Comic Reviews

This week the Kingpin of Crime gets his Trump on; Tim Drake has a word with himself; mutants and aliens get therapy; and after months of uncertainty we get branding confirmation that Jennifer Walters is still female.

Daredevil #595

Mayor Fisk part 1

Marvel just does not do subtle satire, does it? I mean, they even have Foggy Nelson explain to the reader that no one who voted for Fisk was under any delusion that he wasn't the Kingpin of Crime but they liked that he was a political outsider. Just about the only thing they don't do is make him a Republican, instead making sure to mention he ran as an independent.

Meanwhile, Mayor Fisk has ordered he DA's office and Matt Murdoch in particular to start preparing briefs on how to hold vigilante superheroes accountable. Its not a comfortable situation as any reasonable person probably would prefer people who cause massive property damage on a regular basis to have some accountability and it ties in with the recent Supreme Court arc about bringing the heroes into the legal framework. We get Matt in full hothead and pissed off mode which means he falls for approximately one hundred percent of Fisk's plans through the whole issue because Matt Murdoch can always been relied on to make things worse for himself. Its an interesting angle that continues to use Matt's new position as a prosecutor to good effect and I look forward to seeing where it goes, though I hope that Fisk stays mayor for a while to come because that's the sort of angle that has a lot of juice in it.

Detective Comics #968

A Lonely Place of Living conclusion

Given her presence on the cover I was hoping to see a Steph/Tim reunion but sadly not. Instead we get a big long fight between various elements of the Bat-family and evil future Tim. Its not badly written or drawn but there is a lot leftover for future stories and in the typical infuriating time traveler way evil future Tim keeps banging on about how Kate will do “something” without going in to the sort of specifics that might help prevent the something even though his murder plan fell through.

Still, he does say the something will happen in a few weeks so we might get to that sometime within the next year.

Runaways #3

Find Your Way Home part 3

Okay, this is a SPOILERS one so skip down a bit if you don't want to know why I liked it...

…

I like that Karolina said now when Nico, Gert and Chase came into her life and asked her to abandon it. I like that she felt guilty about it and had to chant affirmations at herself whilst crying after they left. I like that she's shown as conflicted and unhappy with her decision but that the narrative is firmly on her side about it. I like that she is putting her own needs first here. Chase never recovered from Gert's death and Nico has her abandonment issues from the break-up of A-Force (such a good title...) but Karolina is in college, she has a girlfriend and is making headway with therapy. Much as I like the character (and please let that girlfriend be Julie, please please please) I think showing all this is a very positive thing.

I also liked that there was acknowledgement that getting Chase and Gert back together would probably be a mistake. He was always a little older than her and now there's an age gap of years that makes things horribly creepy if they tried to reignite their actual relationship.

Generation X #8

Speaking of superheroes moving on, after far too many years an X-book gets back to seeing what Husk is up to. Last time we saw her was back in the dying days of the Wolverine and the X-Men title when she'd started being the school's guidance counselor. Now she's completely outside the X-Men, taking her PhD to become an actual psychiatrist. What's more, she's started talking with her proper accent (and less annoyingly written, I hated the old phonetic way the “hayseed” characters were written, its more contractions and the odd apostrophe now).

Also, nice to see the likes of Mercury, Dust and Hijack are now low level leadership figures amongst the student body.

She-Hulk #159

Jen Walters Must Die part 1

I am so very dubious about that title change. Nostalgia is one thing but... ugh, nevermind, still the same writer so there's hope. That having been said...

Now, its not like Tamaki's run on this title was without humour before, in fact it was pretty damn funny, but there's a different flavour to the funny in this issue. There's a restaurant that sells “burger cake” and a professor who is a stereotypical airhead blonde. Maybe that's the “Legacy” angle for this title: to go a little more towards the oddball humour of the original She-Hulk run (okay, okay, pedantically it was the second run but no one actually cares about the first one).

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the change. On the one hand it is a pretty minor change but I hope that it doesn't come to dominate the tone of the series which up to now I've really, really liked. Time will tell. 

Comic Reviews

Its basically all Marvel all the time this week since DC hates five week months with a fiery passion matched only by their hatred of having the same continuity for more than two years. Okay, there was The Lazarus Contract conclusion and an issue of The Flash this week but neither particularly inspired me to write anything about them. Plus, Doctor Strange fell off the pull list for a bit because Nazis so this genuinely is most of my pulls for the week and not just me being lazy, honest.

Cable #1

Right, these post-IvX series have so far made me care about the Inhumans so let's see if lightning can strike twice and they can make me care about Cable, patron saint of 90s Second Amendment comics. It is James Robinson on writing duties, which is almost always a good sign.

Anyway, Robinson takes the time travel aspect of Cable and runs with it. As a first impression he has Cable swaggering into a Wild West saloon and Cable as old fashioned gunslinger is certainly a good take on the character. I mean, the whole look of him is basically old-style masculinity boiled down and distilled into a single character. Anyway, Cable is on the trail of some sort of time travelling arms dealers, first going after Wild West outlaws and then a bunch of sixteenth century ronin with lightsabers. Either of these would make a good single issue story but, sadly, they make a pretty a rather spare single issue that's long on atmosphere but rather short on story. Still, that's not a million miles from my previous experiences with Robinson (his Superman run in particular) and I know he's a writer I can afford a degree of patience to.

Hulk #6

I know an ongoing theme of these reviews lately has been me getting a bit tired of the decompressed storytelling style of Brian Michael Bendis and the like but this series absolutely lobbies for the right of that style to exist.

Its been six issues and only now do we get substantial time with Jen as the now neutrally gendered Hulk. We've had snippets of it here and there, other scenes where its implied but Jen spends most of this issue in her new grey skin and green scars form. We also get final confirmation of how this version of her Hulk form differs from her previous one and its entirely based on the idea of psychological triggers.

Mariko Tamaki's take on this character has been so good for the way it takes the decades long canard of the Hulk as mental health metaphor and actually used it to explore themes of mental health. I know that discussion of mental health is, in a lot of ways, something we're only getting good at now but the idea has been around for decades and its only truly being exploited now. Obviously, its no how to guide on how to handle depression and anxiety, few of us have the chance to beat up supernatural horrors as occupational therapy, but the underlying emotions Tamaki writes ring very true to me as someone who has some experience dealing with such feelings in others.

I am very much looking forward to seeing where the next arc takes this series.

Generation X #2

Thus concludes a short and sweet introductory arc. Only two issues in and we have a good sense of the cast, a mission statement for the series and even a good bit of information on how the new Xavier's works in practice (which, sadly, we haven't managed to get from X-Men Gold, the main series set there).

Throughout it all, Christina Strain writes Jubilee as the veteran she damn well should have been since the original Generation X folded. Now, nothing will diminish my love for her as written in Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat but she was the POV character in the 90s cartoon and so I have a lot of affection for her. Plus, the idea of training mutants for something other than superheroics, training them to survive in the outside world and maybe to act as ambassadors for mutantkind is an interesting hook.

Plus, Strain has a great eye for where to slot in a cameo with the likes of Gentle, Broo and Graymalkin getting walk-ons during the fight with the Purifiers. Oh, yes, and seeing Jubilee's palpable rage when she confronts one of the Purifiers was great, whether it was a conscious callback to Skin's death or not.

Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #7

There are two big takeaways from this issue. The first is how amazingly bad the Star Wars movie characters are at existing in Aphra's world. There's a moment when Triple Zero confronts Leia with how she “uses” Han and Luke as assets and Leia is horrified by the idea. One of the big themes of her character in Empire and Return is pulling back from how the war has dehumanised her and this marks as good a starting point as any for that journey.

The other takeaway is how conflicted a character Aphra herself is. Her shock when Luke refers to her as a friend is brilliant, as is her every reaction she has to presence of Sana. Boy, do I want to see an arc with them working together. Aphra has always had a certain “female Han” vibe to her so maybe an arc or two with “her” Lando would be cool. And I mean that comparison in more terms than just Sana being black: the two of them have old grudges and an older friendship, even if its more implied than anything else at this point.

And, yes, in this formulation Vader is Aphra's Luke.