creature bred for destruction while Atomic Robo… well, not much backstory is given to Atomic Robo other than he was created by Nicola Tesla. In fact, a lot of the backstory in Atomic Robo remains thin and unexplained as Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener concentrate more on trying to create rip-roaring yarns. They succeed in creating a fun and colorful world around Atomic Robo, a world where Carl Sagan can talk Robo into a 2 year trip to Mars and Stephen Hawking can play psychological jokes on a robot. Clevinger and Wegener have a good time with Atomic Robo and his team of adventure scientists.

What Clevinger and Wegener don’t do enough of is building the characters. Atomic Robo is a standard adventurer because they often chose not to concentrate on one simple fact– he’s a robot. They do get a nice character moment when Atomic Robo receives a letter from the grand-daughter of someone he fought WWII with and the sequence when he takes a 2 year trip to Mars is great as it looks at what Atomic Robo would do for two years alone in space when he has no books or anything to distract him. And then there’s the ever-present team of adventure scientists who don’t do much other than join Atomic Robo on his adventures. A short backup story suggests that the team members each have their own story but little of that is hinted at during the main stories.

The collection itself is a bit of an odd experience though. With no clear breaks between the separate issues that make up this book, the stories bump up against each other with no rhyme or reason. Reading the book gets confusing as one story doesn’t really end before another begins. That’s not necessarily a weakness of the character or the stories but of the book design itself. There needs to be a cover or another illustration in between the stories to clearly mark where one ended and another begins. Without that, the stories are jumbled together and have no beginning and no clear end.

Atomic Robo Volume 1 is an enjoyable introduction to the character as the creators define a bit of the lay of the land and give you just enough characterization to give you a taste of what this title could be like. Clevinger and Wegener have a solid beginning that could lead to more fun stories down the road.

Atomic Robo and the Fightin’ Scientists of Tesladyne tpb
Written by: Brian Clevinger
Drawn by: Scott Wegener
Colored by: Ronda Pattison
Lettered by: Jeff Powell

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Astonishing artwork– Bianchi’s X-Men pages

July 5th, 2008-- by Scott Cederlund -- · No Comments

I’ll have a more formal review up about Astonishing X-Men #25 in a couple of days but for now, I wanted to highlight something that stood out to me– Simone Bianchi’s page layouts.

Look at the strong angle on that page, leading you from the upper right hand corner down to the lower left and then immediately into the lower right. Throughout this issue, Bianchi designs the pages to lead the viewer’s eyes where he wants them.

He does a similar thing on this page where the entire focus is to get you to look at the bridge. The curves of the first and third panel and the strong vertical of the second panel lead you directly into the bottom part of the page.

June 30th, 2008-- by Scott Cederlund -- · No Comments

My official notes and musings are now up on Pop Syndicate.

June 29th, 2008-- by Scott Cederlund -- · No Comments

While I may have my own issues with the story in Identity Crisis, none of those were involved around the artwork. Rags Morales on the interiors was a great pick to do this story and Mike Turner’s covers did what covers should– they enticed the potential reader without giving too much of the story away.

This cover to Identity Crisis #4 may be one of my favorite pieces by Turner. Up to this point of the story, we really hadn’t gotten Wonder Woman’s reactions to the events of the book and the truths uncovered. This cover showed a woman searching for the truth (or THE TRUTH!) I hoped that she would have been the sane one in the book from this cover, maybe even playing the cool and detatched detective that’s usually Batman’s role but that’s not what Meltzer had planned. I like how the character emerges from the shadows, lighted only by the lasso.

The cover to issue #2 is one of the only group shots of Turners that’s really good from this series. The covers to #1 and #3 show the weakness that crept often into his drawings but this image, lighted like #4, is a nice image representing the satellite era JLA.

I don’t think I’ve ever noticed before how the covers for #5 and #6 are so strongly related to each other, as the dynamic duo face the loss and inability to solve and stop the murders. #5 is a nice, simple image and I like how the edges fade to white as Turner knows when to pull back from the image. He puts just enough information in this image to let you know what’s going on.