On the imminent conclusion of Hydra!Cap

I have this horrible premonition. I have this awful feeling that we're going to get to Wednesday and the final issue of Secret Empire and Marvel is just going to announce that the series needs to run for another two issues.

Or four.

Or forever.

To be frank, given the exceptional ability Marvel has shown to fuck this thing up at every possible opportunity I would not put anything past them at this point. I would not put it past them to have changed the ending of the final issue so it turns out that the new Captain America (after Miles Morales shanks Steve with a steel rebar) is a clone of Robert E. Lee who fights his enemies by firing Confederate memorials at them out of a bazooka and Sam Wilson is reduced to his sidekick again except he can't fly anymore because of the massive shackles he has to wear at all times “because its important to remember our heritage”. At this point I only find this scenario moderately unlikely, though in part that just can be put down to the nature of comicbook narrative.

I want this done. I want Hydra!Steve gone. I want daemonically possessed hypersexualised Wanda over with so we can actually get some follow up on that excellent James Robinson solo series she had. I would very much like X-Men Blue to get back to its regularly scheduled programming instead of this odd divergence where Tian is suddenly back for some bloody reason and Emma Frost wants to bang teenage Cyclops.

Most all all, I want an end to this business of the Marvel Universe's moral centre being on the side of Nazis and that apparently being the natural state of history and the version where he was a good man who decided to stand up for others was a corruption who only existed because someone else essentially brainwashed him.

Oh, and whilst we're at it: what kind of dick gets their hands on a Cosmic Cube, rewrites the history of the Second World War to favour the Allies and leaves the sodding Holocaust in?

This event needs to end, it needs to die and reside in the lowest circle of Big Event Hell where it will replace the Clone Saga in the mouth of Satan himself. 

Goodbye, Black Panther & The Crew

Patience, they said as they made Captain America a Nazi. Patience, they said as the situation got worse and worse, as they told us Magneto was joining Hydra, too. Patience, they said as more and more context piled moral offense upon moral offense on the road to Secret Empire. Patience, they said for more than a year as they geared up to fill my pull list with unavoidable Nazis.

Then they cancelled Black Panther & The Crew after two issues due to poor sales. The most promising team book I've seen Marvel put out in years, that I did not see one ad for in any of their comics aside from Black Panther, will now run for a single six issue arc.

All this has happened before and all this will happen again, as the saying goes.

This was genuinely the most promising team book I've seen from Marvel since Keiron Gillen's Young Avengers. Its Harlem setting was fascinating and well-researched, Ta-Nehisi Coates' angles on Storm and Misty Knight were interesting even beyond the sheer novelty of having those two very different women working together. It was all tied in with the history, both real and fictional, of Harlem which is just something you don't have reason to learn much about when you're a white bloke from the south of England. All that was great and at the end of the second issue Coates finally introduced Black Panther to his own team book and we were off to the races.

Well, not so much now.

This is a microcosm of something I've been banging on about for a while. You see, as I write this I have Coates' Wikipedia page open and I am wondering how a series written by someone like this, with past work like his, isn't one of the biggest deals in Marvel's publishing portfolio. His second book Between the World and Me won the (US) National Book Award For Nonfiction and was a Pulitzer finalist. He has a television deal developing a series for HBO about Martin Luther King being produced by Oprah Winfrey. Not being American, I don't know exactly how famous these distinctions make him but I think that there would be some potential in getting his name out there to attract new readers...

… if Marvel, or any comics company, actually advertised anywhere other than inside their own publications.

So here we are again, with the insular nature of comicbooks coming back to bite the industry on its arse. Now, I'm as big a supporter of promoting internally and recognising when someone has paid their dues as you'll get but right now a title about a team of African and African-American characters set in Harlem written by a Pulitzer finalist who has written extensively about African-American history and philosophy has died on the vine. Meanwhile, a huge crossover event about Captain America being a Nazi at the worst possible moment in modern history is being handled by a man whose only claim to fame outside comics is a failed political career in Cincinnati and whose Wikipedia page refers to a 2011 one-shot in the future tense gets the lions' share of the company's meagre advertising budget, questions have to be asked.

Questions like: what the hell are you guys doing? Do you want new readers or not? Why did you bring Ta-Nehisi Coates into the comicbook industry if not to use his existing reputation to sell product?

Do you, in short, have any plans to actually grow your business or are you content to allow Disney to act as your life support system until they decide that just having the IP rights means they don't need your niche, barely profitable product cluttering up their portfolio?

Because that's what's going to happen at this rate. 

Comic Reviews

This week, my avoidance of Secret Empire reaches comes to its sad conclusion, Lana Lang and Cass Cain have family moments, Luke Skywalker goes on a date with his father's sidekick, and it turns out Storm is black.

Secret Warriors #1

Oh, its a Secret Empire tie-in. I'm doing my best to avoid this mess but events being events, of course Marvel are using it to launch an ongoing series that they set up in their last damn event. I get the feeling I'd actually appreciate this issue more if I had any interest in the event because otherwise this is a pretty bland “getting the team together” issue with a slathering of green Nazis on top. Its not badly written, its reasonably engaging but I have no context for half of it.

I might actually drop this until Secret Empire is over and this series has a chance to tell its own story divorced from larger context and green Nazis.

Superwoman #10

This title has been hovering on the edge of being dropped for a few issues now and I worried that whatever lay in store after Superman Reborn might be the final straw. Surprisingly, Lana losing her powers a couple of issues ago has made me appreciate the series in a whole new way. I never really got the character. Part of the problem is I'm used to so many different versions of Lana but I didn't follow the New 52 Super-books closely enough to be used to this version.

K. Perkins writes the hell out of this issue, a real character study that goes into Lana's strengths and weaknesses as a person. Also, we get a bunch of background for Natasha and John Henry Irons, again characters whose previous incarnations I'm familiar with but whose current selves escape me.

Detective Comics #956

I'm trying to think of something to say about this issue beyond “Kate looks great in a suit and bowtie”. I mean, that's a valid critical opinion but I feel, given how much I've loved the arc, I should come up with something more.

I love Batwing and Azrael as a partnership, the whole science and magic thing really works. Cass continues to be my favourite character of the whole team and her final confrontation with Shiva is a joy to read. I've heard a lot of people complain about how this series “marginalises” Batman himself but so long as it turns out stories like this I'm all for it and Batman can muddle through with his two other ongoing series.

Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel one-shot

The Star Wars/Doctor Aphra crossover I didn't know I wanted until I read this issue. The thing is that once Aphra was out from under Vader's thumb I was so much more interested in seeing her fly solo in a proper EU series with no big famous movie characters getting in the way. After this issue I'm finally convinced that having her interact with the main cast has more mileage in it. Luke and Aphra at the Star Wars equivalent of a high society party is a great hook, not just for how they boune off each other because of how artist Marco Checchetto goes to town on the drawing the guests.

Tonally, this is much more an Aphra story than a Luke story, not just because Gillen is writing and Aphra sets the story in motion but because the gloriously over-the-top setting of the Screaming Citadel itself is much more the sort of place we're used to seeing her in. I like that, I like the mad as you like vision Gillen has for the Star Wars universe and I'm really looking forward to four more issues of Luke bumbling through that side of things.

Black Panther and the Crew #2

To my utter surprise, in spite of having Captain America on the cover this issue had nothing to do with him or the bloody Secret Empire event. Instead, the love letter to Harlem continues as Storm meditates on what the place means to her: her father's birthplace, the place she should have grown up in if her parents hadn't died in Africa. Its actually interesting, after all these years, to see a series address the fact that Storm is black, I know it sounds utterly mad that for all the hundreds and hundreds of X-Men comics I've read, the fact that one of Marvel's oldest and most well-explored black heroes is black has barely come up.

The simple fact is that her being a mutant and all the allegory that entails has sort of eclipsed the fact she's black. This, more than anything else, really convinces me that this series is going to go great places. Hell, even if it doesn't, the team-up of Storm and Misty is more than interesting enough in itself. Hell, I was almost disappointed when T'Challa finally turned up. 

Marvel, are you kidding me with this?

Fair warning for those who want to follow this train wreck by paying for it: SPOILERS for Secret Empire #1 and the identity of Marvel's latest unimaginably stupid choice to turn into a Nazi. Find out after the dots.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

IT'S THE SCARLET WITCH!

A Romani woman, a practicing Wiccan, who for years believed her father to be Jewish, who has a gay son.

That Scarlet Witch.

She's now working for Hydra. As is Thor (the dude one) because what you really want to do with one of your tentpole characters is explicitly ally them with the sort of fascist movement that co-opts their imagery in the real world for their own disgustingly eugenic purposes. That's not going to encourage the very worst of humanity to feel that a multinational publishing company is “on their side”, is it?

What is wrong with these people? 

Too sick to review, gonna moan instead

I am currently in a lot of hayfever pain. Puffy, itchy eyes; sore throat; skin rash where I rested my arm inside a sleeve against some grass the other day. Worse yet, until the rash happened I thought this was a cold so I spent two sodding days self-medicating with the wrong medication.

So, I can't really review this week's comics because I can't read the things. Instead I am just going to moan about Secret Empire aka Nazi Captain America and his House of Flying Controversy and the fact that it is going to mildly inconvenience me in the coming months.

I don't want to read Secret Empire. Captain America the secret Nazi doesn't interest me as an angle. It doesn't exactly offend me, it just strikes me as a sort of bland controversy bait that's I've seen enough times before. I get why a lot of people are offended, its a pretty damned offensive idea to flip the moral centre of the Marvel Universe to be a Nazi; Nick Spencer has not helped the issue by taking to Twitter to insist that Hydra totally aren't Nazis, honest guv. Of course, that line of argument hit a brick wall of Agents Of SHIELD gifs from that scene where Skye explains to Ward in detail that HYDRA ARE BLOODY NAZIS!

Then there was a whole thing where apparently Magneto is going to be on Hydra's side in this because it makes huge amounts of sense for Magneto, the Jewish concentration camp survivor who married a Romani woman, to side with a neo-Nazi movement.

So you can understand why I woud want to skip this one.

Except I can't. This week, even as I ignore the zero issue and the first tie-in of the Steve Rogers title this bloody story makes its presence known in U.S.Avengers, my favourite Marvel title at the moment.

Usually I'm really invested in these big Marvel events and its only now one has come along I actively want to avoid that I'm really thinking about how intrusive these things are. Titles I like are going to have to waste time dealing with the events and consequences of this bollocks that could be spent on things like more scene of Squirrel Girl and Rescue in tuxedos or Danielle Cage being a better Captain America than any of the characters wielding the shield full time at the moment.

They're storytelling road blocks and its a coin flip whether the tie-in issues are going to be completely incomprehensible things that I could skip because they're totally about the crossover or whether they'll just play lip service to the thing and just be a normal issue with things I want to read because they're about the series.

Or they could be a frustrating mix of the two.

So, yay for issues full of Nazi bullshit getting in the way of my reading enjoyment.