Quick-Hit Reviews – Week of May 25, 2011

A whole LOT of very solid comics last week.  We can’t review everything in-depth, so the least we can do is give you a quick-hit letting you know what we thought of an issue and whether it is worth picking up.

Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #6 – Talk about not being what I expected!  I was honestly starting to lose the narrative in issues #4 and #5 of this series once Spider/Wolvie ran into that Luke Cage-looking guy with the diamond-encrusted baseball bat.  So, I really wasn’t looking forward to this issue at all, but it really came together nicely.  Silly me, how could I doubt Jason Aaron?  The guy still hasn’t told me a bad story.  This issue dispenses with the diamond-encrusted baseball bats and Mojo and finds Peter and Logan stranded in the Wild West where Peter finds love and Logan comes to realize how much he likes Peter.  I’ll need to reread this entire series, but I think it might just be one of those modern classics that you could just hand to people as a good Spider-Man/Wolverine story.  Really nice art by Adam Kubert.  Grade: A-

Uncanny X-Men #537 – Kieron Gillen has got a nice little story going on in Uncanny and it is making me very optimistic about how his run on Uncanny might turn out.  The story in this issue follows the deposed Powerlord Kruun from Breakworld as he attempts to exact revenge upon the X-Men who caused him to lose power during Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run.  What makes this story work so nicely is that Gillen is only playing with a few of the X-Men at one time.  Less is always more when doing an X-Men story!  Most of the action in this issue is Kitty-centric as she has to find a way to get help when no one can hear her.  Her solution is pretty darn clever.  I wish the Dodson’s could do all the art on Uncanny and it should be a law that every issue that the Dodson’s do illustrate feature Kitty and Emma Frost because they draw the hell out of those two characters.  Grade: B

The Tattered Man – This one-shot from Image by Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray is a very straightforward.  It’s Halloween and some druggie kids take advantage of the holiday to get an old man to open his door, they bust in wanting drug money and get a little more than they bargained for.  There are some parts of this story that are a little familiar, but the execution is really tight and the creators bring it home by not being afraid to kill a few characters who you would usually think are “safe”.  The highlight of the issue was probably the old man recounting his background as a Holocaust survivor (just going to show that you can tread familiar ground if you do it well).  Nice art, especially on the design of the supernatural force of vengeance that shows up.  Palmiotti & Gray could have a nice creator-owned winner with this and this could easily become an ongoing series.  Grade: B

The Incredible Hulks #629 – This was a very good conclusion to a pretty good story arc that teamed up Bruce Banner/Hulk his ex-wife Betty/Red She Hulk.  The story has lots of good Hulk moments.  What Pak does really well is sell the “Oh no!  Now you’ve made him mad!” moment.  You know, the scene where the bad guy whacks the hell out of the Hulk, Hulk goes flying 15 miles through the air and smashes into the ground, but when Hulk climbs out of the crater you just know that the other dude is in HUGE trouble.  It’s hard to capture that moment, but Pak does it really well.  We also get some really good Banner/Betty stuff in this issue.  Betty wants to be with Bruce, but as Red She Hulk, she has other plans.  The only downer in this issue is that I don’t see how the ending jibes at all with what happened in Fear Itself #2 where Banner and Betty are working out their issues in a rain forest.  Is there a writer who cares less about that sort of contemporaneous action than Matt Fraction?  Great art by Tom Grummett too.  Grade: B

Spider-Girl #7 – There are some good elements in this issue, but the negatives kinda balance things out.  The good is seeing Spider-Girl teaming up with Spider-Man to take down some bad guys.  We’re so used to Spider-Man being “the kid” who is always the one being childish and inappropriate and annoying the piss out of the other heroes, that it is kinda fun to see the role reversal and Tobin handles that really well.  There is also a very creative moment when Spider-Girl overwrites the code of a murderous robot’s AI with the game Angry Birds to keep the robot from attacking (unless someone acts like a pig, of course).  But, the downsides are here too.  For one, I don’t want Spider-Man in this book.  Nothing screams, “This character cannot carry his/her own title!” like having Wolverine or Spider-Man co-star.  The other problem I’m having is that this issue is full of Spider-Girl punching out room’s full of commando guys.  Spider-Girl has no powers and is a ~80 pound teenage girl.  I don’t care if she was “trained by Captain America”, she just can’t hit hard enough to have her main attack being punching and kicking 230-pound guys.  Watch some MMA and get creative with how these undersized characters can take down a bigger dude!  And we have a classic Marvel cover fail that shows Spider-Girl punching Screwball (who isn’t even mentioned in the issue).  Grade: C  

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko – Review

By Blake Bell

Blake Bell’s history of artist Steve Ditko’s career begins with a seemingly prophetic story from Fantastic Fear # 5 (1953). Lawrence Dawson is a bed-bound invalid whose meager self-worth cripples him into hatred for the world. When a new drug allows him to live a normal life (which subsequently imbues him with super-elastic powers), Dawson chooses to seek revenge on the world and take the fortunes that are apparently “owed” to him. His elastic condition, however, becomes too much to control, leaving Dawson to steal the only cure and impetuously killing the only man who can help him. In the end, Dawson, because of his haste, avarice, and egocentricity, literally liquefies himself. This is Ditko’s very first published work.

Many argue that Ditko’s departure from Marvel Comics in 1965 was the result of a man tired of not getting recognition for his work, and who sought, disastrously, to attain the fortune “owed” to him. Bell elucidates the situation and takes the reader back to a time before red and blue tights and big city lights, to a small Pennsylvania mining town and bespectacled young man. The Ditko family was a modest but loving home, filled with encouragement for the family talent: drawing. From an early age, Steve Ditko was raised on comics that were cut from the newspaper and sewn together into a clothe-bound book by his mother

Despite this love and encouragement, Ditko remained shy. Bell relates a story where Ditko returned home for the holidays after moving to New York City as a illustrator. Always committed to meeting his deadline, he worked in his parent’s kitchen on a breadboard, basking in the company of his immediate family. Yet, when one of his cousins or other relatives would enter the room, he would become noticeably uncomfortable.

Bell notes other awkward reactions. While sharing a studio with fetish artist Eric Stanton from 1958 to 1968, Ditko inked a few of Stanton’s seedy stories. If it weren’t for Ditko’s immeasurable inking style, no one would be the wiser. Whenever he would be confronted with the Stanton material, which was unaccredited, the artist denied his affiliation with it outright. On one occasion, Ditko rebuffed an inquiry made by fellow artist Joe Rubenstien, saying: “No I didn’t… There’s no proof.”

Ditko’s rejection of the erotic work may simply be out of embarrassment or possibly his Objectivist beliefs. Heavily influenced by the works of Ayn Rand, Ditko reasoned that his work at Marvel Comics in 1965, namely the incredibly successful Spider-Man, was insufficiently respected and compensated by the company. He demanded, as Bell notes, for proper creative credit and more pay even before the “King of Comics”, Jack Kirby, dared to do so. His departure from the company was intended to find better pay and greater autonomy in comics; he found the latter, but at the cost of the former.

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko is an effervescently written history about this peculiar and tremendously talented writer and artist. With additions of reprinted strips and un-inked pages, Bell strips away the heavily shaded corners of this man’s life and helps the reader better understand him. Unlike his first published character Lawrence Dawson, Ditko hasn’t melted into the carpet; through his amazing comics and struggle for artists’ rights, he is far from dripping away into nothingness. (Grade: A)

–Steven M. Bari