Superman



Superman's greatest power is his compassion. Throughout every successful iteration of the character that one virtue remains constant: he is an extremely powerful and endlessly resourceful man motivated by bottomless reservoirs of compassion to help people in whatever way he can.

This isn't a new observation, and it comes fairly close to what I think most people consider to be Superman's most basic core principles. But I don't think very many stories really take this idea as far as it could go. Certainly, Morrison's All-Star Superman is justifiably celebrated for being the best Superman story of at least the last decade, but its important to remember that the book succeeded not because it was in any way revisionist or "deconstructionist" (in the informal sense) but because it amplified the character's most central attributes to the point of bare iconography. It was in many respects the "purest" Superman story ever told, in that every story element was expressly dedicated to reflecting some facet of Superman's core thema. It is not the type of Superman story one can imagine coming across very often, because the tone is so unabashedly sincere that it would probably seem merely bathetic in the hands of an inferior creative team. Despite whatever qualms I may possess in regards to latter-day Morrison, there's no doubt that All-Star Superman is a towering work in the field.

But it wasn't All-Star Superman that inspired me to muse on this subject, it was a far less celebrated spin-off limited series from the mid-90s called The Doomsday Wars. If you don't remember it, don't worry, it's been largely forgotten for a number of reasons - the first of which being it is deeply mediocre, and the second of which being it served as a prelude to another in a long line of subpar Brainiac revamps that stretched from the immediate aftermath of the Crisis and on through very recently. I reread the series recently on a whim, looking for a light read and vaguely remembering the series (along with its predecessor, the actually-pretty-decent Hunter / Prey) being a good popcorn read. Sure enough, the actual plot was not particularly memorable, but there were a few bits that did stick in my mind. There's a subplot involving Superman remembering a story from his youth - mid-teenage years - wherein, during a fierce blizzard, he was unable to reach a herd of cattle stranded on a far field, and they died because he crashed the truck into a snowbank while trying to reach them. (Keep in mind this was still the post-Crisis period when Superman's powers did not even begin to emerge until late adolescence.) The flashback echoes the contemporary story, with Superman trying to carry Lana Lang and Pete Ross' newborn son from Kansas to a state-of-the-art neonatal care ward in Atlanta, but being waylaid by Doomsday in the process. (Don't worry, he saves the kid, but not before getting the snot beat out of him a few times. It doesn't end on a downer.)

The point of the story is an important one, despite the rather gruesome imagery of a young Clark Kent being traumatized by dozens of dead cows buried in shoulder-deep snow. Every now and again someone does a story that follows the general idea, "Superman can't save everyone." It's a downer, yes, and there are certainly many examples of the trope done poorly - but it's necessary to do the story every now and again for the simple reason that it underscores what might be the character's single most crucial character trait, the one virtue that enables everything else he does: humility. He is (for all intents and purposes, Captain Marvel notwithstanding) the most powerful man on earth. And yet he must be constantly aware of his own limitations, always conscious of exactly what he can and cannot accomplish with his powers. He knows that there are many, many things that he simply can't do even with all the power in the world, and although it might prove frustrating time and time again - and provide fodder for countless stories - at the end of the day he is Superman because he accepts these limitations and moves forward to do the best that he can.

He has to be able to forgive himself for not being able to be everywhere and do everything, and so by necessity he also has to be forgiving of others as well. Few writers have spent time articulating just how differently the world would seem to someone like Superman. His senses would give him an unenviable vantage point from which to observe humanity. Even if he never used his hearing or his sight to invade privacy - which would probably be fairly difficult to do in absolute terms - he would still be privy to more of the panoply of human behavior than anyone other being in history. He could see cause and effect, the roots of poverty and wealth, the consequences of charity and compassion. Elliot S. Maggin's averred that Superman would have to be a vegetarian, because his enhanced senses, extending to the infrared spectrum, would enable him to "see" the heat auras of living creatures, and register their emotions in much the same way as Daredevil does. He couldn't eat meat because - having grown up on a farm - he would be intimately aware of just how much pain an animal suffers as it dies, would be able to feel, see, smell and hear the process so viscerally that it would be overwhelming.

I think if you extrapolate that idea outwards, it's not hard to see that Superman's compassion is completely reflexive and therefore completely inextricable from the character. It's easy to do an "evil Superman" - just give us the same basic person with the same powers only without the compassion. Without that bedrock human decency, it's hard to see why all that power would not corrupt - but if you believe that "super empathy" is as much a part of Superman's powers as super strength and hearing, it's easy to see why the character would remain so steadfast throughout decades (and, in many alternate versions, centuries and even millennia) of the "Never Ending Battle."

To the best of my knowledge Neil Gaiman has only written one Superman story (not counting cameo appearances), the Green Lantern team-up Legend of the Green Flame. Originally written to run in Action Comics Weekly (that was a long time ago), it was dusted off and finally published in 2000. It's not that memorable of a story, but there's one bit that's always stuck with me. The gist of the story is that, thanks to a mystical MacGuffin (something to do with the Golden Age Green Lantern's lantern, considering that this story was supposedly set during the period when the original Justice Society had been exiled to fight an eternal Ragnarok inside a pocket universe [an odd Roy Thomas plot that was also mentioned during Season of Mists]), Superman and Hal Jordan are killed within the first few pages, and spend the rest of the story wandering the afterlife trying to find out how to return to life. There's an absolutely great bit with Superman and Hal in Hell - the real Hell - and Superman is rendered almost completely insensate. His can see and hear everything, and it's impossible for him to look away from the limitless catalog of torture and suffering in the inferno. He just stares, eyes wide open, unable to do anything but float rigidly above the lake of fire. When faced with the apogee of human suffering, suffering which he is definitively incapable of alleviating, then and only then when hope is obliterated can Superman be completely defeated.

SIR

Fear Itself #3
Flashpoint #2

We were somewhere around Seventh Avenue on the edge of TGI Fridays when the drugs began to take hold. I think there was supposed to be a Flashdancers Gentlemen's Club somewhere on the block, maybe in the same building as the place we were looking for, the greasy armpit of American pop culture detritus headquartered in the heart of the capitol of American business. Right off the Great White Way. Somewhere up and down these savage hallways and corridors there lurked a man, a Superman, shorn of his underwear and given a sharp v-neck turtleneck, as if the year were 1989 and Star Trek was still making nighttime sexy for Patrick Stewart fans everywhere. There's something indefinably rancid in the stew, some kind of mad brew of noxious chemicals piped in from across the channel in Jersey where all the goombas and grisly morons drain their tanning lotion down the sinks and shower drains of a thousand underwater tract homes. We're getting high on failure, the drugs are cheap and plentiful as long as you don't mind the rattle of bones.

There's no money left, no money left anywhere, we're all in debt up to our eysockets and hoping against hope that the credit card companies and the collection agencies deputized to act in their stead don't figure out the new number for at least six months. I don't even use the land line anymore except to call out because the line is always busy, always busy, Unidentified numbers calling in from unfamiliar area codes somewhere near Barstow, one of those punk ass burgs filled with unlicensed backyard wrestling of the kind that puts kids in crutches with sutures across their bulging collarbone. Fat and yet malnourished with an XXL Ke$ha T-shirt, you know the type. I just spent eight dollar American on fifteen minutes worth of reading material, smeary pages on cheap paper, but not cheap enough to make it cost less than lunch. I don't think toilet paper would be cheap enough to pay the rent without lopping off at least a small finger's worth of flesh. They demanded a pound and by gosh they took a pound, and they don't give a flying fuck that the blood is pouring everywhere in rivulets and dried dollops like the skin off a British pudding. That's what two pounds sterling for our friends across the pond? Not that they have any more money than we do, they're rioting in the streets to keep the library doors from swinging shut.

Two cheap floppy pamphlets filled with gibberish, so easy to drop them down a manhole cover somewhere between here and Central Park, it's not exactly art so it's not exactly littering. Let the rats fight it out. But I spent so much money on these things that I am loath to part. Too much money and heart and soul invested in these little bastards, one of which suffers from a lack of soul the other from a lack of heart. I'll leave it to you to decide which is which. Does it even matter?

The overwhelming sensation is sheer desperation: something bad is happening and the folks in charge of minding the lighthouse lost the oil on the stairs, there was a big bottle of lamp oil and it took a plunge somewhere on the fifth floor staircase. They're on their hands and knees trying to sweep up enough oil into their cupped hands in order to keep that lamp burning bright for as long as it takes for - what, to make sure the ship gets safely to shore? Is that even something we can be sure we want? Wouldn't it be easier just to let the whole damn thing crash on the reef and let the cargo holds fill with salt water, drowning the ballast, drowning these books and abjuring any power left in the tainted sigils of our distant childhoods? That's what's going on, only it's not lamp oil, it's shit, it's liquid diarrhea and it keeps dribbling through your fingers in chunky bits. It's what you think you want because you've been doing it for so long that you don't have any other way of making things go forward, but really it all boils down to sticking your hand up against the cow's anus and expecting something besides grassy, oily shit to flop into your hands. It's like maybe one of these days it won't actually be shit, it'll be caramel soft serve or something equally delicious. But until that day you'll keep eating it anyway because real food loses its flavor when you've spent thirty years eating shit.

But let's step back a moment, because that's an awfully stupid thing to say. It's not shit, it only looks like shit on certain occasions, say, every alternate Tuesday when you're feeling peculiarly phlegmatic. Because really it's just too easy and too condescending to talk down to superhero comics like they're some sort of blight on the cultural landscape. Let's take a minute and breathe this city air, see if we can get the balance right here right now: somewhere in this city there is a great and terrible beast slouching towards some modern-day Bethlehem waiting to be born, but it's nothing in Los Angeles, sorry Joan, and sorry Hunter, this great virus has infected itself in the heart of American capitalism. It's bigger than that, but there's your artificial dichotomy: here's your approved cultural product and your disapproved cultural product, they all cost the same and they all leave you feeling similarly empty. Emma Goldman's Living My Life costs $16.99 American, and you bet your ass the good folks at Penguin have no interest in examining the irony of that proposition. The truth is that it's all terrible, every single bit of it, every shred of escapism dedicated to distraction and contentment. Crying out low art and high art distinctions doesn't impress anyone anymore, I say to my friend as we slouch across the city street, still keeping our eyes open for the supermen, the true guardians of this loveless isle of Manhattan. I've got a copy of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word in my jacket pocket and I'm feeling twitchy, so I pull it and see if I can find something interesting in these snot-stained pages:

But wasn't there something just the least bit incestuous about this tendency of contemporary art to use previous styles of art as its point of reference? Early Modernism was a comment on academic realism, and Abstract Expressionism was a comment on early Modernism, and now Pop Art was a comment on Abstract Expressionism - wasn't there something slightly narrow, clubby, ingrown about it?

Then there's some bit about Clement Greenberg asserting that art is about art, which I guess makes sense inasmuch as it's something of a tautological assertion of value without basis. More or less the definition of petit bourgeois bullshit, but there was a point there. Something sitting right past the edge of my nose, daring me to pick it up, pluck it out of thin air like a will 'o' the wisp . . .



No, not that jackass.

So these comics, what are they about? I've got both issues wadded in my hand like soiled tissues, leafing through the creased pages . . . all possible criticisms are either cheap or easy. Mouthbreathing morons in their basements, etc etc. You can fill in the same circle-jerk elitist shit you've been sniffing for decades. It's not that criticism of these things on the basis of their idiocy isn't valid, it's that there's really no point in making that argument because it's moot. These aren't really collectibles or pieces of art or anything, they're just stories, bad stories, but on some level an honest attempt on the part of someone to communicate some kind of idea. Cultural product is product yes but the people in the sausage factory can usually be counted on to convince themselves that the sausage they're making is good to eat. Personally, I like sausage, even if I know that most industrially-produced sausage probably contains trace amounts of human and animal fecal matter. It's the price we pay to do business in this man's world, don't you know.

Narrow, clubby, ingrown - this are the watchwords we mutter under our breath. With the industry on a respirator what do we do, what can we do but double down on what we got? I look on the calender and see two giant event comics hitting store shelves the same day, the exact same moment on retailer shelves across the nation, and what I smell is two large sewer rats, giant fuckers plucked out of the sewers under Seventh Avenue and starved for the better part of a week before being locked in a cage with one and the other. It's a struggle to the death, is what it is, the two largest media conglomerates in the world waking up from their long stuporous haze and realizing that they have their very own Southeast Asian country in which to wage their proxy battle for domination of the Twenty-First Century mediascape.

So let's see what we see when we pull the cock out of the condom:



Now that is what I call a goddamn comic book cover.



Let's be frank, now is not the time to mince words, there is no more point in complaining about the scabrous content of American superhero comic books because kids don't read them. They don't. Pointing this out at such a late date is simply an insult to everyone with a pair of functioning eyes. but if you put a dude on the cover getting shocked by an electric chair, what you're really saying is, yeah, this isn't for kids, but really, it is totally for kids, because who the hell else is gonna be turned on by seeing the Flash get fried (and there's a pun too obvious for me, ladies and gentlemen) but a little kid? They've gone from being obviously for kids to being for grown-ups in such a way as to primarily appeal to kids. It would almost be brilliant if it seemed intentional, but I doubt this was the intention. Kids loved and still love gangsta rap because it was dirty and violent in all the ways that they weren't supposed to like, but they loved it anyway and sat around their friend's basements listening to Too $hort rapping about "Blow Job Betty" like it was Little Orphan Annie's secret code phrase waiting to be deciphered. That's something that a lot of people don't seem to get: the best way to appeal to kids is to make it as stupid, violent and inappropriately sexy as possible. In this instance, I have a hard time believing that DC could be doing a better job than having one of their most recognizable superheroes be electrocuted by a demoniacal Batman on the cover of their big crossover. Not that it'll help, of course.

How many middle-aged management types are going to start downloading DC comics to read on their Kindles and iPads on those long flights from Topeka to Seattle? Judging from the type of shit that gets sold in airport kiosks under the names "Brad K. Thor" and "Robert Patterson," I'd say it's a good bet that they might just be able to sell some of these shitty pamphlets to the salarymen, if the advertising works the way it should.

But in the here and now the fleshbags responsible for making these stories are charged with the solemn responsibility of making these business decisions somehow translate into four-color stories. As far as these things go, it could be worse: nerds love alternate-reality stories because then they get to play put the puzzle together only some of the pieces are missing or colored differently or mad rapists or whatever. It's hard to fuck one of these up, but by the same token it's kind of easy. I'm certain the people who made this book had a good time making it because, yeah, it's kind of fun. But cheap all the same. Which is not to say it's not worth doing, but don't say we didn't warn you when you're bending over with the tiny comb trying to find all the little crablouses in your crotch. There's a reason she's got a t-shirt with bicycle handlebars where her tits go.

But enough about your sister.

I'm sick of inhaling truck fumes but there's not a lot else to get high on in New York City here and now. Oh, I'm sure there's real drugs somewhere but I lost my case in security and my friend - my associate - my business partner - my platonic lover - he's not that picky. He'll take just about anything, really. Things are getting desperate in these parts. He's a sexy man with a sexy plan, and it doesn't necessarily include reading these silly little comic books, but that doesn't mean he's not open to the possibility. He speaks in grunts and riddles, spends his spare time down at the Brozone jacking off the Shake Weight because that's the only way he can get off these days. I pass the copy of Fear Itself under his nose and he snorts like an animal who just smelled one of its own dead and upwind. He lets slip a mournful moan, because in the moment he smells that sucker he can see his tribemate dead on the side of the road, a large black bulk hit by a car and dead before the body hit the ground. What is this? It's dead, it's inert. It's got Nazis attacking the American capitol in giant robot suits with machine guns, and wow that's pretty much the laziest kind of nightmare we can imagine in the year 2011, isn't it just?

If comic books had a Daily Recommended Minimum, it would be Fear Itself. It represents starvation rations from a group of men so emaciated of imagination that even their most fantastic daydreams appear to be cribbed from unproduced Law & Order spec scripts. Here's the one where Briscoe finds the ancient Norse warhammer and turns into a giant monster in downtown Manhattan. Of course this is a problem because he starts making mistakes and crooks start walking on technicalities and then Sam Waterston looks grim and resolved, or is it pensive and angry, I can't tell because seriously the man has one single facial expression with which to express the enormous range of human emotion. Seriously, these fuckers are so damaged they can't even imagine what a fantasy story looks like that does not in some fashion involve paramilitary law enforcement people sitting around a room with giant television screens and deliberating their course of action. This is what all these stupid stories are about: who gets to sit in the control room telling heroes what to do. This is such a massively boring and inescapable preoccupation on the part of men entrusted with our societal dreaming that it amounts to nothing less than a complete dereliction of duty. If you sit down and read fifty issues of The Avengers and think that what it most needs is to resemble a police procedural, then you're just bleeding frothy pink shit out of your ears.

(A digression on the matter of fecal metaphors: people use shit because it's an effective way of expressing disgust in an appropriately transgressive manner without resorting to the kind of crude sexual imagery that brings immediate censure. For instance, I could say that Fear Itself resembled nothing so much as getting raped in the mouth by an eight-hundred pound gorilla, but then someone would raise their hand in the back row and say, "I . . . I was raped by a circus gorilla. His name was Bobo and he was not a gentle lover. It took me years before I could leave the house without checking the bushes outside my doorway for banana peels . . . >choke< . . . how dare you?" while fighting back hot tears of rage. So, that's why we go back to shit so often. We're not Tyler, the Creator, people.)

My friend points to one strange bit of serendipity: both issues end with a central character at or near death, broken and burned across his body. (SPOILER!) How interesting that both comics did the same thing on the same day. It's almost like they're really in cahoots, sitting in a freezer box at the base of the Triboro Bridge with red spray paint coating their lips like glam strawberry jelly as they pass the paper bag back and forth. With the cars whizzing by and my friend mooning disconsolate against the red afternoon sun I realize with a sudden flash of clarity that it's all over, every single bit of it, it's all done and gone, we're just now hearing the echoes from the last fading sonic boom of fading glasnost. The Cold War is over, things are boiling hot, the rockets have flown, these are the End Times, everything is over except the screaming. There's nothing left but to crack the glass on the bell jar and see if maybe, just maybe, Sylvia Plath will crawl out of the seam and help us all put our heads in the oven.

A Simple Thought, Expressed Succinctly

When the creative teams for DC's 52 relaunches are announced, we should arrange a mass drinking game for every "TBA" therein. DC will be responsible for any and all hospitalizations for alcohol poisoning.

SIR

Iron Man 2.0 #5

You gotta give them props for being honest with us: whatever semblance of a story Iron Man 2.0 may have been telling in its first four issues is completely unimportant compared to the possibility of scratching at a small corner of this month's giant crossover. War Machine says as much, "wow, I was fighting someone else and doing something completely different, and then a crossover happened, so here I am with some other guys who've never appeared in my comic before doing something completely unrelated." The problem is that, as uninteresting as Fear Itself has proved to be so far, the hook for this particular crossover is still a billion times more interesting than whatever the hell Iron Man 2.0 has been doing for four issues.

(Don't worry, I know what it's been doing, I've read it. So far it all adds up to a strangely deaf attempt to ape the tone of Fraction's regular Iron Man. And since Fraction's regular Iron Man is already kind of a boring book at its very best, Iron Man 2.0 comes out like a faded photocopy of a VCR manual.)

I was one of the few comics bloggers who was strangely unmoved by the recent Iron Fist reboot - I just don't care that much about martial arts in comics under the very best of circumstances. Given that, you have a pretty steep road to climb to get me to want to pay attention to Iron Fist, and what I read seemed oddly static and talky for a martial arts adventure. But this actually was pretty fun. If in hindsight a surprisingly large percentage of pages in The Immortal Iron Fist was expository set-up, this is where we get the pay-off: some nice, fairly original characters and concepts added to the sandbox for later writers and artists to play with. In this case, Nick Spencer decided to check in and see what was going down in the Seven Cities of Heaven during Fear Itself; which involves getting the Immortal Weapons involved in the hunt for one of the Serpent's giant hammers; which involves Titania and the Absorbing Man; which I'm down with as well; which has fuck all to do with War Machine and is basically pressing the "pause" button on a series that's not yet five issues old. But maybe this is a good thing? Because honestly the way it was heading Iron Man 2.0 was really boring and superfluous. The regular storyline might not suck so bad when they take it off anesthesia in a few months. Maybe it actually gets some blood pumping with this definitively gratuitous crossover action.

The Mighty Thor #2

I've written a great deal about how boring Matt Fraction's run on Thor has to date been. There is no doubt: he is leaning heavily on talented artists to fill sketchy plots with "epic" scenery, seemingly oblivious to the damning fact that even in hardcover the story will still take less than 20 minutes to read.

I've been on an old comics kick lately - lots of bronze age stuff, some 80s and 90s books as well, maybe some stuff I'll write about, maybe not - and it never ceases to amaze me how long it takes to read any average issue from 1985 or 1995 compared to almost any example from 2011. The change is easily explained: after Quesada and Jemas took over Marvel in 2000, they did away with thought balloons and third-person narrative captions. Not all at once, but slowly and more-or-less permanently. I still don't know, and really have not seen a single compelling reason, why these changes were pushed through so thoroughly, but the more I think about it the more I am fully convinced that this shift was undeniably deleterious to the long-term quality of the line. It's a question of economy: captions and thought balloons were an extremely efficient way of communicating a large amount of information in a surprisingly concise package. Back in 2000 $2.25 for 15 minutes of reading was a good deal. No amount of inflation will make $3 or $4 for 5 minutes a good deal for anyone.

The good news is that, as of this issue, Fraction seems to be getting ever so slightly more comfortable with the character and the format. This issue took more than 5 minutes to read - and there's a fair amount of content in here. We are left with the promise of a truly awesome Thor / Silver Surfer clash, which is something we haven't seen in decades. I already like this new relaunch better than I did the entirety of Fraction's previous storyline. It's fairly obvious that before he was padding for time before Fear Itself hit, laying the groundwork for that crossover with what was essentially an extended prelude. It's nothing short of scandalous that they expect to get off charging so much for so little, but maybe one of these days they'll figure out that people might just be inclined to buy more comics if they thought they were actually getting a reading experience commensurate with the exorbitant price, and not just ten or twelve Roger Dean album covers with some sparse lettering across them. Letting writers write more may have resulted in some talky, ponderous and boring comics back in the day, but it also offered an opportunity for more characters to shine by allowing an insight into every character's thoughts and feelings. Some of what has been lost might conceivably be dismissed as "cheap melodrama" by readers more accustomed to contemporary storytelling, but dramatic irony and purple prose were the grease in the gears of mainstream comics for at least fifty years. Throwing out many of the tools that allow the comic book reading experience to be distinct from any other entertainment medium is extremely short sighted, unless your only goal is to transform your properties into adaptation-friendly forms that can be easily transported into other mediums. Any contemporary issue of Avengers should illustrate this point well, with the writer actually resorting to reality TV debriefing scenes in order to convey exposition and character beats that could have been much more succinctly delivered through captioning.

A book like Fraction's Thor could definitely benefit from increased density. Thor is usually an ensemble book, and its cast can be very large - basically, the entire realm of Asgard, plus anyone else from Earth who happens to be near the action at any given moment (such as, for the moment, the town of Broxton, Oklahoma). There's only so much plot that Fraction can display in any given issue because the widescreen format he's chosen (literally widescreen, filled with long double-page spreads). There's only so much character development he can provide in the context of relentlessly epic action spreads. This issue was a bit more talky than usual, and I take that as a good sign: it actually took a few more minutes to read. Maybe with a bit more density the book might actually live up to some of its perpetually frustrated potential.

Secret Avengers #13

Marvel botched this title really badly, and what we're seeing here is some pretty aggressive water-treading in the form of an action-packed crossover tie-in. This was also written by the above-mentioned Nick Spencer, and appears to fit in either directly before or directly after the action in iron Man 2.0. As with that issue, this is a surprisingly good (not "great," but solidly good) and surprisingly focused tie-in story, even if it (again) has fuck-all to do with the stories that immediately preceded it.

(The problem with Fear Itself seems to be that the story itself really is nowhere near as involved as people were led to believe, hence a lot of people continually complaining that they don't "get" what it's really "about." For months we were "treated" to teaser images of all our heroes being faced with images of their greatest, most profound fears. It is reasonable that most people expected that the story would involve many of these heroes being brought face to face with their greatest, most profound fears in some fashion. But no, really, it's just about a bunch of bad shit happening all at once that the heroes are too busy to clean up in an organized fashion. A bunch of really strong people get giant magic hammers that make them even strongerer. So yeah. That's it: they're afraid because shit just got real. Which, eh, isn't really the story they advertised, but whatevs. How this is any real-er than Secret Invasion or Secret Wars II or Maximum fucking Security is not really clear. Giant hammers and Nazi robot? Oh my, the pulse, it throbs with suspense.)

Secret Avengers hasn't worked because the stories being told were nothing like the stories people wanted to read in an Avengers book with this cast of characters. As written, Brubaker's Secret Avengers was essentially a Steve Rogers book, with a loose cast of affiliated Avengers as tertiary characters being called as the mission required. The first arc, with the whole of the team on Mars, was something of a red herring: every subsequent story has gone out of its way to provide as little actual Avengers action as possible. So finally we get to see Avengers Avenging, and while it's better than what preceded it, that's not saying a lot. There's a bit of a ham-fisted conversation between the Beast and someone who is obviously supposed to be a stand in for John Lewis, a former Freedom Rider-turned-Congressman who is also an omega class mutant with the power to turn the Lincoln Memorial into a giant Nazi-killin kaiju. All well and good, and there was some good action bits in there, but obviously "fill in." Kind of sad that the fill-in actually works better than the regular series has up to now. Maybe the Warren Ellis run will be better, but I still don't think it will be anything like what people had in their minds' eyes when the book was announced over a year ago.

Still Alive

Blogging will resume imminently. Been a busy couple of weeks, but I do have a couple things on the hopper.

In the meantime, this is what I've been up to: